Ludovic #1

I visited Ludovic #1 recently, the extraordinary engine that consumed such an important part of my life. They built the Plague Years Exhibit around it, a museum within a museum. School children visit the control room, stroke the long-cold tanks, peer down into the reactor stack, run wildly up and down the bunk room despite the signs instructing them to walk, barely glance at the schematics and blueprints on display, flash the strobes at each other. They are an unruly lot until the end of the tour where they stand mutely in the auxiliary fire chambers. Even their little minds can sense the implacable finality of those insulated low-slung boxes. I told the museum director to do nothing to those chambers, except sweep away the loose debris. If a child dares to touch the walls then his hands should come away blackened, so he will remember. In this at least the director listened to me.

The machine itself is the What. There are many plaques and diagrams and demonstration devices to explain the technical How of its workings. There are fewer explanations of Why and the When, as these are generally known. But there is only one sign that says anything at all about the Who, albeit a very large one at the entrance of Ludovic Hall. The sign features a line-drawn image of the man himself which takes some artistic liberties: I promise you he never looked so handsome when I knew him. The text reads:

In the Sixth Year of Plague warlord Martin Ludovic conceived a last-ditch effort to save mankind from the Zombie Plague. He sought out the most talented engineers still living and gave them unlimited materials and manpower. With his support, these men and women invented all of our crucial devices for destroying zombies. Their joint efforts culminated in the machine which today bears Ludovic’s name.

Nobody recognizes me during my visit, and that is by design. Yet part of me imagines that some gray-hair from the old days, their grand-children tow, would spy me and swing by. There would be introductions (with many implied winks and nods) and we would agree that yes, it really is something seeing the old girl as a museum piece like this. Those were some days. Then the children would pull my old companions away, and I wouldn’t see them again until the occasional reunion.

Instead, I am given the gift of witnessing a child, more brave or more serious than her fellows, contemplating the night-black smudges on her fingertips.

Hermitage

Everyone has their own paradise. Mine was on a south-facing slope in Northern California, what you kids call Norcali these days, at the end of a narrow access road, that branched from a secondary road, which didn't join any kind of state highway for over ten miles. It was a single story house, with a car port and an unbroken expanse of roof entirely covered in solar panels. Near the house was an expanse of growth that looked wild, but in fact kept me well fed with little effort.

The inside of the house was comfortable. The solar roof and storage battery gave me enough of a power budget to keep a few lights on, run the refrigerator, and sometimes cook a meal on the induction stove if I wasn't too demanding. The bed was soft, and the roof didn't leak.

Judging from the professional decor and general lack of character when I first arrived, the place had been purchased as a vacation home and then rented out through an online service. Nearly the first thing I did was gather up all the papier-mâché "vases" and gigantic artificial flowers, prints of inoffensive, unchallenging artwork and a mountain of extraneous pillows sporting huge, gaudy tassels. All that junk went into a bonfire one cloudy day and was never seen again. I left the photographs in one room untouched: landscapes of windblown trees and desert wildflowers in bloom, underwater scenes of coral reefs and sea anemone, mounted in plain but expensive archival frames. They were the sole evidence that a real person with real interests had ever visited long enough to leave a genuine mark on the place.

You couldn't see the house from a distance, not unless you climbed the hills in the area and looked right at it, because the orchard shielded it. It was an easy place for the eye to ignore, a mass of confused growth similar to the occasional copse of trees that dot the region, tallest in the center, tapering down at its edges to lower and smaller plants until the predominant grasses took over. But if you looked beyond the ground cover, the creepers, the smaller trees, and the odd flowering vine, there was a precise array of fruit trees inside the wild mass, holding it all up and sheltering the layers of garden underneath.

The orchard grew dozens of kinds of fruit. There were some apples and pears but the bulk were stone fruit, including a breed of avocado that was so massive, a single fruit would make a bowl of guacamole. The orchard had belonged to the house's only neighbor, but deeds and property lines didn't mean anything then and I had taken it over. I pruned the trees and left the branches where they fell, then planted beneath them such things as would grow in partial shade and mostly unattended, everything I could think of really. The initial effort was months of exhausting work, a way to bury my pain in hard labor, but in the months and years after I could observe how it grew and make small experimental adjustments. In the summer of my third year there, I could hardly walk the garden's narrow pathways without having to clear my way with a machete first.

Meals were foraged during my morning walks through the garden. I stepped on any plants I didn't want, or took off their heads before they could seed, and left alone those I wanted to encourage. Depending on the time of year, I could take cabbage and kale, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, garlic, kiwi and other gooseberries, strawberries, plums, apples, peaches, pears, cherries, melons, cucumbers, squash, and more. For herbs I had thyme, verbena, basil, and rosemary among others. Any fruit I didn't pick was left on the ground to ferment and rot. All that mash on the ground, and all the edible greens, attracted wildlife. I shot deer and pigs with a bow, enough to teach them the area was dangerous, and stored the meat in my freezer. If I had a complaint it was the utter lack of bread, and I always had more squash than I wanted.

There is sound theory behind my apparently lackluster gardening. What I did there wasn't random. But as this is a story mainly about zombies, and not a story about agroforestry or syntropic agriculture, I will spare you. My point here is that it took little ongoing effort to feed myself, aside from some extra effort at planting time and whenever I wanted to lay in some of the harvest. In spite of that advantage, I dedicated time each year to tour the nearby countryside and plant little caches of edibles. A stand of potatoes here, squashes there, cabbages or brassicas, tomatillos, amaranth and plenty of onions and garlic (which grow like weeds), whatever I thought might thrive without direction. In case of a disaster, I planned to have food nearby.

In my opinion, no paradise is complete without access to a beach. In the Before years everyone wanted a house on the beach, but it turns out the beaches in Norcali are colder than you would like, too cold by half during winter if your power budget is thin and you don't like chopping wood all day. So my paradise wasn't on the beach but near it. I could make the short climb to the crest of my hill and look down at the sunset and vast Pacific horizons, watch the clouds billow up from the infinite sky and, when there was a storm coming, rush at the land. From there I could take one of the flexible, durable sheets of plastic I kept stocked there and sled down the grassy hill at insane speed, careening among the gulleys and hillocks, teeth clenched against the jarring ride, until I hit the bottom where the mountain splayed out into a nearly flat expanse of long grasses and my sled would loose direction as it slowed then tipped me over, limbs locked together so I could roll like a log until the stalks and the bushes caught me.

It took an investment of an entire autumn to shape that sluice of earth, most of it spent moving rocks, and it was my one source of real excitement and the fastest way to reach the shore. Sometimes I would go too fast or lean the wrong way and my plastic sled would jump out of the prepared track and toss me in the air to land on unprepared ground, usually hard, and often with minor injuries. The helmet I wore for these adventures showed scars and signs of all the brain damage that could have been. On days when the solitude wore on me I would make the trip twice or even three times, until I had to limp painfully home to collapse into bed.

There was a slower route to the beach, a packed earth trail, a remnant of Before, that wound between my mountain and the neighboring one.  It was a fine walk through a gulley crowded with tall trees full of birds who made all kinds of riot in the daytime, then down into brambles of blackberry, and then suddenly I would emerge with the hills at my back and the last stretch of sunlit grasses lay in front. The path meandered along the contours of the plain, finally leading me to the barrier of scrubby dunes that defended the beach from the not-beach.  That was my "private" shore.  A few miles south was a large bay and a sizable town, but I avoided the more public beach on account the "public" were all zombies.

For salvage I had the nearby hamlet at the other end of my access road. There were a few dozen buildings there, mostly homes, but also a "main street" with ten storefronts and a single intersection. There was a grocer and a little hardware store for the locals, but the rest were aimed at tourists and passers-by on their way to the ocean who wanted sweets, or postcards, or fresh oysters grilled in their shells and served with a local white wine, all at a price cheaper than the bay town. There was also a traditional white church with a steeple. I don't know how big its congregation was but it also held the community's library and was the source of my daily reading material.

There were billboards along the road between my hamlet and the bay town, advertisements for a much bigger church. They said things like, "When life hurts, come to church," and, "The congregation that cares about you," and, "Feeling alone? Get off your phone! Come to church!" I painted over all those billboards in white and wrote new signs in careful black letters: directions to the nearby towns and cities, and their approximate distances.

Once in a while, maybe four times in three years, a group of survivors would come through and search the hamlet for salvage. On those occasions I would lie down and watch them through binoculars to judge if I should stay or if I should run. At least one group saw my helpful directions for what they were: an invitation to leave there and go anywhere else. They climbed the church's steeple and got a good, long look at the area. Their scouts, also armed with binoculars, passed right over my position as they inspected the surroundings, and similarly passed over my tangled garden as being too wild to be worth their notice. From the church's position my house was well-hidden behind the scenery and they never suspected it was there. In the absence of any decent salvage there was nothing to be gained by sticking around, and even that group moved on.

All in all, it was an excellent place to wait out the final days of the human race. The zombie organism had won the contest of the fittest, and the rest of us were just zombies-in-waiting. Survival had been reduced to a function of luck, a throw of the dice you made every day in deciding where to go, or if you should stay, whether you should hunt or forage, if you should meet new people or hide from them. There were too many unknowns to ever make sure decisions.

In the absence of certainty you could load the dice with preparation, disciple, and skill. You could load them pretty heavily in fact, but no matter how careful you were, or wise, or prepared, sooner or later everything went to shit.

The day the horde showed up, I wasn't surprised to see them. A few days prior a pod of whales had the nerve to run aground on my private beach and die there. Nobody knows why they do it, or what makes them do it, but by the time I spied them from my hilltop they were already dead and bloating like zeppelins. Their stench drew thousands of zombies from the bay town to gorge on the massive beasts, which in itself was enough bad news to put the future of my home in doubt.

Like any settlement at the time, the Hermitage had a defensive perimeter. All around the region I had scouted the roads and the flat places where zombies might like to amble and, wherever there was a convenient ditch or other zombie-catching obstacle, set a trap and baited it with John Phillip Sousa.

The hard part was setting up a pole of some kind, typically a long metal stake from a big-box hardware store or garden center, sunk down with a post driver. A few times I tried actually digging holes and filling them with cement and a wooden post, but that was ten times the work for mostly the same result. On top of the pole, out of reach of desiccated zombie fingers, I installed a lure. When something ambled by it would trip a nearby motion detector, and that would signal a digital recorder to play one of Sousa's marches. The shamble would detour towards the sound, fall into the ditch or get stuck in concertina wire or otherwise find themselves trapped. Sooner or later I would stroll by with a sharp stick and poke them all in the brains.

The parts to make lures were easy enough to find. I made a habit of scavenging motion detectors, breadboards, wire, and simple electronic components at every opportunity. The lures were hardly more than toys, amateur stuff really, powered by a solar panel and some rechargeable batteries. They weren't exactly reliable: a lot of times they only succeeded in startling wildlife, and they often failed in winter when the days were short and overcast. But they were easy to make, there were a lot of them, and they did a good job of sidelining small shambles of zombie into places where they could be safely dispatched. Once in a while the lures went missing entirely, pilfered by humans who liked the idea and decided to walk off with them. It was flattering when it happened, and one time the thieves left behind a crate of canned food and cooler containing a bottle of antibiotics.

I can hear you asking, "Wait, go back! Why John Phillip Sousa?" Zombies are attracted to low pulsing noises more than they are to high-pitched irregular noises. Any music with a strong beat would suffice, but I used Sousa in particular because his marches were nearly as effective as EDM, but only half as annoying to me.

Near to the house I used a very different strategy: inconvenience. I blocked the access road with a gate and let vines grow all over it and the nearby fence. Zombies and humans alike were encouraged to walk the road that ran along the outside of the fence, past houses belonging to the hamlet. That outer fence didn't run entirely around my mountain, but it did block the easiest slope. Anyone who got past (or around) the fence would face a short but steep climb before they reached the garden and the house. A barbed wire fence ran through the garden, hidden under the canopy, a handy trellis for some plants. I hung bunches of Christmas bells on the fence at intervals, the tiny kind that are less attractive to zombies, so anything that tried to pass through it would get snagged and make the bells jingle to let me know I had caught something. I didn't like that the bells rang during storms or when the crows decided they were good playthings, but nothing in this world is ever perfect.

Zombies don't like to walk up steep hills, and they aren't very smart, but they are terrifyingly persistent. Their favorite prey is living people but they'll eat any living meat. Sometimes they'll chase rabbits up hills they wouldn't normally climb, or run deer to exhaustion, or surround a pack of coyotes and devour them all together while the poor beasts yelp and cry in awful unison. These adventures sometimes led them onto my property and, more than once, my interior fence snagged a lone zombie or a small amble of them before they reached my house. I would follow the sound of bells and find them pressed against the wire, stuck on the barbs among the runner beans and tomatoes, bad vines ready to be pruned.

Zombies will also scavenge meat that is quite rotten, with the exception of people: within a minute of a person dying the zombies lose interest in the corpse and look for something else to eat. The change from human corpse to upright zombie takes longer than a minute, but it starts at the moment of death and the zombies can tell.

If you know all of this, and your environment stinks of rotting whale, you shouldn't be surprised when a few zombies come to call. I was sleeping fitfully and outdoors in those days, in a tent pitched uphill from my house on a crest that offered the best possible view inland, over the grassy eastward curves of land and the roads once used by tourists on their way to the bay town.

I didn't visit that spot often, not since I buried my dog there. He was a shaggy mid-sized mutt named Kojo, and he liked to sit on that spot with his nose in the wind, ears flapping behind him, eyes half closed. I would scan the world through binoculars, and he would sniff the world with his nose, and I like to think we had a pretty good handle on things for a while. But the zombies got him like they get everything. I found what was left of him, buried him in our favorite place, and promptly stopped going there. But when you are expecting a visit from the undead, a good tactical crest is the best place to be.

On day four of the beached whale misadventure I was swimming in their stink, unable to sleep, when dawn showed me the worst of all possibilities: a zombie shamble hundreds of thousands strong. They were far away at first, but the road was stuffed so full of them that they fanned out to the slower, rougher terrain alongside. The overall impression was a dark wedge crawling over the landscape, its point aimed directly at my hamlet.

Hour by hour they came closer, innumerable and unstoppable.

The stench of rotting whale blubber on the wind was more powerful than Sousa, and they ignored my lures. They should have followed the easy road down main street and been diverted to the bay town, but the wind brought them directly at me. Zombies on open ground like to shamble with an arms length of space between them but when they hit an obstacle, like a fence, and they are intent on something beyond it, they press against each other and the obstacle until something gives way.

My outer fence held them for a few minutes, until the accumulated pressure of all those bodies was too much and it collapsed like a bad levee.

One thing you won't read in your textbooks about the Plague years is that nearly all zombies are naked. They don't start out that way, but as they dry and thin their clothes no longer fit. The pants are usually the first to go. When the pants first fall down the zombie trips over them and ends up on the ground. Too dumb to crawl its way out of its predicament, it tries to stand up and falls again. This can go on for a long time, until it just happens to step out of the legs and is finally free, sans pants, to roam and menace and eat again. Tops and dresses take longer to shed, but they too end up at the wayside. Some items don't come off so easily, like one-piece swimsuits, flack jackets, lycra bodysuits, and those harnesses movers wear to lift something heavy. I have seen all of those things, and much more besides, on the formerly living. But in the main they are naked and gaunt and dry and not very fun to look at.

The naked dead flowed onto my Hermitage in their thousands and their tens of thousands. The inner fence fared worse than the outer one, taking a few tangled zombies down as it fell, to be ground into pieces by the flood. It was useless against such numbers.

I should have bolted then and there, but I was loathe to leave. Beneath the low keening of the dead, I could still hear the speech of birds and the whispers of trees. And even with that awful stench of whale rot over everything, I could imagine the scents of neglected fruit fermenting in the sun, loamy soils, the spice of bay and eucalyptus, salt air from the Pacific, wild lavender, and a hundred other smells that made up mine and Kojo's place.

I had thought I was long out of the habit of wishing for anything, but right then I wanted more time, I wanted it with such force I felt I could hit them with it, crush them with my wanting. I knew I had no need of that place, that I could find another and build it up. But why should I have to? Why shouldn’t I keep the place of my choosing? Didn't I have the right to live in peace, with a dog and a garden and not be a bother to anybody?

I mark that moment now, because that was the real beginning of the Machine. Whatever our accomplishments, for good or ill, our reasons matter. Reasons aren’t all that matter, but they are added to the scales alongside our methods and our results. Mine were simple, and selfish: I wanted to stay in one place long enough to get tired of it; I wanted sleep without fear; I wanted to garden or hunt or build and not wonder if I would return home that night; I wanted to have a dog that wouldn’t be eaten by zombies. I was fully packed, prepared to flee, but I couldn't because I wanted what they were taking from me.

I was stuck on that grassy crest, pinned by my accumulating losses, until the zombies stumbled into my fire pit. The fire pit! I had banked it deep in layers of ash at sunset, but a zombie gets really dry after walking all morning in the summer sun. A little air and a bit of desiccated skin was all it took to turn a coal into a hot flaming zombie. They don't like burning any more than a human does, and for almost a minute the first one stumbled in all directions, setting fire to its fellow shamblers, who set fire to more, and soon the garden and the house and the hillside were aflame while the backlog of a hundred thousand more were still coming.

The fire broke my spell. There was no more Hermitage to want, nothing to stay for but a grave with a few scraps of fur and bones in it. I sprinted up the hill and picked out a sled. Before leaving I sprayed myself with Febreze with the hope I would never smell as tempting to zombies as the feast on the beach.

With the smoke and flames still climbing up one side of the mountain, I hurled myself down the other as fast as I could, fast enough to outrun wildfire.