20 Trapped

Ludovic had assembled a nightly variety show of comedy, music, sports, news, and powered up an AM radio station to broadcast it. Instead of being brought to you by some brand of shaving cream or breakfast cereal, it was funded by the patronage of King Ludovic (His Grace, Defender on the Peaks, Master of the Mountain Holds, etc.). The King had assembled some fine acts: a soprano singing a well-remembered aria; a reenactment of the famous Who's on First routine; new music from the Collins Sisters, who were famous from Before; a humorous short play.

There was also an installment of an ongoing drama. We could barely follow the story because we knew nothing about the characters. You know them today as the intrepid reporter Mary Petts and her trusty, always-ready-with-a-gun sidekick Albert from Nowhere, but back then they were just two lost kids trying to find their way to Ludovic's kingdom in hopes of gaining safety. In a neat bit of recursion, they are aided on their way by the Sundown Review broadcasts.

What astonished me the most were sports scores. It's common knowledge today that Ludovic established the Kingdom Soccer League, but I wonder if anyone aside from us plague survivors appreciate how it affected people then. Having someone to root for, a home team, a little spectacle to partake in, is as important to a group's identity as a flag or an army. Listening to the highlights and scores was a sudden throwback to a sense of normalcy. Talking about the latest sporting match is about as common an activity as you can find, but it requires a civilization. Nobody talks about yesterday's hockey scores with the settlement next door when they're worried about being eaten by undead, or that the other team might kill ours to keep all the half-time snacks for themselves.

After sports there was a stand-up comic, and then more live music. Then a recap of the day's news, and the headline was Grand Junction: it was now firmly in the grasp of Ludovic's forces, liberated from the Cult of Seven. I never would meet anyone who knew anything first hand about the Cult of Seven, in fact nobody had heard of them except from the Radio. I think they were never more than a convenient myth to excuse the forcible takeover of a tiny settlement there.

In spite of what we knew about New Kingdom from Jules the Damned Codger, the character of Ludovic, and the dangers of his budding empire, we gathered around the radio, rapt. The Sojourner program was a modest chapel experience by comparison. But, for all the surprises, the closing message was the most shocking. It was delivered by a sultry feminine voice.

"And now we have a personal message, to the one called The Engineer. Your works are a marvel. Come to New Kingdom, Engineer. Here, you will be a celebrated hero. Here, you will want for nothing: food, women, renown. His Majesty will provide everything you need to continue your great work. In New Kingdom, you can achieve true greatness. Present yourself at the gates of Grand Junction or Steamboat Springs, and achieve your destiny." She went on like that for a while, and offered rewards to anyone with news of my appearance or whereabouts.

Jules had told us the man's reach was growing long, and that damned codger knew what he was talking about.

I have to admit, I was curious. The so-called king might have significant resources, including more people like myself who could help with bigger projects. That had to be balanced against everything Jules had told us about Ludovic. His invitation might sound polite, but if Jules was right about him then he should be avoided like Plague itself.

It didn't take five minutes for us to decide it was time to go home. We would have to send our apologies for missing the last two meets by shortwave. Our immediate problem was the hundred yards of icy water that ran between ourselves and home: we were on the wrong side of the Colorado River. There were only two bridges within a hundred miles.

"They have to figure you're somewhere in Utah, but they wouldn't know where. Not yet." Alfred had his Rand McNally out, but I already knew what he would find. We all did. Ludovic had just taken Grand Junction, which wasn't far from Dewey. Setting up a watch over the Dewey crossing was a logical next step for the conquerers. We had to assume it was being watched, if not actively guarded and tolled. And, if Ludovic invaded Green River, we couldn't count on White Hawk to keep our passage a secret, not if they threatened her own people. If they were actively looking for me, then it wouldn't be long before they realized I was close by.

If you've never been to Utah, maybe you don't understand how difficult our situation was. The terrain in the southeast part of the old state is a maze of mountains, canyons, gullies, basins, and mesas. It's mostly sandstone mountains, shaped by wind and water into a hundred blind alleys that cut through the red cliffs only to leave you stranded at a dead end. The greenest and most livable places in the region, the river beds, were also the deepest canyons and the hardest to get out of. The Colorado is the largest of these, winding its way between mountains, slowly grinding away at the soil to deepen its own channel. From the surface of the river, or from the road that follows along it, one can only look in three directions: downriver, upriver, and up. Finding a way to get out of the river canyon and onto the mesa above, without using the well-known roads, could take days.

For most of the Colorado's journey, hundreds of miles in each direction, there were precious few places where one could look across the river and not be confronted with red walls built from stacked layers of sandstone. Moab is one of the few exceptions to that rule. The river breaks free of the mountains into a mile-wide basin where it makes a leisurely bend before entering another canyon on the other side. That wide, slow span of the Colorado is an easy crossing point and a natural location for a town. Not only is there flat space and plentiful water, but the inside edge of the river's bend is a thick deposit of fertile silt. A spot like Moab was a gem in the wilderness, ripe for fishing and agriculture and trade, and it made sense that Ludovic would want to occupy it, both for the strategic bridge and the small patch of easy living it provided.

So, we weren't trapped yet, but we didn't have any convenient paths to get home either.

"We have to go to Moab tonight," said Jaida, "and check it out. If we can't cross, then we have to make for Hite. Overland, if we have to."

"That's a long ways, on one ninety one," observed Alfred, "cross country might be worse, though. Canyonlands is hard terrain. Easy to get lost. And we only have a few days of food."

"There's a foot bridge by the boat launch, about a quarter mile from the main bridge." Jaida was reciting from memory, having scouted the area once before.

"You can see one from the other. If they're watching one bridge, they'll watch the other, too. "

"We have to call it in," Hector reminded us, "let them know." He climbed back up the gully wall to replace the AM antenna with one more suited to the Sojourner frequency, but he still couldn't raise them. Radio is a bit like black magic. I'm sure there was a reason we couldn't get through, but damned if I know what that reason was. Hector even tried the next day's frequency, and the previous day's, too. I instantly worried if New Kingdom had ventured a lot farther west than Grand Junction.

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"We could call Green River," suggested Hector, "maybe they'll pass a message for us."

Jaida was emphatic. "No! They're next in line to get conquered. Call them and warn them, but don't broadcast anything about who we are or try to pass any messages through them. Assume the enemy is listening." Green River hadn't given us any ciphers or keys, so everything we said to them was in the clear.

Hector played the situation pretty well, with some coaching from Aflred. He called up Green River and had a friendly conversation with their operator, told them about the Sundown Review and what channel it was on, and that New Kingdom had taken Grand Junction from some group called the Cult of Seven. Had anyone heard of them? No? Well, check out the Review tomorrow, because it's a great program. It was a warning couched in casual conversation.

While Hector was busy, Alfred and Jaida made a decision. We would head for the Moab crossing that night. They would scout the bridges to see if either one was passable. If there was any trouble, any at all, Sandy, Hector, and I would retreat and hope the Eklunds would catch up to us later.

"I mean it," Alfred told me, "if you hear shots, or we don't come back right away, don't wait for us. If the last thing I see in this world is you getting killed trying to help us, my zombie is going to be pissed off and kill your zombie. Got it?"

We broke camp, doused the lights, and entered a period of silence. We even turned off the static generators, not because someone might detect them but because we had to conserve all of our resources now, especially batteries. We might not have the luxury of stopping for a day or two to lay out solar panels to recharge everything. We lay in our darkened camp, listening to the wind and the distant river, as the stars marched their nightly trek overhead. Watching the stars wasn't some idle task: it was our clock.

The skies move fifteen degrees per hour. We were tucked into a canyon that ran roughly east-west, so it was easy to measure sixty degrees from the horizon up to some memorable star. When the watched star hit the horizon, four hours had passed. We spent the time huddled together for warmth, same as the horses, not talking or doing anything else.

In the Before times that would have been a real feat, if you can believe it. Our lives were so full of noise and distraction that it seemed we were never truly alone with our own thoughts. Your generation can't comprehend the cacophony of our lives Before, with our every activity monetized for commerce and constantly connected with far-off strangers who we called friends. Even in the middle of the night, when you should be dreaming, your phone would beep or ping at you, a sound that would shift your private thoughts for at least a moment, alert you some important event had occurred. Maybe your server was undergoing automated maintenance, or an acquaintance you had never met in the flesh had commented on one of your photographs from halfway across the world, or your neighbor's cat did something funny. Even if your phone was silent it still demanded your attention with a vibration, felt through the wood of your bedside table or from under your pillow. Nearly everyone slept with their devices nearby. Many fell asleep with the infernal things in their hands: I know I did.

When the towers all went dark we were suddenly alone with ourselves and, if you were so lucky as to have them, the people immediately around us. That was just as immense a change as the plague itself. We didn't appreciate how loud our lives had become until the plague silenced us. We received master classes in a variety of lost arts, silence and patience among them. Sandy looked chilled so I put her under one arm and draped us both in a blanket, felt her push against me and start to take up my heat. Our party was able to sit and do nothing but wait for four hours, and it hardly seemed like any time at all.

Your own times are noisier than the plague times, and I think you're better off for it, but you could still learn a thing or two about the value of silence.

We moved when Jaida moved, on our feet and in our saddles, clomping down the slope of the gulley and onto route one twenty eight from whence we came. It was a warm night, above freezing at least, but the river's deep channel funneled wind into our faces, loaded with cold moisture. We plodded on for a few miles until, coming around the last bend before the Moab crossing, we could spy a starlit image of the footbridge that crossed the river. Haida and Alfred rode forward, just the two of them, hooves muffled by the sound of the river, as they slowly faded into darkness. I imagined I could see them, dark shapes against a dark road and a dark bridge, spanning the river scaled over with slow-moving ice.

We saw the flashes before we heard the reports. One two three four five sparks from the far shore overlapped with the familiar sound of an assault rifle on burst mode, ba-ba-bap, ba-ba-bap, a half-second behind. More flashes of light answered from the other end of the bridge, and I don't know what happened after that because I was already turning and running, Sandy and Hector and the extra pack horse right behind me, galloping away while we trusted to the river and the gunfire to mask our flight.

We backtracked again, north up the state road until we hit Castle Creek, both the road and the thin waterway, where there used to be a business that guided tourists on horseback through the nearby valley. We followed the tourist paths that cut southeast along the creek bed, picking our way along those trails well into morning. We hid ourselves in the creek gully for part of the day so we could catch some sleep and put out solar panels to charge some batteries. The gully we were in limited the number of useful hours we could catch sun, but we took what we could get without climbing up and potentially exposing ourselves.

I suppose we could have made the trip without the horses, and that would have let us climb some obstacles we had to find our way around, but that would also have meant leaving a lot of food and equipment behind. Instead, we sent Hector to clamber up a nearby slope covered in scree to take a look around. He returned an hour later, having found no humans but plenty of bighorn sheep. I let Hector expend a round of rifle ammunition, with our only remaining silenced rifle, to take down one of the big animals while the wind was still favorable.

Getting a clean shot at a bighorn was a stroke of luck, but getting it back to camp took all three of us. We had to cut down the largest bushes we could find and weave their branches together to make a travois. It was less like a proper A frame and more like a loosely woven sack that we dragged behind us. We arranged some rocks in the river to create a pool and stashed the gutted body there to keep it cool. A smoky fire in daytime would be like hanging out a sign. It was better to wait until night then smoke the meat over a low fire.

Having such a large animal was a windfall, but it also changed our schedule: we couldn't move and preserve meat at the same time. We knew we were in for a long trek no matter what we did, so a chance to lay aside food was something worth sitting still for. The Eklunds knew the route we planned to take, so if they arrived at the meeting place before we did they knew where to look for us.

We gathered plenty of dead wood for fuel and built an enclosed smoker box using nearby rocks that we stacked up against the hillside. We stuffed the cracks with mud and green plant matter to seal the smoker and then waited for evening.

That afternoon brought us a pleasant surprise: lower temperatures and a thick fog. We pulled the bighorn from our makeshift chiller, skinned him, carved him into suitable-sized chunks, and hung them in the primitive smokehouse. Fog and the approaching night made it safe enough to light up the smoker. We set a watch, both for the fire and anything encroaching our camp, then tried to rest some more.

Nights like that one might sound tranquil, but it was loaded uncertainty. Alfred and Jaida Eklund were still missing, and we had no idea if they were dead, alive, captured, or waiting for us. We knew people were looking for us, but we didn't know where they were looking, how many people they had, or how much they knew about us. We knew so little that every choice was a gamble. Moving fast might expose us or, just as disastrously, get us injured. Ludovic's army might move on in their search, or they might search the area around Moab harder.

Our best hope was if the people searching for us had paranoid minds. We had openly asked White Hawk about river crossings, but it was common for people to ask about routes they had no intention of taking as a way of planting false trails. Maybe the searchers would assume that was our intent and focus their efforts on the west side of the river. If they did, then it sent them away from us and toward the Sojourners. The longer I thought about our available choices the more muddled the options became. Hector still couldn't get our people on the radio, and that compounded my anxiety.

We hid, and we ate, but it wasn't restful.