05 Stocking Up

One does not simply drive from Norcali to the Rocky Mountains. Central Valley is a mess, with roads that are washed out or covered in debris from the yearly floods. In winter there are times when half the valley is a lake. Then there's the Central Valley mega-shamble, one of the great migrations on the continent. Millions of zombies head north in mid-summer, then come back south in January. There are always stragglers in the valley, little knots of abandoned zombies left behind by the horde, standing lost in the middle of a field waiting for the stimulus that will pull them in a new direction.

Then, there's the crazy people. We can start with the Perfect Masters. They believed Order was the key to surviving Plague, so they built a society composed of a few Masters and a multitude of Slaves. I had a brief run-in with a Perfect Master on my way west: she was very keen on adding me to her menagerie of slaves, but I escaped before she could tattoo me with the "Tri-Fold Formulation of Mastery" that would forever bind me to her. (As if I would let a tattoo decide my fate!) You can still see the White Obelisk, a symbol of their creed, looming over a suburb of Sacramento, although the people have all gone into the belly of zombies.

Then there's the Church of the Redeemed in Barstow, who simultaneously assert that (a) God sent his son Living Jesus to save us and (b) he sent his other son Zombie Jesus to punish us, possibly for killing Living Jesus. For a corollary they took their own survival as proof of their righteousness, and converted everyone they met under threat of death. They never considered the possibility Zombie Jesus just hadn’t gotten around to them yet. In the Third year of Plague they were overrun by the Central Valley mega-shamble and joined the ranks of Zombie Jesus’s Eternal Hunger. Still, it was the least-crazy religion to pop up in those days. If I feel a need to swear, I still use Zombie Jesus's name in vain. Why use the name of an allegedly benevolent god for cursing, when there's a perfectly hostile deity to use instead?

Then there were the Jade Tigers of Eternity and Immortal Gold Dragons, two clans of martial arts fanatics that were pretty benign to everyone except each other. They fought on principle: fighting made the survivors stronger. They fought so hard, and for so long, that soon the mighty clans in their hundreds had dwindled to a few dozen total. They too fell to the Central Valley mega-shamble.

I fully expected to find fewer people in the Central Valley than I had when I was going west, but I didn't assume they would be any less dangerous or insane.

After Central Valley comes the Sierra Nevadas, prime territory for settlements and bandits alike. Then there's Death Valley (if you take the southern route), which is so barren even zombies avoid it. Then, all of Nevada, which is mostly empty except for the Las Vegas migration. Finally, you can enter Utah, where I hoped to find the Sojourners. If I didn't find them, I might have to swing up into Idaho or Wyoming.

The journey takes planning and preparation. Just assembling maps can be a task. When the internet attached itself to everything, people stopped keeping so much paper. When the internet died, on about day fifteen of Plague, we lost more than just videos of cats and hilarious twerking mishaps. We lost our pictures, music, journals, all kinds of stuff. Basically, we lost our minds as well as our maps. Hardly anyone kept physical maps in their cars any more. Gas stations sometimes had the old-fashioned fan-folded ones, but they only showed tourists the way to local attractions. Libraries were the most dependable source, and even though I hated taking away something other people might need from a public library, I was able to acquire a fat book that covered all the major roads of the (formerly) western United States.

For a vehicle, I chose a plug-in hybrid station wagon. It had mileage, fuel flexibility, and cargo space. I took it from a dealership parking lot and drove it back to Crush Manor, side-swiping the occasional zombie for old time's sake. Over a period of weeks I would stock it with luggage rack, two full-sized spare tires, trailer hitch, emergency tools, snow chains, an e-bike, a small trailer with full gas cans, simple electronic parts and tools, and a lot of food.

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The weather in that part of Norcali is so nice that zombies don't feel a need to migrate, so they just stick around all the time, clogging up the cities. By my estimate the whales had pulled a million zombies out to the coast, and that opened up some new areas for scavenging. It reminded me a little of those first few days, when Abigail and I could get anything we needed with ease. If you were fast enough to outrun the zombies, then you were fast enough to go shopping wherever you wanted.

I knew when I settled at Crush Manor that the warehouse's days were numbered: it was too close to the highway on one side, and at the bottom of a long incline on the other. If a herd didn’t follow the off-ramp to get there they might just stumble down the hill and land on my fence. There were several occasions when I had to hide from herds passing through. They had a tendency to chase the ducks, the ducks would fly away, then the herds would mill around for a bit, until the wind changed and reminded them there was something huge and irresistible on the horizon, and they moved on.

When I was hunting and gathering I frequently came upon zombies in twos and three, and those I dispatched with arrows. My only close call happened while I was field dressing a pig. I had dragged him to a tree to hoist up, but left my bow on the ground thirty feet away. I was so focused on what I was doing that I nearly didn’t hear them in time. One moment I’m elbow deep in hot pig entrails, and the next I’m looking at ten zombies between me and my best weapon.

A few of the zombies fell immediately onto the offal but the rest of them came for me. Like any sane man, I ran. It was fortunate that I had so much open space and no other herd to worry about. As I ran, the herd trailing behind me formed into a single-file line sorted from fastest to slowest. When there was sufficient distance between the first few of them, I turned to face them.

A word on equipment: I always keep the most essential items strapped to my body. I never leave shelter without a one-gallon Camelbak of water, a first-aid kit, extra layers of clothing, several thousand calories of food, and a very hard-to-replace thin-film solar panel. Strapped to the outside of the pack is a hunting knife, decoys, and a flanged mace.

On the occasion in question, I reached for the mace. The shaft was made from a titanium pipe. The flanged head was a separate piece, also made of titanium but with lead inserts added for weight, screwed onto the shaft. It was as fine an instrument as you could ever want for close combat with zombies, made special for me by one of the first Sojourners. When I clubbed the first zombie with it, the flanges bit easily and deeply into the skull without getting the least bit stuck. I retreated a ways to draw out the zombie line, and repeated the process until I got to the last of my followers. The slowest one was a poor specimen, so badly degraded I had to chase it until I was close enough for the kill.

When I returned to claim my bow the three zombies that stayed behind had moved on from entrails to the hanging carcass. They didn’t even notice when I shot them. My pig was ruined, and I would have to hunt another, but I was alive.

That night I did the math again. At ten zombies a day, it would take longer than I had left to live to make the state safe. That was assuming one of them didn’t eat me first.

The only other event of interest from the Crush Manor days was I ran into some survivors, three of them. They were a sad, hungry lot, arguing over whose fault it was they couldn't find anything to eat. I don't think they were normally so argumentative: it sounded like they were just hangry and on the verge of tears. From their conversation, they had been living in a safe setup almost from the start of Plague, and other people had done the scouting and hunting for them. The whale incident had displaced so many zombies, they overran the survivors' settlement and ruined everything.

I listened to them argue for almost an hour, hidden in grass only forty feet from them, before I decided to help them out. Carefully. From a distance. There were too many people who, if you offered them half a loaf of bread, would kill you for the other half.

I tossed my game bag at them, and then another bag full of my wild garden produce. The sudden appearance of two bags, flying into their conversation one after the other, and a strange haggard man standing nearby, scared the daylights out of them.

"Just take it and live," I told them, using my voice for the first time in weeks.

For several seconds they were too frozen by surprise to speak, but finally one of them had a bright idea. "Hey! He can help us!"

"No, he can't," I growled at them, "and if you follow him, he'll shoot you." I shook my bow at them, and retreated.

I sometimes think about them, and wonder if I helped them or not. Was my gift enough to let them survive? Or, should I have done more? But I also remember all the scouting parties I had let slip past at the Hermitage, people I had tried to redirect elsewhere, anywhere, as long as they didn't stay in my hamlet or near my house. Suddenly I was getting involved, and I wasn't sure that was such a good thing.