30 Fan Girl
Our entire compound moved to the Denver rail yard, renamed Imperial Yard, over a period of three days, in convoys of electric vehicles. Everyone knew the stories about Denver, and everyone had heard that Denver wasn't clear, so there were a lot of people who weren't keen to go. I spent mealtimes explaining to them we could control zombies well enough to keep them out of the new compound, but not everyone could be convinced.
The day before the first convoy was set to move out, the army rounded up six deserters. Alvarez and his people must have grabbed them during the night because they were all lined up before breakfast, zip-tied to the chain link fence that surrounded the compound, near the gate so they couldn't be missed. I wondered, briefly, how Hector must feel about his role in the matter, but decided it wasn't worth my time. We were told to gather and watch, so we gathered and we watched.
There were three greenies present, but it was Dragon Ball who did the honors. "These six individuals," he shouted though his helmet, "attempted to flee the kingdom. They reject the kindness of New Kingdom. They betrayed His Imperial Magesty Ludovic, and they betrayed you. They abandoned civilization itself. There is only one punishment for traitors."
Some of the deserters sagged in their restraints. Others fought, twisting and pulling against the thick plastic ties that bound them to the steel fence. Dragon Ball started with the ones who weren't fighting for their lives, to save the best for last. Each victim received a single cut to the carotid artery. Each victim had time to know they were dying. Most of them pleaded for their lives.
Dragon Ball waited for each man to die, avidly watched the blood flow and pool onto the ground until it stopped, before going on to the next. It took several minutes to do them all, and during the entire time Dragon Ball wore a huge erection.
Afterwards, they just left the condemned there to turn to zombies. After the spectators were excused I lingered, notebook in hand. I had recorded the time of each man's death and I wanted to know the time each began to show signs of zombifaction.
Sandy stood close enough so one foot could touch mine, our way of finding comfort without announcing it to everyone present, while Marcello looked over my shoulder at my notes.
"That's fucking cold." Marcelo sounded like he didn't approve.
"I'm as appalled as you are," I assured him, "but free data points shouldn't be passed up. Did you know people zombify faster if they're laying down instead of standing up?"
"I read your book, but I guess I never thought about it," he said, thoughtfully. "How you know what you know."
I almost told him I could skin a human in under two minutes, excluding extremities, but thought better of it.
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As we entered Denver we could see the fabled Green Zone from the highway. It was a mass of zombies, all centered on one of the downtown parking structures. A short metal tower jutted up from one corner of the structure, as a support for the attraction antenna. The top of the structure had long ago been topped with a solar array, so power wasn't a problem. If you had good field glasses you could watch the zombie horde churn. They went up the structure, massed by the corner with the antenna, then pushed each other over the edge. The falling zombies sometimes landed head-first and died, and sometimes got trampled by the other zombies.
Over time such a large cushion of dead zombie collected under that corner, the falling zombies wouldn't die any more. The same hundred thousand zombies kept filling the parking structure, slowly shambled their way up all the levels until they finally made it to the top, fell off the roof, then worked their way inside all over again. It was like an amusement park ride for the formerly living, with about a million or so of them packed into the surrounding blocks, unable to get close enough to ever get a turn.
It didn't kill them, but I thought it was genius. I was told there were four more, similar in design, in different parts of the city. Together, they would keep the rail yard free of zombies.
Our new residence was a hotel near by the yard, with two hundred rooms and not nearly enough power. There were a lot more people than in our Estes Park compound. Marcello had brought his own people down from Wyoming, and a small crowd of laborers had been drawn from the colonies for a three-month tour. An equal number of women were present, but their tours would only last long enough to get pregnant and then be replaced. When you counted children, there were almost five hundred of us. Some of the laborers were quartered in a nearby apartment block, to relieve the pressure on the hotel.
Sandy and I got room 125, on the ground floor as befit our status. Our little kitchenette and living area meant we had more room than most people. It wasn't that much of a change for us, since most of our previous house had been given over to work space, but we didn't have anywhere to keep our extra food rations. There was no power in the room, not even for lights.
The lack of power wasn't my main issue with the Denver compound. My biggest problem there was Psi. Somehow, he had convinced a minister he was the best man to run a key installation. We had to call him "Director Psi", and his knife allowance had been upgraded to twelve inches. He liked to walk around, tall as white pine, proud to be in charge. Whenever he passed within sight of me he stuck his chest out and put on a grim expression. I think he was trying to intimidate me.
One of my few direct interactions with Director Psi happened a week after we arrived in Denver. He called me to his office in the middle of the day, and told me, "You're giving Sandy to me for tonight. If she pleases me, I'll let you use a shelf in the kitchen's cooler to keep your extra rations."
Sandy was standing right next to me at the time, because we went everywhere together, and her mother's knot was in full view.
I said, "the fuck I will," and we walked out on him. If there was a diplomatic way to handle the situation, I don't know what it would be.
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"You'll be sorry!" he shouted after us, "It'll go easier for you if you let me have her!"
I turned and back at him, "It'll go easier for you if you if I don't cut out your tongue!" I've never cut out a man's tongue, not while he was alive, so it wasn't like I meant it as a real threat. It must have made an impression on him, because he didn't yell at us any more. Weeks would pass before he said anything to me at all.
In truth, he barely knew about anything that was going on in the compound. His girl Tamala wrote all the reports, planned the supplies, and organized the work teams. It took me a while to catch on to that fact, because as long as I got whatever I wanted in the way of work teams, it didn't matter to me that the lists were posted in written form instead of being communicated directly from Psi.
I might never have noticed except I happened to see Tamala one day, pinning up a revised work team list. She told me, "You got the new people you asked for, but they won't be here for two more days." Psi never talked directly about what we were doing in Denver, not ever, so the fact Tamala knew details about my manpower requirements made me curious.
Six ounces of fresh coffee beans, allegedly grown in east Texas, found its way into Murati's hands in exchange for information. Tamala was indeed running everything, she said, while Psi took the credit and traded their extra food rations for vodka. She was the reason the compound was running so well, but she was running out of time. She needed a second child soon and Psi didn't seem to be up to the task.
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My part of the grand plan was to build the "hotboxes" and all the systems required to walk the zombies into them. Rail lines are commonly fenced off when they pass through urban areas, and we were running a ton of the little repulsion radios, so basic protection wasn't a problem. With a little more fencing and a few more devices, we boxed in a section of tracks so it was completely separated from the yard, then added gates and sluices to bring zombies in from the outside. A single attractor radio was all we needed to pull as many zombies as we wanted from the city.
We built our experimental fireboxes in the train shed and wheeled them down the tracks to the test corral for trial runs. In case things went badly wrong, a roll-away staircase connected the train car to the inner fence to provide an escape route. As a last-ditch defense we had sleep rays and sharpened sticks, which was all you really needed if you had to lay down a few hundred zombies on short notice.
Merced had procured a mountain of firebrick and high-temperature insulation, I don't know from where, and spent liberal amounts of fuel to get it carted into Denver. Helen and I, with a lot of help from a work crew, lined a boxcar with the brick, packed it full of zombies, and lit it on fire. When the smoke turned from white to clear, indicating most of the moisture had burned off, we closed up the car and let them cook. Twelve hours later, we had charcoal.
"See? Too slow," Helen said as we shoveled out the hotbox, the whole crew turning black as they worked. Crews kept packing in zombies and cooking them, while Helen and I set about designing the next iteration. The first batch had been fired with wood, but all of the subsequent batches would be fired with zombie coal. The remainder of the coal, and there was plenty of it, went to the kitchens for fuel. I was excited that, one week into our Denver residency, we were already burning zombies with nothing but solar power and the remains of other zombies. Helen said we hadn't even really begun.
Helen was the key to everything in Denver. She had a lifetime of experience making, storing, and moving flammable fluids, liquid and gas, all over the globe. Helen taught me everything I had failed to learn from books, one prototype at a time, one boxcar at a time, one concept at a time, cannibalizing the oldest models to build the newest. The hotbox rapidly evolved from an insulated car that converted zombies to charcoal, into an industrial mass of pipes and pumps that digested a zombie in minutes and spewed copious amounts of syngas for output. At week three we were already generating a little gas. The gas generated electricity, using the turbine Marcello had brought with him. By week seven, we couldn't even use most of the syngas we made.
While we worked on the hotboxes, Marcelo and his crew built storage cars and turbines for distribution to the colonies. The most skilled people in Imperial Yard were his metal smiths, brought down from Wyoming to work on the fans that accelerated burning, expanding gasses until they were going fast enough to push a generator at high speed. Another crew built the storage cars, so we had a place to put all of the gas we were making.
The finished version of the burn box was built as a series of shipping containers, carted by rail and then stacked with a crane, three containers tall, into a "conversion stack". We borrowed the lessons of the Denver parking garages and built scaffolding so zombies, lured by an attractor, could reach the top of the structure. They fell in at the top, were dehydrated by hot waste gases, and gradually sank down to the middle layer where they were burned at very high temperatures in an atmosphere of alternating steam and oxygen. Zombies were converted in mere minutes instead of hours. Syngas came out one pipe to be pumped into storage, and a small amount of slag came out the bottom.
The storage system was likewise made from shipping containers. Each container held a massive bladder, and all the storage containers were hooked together so they would act like a single bladder. The number of pumps you needed depended on how many reactor stacks you were running, not how much storage you had. So if you were running a single conversion stack then you only needed one pump, even if you had fifty storage containers to fill. If we overran our storage tanks, then we flared off the excess in a giant plume of flame from a tall aluminum chimney.
Another shipping container held a small turbine generator. It drew fuel from the gas storage, and generated enough electricity to run the system. The generator itself was pretty small, and it could run up to three conversion stacks, but it included a sizable battery array in case you had to stop and then restart the system.
The last part of the system was living quarters, yet another shipping container with basic accommodations built inside. Since power was abundant they had heating and cooling, refrigerators, and induction stove tops. The crew was necessary for the same reasons we needed them on Zee Muncher: to winnow out zombies wearing non-combustibles that could jam up the system, and halt the zombie march whenever some maintenance needed to be done. It was repetitive work, done in small crews isolated from any other colony, but it was otherwise comfortable living.
The main downsides of the system were it had to be assembled, and it had to be placed somewhere with a decent water supply. The conversion process consumed steam, so it wasn't something you could operate out in the desert. Setting up the factory was the most dangerous part of the operation, since a single slip-up with the crane could crush a man between heavy objects. Zombies could be managed easily enough but gravity remained as intractable as ever.
The biggest gas turbine we had at the time was on our one locomotive. She pulled three cars of gas for her own use, and then whatever load she was moving. If she was setting up or taking down a factory, then she would have a large electric crane and a line of well cars to carry the modular containers. If she was just running gas between colonies then all she needed was well cars holding two-high stacks of storage containers. Most often, we expected her to pull a passenger car and two or three freight cars at the end of the gas trains. Since we were starting out with only one locomotive, we couldn't afford to use it for a single purpose.
We christened her Fan Girl, but the kingdom would officially designate her Ludovic Number One. But before we could deploy Fan Girl on her maiden voyage, I had to deal with Director Psi.