This is a fictional story. All names, places, and viruses are used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, past or present, are intentional.
If you haven’t read from the beginning, please start at Chapter 1 here.
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Due Date: 74 days away
I never worked in the field, not like the technicians anyway. I knew how to do everything in theory but not necessarily in practice. What I did know, I’d done in our conference room, once, maybe twice at best.
The good news was that I had Travis get it as far as possible before we pulled off the project. The only thing we were missing was a network connection to get everything working. Good ol’ AT&T struck again. Or maybe it was the owners. We couldn’t tell at the time. Either way, somehow the work order got screwed up, so they didn’t have internet. No internet, no programming. No programming, and we couldn’t make any of the doors active.
Travis pulled the terminal strips off the panel before he left. “Just in case something shorts out somewhere.” It was the right call. We didn’t want anything getting messed up after we left.
“Is that it?” Kenneth asked.
“No, it’s up here in this office. It’s a gray can. That red one’s the fire panel.”
We stepped into the office down the hall, Shepherd trailing behind us. I pointed to the far wall. “Here it is.”
The office looked more like an apartment. They had a kitchen counter built into one wall, built-in sink and everything. In the corner, they had a small fridge.
Our NVR and monitor were sitting, where we’d left them, on the Hikvision box in the corner.
I ran my hand along the back of the monitor and found the power button.
“Sounds like it’s on,” I said. A few seconds later, the screen’s logo faded up on the screen. A couple click later, and the cameras were tiled across the screen in a four-by-four grid.
“So if you click down here, Kenneth, you can move over to the other page of cameras.”
“Oh, cool. How many do they have?”
I gave Kenneth the mouse. “Count them up.”
He counted 13 cameras, one at a time, on the second page and then clicked back to the first page.
“Twenty-nine?”
“I actually thought we had more than that here. Maybe one dropped out. Oh, no… that’s the one that’s going on the gate, the license plate camera. We haven’t installed that one yet. Twenty-nine is right then.”
I took the mouse back and showed him how to double click on a camera to pull it up in full screen and how to search playback. Shepherd wanted to try too.
“We probably won’t need to look at footage too much, but it’s nice to know how to do it if you need it. But cool, that’s one thing done. Let’s check out the doors.”
I used the key on my key ring to open the enclosure on the wall. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have a battery in it. We probably didn’t leave one since none of it was powered up. We should’ve at least left the batteries in the cans and just disconnected them. As long as the power was up, though—and it was, since the cameras were working—we could lock the doors.
That, and as long as I could actually get everything powered up right.
They never installed the motor for the gate. We worked with that gate company on another project, for like a year. We were still working on it when the virus started. They never had a chance to get around to this one.
“We need a way to keep this locked,” I said.
Kenneth looked at the the ends of each side. It was a sturdy, wrought iron gate with double swinging doors that opened out toward the road. “There’s no lock or chain or anything?”
“Not yet. Let’s find something.”
“Why don’t we connect some of those wires to the fence?” Kenneth pointed toward the wall where three conduit pipes carrying exposed wires protruded from the wall. “Do you think that would be a good idea? Shock anyone who touches it?”
It sounded like those video games were paying off.
“I don’t think I have the skills to do that. I’d probably end up shocking us instead.” I pushed the gate closed. “We really don’t want to do that.”
“Okay. What about the chains we broke off the doors?” he asked. “And I have a padlock in my backpack with my computer.”
Now he was talking.
We spent the rest of the day powering up the system, setting up a data plan on my phone, using that data plan to get some internet on the access control system, enough to download the doors to lock them, and then cutting a hole in some drywall to carve out a secret nest way upstairs for us to sleep safely.
I would have felt crazy if it weren’t for Liz. We kept kept her on video chat most of the time. And most of the time she slept.
As dusk darkened the courtyard of our giant, new sanctuary, I set the alarm on my phone to wake me up with enough time to make a decision in the morning. We nestled into our sleeping bags, Shepherd and I nose to nose, Kenneth and I back to back. And we slept, feeling safe and sound for the second camp out in as many days.
