It was late at night, one of the servers had gone down, so I grabbed a backpack with a laptop, some notes I had taken the previous day when it also went down, turned the cell phone on, and looked at the computer screen displaying the error message, along with some previous log files.
The coffee machine sputtered to life as I hit the on switch, I quickly added some ground coffee into the filter, I had 5 minutes before it was done brewing the coffee and my boss expected me at the datacenter within 30 minutes. Luckily I had not received a call from him yet.
Picking up some of the trash I had laying around, I shook my head in dismay as once again my apartment look like a mess. How was I supposed to get laid in this dump. The living room was square and had a doorway in the middle, on the right side, which led to a small hallway which led to a bed room, and a bathroom. In the left corner of the room was my rack. It housed several personal servers with movies, music and other data. It had many blue and red LED's on the front which lit up the entire room. On the right side in the far corner sat my workstation. This thing was a beast. Dual dual core 2.4 Ghz Intel pentium processors, 16 GB of ram, and 4 TB of hard drive space. It was mainly used to run all the various virtual machines to learn new operating systems on.
I grabbed a travellers mug from the work desk, and quickly rinsed it out in the kitchen, which adjoined the living room. It was about that time that the coffee machine was done, and I heard it sputter the last of the boiled water into the tray holding the ground coffee. I did not wait for it to finish dripping and quickly filled my travellers mug, put the lid on it, and grabbed my bag and went out the door. I did not even bother locking the apartment, it was all regulated by the computer. It locked itself. Perfect for someone like me who always forgets to lock doors. Much simpler to use, RFID is used to get in and out of the apartment. No more keys to lose, no more fumbling around.
I got in my car, and my car computer instantly recognised me.
"Where are we going today?"
"Datacenter at Beef St."
"Okay"
It turned on, and I started driving. The computer gave me the occasional advice. It instantly recognised my cell phone and bluetooth linked the two together. Right at that time my boss calls.
"Mr. Friedman is calling"
"Answer"
"Why is the server down again?"
"I don't know. I am heading out there right now Jack. I was looking at the logs and I could not see anything special. Are we being attacked again?"
"Nope, no attacks this time."
"I'll let you know as soon as I know more"
I end the call as I turn onto the street. I look ahead and see a few people mindlessly walking up and down the streets. I don't think much of it. This place is filled with junkies. Which is perfect, no-one would ever suspect a high-tech datacenter to be near by housing millions of financial transaction a second. I turn right to enter the street that the datacenter is actually located on. It is not named. I pass the first gate. As I am driving it starts sloping down into the ground, and soon I am engulfed in concrete. I drive just a little bit further, I stop at the nuclear blast doors, walk up to the computer, and have it identify me by retinal scan, fingerprint and pin code. The doors open as I walk back to my car.
Back at my car I find it strange that there were no security gaurds, and come to think of it, I was not stopped at the security gates at the front of the street. Usually there are some guards there to make it seem like it is a private mansion. I don't give it much thought as I head deeper into the tunnel, two minutes later I am in the parking garage, I park my car, turn off the lights, and grab my bag and coffee. I let out a sigh and head to the entrance.
I walk in, and see that Will is already here. Will is an awesome friend, he is tall, blonde hair, brown eyes and since he works out regularly he is very much in shape. He is always available when you need a hand.
"Hey Will, did you stay the night?", I politely inquired.
"Nope, Robert was supposed to, but I can't find him anywhere!"
"Yeah, I tried to contact him over instant messaging, could not get a signal"
"404, dude!", will replied. We both chuckled and headed over to the server room. Will had already grabbed a keyboard a mouse, hooked up his laptop over serial and told me to take a look.
There was nothing on the screen, what we had expected is to see at least a dump of what had happened.
"Did you reboot it yet?", I asked
"Nope, waiting on you! Jack said not to touch it till you got here."
"Well, you know how he is!", I replied. Jack was rather touchy on the subject of letting other people besides me touch this IBM AIX machine. I was the only one in the company that had certifications from IBM to run the machine, but Will knew just about as much as I did from his experience using the old school Unix's like HP-UX, and Solaris.
Walking around the rack I noticed that for a day such as this one, I was expecting a lot more flickering network lights and HD traffic. Europe had just woken up and we would be handling the transactions dealing with credit cards for when they went and bought morning breakfast, as well as the stock market, which would have opened by now. I unplugged the IBM machine and heard it make a few last beeps as the PSU unit let me know that it lost power. I quickly unplugged the secondary power cable going to it as well. I want it to be totally off. I plugged them back in and murmured something about ancient hardware and reporting software that should be replaced. Will shouted that he was seeing stuff on his screen, so the server had not totally died on us.
I waited for it to boot, this machine should come back up correctly I thought to myself. It did last time without any trouble. We waited for a bit, and the machine seemed to be online again. Suddenly a loud pop, and I see black smoke pouring out of the IBM. Bad juju. I run around the rack, to quick turn off the power to the IBM, hoping the fire-alarm does not go off. If it does Will and I had 30 seconds to clear the room before the halon fire suppression system would remove all air from the entire room we were in. I grabbed us both a mask and threw one over the top of the rack, where Will caught it. He gives me a quick thumbs up, before looking bewilderedly at his laptop screen.
Something was up, I could sense it. The IBM was dead and I would have to call Jack about it. We'd need to get IBM out to the datacenter and have them replace whatever was required to get it to boot. I silently thanked the service agreement I got Jack to agree to when I took the position. It might cost us an arm and a leg, but IBM is extremely fast with their turn around time. I head back around to Wills laptop and see that CNN is open on his screen. He is looking at some news cast from California.
In the new cast people are walking around mindlessly, and suddenly however that changes. A car comes around a corner at high speed, rolls over, and the driver slowly gets out of the car. At that moment in time all the people that were mindlessly walking around start heading directly to the driver, at which point they start gnawing at his face.
Will looks at me, and says, "That's not seriously happening, is it?"
"I don't know Will. Is it April fools day? How about other news agencies?"
Will opens a new browser tab, and heads to MSNBC. Same news story, they are calling it a zombie attack.
"Zombies huh? I played Dead Rising. They are going down!"
"Keep your pants on. Where is this happening?"
"Everywhere according to this article."
"Shit."
Will follows me as I quickly run off to the security room. The facility itself is monitored by hundreds of cameras, infrared, and just standard colour. I do a quick scan across the monitors and cameras in the datacenter and see that Will and I are the only ones here. Not a surprise really, seeing as how it is really late at night. I don't see Robert anywhere though, which surprised me. I turn my attention to the outside monitors and see that indeed people are mindlessly wandering around. I do a quick check, and hit the button to close the outside gates. The nuclear blast door is already closed. I sit down, and stare at the ceiling. Will has left the room.
"Hey, come over here!", Will shouts from what I call prison camp. This is where there are some bunk beds set up, and all the full time admins have their own place to sleep if they are staying overnight.
"What is it?", I shout back. Not really sure whether I should cry, or find out if any of my family s affected, and how come others are affected but I am not.
"Just come over here!"
"Fine."
On his personal home laptop he shows me some of the mailing lists he is subscribed to. NANOG is showing heavy activity with about 2 emails a second from a member saying they are in some datacenter and are unable to leave due to a zombie attack. Most of the IT infrastructure is still online other people are reporting, and that it seems like power is still functioning correctly. One engineer from Google chimes in that this has hit in Europe as well.
I grab my laptop which was sitting in my bag from the server room, I connect to Skype and start making calls to friends and family. Only mom and dad answer. They say they are okay, and are in their bomb shelter. I silently laugh. My mom had made so much fun of my dad for building that bunker in the first place, and now they needed it. My dad had stacked the place full of non-perishable food. He could live there for days. I hung up.
"Fuck." How are Will and I supposed to get food? We have some food for when we stay here, but definitely not enough to last both of us past a week. We would need to go out and go get more food. In terms of weapons we did not have anything either, which would make it much harder to get out and fight off any attacks if they did happen.
Will walked into the room I was siting in, with a coin. He flipped, and asked, "heads or tails?".
"Heads"
The coin fell and made a loud clang on the floor, it was heads.
"You are first to go out and find us some food!"
"So you thought about that too, huh?"
"Good luck buddy."
I headed out of the entrance to the elevator. This would take me up to the ground floor, from where I could walk towards the main entrance. This was mainly used to let people have access to the datacenter without letting them know how far underground it was located, and provided better security, since it is easier to search a human for a few disks and memory sticks than entire cars. Will had handed me a tire iron, as well as the keys to his truck. He always parked it on the outside of the complex so that he could get the exercise of walking to and from the elevator. I dread the mile walk to the main gate. Will was able to track my progress, the security system would pinpoint any activity. One last thing he handed me was a two-way radio. I got the gate and did not see anyone or anything. I radioed to Will to let him know he could open the gate and let me out.
As soon as the gate was closed again, I walked over to where Will had parked his truck and opened it up. I slid into the drivers seat, started the car and slowly started driving. Either the zombies were not able to see me, but not a single one of the people looked up as I drove by. WalMart was only about 5 miles away from the datacenter and it is where we got our late night caffeine fixes. The manager there knows all of us, and as soon as she saw us approach she let me in. I told her the situation and she told me she knew. Her name was Lindsey. She was in her mid-thirties and had long brown hair, a smile that could stop traffic, and seemed to have a thing for me. She is what most men would call a bombshell.
"You should come with me!"
"No, I have to stay here and help people that come in"
"Leave the doors unlocked, anyone that is not a zombie can figure out how to get in!"
"I ... yeah ... that would work, here let me help you grab some stuff", she replied.
We quickly found some strong suitable bags and filled them with anything we could carry. I had parked the truck in front of the store, so that I could just open the door, and drop the bags into the truck.
I quickly headed over to the tools section, grabbed some random tools that looked like they could do damage if used in a fight with a zombie. If it was anything like Dead Rising, then chain saws would be perfect. We packed everything into the truck, and hopped into the cab. WalMart looked really deserted as Lindsey and I pulled away from it.
Fast forward a few months. Lindsey is still living with us, she has become quite adept at Linux and knows her way around a BSD system or two. In her spare time she has taken up programming, and managing our food supply, which is slowly starting to dwindle. Luckily enough the zombie epidemic is starting to slow down, and they are starving because of not enough humans to eat, having practically killed off the entire human race, except people in Australia and New Zealand as well as Japan which do not seem affected at all. It is Wills turn to head out. I hand him a knife I got at WalMart months before and wish him luck.
He heads out the entrance, into the elevator and walks the mile to the main gate. After using the truck to transport the goods, we thought it best to park it right inside the main gates, so that we had a secondary backup vehicle to drive if my car was not available for an escape plan.
When Will came back he said he was unable to find food, but he brought back a shot gun with some shells. I started questioning what he was planning to do with it, and where this was going. I had become very weary of Will who seemed to only want everything for himself and hated me for bringing back what he thought of as a "trophy girlfriend". Lindsey and I were not involved in any way other than she learned how to program from me. I did not understand his hatred. I knew enough of what Will was thinking and I saw it go down before it even happened. I would be ready.
That night instead of heading to sleep like I normally would, I pushed some pillows into my bed to make it look like I was sleeping, and waited. I knew Will would find it hard to kill an old friend without even thinking about it, but I needed that shot gun. I would need it to safe guard myself when I went out to get more food. Will slowly came walking into the room, and slowly aimed the shot gun. I heard him let out one big sigh, just before he pulled the trigger. The entire room was filled with a loud bang, at which point everything was quiet again except for the hum of computers. I took the opportunity, I jumped down from the top of the bunk bed at the opposite side of the room, knocking the shot gun out of his hand. At the same time the kitchen knife I had in my hand went straight through his breast plate into his heart. I could see in his eyes how much of a fool he had been. Lindsey came running in after hearing the gun shot and looked at me, then saw the shot gun holes in my bed and turned around and ran.
I wrapped Wills body in a blanket, and lifted him onto my shoulders. I walked into the elevator, the mile to the front gate and then to the front of the complex, and dropped his body off in a trash compactor. I said a quick prayer and went back. Lindsey was still very much in disarray. When I came back in she was pointing a kitchen knife at me, telling me to stay away. She was on the verge of tears and I could see this. I calmly explained that Will had tried to kill me, and that I just did what I had to do to stay alive. She slowly realised that I did the best I could have done in the situation and dropped the knife. She walks over and puts her head on my shoulder and slowly starts crying.
A few weeks later, I have acquired enough food to keep both Lindsey and me alive for months to come. The zombies are slowly dying off, and within our local area there are no more zombies because of a lack of food. Authorities in Australia tell us to still stay away, that there could still be other zombies and that it is within our best interest to wait for them to mobilise their armies to properly go through. Australian scientists have been working on a virus, that would stop the zombies from attacking, thereby letting them die faster without harming other humans who have not yet become zombies.
Lindsey walks in, we have become very close over the last weeks after Wills death. I think this primarily has to do with the fact that she did not want to make Will feel unwanted. We were still very much not in a relationship, that was about to change.
"It will all be over soon", I say as walks over
"Awesome," she replies as she drops her bra.
"It has been too long ..."
She seductively licks her lips. As she holds my hands and brings them up to her mouth. She slowly kisses my hands.
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