10 HuSH Labs

Rachel's idea was Human Scale Homes, a business specializing in tiny, custom-built houses. It took us about two minutes to start calling the place “HuSH”. They had a few acres of land just outside of a small town, and that's where the owner had lived, worked, and showed off his model homes. One of the homes was a hundred square foot gypsy wagon you could pull behind a small pickup truck. Another was a two-story three hundred square feet colonial, looking prim and ready for move-in. Another was two homes built from a single shipping container, their respective front doors occupying the ends of the container, ready to be transported and stacked three or four stories high. All of the designs were clever, efficient, well-insulated, beautifully made. There was also a very large workshop with a line of houses in various stages of completion, a big warehouse given over entirely to seasoning raw planks of finish-quality wood (apparently the owner had curated his finishes), and another warehouse that held several completed houses on trailers.

I wondered about whomever had run the place, the way he lingered in cleverly hidden storage spaces, perfectly scaled colonial details over a front door, beveled glass windows that sparkled like cut gems, wall-mounted beds, hide-away desks. I wish I could tell him how much pleasure his work gave me. But one day he had sent his workers home and locked it all up, every gate and door, left the keys on his desk and had never returned.

Not many people had come since to despoil the business. The fence was white picket only four feet high and broken in some places, but it could be fixed. Someone had been in the wood warehouse and knocked over a stack of walnut, but whether they took anything we could not say. One unfinished home had hundreds of deep finger-sized gouges on the exterior walls, broken windows, and an ancient stain of pooled blood.

The “main house” was a clever arrangement of a few simple walls that neatly segmented four hundred square feet into four L-shaped rooms (2 beds, a kitchen and a bath) around a central living space with a skylight. An identical building shared one of the exterior walls and functioned as office, design center, and showroom. Like the rest of HuSH’s work, it was all mercifully well-insulated against the cold Idaho winter, warmed with highly efficient wood stoves, and topped with solar panels.

That first afternoon was just warm enough for zombies to move around, so we started the clearing exercise with a little music: John Phillip Sousa. Zombies can’t march, but they do love marches. Nothing stirred inside our new compound, but just outside we got a few sleepers to come out from under the fall leaves. I insisted Sandy put one down with her sling (her first stone hit it in the chest and knocked it down, her second was a perfect and deadly shot to the head) and Rachel did the second with her axe. I used a catch pole on the third and, once I had the loop around his neck, I yanked him off his clumsy feet so he was face-down on the ground. Rachel got a leather bag cinched over its head, but then things got difficult. Our would-be test subject was warmed up now, and fully aware of the meal on his back. It started to thrash and claw at Rachel's legs, and if it weren't for her thick leather boots she could have been hurt. My weight plus Rachel’s was just enough to keep him down and force his hands into protective bags. We ran a rope from Test Zombie One’s neck to a tree and left him there, where he slowly calmed down.

“That was way too dangerous,” said a sweaty Rachel, “we can’t do that again.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, sipping from my camelbak. “So what’s your plan?”

“This whole thing is your plan! You’re telling me you don’t know?”

“Hey, I’d love to get them when they’re hibernating, but we don’t know where they are.” She was right, we couldn’t take that risk again. In fact, we should have killed it the moment it started being a problem. “Let’s clear the compound for now. This is a problem we can solve later. This one can’t get away without losing his head.”

There was a lot to do. We examined every nook and cranny for zombies, even closets and the spaces under beds and trailers. We had to fix the fence and a leak in the house roof. All of the solar panels on the property had to be cleaned, or they wouldn’t produce enough power for the water pump. Our first test zombie would have to wait a few days before we got around to him. In the mean time, we left it tied to the tree.

I remember those first few nights at HuSH, and many of those that followed, with a great deal of affection. The freezing nights gave us the security to play a few games (Sandy had never played a board game, ever) enjoy a little music, talk louder, and most of all to laugh. It was just the three of us in a tiny house on bitterly cold nights, with no light except the stove and an LED flashlight, but we were warm and together.

We often fell quiet in the hour before we slept, each of us reading or repairing something, or sometimes we just did nothing, piled together for warmth in any order. My chest would ache in those quiet moments, like my heart was a limb that had fallen asleep and had started to wake, painfully, with pins and needles, but I was glad for the pain. Once early on, Rachel asked me what I was feeling. I told her, and she joked that I was like the Grinch, with a heart two sizes too small. Growing pains, she called them.

The three of us slept in the same room, side by side on futons, Rachel and Sandy and me, near a wood stove we kept fed just enough to drive away the frost. I mounted a steel D-ring in the floor next to Sandy's futon for her handcuff. Sandy slept like a rag doll, flopped about, pliable and warm. Rachel and I were often awake well before the winter's sun, and in those coldest of hours we pressed against the younger woman's body for warmth and we talked.

"I still miss her," Rachel might say, and then tell a story about Abigail. When she was a child Abigail had climbed a nearby rock formation, alone, and them come home covered in scrapes and grins, and no amount of scolding would convince her she had done a bad thing. She brought home injured animals from the wild to nurse to health, often against local and federal law. Once, she shoplifted a dozen burritos from a grocery store to give to a homeless woman so she would have something to feed her children.

I had stories too, from my few short years with her, and I shared them out to Rachel as I thought of them. Mostly, they were about Abby's dragging me off in the middle of the day to see a rare plant she had found, or travel to some estuary and catch a glimpse of birds you could see only a few days each year. She loved the rare events, our Abigail: eclipses and comets and migrations and seventeen-year cicada blooms. She cherished the events that didn't last, the ones that couldn't be had again, couldn't be bought with money or favors. They happened in their own time, and one had to make time to experience them.

Rachel was the only living person who had known Abigail for longer than I had and she understood what my wife's death had done to me, better than anyone.

Winter solstice celebrations of the ancients must have been like our nights at HuSH, intimacy and joy afloat in a sea of cold silence. My own youthful christmases with their sales and lighted trees and mountains of presents were sad commercial trade by comparison. But I have gotten ahead of the story here.

Our 5th dawn at HuSH I was up early surveying the grounds, drinking instant coffee (the only kind that hadn’t spoiled). The cold spell was broken so I went about my rounds silently, ceramic mug in my left hand and titanium mace in my right. All was quiet. Everything was where it belonged. Except for Sandy, who was teasing Test Zombie One at its tree. The zombie was standing at the end of its tether, bags over its head and hands, still. Sandy stood out of reach and raised a hand towards the creature, who responded by trying to move towards her while raising its arms as if seeking something heard but not seen. It began to struggle against the leash that bound it to the tree. Then Sandy lowered her hand and the zombie subsided, once again just standing still, waiting for some new stimulus.

The sight of the timid girl tempting the undead was so unexpected I wasn’t immediately angry. I just watched her repeat the motion a few times and I thought, “good, she remembered to wear her equipment.” Then it dawned on me that the zombie couldn’t see her. She was making no noise in raising her hand that I could hear, and it seemed improbable it could smell her hand through the hood and upwind.

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Skin. It had to be the skin, I thought. Skin was the biggest organ in the body. It probably had more nerve endings than all the other organs combined, except the brain. I would have to check my references. “Don’t freak out,” I whispered to Rachel when she came running out in alarm.

“What in the world is that girl doing? Is she out of her mind?”

“She’s giving us our first breakthrough,” I whispered.

“This is a good thing, right?” whispered Rachel, and I nodded. “Then why don’t you sound happy about it?”

“I came a thousand miles to do this. I risked my life just to get the right fucking books. And before I even get started this girl, who can barely read, just hands me a major breakthrough.”

“Oh, poor baby,” said Rachel in a sympathetic voice. Mockery was not my favorite part of her personality. “Hey, look on the bright side. It was your idea to bring her!” Rachel went to pull Sandy away from the zombie before she got hurt, and they went off somewhere and left me with my thoughts.

“Actually, it was her idea to come along” I said into my mug, where no one would hear.

❖ ❖ ❖

After the trouble with our first subject we put more thought into “resource management”. They were hard to find during a freeze, but hard to handle when it was warm. So we developed a system where we would lasso them with catch poles on warm days, tie them to trees, then come back for them during the freeze. While they were hibernating we could strap them dollies and put them into storage until we needed them. We restrained them with nylon payload straps around the head, torso, arm, wrist, leg, and ankle then put a hockey mask over their faces to keep them from biting. We retrieved up to 20 during a cold spell and put them into storage in the lumber warehouse.

The first few weeks of experiments were frustrating because I had to improvise so much of the equipment, and we kept running out of electricity. Sandy was surprisingly helpful. She had a knack for the graphical language of schematics, and could fetch the right parts. When I taught her how to solder, I discovered she had good hands, better than mine. Some of the pieces I needed had to be salvaged from other electronics, and Sandy not only had a knack for finding them, but could de-solder and remove parts without ruining them. In spite of the obstacles we made progress on our research, and the speed picked up as we built up our facility.

The test chamber was an unfinished tiny house, about three hundred square feet, heavily insulated for heat and sound with one room set aside as the subject room, speakers for providing a range of sounds, and two large LCD screen for visual stimulus. Vents brought warm air from the heaters or cold air from the outside. A variety of probes were available to measure temperature, electrical conductance, moisture, limb velocity, and muscle response. I built a control panel that looked a bit like an old Moog analog synthesizer except that it produced electrical pulses instead of sound. These were monitored by an oscilloscope and piped into any of several metallic surfaces inside the test chamber. It was all made from parts I had collected since Crush Manor, things I recovered from Dan and his raiders on the day I found Sandy.

Most of the observations could be conducted from a tiny adjoining control room behind glass we made reflective with automobile tinting. A miniature door between the observation and subject rooms was for presenting objects (small animals and such) to the subject zombies. We had to wallpaper the entire subject room in aluminum foil and cover the glass in security film to prevent EM leaks from the tester (yours truly) getting to the subject. Rachel, who was the handiest with heavy tools, welded together a capture plate and locking bar that could hold a dolly upright, and we bolted it to the center of the room.

When we needed a new subject we wheeled a dolly from the warehouse to the test chamber and locked it into the capture plate, then stuck the various probes on/into the zombie. We noted ambient temperature and general condition of the zombie, observing details such as presence of limbs, organs, skin, eyes, and so on. We ranked each aspect on a scale of 1 to 5. Then we loosened the straps around the head and limbs to allow movement, keeping the wrists leashed. Our strapping system could be safely managed from the back of the dolly and we only gave them a few inches of movement, but it was common for the subject to become frantic during this period (a 5 on our reaction scale). Because of the danger, I insisted on doing the setup myself.

At first I was just trying to figure out what stimulated zombies. I piped sounds of different frequencies to the left and right speakers in an attempt to make the subject turn its head. I showed shapes and lights of varying color and intensity on the LCD screen. I used the object door and a fan to blow different smells into the chamber. I spent a lot of time on my EM synthesizer. In my first week of observations I developed an entire routine of measurements which could be repeated in thirty minutes, if a companion was available to help keep records. This process would be repeated on a subject multiple times while I varied some aspect of the environment, then observed the changes in response. With some subjects I took the tops off their skulls and cut away brain matter between test runs. On others I would peel away sections of skin. Some subjects I froze repeatedly and tested them every tenth thaw. Some were allowed to feed (we kept rats for that purpose), had sections of intestine removed, then were allowed to feed again. It was often grizzly business, one which relied on sharp instruments and boxes upon boxes of rubber gloves, but we pressed on.

A zombie is human hardware that has been hacked by the virus and put to new ends. We understood that much before we started, but we didn't know exactly what the changes were beyond the obvious. Through testing, variance, and repetition we learned details. Their eyes could distinguish between light and dark and discern a limited amount of movement, but had almost no color perception. Zombie hearing was narrowed to a few bands of sound frequencies, and you could nullify it completely with white noise. Vocalization, when anatomically available, was pitched to the range of zombie hearing and was confined to “food might be near”, “I’m eating now”, and “are there any other zombies nearby”? The zombie sense of smell seemed heightened to me, yet experimentation revealed it to be no better than Rachel’s, who could identify several kinds of animals from downwind.

The zombie absorbs most of it nutrients through the gut, as we do, but can absorb a smaller amount of nourishment through the skin. Removing the entire digestive track, esophagus, tongue, and mouth has zero effect on zombie appetite, yet the zombie will starve and whither until it is too weak to move.

As far as I could tell, zombies not only lack memory but have little to no capacity for operant conditioning. If B.F. Skinner had been on the team, he would have abandoned us.

The brain was largely dead, and you could slice away vast swaths of the outer layers while barely altering a zombie’s faculties. If you carved deep enough the zombie would lose sight and hearing first, and then its sense of smell. To cause any real damage, as we all know, you have to reach the parts of the brain close to the stem where gross motor control and reptilian instinct lay. Even these areas show some resilience: to kill the zombie requires you destroy or sever roughly 35% of the crucial brain tissue.

Sandy’s discovery of the importance of skin yielded a treasure trove of knowledge when explored. An otherwise complete zombie, when deprived of its outer layer of nerve endings, couldn’t even stand but was reduced to crawling towards its prey, which it could only locate haphazardly through the badly degraded senses of sight and sound. You could stand near such a creature with impunity at a distance of a few inches, provided you didn’t shout at it. A badly degraded zombie with an intact skin would have you for dinner under the same circumstances.

Skin is the one organ actually improved by the zombie virus. In all other organs the virus can only halt or delay decomposition then make limited use of what is left. But skin nerves get rewired to form their own brain-like interconnections and have heightened sensitivity to heat, electric fields, and vibration. What we often took for zombie hearing was in fact a skin response to low-frequency impulses, which explains the zombie attraction to EDM and marches.

Zombies can sense a healthy nervous system to a range of a few feet. Separating a zombie from its prey with a conducting material often had little effect, but an insulating material made the target invisible. This discovery alone gave reason to scores of deaths that had seemed like bad luck. And it explained why mylar was good hiding material: it blocks most EM radiation.

Hearing and eyesight, once degraded through starvation, could not be regained by feeding. The sense of smell and the various sensations passed through the skin waxed and waned with nutrition, but there was a quantitative difference in nerve connections between newer and older zombies.

Cataloging zombie reaction to stimulus took a lot less time than pinning down behavior. I finally settled on a model that treated zombies like the difference engine in Asimov’s robots. The motivations and relative strengths are, in descending order:

- Eat (extremely strong)

- Hunt (varies according to perceived nearness of prey)

- Avoid damage (extreme heat or acidic environments only)

- Conserve energy

Unlike so many people before me, I wasn’t trying to understand the virus that caused plague or the personhood of the zombie organism. I was only interested in a functional description of the beast. I was Galileo dropping balls off the tower at Pisa, not Niels Bohr probing the intricacies of the atom. A true medical doctor could have done better, as could someone who knew anything at all about biochemistry or neurology. Many of my so-called discoveries seem, in retrospect, so blindingly obvious it’s a wonder nobody knew of them sooner. Someone likely did the work before I did, in the early days of the plague, but word of it never got around.

In spite of my many shortcomings I knew I was producing something of great importance, and I knew that I was just getting started.