25 Estes House

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Denver was a problem because, unlike every other major city in the early days of plague, they had their act together. The city government refused to crumble as soon as things went south. Instead, survivors walled themselves up in a section of the city, elected replacements for those officials who were missing or dead, named their settlement the Green Zone, and went about the job of surviving a bloody apocalypse with single-minded unity and teamwork. For the first three months of the plague they gladly took any and all survivors, no matter who they were or how they managed to arrive. As the living population grew, zombies from the entire region migrated to Denver. They came from the greater Denver area, from Boulder, from Fort Collins, from Colorado Springs, from as far south as Pueblo. Downtown became surround by zombies in every direction, a thousand deep, milling about the city in a slow cyclonic action around the still eye of the Green Zone. When all access to the Zone was blocked, flotillas of people flew in by air, using ultralights and hang gliders and anything else that would get them inside. Some parachuted in, abandoning their aircraft to crash elsewhere.

Ultimately, Denver's success at attracting an ever-increasing number of people into a fixed-sized space was self-defeating. We don't know how their downfall started, but we know how it progressed from the desperate stories relayed over the shortwave from one struggling outpost of humanity to the next: zombies were in the safe zone, and with so many undead surrounding the city there was no escape. Several people got killed and changed, and the plague script played out there the same as it had everywhere else. A few fortunates were able to take to the air from the highest roof in the Green Zone, in parasails and makeshift ultralights, but some number crashed before they could get past the city's infested core. One hopes they died in the fall, and were not alive when they were eaten.

Even after the fall of Green Zone, by some confluence of geography and climate and urban planning and zombie proclivities and who-knows-what-else, Denver became a massive congregation point for the undead. When the western plains megashamble moved north in the summer it would attract a few tens of thousand from the city with it, and on its way south in the summer gave back a similar number. Overall the zombie population had stabilized at over three million by New Kingdom's estimation.

Given these facts, why did Ludovic want Denver? Ludovic didn't say as much to me, but what Denver had that everyone else wanted was salvage. Amazing, untouched, legendary salvage. Rumors had been circulating for years about the Denver Mint and its store of over twelve hundred tons of gold; the Museum of Natural History's gemology collection; A dozen Amazon warehouses, all untouched; telecom companies with warehouses full of new cell tower units; a Solar City depot full of panels and batteries; Armories full of automatic weapons and explosives. If there was something people wanted but couldn't get, it was sitting in a warehouse somewhere in Denver, waiting for people brave enough to claim it. Those were the rumors.

The reality was Denver only had some of those things, but it remained untouched because it had a different kind of zombie, one that didn't freeze as readily in winter. A typical Idaho zombie would go dormant as soon as temperatures hit freezing, and not get up again until the thermometer hit forty degrees Fahrenheit. A Denver zombie could withstand multiple days of freezing temperatures before going into hibernation, and if he did need to sleep he'd be his spry self again the moment the mercury hit thirty-five. There were precious few days in the year when you could actually salvage anything from Denver.

I have a theory about the Denver zombie. I think zombies can exchange spores or viruses or whatever it is that grows into zombies and, just like their disease colonizes humans, they can colonize each other. Zombies don't normally touch each other unless they're feeding or a shamble is pushing its way through a narrow space but, during the Green Zone siege they were packed together, millions of them, shuffling about in a tight formation. There was a huge amount of cross-zombie contact during the siege, and that gave them the opportunity to exchange viruses on a massive scale and evolve.

None of that was Sandy's or my problem. Our problem was making enough devices for Ludovic's planned liberation of Denver. They had The Good Book, they had acquired some parts, but they hadn't been successful at turning those parts into the sleep rays, static generators, and attractors they needed. To that end, we were assigned to a small house in town, on a block with mostly similar houses. The entire block was surrounded by "protective" fencing, but one couldn't help notice there were soldiers stationed inside the area as well, and they guarded the only gate in or out.

It was Sergeant Alvarez who explained it all from the passenger seat of an electric SUV while Hector drove us to the compound. Alvarez didn't highlight the compulsory nature of our employment, and we didn't need to ask. The fence and the guards said plenty. But, it was a gilded cage by the standards of the Plague Years, and if we played along we would help kill a ton of zombies and maybe get a chance to escape in the future. Collaboration was our best strategy.

Our house had a sturdy door with strong locks, solar panels, and it was connected to the panels on nearby buildings. The garage held a battery storage system that was far too large for two people. That was because the house wasn't only our residence, but a team workspace as well.

Taped to the wall next to the battery was a suggested power budget, written in pencil with signs of frequent erasure, suggesting a degree of trial and error by the previous inhabitants. The workshop took most of the power. If we didn't run the washing machine very often, and kept the panels clean, we might have enough power to run the refrigerator and take short warm showers without starving the workshop.

Most of the first floor had been given over to the kitchen, a living room, and storage rooms. Thick slabs of insulating foam were fitted into all of the windows, even the large sliding glass doors, to improve the insulation. If you needed light, you could choose between uncovering a window or turning on one of the LED lamps.

The second floor, which had the best light, was three bedrooms converted to workspaces for turning parts into working tools. Every room had two or three workstations, each with a stack of breadboards, spools of colored wire, containers of resistors and assorted small parts, and a soldering stand with magnifier. The devices were built on prototype boards, slates of plastic with holes through them, and some of the holes are connected to each other with conductive metal. You stick the legs of various components, like resistors and capacitors and such, through the board and solder them into place. The solder glues the components to the board and to each other.

A brief look at their "completed" work was all it took to see the problem: nobody knew how to solder. There were huge gobs of metal that connected things that shouldn't be connected, and wrong parts were being used all over the place. It didn't help that some of the components were installed backwards.

That explained why Ludovic was so determined to find me: his people couldn't follow the designs because they lacked essential skills.

Sandy's and my living space was in the basement, where the temperature was most stable. It was a lot more comfortable than our freezing room in the palace. We were surprised by the clean sheets and vacuumed floors, and Alvarez explained we had a full-time housekeeper. There was a second bedroom in the basement, apparently unused.

Meals were had communally, in the largest house on the block, set aside as a combination "mothers' house" and dining hall. In addition to the regular meals, our own kitchen was stocked with a weekly allotment eggs, some bread, a full pound of meat, some squash, and a small sack of whatever grain was available. All of that was Sandy's and mine, personally. If Sandy got pregnant, our ration would be increased. I hadn't seen bread in years, so at the time it felt like they were paying us in gold.

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That didn't change the biggest downside of our situation: that we couldn't leave.

"You're in charge of this workshop, and that means you're responsible for getting working devices into the field. As a sign of His Radiance's trust, you're allowed to carry a knife," Alvarez told me. "This is a big deal around here. It says you're someone important, more important than soldiers but less important than officers and greenies. Carry it, but don't threaten anyone unless you're prepared to kill them."

After his little speech and a few more warnings he returned my knife, a heavy nine-inch hunting blade. I was glad to have it back, but it wasn't the confiscated item I was missing most.

"Can I have my mace back, too? It's not a firearm, and it's not sharp. It was custom made. Great for killing zombies."

"Not a chance," the sergeant told me with an appreciative smile. "It is a nice weapon, though. Maybe if you do a good job here, His Radiance will grant you a favor and you can ask to have it back."

We met our device-building team in the dining house, a half-dozen men between twenty and forty years old. All of them had been requisitioned, each from a different settlement, based on the fact they could read well and handle basic algebra.

There were three people, two men and a middle-aged woman, who were "logistics". They were the ones who procured whatever our compound needed, sometimes by requisition and other times by salvaging in nearby towns and cities. Logistics was a quiet, disciplined group, who could move silently and knew where to find goods. Merced, no first name, was the leader of his little team, and his interest in Sandy and me was obvious: he and his people were the ones who had risked their lives to get all the materials sitting in our workshop, and the build team's complete failure to get the devices working were a sore point with him. Of everyone in that little compound, logistics were the ones who needed the devices the most. They were the people who had to skulk around in yesterday's ruins among yesterday's people.

Then, you had the military contingent. Call them our protection or call them our jailers, either view was accurate. There were as many soldiers as there were other men in the compound, a dozen all told, with Sergeant Alvarez as their leader. Hector bunked with them as a fresh recruit, lowest man in the hierarchy, sent to do all the work nobody else wanted. But, he loved his uniform and he set to every task with a will to please. His pride in his new situation, the way he creased his kingdom-issued fatigues, his crisp salutes and straight back, all of it made me sick. He traded us, his fellow Sojourners, for a place in Ludovic's army, and couldn't see what a bloody and terrible thing it was.

We had introductions and handshakes all around, and for about ten solid minutes I felt like a rock star. They all knew who I was, and said they were looking forward to working with me.

There was one exception, and that was a man named Psi, like the greek letter. It was his team before it was mine. My arrival was his demotion and he had lost his team, his house, his extra food, and his right to wear a knife. He sat at the end of one of the long tables, sullenly, and refused to shake my hand. I wanted to tell him he could have it all back if I could go home, but we didn't talk. Not that night.

The caretakers (all of them women, half of them visibly pregnant) had eaten before Sandy and I arrived, and they served the builders, military, and logistics crews. About the time we were done eating, a herd of children stampeded through the font door and displaced us from the dining room, tired and hungry from whatever they had been doing all day, but generally cheerful. There were almost as many minors as there were adults, and those were just the ones who could walk. There were just as many babies and toddlers, products of the kingdom's procreative policies, somewhere upstairs in the house squalling and laughing and crawling about with constant thumpings overhead. It took a large number of women to care for them, as well as for everyone else, and it wore on them. The older girls went upstairs as soon as they were done eating, both to help with the children and, I think, to get out from under the gazes of men.

That night, Sandy and I slept in the same bed, in our private bedroom in the basement of our new house. I still felt bad about hurting her, guilty that I wanted her, confused about our sudden change in status, and I was unable to talk to her about any of it. Twice, I opened my mouth to say something. An apology. An excuse. A reason. Anything. But no words would come out.

I lay on my side facing her, and held her hands in mine. She smiled back at me, a little pitying I think, and went to sleep. I watched her for a time, finally free to look without her looking back at me. She was truly pretty, I decided. Great skin, heart shaped lips, even features, good hips, small but luscious breasts. There wasn't anything to not like about her physically, unless the scars on her back and wrists turned you off. And she had a sweet personality, if you excluded the previous few days. It wasn't her fault things were strange between us. It was mine. Nevertheless, I was glad to have her back.

That night, I dreamed of Abigail.

It was her scent that reached me first: cardamon, lilac, sandalwood and musk. I told her, "You always smell so wonderful," and she answered with a kiss, one of her deep-breath affairs with no preamble and no end in sight. My hands recognized her lingerie, our lingerie, and were so glad to have her back they didn't hesitate to take hold of her. I didn't try to take anything off: I put my hands under her clothes to touch her.

When Abigail was ready she put her back to me. I moved her underwear to one side and plunged in, home at last, too long away not to be joined.

By the time I knew Abigail was Sandy, I was already inside her. One woman became the other in that liminal state between asleep and awake, until I was beyond caring which one I was with. I couldn't get enough of them, tried to hold back, make it last, but they wouldn't let me. They drove me with their strange shared body that was beloved Abigail one minute, forbidden Sandy the next, until the three of us were shook and spent in that dark basement.

We collapsed after, fully awake, sweating and laughing. Sandy stripped off the underwear and lay naked on the bed with her feet propped up against the wall to improve her chances of conception. I stroked her hair, and delivered little kisses to her face, because she seemed to like it. I can't say my old image of her was banished then, not yet, but it was pushed to the side for a while.

"How did you get Abigail's perfume?" I asked her, "And her lingerie?"

Sandy grinned like a child caught mid-mischief, proud of her little deception. "From Rachel. It was for emergencies," she shrugged, "and I thought, this applies."

"What kind of emergency did you two imagine, when you ginned up this plan of yours?"

"We didn't want some floozy stealing you away from us! When those Sasquatch women at Fish Lake were all crawling into bed with you, I was ready to intercept! I had the perfume in my hand, and the sexy underwear under my sweats. I was ready to beat them back!"

"That would have been something," I said, laughing with her, "I'm sorry I never got to see that. Next time I'm attacked by Sasquatch women I'll let them get a little further, so you can jump in and save me. Perfume and everything."

Sandy kissed me, light and wet. "You'd better not," she whispered, "I'll have to tell Rachel. And she will mind."

Sandy settled down to sleep spooned into me, and wrapped my arms around her like an extra blanket.

"I'm sorry you had to be Abigail. I don't know what's wrong with my head."

"I don't mind being her." Sandy pulled my arms around her tighter, and I obliged her. "She's Rachel's sister, so she's like my sister too. I can be Abigail for you as many times as you need." Sandy started to hum soon after that, too low for me to make out the tune. Our little basement bedroom had a half window, high on the wall, where snowflakes stolen from the wind danced along invisible eddies.

I whispered to her, "What are you humming?" but she gave no response. At the time I saw it as a quirk, something I had failed to notice before. But I would learn, in the months and years ahead of us, she sometimes hums in her sleep. And she only does so when she is supremely happy.

So it was Sandy who built the bridge between us, made from parts of Abigail, and of herself, and a courage I couldn't yet match. I held her tighter, glad that she hadn't left me after our nights apart.

When we are alone, the voices in our heads are hard to ignore. Something whispered that I couldn't trust everything she said. She had been a sex slave and, however nicely we tried to dress it up, she was a sex slave again. Like all those lottery women who went when they were called, Sandy was acting out a part to eke out the least bad scenario she could. I was pretty confident she didn't hate me, but for all I knew she just saw me as a convenient but temporary means to better her ends. The voice told me, even while I held her, she was only a victim of her circumstances. I couldn't assume she truly cared about me.

I am not a neurotic person, I swear, but I was having a very neurotic week.