Ashes (Of the Earth Series)

Chapter 14.2

It had been six months since we'd arrived, and in that time, we'd transformed the lone cabin in the meadow into a fortress. Multiple cabins dotted the clearing, some finished, others currently being worked on. The ring of hammers and chopping wood filled the air.

Beast sat next to the main, original cabin, thick trails of wires extending from her underside and running into the house. From the side of the cabin, other wires extended to the other small homes, and off into the woods headed towards the base of the mountain. James, Kendall and Mathis had worked together extensively to create a power network from Beast's enormous diesel engine and our previous electronics setup. It was janky and we experienced a lot of outages in the early days due to diesel shortages, but it was serviceable and the three of them had quickly become experts on power management. Beast's trailer now held a veritable fuck load of deep cycle batteries, all running in paralle, each tied into powerful solar panels atop her back. We had power twenty-four seven.

A third of our group was scavenging for supplies in the surrounding area, a third manning the walls, and the rest were working on defenses or at one of our three main projects. The first was expanding our living quarters. The second was fortifying the vehicles. And the third was something more ambitious.

Lilly, Irene and Alicia had been hard at work on an underground bunker beneath the main cabin that would double as a fallout shelter, hospital, and secure storage for our limited supplies. Irene had taken over and the idea had come further than I'd ever expected.

Stali knew a bit about pipes and had even been able to connect up the nearby well for water. Mathis ripped out a few water pumps from vehicles in town and just like that, we had running water. After that it had been simple enough to break into enough houses to find ones that had a tankless water heater and soon after, everyone could take as many hot showers as they wanted.

I sat on a stump near Beast, wiping down my shotgun and watching as our community took shape around me. It wasn't paradise, but it was home.

A hand landed on my shoulder and I looked up to find Kendall. "Hey bro, come check this out! I finally finished what I've been working on."

I stood up, and slung my gun over my shoulder. "Lead the way," I gestured for him to take lead.

After a few minutes walking down the road, Kendall veered off and headed towards a thicker section of trees, searching around beneath a bush. "Ah, here we go."

Kendall beckoned me to see a tangle of wires and devices lay hidden under the foliage. "Welcome to the heart of the Banshee," he said with a hint of pride. He ran his finger along a wire, leading to a small, cylindrical device attached to the trunk of a tree. "These are piezoelectric microphones, scavenged from old musical equipment. In their previous life, they turned string vibrations into music. Now, they're our ears in the woods. This is just a rough set up, but soon I'll have these all over the forest."

I leaned in closer as he picked it up. "Explain it like I'm five, Kendall. I don't get all this fancy shit you guys work on."

"Piezos work on pressure. Any vibration – be it sound waves from a voice or the thud of a footstep – puts pressure on the piezo crystal, creating a small voltage. The greater the pressure, the higher the voltage. We're using that property to our advantage."

I frowned. "Okay, I don't know that I really understand, but good enough, sound goes brrrr, go on."

He traced his finger along a wire that snaked away into the underbrush. "This wire network is the Banshee's nervous system. It connects each piezo mic to a several car alarms back at HQ. Come on." He stood up, pressing the foliage back over the top of the wires.

Kendall followed the wire he'd plucked earlier, leading me to a small, camouflaged box, its front panel open to reveal a complex arrangement of electronics. "This is our central processing unit," he explained. "Each piezo is wired to this hub. When a mic picks up unusual vibrations, it sends a signal here. But the key is filtering out everyday forest noises – rustling leaves, wind, small animals. That's where the programming comes in."

He pointed to a series of chips and wires. "James set parameters for what constitutes a normal sound range in these woods. The system ignores anything that falls within this range. But when a signal exceeds it – say, the sound of a vehicle or human footsteps – it triggers an alarm, which sends a signal back along several different wire series back to base."

"The alarms," he continued, "are each tuned for a unique distance. So, depending on which one sounds, we can pinpoint a rough location of the disturbance. Back at HQ, the higher the pitch of the alarm, the closer it is to us. It's all about pattern recognition. The system identifies the piezo that sent the signal and triggers the corresponding alarm."

I watched as Kendall gently closed the box. "The calibration was tricky. Too sensitive, and we'd have false alarms all day. Too insensitive, and we might miss something crucial. It took weeks of testing, adjusting the sensitivity, reprogramming the filters. I'm sure we'll have a lot of false positives, and more than one person is gonna give me shit for being woken up in the middle of the night but..."

"It only takes saving our asses once for it to be worth it."

"Exactly," he smirked. He stepped back, a look of satisfaction on his face. "Now, it's finely tuned. It can differentiate between a deer stepping on a twig and a human footfall."

"So this is where you've been wandering off to all the time... Kendall, this is incredible! How did you do all this?" I asked.

He beamed at me. "Lots of practice. And your set up in Beast let me power on a few laptops and program the hub. James helped a lot, too. Guy knows his way around a motherboard."

I shook my head in amazement. "Seriously, this is brilliant work."

Kendall shrugged, looking pleased but trying to downplay it. "Ah, it was just a fun idea that I thought might help us out, no big deal."

"Don't sell yourself short," I said firmly. "This is special. The technical skills, the hours you must've spent alone testing and tuning out here...you should be proud."

Kendall gave a small smile at that. "Thanks, man. That means a lot coming from you."

I clapped him on the shoulder. "C'mon, let's head back and grab some dinner. Wait till the others hear about this!"

As we walked, I glanced over at him. "Think you could rig up some other cool tech defenses?"

He paused. "Well... I'm kind of working on a flamethrower..."

"Now this, I've gotta see."