by Jack J. Lee
Jim chuckled, “Mark, you’re a son-of-a-bitch. You know how I feel about the Vietnam War and the last Iraq one. I think both conflicts were major mistakes. I think you got the analogy wrong. It’s not men with and without balls; it’s men with and without brains. As for how I feel about these expeditions, I understand the humanitarian need for them. I’m an officer in our militia. I swore an oath to serve. I will follow all legitimate orders but I think it’s a bad idea to go down to Southern Utah. It could cause a war with the FLDS. In wars, bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to women and children. I really don’t like the idea of getting into a war with humans. Too many people had died already.”
“That’s the whole point, Jim. One of the reasons why I invited you was because I know a lot of people in our community agree with you. I agree that it’s always been a really bad idea for the United States of America to ever start a war. I’m worried that if we don’t take care of the FLDS soon, that they’ll become a much greater problem in the future. I worry that if we don’t go through the necessary evil of getting into a war with them now, the suffering of innocents will be much greater later. The FLDS breed like bunnies. In 10 to 20 years they could have a bigger population than us. They might actually become a threat to our very existence. I’m worried enough about this that I going to ask 21 men to volunteer to act as bait. Their mission is to inform them of our presence and to give aid. If the FLDS accept their aid or simply leave them alone, I won’t worry so much about them. If they detain or harm them in any way, we won’t be starting a war; they will. Jim, if we sent 21 men down to Southern Utah on a strictly humanitarian mission and they get attacked, would you have any reservations about getting into a war with the FLDS?”
“No.”
Hiram grunted, “Bait usually dies, Mark.”
“I know Hiram. That’s why the bait has to be volunteers with no dependents. Fifty-eight thousand US soldiers died uselessly in the Vietnam War because their leaders made decisions that divided Americans back home. The second Iraq War almost turned out the same way. Soldiers die. It’s our responsibility as leaders to make sure that we don’t waste their lives. Preemption is tempting because in the short term it saves soldier’s lives. To truly be American, you have to believe you’re one of the good guys. Good guys don’t start wars. Good guys always let the bad guys take the first shot even if it gives the bad guys an advantage. You guys know I don’t have any false humility. I’m a smart guy. I make pretty good guesses about the future. Our people won’t support a war that is started by us. They will support a war if our men are attacked without reason. I’m worried that if we let the FLDS spread out that they will be a danger to our very existence. If war is inevitable, we need to get into one while we are strong and they are relatively weak. We need to find out sooner rather than later if I’m right. To do this we need to use our own people as bait.
“The Outbreak has been hard on liberals. Utah’s always been a red state. It’s gotten even more lopsided since the zombies. At its worst liberalism as a political philosophy has been dominated by the ‘blame America first’ crowd. At its best it has been the conscience of our country. Conservatives tend to be too focused on what works to ask questions about what’s right or fair. We need liberals in our leadership which is why I think we need to listen to Jim. By the way, Jim, I’m sorry about calling you ball-less. I didn’t think you were smart enough to catch the insult.”
After we stopped laughing I asked, “Mark, we’re talking about sending men out on a possible suicide mission. I don’t know how I feel about that as a private citizen or mayor.”
“Art, would you choose to sacrifice your life to save other members of your family?”
“Yes.”
“Elite troops are family. It’s not just marketing; soldiers fight for each other. Soldiers risk their lives to defend their country. Anyone that goes on this next mission will know that they’re volunteering to be bait and why. All of you know that I intend to restore a functioning government to the United States. It truly will be the United States of America, which means that our Constitution has to be the law of the land. In the long run we can’t allow separate nations to form within our borders, but I’m not going to start a war. The ends don’t justify the means. If we get into a war, it will always be started by the other side. We’re the good guys. The means matter to the good guys. I’m going to ask for volunteers who are willing to what’s necessary for their country.”
I asked, “Who’s going to lead the expedition?”
Hiram smiled, “Art, there’s no one else except me. Mark, promise me, if the FLDS take my head, you’ll make them pay.”
Mark stopped smiling. His face was bleak. He understood what Hiram had just volunteered to do. His voice was ice cold. “If they harm any of mine, I will destroy them root and branch. I will burn down their homes and sow their fields with salt. Hiram I promise you, I will be the instrument of God’s wrath. I’ll make an example of them that will make every other stinking cult and tin pot dictator think long and hard before they fuck with the Salt Lake Troopers.”
Every night since that meeting I have prayed for Director Jones. Every goal the Director had, I supported but his methods and his willingness to be ruthless in the service of good disturbed me. I worried about Hiram Rockwell’s life; I didn’t worry about his soul. Mark Jones was a complex man. He was a great leader; I worried about him as a man. I prayed nightly that our Heavenly Father would inspire him, soften his heart, and lead him away from vengeance. I prayed for Mark’s soul.
Chapter 17: Hiram Rockwell, April 10th and 11th, 2010
Joyous is a word that isn’t often used to describe me. I’ve been told by many that the right word is grim. Right now, joyous was a good description of how I was feeling. The life of a combat soldier is usually filled with tasks that are necessary; it’s rarely fun. I was driving Bertha, a Beiger Industries Mark II Armored Personnel Carrier and it was a blast; I didn’t need a mirror to know I was smiling. Henrietta our second APC followed behind.
We were going 5 miles an hour down the center line on I-15. We had taken this Interstate Highway all the way down from Salt Lake City. Bertha had started off as a metro bus. She had 3 inches of multilayered steel armor over her exterior including the top and bottom. Her sides were angled so bullets hitting her were more likely to glance off. All the windows were covered by massive steel bars. Bertha had two large bulldozer blades pointed like an arrow in front of her. She was ramming the abandoned vehicles off the highway.
You could feel a jolt down to your bones every time Bertha smashed into a car or truck. There was a stream of zombies in front of me. The dozer blades were designed to catch them at the knees and knock them down. Behind the blades were rollers with spikes a couple inches off the ground that turned the zombies into chopped flesh. Sweepers behind the spikes kept most of the zombie bits away from our wheels. I couldn’t physically feel the zombies being squished below me but I could picture it in my mind; the image made me smile. I had been driving for about an hour. The constant pounding was punishing. As painful as it was to drive Bertha, it was fun. As a boy I used to daydream about having a vehicle big enough to mow down everything in front of me. I had a grin on my face for so long, my face was getting tired. Every half hour, Bertha and Henrietta changed positions.
Ever since we almost got our asses handed to us by a vampire smart enough to attack us from a distance up near Ogden, SaLT SOP or standard operating procedure for being out in the field had changed. Armored vehicles based on modified full size pickup trucks became obsolete. The Ogden vamp had launched hundred plus pound manhole covers at our old trucks and had pounded them into scrap. The old armored truck doors hadn’t been strong enough; this wasn’t a problem on our new vehicles. We had enough room in our new APCs to fit 40 people. We had twenty-one men split between two. We had room now to pick up small groups of survivors and for all our gear. We only got 4 miles per gallon so we had to bring lots of fuel.
There w
ere stretches on the highway between towns where the road was clear. On those stretches we went our top speed of 30 miles an hour. Other times when there were wrecked semi-trucks or the multicar pileups that couldn’t be pushed out of the way we had to use diesel powered winches to pull vehicles off the side of the road. There were masses of abandoned cars at almost every exit we passed.
We had aerial support. Mike Kim and Alex Wu were flying in front of us in a two man Powered Parachute or PPC. The PPC had a normal flight speed of 30 miles an hour and could stay in the air for 4 hours. The downside of the PPC was that it couldn’t be flown safely in the rain or if the winds were blowing faster than 15 mph. The past few days the weather had been perfect. The PPCs were great for scouting. They were also the best way to herd zombies. A PPC circling the air a couple hundred feet off the ground will draw zombies from miles around. Cowboys herded cattle. The PPC Zomboys herded zombies.
We had photographs of I-15 taken two days ago from our only operational airplane. Before we left Salt Lake City, we knew where people still survived and where there was open highway. Every gas station was marked. We knew that the FLDS had a degree of operational control because a lane of traffic had been cleared from St. George to Colorado City.
Our mission was threefold: to try to make peaceful contact with the FLDS, exploration and rescue, and pest control. We were clearing I-15 from Salt Lake City to St. George. The entire trip, Zomboys drew zombies on to the highway in front of us.
Even at 5 miles an hour we were going fast enough to run down the undead. Men on top of the Henrietta behind us were shooting every zombie Bertha missed. The constant pounding and shaking made it impossible to shoot accurately from the lead APC.
Pre-outbreak population estimates gave us useful intel. Close to 40 percent of the US were infected with the zombie virus on September 11th last year; if you knew how many people used to live in a town, you had a pretty good idea of how many zombies there were. Cedar City used to have a population of about 20,000. There were about 2,000 zombies on the highway in front of us; there should have been 8,000. Whenever there was a mismatch between the predicted numbers of zombies versus the actual, there were usually survivors.
Two thousand was too many to mow down in one pass. Bertha’s turning radius was crap. I used the last exit ramp out of Cedar City to turn Bertha around and then make another sweep. The spikes behind our dozer blades were 6 inches long, one inch think, and spaced a couple inches apart. As they rolled over a zombie they poked one inch diameter holes, every two square inches over a zombie’s body. When we ran over a zombie, every bone in its body including its skull was broken into cracker sized bits. Our APCs made monster mash. It took 6 passes to clear out all the Cedar City zombies. There’s a certain pleasure in nailing a zombie in the head with a well aimed rifle from hundreds of yards away; nothing beats mowing down 2,000 zombies in a few minutes in a huge APC.
Private Kim, the PPC Zomboy pilot, had done a good job drawing local zombies to the highway. Zombies are slow and have a top speed of about two miles an hour. We had made so much noise and there were now so many dead zombie bodies on the highway that the entire strip of highway had become a zombie magnet. We spent the next two hours shooting down stragglers. Once it looked like there were no more zombies coming, we put Bertha and Henrietta into lock down mode. With our old armored trucks, we had to manually put up jacks that kept our vehicles from rocking and had to put up fencing around our vehicles by hand.
Bertha and Henrietta were completely automated. With a push of a button, 6 hydraulic outriggers come down to make it impossible to rock or overturn our vehicles and armored plating deployed to protect our tires. The buses had razor wire strung all around the vehicles so that if any zombie tried to climb up the sides, their fingers were sliced off. The top of the buses were observation and shooting platforms.
Once we were sure the perimeter was clear. I radioed up to Kim’s copilot Alex Wu and told them to land. Once on the ground, it wasn’t a big deal to get the PPC stowed inside Henrietta. The PPC unloaded only weighed 250 pounds. With a ramp down it was easy roll it up into the APC.
The last time our plane had come this way, the crew had seen survivors in Cedar City, Hurricane, and the twin cities of Hildale and Colorado City. The plane dropped care packages in Cedar City and Hurricane. The FLDS in Hildale and Colorado City had taken shots at the plane; a care package wasn’t dropped. The care package included medications, two suppressed rifles, a couple hundred rounds of ammunition, and a pamphlet describing what we had up in Salt Lake City and that we welcomed newcomers. Kim and Wu confirmed that there were still survivors in Cedar City. Wu thought that there were about 500 survivors. Cedar City had a vampire; most of the survivors were women and children.
We were seven months out from the zombie outbreak. Zombies are only dangerous in large numbers. If you survived the initial zombie outbreak and avoided getting trapped by a large numbers of them, they weren’t that dangerous. Plywood walls could keep Zombies out. Vampires on the other hand were quicker than weasels and were strong enough to tear through most roofs and plywood walls like they were tissue paper. They could also jump over twenty foot walls. I’ve seen a vamp throw a grown man 30 feet across a room.
Unless you found a bunker with steel or reinforced concrete walls, you couldn’t avoid a vampire at night. Vampires preyed on humans. Even worse, vampires kept humans much like a rancher keeps his cattle. For the last couple hundred miles we had been finding isolated groups of a couple hundred humans usually holed up in a fortified ward. In almost all these cases, vampires had been coming to feed on the survivors a couple times a week. Clearing out zombies was easy as they were always predictable. Vampires were predictable most of the time; they became problems when they weren’t.
It had taken 3 days to drive 252 miles from Sugar House to Cedar City. We could have gotten here faster but we were trying to kill off as many zombies and vampires as we could. I was anxious to see how our new armored vehicles handled a vampire smart enough throw things at us. I use the word ‘anxious’ because I was uncertain about how it would go. The kind that was smart enough to throw things tended to be unpredictable; in combat the unexpected is a bitch.
We set up for the night on the highway. We turned on two lights on the back of the APCs. Vampires hate bright lights and will almost always try to destroy the lights before trying to attack people. All our lights were surrounded by steel cages that made them difficult to break. There was a small platform below the lights that was a perfect standing spot for vampires. It was a trap.
A little after two in the morning, a vampire landed on Bertha’s vampire trap. The vampire’s weight caused a hundred thousand volt current to go through the platform. Vampires are tough. The current froze the vampire in place; it didn’t kill it. A target that can’t move is easy to hit. One of our sentries blew a hole in its head with a large bore hunting rifle. Even after it was dead, SaLT SOP was to shoot at the head until the top half was gone. Our troops were good shots. It usually took three shots to do this.
At first light, The Zomboys took off. They flew 30 miles-per-hour about 500 feet off the ground. They scouted our path to the survivors. We had done a good job clearing out Cedar City yesterday. The PPC only pulled in two zombies. Our snipers took them out easily.
The survivors were holed up in a fortified ward 3 miles from the highway. We left the APC’s outside their compound. Half my men stayed in the APCs. I took the other half into the ward. This wasn’t the first time I’ve rescued people. It never seemed to get any easier. Most survivors are grateful. A few are always angry. As usual, someone asked why we hadn’t come just a few days or even twelve hours earlier. We were rescuing people as fast as we safely could. It’s a balance. Push too hard; take too many short cuts, SaLTs die. Be too careful; take too much time, civilians die. Even though I knew we were moving as fast as we safely could, I felt guilty whenever anyone asked why it had taken so long to rescue them.
Before the Outbreak, humans w
ere top predators. For the last seven months these people had been prey. It took a while before people calmed down enough to tell us their story. Three Cedar City wards survived the outbreak on September 11th. Just like Salt Lake City, about half the adult population turned into zombies. Unlike Salt Lake City where there were hundreds of thousands of zombies, in Cedar City there were less than 10,000. Over the next several weeks, the survivors were able to kill all the zombies surrounding their fortifications.
For the first couple of months, everything went well. The wards were able to band together. They were in the process of rescuing non-LDS families that had survived in single family homes when the EMP hit. The EMP took out their lights. That night, the vampire attacked. Since then the vampire had been feeding on one of their men every few days. Only four adult men were still alive. Five hundred and seven women and children survived. The ward members had gathered enough food and water to keep 2400 people alive for three months. So many people had died since then that they still had supplies from the original stores.
About a month back, our plane dropped a care package including rifles and ammunition into their compound. A group of ten men tried making their way by foot to Sugar House. The first night they had been out, the vampire attacked and killed two of them. It then chased the rest back to Cedar City. Since then the vampire had killed all the men that had tried to escape. I used my walkie talkie to call my second in command, Corporal Jake Jackson.
“Jake, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, Sarge.”
“Relay a message back to the Fortress that we need transport for a little over 500 people in Cedar City.”
“Will comply, Sarge.”
I called the zomboys and told them to land and fuel up. We still had plenty of daylight left. I was going to take Bertha and the PPC and head on over to St. George which was 54 miles south of us on I-15. We knew for sure that there were survivors in Hurricane and it was likely that other smaller groups of survivors were still alive. It would be tragic if there were people who needed rescuing close to us and we turned back without them. I wanted to make sure that the PPC was completely topped off with gas before we started heading south. The PPC gave us better information than a plane. Our plane had a cruising speed of over 200 miles-per-hour and generally flew a couple thousand feet up in the air. It was easy for our plane to miss something that could be seen by a PPC which had a cruising speed of 30 miles-per-hour flying a couple hundred feet off the ground.