28 The Denver Problem

One day late in March, Sergeant Alvarez took Sandy and me on a field trip, just the two of us and our ready bags, with Hector driving and four other guards in an electric Humvee. I assumed they were there for the dual purpose of keeping us safe and making sure we didn't escape. I had barely spoken to Hector since the demo we did for the king, but I had seen him around the compound doing soldier work: guarding the gate and halting arguments that threatened to become violent. After the first half-hour of the trip I gave up trying to bore a hole in his brain with my eyes, and watched the snow and trees rush by as we went down mountains. We kept going down until our ears popped, then popped again as we passed through a line that separated mountain snows from the green spring of the plains.

It was an extravagant use of power to take Hummer down the mountain and, I presumed, bring up back up again. Alvarez hadn't said where we were going or why it was so important, and I didn't ask: if we were permitted to know then he would have told us. I was fairly certain they weren't driving us out to a remote location to kill us and dump our bodies. There were too many possibilities to guess at. They could be moving us to another location, giving us a new job, farming us out to some new settlement. As long as they didn't separate us, then we would probably be fine. We had done what the king wanted, and more. Not only did we make a ton of zombie-fighting gear for his soldiers, but we taught a bunch of other people how to make them, too. So I didn't understand why we were going down the mountains to the East, away from the direction my own people had gone.

There isn't much in the way of transition from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains. There's five hundred miles of mostly flat land, and then suddenly there's mountains. When we hit the plains and turned south I wondered if we were headed into Denver. Given the number of zombies populating the once-great city, I wasn't a fan of that idea even with our gear. The hummer we were riding in had one of my new omni-directional sleep rays, powered by a massive battery, about what you would find in your average electric sedan. Turn it on, and every zombie in about a hundred and fifty yard radius would fall down. Some of them wouldn't get up again for hours. We had only made a hand full of them because so many of the parts were improvised, especially the high-power connections. It would only run for a short time, and then it took hours to recharge. At the time it was a strategic weapon for the NKA, and they called it the Omni.

I guess I should have been flattered they were transporting us in one of the few omni-equipped vehicles, but we wanted to go west, not east, and for them to leave us be. But we had been too useful to Ludovic, and there was little chance of him letting us go now.

Our destination was Golden, an exurb of Denver smashed up against the first rank of mountains to spring up from the plains. Our first stop was Lookout Mountain, specifically an overlook point directly adjacent to Golden but a thousand feet above it. It isn't the highest point of the mountain but it has the most impressive view, and if you should ever find yourself near Denver it's worth your while to find the overlook.

From that point you could look directly down at Golden, at the array of public soccer fields now overgrown, the outlet malls nestled in the young conifers, office parks and apartment blocks barely visible in their increasingly forested landscape. There are numerous rivers and streams that come down from the Rockies, and these meander through Golden and into Denver, feeding lakes and once-walkable canals that anchor extensive parklands that used to be a feature of outdoor life in the city. Aspens colonized the low-lying areas near the water, turned skeletal for winter's long sleep. The most obvious of these areas might be Sloan's Lake Park, because the water sits directly between the lookout and the skyscrapers that used to be Denver, but there are plenty of others if you cast your eyes around. Keep your eyes scanning up, and you can see to the far side of Denver, and past that to the iconic circus-tented airport in the distance. Beyond the airport lies five hundred miles of plains, and on a clear day you can see the first broad reach of it along the entire horizon, from north to south one unbroken expanse of flat land that is the leading edge (or perhaps the trailing edge, if you're coming the other way).

But all of that was on clear days. On a winter's day you were more likely to be faced with one of Denver's inversions, a cap of cold air on top of warmer air, which can trap the city in a cloudy dome. There was a time when inversions turned the air a muddy brown, before the government decided that controlling smog might be a good idea. On this particular day, the day Sergeant Alvarez brought us to Golden, there was smoke rising from bonfires between Golden and Denver, each one extending a plume that rose to the limit of the inverted air boundary then bloomed out. I counted twenty pillars of smoke, arranged in a rough north-south line about as far east as Sloan's Lake, and around each of them trees had been clearcut to provide fuel. There were other areas where they had done the same, and then moved forward, leaving behind them circles of cleared ground among the urban forest.

Just beyond the fires was formations of soldiers in neat squares, wielding plexiglass shields and spears, holding the line against zombies like roman legions. From so far up and so far away, their task looked impossible. There must have been a few thousand men down there, in their neat columns and rows, but they were facing an ocean of the dead. Beneath the screen of evergreen boughs and naked branches moved a force of hundreds of thousands, dyed brown by rot and sun, shaking trees as they passed in their shambolic hunger. Beyond the wide parklands was a highway packed with zombies, and past that the city center, writhing. They didn't just cover the ground, either. They were on the highway, packing the parking lots, and in the waters, hanging out of windows of the buildings, some falling several stories in their urge to join the pack. Even without field glasses you could tell the city squirmed, covered in zombie as far as the eye could see, a single herd held together by the basic magnetism each zombie felt for its neighbor.

"They're burning zombies," Hector said with awe, "thousands of them."

"Try hundreds of thousands," Alvarez told him. "They've been at it for weeks. But we're losing. Don't tell Chief I said that."

NKA had set up an observation post on Outlook Mountain, six men to work in shifts, to watch for errant hordes and radio in any signs of trouble. When they realized who I was, they asked for my autograph and pictures. I made sure Sandy was in the picture, and Hector wasn't, and let them snap away with a tablet. I signed the image with my finger and Sandy added her own touch, using a little heart for the y in her name. She was distant with strangers, cooly detached, but her beauty lured them in anyway.

We learned from the observers that their station hadn't been part of the original plan for retaking Denver. They had been posted after a company of two hundred soldiers had been caught unawares by a horde from their rear. Most of the company survived, but a loss of even fifty men was unsustainable when you were fighting an enemy with a thousand-to-one advantage in numbers.

And that's why Ludovic had called for us. He called for me, actually, but I didn't feel it was safe to leave Sandy behind and nobody had objected to my bringing her. We got back into the Humvee and went downhill again, this time to the city of Golden proper, to a moldy office building with a huge name of a once-titanic company spelled out in dirty letters.

The top floor was an old cubicle farm with glass-walled offices around the periphery. The NKA command center occupied about a quarter of the floor, the part facing Denver, and it was a hive of activity. Most of the noise was the several radio operators, headphones on, talking into the attached microphones, heads down over their pencil and paper. The largest glass-enclosed room had a long conference table, and Ludovic was using it as a map room. He had a topographic map of the area blown up to improbable size, and his people had placed markers to represent his troop locations and opposing zombie forces. He had a few uniformed soldiers with him, and two women who seemed to be in charge of the map. There was a large office next to the map room whose expensive furniture marked it as the seat of the most important person in the building. Next to that was larger but more sparsely furnished space that I could identify as logistics, because Merced was in there talking to a uniformed soldier with stars on his shoulders. He noticed us when we entered the floor, gave us a nod, then went back to an impassioned discussion with his superior.

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Sandy and I had to wait for a while, in old office chairs that hurt my back. The radio operators had probably found and claimed the best chairs and left the crappy ones for guests. But our time wasn't wasted because we could see into the map room. Messages went in and out, markers got pushed around, and the logistics general entered and had a polite-looking argument with Ludovic. Papers went in and out of Ludovic's hands, he made decisions, and those were passed on to the radio operators.

Ludovic was in his element, commanding forces and fighting an enemy. But he was also the same as when I first met him in the palace. His glamorously made-up women, his Vanna Whites who served him hot drinks and pushed the map markers around, were probably the most attractive women in the kingdom by his own standards, and he stripped them naked with his eyes every few minutes. His office was prominently stocked with food, cigars, and whiskey. Opaque-visored greenies stood guard over him: two inside the room and four outside, and I felt like they were eyeing us as intensely as I was watching the king.

I never liked the man, not even remotely, but in Golden I could see the person who found a way to evacuate three thousand people out of New Jersey before the hordes could get to them. I could understand why people would follow him. In the Before years he might have had a fine military career, followed by a second one in politics. The checks and balances of Old America would have stymied his autocratic ambitions and perhaps left him frustrated and disillusioned, but the Plague had made space for people like him and he was filling that space with gusto.

After a half hour of watching we were summoned inside with a wave.

The king pointed at me and told one of his handmaids, "Explain it to him," then went back to reading the latest stack of messages. From the recent action on the map, it looked like they were withdrawing from the field.

"Yes, Chief," she said, and started pointing at pawns on the map with elegant gestures. "The plain toy soldiers are groups of one hundred, the ones with orange helmets are fifty, blue helmets are ten or less." They had thirty-five hundred fighters on the front line, retreating towards Golden. I was surprised Ludovic had managed to find so many people still living, much less put them under arms.

"The little pyramids are the fires. Poker chips are zombies. One blue chip is a thousand, one black chip is ten thousand." Instead of skyscrapers, downtown Denver was dominated by stacks of black poker chips. Stacks of blue mobbed the line of fire pits, but not many had pursued the soldiers: they must have left static generators behind to defend their retreat, or laid down the front ranks with sleep rays. What worried me was the mass of black towers, which seemed to be releasing smaller towers of black and blue into the conflict zone, feeding it an endless supply of more enemies than the NKA could handle. The unwanted shambles were circling to the north and south, too, threatening to flank the fighters, and that was why their line was so long. The more spread out they were, the longer each soldier had to fight between rests and the fewer reserves they had for emergencies.

Originally, they had thought they could pull a few thousand zombies with attractors, then turn off the attractors and use sleep rays or static generators to keep them docile while the soldiers killed them off. Then they would burn the bodies.

"How is your power budget?"

"Strained," said the logistics general. "We have to stop operations every few days to recharge. More often, if it's cloudy."

"We're too vulnerable when we're out of power," added a soldier wearing captain bars, "so we keep a large reserve. Most of it goes to radios and transportation, but we burn a lot of it on these devices of yours."

I looked at Ludovic, who was eyeballing Sandy instead of paying attention. "So, how can I help, Chief?" As soon as he looked at me instead of her, Sandy took a half step behind me so she was only partly visible.

The King, or I guess he was Commander-in-Chief that day, glared at me and said, "fix your damn attractors! They're pulling the whole city down on top of us."

"Hordes are like flocks of birds, Chief. They can sense each other, and they follow each other around. When one sees something interesting, all the ones around him follow. Sometimes terrain will slow them down enough to break apart a herd, but mostly they prefer to stick together. So, you can split them up, but terrain matters. Look." I pointed at the big interchange near downtown, "I don't know Denver, but am I right in thinking these highways here are elevated? Because if they are, and there's a good walkable route from one side to the other, and all the way down to Sloan Lake, then I'm not surprised your line is pulling the whole city." While I'm saying all this, Ludovic's face is turning red because his strategy is starting to sound like a huge mistake.

"It's easy to fix, though. Multiple attractors will split the horde's attention."

I plucked some unused chips and a couple of tiny pyramids from the box where they kept such things, and put them onto a corner of the map. "Let's say you have an attractor, on a rooftop or something, in a zone of the city you don't care about. Every zombie will head for it." I surrounded the pyramid with poker chips. "Then your army marches their own attractor forward until it pulls some of them away, then they back off to draw that portion of the horde with them. Most of the horde won't follow them, because the stationary attractor is closer and therefore more interesting." I simulated the maneuver, using my fingers and the poker chips, pulling away a small subset of the chips.

"The best places would be here, and here," said the captain. He had picked out a pair of buildings on opposite flanks of the parklands where they were fighting the zombies. I didn't see the particular attraction of those sites, but he knew more about the terrain than I did. "Problem is, they're packed tight in those places. Even with static generators, we might not be able to get a man in."

Sandy tugged on my sleeve, and glanced at the far end of the cubical farm. I followed her eyes, and understood. There was a workbench, and a row of charging stations. Plugged in to the outlets were …

"Are those drones, Captain? Do they work?"

"Yes, but we save them for when visibility is too low for the overlook post."

"We might be able to wire a couple of those up with attractors, and give you a way to turn them on an off in flight. Can we take a look?"

With the captain's permission, I sent Sandy off with both of our bags. Between the two of us, we carried enough tools and parts to convert their whole fleet of drones into zombie distraction devices. She attacked one of the drones with a screwdriver, and soon had it in pieces. I didn't join her yet, because I had one more thing to discuss with Ludovic. I wasn't sure if I could approach the subject without angering the most dangerous man in a thousand miles, but there were too many lives on the line not to try.

"Chief, if it isn't too forward to ask, is there a reason you're in a such a rush to clear Denver? Is there a deadline of some kind?"

"What's your point, Engineer?"

"Well, it's just that you seem really focused on fighting the zombies man to man, so to speak. Maybe that isn't necessary." When he was silent in response, I went on. "In Idaho we lured a quarter million zombies into an old quarry, without putting anyone at risk. And in Utah we used an industrial tree shredder to kill a million of them. It took a week, but we chewed up and spat out the entire mid-Utah mega-shamble. It's a mile of mulch, now."

Ludovic was still quiet, and I couldn't tell if he felt like he was being made a fool of, or if he was receiving a divine revelation. Most people like to talk about what they know: it's natural and I'm no exception to that rule. In this case though, it might have been better if I had kept my mouth shut. Ludovic wasn't likely to let us go, I'm not a fool, but opening my mouth right then all but guaranteed we would end up in Denver for the long term.

"You pick an area of the city you want to clear, and put attractors away from it, with good power sources. Ten times more solar panels and batteries than you need. Ring your safe zone with static generators to keep residents safe. It's a standard push-pull arrangement that worked great for the Sojourners and for Green River." I didn't mention the other settlements we had visited, because if New Kingdom hadn't already found them then there was no reason to tip them off.

"You build your zombie-killing machine in the safe zone, then lure them in and let them kill themselves. Chief, instead of fighting the zombies, we process them. Who cares if it takes a year or two, if you can do it without losing anybody?" I knew I was smiling my mad scientist smile: I could feel it stretching my face.

"Denver doesn't have quarries," he reminded me. "And there isn't enough diesel in Denver to run them all through the wood chipper."

"True, Chief." I put my finger onto a conspicuous rectangle not far from downtown. "But Denver does have a rail yard."

Sandy, bless her heart, never gave me a moment of grief for landing us in Denver. Not a single one. But maybe she should have.