03 Crush Manor
Taking the fast way down the mountain meant plummeting directly towards the beach and the parade of massive carcasses that were drawing all of the zombies. I knew from my observations there were thousands of zombies already feasting, and they never seemed to get full. They just kept eating and eating, while more and more zombies joined them, until every surface of the carcasses were covered with them. There were zombies on top of the whales eating their way down; others were crawling into the mouth, past the baleen, and eating from the inside out; hundreds entered from the soft belly, disappearing one after another and filling it up until the dead cetacean writhed; and none of that stopped more zombies from showing up and pressing forward, demanding a turn. Seventeen massive bodies were completely covered with insatiable undead, who had eyes and teeth for nothing else.
All that feasting had promoted them from the dried out, flammable species that had overrun my farm, to a damper and better fed and slightly faster variant. If they hadn't been so fixated on the whales I might have had a problem, but the wind was in my favor, I was sporting a layer of Febreeze cologne, and I never got closer than two hundreds yards to them. I couldn't turn south, since that way lay the bay town and zombies on the hunt, so I headed north instead. I followed the coastal highway but avoided walking on it, on account of the frequent shambles going by. It seemed like every zombie in the county was up and about, and had come west to sample some whale. I ghosted through grass, crawled through gullies, high-tailed it through exposed pasture, took the road when I absolutely had to (always to cross bridges) and generally hoofed it overland and tried not to be noticed. I took the first road I could going back east, along the Russian River as it wound through the mountains to emerge on the wide, comfortable valley on the other side. I never slept, not fully, but I camped in the most inaccessible spots I could get to with the time and energy I had. The body had to rest, even if the mind was too keyed up to shut down completely.
The whole week blurred into a long hyper-aware episode of hide and seek, including one death-defying sprint through a widely-spaced shamble when there was no other choice. Six days passed before I settled down into a new situation, in Alexander Valley, situated on the flood plain of the Russian River. The minute I felt secure I slept for a whole day and most of a night, waking only to eat and use the bathroom.
I had found a row of three warehouses in the heart of wine country, filled with wooden palettes and giant plastic bins stacked to the rafters, waiting for a harvest season that wasn’t coming. In one of the buildings, I found stainless steel machinery behind the stacked containers: industrial presses for turning grapes into must. A fence around the complex gave me some decent protection, with an elaborate wrought-iron gate as my primary way in and out. The gate spelled out the name of the business in twisted iron bars, welded onto the gate and painted gold. Each of the three buildings had a cosmetic tower-like structure at one end, a popular feature in the county for some historical reason.
On my first day after waking I patched sections of fence that needed it, built make-shift alarms from wire and cans, stacked palettes to form barriers, and scouted sources of food and fuel in the area. I set up three exits: the gate, a zip line run from one of the tower follies to a tree on the outside of the perimeter, and a rolling stairway tall enough to let me climb over the fence with ease. I wasn't very sure about the zip line: the time I tested it I nearly broke an ankle on the landing. But it was better to have a third and somewhat questionable exit in addition to the two sure ones.
With my perimeter in shape, I went hunting for ducks.
Plague had reshaped the landscape, mostly in ways related to fewer people and more water. In the early days a group calling themselves Earth First! renamed themselves Earth At Last! and attacked every water management project they could get their hands on. With humanity on its last legs, they figured the least we could do was put some things back the way we found them. They welded sluice gates wide open, blew holes into earthworks, undermined defective dams so they would fail, basically anything they could think of. The more water they freed upstream, the more facilities downstream failed of their own accord. They caused a lot of chaos but I think more people would have been understanding, if Earth At Last! had paid a little more attention to the not-yet-zombies living downstream from their radical actions.
Several years later the result was a mixed bag, and how you felt about it depended on your interests. Buildings on the floodplain of the Russian River were mostly destroyed, especially residential housing. After a few years of the river running wild, a wide swath alongside the river that had always been marginal for housing had seen all the homes flattened and carried off. Industrial buildings, like my trio of warehouses, had cement floors and metal posts and were situated to be more resistant to the occasional flood, and most of those still stood.
If you were a traveler then your attitude depended on the time of year. The highway was still a reliable way to get around nearly all year, but the secondary roads could be very seasonal. An area that was a pleasant drive during the summer would require a sailboat in winter. This was especially true in the estuaries, where high tide plus rainfall usually equalled impassible terrain.
Vineyards were a mixed lot. Depending on the location and the variety of grape, vines could be drowned to death and making way for a succession of water-tolerant plants, or parched to death and giving way to forest or grassland. There were endless hillside vineyards that had given up completely, too dependent on irrigation to survive without people. The most interesting vineyards were the ones close to the river but not too close, thriving wildly in an accidental ecology of companion plants. The occasional flood brought them nutrients and water, without killing them off. A select few of the hilltop vineyards were surviving too, and produced clusters of small purple fruit with an overwhelming flavor, like eating jam encased in thick skin.
If you were a hunter, the new water situation was the best thing since … well, I can't say sliced bread because by that time I hadn't had bread in years. But we did have duck, and plenty of them, all year round thanks to Earth At Last! I shot four of them with my bow in the afternoon, then spent a couple of hours dressing the birds and building a simple smoker box from spare aluminum siding, with dry branches of valley oak for fuel. Dusk brought good conditions for smoking meat: the smoke wasn't nearly as visible as during the day, but you had to be careful about your light. Once full darkness fell, even a small fire shined like a beacon.
So it was on midnight of the eighth day I rested, noshing on smoked duck and grilled vegetables from one of my many satellite gardens, watching the moon rise from my perch on a second-story balcony the former employees had probably used for their own get-togethers.
I was still young enough to live another forty years or more if it weren't for the plague. But the plague had come and my remaining moonrises with smoked duck were numbered. The future had been so beaten out of our race we couldn’t imagine a way to win, but that was precisely where I had to begin. If I was going to get all the things I wished for by Kojo's grave then a radical change was required. The zombies had to die. Every last one of them.
The math wasn’t good. The plague virus made people sick before it made them into zombies, and it killed six out of ten people outright. When the dead began to eat the living most of the remaining four out of ten died in the first few days. Only a few people in a hundred lived through the first month. Within a year, starvation and simple diseases were taking as great a toll as the plague. People unable to feed themselves turned on each other, brutalizing strangers for a box of MREs or a handful of antibiotics. As of the night of my moonrise duck I had seen hundreds of thousands of the mobile dead in the prior month, while only spotting a few living humans during the same period of time. And, I only saw the humans from a distance. It was too risky to contact them because I had enough to eat, which meant I had enough to be worth killing.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Once you added it all up, calling us "badly outnumbered" was a laughable understatement. On average, each living human would have to kill tends of thousands of the formerly living. That was more than I had done in six years, even with all my luck and ingenuity. Most people couldn’t accomplish anywhere near so much: they survived by hiding more and fighting less. The few of us who were truly determined might each have to kill hundreds of thousands of zombies before we could live freely. All the years I had left were not enough. It was hard to imagine any tool for pulping zombie brains fast enough to get the job done in any reasonable time frame.
I pondered the problem well into the next midday, when the sun drove me to the cool of the warehouse. I say warehouse, but it was really the first stage of a vast factory for making wine. For most of the year it was quiet, but for a few weeks in autumn the bins would flow out in trucks and return filled with grapes. The fruit was systematically spilled, conveyed, washed, and crushed into must. The thousands of gallons of chunky liquid was decanted into tanker trucks and carted off to be fermented elsewhere. This whole process would repeat until all the grapes were gone. When the chardonay was harvested they would move on to the riesling, the cabernets, sangiovese, and so on. In all, a stunning quarter million bottles of wine were made from over a half billion pounds of grapes. That much was done, in a single county, in the space of a few months. Even after years of idleness the smell of grape must still lingered in my adoptive warehouse.
It was amid the simple machinery of the yearly crush that I conceived an answer to the plague problem. Actually, it was less of a concrete plan than a philosophy, but promising nonetheless. We didn’t need better ways to fight the zombies. What we needed was a way to process them. We needed factories that accepted zombies as input, and produced as output something that was not zombie. If we could mechanically process grapes and chickens and lumber and cement and silicon by the millions of tons, why not zombie?
The first stage of thinking took me a few weeks, in between shoring up my food and safety situations. I don’t remember the exact number of days, only that it was summer, and I spent most of the day finding my abandoned mini-gardens, harvesting from them, and planting new ones. Or, I scavenged for things I would eventually need, like a vehicle, camp stove, tents, gasoline, and so on.
At night I shut myself inside the domicile I had dubbed “Crush Manor” and thought through my ideas. In the Before Years I wrote technical manuals, so I was engaging in an unfamiliar task, but I was used to learning new things and working with complex systems. I have always taken an interest in learning new skills, a fact which greatly amused my friends as I continually picked up new hobbies and dropped them as soon as they started to bore me. My profession may have turned out to be useless as a post-civilization survival skill, but some of my hobbies proved to be vital. Skill with a bow is the best of these, but several others kept me alive and fed in the Plague Years. That I knew almost nothing about industrial processes didn’t even give me pause. Whatever I didn’t know, I was willing to learn.
Besides, what ambitious project is not beset by unknowns in the early stages? My main purpose in those days was to consider all the things I didn’t know and how I could learn about them, the possible sources of that knowledge, the equipment I would need in the mean time, and so on. To get a handle on the enormity of the problem, I sketched out pages and pages of ideas much like this these:
Grand Canyon Trap
(Sketch of a seesaw contraption on the edge of a cliff. Zombies walk along it and are tipped into the chasm.)
PROs
> simplicity
>
> uses natural features already available
>
> can be used anywhere there is a sufficiently large hole (quarries, pit-mines)
>
> can run for long periods of time unattended
>
> With proper use of leverage, can run entirely on solar and gravity
CONs
> major topological features not widely available
>
> falling does not guarantee zombie death
>
> makes your national landmark unusable, because it is full of zombies
>
> leaves behind a massive cleanup problem
>
> Won’t surviving zombies just walk out?
>
> How to get zombies to walk on the seesaw
Unknowns
> How far does a zombie have to fall to guarantee brain destruction?
>
> Is there anyone living in the Grand Canyon?
Zombie “Car Wash”
( Sketch of an automated car-wash facility, with rotating brushes replaced with spiked drums)
PROs
> guaranteed zombie death and destruction
>
> can possibly be built from existing facilities all over the continent
CONs
> complicated
>
> even worse cleanup than canyon trap
>
> high power requirements
>
> requires constant attention (someone has to be close to the zombies)
Zombie Compost
PROs
> Turn zombies into useful soil amendments
>
> Low power
>
> Earth-friendly
>
> Perhaps useful as a disposal mechanism (see Zombie Car Wash)
CONs
> Does not solve the zombie-killing problem
>
> Very slow
>
> Requires a lot other compostable materials plus space to put it all
>
> Needs occasional turning
>
> Unknowns
>
> can you safely eat food grown in zombie compost?
>
> how long does it take a zombie to decay?
>
> Do worms eat zombie? (consider vermiculture)
Crematoria du Zombie
PROs
> Kill and dispose of zombie menace in a single step
CONs
> Prohibitive energy requirements
>
> Unknowns
>
> How much energy does it take to turn zombies in to ash?
>
> Is Zombie ash safe for use in cement?
The notion of killing all zombies everywhere presented some organizational problems. Obviously I wasn’t going to do this all by myself: I had to convince thousands of other people to risk their lives building the facilities and then engage in boring, repetitive factory work. It had to be safe enough for people to work at it for years with a high chance of survival. And it had to be done everywhere. Most people had died in cities but their zombies had gotten up and shambled off in random directions in groups of five to five hundred thousand. Now they were everywhere.
Another big problem was the power budget. Running machines takes energy. Even if you just want to put zombies in a box and burn them, you need fuel, and fuel was already hard to find. Most zombies aren't nearly as dry and flammable as the mob that destroyed the Hermitage (it was my bad luck they hadn't eaten in a long time, and the day was hot). Wood was an option, of course, but chopping down enough trees without chainsaws would be daunting. Solar was another option, but running a factory on the sun meant stringing up a massive panel array or tapping into an existing one, and solar panels were a limited resource.
I also needed to learn about factory processes and safety, maybe some chemical processes, and how to handle livestock. Most of all, I need to know more about zombies themselves. Any process would rely on intimate knowledge of the physical properties of the target material. I didn't need to create a vaccine or plumb the origins of the disease: smarter people than I had already failed at that. I needed to know things like how much force was required break a zombie's leg, and how to tell if the zombie's ashen remains were poisonous or not.
Finally, I was going to need help in the near term, and there was only one group of people I trusted enough to ask. But meeting up with them presented other issues.