18 Zee Muncher
Preparations for winter began in early summer, mostly in the form of planning and planting. There was always a long list of things to do and stuff to acquire: every year brought more or fewer people, new challenges in what could be scavenged and what couldn't, and different food situations. Food was, naturally, the main concern. We hunted and harvested from our patches of wild gardens to get us through the spring. Anything we planted in spring was meant to feed us in summer. The summer plantings were what got us through the fall and winter, and that had to be planned accordingly. Lars's son took over from his father, and we started calling him Larson which he didn't mind at all.
The yearly migration required transportation, which meant having reliable vehicles and sufficient fuel, but gasoline was getting difficult to find. Increasingly, we found ourselves using horses that year. Not just for pulling farm machinery around, but also for riding. Up to that point, Sojourners sheltered their trained horses during the migration and then let them loose before they traveled to Idaho. In spring a sizable fraction of those animals would return to us on their own. Sometimes, they even brought other horses with them, which surprised me to no end when I first saw it. A spotted mare brought another mare with her, mostly fawn-colored and younger than she.
Our resident trainer explained how smart and social horses are. He said, if you can imagine a dog doing something smart, like bringing a friend to a safe place, you shouldn't be surprised to see a horse do the same. That was the summer I learned to ride properly, on a paint mare we called Sparky, and it opened up the land to me in a new way.
Cars were fine for long-distance travel over well-built roads that had no real obstacles, but most of the west isn't adjacent to such roads. By that time, most country roads had fallen into some level of disrepair. Forest fires, landslides, freeze cycles, erosion: a road has enemies, and nobody was going around defending them. We had electric cars, of course, but the four-wheelers among them drank power at an astonishing rate. Also, there was the issue of finding keys. The electrics were new, and new cars had advanced systems for deterring theft. You had to find the keys which, as often as not, had wandered off in the pants pocket of some zombie or other, pants which were doomed to fall off at some random point in time and space.
On the other hand, a horse gives you faster overland travel than walking, and a high viewpoint. I spent a lot of time afield around midsummer, with my security detail of the Eklund siblings and Hector, plotting the mega-shamble's route. The horde leaves telltale signs as it passes. There is the swath of animal bones you would expect, and the occasional shuffle of zombies that dropped out of the migration for whatever reason, and other signs, too. But the most obvious were the potholes that dotted the landscape wherever they had been, like someone had been digging for buried treasure. Zombies loved to chase burrowing animals. Five or ten zombies would fall on a gopher hole and dig it out to get at the source of whatever telltale vibration or electrical signature had betrayed the unfortunate residents. Nothing that lived in a shallow hole was safe, and I never realized just how many burrowing animals there were all around me until the zombies had dug them up and left a pockmarked terrain behind them: rats, lizards, prairie dogs and gophers, tortoises, owls and snakes were all good zombie food.
I was touring the back country because I was looking for a good place to build my next machine, somewhere a lot of zombies passed through but narrow enough to let us control them. Given the way mega-hordes split up and rejoined as they flowed through the labyrinthine Utah geography, our choice of location was critical. We probably couldn't get the entire horde, but we could get most of it if we chose well. We also needed a convenient way to dispose of the remains, which itself was no small task. I was doing this because, to my surprise, the Sojourners wanted to stay in Utah for the winter. When the fall migration came south we planned to trap it and kill it.
My first idea was to drop them into a major river gorge, but I had to discard it. Great river gorges contain great rivers, and zombies that don't die from the fall are washed downstream until they land on a point bar somewhere, to resume their un-life of looking for people they can eat. Sometimes, zombies even lie at the bottom of a river until some sufficiently tasty animal wakes them from hibernation. That was just one more reason riverbanks were not safe places to build settlements. Between wild animals, floods, and surprise packs of wet zombie, there were as many dangers as there were advantages to a riverfront view from your back porch.
After a couple weeks of searching, we discovered the town of Willard. Geography is destiny, they say, and Willard's destiny was to be a mass killing ground for zombie kind. Zombies liked easy walking just as much as any animal and highway 15, which ran directly through Willard, Ogden, Farmington, and Salt Lake City, was the main artery of the mega-shamble. That whole corridor was sandwiched between Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains: the widely dispersed mega-shamble funneled and concentrated at one end, passed through in such numbers and determined velocity they even knocked down buildings, then slowed and dispersed at the opposite end. It was a thirty mile long Venturi tube for the undead.
What was special about Willard was its combination of narrowness and the fact that it sat at the north end of "the tube". For two miles, highway 15 ran alongside a reservoir: any zombies in the water would struggle to get onto the highway so it was mostly protected from that side. From the highway to the Wasatch Mountains was less than a mile of flat land, occupied in the main by widely spaced ruins of houses destroyed by past migrations and a lot of trees, junipers and pines mostly. We were confident we could cover enough space with fencing and static generators to push the migration onto the highway.
The heart of my plan was to use a wood chipper to grind up the zombies and spit them out. No ordinary wood chipper would do for such a heavy duty task: we found an industrial scale wood chipper, the kind that was its own vehicle, had an intake tall enough to let a person walk into it, and could eat massive trees in a handful of seconds. We mounted one of Sandy's attractors right over the intake, to lure the horde in, and used an array of static generators to make the rest of Willard unattractive. If anything got out of hand, we could use sleep rays and retreat, abandon the project and hide in the usual caves while the migration passed us by.
It took us a month to prepare. Some of that was spent modifying our zombie destroyer with some extra platforms and protection, so people could safely stand on it, more or less, while it was running. We added metal flanges to the intake, in a vee shape to help direct zombies at the destructive mouth instead of mobbing the rest of the machine. And, we mounted a kind of chain link cage around the whole thing to protect the operators.
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There was also fuel to be scrounged. We needed diesel, lots of it, and that wasn't easy. We pumped the last dregs from every gas station and every truck we could find. Often the fuel was contaminated with water and had to be separated, then pumped into the tanker truck we planned to use to refuel the chipper.
Given the Before peoples' obsession with cars, and the small number who survived, you would think fuel would be easier to find even after six or seven years of Plague. But the Before economy ran on a just-in-time system. Things were made as late as possible, and very little was stored. A grocery store might hold only two or three days worth of eggs, for example. When you had a global communication system that told manufacturers how many of their product sold on any given day, they could plan just enough production to get new product to the stores before current supplies ran out. It was impressively efficient and kept everybody supplied with everything they could possibly want at low prices. That is, until a typhoon flooded a small, previously unheard-of manufacturer somewhere, and the whole system ground to a halt because one kind of aluminum widget suddenly wasn't available.
Diesel was considered a critical resource, yet less than a month's supply was kept on hand. The assumption was we could make more, even if oil imports suffered some kind of disruption, by having the oil refineries pull from a strategic oil reserve that held hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. But all of the refineries went up in flames and toxic smoke in the first few months of Plague. There were full tanker trucks on the highways, but most of them were used to start massive fires in attempts to destroy hordes (a quarter of San Francisco was burned down in this way). What was left was in gas stations and vehicles, and it was easier to use all that fuel than you would think, especially when you didn't have to pay money for it. When we embarked on our plan, we knew it could cost us all of our nearby diesel stocks.
In the week before the horde arrived, we practiced. There were twenty thousand or so zombies hanging around Salt Lake City, plus some more in the greater tube zone, and they proved to be instrumental to our success. The most dangerous days in the whole operation were the first two days of practice, as we refined our methods of mob management. Scrubbing the area clean of zombies delivered a bonus, too. It opened up some fuel reserves we used to top off our tanker truck.
We had one serious injury, and it happened in those first two days of practice: A newcomer named Kris crushed his hand while modifying the protective cage around the chipper, and it had to be amputated. Come to think of it, he never complained about his missing hand. It was his left one and he was proud of the stump, right up to the day he died of a heart attack twelve years later.
Aside from keeping the mob directed at the chipper's intake and not letting them surround the machine, we had to watch out for the zombies wearing helmets or flack jackets, combat-grade materials that could conceivably damage the machine. The chipper came with a long-reaching claw, designed to grasp trees and brush and shove it into the intake. The most skilled job on the team was the claw operator, whose job it was to pick armored zombies out of the mob and toss them to the side where they would be hit with a sleep ray and dispatched manually.
The team was run by a spotter, whose job it was to monitor the mob, direct people to adjust the attractor/repeller array, notice any zombies that needed to be picked by the claw operator, and decide when it was time to move the chipper forward. There were four teams who worked in shifts, so we could run the monster machine around the clock.
A vote was taken, and the machine was named Zee Muncher, or just Zee if you were feeling informal. Her name was lettered in rainbow hues, on both sides.
When the day of the migration came, we were scared. Excited, sure, but also scared. We were a tiny fortified island whose main protection was an invisible barrier of radio waves, facing a million-zombie hellscape that, if they got hold of us, wouldn't leave enough behind to make even half a zombie. I had spent years avoiding big shambles, watching for them in every waking moment, and as that dark horizon closed in I had to fight an urge to run. As they entered our area of control, and the zombies were pressed together, they began to move faster, as the static generators gradually pushed all of them onto the highway. There was an hour, when they first hit us, when all I could see to the north was zombie, never ending, never sated. I nearly bolted, against my own will, almost left my fellow Sojourners to their own fates right then and there, but thoughts of Rachel and Sandy and our expected child is what kept me in place. Children, actually, since Rachel planned to have more than one. I could not face them if I turned and fled without giving Zee Muncher her chance.
Zee was up to the task, in spades. Her prey rushed at her, tens and hundreds at a time, driven to frenzy by their own group proximity and the nearness of the attractor antenna, dialed up to maximum gain. They disappeared into her toothy rotating maw with a BZZZ-sss-tt-chch, BZZZzzzz-grr-ch-ch-CH, and their bits and chips were accelerated to high velocity, up a chute where they sprayed out in a fleshy, ghoulish arc. They flowed into Zee, softer than wood, and Zee annihilated them. The mound of waste product grew and grew until we had a rounded hill so high it threatened to block the chute.
We had to move Zee, a few yards at a time, against stern manufacturer recommendations and dire warnings, chewing zombies all the while, even when refueling. We worked in shifts, around the clock, under an oppressive sun during the day and LED lights at night. For seven days we tended to her, and she made her own monument of zombie destruction: a mile and a half long berm, parallel to the highway, almost twenty feet high by forty feet wide, made entirely of zombie shreds. She ate the entire horde, with a thousand gallons of diesel to spare.
The last zombie passed through Zee's maw in the early morning. As the sun vaulted over Wasatch Ridge and spilled itself over the flat land, we beheld a world free of zombies. Not even stragglers were left behind. We could see the trees, the houses, the reservoir, and the long long berm of corpse chips, all of it and not a single zombie. We cheered and we wept and we jumped up and down and we punched the sky. We danced and we shouted! We stashed Zee and the tanker, then returned home to feast for three days and three nights. All the women kissed me, and some of the men, too. We marked the day for annual remembrance, Zee Day, to celebrate in place of Thanksgiving.
I wish I could stop here, say this is the end of my story and we lived zombieless forever after. But one must do the math. We had burned virtually all the diesel to be found in the (formerly) most populated area of the state, to kill one million zombies. The important word here is "one". There could be two hundred million zombies or more in the continental united states. What we did was great for our part of Utah and the areas north and south of us. That's true. But it was only one half of one percent of what needed to be done, and we had no way to refine diesel to power machines like Zee. We had no way to make new parts for her if she needed repair. She was the most viscerally satisfying method of mass zombie destruction I would ever meet, but she was a dead end.