Fan Girl started making semi-regular runs out of Denver. She hauled new power facilities, each consisting of a turbine and some gas storage containers, to two classified destinations somewhere in Colorado. They would occasionally receive more fuel from us in the form of Fan Girl pulling a line of gas cars. The gas was pumped from the cars to the holding tanks and she would return home, mostly empty. She also made a couple of runs to Strasberg: once to haul the new conversion stacks and all their paraphernalia and personnel, then again to resupply the build crew with food and water.

Marcello always drove the train personally, dressed in clean denim overalls and a blue-and-white striped bill cap. I never saw a man happier with his toys than when Marcello drove Fan Girl out of Imperial Yard and back again at night, grinning from one side of his head to the other, prouder than a new father. He had a second locomotive under construction, we called her Fannie's Daughter, but it was Fan Girl he loved the best. Her chassis had housed several generations of prototype engines, and with every iteration he made his crew paint and buff her brighter and brighter until she was a gleaming ruby of a machine.

Burn crews whittled away at Denver's zombie population, turning them into syngas, but only for part of the day. One shift was more than enough to make all the fuel Imperial Yard and the two secret installations needed. It would take a long time to empty Denver at that rate, but anyone could see it was possible. My original plan had called for auxiliary incinerators, furnaces basically, where we would use excess syngas to cremate zombies in large batches. Ludovic had other ideas. He commanded us to park the zombies indefinitely, to keep them around as fuel. Zombies had been transformed from menace to resource.

While Marcello and his crew worked on locomotives and power plants, and Helen worked on gas storage and pumping systems, Sandy and I had the dining car, or "special viewing platform". It was an opulent rail car designed to evoke the golden era of rail travel, but with far larger windows. It had belonged to some billionaire or other, who had a thing for trains and enough clout to get his own car pulled around the country when he felt like traveling. Leather upholstery, dark wood paneling, wainscoting, book shelves, and a row of semi-private dining nooks made it feel like the domain of an early twentieth century robber-baron. Only the oversized windows and LED lighting gave away its more modern origins.

As a show of his power and reach, Ludovic had ordered a huge fish tank be built into the special viewing platform, displacing two tables and causing a lot of extra work for a specialist brought in from Oklahoma. The fish weren't as exotic as you could buy in the Before days, but even getting some red drum and sea robin from the Gulf of Mexico was a feat. A school of tiny pinfish flashed silver as they swam back and forth between the larger, bright-colored stars of the tank.

The dining car had other features of particular interest. One was the waist-high stanchions, made of brass and fastened directly to the metal frame of the car. The other was the chandeliers, each of which reflected their LED lights through a hundred refracting crystals, mounted on an ornate, heavy, brass frames.

Anode, meet cathode.

It was somewhat fortunate for us that the dining car's electrical system had deteriorated from neglect and needed repairs. As we explored the old wiring we discovered the billionaire had installed magnetic locks on all the doors, and surveillance cameras throughout the car. We had the old wiring removed (it really was pitiful next to the opulence of the rest of the car) so Sandy and I could personally replace it.

Since the dining car was to be the king's personal vehicle for the long term, it only made sense to add some extra security features. We attached a huge omni antenna on the roof, on a hinged mount that let us fold it down for travel. With the antenna up, and enough voltage, we could in theory lay down every zombie within three hundred yards. Our design challenge was how to power the thing.

The antenna was meant as an emergency device, so we didn't have to keep it powered for long, but we did need a short burst of high current, and to that end we made capacitors. If you stack metal plates with insulation between them, then make them part of a circuit, you can store a charge of electricity. Capacitors don't hold as much power as batteries do, but you can discharge them almost instantly. So, if you're building a device that requires a surge of obscene amounts of power, capacitors are your key component. We had to impose on Merced's team to acquire copper plates, polyvinyl, epoxy, and high-voltage connectors and wires.

By the time our crew started work on capacitors the yard had plenty of surplus power. Being able to use things like power drills and hair dryers without concern for the other workers was a kind of freedom we hadn't experienced in a long time. We soon had a full bank heavy rectangles, pavers made from layers of epoxy and copper, lining the roof of the dining car. The other radio components were similarly large and flat, designed to lay low on the car's roof so they wouldn't snag on tunnels.

We added low-profile antennas to the edge of the car's roof: zombie control devices. If you could look down on the car from above it was all a bit unsightly, but from the ground level you couldn't see anything except the bowed length of the omni antenna, laid down for transport.

All the security enhancements were controlled from four big toggle switches, located behind the bar near the aft of the car. They were the kind that you think of when Frankenstein powers up his monster: polished wooden handles attached to brass rods, rather in keeping with the period decor.

The day we tested the new omni, I didn't think to warn anyone. We had the dining car towed outside, raised the antenna, and plugged the car into our power grid with a heavy cable. We had done such a nice job on the circuitry that we barely heard anything when we charged the array. There was a gauge next to the first switch that showed the stored voltage, and once it reached its peak we threw the second switch and locked it into place. We could hear a crackling hum through the ceiling of the car but, otherwise, nothing much happened. At first we weren't sure if it had worked.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Two minutes later the shift leader from the burn crew came tearing onto the test track, wanting to know what the heck we had done. He was supposed to be managing twenty thousand zombies on the east side of the yard, guiding them towards their useful fates as feedstock for syngas. He was alarmed that they had collapsed, all of them, all the way to downtown. And he'd be damned if he and his guys had to manually collect the dead things themselves and throw them into the converter, because the damned things were supposed to walk on their own. But then he saw the omni, a massive version of the ones mounted on hummers, and started laughing.

Sergeant Alvarez showed up while the burn leader was still holding his ribs, but he was less amused. "What the hell has gotten into you!"

"What?" I shrugged innocently.

"Half the city just laid down and took a nap, that's what! You didn't think to warn anyone that something weird was about to happen? People went over my head and talked to Estes Park! I'm fielding call from ministers, who want to know if all the zombies in the world have suddenly died!"

"Interesting. How far out did it work?"

"At least to Washington Street," he barked, "and I do not like getting calls from ministers!"

That was nearly a mile away, way better than my estimates.

"It's the safety device we talked about" I said, holding out my arms dramatically towards the dining car. "Dear Leader's personal zombie nuke. Don't tell me he won't love it."

"It's Sire right now." Alvarez stabbed a finger in my direction. "Don't forget, so you don't loose your head. And call around next time, before you do something crazy." He marched away from me, not waiting for a reply.

"Hey Sergeant," I called to his back, "just how many compounds do we have around Denver now?"

"That's classified," he yelled back. "You worry about your own work."

The massive zombie knock-out device was soon dubbed "Omega" by popular vote.

We made labels for the toggle switches behind the bar: "Charge", "Omega", "Locks", "Perimeter".

But, Omega was only a cover for our real work inside the dining car: turning it into a bottle for lightning. It was the salt water tank that gave me the idea: the original builders had used metal rivets to attach wood flooring to the metal shell of the car, and then laid carpet on top of that. If we could soak the floor with salt water, we could get high-voltage sparks to fly from the chandeliers, through the people, and then into the floor of the train car. If they happened to be grabbing the stanchions, that was even better.

The Omega wiring was easily redirected to the chandeliers. Everyone in the room who wasn't well-insulated would be the target of the world's largest stun gun. We set up a safe space behind the bar, where the toggles were, a slightly elevated platform covered in thick layers of rubber.

For our plan to work well, we needed to get the salt water out of the tank and on to the floor. That's where the Ecklunds came in.

Eight fifteen AM was our signaling time, during my regular office hours. I made a daily practice of listening in on the chatter between nearby kingdom installations, and got to know the other directors by name. Imperial Yard was the largest, but there were groups of growers and salvagers and specialists around the area, too. Nobody looked twice when I had the headphones on in the mornings, and nobody else heard the sequence of clicks I either sent or received on a special frequency. Three for a dead drop. Five for a personal meeting. Repeat three times.

Dead drops were easy. We put a USB drive into a fake hide-a-key rock, and left it just outside the fence. Nobody watched the east side of the yard because it was full of zombies held at bay by a fence and static generators. Jaida, wearing her own static generator, could walk right up to the fence at night, exchange drives, and walk away again without anyone noticing.

To pick up the drops, Sandy and I made a regular habit of going for walks at night when the air cooled. We took a different route every night, but on dead-drop nights we spent a few moments by the east fence, long enough for Sandy to reach through the links and retrieve the rock. A flash of her hands and the switch was done, and we returned to our evening constitutional.

Only once did someone take notice. One of the liaisons either followed us or stumbled across us. Sandy was crouched down (not an easy position for her now that she was showing) making the switch when a flashlight shined right at us. "Who's there?"

Sandy was quick to drop the imitation rock and unzip my pants, reach inside and start caressing me.

"You're interrupting something here, Sam." I looked to where he was, on my right, directly into his flashlight. I felt my body respond to Sandy with its usual enthusiasm. It takes the interloper a couple of seconds to register what he's looking at.

"Director! What are you doing out here … at night … with …," then Sandy pulls my member out of my pants, almost fully erect. "Ohmygod."

"You're ruining the mood, Sam! Go away!"

"I'm so sorry," he said, but he didn't move. He froze, flashlight focused on us. It seemed like all the liaisons were missing something in their heads, and that was what landed them in their positions of liaisons, where they weren't fully trusted by anyone.

"Hand me a rock," I told Sandy, and she put a palm-sized one in my hand. Then she surprises me by taking half my length in her mouth. There's a dark and glorious moment where all I can think about is how hot and clever Sandy's tongue feels on me.

But, stupid Sam is still there and his light is pointed at us, pulling my focus away from where it obviously belongs. "FUCK OFF Sam!" I threw the rock at him with real feeling, as hard as I could without dislodging myself from Sandy's mouth, and suddenly the light was gone and Sam's boots were running in the other direction.

After that, nobody questioned our nighttime strolls.

On our last in-person meeting, a week before the demo, we get a surprise when we reach the fence: Jaida isn't alone. Alfred is leaning on a cane but he's there, looking pretty great for a guy who was dead a few months ago. They can't stay long because it's too much of a risk, but we link fingers through the fence and congratulate each other on being alive.

"This will do what you want." He slips a tube the size of a flashlight through the links. "High explosive, waterproof, ten second delay. More than enough to blow out your fish tank."

"Nice work, as always," I told him.

"Are you sure we can't do more?"

"This either works, or it kills us," I told him, shaking my head, "but we really need that rendezvous, or we'll never outrun the NKA."

"We'll be there," he promises us, "we'll all go home together."

"Don't die waiting for us," I urge him. "If the worst happens just go back home, and tell them what we did. Tell Rachel we love her."