Class of 2013 - 9

Chapter Nine

It hadn’t taken long for everyone to hear of the news once we left Sweet’s office. The saber and S&W 629 showed that he was serious about going, as did James and Lea grabbing their weapons. To top off what they had, I also gave James one of the 1911’s and a shotgun, and gave Lea the two Beretta 9mm’s. To Sweet, as much as it pained me to let it go without ever getting to shoot it, I gave the AR-15 – though I made him promise to bring it back. I made sure to give them all plenty of ammo too. I knew that they would need it. As I was doing that, Chien was checking their vehicles over to make sure that they were all fit and ready to go. Between Sweet’s ’69 Cutlass, and Lea’s ’67 GTO, I knew they wouldn’t exactly be quiet, but I also knew those old cars could take a beating if they had to.

Once Chien was finished with the pre-trip checks, James and Lea headed for her GTO and Sweet headed for his Cutlass. Sweet would lead the convoy, and Chien and I would be the ones to close the gate as soon as they were out. Thankfully both vehicles had more than enough fuel to get to Menifee and back, so I wasn’t worried about them running out along the way. Soon enough they were beyond the gate and on their way, and the gate was rolling closed. That left Chien and I with the rest of the survivors, and while we both had ideas of what to do, neither of us were sure what exactly should be done first. Though it wasn’t too long before we had an idea of what to do when we saw everyone looking at us. They needed things to do, things to keep them occupied and productive while Chien and I raided Big 5. I had a project in mind.

We knew that eventually the power was going to go out, and while the generator could serve as a backup, and the solar panels were designed to function well enough without anything extra to support their power output, they wouldn’t be able to support everything we would eventually have here. We needed to have more capacity for freezing and storing food to make our supplies last longer, and I hadn’t had the opportunity yet to speak with Sweet on the matter. However, I doubted very seriously that he would be against us making something that could produce power. Chien thankfully knew enough about electronics and cars to know how to create an alternator, and I knew enough about rustic technologies to make a steam engine. Put them together, along with a few gears, and you had yourself a steam generator. Better, I had ideas for making a solar powered version. However, that could wait until we had a regular steam engine version up and running properly.

Bringing everyone in, we handed out radios to two teams of four and had them begin looking around for things that were large and could contain water. Really, we just needed something that could be proof of concept. I already knew how to build a steam engine, though when I spoke I often simplified the process. Basically all you needed was something large that could contain water, a large metal (or potentially concrete or brick) box to hold the fire, some piping, pistons, and (for the purpose of a locomotive or an electrical generator) wheels and axels. Arrange them in a particular fashion, and ta-da! You had yourself a steam engine.

For the purposes of an electrical generator, I was thinking of something that looked the opposite of what most people believed a steam engine should look like. Essentially it would be the same configuration as a simple steam locomotive, but with the pistons and drive wheels above the boiler rather than below, and an enclosed system. Doing it that way the steam could re-condense into water and flow down a pipe to feed back into the boiler – under pressure, of course. Likely the water in the pipe would have to be forced into the boiler even if there was a lot of it, which meant the initial boiler would have to be large, but that would be fine. You see, as with all steam engines powered with fire and water, it would have to be manned… but one or two people at a time could easily run it once trained. Taking sixteen people into account (yes, I was counting the three new members that hadn’t yet arrived), that wouldn’t be difficult.

I had already decided that the first one we built would be simply for proof of concept, to make sure that we knew what we were doing. Therefore, while everyone else was out and about looking for potential pieces that we could use, I was drawing up a rough sort of schematic for the engine. I couldn’t be sure about specifics until we had parts, but I could at least come up with the general idea and build it. It would certainly look crude, of that I had no doubts, but if it worked we had reason to refine the idea. If we could get a regular steam engine working, we would also then have reason to work on the solar powered idea. Also, despite the fact that it was June, I was already thinking about winter. It seemed so far off right now, but I knew that before October was out, we would be needing another power source besides the diesel generator and the solar panels. They were a lovely combination so long as there was a good supply of sunlight, but once winter came… we’d have about three to four months of clouds, fog, overcast, and rain. Worse, even when we did get decent sunlight, it wouldn’t last as long as we needed. The days were shorter.

Also… there was a rather morbid reason for this idea. Perhaps I was thinking too far into the future, after all… this was only the second day of the zombie outbreak… but I knew that we would need what limited land we had secured for other things as time went on. We couldn’t depend on canned food and scavenging forever. We would eventually have to plant crops and grow our own food. Eventually we’d have to hunt. We’d have to learn to make weapons and ammunition at some point. At this rate, we’d be lucky not to regress fully to the technology of the 1800’s. The nineteenth century was a colorful one, but one that also had many dark marks upon it in our history. I doubted that we would ever fall that far so long as there were any bastions left where our technological might remained. So long as our populous continued to receive education we might be alright. There was still hope for North America in certain areas that were tucked away. Islands and such that were away from the mainland would be alright.

It was the rest of us, the mainlanders, that would have to make due. That was the reason behind the morbid thought that came over me in regards to the steam generator… California wasn’t great at growing things naturally in the southern portion of the state. We didn’t have a lot to burn that couldn’t be used in some better way for construction of one kind or another. What we did have now, however, was a lot of material that went up very easily. I had displayed as much earlier on when I burned the first of the corpses. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t kind. It wasn’t politically correct. It was a way to survive, and to continue our way of life. Besides which, where would we bury all these bodies anyway? In the exact places where we wanted to one day plant our crops? Did we really want to be digging up bones out of our gardens for the rest of our days? Did we want our children, and our children’s children having to pull up skulls and femurs and ribs as they harvested the crops to live?

I didn’t want that for us. I didn’t want that for anyone. That would be a hellish way to live. This world was going downhill, and fast, but I didn’t want it to overextend into the lives of those that would follow after us. The United States was a great and powerful nation, but it had somehow lost its way in the days of the modern era. Our last great triumph over any sort of true evil was sixty-eight years ago when we defeated the Third Reich. Some would include Japan and Italy in that, and while they were our enemies, and while they did do some horrible things, they didn’t commit the mass extermination of millions of people. Hell, it’s often forgotten, or even unknown by many people, but the Japanese actually were helping Jews and others that were marked for death by the Nazis escape. Of all the sad things in history, many people that were so marked had fled Germany, Poland, and other nations just to end up suffering when we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I support dropping the bombs; it saved a great amount of time and lives (ironically), but the simple fact that such a fate could befall those that weren’t even our enemies was horrible.

Without evil like the Third Reich, however, we would never have achieved such a power base as we had in the world. The American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, The Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan to name a few conflicts… there was nobody that could honestly say our track record for combat wasn’t at least a little bit impressive. We didn’t win each and every time, but we had never actually lost a war. We had never lost any of our soil to a foreign power by military force. However, it wasn’t until World War Two that we really proved ourselves as a nation and shot to the top of the charts in both military power and economic might. The greatest irony was that we owed it to the war for getting us out of the depression – not our own government. We owed our great strength to having to defeat the world’s greatest evil to date. What sadder state of affairs could there be than having to admit we owed our greatness to the rise of a short Austrian with a bad mustache?

Perhaps this was our chance to start over and do things right this time around. To do that though we had to be prepared to do some things that might seem wrong, might seem foul, but would let us survive long enough to do what was right by people. No more of this talk of what the founding fathers intended. They didn’t intend a damn thing as far as the good of the world was concerned, and I would dare anyone to find anything to convince me otherwise. A number were wealthy land owners and half of them owned slaves. They weren’t concerned with the rights of anyone but the rich white men that made up their ranks in government. They didn’t care about women, they didn’t care about future generations of the common people, and they sure as hell didn’t care about anyone that wasn’t thumping a bible and going to church as often as they could. It was time to make our own way in this world, and to ensure that we didn’t fall off the path again.

It started here, with this steam generator, and with the wherewithal to provide it with a good source of fuel. Water was one half of the mix. The other half was something to burn, and for lack of an ensured future supply of wood, I felt it best that we use the fuel source we would run into incredibly often. It was a shiver inducing thought, but burning those desiccated corpses would not only provide us with power, but it seemed to mostly be clean. The first body had burned incredibly well, and incredibly hot, and by the time it was over only a little bit of ash remained. So hot had it been that the bones themselves had caught alight and burned away until there was nothing but a thin layer of black ash on the ground. Something in me also believed that it would be a good way to get fertilizer. After all, while whole bodies would be bad, that black ash undoubtedly could help the soil out. If not, it would at least be worth a try.

While I was working on the design for the steam engine, Chien was working on the design for the alternator itself. For the prototype we really didn’t need to make one. We could just as easily take one right out of a car and make sure that the wiring was properly connected. However, he was designing not only the alternator, but a series of batteries that it would be charging. With both the alternator and the batteries in place, we would be able to run things off of the engine. It was a wonderful showing of how Chien and I could work together intellectually when we had a common goal. I was sure that he would give me plenty of odd looks if I actually told him right now what fuel source I planned on using, but once we had our own generator up and running, I doubted he’d mind. Everyone would probably be aghast at first considering that the bodies had once been human, before they had been zombies, but if it gave us what we needed… well, human needs always won out, right?

As we worked away in our notebooks, I caught Chien glancing over at my schematic curiously, right after I had drawn the drive wheel connection rods for both sides. I had a good feeling that I knew why he was looking so perplexed by them as well. While I had studied and been interested in rustic technology for much of my life, things to do with the railway especially, Chien had not. I actually doubted he knew how a steam engine really worked – no doubt that he understood the concept, and no doubt that he could understand the mechanics of it, but simply the doubt that he had ever actually looked at how they functioned. The concept was simple and pretty straight forward. Fire under boiler, boiler full of water, water boils due to fire, boiling water makes steam, steam moves through pipes to push pistons, pistons push rods, rods turn the wheels; wheels turning creates motion for the engine. It was basically that simple.

“Why do you have the drive rods in different positions like that?” He finally asked me, and that was the one thing that I found many people didn’t know. I hadn’t known about that myself until a couple years ago when I finally took notice. It wasn’t hard to go unnoticed either, when you only ever really saw the train from one side of the rails. However, it was fact.

“They’re off by ninety degrees so that if the engine ever stops and one is all the way forward or all the way back, and thus entirely straight, you can start the engine again. If that weren’t the case, you’d end up with pressure buildup throughout the system, and eventually you’d have a catastrophic boiler explosion, if you just left it alone.” I saw him blink a bit and give me the same look as before when he asked me how I knew things. This time he actually seemed to not be too surprised, at least not for very long, and quickly accepted what I said.

“Makes sense.” He leaned back in his chair then. “So what do you think they’re going to find for us to make the engine out of?”

“Probably a bunch of junk that would end up exploding if we tried to use it as more than a proof of concept prototype.” I shrugged, and then looked at him with a grin. “You know that we’re probably going to have to get the real parts when we make the real thing, don’t you?”

“I was trying very hard to not think about it yet.” Chien said flatly, and I chuckled. A grin came to his lips then. “Make a deal – you get the parts for the engine, and I’ll get the parts for the alternator.”

“Oh bullshit… you’ll just pull an alternator out of one of the cars in the parking lot.”

“No I won’t.”

“Bus?”

He gave a look of mock surprise. “How did you know my master plan?”

I rolled my eyes. “Wasn’t hard to figure out, dearest Asian.”

He grinned. “Y’know, come to think of it, we could probably get all the parts we need off of one or two of the busses. There are plenty of them.”

“That’s very true, but for this first one, let’s just let everyone try and find parts for the engine. Gives them something to do and makes them feel useful. Morale thing, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.” Chien nodded, “Means they have something to make things not feel so hopeless. After all, they’re mostly kids. I mean hell… the four of us are the only surviving seniors, and only three of us are adults. I won’t be eighteen until August, and even then there will only be a total of five adults out of thirteen.”

“Well, no, not quite. There will be six out of sixteen. You’re forgetting Sweet’s wife, and his sixteen year old daughters. Those twins turn seventeen next month too, so in another year the number of adults will about double, and the minors will be a minority… assuming we don’t find more out there somewhere.” I sighed a bit and leaned back in the chair. “Do you think we will?”

“Find more minors?”

“Yeah. …Well, no… I mean survivors in general. Here in Perris.” I looked over at him.

“I’m not sure, but I would think so. I mean with all the vets and all the guns in this town… there’s gotta be at least a few, right? Even if only a tenth of a percent make it, that’s still something like… fifty total, probably?” He leaned back, thinking about the numbers. “Plus Moreno Valley is basically right next door to Perris, Romoland isn’t more than a few miles away, and Lake Elsinore is right through the pass taking Highway 74. If we’re able to collect survivors from each area, we might be looking at two hundred people… maybe more, being that I don’t really know the population specifics from each place – and that’s assuming only one in a thousand survive. Not bad odds, really.”

“True. Not bad odds at all, considering how quickly this infection was able to spread.” I thought for a moment. “Though… one in a thousand would mean the population of the mainland would be something like three hundred thousand… or so. Around there.” I then added quietly, “And shrinking in number every day that passes.”

“You’re sure sounding pretty defeatist all of a sudden, Roy.”

“It’s not hard when you start looking at the statistics. I mean, I’m glad we’re going to have Sweet’s family safe. I like them. But… it seems kind of selfish at the same time, doesn’t it? To just worry about people that we know? It’s natural, but it’s still selfish.” I leaned forward, resting my arms on the table in front of us. “It’s only day two, but we’ve lost millions. We should be doing something more it feels like.”

Chien smirked then as he spoke. “You just have that knee-jerk reaction to play hero, don’t you?” He shook his head. “If you’re thinking about going out there and rescuing people, you’re out of your mind, dude. I mean, I like the thought too, but you’ve seen how things can get. Hell, in less than an hour almost everyone on this campus ended up zombified. What would you do if you got caught in that out in town? You and I both know that you, me, or anyone else would end up a zombie snack.”

“So what, we don’t try?” I glared at him then.

“Roy…” He sighed, “I’m not saying that we never try to help anyone. I’m not saying that at all. However, we need to have ourselves set first. What good would it do to rescue someone if we can’t even take care of them?”

“They’d at least be alive to help us get better prepared to help more people.” Chien looked at me for a moment, and then pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Okay Roy… and how would you propose that we go help people? Go house to house and knock on the doors, hoping that they aren’t already zombies?”

“That’d be better than nothing.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake… Roy… be realistic, will you? You’re always telling James to be; it’s time for you to listen to your own advice for once. You always say to bide your time and wait for the right moment. Is it really the right moment for us to go out and try and bring people in? Think about it!”

I scowled and looked away then, leaning on the table. I hated it when my own words were used against me; it was only worse when the person was actually right. In this case, Chien was right, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to admit it. I’d always acted the villain around my friends – played the part, acted like I would be the world conquering super-villain of us all. The only one that actually ever seemed to buy it was James, for some reason, but that had never stopped me from doing it. At heart though… I had always wanted a real chance to play the hero. I knew the same went for James, Chien, and Lea… and all things considered I supposed that James and Lea were actually getting their chance right now by helping Boss Sweet save his family in Menifee. For a moment I had to wonder if I was jealous of them, and that’s why I had this sudden urge to go out and rescue people. I pushed the thought of jealousy away, but part of me still couldn’t help but wonder. Was that the reason for my sudden apparent lack of common sense?

Without looking at Chien, I spoke, changing the subject. “Is that schematic of yours finished?” There was silence for a moment before I heard him sigh and answer the question.

“Yeah, it’s finished.” He blew out a breath. “Not sure where exactly to get all the wire and insulation from… though… guess it doesn’t really need to be perfect so long as it works, so it could be huge and still do its job right.” He shrugged, and it was quiet again for a moment. “You know… I want to help people too, Roy.” He said quietly.

“Yeah… I know.” I let out a breath after holding it for a moment. “I just don’t want to wait to do it.” I chuckled and leaned back in the chair. “I guess James has been rubbing off on me. His impatience is as infectious as the virus.” We both laughed a little.

“…Think they’ll all be okay?” Chien asked, turning to look at me. “Sweet’s cell phone was still working, so they can call here… hopefully… but even then… It’s not like we can just go charging off and help them, y’know?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I popped my neck then and winced, rubbing it. Always seemed to get stiff when I had been torqued. “They’re gonna be fine. It’s just a field trip, right?”