19 Victory Lap
The high from Zee Muncher's triumph didn't last as long for me as it did for everyone else. Strategic Problem Number One was still in full effect: I had to mobilize more people and give them better ways to kill zombies. Part of the solution was to deliver copies of the Good Book, Marta's compendium of Sojourner knowledge and methods. Father Caleb didn't like us calling it that because it smacked of irreverence, but the name stuck. Every Good Book was a tablet computer, with necessary accessories, plus a zombie sleep ray, two static generators, and a few other useful tools. We added a bible, in printed and electronic form, to ease Caleb's conscience. This was neatly organized into backpacks and distributed around the countryside. We stashed them in easy-to-reach caches and broadcast their locations on the radio programs. For good measure we raised the biggest American flags we could find over each spot. We knew the program was working because the backpacks kept disappearing.
By November we were getting callbacks on the radio. People wanted more backpacks, more sleep rays, and more tablets. There weren't many survivors but settlements did talk to each other, west of the Rockies and into the Great Basin, by shortwave radio, forming a network of information. As the word spread, people came from hundreds of miles away to visit caches in hopes of getting a Good Book, and if none was to be had they were willing to wait for one to be delivered. They also wanted to meet the man known as The Engineer. Good Book deliveries could be arranged blindly: we could drop them anywhere and then tell the other party where to find it. The risk is entirely on them. But meeting in person was a different matter because … you know how it is meeting new people. You never know in advance if they're going to be nice or if they're going to abduct you for ransom/conversion/dinner.
The idea of me playing ambassador was a subject of vigorous disagreement on the council. Caleb and Marta were against sending their most valuable resource into the unknown just to meet and greet. Rachel, who had taken Lars's old seat after she got pregnant, thought I should do it on account it might inspire people, and on this issue I could have gotten by with a lot less faith in me on her part. I was not a fan of the idea. Not even remotely.
In the end I asked the council permission to go, but it wasn't so I could play savior and go around inspiring people. I went because I hadn't done anything new in months. I was out of practical ideas, and if someone didn't come up with new inventions soon then progress would stall. That would leave humanity on a gentler slope towards extinction than before, but extinction nonetheless. I was invested now, and I couldn't sit by and watch humanity slide into oblivion, however slowly.
I was to take my usual guard of Alfred, Jaida, and Hector. We would copy any new useful ideas we discovered on our trip. Rachel wouldn't be with us because she was on the council and she was pregnant. Babies were the whole point of the Sojourners, so nobody was letting her put one in danger by chasing strangers all over Utah.
Then there was Sandy. When I told her she wasn't coming with us, she was in the middle of writing a list of things to pack. She didn't say anything when I forbade her from coming, she just stood up and left the room.
It was odd behavior for her, because she normally did whatever I told her to with a smile on her face. I could give her tasks all day long, and all she wanted in return was for me to inspect the result and praise her efforts. Sometimes, when I took a break from my own work, I would watch Sandy toil away at whatever job I had given her. Being around Rachel and making friends with the Sojourners had eased the perpetual wariness from Sandy's face and I often observed when she was working a look about her that was more than a smile, an air of deep happiness, almost blissful. When I was stuck on some small problem, or I was overtired, watching Sandy at work would fill me up again with energy and hope.
I was surprised when Sandy trod off without a word, and I thought she must be angry and would return after she had some time to cool off. Maybe she would even argue with me. Instead, Rachel stormed the room soon after.
"You're taking Sandy!"
For a moment I was so surprised I couldn't speak. "We're going to be wandering the countryside meeting strangers," I explained, "I'm not exposing her to that kind of danger."
"You have guards, and guns," Rachel reminded me. "If you don't take her she'll be miserable. She was heartbroken when you went off scouting just for two weeks. She cried, E, every night because she thought you didn't want her any more. You can't leave her behind, it would wreck her."
"Then maybe this ownership thing has gone too far," I said, "maybe she should make her own choices from now on."
"Oh, wow," Rachel threw up her hands, "I can't believe you said that! Do you really think she's your prisoner? That she's too dumb to know she has options? Because Sandy has options, E. She's been approached several times, and you know what she says? She shows them her bracelet, the one you made, and says she belongs to you and that she's very happy."
Rachel said some more things after that, but my mind was stuck on that scene, where Larson or Hector or one of the other younger men asks to spend some time with her and she refuses them, brandishes a black and red leather bracelet as proof of her sincerity. The picture thrilled me in some small way, until the tips of my fingers tingled.
I touched my own bracelet, one of three, and realized I had become a lot more involved than I intended. I brought Sandy to the Sojourners to dump her there, but instead I was planning a future with her and Rachel. Whatever we were, it wasn't master and slave, owner and owned. It was more complicated than that. I didn't understand exactly what we were, but I knew Sandy had felt misused by my unilateral decision and mustered Rachel to her defense. Sandy had more agency than I gave her credit for, had stayed with me because she wanted to.
Rachel's voice grew more and more stern, but I was too far afield to catch most of what she was saying.
"Are you listening, E?"
"No, but it's fine. She can come. In fact," I said, surprised at myself, "I want her to come. I am worried about her safety but, like you said, we have guards. I'd miss her too, if she wasn't there." I also didn't want to give the young Sojourner men any more opportunities to ask Sandy out while I wasn't around.
Sandy bust into the room with excitement, rushed at us with open arms, and hugged Rachel. "Thank you! Thank you so much!" She was thanking Rachel, not her supposed master.
Rachel looked at me over Sandy's shoulder, insufferably smug.
Is it strange that Rachel scared me sometimes? It's true. I had taken on the job of building machines for a zombie-free world, and if that meant going out into the wild to mix with possibly homicidal strangers, never mind the mega-hordes of undead, she would hand me an extra canteen and a box of homemade ammo. There's the door brother, try to be back before the kid is born. In the early days of Plague it was Rachel's readiness for violence that scared me. Later on, the really scary bit was her belief in me: the way she assumed I could just do things that were hitherto impossible. And, on the rare occasions where I balked at something important, like keeping Sandy close to me, she could always find ways to convince me. Then again, didn't I do the same to her every time I let her fight some deadly enemy on my behalf? I suppose that was our bargain. She protected me, and all I had to do was invent stuff to save the world. And I had to be good to Sandy, apparently, because they were sisters.
I remember January 23rd of that year clearly. I can feel the apprehension even now, decades later. Returning to the Sojourners had been a big enough risk for me, and I would have done it much later if it weren't for Sandy. Now we were heading out into the wild to rub shoulders with complete unknowns. Most of the places we were visiting were settlements only known from the radio, never seen up close. They weren't likely to be cannibals or marauders. Survivors had learned a long time ago to band up against cannibals to destroy them, and marauders didn't talk to you on the radio for years before killing you. But, there are all kinds of other violence and unpleasantness in the world, and you could never be sure of what you were walking into.
Our party of five people and six horses said goodbye to the Sojourners to follow a map of meeting sites. The locations were arranged as far away from home as we could manage, a fact I regretted the moment I started to leave. But a week of travel, even by horse, was not so bad when you were equipped with white noise devices and sleep rays and competent fighters. We towed the horses north in a trailer, then disembarked to travel uphill on bad roads to the first meeting spot.
A journey at a higher elevation or latitude would have been dangerous, but in the high desert it was merely inconvenient. The nights were freezing, in the teens and twenties, but that was just enough to keep the zombies away. The days were usually above freezing, as high as forty-five or even fifty degrees, comfortable for a long journey. Best of all, there was little in the way of rain or snow that year.
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We covered as much ground in a day as the horses could manage, then slept in two tents for warmth: I shared a small tent with Sandy, in a double bag and long underwear, and the three guards shared a larger tent. If you've wintered in Idaho, you can camp in Utah any time of year as long as you avoid the high mountains. Global warming had made Utah winters a little less snowy. A few degrees rise in average temperature translated to a much more tolerable winter for humans, however the plants and animals might feel about it.
Our first meet was a colony near Fish Lake. It's famously beautiful country, but when I was there it looked like a forest fire had gone through the place and burned it all up a few years prior. The grasses and aspens were taking it all back with a vengeance. Clumps of skinny white trunks grew among the blackened remains of the evergreens used to grow there. The old had burned away but the new were feasting on the remains. In a few score of years it would be evergreens again, or maybe the new aspens would join up with the famous Pando stand on the other side of the lake, forming an ever-larger single organism.
The people we met at Fish Lake called themselves Truthers. We didn't meet in their settlement proper, but at an old vacationers' motel. We each had our own rooms while the Truthers camped outside in tents. It was their opinion the government was still in operation in Washington DC, and was manufacturing zombie hordes to keep the revolutionary factions of the population in check. I must be one of the good guys, since I was so good at subverting the Weapon of Universal Terror. They asked me about a million questions, and didn't believe me when I said everything was the same all the way to California. I must have taken the obvious roads, they said. The parts of the country loyal to DC wouldn't be affected. They were kind enough not to hold my ignorance against me.
We visited with them for three days and three nights. I think they intended to breed me with their women because someone tried to sneak into my bed every night, and it definitely wasn't Jaida or Sandy. At least, I hope they were women. Every night I had to kick at least one person out of my bed, but nobody seemed sore about it. I would learn later that Alfred and Hector both entertained their midnight visitors and I was the only abstainer. Sandy, who shared a room with me but slept in a separate bed, thought the entire affair was funny and promised to report the events to Rachel in a most positive light. She even offered to sleep in the same bed with me, to protect me from the terrors of strange women. It was a gallant offer, I told her, but I could defend my own honor against the Truther women.
The Truthers didn't have any new inventions to share, but they had a ton of beaver pelts and an impressive supply of working shortwave radios. We traded a complete sleep ray and a handful of static generators for some of each and called it a partial win. We made contact with another colony and came away on friendly terms. We exchanged frequencies and codewords on parting, so we could meet up again someday in the future.
The Truthers were typical of about half our meetings, what we came to call "mountain colonies". These colonies survived because they were so remote and the terrain was so rugged that zombies rarely came near. They were big enough to fight off the occasional bandit, but small enough to be hard to find. Their remoteness meant they didn't scavenge, but were living a subsistence lifestyle with what they could garden or hunt themselves. They tended to be thin, suspicious, bizarrely religious. Everyone we met had access to a radio or else we wouldn't have found them, but otherwise they had even less news of the world than we did. The meetings themselves were cautiously begun, friendly but a bit weird in the middle, had some kind of trade at the end, and in total were not immediately helpful.
A few meetings we simply skipped. We always scoped a meeting place from a distance and if the Eklunds didn't like the look of it we just went another direction. A day later we would contact the jilted colony to say sorry for getting cold feet but, we just didn't like the look of things. Maybe next time.
As we traveled, by car or by horseback, we kept in touch with home. Hector was our best radio man. He kept track of the rotating frequencies we used to call home, carefully encoded the more sensitive portions of our reports, and fiddled with antennas until he reached them. Some days it wasn't possible to get ahold of the Sojourners, because we were too far away or in the shadow of a mountain, but Hector could usually make it work. He spent his evenings, and a fair portion of our power budget, with his headphones on, scanning frequencies for strange signals. A lot of transmissions were intentionally short-range, so moving around was an opportunity to listen in on new conversations. Once in a while he would catch a transmission from the people we were visiting, talking to another settlement we hadn't known about.
We visited two settlements that really got the Good Book's message and were doing something with it. The Cañaros were from, appropriately, the Grand Canyon. We met the Cañaros party on what used to be a shoreline of Lake Powell, now a deep valley ever since Earth At Last! ruined the damn. The Cañaros showed us a smaller, lighter version of the static generator. It was a modification of a popular walkie-talkie model that only required a little careful soldering and two new parts. They were also packing up a hundred new copies of the Good Book to spread south. They said they traded with several colonies between the Grand Canyon and the Rio Grande but gave away nothing about their location or numbers. We traded some of the Truther beaver pelts for food and ammunition, then promised to stay in touch by radio.
The other good find was in Green River. They were a group Sojourners had interacted with before, in a limited way. Lars used to visit them every year to exchange tips on agriculture, and he always took one or two others with him. The Green River colony was north of the town by the same name, off the main roads, and built around two massive "temporary" structures made from steel frame covered with heavy-duty fabric. The buildings were semi-circular in shape, maybe a hundred feet wide, and several times that long, like big quonset huts. These were surrounded by a three-layer fence over a mile in diameter. It was unclear who had built the thing: it was nearly complete when they found it. Once they cleared all the zombies from it they finished the fence and started living there. Plus, they had some seriously talented snipers and large supply of ammunition. They weren't in the path of any major hordes, but if one did show up they had a fallback position in the bluffs. Out of deference to their sense of security, the Sojourners never came so far East into the desert without radioing ahead.
We never went in to the settlement proper but instead camped a way downstream, on a little rise that gave us a good view of our immediate area and the river below. They came out to our camp in small groups to meet us, and I shook hands with what felt like a hundred people. Who knows how many more were living inside the fence? From the way they looked at me you would think I had personally saved them. However good their setup was, the hordes had still taken plenty from them, but now there wasn't a zombie in sight, anywhere. They had built a single burn pit, by the highway south of them, and set up deterrence devices well outside their fence line. Zombies never even got close to them any more.
The Mayor of Green River was a Shoshone woman who called herself White Hawk, and she gifted us with some hard-to-find water pumps. She told us her settlement had doubled, to just over a hundred, in a short time because she was able to keep the surrounding area clear. Once the area was safe enough, people just started showing up out of nowhere. Green River could feed them all because of the irrigation systems they had built with the river as their source. For years they had been over-producing, hoping for more settlers, and then plowing the excess back into the earth. The result was a fantastically rich soil and plenty of food.
Green River added their own ideas to the Good Book, mainly about irrigation and agriculture, and was pushing more copies to colonies they knew in the north. We traded them one of the Cañaros compact radios and a copy of the build instructions, and got fruitcake in exchange. It was honest-to-Living-Jesus fruitcake, with dried fruits and flour and eggs and brandy, heavy like the brick of carbs and sugars that it was, and smelled of alcohol. When toasted and slathered in sheep butter, Sandy said it tasted like angel candy. I watched her eat two slices of the divine stuff, as enraptured by it as she had been by the peaches.
Our next-to-last stop was near Moab, but to get there we had to cross the Colorado River. The Colorado is one of the world's great rivers, and it runs through the vast wilderness of Utah and Arizona spanned by only a handful of bridges. Some of the bridges were destroyed during the plague years, and the others were often barricaded by "toll officers". Someone had taken bulldozers to the roads near the bridges, too, scooping out big ditches across the roads so you couldn't approach them with vehicles. You could cross the river easily enough by kayak or canoe, assuming you felt like searching for one and could find a convenient landing place, but getting your horse across was another matter. The Colorado rarely, if ever, froze solid enough to simply walk across, but in winter it was cold enough to be suicide to swim. So we needed a bridge, and we had to use our horses.
The obvious route was to follow highway 191 south to use the bridge at the Moab crossing. The bridge there was known to have a badly damaged deck but was crossable by foot or horse. Not being great fans of the obvious, and having recently heard that the nearby Arches National Park might be home to bandits, we elected to drive to the Dewey crossing. According to Mayor White Hawk the bridge there was in good condition and not currently being tolled by anyone. We could ride across by horseback and make the thirty mile journey south to Moab. It was an extra two days out of our way, round trip, but it brought us to our meet in Moab by an unexpected direction.
State road 128 between Dewey and Moab is a scenic two-lane road that follows the eastern bank of the Colorado for about 30 miles. When I was there we saw six or seven hundred zombies standing ankle deep in the river, in a line a mile long, like the shamble had decided to spend a day on the beach but had no idea what to do next. We kept the static generators on and trotted past them — something that would have been impossible a year earlier.
We camped cold, six miles out from Moab, up a side trail that hid us and our horses in a deep gully. Like every day at sundown Hector did his best to contact home over the shortwave to give our report, but he couldn't raise them from our sheltered spot surrounded by rock. Like most nights he spent some time scanning random frequencies, hoping to find an unexpected signal. He happened to scan the AM frequencies, something he didn't bother with often. AM transmitters were too big and power hungry, which is why nobody used them. But that night he caught a dim signal on the AM band and, in total darkness, scurried up the sides of the gulley we were in with a suitable antenna to tune in properly. What he discovered was a show, one that had been running for days or maybe weeks, called the Ludovic Sundown Review.