Year of the Dead

by Jack J. Lee

  We were driving on the outside berm of the highway. There were abandoned vehicles clogging every lane, but the outside berm was mostly clear. Every couple of hundred feet or so, there was a vehicle blocking the berm and had to be moved out of the way, most of the time it was just a matter of putting the vehicle into neutral and rolling it away from the berm. Hiram told me Dr. Martin had cleared me for low-grade exercises, so I was assigned to walk along on the perimeter with my rifle in full kit, with my backpack and baton.

  He assigned another SaLT to drive in my place. Every few minutes, the guy on point would blow a whistle to see if it drew any zombies toward us. Zombies aren’t smart enough to ambush you on purpose. As long as you make enough noise, they will come to you rather than trying to ambush you. Every mile or so, we would come across a zombie that had gotten tangled up in its seatbelt and was stuck in its vehicle. It wasn’t a big deal to put a bullet through its head through the vehicle window.

  I hadn’t exercised for months. I wasn’t doing any running. We were only going on average two miles an hour, but within an hour my whole body was hurting. After four hours of walking, we took a break for lunch and I was allowed to go back to driving again. At four p.m., before it got dark, we cleared enough of the highway to set up our portable enclosure around our armored trucks. We then fired off a couple shots with a nonsuppressed rifle. We only drew a couple hundred zombies. This close to Sugar House, there weren’t many zombies left. It took only a few minutes to take care of them.

  We ate dinner then hung around and killed time until it got dark. All our trucks had the same kind of electrified vampire traps in the front of our headlights that the patrol vehicles did back home. We kept the headlights on throughout the night. We had back-up batteries and a portable generator, so we didn’t have to worry about our batteries going dead. We slept in shifts. Four guys were up at all times.

  We woke up at dawn and took off again. I was sore all over. I felt even worse today than I had the previous day. As we travelled further away from home, we started seeing more and more zombies. Now we were seeing a constant stream of them coming toward us. Once I’d warmed up after an hour of walking and shooting, I started feeling better. It helped that there was a constant stream of zombies coming toward us, which gave me plenty of other things to think about besides how much I hurt.

  We were about twenty miles away from Provo when we put up our enclosure again. We then switched to nonsuppressed rifles. Within an hour, because of the noise we had thousands of zombies heading toward us. We spent the whole rest of the day nailing these zombies until it got dark. The next morning, we not only had to take down our enclosure but we had to plow thousands of zombie bodies out of our way. This was nothing new to the other SaLTs. We had a plow attachment that could be fastened to the front of the trucks to push the zombie bodies out of the way.

  For the first five miles, we didn’t see many zombies then they started coming in a stream again. We made another three miles and again set up our enclosure. If zombies hadn’t been so scary, this would have been tedious. Some of the other SaLTs who had been doing this since October looked a little bored. It took two more days to make it into Provo. Hiram told us we had gone through two hundred thousand rounds. Almost all of us were good enough shots we hardly ever took more than one round to take out a zombie. We got off the highway and were maybe five miles into Provo when we were met by a group of about thirty men armed with axes. One of them was Keith McKenzie, Art Bingham’s son-in-law. He told us his wife was fine. Mark radioed Art immediately. You could hear the emotion in Art’s voice while he was speaking to Keith.

  One of the largest universities in Utah is Brigham Young University. Most of the students at BYU are LDS and they come from all over the world. In the months leading up to the zombie outbreak, worried parents had been telling their children, especially the girls, not to go to school and to stay at home, much in the same way Art Bingham had with my girlfriend. Most of the single girls stayed home and didn’t start the fall semester. Male college students tend to follow female ones, so most of the single male students didn’t start the fall semester either. The male students that stayed mostly did because they were athletes and didn’t want let their team down. Many of the married BYU students also started back up in the fall. BYU has an unusually high number of married students. Normally in the fall, BYU has about 35,000 students. This year, they had less than half the normal number.

  The men we met were all from the BYU Sixth Stake. They had been keeping in touch with us by cell phone until the EMP, so they knew how to kill off all the zombies outside their enclosure. Even after the EMP, they had not been attacked by vampires. A few weeks after the EMP, they were able to leave their enclosure and start exploring and gathering supplies. One of the first things they did was try to look for survivors on campus. They knew from talking to our ward to avoid making loud noises and to try to take out the zombies in small groups. They also knew to make zombie traps and habitrails. Up until the EMP, the BYU Sixth Stake had been in contact with students in Helaman Halls.

  The LDS Church owns BYU, and in the same way the General Authorities had fortified wards all over the world, many of the dormitories at BYU had been fortified too. In the past, Helaman Halls had been for freshman, but this year was different. Most of the single male student athletes had been assigned to Helaman Halls, which was turned into a male-only dormitory. This dormitory held 2,100 students. Since the zombie outbreak started in the morning of September 11th, almost all the students were in their dorm and were protected from the zombies. This was the only fortified dormitory at BYU that had been able to keep the zombies out. Keith’s group had been able to stay in contact with the students in Helaman Halls until the EMP.

  When Keith McKenzie’s group had first scouted out Helaman Halls, it had been surrounded by thousands of zombies, too many of them to take on with just axes. They had come out to meet us and before they brought us back to their ward, they wanted us to help them check out the dormitory. There was something keeping the zombies attracted to Helaman Halls. They were hoping there were survivors. We followed them to the dormitory and saw the enclosure was still up. As we got closer, we could smell the stench of decaying meat. It was December and it was cold, but the stench was still almost unbearable. The smell had attracted a few hundred zombies, which we took down easily.

  We called out, but no one came to the fence, so we cut through the gate and walked in. The dormitory was literally splattered with blood. We saw decaying bodies of dead students everywhere. They all had the signs of being killed by vampires. Even though it was daytime and most of the dorm rooms had windows that let daylight in, we placed a SaLT up in the front with a VSG. It was now standard operating procedure when using a VSG to suit up entirely in rubber clothing and boots. Back on November 26th, when Mark used a VSG against a vampire for the first time, he noticed his left foot was only inches away from the vampire as it was being electrocuted. If any part of the vamp had touched Mark, he would have been in deep doo-doo, which explains the rubber suit.

  We didn’t come across anything living in the dorm. We found the remains of thousands of dead students and three vampire skeletons, all with a knife stuck into one of the eye sockets. These vampires may have been stuck in the heart also, but it was hard to tell with just the skeletal remains. All three of the vampire skeletons were surrounded by bodies of students. It looked like most of the students had been armed with kitchen knives. The students at Helaman Halls had taken their killers with them. A few of these students had probably survived the battle with the vampires, but due to their wounds and lack of medical attention, had died before we could get here.

  We locked the dormitory fence behind us. It wouldn’t be right to let zombies eat these fallen students. We were all somber. Up till now, none of us had faced with this much death. Zombies cleaned up after themselves. When they killed a person they ate everything. A few scraps of clothing and some splatters of blood were usually the only sign someone had bee
n killed. Dead zombies didn’t decay or smell. You got used to them and they simply didn’t seem human. Seeing, smelling, and walking among the decaying remains of thousands of dead students made you realize how many people had died in the last few months. Before the zombie outbreak, there had been close to three million people living in just Utah. Now there were only a few thousand. Forget about the numbers of dead in Utah. What had it been like in cities like LA, New York, or Chicago?

  It took another twenty minutes to make it back to the BYU Sixth Stake. There were close to eight hundred people in the Stake. All the surviving adults were young, aged 19 to mid-20s; many of them had babies and toddlers. The Stake President and his counselors hadn’t made it to the ward in time. The survivors were making decisions as a council and Keith was one of councilors. The BYU Sixth Stake was actually doing pretty well. They had enough food and water and we gave them twenty suppressed rifles and two VSGs. They already had collected a hundred thousand rounds of ammo. We gave them another fifty thousand, as well as a radio with multiple batteries so they could stay in contact with us. In the next couple of months, when we had more room for them in our ward, they could come up. Right now, they were better off staying here. We took just two pregnant women and their husbands with us because the women were close to giving birth and needed to be near a doctor. We had enough time to make it back before dark. Since we had already cleared a path on the highway getting down here, we were able to get back home in a few hours.

  We stayed at home for just one day. Then we were off to check on the Ogden ward we had been in contact with before the EMP. This ward was eighty-plus miles to the north of us and it was slow going. We averaged just ten miles a day and we must have been killing about thirty thousand zombies a day. We also killed two vampires. It was amazing how predictable zombies and vampires were. They always acted exactly the same way. Once you figured out how they reacted, they were easy to kill. It was like they had been manufactured to be perfectly identical in their behavior. The vampires attacked us at night after 1 a.m. and then stood on the metal platform we had provided them when they tried to go for our headlights. It was easy as pie to electrocute them and blow their heads off. We never saw vampires attack as a group after October 10th. The two vampires came at us a couple nights apart.

  Whenever there was a ward reasonably close to I-15 as we went north, we stopped to search for survivors and to scavenge for supplies especially ammunition. We were going through thousands of rounds of ammo almost every day. Everyday a few people would find us by following the noise of our gunfire when we had our enclosure up. We didn’t have room in our trucks for them, so whenever we found survivors we radioed back home. A vehicle was sent up from Salt Lake City to pick them up. Once we had cleared a lane to drive on, it wasn’t a big deal to get a truck up here in less than an hour or so.

  When we got to the Ogden ward, there was no one there. The enclosure was still locked. It looked like people had been in the middle of having a meal when they all left at the same time. There were plates and utensils out, with food still left on the plates. The only things missing were all the guns and ammunition. Hiram decided we would spend a couple of days here to try to find out what had happened to the people of this ward. In addition, we were going to spread out and gather as much ammunition as we could find.

  Before the outbreak, Ogden probably had a population of around eighty thousand people. We were going through thousands of rounds a day and it wouldn’t be long before we would have to start reloading bullets, and maybe even starting making our own rounds from scratch. Since we were up here already and it would probably be months to years before we came back, we decided to go to as many wards and gun shops as possible to look for ammunition and guns. In the course of the day, we got to nine wards and two gun shops. Every single ward and gun shop had already been cleaned out. We didn’t find a single living human being.

  We killed about forty thousand zombies in Ogden. As always, when we were in our portable enclosure we didn’t use suppressed weapons. Normally a few people would find us because of the noise. No one showed up. An hour before dusk, we went back to the ward we started out from. It was spooky going back to a place that looked like it had been abandoned mid-meal, but we wanted to make sure that if anyone from the ward was still around, we would find them. We parked our armored trucks inside the ward enclosure, so we didn’t put up our own portable fence. Our trucks were parked facing each other, about fifteen feet apart in an X pattern.

  I woke up around 2 in the morning to the sounds of gunfire and shouting. I looked up front. None of the headlights were on and I could see two men up front, shooting. The other men in the truck were waking up. I yelled, “What the hell is going on?”

  One of the two men replied, “A vampire took out all our headlights by throwing rocks at them.”

  I heard Hiram bellow. “Hold your fire. Hold your fire. God damn it, hold your fire!” There was silence. “No one shoot unless you see the vamp. Do not put your eye close to one of the holes in the truck or put your barrel through the holes. One of the men in my truck almost lost an eye because of the vamp’s claws. If you put your barrel out where the vampire can get a hold of it, it will grab the barrel and beat the hell out of you with your own rifle. You are not stronger than a vampire. If you play tug-of-war with a vampire, you will lose.”

  I opened up the gun holes on my side of the truck. These were two 2-inch diameter holes sized so you could shoot through one hole and look through your optical sights through the other. The door that kept these holes covered opened from the inside and folded down. As it folded down, it formed a barrel rest about an inch-and-a-half from the opening. Because of the barrel rest, it was easy to keep your rifled centered at the opening. I got a 300 Win Mag rifle out of storage and I started looking for the vamp.

  The cold night air entered through the gun hole. It was so quiet I could hear my breathing; my sight started fogging up. “Shit!” I took precious time and cleaned off my lens. As I was doing this, I could feel the truck start to rise from my side. The vampire was trying to flip us over. I heard gunfire and saw the effects of two high-powered rounds against my side of the truck. There were two spoon-sized dents where the bullets had struck.

  The vampire hadn’t been hit. I saw it streak to the truck where gunfire had come from. It jumped and landed on top of the vehicle. It started striking the top of the truck, trying to break through. I aimed and shot. I could see it flinch and then jump off the truck into the distance.

  Minutes passed. Nothing happened. I heard someone yell. “Sergeant, I’m going outside with a VSG.”

  Hiram shouted, “Stand down, soldier!”

  I saw the back of the truck, where the vampire had been, open. Sam Ortega jumped out, holding on to a lit VSG.

  Hiram yelled, “Turn off the VSG and get back into the truck!”

  Sam replied, “Sarn’t, I think I see it. I’m going to light it up with the limelight.”

  Because of the limelight, I saw the manhole cover flying through the air toward Sam. It was going too fast for Sam to react. The manhole cover must have weighed over a hundred pounds. The vampire threw this mass of metal like a Frisbee. It hit Sam at his upper chest and cut through him like he was made of butter. It went through his body and then through the open doors of the truck behind him. I could hear the crash of the manhole cover bouncing inside of the truck.

  Someone was still alive because the truck doors closed. I heard Frank yell out, “Sarn’t, I’m the only guy in here who can still hold a gun. Terry, Sam, and Matt are dead. Larry is unconscious. I think Gus’s arm is broken.”

  Hiram answered, “Frank, you have to keep an eye out. This vamp is smart. It’s trying to flip over our trucks. Somehow it’s figured out our armor isn’t as strong underneath our trucks. Everyone watch out for each other. If you see the vamp trying to flip over our trucks, take it down. Only shoot if you see it and for God’s sake, before you think about doing something stupid, tell me first.”

&nbs
p; I heard and felt a crash against the doors of my truck. The rear doors bent in. The vampire had thrown another manhole cover at my vehicle. A couple more hits and the door would be trash. Shit, this was getting serious. I cursed. I had jinxed myself a couple days ago by thinking it was easy to take out vampires. All of us in our truck were looking outside, desperately trying to see the vamp.

  Nothing happened for about an hour and then our door was hit again. Ten minutes went by, and still nothing happened. I yelled “Hiram, one more hit and our door is going to be gone and we’re going to be sitting ducks. I think the vamp has gone out to find another manhole cover. We need to do something different. We need to get into Frank’s truck. Hiram, you have anything to say about this plan?”

  Hiram yelled out, “God damn it, I don’t have any better ideas. It’s good with me.”

  I said, “Frank, are you ready?”

  “Yes”.

  “Cover us!” I motioned the rest of the men out of our truck through the cab door. I was the last one out. Instead of running to Frank’s truck like the rest of the men, I got down on the ground and crawled up underneath my truck. I’ve never been so glad to be skinny.

  Hiram said, “Jim, what are you doing?”

  “I think I know where the vamp has been standing when it’s been throwing these manhole covers at my truck. I’m going to take it out. If I miss, I’ll be bait. Nail the vamp while it’s reaching for me.”

  I’m no hero. I don’t like risking my life, but I couldn’t see any other choice. If we didn’t take this vampire out soon, we would all be dead. Someone had to be the shooter and someone had to be the bait. I’ve never felt time go by so slowly before. It was freezing but I was covered with sweat. I could feel sweat running down my forehead and into my eyes. I was almost hyperventilating and my heart was racing.