know what happened then?
Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, this is really important. I’m in [Undisclosed] right now. Do you know what that means?
Nevaeh McInnis: omg are you a zombie
Amy Sullivan: No! That’s kind of the point.
Nevaeh McInnis: oh wow dont tell anybody but my dad is in the air force and he flies a robot plane shooting zombies
Amy Sullivan: I know
Amy Sullivan: That’s why I contacted you
Amy Sullivan: I’m here on the ground and so is my boyfriend
Amy Sullivan: And we’re not zombies
Amy Sullivan: But your dad doesn’t know that
Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed
Amy Sullivan: OK is he going to fly the robot tomorrow
Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time
Nevaeh McInnis: i think so
Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, I’m really scared
Amy Sullivan: We’re all scared down here
Amy Sullivan: Because I think they’re going to shoot all of us
Nevaeh McInnis: They won’t do that
Amy Sullivan: I need you to make sure they don’t
Amy Sullivan: I need you to talk to your dad
Nevaeh McInnis: I cant talk to him about his work
Nevaeh McInnis: hes not allowed to talk about it
Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets mad
Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets quiet
Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time
Amy Sullivan: Then you have to let me talk to him
Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed
Amy Sullivan: I just need his e-mail address.
There was a long, long pause without a response. This was the point where any caution young Nevaeh had developed about strangers on the Internet should have triggered her alarm bells. Amy tried to picture the girl on the other end, almost two thousand miles away. She imagined her simply closing her laptop and curling up in bed. Then she imagined her going into her father’s room and trying to wake him up. Then she imagined her calling the police.
Finally, the chat window blinked to life again, and an e-mail address appeared.
It was as simple as pulling up the e-mail that had the attached form with the analysis of Patient 2027, and forwarding it to the personal e-mail account of UAV pilot Captain Shane McInnis. “No signs of infection detected.” The body of Amy’s e-mail was concise and to the point:
Read this. The boy you shot was not a zombie. The people inside the quarantine are not infected. They are people. They are American citizens. You have been lied to.
There were a million things that could go wrong with this—it could wind up in his spam folder, he might not even check his e-mail in the morning before going on duty, he might dismiss it as a hoax. But she couldn’t think of where else to go with it.
All right. What next? After the drones, the other layer of security around the fence was the unmanned gun things. Amy brought up the bank of video screens, which she had figured out were feeds from those guns. Still a whole lot of nothing going on outside the fence, a series of static scenes tinged night-vision green. She spent the next half hour poking around, trying to figure out how the guns worked. They were called Gladiators (long name: Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or TUGVs). They had diesel engines that both turned the wheels when they needed to move and charged onboard generators to keep themselves powered up. Just as with the aerial drone, she hit a brick wall when she tried to find an application that would let her actually control one of them. That was too bad because she had this fantasy about taking one over and just rolling it around the fence, going on a robot shooting spree and taking out all of the others. But, again, she wasn’t thinking—those machines were military, the room she was in was REPER. And no matter how hard she tried, she could not figure out who was operating them.
She was getting frustrated at this point, but she knew that wouldn’t help. This was a system, one set up by people, and it had flaws. What was the flaw here?
Diesel.
The Gladiators (or TUGVs or whatever) needed fuel and that meant they needed people to fuel them. Even if the human operators were on a base in Japan, the refueling job had to be done by people here, on the ground, operating out of this very building. Which meant that there had to be some mechanism by which they could disarm the guns so they wouldn’t get shot when they approached them with gas cans. She just needed to find it. And she would.
From the room behind her came the sound of metal scraping against floor.
Something was pushing the vending machine out of the way.
Amy sprang to her feet. She couldn’t panic. She had a door on the opposite side of the room she could unlock and run through. Where it led, she didn’t know, but she would get there as fast as her feet could carry her.
Molly ran over and faced the door standing between them and the intruder. She let out a low growl. The scraping continued. When it stopped, what replaced it was the sound of something stepping over the vending machine. Then, there was the crunching of glass, something stepping across the shards that had crashed out of the machine when Amy tipped it over.
Amy ran for the opposite door and cranked open the dead bolt. Molly did not move from her spot. Amy was about to call to her when she heard—
“Who’s there?”
A tiny voice, from the room the intruder had entered. It sounded like a little girl, and Amy had the crazy thought that Nevaeh McInnis had somehow teleported in from Nevada.
The little voice said, “Can you unlock the door? Hello?”
Amy cautiously made her way over and said, “Who’s there?”
The voice answered, but Amy couldn’t hear. Then, louder, it said, “What’s your name?”
“My name is Amy. Are you lost, little girl?”
“I’m not little, I’m eight.”
“Who’s with you?”
“It’s just me. Can you let me in? I’m scared.”
Amy glanced back at Molly, who looked as skeptical as a dog can look.
Amy unlocked the door, and opened it just a crack. “Uh, hello. Who are you?”
The little voice said, “Anna.”
2 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
I ducked down and banged my head on the window crank on the Caddie’s door. I anticipated the thunder of gunfire and the sound of lead punching holes in the Cadillac’s door panels. Then I realized I may very well hear nothing at all, because John had
