Monica
She glanced at her wrist again. If it wasn’t for her watch, she would have no clue she had been down here almost five days. Funny, she never used to wear a real watch other than when she was doing her Reserve duty. The Smartwatch was so much more convenient. She guessed she had Jim to thank for that.
The clunky watch was supposed to be a Christmas present for him. She had scrimped and saved for it and had picked it up from the base exchange during the second of her deployments overseas. She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he unwrapped it. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.
Monica came home the week before Christmas, brimming with excitement. Jim had told her they had something important to discuss. With all the signs and hints, she was sure he was going to ask her to marry him. She was ready to say yes, too.
The plane got in a day early and she decided to surprise him. She showed up at home, to find him there, taping up boxes of his stuff. He was moving out. He told her he couldn’t take the deployments, the long absences. No, he wasn’t cheating on her, but he just couldn’t do it anymore.
She was crushed. Jim told her the rent was paid for another three months so he didn’t leave her in a complete lurch, but he was gone. Monica just stood there watching him carry the last box of his stuff out of her life.
Without him, the apartment they had picked out together felt wrong, and was far too expensive. She moved everything back home, cried on a shoulder or two, put herself back together, got a new job in town, a small apartment and rebuilt her life.
Much later, she realized she didn’t even hate Jim for doing it. If he couldn’t stand by her through a deployment, then he probably wouldn’t have been able to stick through anything worse, like now.
Monica wondered where he was now. She hoped he was happy with whatever life he built after her. Right now, she had much bigger things to think on. She had finally found a good building to get above ground. She needed to look around before she moved out.
The building was an old business building. State of the art stack of brick and mortar, circa 1030, it was five stories of outdated and dilapidated glory. Still standing because it was too costly to tear down, but not enough interest in the area to gut it and crate trendy apartments, it was another blight in the older part of the town.
Monica was hoping there weren’t a ton of squatters in it. There was literally nothing in it for at least ten years, so rioters and looters had nothing enticing to draw them to it. All she was looking for was a way to get above ground without being seen and hopefully she could go up a couple floors and scope out the activity around her and between here and her apartment.
A lot of big ‘hope’ and ‘maybe’ in her plans and ideas. Right now though, it was all baby steps. She had to get to the apartment and her dad’s car. Stuff from her apartment would be a bonus, but the car was her way to get to Dad’s house. There, she would be safe. There she could ride things out until everything stabilized.
In the Building
Inside the building was a strange mix of trash, decay, and time capsule. The door she opened came into an old mechanical space. It was next to an old coal chute or some sort of machinery access for the old furnaces or something. She didn’t know. The equipment itself was gone, the only clue being the concrete mounting blocks with their bolts sticking up.
As she moved about, she tried to use the least amount of light she needed to see. That was one of the reasons she was coming up in daylight. If she was doing this at night, then any stray crack or window would show her light moving around and draw attention.
Her first goal now that she was out of the sub-basement and basement, was to move around the ground floor to get a better feel for the layout and location of the exits if she needed them in a hurry.
It looked like at some point squatters had gained access, but weren’t able to stay very long before the building was resecured. This was both a good thing and a bad thing. If it was secured well enough they couldn’t get in, it might be hard for her to get out, especially without creating a ruckus or leaving evidence of where she came from and by extension, where a good way into the sub-tunnels. On a positive note, with the building secured, she won’t have as much worry about meeting anyone else in here.
One of the big tools she was using in her exploration was listening. This was huge to her. It was more likely she would hear someone moving around before she saw them. She did her best to not get sidetracked and investigate every nook and cranny. Her primary goal was top floor roof access. She had things to see.
It took forever.
The door to the roof wasn’t hard to find or get to. The major hurdle was getting it open. It took a good thirty minutes to dig through the combat purse to find the right tools. She knew with everything her father thought of, he had to include them, but they were so small the big problem was where did he put them.
The breakthrough happened when she stopped and thought about the size and shape of the main tool she was hoping he had included. It was at least eight or ten inches long, flat and straight. She found it in the bottom of the bag beneath the stiff bottom protector in the bag. A strange place for it, but she tried to think like her father.
He would be able to reach straight into the bag without looking and by plunging his hand all the way to the bottom, then sliding his hand under the padding, grab it. She would have to try thinking of things as they would be used rather than as just a big dump pouch.
The firefighter’s door swipe tool was a spring steel flat tool used to manipulate the plungers in most commercial doors. Instead of trying to defeat the pins and tumblers, it went for the actual object coming from the lock into the doorframe. As long as there were no deadbolts, this was the go-to. Deadbolts would make things a lot more time-consuming and problematic.
As it was, just using the swipe tool took time. An average firefighter would have done it in seconds. Shoot, a thirteen-year-old Monica would have done it in under a minute. That girl was over a decade in the rearview mirror, no longer sitting and playing with padlocks and pick kits at the dining room table with her father, racing her sister to see who could open the locks faster than the other.
There were a small set of lockpicks in with the swipe tool in the bottom of the bag. Those she really didn’t want to need, at least for anything important. Simple swipe tool stuff would be hard enough. Actual lock ‘picking’ was another thing all together. As far as her brain was concerned, it was like Tanya’s old saying of ‘comparing band-aides to brain surgery.’
Once she had the door open, she took the next logical step. She dropped a U-bolt through the doorframe at the middle hinge. It would prevent the door from closing far enough to latch and trapping her on the roof. She had scavenged several of them while she was in the tunnels from where they were used to hold up pipes. Easy to drop into place, easy to pull as she went back through, they were more convenient to carry than door wedges and would help keep her able to move around.
Out on the roof, she looked around, trying to both orient herself to where she was and to see the conditions she would be dealing with between where she was and her apartment. What she saw wasn’t good.
There were a ton of cars on the streets, all newer, all in various states of destruction and abandonment. It took a few minutes for Monica to both realize it was mostly new cars and deduce why.
The newer cars were set up to transmit and receive signals into the integrated systems. Satellite radios, nav systems, hands-free cell phones, Bluetooth anything, they were all computer-driven, and all set up to receive and process signals. Anything with a computer can be infected, confused or corrupted.
This meant the hacking was able to jump devices and systems. ****! Anything that talked to another computer through whatever means, if it talked to one with the virus or the hack or the malware, or whatever the hell it was, was suspect and not to be trusted, especially around other items not yet corrupted. So much was computer-driven now though!
Monica sat down on the roof as her brain went into overdrive. It had been years since she had this happen. At least this bad. She was trained to spread the data out, sort through it and make the logical connections, find the links others didn’t, find the safe path, find the way to the target, find what others were trying to hide.
Normally, or at least back in the day, she would be sitting in the SCIF, staring at papers on a table, or at two or three large screens. Now, she didn’t have any of the visual elements in front of her. They were just spread out in her mind. She closed her eyes and thought through to the next couple elements with her new revelations.
Really new cars were all screwed. Older cars would still be ok, as long as no one plugged an infected OBD reader in or anything that talked to the engine and the outside world, like some wonder dunder soup-up performance kit they could control with their phone.
Anything that has been turned off and not powered up in any way where it could get the signal would probably be ok. When she got to the apartment, she would have to figure her laptop and her pad were paperweights. They were powered up and talking to the router. Worse, she couldn’t even risk bringing them with her in the off chance they were infected and could infect other systems not yet screwed up.
Her old laptop and pad were completely powered down with no charge in them. Those she could grab, plus the external back-up drive. It had no power of it’s own and wasn’t connected to anything. If she took all of this with her to the house and didn’t power any of it up til she got there and was able to charge it, they shouldn’t be infected, and since there’s no internet there anymore, she should be ok, as long as she kept it as a closed loop. That also meant she couldn’t risk bringing her phone there either, not that it worked anymore. She wondered when in the last four or five days that happened.
She shook herself. She had to think of things in the right order. It was like Tanya was always fond of saying- ‘Better to wipe a little pee on your pooper, than to wipe a little poop on your pee’er.’ Doing things out of order could lead to big problems that could be easily avoided. Right now, she had to look at the best route to the apartment, and the right way to avoid the trouble between here and there.
She needed to get a better look without being seen. If she could get a little higher so she could see out without people close in being able to see she was up there…She looked around the roof. There was a parapet wall at the edges, so she needed to see over it, without leaning over and looking like some dumbass movie sniper.
The large rooftop air conditioning box would do. It’s not like she had to worry about the fan coming on and recreating the Marilyn subway grate scene with her skirt. Even if there was power in the town, this building wouldn’t have any.
She scrambled up and got a good stable position. From up here, she could see a long way, and unless someone was in another building, no one on this block could see her up here. Next step, plan her route and escape routes.
She pulled a couple pieces of paper from the notepad in the combat purse and tucked them under the watchband, along with of the pens. The monocular in the bag would get her more info than her bare eye could. Now she would spend the time scoping things out. Down each street, every window, along each alley, into every car she peered. As she came up with things to avoid, places to duck into, cut overs from one route to another, she wrote a note. She was glad dad had put a couple of those four-color pens in the bag. This let her use different colors for different things, not wasting the space for labeling her lists.
All of this took time. Better to take the time up front though. Her mother’s lesson about time spent planning and preparing was always at the forefront at times like this. ‘Two ways to do things, right and again.’ Whenever her mother told them this, her father always added his version. ‘If you don’t have time to do it right, you sure as hell don’t have time to do it again.’
She wasn’t going anywhere in the daylight anyway, so the time was better spent getting things fixed in her mind now, rather than running blindly down some dead-end alley if trouble shows it’s ugly head.
She scanned and made notes.
www.timebomb2000.com
