Asha Tamboli:

When the eddies of Zack crested on the horizon, we were all lined up along the fence. It was single layer, back then. Some of us were lucky enough to get some of the duct tape jackets, including me, but the guys making them could only make them so fast, and there was only so much allotted duct tape. We were all clumsy with the rebar sticks, the shovels. And the cement wasn't quite dry, yet. We'd braced the fences with some of the construction machinery, with vans and logs from the trees we had had to rip up. The sandbags were handy, too, and we had quite a few of those. But - [takes a moment, remembering.]

There were just so many. I'd like to say we had a cinematic moment where things felt hopeless before we suddenly got the hang of it and turned into zombie killing machines, but that's just not the case. The first couple waves, we dispatched the same day. After that, the traffic was continuous. We needed to have teams covering our southern perimeter at all times, and they were engaged at all times. [Rolls her head and shoulders, limbering up at the memory.] We had power in numbers, but the constant shifts for hours looking through the bars into an oncoming sea took a toll. We'd be relieved by the next shift, but we'd hear them, even in the farthest corners of campus. The only places you could shut out all the noise were in some of the basements and the soundproofed rooms in the music building. I'd come off shift, eat a couple happy meals and head to bed. I was bunked with my sister in a room meant to be a double with four others. It was cramped. The power grid shut off several days after Yonkers, and they were conserving the generators, only using them for the freezers until everything could be cleared out.

That was our existence for a few weeks. Wake up, eat, do whatever chores you'd been assigned, like storing the school's papers and records in the library, eat, do your Zack shift along the perimeter, pile some dirt along the perimeter, shaft some more Zack, eat, take a timed shower, go to sleep. Wake up, repeat.

The school records were that important to Marana?

Hell, yes. Well, not Marana, specifically. Did you hear the bit where Cedar spent a good amount of her senior year typing every plan, every set of contingencies, logging all of her expenses funded by Mr. Chen and the other families, and every random thought that occurred to her? I don't know how she found time to go to class, although it sounds like Maxine and Courtney, and probably Baozhai, pitched in. They recognized that governments would do what it took to preserve themselves as an institution, first. Then, some would come for the survivors. How would survivors rebuild a life? How can societies and cultures retain heritage, their memories, when they've just splattered them all over grandma's needlework?

Did you know that we are the only, repeat, the only prewar institution with near perfect records both before and during the war? We've had several survivors with connections to the school contact us for copies of our records to provide documentation that they, their daughter, wife, grandmother, whatever, owned or had family that owned land wherever. We protected student information - contact lists with their relatives and their addresses, finances, you name it. Marana didn't give a shit about the records, but she and Cedar were, like, best friends back in the day. And she admitted that preserving our past would help pave our future, as cliche it sounds. You're recording people for a reason. [Gestures towards my recorder.]

You see the value in an oral history, so you likely already know: American Indians had incredible histories, epic tales, creation stories, family genealogy, stored through oral tradition. Do you sit and memorize it with lines and homework? No. They tied their stories, their heritage, to the land. When their land was taken from them, their history and therefore, their identity was taken from them, too. The Founders knew they had to be pragmatic. That's why they bought every generator they could get their hands on. But they also weren't sure they wanted to survive if it meant living in a world where they wouldn't be able to raise a future without a past.

[We sit on a bench underneath a magnificent beech tree, where Asha briefly launches into its history, along with the school founder's grave some distance off.]

But, you wanted to hear about winter. There's not much to say, really. It came early. It was only weeks after Yonkers when we were hit with another snowpocalypse and we were suddenly on shifts shoveling snow, looking out at a sea of frozen Zack. It was like the terracotta army had come marching on our gates. We'd shovel the snow and ice, all polluted, so the two bulldozers could clear the piles from our fences. Then, we'd go out, kill as many as we could find. We dug into a campus hillside to build a root cellar, which we'd finish in the spring. We went out and shoveled snow all fucking day, building barricades. We'd break some ice on the Connecticut river and haul buckets of river water up to the snow barricades, pour it on. It would freeze and make it virtually impossible to pass until next year. Hopefully, that would buy us time in the spring so we could both plant crops and build Perimeter Two. We were worried about more than just the dead.

You worried about raiders?

To an extent, yes. For all my bragging about our great location compared to the other consortium colleges, and the city based campuses, we were still in a heavily populated region. A lot of the hordes had headed west, following the army and the civilians that followed them, but that still left a crap ton of them here, and the ones out west might find their way back. I think everyone expected tons of movie style, violent looting in an apocalypse. Well, there was looting, but it was just people looking for food. Remember Hurricane Katrina? The news went wild over reports of looters, but it was the same deal there, too. People trying to survive. The violent looting, with people stealing TVs, that's usually political. Natural disaster looting, like I saw, was almost tame. I was on a food run detail earlier, and it was all pretty orderly. One store manager actually showed up and unlocked everything for the crowd, and people just raced around, grabbing things. There were some bouts of tug-o-war, but nothing too bad. You grabbed what you could and got out; fighting only risks injury and leaves anyone dependent on you with nothing.

Yeah, we were worried about raiders, but we had an open door policy, even to the bitten. The deal was, you'd get protection, but everyone was expected to haul their ass out of bed and work, and it didn't matter if you didn't plan on being a fucking farmer; if that was your assignment, that was your job. Most everyone was with the program. If you were too young to work then we had people too old to work to watch you and teach you subjects. If you were ill, you were better off asleep in bed, getting better. If you were bitten, you had a nice, if conservative, meal and a cozy bed in one of the squash courts.

Squash courts?

Yeah, in our field house. Three solid walls and a fourth wall made of impact resistant glass designed to withstand repeated impacts from squash balls whizzing by. They didn't have traditional door knobs. Instead, they have these flat latches that drop down. To open them, you need to lift the latch up and away from the door and twist it. The door opened inward, so you need to pull it open while twisting the latch. Then you'd have to watch the threshold. No way can the braindead figure it out when the living struggle with them.

Anyway, we had these squash courts converted into cozier arrangements, so people could spend their final days or hours able to move their limbs freely, without the fear of eating anyone. There was no real ceiling, though. It was open up top, with a balcony overlooking the room so coaches could talk to them, I think, and it was open to the field house. We didn't need to use them during the winter, though, which was nice.

So, those were the squash courts. They drove our instructors nuts. We got a few instructors from the army during our first or second summer. They couldn't believe we would let the infected in, use resources on them, but that was our way of culling the desperate from the true raiders, the people we wouldn't be able to assuage.

The army instructors helped us build Two and Three, and spent the winters teaching us about weapon safety, running us through drills, making modifications to our protocols, that kind of thing. They were assigned to us for the duration. That fact alone gave us the hope and the confidence to think smart and long term rather than desperately. We were even designated as a legitimate Point of Contact.

Point of Contact?

Yeah, for anyone in association with the government, who received even basic crash courses on operating in the field. Before they deployed, they memorized which strongholds were points of contact in their region, meaning they were either a military base with a maintenance crew, or a place like us, with military personnel assigned and therefore had a radio station. It meant that we would be the choice place to seek refuge and make a report using our transmitters. That radio station Mr. Chen paid for is probably the main component that saved our asses, apart from the perimeters. It's what brought Cedar back to our gates.

She visited during the war?

Oh, yeah. A couple times, actually. Through her work as a Gopher. Turns out she was just graduating from the Air Force's basic training when Yonkers happened. Everything went to hell in a handbasket, and she was sent to a bunch of other bases to help lock them down and clear them out. Orders were constantly changing, everyone was assigned to do things completely different from the specialty they were supposed to have and people sent on errands kept being eaten and not coming back. Or they came back with a slack jaw.

Apparently, she and another guy got separated from their unit in Virginia and decided to swing up here. They found the airbase to our south was done receiving drops until the next year and neither of them wanted to wait. Told the base to radio west and let them know to expect their arrival. We helped them get a couple bikes from a bike shop, packs with proper gear, supplies, ammunition for their sidearms and a crowbar each. Off they went, banking on dropping temperatures to help them through the sea of Zack. The only reason they were let through the Rocky Pass checkpoints was because they were in uniform with dog tags. They both had family or contacts crucial to the war effort, which helped.

You mentioned people you couldn't convince to join you or leave you be. What happened when you couldn't assuage them?

We eliminated them. [Pause.]

Could you elaborate?

It goes like this. We got with the program. There was a new world order, a reshuffling of the hierarchy. Suddenly, we weren't the keystone predators, or destroyers or whatever. Either you wrapped your head around that and adapted, or you clung to the past, thinking like city idiots. That's why I can't bring myself to support the yahoos who're still trying to stick it to the government. The deck is being reshuffled again. You go with the program or you don't get to go.

Remember that one apocalypse movie? It starred this hunk of a guy who races around the world to solve some end-of-days premise. He survives by having clear traffic amidst mass hysteria, finds abandoned vehicles with exactly the right survival gear, runs into criminals with hearts of gold, gets saved by strangers, survives car crashes, plane crashes, and grievous injuries like they're no big deal. Fans of the book were pissed that just about all the source material was nixed. Point is, everyone would watch these movies with people surviving unsurvivable things and say to themselves "It'll work out, I'll be that guy." [Silence.]

Raiders, thieves. For the most part they were people who were just desperate. They hadn't come to terms with the fact that unless you happen to be Bear Grylls or a feral who grows up alone or whatever, then just about no one can make it alone in this new world. Especially in those early, tumultuous years. It wasn't about safety in numbers. It was about survival in numbers.

Early on, we had some stragglers who were on their way farther north, asking for handouts. We'd invite them to stay, try to explain to them that, unless they had radio contact with an established safe place farther north, their best shot was with us. Most took us up on that. We had people passing through with requests for supplies, which we mulled over, and decided to give them. We'd fill their water reserves, give them apples, leafy greens, berries, maybe a squash or a couple potatoes. We never gave them milk, eggs, grains, or any indication we had them, unless they decided to join us. A lot of them guessed, but were passing through and didn't complain.

So again, what happened when they didn't want to join you, and you couldn't assuage them?

[Pause.]

We couldn't allow the possibility of damage to the fence. And we definitely couldn't set the precedent of allowing our people to be terrorized. There was this group during fall, a year in. Our first winter was pretty uneventful, save the shoveling and planning. The first thaw came in May, which worried us, because we wanted to plant. We were lucky, because we had the school greenhouses, and we'd spent part of our winter securing the other school's greenhouse, for later use, in case we ever got the chance to use it. And, there were these plastic greenhouses that we'd fenced in, so it wasn't like we didn't have anything. But we had almost 800 people to feed.

We'd finished the fast food. Started working on the stored food in our school and the nearby middle and high schools. Once the snow set in, we went to the other colleges and raided their freezers, the hospitals and airports. If there's one thing I love about the old days, it's how much food we hoarded in bulk. We didn't even need to run the freezers on the generators, there was so much snow. We built little igloo rooms and stored it all in there. Saved a lot of energy that way. When April rolled around, and Courtney's contacts over the radio, both civilian and military, confirmed that winter was expected to continue, Marana got this desperate look.

So, it was fall, a year after Yonkers. We'd spent the warmer weather staving off the dead and building our cob walls, grateful we'd already set out the dirt. Come fall, she sent the people with experience in construction, who'd worked a miracle with Perimeter 1, across the river to see about deconstructing our sister school's greenhouse piece by piece. She had no intention of trying it that year, but if winters were going to last this long regularly, we'd need to adjust for that. Mark was an engineering student with a lot of time spent on the robotics team or something, so he volunteered to go with some of the other mechanically minded.

That was when this group picked Mark and his team up. I was on watch on our western perimeter. They show up at the gate and line up Mark and the other five people in his group. This guy with a brown beanie hat tells me to be a doll and get the guy in charge. I didn't feel right about leaving my watch partner, my little sister behind. But we'd just had our first freeze and she'd pulled a muscle in her leg and couldn't run very well, so I ended up going.

I found Marana in the geo lounge with Courtney, Maxine and Justin. When I told them what was up, Marana pulled on her coat, ordering Courtney to broadcast our situation. The airbase boys knew our location, of course, but otherwise, we never gave that out over the air. If people wanted to join us, we gave them coordinates to meet us, and we'd pick them up.

We got down there, I sent Bhumi away and our little entourage faced off with the yahoos. There were nine of them. It had been a long winter, a short spring and summer, and these people looked like scarecrows. Their leader, the guy with the brown beanie, started to say something, and Marana interrupted him. Told him they looked hungry. Mark looked calm enough, which meant none of our group had said anything about our supplies or how many people we had, although someone patient could always just do a stake out and count heads. She told them about our open door policy and that if people are willing to take orders and work, then they've earned a life behind solid walls.

This guy laughs and tells her he'd like to fuck her 'till she split in half. Said they knew we had a good number of people, so we had to have a good amount of food, and they wanted to take all of it in a few of the vans we had. If we didn't give it to them, they'd kill our friends.

Marana got this scary look on her face. It was a totally slack face, but it somehow felt like she was talking to an amusing child. She asked him just what he thought we'd been eating all winter. Asked him why he thought we had an open door policy and let that hang there. There were a couple of moments of silence, and it's a good thing I was bundled up, because otherwise my face would have ruined her bluff. The guy with the brown beanie kind of sputtered, but started waving his knife around, saying that in that case, we wouldn't mind if they had a couple bites. Maybe it was nerves, but he didn't seem like he was all there. He and this other guy started grabbing at Mark, pulling at his scarf.

He was down before I could figure out what was happening. Turns out Marana was quick on the draw and had hole punched Brown Beanie and the other guy between the eyes before anyone could move. Had her gun leveled at the rest of them. Mark and his team booked it.

"You have one chance to convince me not to kill you right now." She was pointing it at this woman who looked like she was fairly shitting herself. I was ready to pee, myself. The lady started blubbering about a hungry kid at their place, they were just trying to get by.

"So your kid matters more than everyone here?" Bang. Next one, a kid who looked like he was twelve.

"You have one chance to convince me not to kill you." He was really crying, and said he didn't know anyone would have to get hurt or something to that effect. After a moment, she was on to the next one, a bearded guy.

"You have one chance to convince me not to kill you." On it went. She ended up sparing four of them, mostly because they were all about Bhumi's age or younger. Everyone could see they were strays tagging along because they had nowhere and no one else. Marana took them in and told them if they were willing to embrace a new life, we would do the same.

And she felt you could trust them?

[Snorts.] No, but she had scared the living daylights out of them, and that was enough for the time being. Courtney, Justin and Professor Wells were all pretty good at setting people at ease, so Marana told them to watch over the new arrivals and help them adjust. They were too afraid of her to reciprocate anything, and it needed to stay that way. Until they truly did embrace this place, they needed to have a boogeyman inside the walls to keep them in check.

How did you feel about what you'd seen?

I didn't know what to feel. I was happy my sister hadn't seen anything. Sad it only delayed the inevitable. At a pragmatic level, I felt a sense of frontier justice. A sense of righteousness that Marana responded decisively, but mercifully towards the young, though I still would have supported her if she hadn't. Mostly, I despaired that the other shoe had dropped. The world had spiraled out of control, but we had thus far maintained our innocence. Our deniability. Marana, and me for supporting her, had forfeited whatever deniability we had left. My worry was that we'd go to the assembly and find out that no one would support Marana after what she'd done.

How did they take it?

I'm not entirely sure. Not well, at first. By the time the assembly started, word had spread and most knew what it was about. We met in one of the auditoriums and Marana gave a report. It was clinical and exact. She'd actually written it out. We still have her captain's logs in our archives.

Captain's logs? You created ranks?

Oh, not like that. It was a joke on that old franchise, Star Trek. Cedar had left behind blank logbooks, whose purchases she had logged in her expenses log, funnily enough, for whomever was in charge to use. Even if you didn't care about the preservation of humanity's history, if you wanted to learn from your mistakes, you damn well recorded everything that happened as completely as possible. Everyone with a skill set was told to record it. And we didn't create a military rank system or anything. The founders decided that several of the respected and knowledgeable leaders would have a lot of say, and that Marana would be the ultimate voice, but there was a conscious effort to be democratic. You could be a ten-year-old and if you had a grievance or an idea with factual or moral support, you would be heard out. I guess that was also kind of like Star Trek, the pipe dream of our society.

Anyway, so that night, she stood on the stage, flashlight in hand, and read out this report. Then, she asked if anyone had anything they wanted to add to the record concerning what happened. No one did, so she asked if anyone had anything they wanted to say about the matter in general. No one did, so she asked if anyone had suggestions for better conducting future, similar, contacts. No one did, so she pulls out this other paper from behind her report and starts reading. It's a letter to whomever is in charge of the campus from Baozhai's dad, Mr. Chen, though he writes mainly as if it's just to Baozhai. It started with how Mr. Chen is mostly likely dead, and the people reading this letter want the knowledge to be prepared as a steward of this place and its people.

It goes on to say that Mr. Chen did his best to curb what happened and when that didn't work, he tried to warn people. When he failed at that, he funded the students who worked on the project. This campus was his last shot at safeguarding a future for his daughter and anyone else who lived there, so he hoped the compiled resources and supplies would serve them well. He ended it by saying that everything has a cost. When Baozhai was born, she was innocent and he, as her father, tried to preserve that innocence for as long as he could. Now, he knew he failed as a father in understanding that innocence is the price to grow stronger. If Baozhai is anything like her mother, she will find the courage to pay her fare and gain the strength to shoulder the responsibilities in living in this new world. He signed it at the end with a Chinese proverb: Women hold up half the sky.

I found out later Mr. Chen had sent the letter to Cedar, and since it was technically addressed to the leader on campus, she had put a copy of it as the foreword of the Bible.

The auditorium was silent. I know a lot of people were upset and freaked out that Marana had killed people earlier that day, and thought her a murderer. But no one else wanted the job, and realistically, everyone, even the angry ones, was relieved to have proof that they had leaders who were willing to do what it took, whatever it took, to protect our walls and everyone inside.

That's one reason we got assigned instructors from the army. We never even requested any, aside from some basic preventative vaccinations. Courtney was on the radio every day swapping information, advice, the works, with anyone she could find on air. She would sometimes talk with the airbase a few miles to our south a little. I guess the boys there didn't have much else to do, other than maintain the airfield and listen in on her and anyone else on the air. They must have advocated that we receive something, since we had our shit together more than most. Certainly more than any other group in the region. The guys arrived with a small arsenal of firearms, ammunition, and drafted manuals on killing ghouls. And the immunizations, since they were the one thing we had asked for.

I think that's why we got any help at all, because we only asked for one thing, and it was small, cost-effective and served preventative purposes. We still had breakouts of illnesses that cost lives, but the vaccines were vital. The government knew we had generators, animals, a fence and walls. They knew we had realistic, effective plans for self-sufficiency, and the materials and means to do it. They knew we had stores of meds, greenhouses, untouched stockpiles of rice and various dried beans. Importantly, we were a sizable population of predominantly young, healthy, educated, able-bodied people who weren't expecting much in help, and were too busy to be bitter about it. As far as a future gene pool, I think we were an ideal investment.

And we had intact laboratories with functioning mass spectrometers, scanning electron microscopes, which was pretty special, even for the West Coast. We had bio and chem nerds, including a professor and a few grad students, who took samples from ghouls to compare with the uninfected would-be raiders. Governments were desperate for working labs to bounce ideas with their own people, and that made us valuable.

We only had one doctorate in that subject and a bunch of students, so no one was banking on us or willing to invest too much, but it definitely gave us an edge. When we took in the infected the following summer, we made ourselves feel more official by writing up consent forms for people to sign so they could donate their undead bodies to researching ghouls. It gave them a paper trail and the confidence that their life and death might have meaning. When they died, we set up cameras on the balconies above the squash courts and ran tests led by psychology students who had run those types of studies before.

[The balmy air holds a certain warmth in the late afternoon light. The school founder's gravestone, in pristine condition, stands in its gated plot. At each corner stands a granite pillar about a meter and a half tall, new additions to the campus. Upon closer inspection, each pillar is engraved with the names of historic campus leaders and founders throughout the school's history, with dates of birth and death, with some of the more modern names' death dates left blank. Among them, Mr. Chen's name is listed. The rest of the project members, mostly deceased, are also given prominence.

The campus bell tolls. Classes are over for the day and chattering students head to dining halls or dormitories. Among them, professors are also eager to eat and attend the nearby school's opening celebrations. Many of the them have agreed to teach at both campuses until more faculty can be sought and hired. Asha runs a hand over the engraved names of the pillars while watching the school's current students.]

It was like we were just college students again, working on independent studies and raiding the liquor stores for our parties during winter. We'd work our asses off year round, but every few months, usually after some close call with ghouls or an accident, we'd have a night where we'd decide to dip into our alcohol stores. The airbase boys probably hated the guys stationed with us right around then. Once some of the more ambitious students got supplies and started brewing beer, it truly felt like we were college students. Felt like we were sending proposals to some distant academic entity, and we'd receive rejection letters telling us we were under-qualified or overqualified for some unpaid internship. We were pretending to be grown up.

We'd hook up our generators to get the school servers running, and we allotted a few hours of generator time to connect with the West Coast to send our footage, analysis and findings. It also let our people have conference calls that weren't on the open air waves. The presenters would even dig out blazers, pencil skirts and ties as if it were a prewar interview. [Grins.] We got so many brownie points with the suits for our research. [Sobers.] Not sure how much good the research did, though. Years later, we still don't understand how, why, or what the fuck happened.

Author Note:

If you're familiar with New England, you will likely recognize the setting and be able to deduce which campus I picked for the setting. I deliberately didn't name it, or the other women's college, because even though there are some specific descriptions of the campus and surrounding area, I also want there to be some level of suspension from the real world.

University and college campuses, like prisons, are generally designed to be self-sufficient for varying periods of time, have their own generators, food storage, internal infrastructure and open spaces where crops could be planted. Therefore, so long as you have the hands to maintain and secure such a facility, a population could hypothetically live there indefinitely and survival probabilities may be viable.

Earlier on, I tried to figure out a plausible way for the students to defend and supply the campus without much outside help, but because of its geographic proximity to Yonkers and other major population centers, this became out of the question for the time-frame I'd given myself.

Giving Kelli Tate's interviewee a name, Mr. Chen, and having his daughter be a project member was my solution for the financials. Reliable and strong defenses require solid foundations, and with a time crunch the only way I could see a bunch of students succeeding was through external funding from Mr. Chen and other families.