04 Where Were You When …

Every society collects traumatic moments, days or hours that stand out so vividly that we all remember them. Anyone who was alive then and old enough to remember has a story to tell, about where they were when the event happened and what they were thinking at the time and what they did in the following hours and days. They remember who they were with, and how long they were glued to the television, witnessing the great change in the world.

At least, we thought those were big events, and they did have consequences for years and years after, but in the long run they meant nothing. Black Tuesday, Pearl Harbor, V-Day, the assassination of JFK, the assassination of MLK, the attempted assassination of Ronald Regan, Black Monday, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, Covid-19, the capitol riots: all of that was eclipsed by Day Zero. That's what we called it, even back then: Day Zero. Because it only took one day to understand we were at the end of everything.

When an illness affects the whole world, spreads faster than air travel, and reaches into the remotest areas where people live but seldom leave, you aren't facing traditional modes of transmission. The virus was already in us, had been for a long time, and everybody had it. Something flipped a switch inside us that turned on the disease: some environmental signal, a chemical imbalance, a shot of errant cosmic rays, mushroom spores, alien spores, buggy GPS signals, Gabriel's Trumpet, a Holy Word from Zombie Jesus, or who-knows-what. Within twelve hours we were all sick, without exception. The entire world was in bed with the flu.

All mass transportation was shut down, the CDC were telling us to follow good sanitation protocols, and China said everything was fine because their own people were partially immune and their healthcare system was second to none. Some countries immediately went dark, cut off all communication like they wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world until the latest pandemic had run its course. North Korea was the first, to nobody's surprise, and they were soon followed by the less populous Islamic states, and then some Central American ones. It didn't matter which states cut themselves off on Day Zero and which ones tried to stay connected because, soon enough, the entire planet was going dark.

The genius of the virus, the really insidious aspect that ensured the displacement of the human race as we had known it, was that it didn't kill anyone until everyone was sick. Maybe it killed some people in the first few hours and made a few zombies, here and there, the elderly and immunocompromised, people whose bodies couldn't sustain the virus and died and then hurt someone else. But the few incidents we heard about were dismissed as bouts of insanity, a rare side-effect rather than an inevitable stage of the disease. But by that time the news networks were already failing. So, when six in ten of the world's population died (most of them within the same hour, it seems) and turned into ravenous zombies, the remaining four were physically vulnerable and unprepared.

It was carnage. Genocide. A cataclysm. Nearly all of the world's eight billion people were zombified, overnight. Worldwide, maybe a few hundred million people survived Day Zero, and the vast majority of them would be dead in less than a year. There wasn't a word big enough for it.

And where was I, when all of this was started? I was on my honeymoon, camping with my dear Abigail. The camping was her choice, not mine. We were both outdoorsy types but in different ways, so we had negotiated a week in the wilderness followed by a week scuba diving, with enough days of luxury hotel and travel accommodations to round out a three week honeymoon. As proof of her love for me, Abbey let me bring a compact solar array, music player, and satellite radio. Even back then I was a freak about having devices, and powering them from the sun. It was one of my many hobbies.

That's why, on Day Zero, we were sick as dogs and shivering in our sleeping bag far, far from any random zombies. The whole time we were sick, we were blissfully unaware that the world was dissolving around us. It was our honeymoon, damn it, and if we were going to have a flu then we would have it together, and we didn't need the rest of the world's opinion about it. We played music when we wanted it, held hands, and took turns trudging to the river and back to fill up the gallon jug that was our water supply.

In case you're wondering, the chance of any two random people surviving the Day Zero Flu was sixteen percent. The chance on that particular day of those two being together in a remote place, safe from the hungry dead? Hard to calculate. We were just that lucky.

We didn't know what was happening in the world until Day Three. We were feeling better, and decided to augment our diet of powdered and freeze-dried meals with some fresh fish. It was evening, we had lines in the water, and we decided to turn on the satellite radio. That's when we learned that civilization had been pulled out from underneath us, and we hadn't even known. It started out as just a suspicious number of missing stations. Eventually we tried the news, but the news channel was running ridiculous messages on a loop: everyone is dying, we don't know how long power will hold out, zombies are real, destroy the brain, get out of cities if you can. At first we thought it was a joke, or maybe a hoax, like the first broadcast of War of the Worlds. When we tried the other news and talk stations they were all more or less the same.

We didn't pack up right away and head back to civilization. What was there to go back to? The fishing was good, and Abbey could forage a little to supplement our meals. We agreed to stall for a few days to see if the news changed, and think about what we wanted to do. The final decision was, "go find Rachel."

Abigail and Rachel grew up together on television, bit players in a reality series about a group of women (their own mothers among them) who were living in a polygamous relationship with the same man (their father, JP). The series was focused on the adults, especially the raging single-vehicle accident that was JP, but the children were in the frame long enough that they couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. It was less of a problem when they grew up, and by the time I met Abigail hardly anyone on the street would spot her as "little Abby from that show with the dad who refuses to go to therapy."

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The family lived on a good plot of land in Montana called JP Ranch, next to a vast stretch of national wilderness. They had a whole compound there, five houses around a central "common house" where they did school work in the day and had dinner every night. That was the show's primary set, when it wasn't focused on JP's cringingly awkward dates with his various wives. The dinner table got bigger and bigger as the family added more wives and more children.

The decline of the family started with a raid by social services, acting on a tip that the teenage girls were being abused. Armed agents entered the house, separated all the girls, and carted them off to other homes. The tip turned out to be bogus, and after a six month investigation the children were returned, but the damage left behind by the episode was real. It made for great television: the wives suspected JP but blamed each other. There were shouting matches, ultimatums, chair-throwing, and the volatile father figure acquired a persecution complex. In subsequent seasons the older children moved away to attend college, and the mothers began to leave. Season by season, the dinner table got smaller. In the final episode of the series JP was shown having coffee in the morning, at the much-reduced family table, with a pair of hired hands who kept his sprawling property in shape. There wasn't another family member in sight, and the audience was subjected to some very sad music. The ending was a lie, by the way. One of his wives hadn't left, and at least three of his children were always in residence, even as adults, but that wasn't good television. The show runners wanted pathos, so they pretended the entire family had left him, unable to weather his tirades.

Rachel always thought the show's producers were the ones who tipped off Social Service, to add more "drama" to a show with sagging numbers. The truth was their old man got along with his children better than the editors of the TV show let on. Whatever his problems were with his many wives, he was serious about imparting skills and values into his children, and all of them could shoot, hunt, fish, garden, train a horse, train a dog, look after simple livestock, turn a tree into lumber, and turn lumber into a small house. That was his list of things every adult should know, and when their TV show involved the kids it was usually during one of those activities. Those lessons were the load-bearing structure of Rachel and Abbey's childhoods and, I thought, the most interesting parts of the show. And whenever Abigail was in frame, Rachel was right next to her.

I knew about Abigail and Rachel when we got married, how the two of them had weathered all the insanity that reality fame had thrown at them, and remained as close as twins. If Abbey was forced to choose between me and Rachel, she would choose her sister. But Rachel was a decent person, if a bit intimidating, so if Abbey wanted to go find her sister then that's what we were going to do. We broke camp, hiked out to the trailhead, and discovered that ours was the only vehicle parked there.

The very first days of Plague were strange. Everyone was dead, but they were walking around. There was nobody manning the stores or the banks, but your debit card worked. Zombies were everywhere and they were dangerous, better fed and a little faster than the husks they would become, but they hadn't developed the senses or the pack instincts that would make them so terrifying. As long as you could avoid the dead, you could pick ice cream out of the supermarket freezer, pump gas, watch television, and charge your phone. Once, Abbey and I occupied a fast food joint with some friendly strangers, and cooked for everyone. People hadn't turned on each other yet, because there was plenty of everything to go around. Civilization was dead, but the corpse was still fresh and lootable.

You could even make a cell phone call, and that's exactly what Abigail did as soon as she had bars on her phone: she called Rachel, and Rachel answered! Rachel was collecting survivors, people she thought she could trust, and was headed to JP Ranch. Abigail drove most of the way, because I was too slow for her, but it was my idea to just plough through the zombies clogging I-25.

If you want to shove your way through a large number of zombies, you could do worse than a long-haul tractor meant for pulling trailers across the country. We found a huge red one that looked heavy enough to barrel through the shambling dead until it ran out of gas, but we were worried that the guts of the doubly-deceased would clog the radiator and overheat the engine: a disaster if you're in the middle of zombie-crushing. So we welded together a scooped wedge of steel into a cowcatcher (a misnomer, since its purpose is to divert obstacles, not hold onto them), and mounted it on the front. Abbey painted big white eyes on the hood, and named the vehicle "Clifford".

With experimentation, we learned there was an ideal speed for zombie-ploughing. If you went too fast then they kind of exploded, splashing guts all over the windscreen. We had to stop a couple of times so I could wash Clifford while Abbey threw up on the side of the road. You could also drive slow, as slow as you wanted, but that meant driving directly over zombies and getting their guts into the tires and stuck to the undercarriage. But, if you drove Clifford at about fifty-three miles an hour, something wonderful would happen. The zombies gained lift. They were thrown up and to the sides of Clifford in a grand and beautiful arc, airborne, cartwheeling, and mostly intact. We kept a clean windscreen, left a clean path behind us, and Clifford stayed cool.

We arrived at JP Ranch to find Rachel had teamed up with a charismatic preacher named Father Caleb, and the two of them were bringing in survivors and turning the ranch into a real settlement. They called themselves Sojourners, like the Israelites wandering the desert, waiting for God to show them the promised land.

What is the chance that the three of us, Abbey and Rachel and I, would all happen to be part of the three percent that survived Day Zero? About one in thirty seven thousand. We were lucky. But luck isn't something you have, like green eyes or a dollar bill. Luck is whatever happens to you, and not everything that happened to us was good.

We were able to live at JP Ranch for nearly two years, until zombies found and destroyed the ranch, like they find and destroy everything. Nearly all of us got out alive, learned from our mistakes, and kept surviving.

But then, a while after the ranch, Abigail died, and that took the heart right out of me. Every Sojourner's face had memories of her attached to it, especially Rachel's, and I couldn't live with them any more without suffering. I had to leave. I did it badly, without saying goodbye or telling them if I would ever be back. I didn't want them to stop me or, even worse, try to go with me. I just disappeared one day.

I have a picture of us, Abigail and me at JP Ranch, with Rachel next to her and Father Caleb and the Sojourners all around in the background. I am looking at it as I write, because it helps me to remember. I had this picture with me at the Hermitage, but I hardly ever removed it from the journal where it was stored. She was too powerful a memory to leave behind, and too painful to remember, so I kept her with me and didn't look. Not usually.

At Crush Manor, though, I dug up the old picture and all the memories with it. Those were the people I needed to persuade to help me, and I didn't know if they would want to see me. I didn't even know if the Sojourners were still alive. If they were alive, I wasn't sure how I was going to find them.

But if I was going to do this audacious thing, I needed them. No one else would do.