Year of the Dead

by Jack J. Lee

  All this work was fun. As a professor, I had theoretical knowledge of all the things I was doing but had never had an opportunity to put them into practice before. Working full-time at the University, followed by 30 hours a week in the evenings and weekends at the ward, kept me busy.

  My closest friend in Utah was Cecilia Swanson, also a professor at the University. She specialized in modern French Literature. Before the zombies, we were so close we described each other as sisters who had been separated at birth. She took my decision to shelter in an LDS ward as a betrayal and a rejection of her personally. She was one of the first organizers of the co-op and she was the foremost proponent of not bringing guns into the shelter. She was adamant that guns only caused harm and never did any good. She constantly brought up the fact that guns had failed to prevent the outbreaks from spreading in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. I told her that refusing to use guns because of what happened in Africa and Europe was the equivalent of saying that since every defeated army in the past hundred years had used guns, not using guns would win wars. Cecilia called me a condescending bitch, and since that argument on June 6th we had stopped talking completely.

  The US government set up barbed wire and armed guards all along the Mexican border. All deployed Navy fleets were recalled to guard our coasts, and the US was working closely with the Canadians. But basically nothing was being done to help civilians prepare. The only useful thing the Federal Government did was to set up AM and FM radio stations all across the US. They were kept silent, but if there was an outbreak, an emergency signal would be broadcast. Every American citizen was encouraged to be within hearing distance of a radio tuned to one of these stations at all times.

  I was allowed to store a small number of personal belongings and clothing at the Forest Dale First Ward. I was spending so much time after work there I filled up all my allotted storage by June. On the night of September 11th, I woke up to the sound of an emergency broadcast. I slept in a t-shirt and sweat pants so I didn’t have to take time to get dressed. I only had to pick up a backpack filled with supplies and run to the ward. I made it in less than 15 minutes. There was a stream of cars and pedestrians coming to the ward; I was one of the first ones to enter the gates. Art Bingham, the First Counselor, arrived at the same time I did. He was the man at the ward primarily responsible for disaster preparations, and I had been working closely with him for months.

  Art was a really good guy but had a jealous wife. It took only one excruciatingly polite meeting with her to get the message that he was hers and that I was to keep my hands off. I took particular care to talk to Art only when other people were around and made it a point not to wear makeup or flattering clothes. I noticed within a few days that almost all Mormon women took special care to look their best when they were at the ward. I wanted to make clear to all of them that I wasn’t interested in their men. Men think they are territorial; women are territorial.

  I was really glad that it was Art instead of Hiram Rockwell at the gate. Some of the people entering our gate weren’t supposed to be there, but Art understood that trying to turn people back, especially in cars, would create a massive slow-down. I’m pretty sure Hiram would have tried to keep some of these people out. Art asked me to help his wife and daughter pack cars in as tight as possible. In addition to the cars, there was a stream of families who lived close enough to walk to the ward. Due to the traffic, it was probably quicker for most people to walk.

  I was still helping direct cars when I heard gunfire. The gates had been closed and there were still people outside. I heard screaming and could see zombies attacking. I was next to a car when its rear passenger-side door opened. A zombie came out. I screamed for help. Stacy, Art’s wife, may be jealous but she’s also fearless. She ran over and grabbed the zombie’s right arm. I grabbed the zombie’s left. Neither of us was armed. The zombie lurched from one of us to the other, trying to bite us. Stacy was crying and screeching at the top of her lungs but she didn’t let go and neither did I. She had an amazingly loud voice. Her son Peter came running up to us holding a military style assault rifle. He placed the barrel of the gun into the zombie’s mouth and shot. The back of the zombie’s head blew out and it dropped. I hugged Stacy. Both of us were crying. She had saved my life.

  Stacy then turned to Peter and hugged him so hard he almost dropped his rifle. He kept on saying “Mom, you got to let me go. I need to go shoot more zombies.” I went over to them and tugged on Stacy’s arm.

  “Stacy, we have to gather all the people without guns and get them into a secure location. Peter, some zombies have made it into the fence. You have to go with us and make sure they don’t hurt anyone.”

  We got everyone without a gun into the chapel. They were mostly women and children. Only one more zombie had made it into our fence and by the time we saw it, it had already been shot by a woman with a handgun. Once it was clear we didn’t have any zombies with us in the chapel, Peter left to join the rest of the men at the gates. Most of the people in the chapel started to pray. I went and got my laptop and tried to get into contact with the two other wards I had set up for video conferencing. I couldn’t get anyone on Skype, so I went to the video feeds from the cameras I had set up at the other wards.

  The closest ward to us was on Downington Ave, just a few blocks north of us. The cameras showed the zombies had been able to enter the enclosure. Humans were fighting back but were being overrun. The same thing was happening at the ward several blocks east of us. I was able to go back a few minutes on both video feeds to see what had happened.

  At Downington Ave, the ward members at the gates had attempted to turn the people who weren’t supposed to be there back. These people resisted and blocked the gate. By the time the zombies arrived, there were so many people trying to get into the gates they couldn’t be closed in time. At the 1200 East ward, the members had kept the gates open too long. No one at their gates had been willing to close them as long as other ward members were still outside. Their compassion for those not yet arrived allowed the zombies to overrun their gates.

  Our ham radio operator had not made it into our enclosure in time. I wasn’t an expert radio operator but I was able to get in touch with four other wards in the Salt Lake region and a couple of other wards north and south of us. The reach of ham radios depends on the weather and sun-spot activity. We should have been able to contact wards in multiple states pretty consistently, and on occasion, we should have been able to reach wards on the west coast. For some unexplainable reason, the ham radios could only reach wards within a few hundred miles .

  All of the surviving wards had to shut the gates on many of their ward members to survive. All of the upper-level LDS Church members, the General Authorities, should have been in secure locations and certainly should have had ham operators available but none could be reached. Within a few hours of the zombie outbreak, the power went out and we had to start up our generators. Around the same time, all the landline phones stopped working. Fortunately, cell phones kept working and we still had access to the internet through the satellite connection I had set up. Within 24 hours of the zombie outbreak, all television, cable, and radio stations that had live coverage were off the air. Only prerecorded broadcasts were available.

  The only way to explain how rapidly we lost all media coverage, the electrical grid, landlines, and landline-based internet was sabotage. If you knew what you were doing, it wasn’t very hard to wipe out our electrical infrastructure. Large-scale electrical black-outs had happened in the past by accident. On August 14th, 2003, it took only one failed electrical line in Ohio to wipe out power to close to 55 million people in northeastern US and Ontario, Canada, for two days. If our infrastructure were attacked by knowledgeable terrorists, it would be fairly simple, with targeted attacks on the electrical infrastructure in just a few locations, to wipe out the entire landline-based electrical grid in the United States. Landline-based phones for similar reasons would be as easy to take out. Because cell phones used
separate physically-disconnected towers which often had battery and solar panel backups, cell phone systems were more difficult to sabotage. Without a functional electrical grid, even with some cell towers up and functioning, anything close to normal cell phone volume would have made cell phones useless, but with the loss of life that had occurred in the last few days, normal volume was not an issue. For obvious reasons, it was much more difficult to wipe out satellites. The lack of all communications from the Federal and local governments had to be due to sabotage. Our inability to contact the LDS General Authorities couldn’t be explained in any other way.

  On the 12th, both of Orville Johnson’s sons disappeared, and the next night Orville and his wife went missing. That same day our ward ran out of ammo. The good news was for now, cell phones still worked. Art couldn’t get into contact with his daughter who lived in Washington, DC, but was able to establish cell phone contact with his daughter who lived in Provo, Utah. Both Art and I had encouraged all ward members to bring their laptops to the ward and I was able to get Skype working on most of them. A small number of us were able to contact friends and family members who had access to generator power and wireless internet.

  The mood in the ward was grim. None of us had expected much help from the Federal or state governments, but we had been expecting to have guidance and help from the LDS General Authorities and the other wards around us. I coped by trying to help the other women and children in the ward in small ways. Stacy, the woman that had saved my life, was frantic because we had completely lost communications with Washington, DC, where her oldest daughter and her only grandchild had been living. She asked me what it meant that we couldn’t raise her daughter’s ward in DC. I looked into her eyes and lied to her. I told her there were a number of technical reasons that could explain why we had lost our ability to communicate with her daughter’s ward, even though they were doing well. Stacy knew the most likely explanation. Stacy didn’t want the truth from me; she wanted comfort. Thankfully, Stacy’s other daughter in Provo was doing well and she was able to speak to her every day by cell phone.

  I helped as many people as I could use the internet or the satellite phone system I had set up to contact friends and family members. I got a gaming system up on a server that I had set up in the ward so any child, teenager, or adult could hook up into it to play games against each other. None of us had any place to go or any real chores we had to do. We had enough food and water. The LDS Church emergency planners had everything planned out, including food, water, and waste disposal, for three months for 800 people. We even had little 3-gallon solar showers available. We took showers in the bathrooms so we had to use cold water but it was better than any other alternative. Only 400 or so of us were in the enclosure, so we were good for six months, but we had nothing to do. The tension in the ward was intense and setting up computer games helped decrease some of it.

  Stacy and I became close. We had nothing in common, but during Armageddon that didn’t seem to matter. It was strange, but getting to know Stacy helped me deal with my mom. Stacy and my mom were similar in many ways. Both of them put their families first over everything else and neither had any problems embarrassing their children in public. Because I wasn’t related to her, it was easier to see that Stacy loved her children intensely, even when she was fighting with them or embarrassing them. I kept on telling myself every time I talked to my mom, ‘She’s doing this because she loves me.’ It helped a little.

  Even with the friendship I had developed with Stacy, I was lonely. It was normal for Mormons to dress up when they went to church, and even under the current circumstances most of the women wore makeup and dresses. It was a way of holding on to what was normal for them. It wasn’t normal for me. I almost never wore makeup anyway and I certainly wasn’t going to wear a dress in the middle of zombies. As time went on, the differences between me and the other women seemed to get more obvious and I felt even more isolated.

  I wish my last conversation with Cecilia had gone better. Before the 11th, I could always say there was time to make things right; now there wasn’t any time left. I missed my best friend. I was the only single woman with a graduate degree in our enclosure. Mormon girls get married young and all the other women here were married with children and families to look after and be concerned about. I didn’t have anyone. Cecilia wouldn’t have gotten along with anybody else here besides me, but I still wished I had her around. I never had any privacy—there were too many people crammed in too small a place for privacy—but I’ve never felt more alone.

  Every day since the 11th, I had been able to talk to my family. They live in north-central Nebraska, between Atkinson (population of fewer than 1300) and Bassett (population of fewer than 800). Atkinson was 124 miles away from Norfolk, which had a population of around 24,000. Zombies weren’t a major problem for my folks. Even if the entire populations of both Atkinson and Bassett had become zombies, my family and their employees could have handled them. As it was, our family compound was attacked by a few dozen zombies on the 11th, which were easily taken care of. Unlike Salt Lake, where many people had spontaneously turned into zombies, none of my family members or any of their employees had turned. The first thing my father did, once it was clear the zombie outbreak had reached the United States, was to contact me.

  My father and I both knew that in a few days or at most a week or two, the battery power keeping the remaining cell phone towers going would die. The towers here and there that had solar panels wouldn’t be enough to keep the network up. The only thing that was keeping cell phones working so far was the lack of normal usage. I had set up an internet server in the ward and both the ward and my father’s farm had internet access through satellites. Theoretically, my father and I could stay in contact for as long as our power held out and the satellites stayed functional, but nothing was certain anymore, and all sorts of things that should never have happened had already happened. Every day that I spoke to my family could be the last time.

  My mother had never been able to understand that I was happy with my career and I did not need a husband or children to be fulfilled. Now that every conversation we had could be our last, she had decided to discuss everything she had ever wanted to talk about with me. Yesterday, she had asked me if I was gay. You have to understand, there were about 400 people in the enclosure with me. Since the disappearance of the Johnsons, everyone had basically been staying in just two rooms: the chapel and the gymnasium. I was never alone when I was on Skype with my parents. Because of the noise, I used a headset and microphone when I talked to my mother so only my side of our conversations could be heard, but you have no idea how mortifying it is to say “No mom, I’m not gay” in public. My father in his own way wasn’t much better. Growing up, since I was his only daughter, he had treated me like a princess. Even though I was now in my 30s, he still treated me like a child who needed to be protected. There were many reasons I wasn’t in Nebraska.

  Yesterday, mom was focused on my sexuality. Today, she was interested in figuring out why I didn’t have a boyfriend. I guess I should have been grateful to her. Instead of being afraid of dying, like I should have been, I was terrified of what she would talk about next.

  In the middle of my conversation with my mother, the phone to the ward rang. I had switched the ward’s land line phone number to a satellite phone. I used this call as an excuse to end my conversation with my mother.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Mark Jones, Director of Federal Emergency services in Utah. May I ask who I’m talking to?”

  “I’m Helen Hansen, the head of communications.”

  “Ms. Hansen, may I speak to whoever is in charge there?”

  Chapter 16: Art Bingham, September 13th to 16th, Year 1

  Heavenly Father, we had run out of bullets. I stood there stunned. It dawned on all of us that in less than an hour we had shot off all of our bullets and had killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of zombies, but it had made no discernable differ
ence in the number outside our fence. As every zombie was killed, it was quickly torn apart and eaten by the others.

  Hiram Rockwell had been standing there as stunned as the rest of us when suddenly he screamed, attached a bayonet to the end of his rifle, and ran to the fence. He stabbed a zombie in its eye through the fence. The crush of zombies behind it was so dense the zombie was flush against the fence and couldn’t move away. Hiram kept screaming, yelling incomprehensible words in his fury, and he continued to stab zombie after zombie in its face in a berserk rage. The rest of us stood and watched. He had probably stabbed a couple dozen by the time he stopped but there was no evidence he had accomplished anything.

  I motioned us all to move into the ward building. The tragedy wasn’t that we had run out of bullets; the tragedy was that it meant so little. When we had closed our gates on the 11th, we’d had 405 people in our enclosure. In five days we had already lost four people, yet there were an endless numbers of zombies outside our walls.

  We were never able to establish contact with any of the General Authorities and almost all of the wards around us. My wife Stacy’s first concern wasn’t the General Authorities; it was with our two married daughters and their families. We had lost contact with every ward outside of Utah. Because of Helen Hansen, our ward had been equipped with both landline high-speed internet connections and with satellite internet connections. Almost everyone in the US connects to the internet by landline, DSL, cable, fiber optics, and/or T1 lines. Most wards used landlines and all landlines stopped working on the 11th. Our ham radios should have been able to reach outside our state and we should have been able to reach wards across the country by relaying messages between different wards, but we could only get into radio contact with a few wards in our state. Helen told me only sabotage could explain how quickly the whole world had lost power and communications. She couldn’t explain why the ham radios didn’t have the reach they should.