Year of the Dead

by Jack J. Lee

  One of the younger SaLTs said this was the loudest videogame he’d ever played, and I could see his point. It was a real-life version of a zombie video game. Every hour, we all took a 15-minute break. We gathered around and tallied scores, made additional bets, and generally goofed around. I can be dead serious when it’s necessary, but what we were doing relieved stress and made something that could have been enormously tedious, fun. We knew we were shooting the remains of real people—mothers, fathers, and children—but you can only grieve for so long. It was healthier to laugh.

  We had killed almost half the zombies by the end of the second day. When it started getting dark, we split up and got into our armored trucks. Due to the possibility of a vampire attack once we closed up, we had to stay in the trucks until it got light again. This wasn’t a big deal to most of us younger guys, but some of the older guys, particularly Todd Bloom, bitched up a storm about how he had to pee every few hours and how much of a pain it was for him to pee into a bottle in a cramped truck enclosure next to four other guys. The guys in his truck told him it wasn’t a joy for them to have him pee next to them while they were trying to sleep.

  Close to sundown on the third day of shooting, we were down to our last couple hundred zombies. Peter Bingham, the youngest SaLT, was in second place behind Frank Burns. The kind of firing we had been doing over the last few days was completely different than what I had done before. It required continuous concentration, with constant rapid target acquisition. I think all the years Peter spent playing video games really helped him. That asshole Frank had won every side bet he’d made. In two days of constant shooting, after thousands of rounds fired, he hadn’t missed once. I was number three behind a freak of nature and a 17-year-old.

  I was the Sergeant Major. I was supposed to be an adult. The safe thing, given how close we were to sundown, was to bed down and then evacuate the ward in the morning. I told this to the Director. He smiled at me like he could read my mind.

  “Sergeant Major, this is one time where doing the safe thing isn’t appropriate.”

  I smiled back; the Director was a good man. Three minutes later all the zombies were down. We all loaded up and walked to the Riverside Second Ward in a V formation like flying geese. Each man was responsible for watching a specific angle of our approach. Frank was on point. The Director and I were at the two back ends; we had the final responsibility for one-half of the field of view, and it was our job to make sure nothing snuck up behind us.

  As we approached we could see the ward members. They were cheering and yelling. As we grew close, we could see there were only two men. All the rest were women and children. This was bad. They had a vampire problem. The gates of the ward were opened and we were mobbed. Women and children were all over us. It took almost fifteen minutes before they could be calmed down enough so we could talk to them. Only two adult men were still alive. One was the Bishop, Jerry Maple. On the night of the EMP, their ward had been attacked by multiple vampires. The vampires injured most of the men and had broken most all their rifles. They had been left with barely any weapons, other than a few knives and makeshift clubs. A vampire had been coming almost every night and taking one of the men. We had about a half-hour before the sun went down.

  The Director announced we would escort all of the members of the Riverside second and seventh wards back to Sugar House tonight. We had left the thermal camera back at our ward. We were as safe out in the open as we would be in the Riverside ward. We told the ward members they couldn’t take any supplies. We didn’t have time to let them pack. We rushed three hundred ward members to our trucks. The youngest children were packed into the trucks and were sent at top speed back to our ward. They would be there in a little over a half-hour. The rest of us started walking quickly toward home.

  The SaLTs could have run the 6.5 miles in less than an hour, but there was no way that the women and older children could have kept up. Half of us carried our suppressed rifles and the rest carried non-suppressed higher-caliber vampire-hunting rifles. As soon as the trucks got to the ward, they were to turn around and come back. We started walking. Everyone was hyper-alert. We had to worry about vampires as well as zombies. All the SaLTs were separated out in pairs: one had a rifle that could take out a vampire and the other a suppressed AR-15. We tried to keep three hundred people bunched up; it was impossible. The SaLTs were spread out so much we couldn’t support each other. We had tried to clear out this corridor as much as possible, but there had to be a couple of zombies that had wandered into the area since we were last here. The vampire that had been preying on the Riverside ward had to be close.

  It got darker, but never so dark we couldn’t see where we were going. The stars and the moon were bright enough to cause shadows. It was nerve wracking to be walking next to or through shadows into which you couldn’t see. I was as worried about me or one of my troops shooting a civilian by accident as I was about not shooting a vampire or zombie.

  An hour-and-a-half after we had started, the trucks came back. Along with them was every operational vehicle we had, most of them unarmored. It was chaotic. We were trying to get as many of the children and women loaded when I heard suppressed gunfire and the sound of women and children screaming.

  Chapter 33: Peter Bingham, October 10th to November 22nd, Year 1

  Director Jones was an amazing speaker. All of the other politicians and church leaders I have heard giving speeches in my life would lose me after a few minutes. Director Jones was never boring and the things he said made me think. I remember best a phrase he used in one of his talks to the militia—all the active duty troops and the reserves; he said we lived in the time of legends.

  History is cyclical, he said. There are times of crisis followed by long periods of calm. When it’s calm, heroes aren’t necessary. In times of crisis, heroes are essential and legends are created. The only crisis as big as ours in the past was when Noah built his ark. That was the last time the very existence of humanity was in doubt. We were living in a time where everything we did or didn’t do mattered and because it mattered if humanity survived, our actions would be remembered. We had been given the opportunity to be legends. He laughed like it was funny and said even cowards will act brave when they know someone is watching. We all had to be heroes because all of the people, who would come after, were watching us. We all laughed with the Director, but it was nervous laughter. He was right. If humankind survived because of what we did, history was watching us.

  If you spent any time with Director Jones, Sergeant Rockwell, or even Frank Burns, you knew you were in the presence of men straight out of the Old Testament or the Book of Mormon. The Director and the Sergeant had taken out vampires with a sword and a spear. Frank never missed anything he shot at. Before zombies, I never wanted to be a hero. Heroes were rich athletes that only seemed to care about cheating on their wives and how much money they were making. Or they were victims of natural disasters who were being called heroes because something bad had happened to them. Men like the Director, the Sergeant, and Frank proved heroes were men who put themselves at risk to save others. I wanted to be a hero, too. When the vampires attacked us, I had been given an empty rifle with a bayonet on it. My dad and I were along the wall with our rifles, with Cheryl and mom behind us. I don’t have clear memories of what happened. I do know that I had been useless. I was knocked out by a vampire. When I woke up, my mother was dead. I promised myself then that I would never be useless again.

  For a couple of days after the vampire attack, I couldn’t move my right hand without feeling excruciating pain. I had a huge bruise on my right forearm and at first my dad thought one of my bones had been broken. When the swelling came down after a few days, my arm just ached. By the time the zombies around our fence had been cleared out, my arm was feeling pretty good. Before the zombie attack, the militia had been a joke. Half of us were high school kids like me and the other half was made up of out-of-shape men my dad’s age. I could tell even Sergeant Rockwell didn’t tak
e it all that seriously. It was different now.

  At first when we went out, we had didn’t have much equipment. All we had were maces, modified axes with the blades cut off. We had to find and scavenge ammunition for our guns, along with food, water, fuel, and generators. We needed basically everything. Like almost everyone in the ward, I had taken down thousands of zombies through our fence. I had killed zombies before, but it’s completely different when there isn’t a fence between you and the zombie. Frank had an air gun that he used to knock out a zombie whenever one of us got in trouble. The Director was a ninja. Watching him take out zombies was like watching a movie with great special effects: he flicked his sword and body parts went flying. The Sergeant was Conan the Barbarian; he had a sledge hammer that he used to crush zombies. The rest of us, well, we weren’t ninjas or barbarians but we got the job done.

  A couple of times a day as we explored and cleared out zombies, we would come across boarded-up houses where people were holed up. Every once in a while we would come across survivors who had run out of supplies who had to go out to forage. You’ve never seen happiness until you see someone who thought he was going to die, realize that he won’t. It was amazing to know I was helping to save peoples’ lives. Before the zombie outbreak, I was six feet tall and weighed about 150 pounds. I don’t know how much I weigh now, since salvaging scales is not high on the survival priority list, but I’d guess I’ve gained close to twenty more pounds of muscle. My endurance was up, too. When we first explored an area, we always did it at a walk but whenever we were travelling through a cleared area we did it at a run. Every day we went out of our fence, we probably ran ten to twenty miles. Stress fractures caused by too much running were the most common reason men had to drop out of the militia.

  It got a lot easier when we got our suppressed rifles. It was no big deal then for a squad of ten men to take out a couple hundred zombies in a few minutes. Our rifles had no recoil. You could go through an entire ten-round magazine in less than fifteen seconds doing one shot, one kill. Whenever we came up on a group of zombies, two shooters would fire until their clips went dry. Each shooter would start firing from the right-most or left-most edge of the group of zombies, moving to the middle until their clips went dry, then the next two SaLT’s would shoot and so on. You would think that if we all fired at once we would get rid of the zombies faster, but you would be wrong. If we all had shot at once, it would have been complete chaos. The Sergeant explained to us that in times of stress, the human eye is attracted to the same kinds of movement, color, and size. The odds were, if we all shot at the same time, most of us would be targeting the same zombies, causing us to waste time and bullets.

  When you are shooting, you have almost no peripheral vision because you can’t shoot accurately if you are not focused on the target. By having only two men shooting at one time, all the rest of the men could make sure nothing surprised us. If it looked like there were too many zombies and they were too close, we all ran away for a few minutes until we had enough distance to safely start shooting again. Zombies are slow. As long as we didn’t allow ourselves to get trapped and we could run, there was no way a zombie could chase us down. One time, twenty of us led a couple thousand zombies behind us on a three-mile circle for a couple hours until they were all dead. We ran from them until we were about 100 yards away, then we would shoot at them until they were 50 yards away, and then start running again. A few hours later all the zombies were down.

  All of us carried a 30-pound camel pack filled with three liters of water, a couple of military surplus Meals Ready to Eat, and a hundred rounds of ammunition, along with some other supplies. Our rifles weighed about ten pounds. Right after we got our rifles, Sara Beiger gave us all three-pound collapsible metal batons that could be expanded from 15 inches to 38 inches in length with a flick of a wrist. At the end of the batons, there was a two-and-a-half-inch diameter, four-inch-long steel cylinder. Our rifles had an attachment for a bayonet but none of us used the bayonet. The bullpup design, along with the suppressors, made the balance all wrong to use our rifles in hand-to-hand combat.

  Our batons came with sheaths that attached to our backpacks so we could run without the batons bouncing around. You could pull the baton out with one hand over your shoulder and the motion would fully extend the batons into a locked position. We practiced this motion over and over until we could all, in one motion, holding on to our rifles with one hand, use the other to draw out the baton, extend it, and use it to bash a zombie’s head. If a button on the handle was pushed and the handle twisted 180-degrees at the same time, the baton converted into a spear. It extended out another two feet and a spear head that looked like a vampire’s claw came out of the handle.

  The Sergeant had a baton that was heavier, longer, and had an actual vampire claw attached to it. Sara had taken the claw from the spear he had used to kill his vampire. The batons were cool. The only person who didn’t carry a baton was the Director, who carried his sword. The sword was cool, too.

  The first few weeks I came back from patrol, I felt like my arms were going to fall off. Ten pounds may not seem like much, but try carrying a rifle that weighs this much for six hours. It’s brutal. On the upside, I got really cut; my arms got totally defined.

  At first, because of possible vampire attacks, we all stayed inside the ward house at night. Now that we knew what we were dealing with, everyone wanted some privacy. The gym was partitioned into multiple areas, and the whole ward building except for the chapel got turned into semi-private apartments. The Director had a house outside our enclosure within walking distance that had running water and was vampire- and zombie-proof. Ward members and their families who couldn’t stand the lack of privacy in the ward house started fortifying the houses closest to the ward and a few brave families moved out. These families had to come back to the ward to get water, but it was worth it to them to have their own space. Over time, more and more of these homes became fortified and as people moved out, there was more space in the ward.

  Just after we got our suppressed rifles and batons, all of us on active duty got uniforms: black leather jackets with a synthetic removable lining that could be washed. With all the running we did, we sweated a lot. The jackets had plastic armor on the forearms. The idea was that if you had no choice, you would let a zombie bite your forearm and hope the plastic armor would prevent it from infecting you. We wore jeans and running shoes. It was more important to make it easier for us to run than to armor our legs and feet. The jackets all had emblems on them that read “Salt Lake Trooper.”

  All the unmarried SaLTs like me were barracked in the ward house. Some of the married men moved out with their families. Most of us, being younger, were unmarried. Most of the older men couldn’t take all the running that was required. The exception was Todd Bloom. He was old enough to be my grandfather but he had been an endurance runner before the zombie outbreak. He used to win his age group in 100-mile races. It was funny that the two oldest SaLTs, Todd and the Director, were our best runners. Even Sergeant Rockwell looked tired if we ran twenty miles. At that distance, Todd and the Director didn’t look like they were even breathing hard.

  Almost all of the zombies in a couple-of-mile radius around the ward were cleared out. Zombie traps were placed wherever there was a burned-out house. In the confusion of the first few hours and days after the zombie outbreak, fires had started all over town. These fires eventually burned out on their own. Anytime we found a burned-down house that had a basement, the ward members converted them into zombie traps. A low three-foot wall was built around the foundation and the basement cleared of anything that could be climbed by a zombie. A few zombie bodies would then be thrown into the basement. The bodies drew the zombies in.. It was easy for a zombie to climb a three-foot wall and fall into the basement, but it was impossible for a zombie to climb out of an eight-foot-deep basement with a three-foot wall built on top of it.

  All the zombie traps had signs on them stating they had been put up by S
alt Lake City, along with directions on how to get to our ward. Every day, ward members would visit the traps and shoot the zombies. After making suppressors for our AR-15 rifles, Jim Wright and Sam Tucker made suppressors for .22-caliber rifles. Even with a suppressor, these rifles were light enough, at little over six pounds, for pre-teens and small women to carry and shoot.

  There was too much work and not enough people. It would have seemed crazy before September 11th, but now we had 14-year-olds shooting trapped zombies. Adult men and women were too busy fortifying the houses, storing supplies, and re-wiring electrical equipment and motors to do something as easy as shooting trapped zombies. Zombies are only dangerous in large groups. As long as a kid was a reasonably good shot and didn’t panic, it was fairly simple for a kid to take out a single zombie even if it wasn’t in a trap. No kids under 14 were allowed out of the enclosure by themselves, but if you were 14 or older, you were given a rifle and work to do. Some of the more mature teenagers had jobs clearing out zombie traps; others were put to work re-wiring burnt-out electrical appliances, doing construction work, or whatever needed to be done. As time went on and we cleared out areas further and further away from the ward, fewer zombies were found in the traps.

  We always came back from patrols an hour or two before nightfall. It was too dangerous to be out without protection when vampires were out. We always had a couple of suppressed high-power rifles that could take out vampires on patrol in case we came upon a house where a vampire was holed up. Luckily, we didn’t come across any.

  At first, when we came back from patrols I only had enough energy to eat a huge meal and fall asleep for twelve hours. After a few weeks, I could stay up for a while. Because of the vampires, there were more women than men. Even before the zombie outbreak, I’d been pretty popular. I was used to having girls pay attention to me, but the amount of attention I was getting was now crazy. Girls college-age and even older were paying attention to me. Most LDS are firm about not having sex before marriage, but some of the girls, LDS or not, acted like they wouldn’t be opposed to getting physical with me. The SaLTs were mostly LDS, but a few weren’t, like our oldest guy, Todd Bloom. Todd was having the time of his life. I don’t know how he got the energy but he never seemed to sleep in the same place twice. He had a small harem of women twenty to thirty years younger than him.