09 The Sojourners
The Sojourners were run by a three-member council: Father Caleb, the resident physician Dr. Marta, and a man named Lars whom I didn’t know. The ultimate goal of the council was to survive long enough for the zombie population to crash, then repopulate the earth as fast as possible. All of which led to the most surprising aspect of Caleb’s flock: Ten of them were children born since the plague. Of these, two were babies.
The logistics of keeping small children alive were daunting, to put it mildly. Yet there they were, cooing and smiling and squalling. With so much of the group’s purpose riding on the shoulders of the young, childrearing was a more communal effort than Before. After an initial period of bonding between infant and mother, the older children took over much of the work, overseen by the adults. A comparison of childrearing now, then, and Before is a topic deserving its own book, and I will not explore it in depth here. I will only say I felt hope for us in their doughy faces, and a deeply gripping fear. What would the world make of them? What kind of adults would emerge from the Plague?
Sandy and I had to interview with the full council before being admitted, but we had no problems in that quarter. I still had the reputation of my prior works to stand on. Sandy's pitiful story and gentle demeanor ensured her entry, plus she might be able to bear children once she was healthy. As the only councilman who didn’t already know me, it fell to Lars to ask most of the questions. The only one that gave me trouble was the question, "why did you leave so suddenly?" to which I answered, "Abigail."
All in all, they were pretty accepting of my excuses for leaving and coming back. Sandy sparked a lot more interest in them. They wanted to know more about Dan and the kingdom he came from: nobody had heard about it before, but they took the little she knew very seriously. Especially the flag. People who gathered under flags were people to be concerned about.
They put Sandy and me in adjoining rooms, but I let her use one of my twin beds because she looked so miserable when I tried to send her away. I tried not chaining her up, but scarcely an hour after putting her down she was standing over me with the most anguished look on her face.
"Please," was all she could say, so quietly I could have missed it. I laid her down, chained her to the headboard, and tucked her in. Then I lay down in the other bed, on my side so we could face each other. I had figured out that it was important to her we be able to see each other.
Instead of good night, I told her, "Your hair looks nice." It did, too. It was short and artfully shaggy, the best the Sojourner women could manage with her butchered hair. It was cute and tomboyish, and lowered her pity factor by about three-quarters. "It's shiny, too."
"They put stuff in it. You're right, they seem nice here." Not a minute later, she was asleep.
For the next few weeks we did whatever work the settlement needed from us. Mostly, we went harvesting. In addition to the obvious garden, Sojourners kept a lot of "groomed" areas where they planted food and let it grow on its own. They had their secret gardens in fertile, low-lying places near streams, the undergrowth of wooded areas, an orchard that somehow survived the death of all its caretakers, and other caches of edibles. Sandy went where I went, usually with a work group of five or ten, and Rachel was always the security detail. I wasn't sure if she just wanted to be near me, or if she was making sure I didn't escape again. Through it all, I taught Sandy about the plants, what they wanted, how to harvest them, and how to replant them so there would be a crop next year.
The Sojourners had a field of dry-farmed barley. It was a lot of work to harvest and thresh by hand, but it was worth it to have shelf-stable calories. We put down a cover crop, I'm not sure what, but it was two kinds of seeds mixed together. It was a minimal effort, just enough to let the plants put down roots and grow some good foliage before winter came along and killed it all. The biomass left on top and the roots left below would keep the soil healthy and in place during the winter. Sojourners would plant a different cover crop in spring and then, in summer, cut back anything not eaten by animals. The real crop was planted in early summer and harvested in the fall.
If all that sounds like a ton of work for one yearly crop, you aren't entirely wrong. But most of what they did was just throw seeds on the ground, in the right amounts at the right times. There was no tilling or watering, but when there was heavy work to be done they had horses. The horse-drawn machines had come from a farming museum and were some of the best finds of the century, as far as I was concerned. I had started the grain farming as an experiment the year before Abigail died, on a half-acre that we struggled to get anything from, but they had really run with the idea. The Sojourners were able to keep multiple small fields, an acre each in different towns in case one got raided or trampled, all of it managed by Lars. The number of days actually spent out in the fields was small compared to the amount of food it brought in, but without Lars's expertise it would never have worked so well.
Sojourners wintered in Idaho and spent the rest of the year in Utah, often changing compounds part-way through the year. It was a way to throw off bandits, keep zombies from zeroing in on them, and have alternatives in case things went south. So Sandy's and my other job was to work on some of the electrical infrastructure, adding power capacity to other sites. That's when I started teaching her about electricity and how to handle it safely. I taught her Ohm's law, and encouraged her to work on her math so she could use it.
Evenings were nice. Rachel always ate dinner with us and, because she lived across the hall, hung around while Sandy practiced her reading. Another one of the settlers taught math, and Sandy sat in with the children. After a few weeks of this routine, Sandy and Rachel started disappearing some evenings, along with the other girls and women. One week a night was "ladies' night", and I have no idea what they did during their special time together. I know what the men did, and that was roughhouse with the children and joke about what the women were doing. A lot of the women would spend the night together, but Rachel always brought Sandy back to my room because she couldn't sleep if she wasn't restrained. Rachel didn't like it, I could tell by her face the first time she saw me handcuff Sandy to the bed, but she accepted that Sandy needed it and let it lie.
After one such excursion, when I was tucking her in, Sandy asked, "Are you going to leave me with these people and go away?" Her hands clutched at mine, her grip hard but shaken.
“No, Sandy, I’m not leaving you. But someday, you might choose to leave me.”
“Do you want me to go away?" She sounded tiny and frail, like the bundle of rags I had found in that RV. She wasn't a child, not really, but at moments like that she could seem like one, or seem like she wanted to be treated like one.
“I like you.” I held her hands in mine while she slowly relaxed. “Someday you’re going to be strong. Strong enough to make your own choices. Then you can decide for yourself to stay with the Sojourners, or go away on your own, or get married, or ... whatever you want that’s within your power. But I won’t abandon you. You are mine, until you’re strong enough to decide on your own.”
“Can I decide to belong to you?”
“Yes, you can.” It might be the only time I ever lied to her. It was the kind of lie parents tell their children, to shield them from truths they weren't ready to know, but it was still a lie. I believed that, having the power of choice, nobody would choose not to be free, nor could I imagine her being shackled to me for very much longer.
"If you go somewhere, I have to go with you. I belong to you, so you can't leave me behind. Okay?" She sounded insistent, suddenly unlike the scared waif I had found.
"Okay," I said, giving in to her uncharacteristic demand.
"Do you promise?"
"I promise." I tucked in the edges of Sandy’s blanket more tightly to give her the restrained feeling she wanted, then waited a while for her to fall asleep.
Rachel looked on, lips held tight.
❖ ❖ ❖
The first time I saw a mega-shamble it seemed like either a freakish random phenomena or an intelligent massing together of zombies on the hunt. In fact, the big shambles are an emergent behavior, a side effect or changing seasons and simple zombie needs. While it's true zombies have a far higher tolerance for the elements than humans, they dislike freezing or burning. As the day progresses zombies seek sunlight or shelter, as appropriate. Then one day, likely at dusk or dawn when the temperature gradient is at its most perceptible, one of the more active zombies will just keep walking to find a more salubrious environment. Drawn by the interesting shuffle of their neighbor, some others follow suit. As they move along the noise they produce draws more and more zombies until their collective presence is enough to keep them awake and interested, following each other throughout the day and night. A lone zombie becomes a scuffle, then a shuffle, then a shamble which, under the influence of changing seasons, evolves into a full-fledged mega-shamble.
As the shamble grows it takes on some new characteristics. Animals flee before it, their panicked hoofbeats and hunted vocalizations drawing the horde onward. The shamble’s leading edge will overtake some of the wildlife and devour it, and those in the center will pass them to become the new leading edge. As animals exhaust themselves and collapse, successive parts of the horde have their turn to feed. Most of the zombies that get fed in this way move along with the horde, but a few especially well-sated ones will pick a comfortable place to rest and thus get left behind.
A mega-shamble functions less like an army on the march than it does a tidal wave in the ocean. There is a certain number of zombies in an area, then a mega-shamble goes through it, and leaves behind a similar number of better-fed zombies in its wake. The Sojourners didn’t fully understand the mechanisms by which it worked, but they knew it was seasonal and called it “the migration”. It was both an extreme danger, and an opportunity.
Sojourners posted sentries on high places several miles north of town. Each shift consisted of three people posted for four days, and they had the exclusive job of looking out for the leading edge of the migration. When the wave was spotted they split the community into two parts. All children and a third of the adults went into caves, which were well-ventilated and protected by two-foot-thick doors, an external fence, and a steeper approach than most zombies were willing to climb. The previous owner of the property had been one of those overpaid money managers who needed a lot of extra space for his art and wine, but he never got to put anything in it. First his ponzi scheme collapsed, then he went to jail, and while he was in jail the Plague struck. That was the end of him, but at least he left us a nice fortified place to lay up for several days.
The remaining sojourners formed a hunting party, and strung long lines of netting in strategic places. The leading edge of animals, miles ahead of the shamble, would run into the nets. We would kill some for the winter and retreat to the caves before the shamble arrived.
During the watch, Caleb and I were posted together along with Sandy and young man named Hector. That was when I chose to tell him about my plan, because the problem was so apparent at that time and place.
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“Father,” I said, as the first dark line of millions of zombies darkened the horizon, “I would like to tell you about my new project.”
“You sure picked an interesting moment for a discussion.”
“Everyone’s put away safely. We have hours with nothing to do. Your flock has grown. Mostly converts, right?”
“We’ve done well. Forty-five now.”
“Take the number of babies born, and subtract the people who have died. What kind of number do you get?" He doesn’t answer, because it’s a rhetorical question. I know by name some of the people who are missing. “You’re barely breaking even, and everyone else has disappeared." I had already told him about the settlements I had found going west, and how they were missing as I came east again. Sojourners were in contact with other settlements in Utah and western Colorado, but those were fewer than they used to be.
“And that population out there," I said, pointing at the northern horizon, "they won’t crash until there’s nothing left to eat, but by then there’ll be nothing left for the living. Assuming there are enough of us left to even try.”
“God started with just Adam and Eve. A few dozen will be plenty.”
“What if we didn’t have to wait? What if there was a way to kill them all?”
“There’s not. I’m not letting you nuke the country, young man. They already tried that back east. All we got for our trouble was radioactive zombies.”
“Without nukes. Without burning cities. No deadly counter-viruses. Nothing like that.”
“There’s not.”
“But … what if there was?”
“Son, you’re disappointing me now. You know no such thing exists. It’s a fantasy." Then I told him my idea, and I expected him to at least be open-minded about it. Instead, he was angry. "Your head is in the clouds, boy. I'm not letting you get all my people killed for some impossible dream you cooked up, when you should have been here with your people!"
That hurt, because when I was part of Caleb’s flock I had solved a lot of problems for him and the community. After all I had done for them, he wasn't willing to listen.
“God has a plan for us, son. I believe that. We just have to survive, and keep the race alive.”
“A Plan? Caleb, look! There’s millions of them out there. Millions! Your little flock is nearly all that’s left of humanity in all of Utah, and they’re just treading water. The hour is late Father. Very very late. He and His angelic host have not swooped down with fiery sword to strike our enemies. We’re all that’s left. If there is a plan, we are it.”
“Son, you want to kill all the plagued, everywhere? You couldn’t build a factory big enough. Three dozen people are not going to kill hundreds of millions.”
“We don’t have to. Look, powered flight was impossible. Most people said it couldn’t be done, not even theoretically, right up until Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright brothers didn’t build a 747, and they didn’t fly across the country. They flew, what, 100 feet in ten seconds? Not even worth the effort. Fifteen years later we have airlines taking people all over the country, and air shows, and barnstorming, and people are flying across the Atlantic non-stop.
“We don’t have to do the whole thing ourselves. We just have to show people that it’s possible, show them one way to do it, explain it to them. Spread the knowledge a bit. Human ingenuity will do the rest. As a species it’s our best asset, and we should be using it instead of trying to out-starve or out-fight the zombies."
We stood on the mountain, measuring the darkling cloak of the west mountain mega-shamble against some unknown but vastly smaller number of our kind. Aside from God’s flaming sword, or sudden mercy from Zombie Jesus, human inventiveness was the brightest glimmer of hope we had. Father Caleb chewed on this thoughts for long minutes, his beard rolling like the hills. “I hope there is more to this idea of yours than a simple fancy, son.”
“There will be. But first, I need to do some homework.”
❖ ❖ ❖
The hunt went off well: We killed a large number of boar and deer and some smaller game, with no life-threatening injuries. A little we ate, some we salted, and much of it was put into mobile smokers made from cardboard boxes. We could travel and smoke the meat at the same time. Two days after the hunt, the migration had passed us by to the south, and we departed in a long convoy for Idaho. The smell of smoking meat trailed behind us.
Sojourners traveled this way twice a year, going north at the outset of winter before the snow really set in and then south again in spring. Scouts went ahead looking for damaged roads, or worse, road blocks that might mean robbers. We hit small groups of zombies with skirmishers, and we detoured around any larger groups. We only had to take a few detours that winter, and saw no living people along the way. If anyone else was left alive the wake of the winter migration, they weren’t making themselves known to us.
We encountered one abandoned road block, the would-be toll collectors probably overrun by the migration. If so, it was a stupid mistake. So many people who lived through the fist year or two assumed they had been smarter or tougher than their fallen comrades, whereas in truth they were just lucky. If you have a hundred walnuts and eat half of them, there is nothing special about the half that are left. They are no more virtuous than the uneaten ones: you just didn’t pick them. If you eat forty more, there is nothing whatsoever remarkable about the remaining ten. You can keep eating the nuts and there is never anything special about the ones left uneaten, except they happened to be at the bottom of the bag. An astonishing number of survivors were like those nuts, failing to learn enough to improve their chances, uneaten through sheer luck.
Father Caleb’s success in keeping his Sojourners together with so few losses hinged on a discipline of survival. Every Sojourner was trained in a range of basic skills. They routinely cached extra supplies. They recorded the location of important resources. They rotated through multiple camps to keep large hordes from homing in on their scent. At every camp they planted anything that might grow unattended. The process of surviving consumed their thoughts and energies and days. They were good at it.
It had been Abigail’s idea to winter in the north. At first blush the idea doesn’t make any sense: you can’t expect to harvest or hunt much. But what the freezing weather took away in food it gave back in safety. Zombies go into a deep hibernation when temperatures are below freezing, so every cold snap meant days of relief from the constant watchfulness that defined the rest of their lives. Imagine the Sojourners’ consternation when I told them I was going to keep a stable of zombies over the winter so I could experiment on them. Reactions ranged from disgust to incredulity to anger.
I addressed the settlement at the Sojourners’ winter home, at an all-hands meeting. We had just unpacked, hadn't even made the first meal yet, and I sprung my idea on them. The zombie-killing idea was considered fanciful but was nonetheless popular.
However, the research portion of the project had people up in arms. The complaints were endless but predictable. Why would you keep zombies around? How many will you need? What if they get loose? Is this ethical? Are you insane?
“Haven’t you noticed," I broke in, trying to stem the flow of naysaying, "how, when one zombie sees you, suddenly all the rest of them see you? All at the same time?” I asked them. “How does that work? I doubt it’s ESP, they’re not smart enough. If we knew a little more about their senses, how they perceive the world, what stimulates them, we might be able to manage them better.”
“Manage them?” scoffed one of the scouts named Mike, “Kill the damn things, or stay out of their way. Don’t manage them! We know they like to eat people, isn’t that enough?" He had been rude to me ever since I arrived, but it had never been a problem. “I know you’re supposed to be a founding member and all, but fuck that. You don’t get to come here after being gone for years and tell us all we gotta make nice with the undead.”
“Settle down, Mike. He gets his say,” said Marta. “Do I understand correctly that you want to control the zombies?”
“I want to do with zombies what Temple Grandin did with cows. We know they’re not smart, so we should be able to out-think them if we understand how they work a little better. I’d like to guide them into a place where they can be safely killed in large batches." Some people didn't know who Temple Grandin was, so I had to explain she designed facilities where cattle would willingly cooperate with their handlers, without needing to be struck with highly electrified probes throughout the day. She faced a deep well of resistance from the cowboys of her day, whose identities were rooted in a lifetime of routinely shocking large mammals. It took a while, but ultimately the industry came around to her way of thinking: it's easier to manage a few million cows if they do most of the work for you.
I should have opened with Temple Grandin because, by the time I was done explaining, people at least understood what I was trying to do. "Controlling zombies" was crazy talk. "Handle zombies like cattle" was almost sane.
“And you want to kill the zombies," Dr. Marta followed up, "in these factories of yours.”
“Yes.”
“And how will the factories work, exactly?” she asked, sounding more like a lawyer than the resident doctor.
“I can't design a factory until I know what I'm dealing with. I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” I went on when the laughter subsided, “and you have three big problems to solve. You have to get the zombies in with no risk to yourself. You have to power the factory, and as we all know fuel is getting harder to find, especially in the quantities you’d need for something like this. And then you have to do something with the remains, or else the machine clogs up.
“My favorite idea so far is to feed their bodies into a syngas plant. It’s pretty simple, a lot simpler than making enough diesel fuel, and would keep the factory running without having to scrounge fuel. And it takes care of the disposal problem.”
“And you think you can pull this off?” asked someone in the back of the room. I think it was Andy, Lars’ son.
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t know for sure if it’s even possible. But if it is possible, this is the first step." It was too fine a distinction for some people, but I wasn’t willing to just lie to them and promise that I knew what I was doing. “We treat them like beef, lumber, cotton, silicon. We get a solid handle on their physical properties, and then figure out how to take advantage of it. Humans have been doing this for centuries. It’s a proven approach. If we can take the tops off of mountains to dig for coal, we can kill a few million zombies without anyone dying.”
“We’re not seriously listening to this, are we?” said Mike. “This guy is nuts.”
“Mike, shut up,” said Rachel. “This guy invented half of our way of life. He’s put more food into your belly than you’ll ever know. Those windmills out there pumping water and making electricity? Those were his idea. The weather stations, the solar chargers, the decoys: all his. He found the caves you hide in during the migration. So if he says he wants to build a zombie killing machine, we should at least listen.”
When the council felt they had heard all the germane arguments, they excused themselves to another room for deliberation. A few people lingered, clearly spoiling for more argument, but I excused myself under the pretense of putting Sandy into bed. The council would make its decision, and then I would make mine.
“How are we going to catch zombies to study them,” Sandy asked. She had finally started taking enough initiative to ask more questions, sometimes a lot of questions, but she saved them all for bedtime.
“When it gets really cold outside, the zombies sleep. We’ll catch them while they’re sleeping.”
“But didn’t they all go south for the winter?”
“Not all of them. Some get left behind. We’ll have to find them.”
“I think they look sad.”
“They do look sad. But you know they aren’t people any more, right?”
Sandy gave me a look, the Don't Patronize Me look.
I was awake late that night, listening to Sandy’s breathing mingled with muted arguments from the rooms near ours. Some Sojourners wanted very badly to back me but had unrealistic expectations. They were talking about having the whole state cleaned up by next year. Others were dead set against it, on the grounds the current lifestyle worked and shouldn’t be changed. What the later group didn’t understand was the role luck played in their success: even if we did everything right, our chances of living more than several years was poor so long as hundreds of millions of zombies roamed the countryside.
Rachel found me early the next morning while I was shrugging on my camelbak. Temperatures would be just above freezing that day, which made it a normal work day. She was wearing her combat load of body armor, modified sports protection on her forearms and legs, first-aid kit, canteens, silenced carbine, ammo, and axe. Her former life as a trained federal agent had translated well to a new life of scouting and skirmishing.
“The council says they won’t allow it, but acknowledges they can’t keep you from doing what you like, as long as you do it somewhere else. Citizens are discouraged from helping you, because it’s too dangerous." She handed me a mug of herbal tea, “Are you still going through with it?”
“We’ll have go out on our own,” I said with a shrug. “We were going to find a different building anyway. We couldn’t exactly keep our research zombies in the big house with all the living people. I'd go alone," I sighed, "but I made a promise to Sandy.”
“I might know a place. A usable house, solar panels, working water supply, lots of smaller outbuildings. The fence isn’t great, but we can fix it. If the temperature is right today we can clear it."
“We? Council won’t like that.”
“No they won't. But they’ll live with it, and so will you. I’m on your team whether you like it or not, so get used to it. And don’t thank me,” she said heading me off, “it’s not about you.”
We left right after breakfast. Myself, Sandy, and Rachel, our collective gear, a “fair apportionment” of food based on our contributions during our short stay, and all of my research books and equipment barely fit into the station wagon. I exchanged shortwave frequencies with Father Caleb, and promised to keep in touch.