11 Field Test

By the time winter solstice arrived, bringing with it too-short days, I had learned about the sensitivity of zombie skin to EM radiation, and I had spent an unseemly amount of time applying various currents to my test subjects. By toying with the cycles and voltage I improvised a shock baton that could disorient a zombie for about ten seconds, more effective than any stun gun you could salvage, yet I still considered it more a curiosity than a genuinely useful weapon.

Rachel agreed with me and said, “If you have to get that close to a zombie you should just kill it.” I took her words as the highest possible corroboration and abandoned the stun gun project.

The chief reason tasers and stun guns didn’t work better was the massive redundancy provided by zombie skin, and their weak pain response. Overcoming those advantages required inspiration, in the form of a power shortage.

The humble car battery was one the most plentiful and useful artifacts left behind by the Before People. A settlement of any size would be surrounded by abandoned cars. If their hoods were left open then their batteries had been taken. A closed hood meant the battery was still available for scavenging. Those batteries went into houses with solar panels, where we had learned to rig simple chargers for them. It was a pain, but in that part of Idaho solar wasn't so prevalent, so trying to string enough electrical wire between buildings to make a single big grid wasn't worth the effort like it was farther south. Hence, the inconvenience of our manually distributed storage system.

On safe (read: freezing) days Rachel and Sandy would drive around in the wagon with the back full of empty car batteries to visit buildings with working solar panels. They would clean the panels, swap batteries, and bring home a few hours of power. On good days we had a pile of charged batteries to augment our own small grid, but many nights we had a pile of dead batteries and total darkness. When they got tired of hauling batteries around they built a wind-powered turbine, wind being a more reliable resource in Idaho’s winters than sunlight. They did a good job with the propellers and housing, and built a fine vertically oriented windmill that would take wind from any direction. But, Rachel wanted me to make the generator.

A generator is an arrangement of coils of wires, mounted near a spinning plate of powerful and carefully-aligned magnets. The spinning plate with the magnets is connected to the vanes of the windmill so they spin in close proximity to the coils, and just like that you’re making an electrical current. Then you need a simple circuit that converts the alternating current into direct current, and dump the charge into an array of car batteries. I had the magnets and more than enough suitable wire, but I wasn’t interested in making a generator because I begrudged the day it would take away from my research.

Rachel asked me to take time out from my research every day, to which I replied with the grunts and hand waves typical of the disinterested male. She argued that we had a charging system as part of our solar collection grid so half the work was done already, but I ignored her. In frustration she refused to make another battery run until I built her generator. We ran out of power on a Saturday, which left me with little to do except build her generator. I had to use hand tools and Sandy's assistance, which meant the project took most of the day.

Sundays were the days we listened to the Sojourner broadcast together, almost like those black and white pictures of nuclear families gathered around big console radios of yore, so there was some urgency as I tried hard not to shock myself while connecting the new wind turbine to our little grid in the freezing wind. That simple program measured our weeks, and we always enjoyed it together.

It happened while I had the electrical tape in hand, wrapping the new splice together to keep the moisture out. Like most inspiration, it mainly required having all the right elements in mind at the same time: alternating current; zombies; radio.

Zombie skin was very sensitive to electrical stimulus, but it was so large and redundant that you had to hit all of it at once. Radio might just fit the bill by bathing the skin in enough radiation to confound the senses. I pretended to listen to the broadcast with Rachel and Sandy, but Father Caleb’s voice passed me by unheard. Instead, I was devising the quickest way to test my idea with the widest possible range of frequencies and the least amount of equipment possible. If my companions said good night to me I did not hear it. I paced the little house, impatient for dawn and light and work. When the wind picked up, sometime after midnight, I blessed Rachel for her practicality and conveniently forgot my own foot-dragging. Soon I had enough power to run a small LED lamp and started filling the last of our paper with lists and diagrams. I rousted the women before sunrise and begged them to go out for supplies while the cold held.

I worked and slept in the workshop with the test subjects for over a week. My companions did everything for me, but I hardly noticed them. The stove was kept fed so I would be warm. Food appeared when I was hungry. A cot and blankets found their way into the workshop. Sandy's quick fingers turned my diagrams into components. By the fourth day I had found a combination of frequency and waveform so effective it would stun a zombie for up to three minutes. I vaguely remember some cheering on that occasion but I can’t have participated: I immediately started work on a weaponized version of my invention.

I only slept when I absolutely had to. I did three iterations of the prototype gun in only five days. I missed the Sojourner’s Broadcast and didn’t notice. What I ultimately built was a four foot long directional antenna on a shoulder sling, with about ten pounds of laptop batteries and a couple of gauges attached: one to show battery voltage, and the other to show antenna gain. It could fell multiple zombies from twenty paces and they would stay down for a few minutes.

While I was doing that, I set Sandy to making a low-power version that was the size of a portable radio. It couldn't knock zombies out, but in theory it should blind any who got close. They might even move away from you, if you were patient. We called them "static generators", and we figured they could run for an hour or two on a couple of AA cells, but I let Sandy build the prototypes because I was busy with the more amazing "sleep ray".

❖ ❖ ❖

After my third prototype, the women made me come to the main house, saying I didn't look well. I bathed with water warmed on the stove, and I ate. I was pretty far out it, that's true. My head was full of schematics and I hadn't slept properly in a week. I was waking up at odd moments, without remembering I had gone to sleep.

“I’m worried about them.” Was Rachel talking to me? “They’ve been off the air for three days. And we had that shamble go by a few of days ago. It might have turned east.”

“What shamble?” I must have fallen asleep involuntarily again. The dim light through the window was a warning: overcast skies meant warm air with an increased chance of zombie. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“You aren’t even really awake are you? Then why did you say uh-huh like you were listening?”

“I don’t know, I was asleep! Tell me what’s going on.”

Rachel took a deeply aggrieved breath, “I was supposed to talk to Marta yesterday on the shortwave but nobody’s picking up. Four days ago a shamble passed right over us going south. If they turned east …”

If they turned east they could have reached the Sojourner farm three days ago. “How many? And how did I not know about it?”

“Four hundred. You were sleeping, and they didn’t bother us. The static trick works really well. Does the new gun work?”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“What? Yeah, but it needs a field test.”

“Give it to me. Sandy and I are going down there.”

“No way, I’m coming with you. I’m not ending up alone again. Just let me get my bow. Where the hell is my go bag?” It was embarrassing. I had slid pretty far into complacency if I didn’t know where my bag was.

“Here,” said Sandy, handing it to me, “I kept it packed for you.” It felt much heavier than I remembered, and less familiar. We loaded the new gun into the wagon and locked the gate behind us.

The Sojourners' winter place was called the Farm, and it looked like a hamlet surrounded by an expanse of farmland. A mormon man and his four wives and their several married children and some of their children had all lived in several houses built in close proximity, sharing a common lawn, playground, swimming pool, and so on. It must have been like living in condominiums, except you were related to everyone at the homeowner meetings. Various outbuildings housed farm equipment, feed, and so on.

When we got there, a large shamble occupied the Farm, and they were all making the "food is close" noise.

It was one of the outbuildings that held the shamble’s attention: an aluminum box that served as the group’s fallback position. It was a two-story pre-fab building reinforced with extra layers of aluminum siding around the ground floor. I could see faces in the second-floor windows looking down at the zombies, and the zombies could clearly sense the watchers. With food so close they weren’t about to leave. They moaned and pressed against the building: given enough time the entire structure would collapse. We counted three hundred. Another hundred or so were scattered all over the place, fallen in some kind of running battle. The main house’s doors were staved in, and part of one wall. Something had gone badly wrong with the group’s defensive plans.

“What do we do,” asked Sandy. Even through binoculars, the scene looked bad. I didn’t want to be up close to it, but that’s exactly what we had to do if we were going to help the Sojourners.

“The building isn’t coming down right away,” said Rachel, “so there’s time to think about it.” After a few more moments, “how many of them can you take out with that?”

“In theory? All of them within a hundred feet. But I have to get closer.”

“You can’t do better than ‘In Theory’?”

“Yeah. Let’s shoot the damn thing at them and I’ll get a firm answer for you.”

After some more thought Rachel decided to keep it simple. I had enough charge to cover the whole area four, maybe five times over. We parked the car a hundred yards away and approached the front of the building in plain view. Our hope was the Sojourners would see we were up to something and come out to help. When the zombies noticed us, I swept the area with the RF gun.

I can’t tell you how wonderful it was, watching hundreds of them go down in a wave from my right to my left. Whatever black magic kept the horrible things upright went right out of them, and they collapsed. I kept watch while Rachel and Sandy worked over the fallen, stabbing each one in the head and quickly moving on.

The weapon of choice for this task was a stick with a huge nail on the end, made good and sharp with a grindstone. Rachel had a way of attaching the nail so it was secure and you never had to worry about it, but it involved wrapping the end in duct tape so I never learned how to make them myself. As a basic zombie killing weapon, it's excellent: it's lightweight, has reach, and is thin enough to fit through a chain link fence.

Rachel dispatched zombies with calm detachment, just another task on a typical work day. Sandy, on the other hand, barred her teeth and drove her primitive spear with real violence, raising it high and then piercing the skulls so hard that the point got buried in the dirt and the shaft intruded into the ruined head: she was killing a hated enemy, one that threatened the few people who had ever been nice to her.

"You have to ease up," Rachel told her, "or you'll wear yourself out. There's a lot of them to kill. Pace yourself." Sandy nodded, and went about the work with a little more control, but the grimace was still there, and her outrage that anyone would dare to eat her friends.

They killed more than fifty before some of them started to recover and we had to retreat. Then we repeated the process, but with the addition of Rachel shouting insults at whomever was inside but refused to come out to help. We did it a third time, but still we had no help from the people inside the building. I helped with the killing on the third go-round, and in another three minutes there were only a hundred or so zombies left. We ran to the wagon and drove off, to rest.

I noticed the zombies seemed much more willing to leave their prospective food source after getting hit by the RF gun, so I suggested a change. We put Baby’s Got Back on the car stereo (Sandy won the ro-sham-bo) and drove away real slow with the police lights on. (When did we get the police lights? The girls had been modding my car, without asking!) The hundred or so surviving zombies followed us for the next hour, then we sped away and took side roads back to the farm.

If we were young and inexperienced we would have gone straight to the fallback building and walked right in. That’s how Abigail died: by strolling into a building presumed to be friendly, and it was anything but. The Farm had its own switchboard and a battery array for central power storage, so we headed to the utility shed where it was all kept. If we could contact some survivors we could work together.

When we got to the utility shed we found the mains to all the buildings were disconnected. The switchboard was turned off. The phone wires were all unplugged.

In my experience there are three things that can destroy a settlement: zombies, people from the outside, and people on the inside. Hunger and disease hardly ever finish off a settlement, they just weaken it enough to fall to other forces. I could read the whole story from a bundle of unplugged wires and a few thrown breakers: Somebody had used the shamble as cover to break away a splinter group and take the goods with them. All the medicine. All the ammo. All the food. They left the bulk of the colony stranded in the fallback house without power or a way to communicate with other parts of the Farm. The survivors’ best recourse was to hope a new cold spell came before they died of thirst. While they waited it out, or died in the attempt, the splinter group would be long gone.

We turned on the power and the switchboard, and plugged in the EF gun’s charger. Rachel got to work reconnecting phone wires and calling all the numbers. I must have dozed off, because my next memory is Sandy shaking me.

“Wake up! We’re getting them out.”

“Shit,” I stood up. It bothered me I couldn’t remember sitting down, “How long was I out?”

“Two hours.”

“We’re going to draw them to the door,” explained Rachel, “then open it. You wave them with that thing, and we’ll finish them off. Then you can sleep.”

I felt like I had eaten too many caffeine pills. “I’m fine,” I said. Then I noticed something weird about Sandy. “Are you taller?”

Rachel answered for her. “She's healthy and she isn't slouching, Sherlock. Are you coming or not?”

“Yeah.” I unplugged the fully charged RF gun and slung it over my shoulder. The thing felt like it weighed a ton, but I wanted to do my part. If my family was going into danger, then I wanted to be there too.

The fallback building had a human-sized front door, and a loading dock with a garage door. Luring zombies to a garage-style metal door is child’s play: just push on it rhythmically in time with its natural oscillation. The noise and air pressure changes bring ALL the zombies. Someone from inside hit the switch to raise it.

The loading dock was packed full of zombies. Lars, the councilman and head farmer, was among the zombies there, and five fresh Sojourner zombies were with him. Susan the hairdresser was one of the freshies, but her young assistant wasn't. They stood among twenty or so others from the shamble, all of them ready for lunch until I hit them with the RF gun. The old naked zombies all went down as expected. The new ones seemed a little lost, but didn’t fall down.

“Dammit,” Rachel shouted, “keep hitting them!”. I kept the button pressed while Rachel and Sandy laid into the ones still standing. Then we all went to work on the disabled ones. This time the survivors came out of whatever safe room they were hiding in to help us.

Eight sojourners had died. We counted twenty six survivors. That left eight traitors. All of the children had survived, but we had lost two teenagers, a married couple named James and Jill, but everyone called them Jack and Jill. Jill had been three months pregnant.

There were wounded, too. Father Caleb had a long gash down one leg that Marta had stitched up, but it was infected. A woman I hadn’t met before was unconscious and looked like she wasn’t going to live. Another man I didn’t recognize had a splint on his arm. At some point the Sojourners had picked up new members, which suggested new math on the number of traitors. I gave Marta my whole supply of antibiotics, to divide up as she saw fit.

Rachel pointed at the fresh zombies and asked me, “Why didn’t it work on them?”

“It sort of worked,” I said defensively, “they stopped moving didn’t they? Zombie skin grows over time. We’ve never had a freshie in the lab so, no baseline. I have a theory that vision and hearing degrade while the skin is growing...”

“Before you get going, just stop okay? Marta, will you take a look at him please?”

“What for? I’m not hurt.” By this time we were in the main house, though I couldn't recall us clearing it. I suspected I was missing time again, but you couldn't always tell, could you? That's how you know the time is missing.

“Then you won’t mind if I have a look, will you? Come in my office, lie down here,” Marta led me to a leather sofa. “I’ll get my bag and be back in one minute to take your blood pressure. Just lie still so I can get a good reading, all right?” Marta left and closed the door behind her, leaving me in near total darkness. I remember wondering when the sun had gone down, and then nothing for a long time.