by Jack J. Lee
We knew how Mark reacted to rape. After the zombie outbreak, there had been no law or order and it looked like civilization had broken down forever. In times of chaos, there is always rape. In the last 3 months, 17 men had been executed for this crime. In all these cases men had taken female survivors and had abused them. Some of the rape victims had been children.
Since all these cases happened outside our current city borders, Mark claimed Federal jurisdiction. As the only representative of the Federal government, Mark appointed himself judge in these rape cases. There was always a trial with a jury, a prosecutor, and a public defender. The evidence in these cases was overwhelming. When the men were found guilty by a jury of their peers, Mark sentenced these men to death by zombie. The men were eaten alive by zombies in front of their victims.
Many of us had voiced concern about this punishment to Mark. Rape was a heinous crime but execution by zombie seemed equally heinous. Mark told all of us that a tendency to rape is a character trait that is almost impossible to change. The idea of fining rapists was ludicrous and if we exiled them, the rapists would hurt more people. I understood Mark’s reasoning, but if I was in his place I don’t think I could have ordered the executions. I guess that’s why I wasn’t in his place.
Mark spoke, “Look guys, we only have about 10,000 people in our community. Everyone knows everyone’s business. Everyone, within a few hours of a visit, will know when someone visits the brothel. We might as well keep this business above ground where we can watch it and tax it.”
Helen said, “Well what about public health? Isn’t there going to be a lot more diseases being spread with a brothel?”
I answered this question, “I don’t think any of the sexually transmitted diseases that existed before the zombie outbreak are still around.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m sure you noticed that none of the chronically ill survived the zombie outbreak. The zombie virus preferentially infected people who were unhealthy. This seems to have included everyone with AIDS, Herpes, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, and every other venereal disease you can think of. The best I can tell, none of the people I’ve treated since the Outbreak have had a communicable disease, not even the common cold. I’ve been treating injuries. With all the construction and manufacturing that has been going on, there have been quite a few injuries but no illnesses. Everyone, who survived the Outbreak, is completely disease free. Whoever designed the zombie virus, designed it to get rid of human diseases.”
Emma didn’t usually speak during our council meetings. She asked, “What sort of degenerate would consort with a prostitute?”
Mark laughed, “Well, I have.”
Emma is a 57-year-old stoutly built woman. She’s the kind of grandmother who would wash out children’s mouths with soap. She is the essence of a matriarch. I’ve never seen her blush before. Emma was a survivor of the Riverside ward that had been preyed upon by a vampire for months. She has lost her husband, son, and son-in-law at Riverside. Mark helped kill that vampire in front of her. She’s always had a sweet spot for Mark.
Mark asked, “Emma, you know everything that goes on in the Fortress. Do I act like a degenerate?”
“No.”
Emma looked flustered. Helen looked disgusted. Everyone in the room knew that Helen and Mark had spent one night together a couple weeks ago. Their relationship was being scrutinized with an interest that used to be focused on Hollywood celebrities and British Royalty. I knew Emma liked both Mark and Helen. She hoped that they would get married. The topic of this conversation, especially because it was in Helen’s presence, was making Emma blush.
“Emma, it’s been awhile since I hired a prostitute but I have.”
Emma was beet red as she asked, “Why would you need to pay for sex?”
“It’s easier for men than it is for women to have sex without feeling an emotional connection. There have been times where I knew that if I slept with someone I would cause that person a lot of pain. With prostitutes, it’s just a physical release. There aren’t any emotions. I didn’t hire a prostitute because I couldn’t get sex. I hired one because I wanted have sex without baggage. The Outbreak has been hard on men. Because of vampires and their preference of killing men, women now outnumber us 3 to 1. Relationships were hard enough when the ratio was even. It’s triply hard now. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a place where people can have meaningless sex without emotional baggage.”
Emma looked thoughtful. Helen Hansen on the other hand looked like she wanted to kill Mark. If she had been staring at me like that I would have been nervous especially if I was in a relationship with her. I’ve counseled young men in the past about relationships. I tell them that every good marriage is based on fear. When it comes to women’s feelings, most men are oblivious. A healthy amount of fear helps men avoid stupid mistakes. I worried about Mark and Helen’s future. He didn’t fear her enough.
John Black and I voted to keep prostitution legal. To my surprise Helen did too. Sam Tucker and Hank Miller voted to make it illegal.
Mark wasn’t part of the city council so he didn’t get a vote, but he got what he wanted.
Our second order of business was to discuss how our exploration teams were doing. My son-in-law, Keith McKenzie was one of a handful of pilots who had survived the Outbreak. He and the other pilots had flown over multiple nearby cities. There weren’t any signs of survival in the major cities but in some of the small towns in remote areas they had seen survivors. Some of the towns had hundreds of survivors.
We were spending a considerable portion of our resources on these missions. When we sent men out in the field, they needed fuel, food, ammunition and other supplies that weren’t easily replaced. Fixing the EMP damage on a single prop plane took hundreds of hours. That’s why we had only fixed one plane. Just one armored vehicle took thousands of man-hours to build. We collected separate taxes for our city and Federal governments. Our entire Federal budget was being used on these missions. We were using up so many resources that two months ago we had a referendum on whether we should send out exploratory teams to other major cities. Forty-two percent of our citizens voted against sending our men out. These citizens were legitimately concerned that we had limited resources and that we had plenty to do locally.
We got approval for the exploration/rescue missions for multiple reasons. There was a practical reason for our exploration teams. As part of their mission, our men cleared a drivable path on the roads for their armored vehicles. It took time and effort to clear even a mile of clogged road but once the road was cleared, it was easy to use. Everyone could see the benefits of clearing our highways.
It was more difficult to get support for the humanitarian aspects of these missions. Whenever our men found survivors they would radio back for transport and a bus would come to pick up the survivors. A trip that would take survivors weeks to walk could be driven in a few hours. Rescuing survivors took time, effort, and money that could have been spent on our citizens.
Mark gave speeches before the referendum pointing out a ‘selfish’ reason to have these rescue missions. He explained that to have a technologically advanced society we had to have more people. He felt that our current population of 10,000 was too small to be able to rebuild a computer based society. We currently did not have the ability to make silicon chips. We had computer chip making equipment in the greater Salt Lake Region, but we didn’t have the man power or expertise to use the equipment. We were using vacuum tubes to rebuild radios. Mark wanted us to have a population of close to a hundred thousand. He was convinced that once we got that kind of population density, we would be able to start making computer chips. Mark was a man in a hurry; he wanted us to regain this kind of population density in the next few years rather than in a few generations.
Mark had a point, but for me and likely most of our other citizens, his idea of rescuing more people to eventually regain computer based technology was too abstract of a goal and too remote from our cu
rrent day to day concerns. We were handling our rapid population growth as well as it could be expected, but there were growing pains. Humanitarian reasons and the abstract understanding that a larger population base was beneficial probably wouldn’t have been enough to win the referendum. What ultimately won the referendum was the religious makeup of our community; most of us are LDS. We are commonly known as Mormons. Prior to the zombie outbreak, about fifty percent of the population in Salt Lake City were LDS; currently, close to ninety percent of our citizens were LDS.
Before the Outbreak, most LDS had gathered in fortified buildings with stored food, water, and firearms. The most common fortified building was the local LDS church building which is called a ward or ward house. Even among the LDS, the death rate had been horrendous, but when we survived we tended to survive in fairly large groups. I had lived through the Outbreak in a ward. Over 350 people from my ward were still alive. When non-LDS survived, they tended to be with small groups, usually less than ten people made up of close family or friends. This pattern led to a much higher percentage of LDS in our community.
I have been LDS all my life. I served a mission for two years in Spain. I’ve also been a citizen of the United States of America. As religious as I am, I firmly believe in our constitution. I believe in keeping church and state separate. I’m grateful that Mark Jones survived for many reasons. One of them is that he is not LDS. Mark denies that he is an atheist but he has refused to join any church. He calls himself a deist. He believes in a beneficial force in the universe that could reasonably be called God, but refuses to believe that any human or human organization has a true understanding of God.
By becoming our most popular and influential leader, Director Jones single handedly eliminated the possibility that we would become a theocracy. If history has taught us anything, it is that religious leaders make poor political leaders. Assuming that a successful government is one that is governed well, there hasn’t been a single successful theocracy in all of history. This doesn’t mean that in a time of crisis like ours where 90 percent of the survivors were of one faith that a charismatic religious leader couldn’t have taken over.
Mark is complex man. I have never heard him to say an outright lie but I have known him to tell the truth in a misleading way. Last month I asked him if he was giving speeches in favor of the exploration/rescue missions to try to head off a political conflict between the LDS and non-LDS. I wanted to know if his somewhat abstract reason for these missions was designed to give a non-religious purpose for them. Mark didn’t answer me. He smiled.
It isn’t a major religious crisis for Protestants to lose contact with their religious hierarchy. It is a major crisis for Roman Catholics and for the LDS. Without the Pope’s approval there are no more bishops or cardinals. Without bishops and cardinals, new priests cannot be ordained. A Roman Catholic Pope is chosen by a quorum of cardinals. For the Roman Catholic faith to continue past one generation, at least one Cardinal or the Pope must survive.
The leader of the LDS is called the president. He has twelve apostles to help him and when a president dies, the apostles choose his replacement. We needed at least one apostle to get another president. Without an apostle we couldn’t have new bishops. Other Christian denominations call the leaders of their local congregations, minister or priest. We call them bishops. We, LDS, have not been able to find a single survivor of our church hierarchy that was above a bishop. The people who had been responsible for the zombie and vampire outbreak had also gone after every religious and political leader. Jerry Maple was our only surviving bishop. If we didn’t find a surviving apostle, our church’s line of authority would be over.
We had already searched every LDS temple in our area. There were no survivors in any of them. Because of this we assumed that our presidency and prophet were dead. Unlike our presidency and prophet who usually stayed in Utah our apostles were often out on assignments all over the world. We still could hope that one or more apostles were still alive. For both humanitarian and religious reasons, we needed to send exploration/rescue parties out to as many major population areas as possible.
I had selfish reasons for wanting to find an apostle. I had given up my first counselor position when I became mayor, but I was still one of the most prominent Mormons in our community. Both I and Bishop Maple were constantly being pulled aside by church members who thought that since we had more female than male survivors that we should re-institute pleural marriages. Vampires preferentially attack men over women and children. It was mostly men but occasionally even women tried to convince me that we should reinstate polygamy.
These idiots reasoned that women needed the protection of men. Since there weren’t enough men, we needed pleural marriages. They argued that if the council felt uncomfortable making this change, that we should have a referendum. I had to explain over and over again that while politically we were a democracy, in matters of faith, we weren’t a democracy. When it came to religious truth, voting isn’t an option. Doctrine comes from our Heavenly Father. A president must have a revelation.
Many of the idiots who kept on wanting a vote on the issue of pleural marriages had been born to the faith. It got so that I wanted to scream, ‘How is it possible, after being LDS for all your life, to think that we vote on matters of faith? Do you honestly believe our Heavenly Father gives a hoot about what’s popular?’
Every few weeks, someone would come up to me and tell me, he had a revelation. He was the new prophet and the Heavenly Father had called him to reconstitute the Church. I would advise him this was certainly interesting but if he truly had a revelation that it would become obvious to all of us in time. I would encourage him to talk to Bishop Maple and told him that he was welcome to talk to the other church members but that it was likely that we would all have to wait awhile before we all agreed he was prophet. I tried to be as polite as possible but often these would-be prophets ended up screaming at me because “I was patronizing them.”
I was praying that our exploration/rescue teams would find an apostle. I was tired of dealing with religious questions and the idiots who brought them up. Before the Outbreak, I would have felt guilty about being more concerned about dealing with idiots than our religious crisis. I was raised to always try to be a better man and to love my neighbor.
Mark Jones is rubbing off on me. He is comfortable in his own skin. He is by no means a perfect man, but he is doing a considerable amount of good. One of the reasons why he is so effective was that he doesn’t waste any time on things that couldn’t be changed. I don’t have it in me to love idiots. I could attempt to be polite and that was about it. According to the self proclaimed prophets who ended up screaming at me, I wasn’t very good at being polite. Instead of feeling guilty about my inability to love an idiot, I was trying to be the best man I could be. Every few days, Director Jones met with us to give us an update on exploratory teams. Two days ago Hiram led a squad of men down to Southern Utah. He informed us that everything was well. As I walked back to my office from meeting, I thought back to the meeting I had with Hiram, Lieutenant Jim Wright, and the Director about this expedition. It had been a few weeks ago at Mark’s house over dinner.
Helen Hansen’s company had repaired the EMP damage on a single engine plane. My other son-in-law Keith McKenzie was one of our surviving pilots. He and his crew had been flying out every day looking for survivors. Keith’s orders prevented him from trying to rescue small groups. Airplanes are fragile and they require properly maintained runways, which no longer existed outside of Salt Lake City, to safely land and take off. He dropped care packages every time he found survivors. Most of the groups he found were small, a couple hundred people or less. Keith’s crew found a couple exceptions. Thousands of people still lived in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and the Utah and Arizona border towns of Hildale and Colorado City. Hildale and Colorado City were notorious as being the home towns of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. The FLDS had fired upon our plane.
The Director st
arted the meeting, “We’re going to do something different with the Southern Utah Expedition. We’re going to limit it to two squads, and only volunteers. All men with families and dependents are out. This means you, Jim.”
Jim asked, “What are you talking about? Why should this expedition be different?”
“We’re going to do it different because of the FLDS. Based on the pictures our plane took, it looks like most of them survived the Outbreak. There are two camps of them about 16 miles apart. I’d estimate their population at close to five thousand, with two thousand of them able to fight. Right now we have 500 SaLTs. With those odds, it doesn’t matter if we send 20 SaLTs or all 500. It won’t work out very well for our men if they get into a stand up fight with the FLDS. If we’re putting men into danger, we might as well risk the lowest number possible.
We know the FLDS are going to be a problem. They’ve already taken shots at our plane. Survivors are usually ecstatic to see any signs of technology. They typically want all the help we can give them. The fact that the FLDS tried to shoot our plane down is a good sign that they don’t play well with others.”
Hiram commented, “If we know the FLDS are going to be a problem, why don’t we just take care of them?”
Mark replied, “Hiram, then we’re talking about preemption. When we tried that in Vietnam and in the second Gulf War, our country didn’t unite behind those wars. We lost Vietnam and almost lost the second Gulf War because of that. Given two political options, one for men with balls and the other for men without, you know which option I’d prefer. This doesn’t mean however that I can’t see why other reasonable people would disagree. Jim, I know this isn’t fair but I going to ask you how you feel about these expeditions. Do you think this is a good use of our resources?”
