15 The Pits

During the long ride back to Utah I started teaching Sandy more math, a project that would be ongoing for the whole of spring and summer. Rachel had already drilled her in multiplication tables and basic arithmetic, but she didn't seem interested in learning more. That was, until I introduced her to Ohm's law. Ohm observed that current flowing through a conductor (I) was proportional to the difference in voltage (V) from one end to the other. He introduced the notion of resistance (R) to express that proportion and gave us the famous equation I = V/R. Sandy didn't care much about trigonometry or geometry, but knowing which resistor to put into a circuit was a big motivator for her. She learned just enough algebra to let her work Ohm's law, but she still couldn't manipulate exponents or distribution, and there were a lot of holes in her math in general. I can testify she was willing to learn any math I showed to her, as long as it could be used in electronics. It fell to Rachel, and the Sojourner teachers, to fill in all the rest.

Even though it was barely more sophisticated than my music baited trenches in Norcali, as a proof-of-concept the quarry trap was a major success. It didn't take much in materials. You could dispose of an impressive number of flesh-eating zombies in only a few days. It would work while mostly unattended. It was terribly gratifying to watch it suck down so many bodies. The downsides were: The system required a very large hole, conveniently located; If left unattended for too long, the trap could fill up and become a menace; The lure needed a longer-term power source.

During breaks from driving, the six of us spent a tremendous amount of time talking about the next machine we would build. There was enthusiasm right then for burning mass quantities of zombie horde, and they wanted to do a lot more of it. What I wanted was a system that could be built wherever it was needed and run unattended for weeks on end. It should dispose of the zombies, rather than simply piling them up until someone could be bothered to visit it with a can of gasoline and a book of matches.

Zombies burn reasonably well if they're dry, but they don't stand still for it. Once alight, they rush around at their fastest zombie pace, trying to get away from the intense heat, and nearby zombies flee the heat as soon as they feel it. I thought, if you could corral them, lighting one on fire might cause a chain reaction as it collided with another, then they both headed off in different directions to set still more on fire. The end result would be a brownian motion machine of zombie ignition, similar to what had happened at the Hermitage. The bones and skulls would likely not burn in such an open environment, so someone would still have to sweep it out frequently. But at least the zombies would be dead-dead and not just walking-around dead.

At that point we were confident in our ability to lure and manage any zombie groups smaller than a full-on horde, provided we could find parts to build devices. It was the burning aspect of the plan that was troublesome. The corral had to be fireproof and it had to contain the flaming zombies. We didn't want to risk the fire spreading. As Rachel said, "Burning the city down around us isn't a great survival move." We wanted the fire to start automatically when the corral was full, or at least be remotely operated. The fire mechanism needed fuel. Occasionally, the whole thing would have to be cleaned out and maintained. Above all, the technology had to be within our grasp. Feeding ourselves and keeping our near perimeter clear were still top priorities.

That spring, the Sojourners settled in an office park that had its own chain link fence and security gate. When we caught up with them, they were eager to hear how well the quarry trap performed and we regaled them with our success. Getting support for our new plan was easy: excitement ran so high I had to remind them repeatedly of how dangerous it would be to scrounge the parts, and Father Caleb had to remind them of all the other work that had to be done. In a matter of two weeks we built our first corral-and-burn trap in a mid-sized town in Utah. If it worked, more would soon follow.

It so happens that any given suburb had about a quarter of its land paved over for parking lots. Aside from being a large non-flammable surface, parking lots also offered building blocks in the form of cars, and we could use the light poles for hanging sensitive equipment out of reach of the flames. We wanted a solar panel array and batteries, to power the radios we needed for lures. With those requirements in hand, the ideal site was obvious: the eternally convenient big box store.

One particular big box store stood out as an appropriate site: Abigail's Walmart. Since the building was already burned out it couldn't catch fire. It was a commute to get there, and we ended up spending most of our power budget on just transporting people to and from the site, but if anything went wrong it would happen away from where we were sleeping.

We used a forklift to make a circle of cars stacked two-high. The circle was made in six sections that didn't quite match up: instead, they overlapped and left a gap where the zombies could enter in small scuffles. The space under the cars we filled with sandbags and cinderblocks to keep the crawlers from escaping. The corral was large enough to enclose six of the big metal lamp posts you find in such lots, each one equipped with two lures: one of Sandy's radio lures, and the other for synthesized noise. Only two sets of lures had to be active at any one time, and they rotated every few minutes. This was both for redundancy in case of a malfunction, and because it got the zombies walking around a bit inside their corral. The goal was to bring them close, walk them through the gaps in the circle, and keep them moving slowly around the corral so they would fill up the entire space instead of just congregating on one side. When it was too full to allow any more inside, about five hundred or so, then it was time to burn it.

We gave up on auto-ignition because it made the trap so ridiculously complicated. Instead, we experimented with molotov cocktails and ways to deliver them. Simple was better: turpentine and laundry soap in a glass bottle with a screw cap on it. We tied storm matches to the outside of the bottle as the fuse, which was much safer than using a lit rag. Hector made a slingshot out of wood and surgical tubing that looked like big crossbows, and mounted it on a rooftop near the trap. "Near" in this case meant a little over two hundred feet from the nearest building to the center of the corral, quite a throw, but you can store a lot of force in several bands of tubing. Physics students had been building crazy throwing devices out of the stuff for decades. We were just doing something useful for a change.

A little experimentation told us exactly how far to pull back the metal cup that held the bomb, and what angle to hold it at. We marked everything so the crews could reliably hit the inside of the corral: not difficult considering how big they were. All you had to do was put the bottle into a metal cup, light the storm match, pull it back to the spot indicated, and let it go. You could even fire the bomb-thrower at night. In fact, it was best at night: the storm match would flare brightly as the bottle arced into the distance, and then down and down, and suddenly it was a splash of roiling fire.

We insisted people wear protective gear while doing this, because we had some bottles break unexpectedly during the prototype phase. Nobody ever got burned using the live bombs. And, we charted multiple escape routes from the rooftop, for when things went wrong.

The dangerous part of the enterprise was searching for supplies, because you had to clear the insides of multiple buildings, and using the forklifts drew the curious undead. Having a way to incapacitate large areas of zombies is what made it safe enough to even try. Sandy built more of the "sleeper" guns until we had four of them. We still had nerve-wracking moments, but we lost no one while building the corrals.

The first time we set fire to the test corral, all of the Sojourners turned out to watch. Hearing about it is one thing, but witnessing the packed mass of zombies tamely standing in their pen was astonishing to anyone who hadn't seen the quarry. Father Caleb launched the first live bomb, and by the time all the zombies were on fire there were tears and prayers of gratitude. I did my best not to begrudge Living Jesus the thanks He was getting for my ideas, but it was a challenge.

There was one downside to the test corral, and that was the cars: they burned more than expected. All of us had to clear out to avoid breathing the toxic smoke thrown up by the tires and upholstery and whatever else cars were made of that created such black and toxic clouds. We agreed that was not ideal, and it would be better to find some cement traffic barriers.

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As soon as the test corral had shown its worth, we built four pits to ring our central settlement at a distance of about a mile. We still maintained our inner perimeter of chain link fence and watchers. Outside the fence was our nearest gardens, and just beyond those we put motion sensors hooked to static generators, and wired those into our solar power grid. Those things wouldn't protect you from a zombie actively chasing you, but they would turn away stragglers and they consumed very little power. A team was dispatched every day to make sure the systems worked.

I found several aspect of the project disappointing, especially that the corals had to be tended or, at least, visited every day. Twice a day a team was responsible for checking "the pits", and at first they burned every corral nearly every day. After two weeks they were burning only one a day. At the end of a month we had to turn up the antenna gain because zombies had stopped coming. We quartered the small city we were living in, and went from building to building, releasing undead that were trapped behind closed doors: we'd lay them down with the sleeper ray then make ourselves scare. We knew they could find their own way to the pits.

While all of this was happening, Marta was writing an instruction manual. It was a project she had worked on sporadically for years but never had time to finish. She and an assistant named Paul, who in a previous life had been an author of technical manuals, banged away on her precious laptop computer for three weeks. The book already covered a lot of territory, like advanced first aid and how to get water in the desert. They added chapters on what we had learned about the plagued, and all about our research at HuSH Labs.

I was in charge of writing a book about basic electronics skills, especially practical stuff like how to read resistor levels and how to solder. Whenever we needed pictures to illustrate something, I used Sandy as my hand model. Added too, were schematics for the all-important sleeper ray and some other devices. I'm afraid I did a scant job of it. While arguably better than nothing I hopped that, someday, someone else would come along and write a better book. I stuffed some related ebooks onto the shared drive and hoped that would make up the difference.

The team added diagrams of the traps we had built, and some prospective designs yet to be built. When we cleared a major electronics supply warehouse looking for parts we also recovered two hundred brand new solar panels made specifically to charge personal electronics. Marta appropriated most of them and had them packed up with tablets loaded with her book, ruggedized covers, USB cables, and an instruction sheet on how to start one up and launch the book. If you could read, you could know everything we knew.

Rachel insisted I train in the evenings with our skirmishers, to improve my hand-to-hand and learn to fight with a knife. Alfred and Jaida Eklund had spent most of their youth in dojos so took it upon themselves to teach us. When I lagged or my attention wandered Rachel would hit me hard enough to bruise, even if she wasn't my current sparring partner. Jaida was quick to laugh at these surprise assaults, but the other trainees would wince. I wouldn't call them love taps exactly, more like aggressive reminders to keep myself in one piece. It was very like Rachel: I could ask her for absolutely any measure of loyalty, except to go easy on me.

As I think of that spring with the Sojourners, my first spring in years spent with other people, it isn't the burning pits or the sweaty training sessions that come back to me with the most clarity. I remember Rachel and Sandy, in their own bubble of sisterhood, laughing at something or other one of them had just said. They could vanish for an afternoon, hand in hand, and bring back forage or fish or strange rocks or a story about an especially colorful lizard. I remember one time, they found some wild berries and brought back a huge basket of them. Most were shared with the Sojourners, as everything was, but we kept enough to have our own private desert. The potent little berries turned our teeth purple. We grinned at each other all evening.

Another time, we were sitting high up on one of the many bluffs in Utah. That part of the world is made entirely of extreme geography: deep river valleys, desert dunes, imposing plateaus, stubborn forests, high mountains, towering cliffs. Rachel pointed out landmarks, talked about the forces that had shaped them, how many millions of years it took, and she went on for an hour. Every minute was fascinating. Sandy's eyes were wide with her imagination of millions of years of wind and water and tectonic movements, all conspiring to make the daunting land that is Utah.

In the night-time we often read together: Sandy might read aloud about the girl detective, I might do the boy wizard, and Rachel might do poetry. Sometimes, Sandy would read her own stories to us. Sojourner teachers were giving her writing assignments, but all her stories seemed to be about young women of various troubles, often a princess but any distressed damsel would do, who were rescued by princes and went on to live together happily ever after. The princes could not always be identified immediately, disguised as they were by poor manners and bad hairstyles or gender-bending attire, but they always came through in the end, often with help from a cast of friends.

One night, the three of us made bracelets together. It was like one of those crafts projects you did at summer camp, but with actual leather instead of colored plastic. We each made one, using black and maroon strips of leather, and the same weave. We three were marked as belonging together.

In mid summer, during one of our picnic excursions, Rachel announced she wanted to get pregnant.

"You want to what? With whom?" I exclaimed. She spent all her time in training, or with Sandy and me. I wasn't aware of her dating anyone. We surely did not have room for another person, let alone an adult and a baby.

"Alfred and a turkey baster," she said, "he's tall, and this way nobody gets attached."

Sandy clapped and made happy noises, and hugged the taller woman with all the enthusiasm her little frame could muster. But I was confused. "Who's going to raise this proposed baby?"

Sandy answered for her. "We are, the three of us! Right?"

"With the Sojourners' help, of course," agreed Rachel, "that's what I'm hoping for anyway, that you and Sandy will be parents with me."

Parents. To a child. Unthinkable. It had been unthinkable for years. In fact there had never been a time in my life when it had been a proposition at all, given how the plague started during my honeymoon. Would a defenseless child even be safe around me? Maybe this was nothing to Rachel, who had grown up with several younger siblings and half-siblings, but I had no experience with babies. All I knew was they had to be changed constantly and they deprived you of all your sleep. How could I, of all people, promise to be a parent?

My thoughts went in circles around the improbable mix of me and Sandy and Rachel and a mini-Alfred-Baster baby.

Sandy sat next to me, and put a comforting hand on my arm. "I think you broke him."

"He just needs to think about it. He did the same thing when he fell for my sister. He'll be okay once he's chewed on it a while. But don't take a whole year to make up your mind this time, okay brother?"

"I thought you swore off children. You said you would never bring another life in this world unless the plague was cured. It isn't cured."

Rachel shrugged. "We have the next best thing. Soon everyone else will, too. I would wait a few more years to see how it all pans out, but I want more than one child. If I wait much longer I could run out of time."

Time. Not today or this season or next season, but time as measured in years. Time enough to age. Time enough to plan. Time enough to watch children grow and, just maybe, have children of their own that you could hold. Enough time for those children to grow before you had to be put in the ground, your own time measured in scores and tens of years.

I had been living in an endless now where all that mattered was today and, if the day was good, how to get another day just like it. The seasons were just other flavors of today with heat or rain or light in different quantities. I didn't think about next year because there was no reason to. If there was a next year, then it would have to take care of itself.

I couldn't remember the last time I heard someone worry they were running out of time, running out of years. Time had come unstuck, was starting again, because Rachel wanted a baby. We could have futures again. A child or two or three, to teach and love, maybe more if Sandy decided she wanted kids too. And all of them would grow and have their own futures, branching out and away from ours.

Rachel was right, I did agree to it eventually. I just had to think on it for a while, and some days later I told them I would love to raise children with them. It only took two tries for Rachel to get pregnant, and there was much general excitement in our house and in the whole settlement. Hers was one of six children conceived that summer.

Yet as the weeks clicked by frustration gnawed on me. Killing zombies in one desert town was not a solution to all zombies everywhere. It wasn't anywhere near what my new family needed. The world would never be safe enough until all the zombies died. The Sojourners had an unreasonable faith in me, but the truth was I had nothing large enough to do the job.

Sleep seemed impossible as my emotions swung from frustration to terror as I re-imagined all I had seen and how it would happen all over again to the new life growing beside me. Friends gone, parents lost, and our own inevitable ends in a thousand grizzly, remembered details. Abigail was there too, her final silent scream a warning. Did Rachel fret so much in her sleep because pregnancy made her restless? Or did she suffer the same worries as I did? It seemed too selfish to wake her up in the middle of the night to ask her. Anxiety, I was learning, lay near the heart of parenthood.