by Jack J. Lee
We were alive but we had, purposefully and willingly through our actions, caused the deaths of neighbors and friends—good people who had not deserved to be torn apart. I knew behind that wall of zombies, I had neighbors who were still alive, trapped in their vehicles with their families.
I believe in a God who stands in judgment, and because of this, I was afraid. I fell to my knees. “Heavenly Father, have mercy on me, for I have sinned against my fellow man. Please grant me mercy for I am weak and I fear your justice.”
Chapter 7: Art Bingham, September 11th to September 12th, Year 1
Our fence was completely packed with zombies, all screaming with a high-pitched, incredibly annoying, fingers-on-a-chalkboard sound. I asked two of the militia to stay outside the ward building and keep an eye on the fence. The rest of us went into the ward house. Although I hadn’t been aware of it, some zombies had made it into our enclosure. Anyone that had woken up sick this morning had somehow turned into a zombie. Only a few sick people had been quick enough to get into our enclosure. Almost everyone who was in our enclosure was armed. These poor individuals who had turned into zombies were quickly shot down. Luckily, none of these zombies had been able to bite anyone. Thank our Heavenly Father we didn’t need to deal with the aftermath of a zombie-bitten friend or family member.
We had planned to shelter 200 families within our enclosure. Only 104 families made it in before we had to close our gates; we had 405 people in our enclosure. Eighteen families were not members of our ward. They had shown up hoping they would be allowed in. So many of our ward members we had known for years and with whom we had rehearsed emergency evacuations had not made it.
As evening fell, Bishop Johnson asked for volunteers to stand guard during the night. Close to 50 men volunteered. I spoke to Hiram Rockwell, the leader of our militia, and asked him to arrange for the men to switch off every two hours during the night.
The rest of us slept on cots spread throughout the ward house. I was completely exhausted and slept without dreams. I awoke to the sound of women and men speaking loudly. Two of the men, Bishop Johnson’s sons, had been standing guard at night and were missing. They were 21 and 23; he had no other children. The eldest had just been engaged and the youngest had recently returned from his mission. I arranged for a search throughout our enclosure. They were gone.
I have known Orville Johnson for over 30 years. He was a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. To my knowledge, Orville was the only practicing member of the LDS Church who taught in this department. Fifty years ago it was common for men who believed in God to study and teach philosophy; currently it is extremely rare. All the other professors of philosophy in Orville’s department were atheists or agnostics.
I had asked Orville shortly after meeting him why he chose to teach at the University, where he was out of place, when he could have chosen to teach at Brigham Young University. He told me he wanted students of philosophy to understand that the belief in a higher being was not exclusive to the intellectual study of morality. In Orville’s eyes, the search for truth was a search for beauty and the recognition of a higher order that could only be reasonably explained by an intelligent force. Orville did not believe in a wrathful God. He embraced a God that was merciful and loving. Up until now, Orville was a man who had seen his entire life as blessed. Orville’s calling to choose who were in our enclosure, our ark, and his decision to close the gates yesterday had shaken his faith. The disappearance of his sons without warning or explanation broke him.
After the search throughout the entire enclosure was over and it was clear that his sons were no longer with us, Orville Johnson stopped talking. He withdrew within himself and refused to acknowledge anyone. His wife, a gentle and wise woman whom ward members had looked to as a mother, was forced to focus her attentions on her husband.
Brother Rockwell, the volunteer head of our militia, was a man who has always taken great pride in being LDS. He saw the Church as righteous and saw all nonmembers as being those who chose to ignore the truth. He didn’t have any non-LDS friends and often had been heard in years past exclaiming in a very loud voice that “You can’t vote Democrat and be a good Mormon.” He wasn’t hesitant to voice his opinion that we had traitors in our midst. These traitors had to be one of the Gentiles that should not have been in our ward. He ordered our militia to take charge of all the Gentiles. Many of the nonmembers had their own guns. Brother Rockwell ordered all of them to surrender their weapons. One day after we had fled into our enclosure, we were in danger of a civil war. As I ran to intervene by placing my body in-between the guns of our militia and the nonmembers, I heard Dr. Helen Hansen’s voice.
Dr. Hansen was one of the first non-church members to have been accepted into our emergency plans by Bishop Johnson. She was a professor in the Engineering department at the University of Utah. Her specialty was in electronic communications. She knew how to operate a Ham radio and had the knowledge, if necessary, to build and operate a radio station. She also taught classes on cell phone and wireless internet technology. When Bishop Johnson informed me he had accepted her application for a place in our enclosure, I understood that her skills and knowledge made her an asset to us but expressed to him that her personal traits—she was a very attractive single woman who clearly was not religious—might not fit with our ward. I had heard my 17-year-old son Peter describe her to his friends as the hottest professor he had ever seen. I was worried her views on social issues such as marriage, family, abortion, and the roles of men and woman would be a source of friction. I told Orville I didn’t want to make judgments solely on the basis of first impressions, but on the surface she looked the worst, most abrasive kind of feminist. Orville assured me he had worked with her in the past, when they had been on the same faculty advisory committee, and that although I had probably correctly perceived her social beliefs, she was a level-headed woman who wouldn’t create unnecessary social tensions. When I heard what she had to say, I was sure Orville had been wrong.
“Hiram, you asshole, if you want to shoot a Gentile, you might as well start with me.” She was unarmed. Although her words were aggressive, the tone of her voice wasn’t. She looked like she was arguing with a younger not-so-smart brother. She actually had a smile on her face as she called Hiram an asshole.
The look on Hiram Rockwell’s face changed from anger to befuddlement. He is a large self-righteous man who is not prone to self-mockery. I don’t think he had ever previously been called an asshole in public by a woman with a smile on her face. Helen didn’t let the fact that Hiram’s rifle point was on her chest prevent her from moving ever closer, invading his personal space. He started walking backward as she walked toward him.
Cheryl, my daughter, started laughing first. I guess the sight of a 6’4”-tall man with a gun stumbling backwards away from a beautiful 5’6”-tall unarmed woman with a smile on her face struck her as funny. Cheryl has an infectious laugh. Soon the entire crowd started laughing. Within a period of seconds, Hiram had gone from a position of leadership to being an object of fun. I could see his face getting red. By then I was next to Hiram and Helen and I was able to step between them. I took Hiram’s gun from his hands.
“Brothers, sisters, I know we are all stressed. We have every right to be. We have gone through so much. This is not the time to turn on ourselves. Yes, we have Mormons and non-Mormons in our enclosure. Our ward is now an ark that is protecting us from the zombies outside and is not filled with strangers. We are all neighbors. We all know each other. How can anyone of us point to another and see a fellow man who could betray his family to zombies. We all have family in this building. No one is going to be willing to let a zombie kill a wife, husband, or child. Please, we have too many trials in front of us to start making more.”
I looked at Hiram. He looked sheepish. I gave his rifle back to him and turned to face the others.
“Brothers, sisters, I’m as worried as any of you about the disappearance of Bishop Johnson’s
sons. Tonight all of us are going to sleep in sight of each other. It doesn’t look like the zombies can break through our fence. Everyone tonight will stay in the gymnasium together. It’s going to be a tight fit but we’ll make do and sleep in shifts. We will keep the lights on. We will all watch out for each other. Talk to Brother Rockwell about where you will be sleeping and when.”
Chapter 8: Art Bingham, September 13th, Year 1
I was stuck in my car with Stacy my wife, and my children Cheryl and Peter, trapped in traffic outside my ward’s gates. The zombies were slowly breaking through our window. It was only a matter of time until the zombies broke through. I pulled Stacy toward me and told her I loved her. I took out my gun and placed it on her head. It would be better for all of us to die by my hands than to be eaten alive.
I woke from my nightmare with a start. Hiram was shaking me. Everyone who had slept in the gymnasium was safe. Hiram had not slept. No one had been out-of-sight except for Bishop Johnson and his wife. They had refused to move from the small room where they and their sons had been staying. The Johnsons were gone. Hiram was certain no one in the gymnasium could be responsible for the Johnsons’ disappearance. Someone or something we didn’t know was in the enclosure with us.
Hiram and I heard screams from outside. A woman who had gone out of the building to look for the Johnsons screamed that a zombie had made it over our fence. Hiram shouted for his militia to grab their rifles and follow him outside. I called for help to go to our storage facility to grab all the ammunition we could and to bring it outside. Every man and woman with a gun ran outside, including me. I still had my Glock 9 mm pistol. On the ground within the enclosure, approximately 20 feet away, was a zombie. It had been shot multiple times in the head and was not moving.
One of the militia men walked to the fence and shot a zombie standing outside the fence through the head with his rifle. At that point, it became intolerable for all of us to allow any zombie within shooting distance to exist. Every man and woman with a weapon started shooting at the zombies outside our fence. For every zombie that fell, more came into view. The ones that we shot in the head were being eaten, pulled apart by the zombies behind them. For a little less than an hour, all of us lost our sanity. In the last 48 hours, we had fled to the safety of our enclosure only to find we were not safe, someone or something dangerous was in here with us. Our fear and anger had risen to a point where we could no longer stand to see the zombies outside our fence and not do something about them.
We shot until our guns were dry and then we reloaded them. Some of the men who had assault weapons started firing them in the fully-automatic mode, emptying their magazines in seconds. When we shot zombies yesterday, when we had first closed our gates, we could only shoot for a few minutes because we had not pulled out all our ammo supplies from storage. This time, because we had brought our ammo from storage, we must have been firing for at least 45 minutes. Finally we ran out of bullets. We had had 30,000 US Military .223 rounds in storage. By the second day of our enclosure in our ark, we had gone through almost all of them. We had not been very accurate in our fire but in those 45 minutes we had to have destroyed thousands of zombies. Yet there was no noticeable change in the number of zombies outside our fence.
I walked over to the zombie that had made it over our fence. Its head had been shot so many times, it was almost entirely decapitated. The razor wire had cut its fingers off. Somehow, it had wedged its arms and legs between the razor wire and climbed into our enclosure. In doing so, the razor wire had cut so deeply into all its muscles and tendons in its arms and legs it had lost the ability to move these limbs. By the time it had dropped into our enclosure, it had been unable to move independently. It had been harmless. This harmless zombie had resulted in the loss of all our ammunition.
Chapter 9: Jim Wright, October 8th, Year 1
My name is Jim Wright. My two roommates, Frank and Ryan, and I had been stuck in our house for a month. Every hour or so, one of us would check our battery-powered radio to see if anything was on; nothing ever was. None of us had taken a shower for two weeks to save on water, and we were getting really tired of dehydrated food. It was clear to us that we hadn’t really prepared for the zombies and if something didn’t change soon, we were screwed.
We had enough dried and canned food to last us for months. Power and water had been out since the 11th. It was a mild autumn, so heating the house wasn’t an issue; therefore, power wasn’t that important. Our weakness was water. We had stored up eight large plastic garbage bins full of water but with most of our food needing to be rehydrated, and with there being three of us, water was going faster than we wanted it to. Until two weeks ago, we were still using water for sponge baths. Then our water supply got so tight we decided to use water just for drinking and food prep. I was starting to smell so bad, my own odor was starting to gross me out.
We were all stressed out. Most of the things we were stressed out about were fairly predictable. We were trapped. We had seen neighbors turn into zombies in front of our eyes. Some of them hadn’t been bitten; they still turned into zombies. We were paranoid that one of us in the house would turn into a zombie. I guess what really irritates you is all about expectations. It’s the stuff you don’t expect that gets your goat. Frank and I never expected that taking a crap would get so annoying.
Ever since we heard about the zombie outbreaks in Europe about six months ago, everyone we knew had been looking into disaster preparation. All the advice sites seemed to focus on power, food, and water. We had a small gasoline generator we could use for power. Food wasn’t an issue; before I got divorced three years ago, I had been a good temple-recommended Mormon, and like any good Mormon I had stocked up on a year’s supply of food. I got the house; the ex got everything else. I had dumped the religion along with the ex, but the food had just been sitting there. Most of it was dehydrated and sealed and so it was still good. I just had to replace a few items that had gone bad, like condensed milk. By the time my roommates and I had gotten around to looking for water storage, there wasn’t a water barrel to be found. We bought as many of the large plastic garbage cans as we could. Everyone was getting into disaster preparation, so pretty much any large container that was waterproof was going fast.
Before the 11th, I hadn’t thought much about going to the bathroom. What was there to think about? You used the toilet, washed your hands, then left. For the first couple of days after the 11th it stayed the same except for scooping a small bucketful of water from the bathtub and pouring it into the toilet after you were finished. Then the bathtubs went dry, our house was still surrounded by zombies and we had no way to get more water.
My house is a two-story brick with an unfinished basement. Part of the disaster prep we did before the 11th was to board up every window a zombie could get to. Our prep worked, because our house was surrounded by zombies and none of them had gotten in. With no more water in the bathtubs and not being able to get outside of the house, we had to go to the bathroom out the second floor window that faced our street.
Whenever we got to the window, a whole pile of them would swarm below us with their arms reaching up high and their mouths open, making a high-pitched screaming sound. At first, it was hard to let go and start the stream; I mean, here you are all dangling out and a bunch of zombs are below you wanting to bite it off, but it was funny to piss on the zombies. We got used to peeing on them fairly quickly. Ryan was all bummed out that at about ten feet from us, the pee stream would spread out to more of a shower. He thought it would be hilarious to piss directly into a zomb’s mouth.
For Frank and me, pissing on the zombs was kind of a dominance thing and we were cool with it. Like I said, it was funny, but taking a crap was different. It was nerve-wracking to stick my bare butt out the window. I mean, for me this wasn’t a position of dominance. Just by the nature of how we had to position ourselves to take a crap, you really couldn’t look at the zombies while you did it, but I always ended up visualizing in my head h
undreds of zombie eyes on my sphincter as it opened and closed. It was humiliating. I mean, sure, it’s the end of the world and we are all going to die and there are more important things to worry about, but REALLY, before you get killed and eaten, you have to let a couple hundred zombies look at your asshole while it’s opening and closing.
Ryan, on the other hand, thought dumping a load on a zomb was even better than pissing on one. He’d make a point of leaning his ass out so far out the window that he could kind of see below him, between his legs. Every time he took a shit, he was always screaming out things like “bombs away” and “load number two has hit its target.” Frank and I could always tell when Ryan was taking a dump. The first couple of times it was funny but it got old fast. If we hadn’t been surrounded by zombies, Frank and I probably would have kicked Ryan out of the house. At 28, Ryan was the youngest of us. Frank was 36 and I was 33. Until three months ago, all of us had been living alone and we weren’t used to sharing space with anyone else. We were still not used to it.
Honestly, as annoying as Ryan was, it was still good to have him around. Being surrounded by zombies and not being able get into contact with anyone else was freaky. For the first two days immediately after the outbreak, we had been able to get in touch by phone with a few people. Frank was able to talk to his parents in Oregon on his cell phone, but after the 13th we couldn’t get in touch with anyone. By the second day of the power outage, it made sense that if you didn’t have access to a generator, cell phone and cordless phone batteries would be dead. Strangely enough, the landline phones stopped working before our cell phones. I would have thought landlines would be more reliable than cell phones.