21 Castle Valley

The sky cleared during the night and sent temperatures low enough to leave a hard frost under our feet. We moved slowly up the creek bed, burdened with smoked bighorn and worry over the Eklunds, until we entered a wide valley and the former township of Castle Valley. On our right, the dramatic Porcupine Ridge towered fifteen hundred feet over the valley. They named it a ridge but it might as well have been a cliff, a graph of some tangental function, starting off as a climbable slope but fast becoming more and more vertical until the second half of the climb was, for all practical purposes, straight up. That imposing still-motion wave of rock defined the southwest edge of the valley for several miles, its mathematical progression frozen just in time to keep it from crashing down onto the flat and peaceful land below.

On the opposite side were the dramatic mesas familiar from postcards and picture books: Parriott Mesa, Castleton Tower, Adobe Mesa, and so on, each one breaking through the earth, as high as Porcupine Ridge, skirted in slopes of scree. Some were miles wide, and others were pillars. You can't look at them and not wonder what it must be like to stand on top, head in the clouds, and look down onto the Martian strangeness of that land.

In between the mesas and Porcupine ridge was a flat expanse of semi-arid desert, a few miles at its widest, which ran for several miles southeast. A single hump of rock called Round Mountain rose up from the valley floor, a lone precursor to the La Sal mountains that terminated the valley's far end.

Like so much of Utah, the valley is covered in succulents and tenacious scrubby bushes and little trees, mostly conifers, that don't mind scarce water, high altitude, and big yearly swings in temperature. The end of the valley we entered from, the northwest end of it, was relatively lush from the creek, which flowed through the valley along its northeast edge collecting scarce runoff from the mesas. Just before leaving the valley, through the narrow gap between Porcupine Ridge and a mountain, the creek fed a fertile zone that grew real trees, ones that didn't look like Charlie Brown's ill-received Christmas shrub. Near that end of the valley is where you will find the former township of Castle Valley.

Any place that offered shelter to people offered much the same to zombies. Our first task was to clear the place using our now-familiar tools. We crept along quietly for a while until we found a defensible spot, with the creek at our back and a solid redwood fence at our front. We turned on the electric lures, but didn't draw even a single corpse. We advanced farther into town and tried again. The population there never was high, maybe a few hundred at its peak, and it wasn't the kind of place the zombies were likely to find on their own. If someone had bothered to clear it, then it wasn't surprising that it had stayed clear.

When I call Castle Valley a town, you shouldn't make the mistake of imagining some quaint main street lined with shops from the nineteen fifties. There is no town center to speak of. Instead, there is a dusting of houses, each surrounded with plenty of space, over eight square miles of land, at an average elevation of about five thousand feet above sea level. The town didn't even have normal mail delivery: the United States Postal Service, that much-maligned but deeply missed institution, delivered everyone's mail to a group of boxes at the far entrance to the valley. Residents had to drive, walk, or bike their way down the road to retrieve it. There are no businesses to speak of other than whatever business people got up to in their own homes. I can only imagine that, in the COVID years of the early twenty-twenties, some small number of people chose to settle in Castle Valley and work from home, beaming their intellectual labors to satellites and the world beyond, while raising the average price of the local real estate. The architecture ranged from single-story ranch dwelling to a custom-designed faux-gazebo walled in with double-paned glass. I didn't know the place Before, and my acquaintance with it would be brief, fraught with many external concerns. Yet I still imagine it as the kind of place where people settled so they could have plenty of space to themselves and meet with neighbors only as much as they wanted.

I never did learn if they had a Town Hall or anything like it. We saw a sign pointing towards a school and headed for it, figuring the only institution worthy of signage in the town was probably the only one worth visiting. The school turned out to be a Seventh Day Adventist academy. There was a time when the SDA were considered a bit fringe for believing the righteous would be persecuted for worshiping on Saturday, a thing which never happened. At the second coming they would be taken up to heaven and leave Satan and his fallen angels behind, imprisoned on Earth. After a thousand years Christ would return again and raise all the wicked back to life so they could be judged and punished.

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The adventists' long-awaited Judgement Day had come, not in the form of Jesus's return in glorious sunrise from the East, but in animated corpses left behind to terrorize the survivors' hellish existence. By that measure their beliefs weren't so far off the mark, except they had been too optimistic.

When we reached the school we found a simple building, single story, with a minimal romanesque portico in front and a dozen simple classrooms within. Two of those rooms still had desks in neat rows, as if classes had been held just yesterday, and tomorrow or the next day students would return to school filled with stories from the weekend. The sight that didn't belong was a great flag, red and white stripes on the right hand, a blue square on the left hand, and a single white star over the blue field. Ludovic's men had been there.

We surveyed the school grounds, carefully as befit any potential encounter with persons of unknown temperament, until we were convinced nobody was home. Across the street was a church of similar size, and down the road was a greenhouse larger than the school and church combined, alongside a collection of outbuildings. It wasn't hard to find where people had recently been living, packed into what once might have been a dormitory for students. The fencing gave it away, as did the barriers made of spiked logs and the complete lack of vegetation for a hundred feet beyond the fence line. We found their pantry, the only door equipped with a padlock, with empty shelves inside but hardly a speck of dust. Again, Ludovic's kingdom flag had been painted against the building in haste leaving drips and runs and a clear message: they had come and taken everyone and everything they could find.

The damage, what little there was, didn't read like raiders. Raiders like to smash things, indiscriminately. They killed and broke for the love of laying waste to anything that might be precious to someone. To take whatever was of value, whether that be life or chastity or medicine or food, was their special joy and occupation. They didn't want to have those things nearly as much as they wanted to deprive others of having them. And so, with our recent years of experience, it was a puzzle to see a place so recently occupied, with signs of a struggle, but without the usual wanton devastation. I felt sure the people of Castle Valley had been taken, and taken for some purpose other than meat or amusement.

We took a house near the southeastern end of the valley, in good repair and without apparent infestation of undead. Hector tried to use the radio and verify if any of the settlements we had passed through recently had anything to report. But, the house we had chosen lay hard in the shadow of Porcupine Ridge and there would be no talking to anyone west of us. It was only a mile or so to Round Mountain, and we thought we should get a good signal from it. We let the horses loose in the fenced acreage behind the house and hiked to the lone mountain, and we shared the load of the radio. It took us three hours to find a path and climb high enough, but we finally managed a signal to the Sojourners.

I had already written a short message, highlighting the most important facts. "ludovic expanding. eklunds mia gunfire. stat unk. loc e of colorado. bridges guarded. do not come for us. advise soj move far".

Hector had worked through the message with a one-time-pad, and I had checked his work to make sure the resultant gibberish could be translated back to english. As soon as we had a signal from up on Round Mountain, Hector said, "prepare for traffic". When the Sojourner operator was ready, Hector recited the encrypted message, letter by letter. Sending messages like that is a pain, but even small bits of information could give us away.

After what seemed a long time, a new message arrived. Letter by letter it trickled out to us, not from the usual operator but in Rachel's voice. That she chose to deliver it herself meant … something, but I was afraid to know what. I wanted to call out to her, ask her how the baby was doing, ask if everyone was okay, but all we had was a string of random letters.

My heart sank as Hector worked through the decoding process.

"green river fallen. soj voted move yesterday. dest xanadu. survive at all costs. all my love."

They knew what New Kingdom had been up to, and they had already decided to leave. It hurt to know they could leave without us, if I'm honest. Even though it was the undeniably right choice, it still hurt. Part of me wanted them to mount a rescue, assault Moab and take the bridge so we could just ride over and join up with them. But that was folly. Who knew how far west Ludovic would push, or how many men he had in the field right then? We knew from Jules that Ludovic had hundreds of fighters, which implied he had thousands of settlers to keep them provisioned. He was able to move with a mass no lone settlement could match.

Any settlement that didn't want to end up as part of New Kingdom had to move, and that's what the Sojourners voted to do.

"Where's Xanadu?" asked Hector.

I rubbed a tear off my face, and another one from Sandy's. We were losing ground, getting farther and farther from home. "If we get out of this, I'll tell you."

We composed one more encrypted message, and we had Sandy read the coded letters over the air. "c u there. all our love."