29 Making a Move

The next few weeks were hectic ones. Ludovic was moving us "downhill" to Denver, to a new compound he planned to clear around the rail yard. That meant our workshop had to move, along with the entire rest of the compound. And, we had to prepare for the move while keeping up our production. The army was sending out devices everywhere, to every colony of the kingdom. The word "settlement" was officially banned when speaking of populated areas within the domain of His Imperial Majesty, King Ludovic. They were all colonies now.

The colonies also got copies of The Ludovic Book of Wisdom. Someone in the palace took the Good Book and, after subtracting some of the Sojourner material on religion and ethics, filled it with New Kingdom propaganda to make Wisdom. I always knew settlements could make changes to the book before sending it on, that was part of the point, but it felt especially obscene when Ludovic did it. We had made the Good Book to free people from zombies, not enslave them to someone else.

On the tenth day of April a storm buried Estes Park and everyone had to help dig out. Children were out in force, and they tossed as much snow at each other as they threw into the designated piles. The adults, meanwhile, with their more limited energy and better focus, ensured all the important paths were cleared: the sidewalks between houses, and paths between compounds, wide enough to allow small vehicles to pass. I watched from a second-story window as light-footed nine and ten year olds clambered onto rooftops with push brooms and swept the solar panels. If you let the snow melt and then freeze, the panels wouldn't produce much of anything, and they were prone to damage if you tried to scrape off the ice. The best time to clear them was while the snow was still powdery.

In a week it would seem like the effort was wasted. Frozen nights and almost-warm days would leave most of the roads and sidewalks clear, but put hard icy caps anywhere snow had gathered in drifts and piles. More snow sheltered in the northern shadow of houses and trees in little patches, holding out against the sun. The cycle of storms and partial melts would repeat again throughout April and May, but we would be gone by then, downhill.

New people began arriving as soon as the roads were clear. A few came from the newly conquered colonies in the west, but most of them came from somewhere north or east. A lot of women went downhill that week, taking their children with them, and new women came uphill to replace them.

Ludovic was serious about tripling his population, and any woman who was the right age but hadn't had a child in a couple of years was brought up for observation. That's what they were calling it on Sundown Review by then, "observation," as if their failure to conceive was just some kind of medical problem, and being forced into pregnancy by random men was a minor intervention.

While the new men who joined our compound came from all over, the new women all seemed to come from the same place. They all had that thin, skittish look that comes from years of living in a place with not enough food an no safety whatsoever. When Murati took charge of them, the first thing she did was feed them. She didn't let any of the men approach them for the first weeks, choosing instead to focus on food, clothes, and medical checkups. Somewhere in Estes Park there was a Scan-All health station and a large store of the reagents needed to keep it working, and Murati tested everyone who joined our compound.

On the day the new women arrived I was sitting in the common house, facing the door, when a familiar face walked in. He was grayer than I remembered, and thicker in the middle, but his arms still looked like they were muscled with steel cables. When he smiled, a gold tooth flashed at me. That was new: the last time I had seen him, he had all his own teeth.

"E!" he shouted, with his arms spread wide, "it's been a while!"

I went to hug the man, whom I hadn't seen since the early Sojourner days back at JP Ranch. He was still taller than me, still strong enough to crack my ribs, and he still didn't hold back. There was a familiar smell to him, of hot metal and whatever gasses were left behind by arc welders.

"Sandy, meet Marcello," I said once I was free. "He was a Sojourner back at the beginning, and a friend of Rachel and Abigail. His claim to fame is he's mechanically inclined. Marcello, this is Sandy. She's mine, so don't get any ideas."

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, shaking her hand delicately, "she's too pretty for an old fart like me. Too pretty for you, too. When they told me I'd be working with the Engineer, I kinda hoped it would be you. I can't believe you figured out how to control zombies. It's changing everything out there."

"It was a team effort," I said, with a nod in Sandy's direction. "Sandy and Rachel had a lot to do with it."

"And how's the old crowd? Are they still kicking around?"

"They went west somewhere, to get away from New Kingdom. Rachel is having her first child, and Father Caleb is still preaching. Sandy and I were, you might say, conscripted. If the kingdom ever lets us go, we'll catch up to them."

"I'm sorry to hear that, E. I assumed you volunteered. New Kingdom puts a lot of resources into its key people."

"Yeah well, some of us were pretty happy before we came here." I said that while looking at all the new women, huddled together and hunched over their meals. They looked like they had come from a bad situation, but I couldn't say for sure if their new one would be any better. At least they would be fed, and that was something.

"Maidens of Trent," said Marcello, guessing my thoughts. "They were slaves of this huge asshole, like Jabba the Hutt huge. He and about five guys kept a stable of them somewhere in the Ozarks, penned up like animals. Get this. The guy's name was Trent, and he liked to name everything after himself. His settlement was named Trent. His horse was named Trent. Half those girls' names are Trent. This is a step up for them, trust me. They get fed, and they can pick better fucking names than Trent."

I hated that he was probably right. Our whole world had sunk to such a level that the demands of New Kingdom, even accounting for its more random brutalities, was preferable to a life outside of it for too many people.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"You have something to do with the trains?" I was glad I would get to work with Marcello. When I said he was mechanically inclined, I meant it as a joke. It's like saying, "Newton was a little clever," or, "Fat Man was a kind of bomb".

"I've been building turbines," he said proudly. "Not to turn back the clock or anything, but I have a coal-fired power plant in Wyoming. The old ones ate themselves when they went unattended, which was not supposed to happen by the way, and they'd be too big to run even if they were working. We've scaled things down, and we can power a small town now. Well, a major city for these days.

"But you know, I hear burning coal is too blasé for some people these days. I heard you want to use zombies as a fuel source. Care to let an old friend in on the plan?"

"There's not much of a plan yet," I told him. "My idea right now is to turn rail cars into mobile charcoal kilns. Lure the zombies in, close the doors, and fire them up. We can use some of the charcoal to power the train, but I think there's going to be too much of it. We'll have to dump it by the tracks. When one horde is gone, the train moves on to the next one."

"Not bad," he said thoughtfully. "It's definitely an improvement on what people are doing today. But, I think I can do you one better."

I felt both envy and hope when Marcello said he could do better. Envy, because he was always smarter than I was. Hope, because I was in desperate need of good ideas.

"So, what's your idea? Don't keep us in the dark."

"First you have to meet Helen. She's coming uphill tomorrow, but she's something of a night owl."

❖ ❖ ❖

Helen turned out to be a leather-skinned septuagenarian in cowboy boots, rancher hat, jeans and a button-down shirt, the collar held closed with a turquoise bolo tie. She was tall and bony, with close-cropped gray hair, and had the look of someone who had spent her whole life out of doors. She had started her long career in the oil industry by working in the fields to pay for her tuition. Her degrees in chemistry and engineering landed her right back into the same industry, as a chemical engineer working on various kinds of refineries. She sat in our kitchen that night, drinking from her own stash of whiskey, while talking to us in a voice worn whispery by hard sun and bad weather.

"You're not going far enough. It takes energy to dry your fuel stock, dead critters that won't stay dead, and then more energy to heat them up. If they've eaten recently they can be pretty juicy. Now, if you say you can get them dead things to walk themselves into the oven, then I believe you. But once you got 'em in the oven, it's a shame to pyrolize them and leave it at that. There's more efficient ways to use your feedstock."

"I'm not looking for peak efficiency." I poured Sandy and Marcello and me shots from our own stash, since Helen didn't seem to be sharing. Sandy's pour was tiny, over ice, because of the baby. Marcello's was a double because that's the way he drank. "I just want a mobile factory that kills zombies, and is powered by zombie by-products. It doesn't even have to be a train but," I waved my shot glass around, "I know His Imperial Majesty likes trains."

"And they're efficient transportation," added Helen.

"And they're efficient," I agreed, "and if New Kingdom is restoring tracks across the country, then we can intercept all of the big migrations."

Helen shook her head, seemingly in dismay of my ineptitude. "But you're not making good use of your resources. And your process will take too damn long. It takes hours to turn anything into char. Even with fifty rail cars, it could take a year to clear Denver."

I shrugged. "I figured we'd use some of the charcoal to power the locomotive and the electrical generators with steam. We can use the extra coal to burn up zombies directly. Just cremate them."

"You could do better," she said. It annoyed me that she was playing professor, trying to get me to think of better answers, when she was the chemical engineer. I could understand chemistry well enough when I read about it, and I could do the necessary math. But I had no idea how to regulate oxygen in a reaction vessel, or superheat steam, or do any of the other advanced-sounding things I had read about in my scavenged books. At that point, I didn't even have those books any more. I left them with the Sojourners, who were thousands of miles away. So, I was getting annoyed.

"You could do better," I told her, "I can't. I get that there are other possibilities, and I would love to turn them all into syngas and then distill gasoline from that, but I don't know how to build a chemical plant. So if you want to build a gasification plant or something, I'm all ears. Especially if it kills zombies faster. But it has to be achievable with the technology we have. We can't spend two years figuring out how to build a diesel refinery with nothing but baling wire and duct tape. The people who report to His Imperial Majesty are all degrees of psychopathic. I'm not willing to test their patience. Or his."

Helen and Marcello looked at each other, and some memory passed between them. "We know," Marcello assured me, "we've seen what the greenies can do. I wouldn't involve you in a scheme that was harebrained. What would you say if, instead of the train being a factory, it could deliver and set up a factory, then come back later to pick it up and move it?"

I paused for a moment, but there wasn't that much to think about. Anywhere we intercepted a big horde, the factory would need to stay put for an extended period of time, possibly for years if it was on par with the central valley. It didn't make that much difference to me if it was moveable instead of mobile.

"It's fine," I told them, "especially if it means we get more fuel for trains and power. You are thinking syngas, right?"

"We are," explained Helen, "Marcello told me you were smart. We cook your zombies at a very high temperatures, which means we cook them a lot faster, while we alternate hot air and steam as inputs. We take syngas as our product."

"Carbon monoxide and hydrogen," I said. Even if I couldn't build a syngas plant, I could at least show off the fact I wasn't a complete chemistry dullard. "How are you going to store it?"

"In special tanker cars," Marcello added, "they're like balloons for transporting gas. Trains can cart them off to where they're needed, and take empty ones to zombie factories for refilling."

"And you just happen to have some of these cars laying around?" It sounded a little too good to be true.

Helen smiled. "We do, actually. We've been working on the fuel problem for a year now. New Kingdom doesn't want people to have gasoline, it would make them too independent, but it needs more transportation. Instead of diesel-electric locomotives, Marcello has a syngas-electric prototype."

Marcello grinned. "That coal plant I mentioned before? We're gasifying the coal, then burning the gas to make electricity. Put a smaller turbine into a locomotive, and you have a functional train.

"If you can store the syngas," I said, "you can cart it all over the country in your syngas-powered train, and spin up electric systems on days when you need it. Like during the winter."

"Especially then," Helen told me pointedly. "Solar and wind have been good to us, but this was the first winter nobody died from cold. And we need the trains, to keep food and material moving around the kingdom. Trains don't run well on batteries. We've tried."

"Syngas doesn't have the same power density as diesel," Marcello admitted, "but we aren't hauling around a hundred cars of iron ore, either. If we can pull twenty cars on a regular schedule, we can change the country."

I downed a shot of whiskey, and poured another all around. "So all we have to do is shrink down your gas plant so it fits onto train cars, tune it for zombie feedstock, manage the zombies, train people to operate it, and find a place to park it."

Marcello flashed his gold tooth at me. "That's about the size of it."

I thought of all the work we had to do, just to move down to the new workshop to Denver, and groaned. The next week would be madness, and that was before we could even start on the project.