Doomsday: Ultimate Survivor

Chapter 8-1 Map

Andy opened the laptop they had found and after a few minutes, he shouted in a surprised tone, “Eric! Come here! Check this out!”

Andy’s fingers quickly tapped the keyboard, and he enlarged the image of a rough map for Eric to look at.

“What the hell is it?” Eric, who was not a technician, didn’t understand it at first glance.

Andy pointed to the screen. “Eric, this is a small program I created in a hacker league last year. The program uses the public cameras of the whole city to analyse the traffic flow and determine the traffic situation throughout the city.”

Eric was still confused. “What’s the point?”

Andy laughed. “Eric, this map is quite simple and crude, but you should be able to see that it is a map of Kings city. The public cameras are not able to distinguish people from zombies. Look, those places that used to be highly populous are still crowded, but they’re almost certain to be zombies.”

Eric hit Andy on the head. “Can you please get to the f*****g point? Tell me straight! What does this mean?!”

Andy scratched his head and pointed at the screen. “Eric, look, doesn’t this look a little strange?”

The location he pointed at was in the northeast suburb of the city, in a small neighborhood. The map showed there was almost no one in the area, except for in a few small points distributed throughout the community.

Andy zoomed in. There, they could see that this community clearly showed signs of recent renovation, and there were lines around it that looked like manmade defenses!

“I can’t be certain, but to me this looks like a human survivors’ settlement!” Andy exclaimed.

Human settlement? Just when he was wondering whether to search for other survivors, Andy found a human settlement?

“Eric! Instead of looking around for a place to live, the two of us might as well go and see if this place can take us in. The more people there are, the safer we’ll be!”

Eric was lost in thought. If the place was really a human settlement of survivors, should he consider joining? The first living person they had met tried to kill them. This was still very troubling for Eric. What if the people in this community weren’t nice?

Of course, he didn’t say any of this out loud. Instead, he asked Andy, “OK I have a few questions. First of all, are you sure this is a group of survivors? It couldn’t be a small group of zombies?”

Andy did not hesitate. “This has to be a group of survivors. Judging from the evidence of activity over the 12-hour intervals between camera shots, the population of other places...”

As he spoke, he clicked open the map at different places, pointing to the larger dots on the screen. “Look, here these movements are very irregular and basically disorganized, which is in line with the zombie groups we’ve encountered. They go wherever there’s a living creature...”

“But this group... look;16 points around the community and 4 points at each corner. It’s obviously the same position, maybe a sentry post? It just looks very unlikely to be zombies.” Andy’s eyes were sharp and his reasoning was convincing.

But Eric saw things differently. “Do you think these people will take us in when we come with all our stuff? How do you know they won’t be like the guy in the supermarket and kill us the moment they see us?”

It was not that he had no faith in himself, but in such a situation with limited information, it was a little risky for them to take their assets with them to seek refuge with others.

“Eric! If my analysis is correct, this group of people is very orderly. They have guards, they’re organized and the people inside show no sign of wanting to leave. At least in terms of security, that place is better than ours, where we don’t know if we can survive tomorrow.” Andy analyzed the problem in the same way he wrote a computer program. He had a neat, methodical mind.