by Jack J. Lee
“Take off your clothes.”
She stood up slowly. She unbuttoned her dress. She slid it off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a bra or underwear. She had scars from old whippings on her back. I pulled my belt off and beat her with it.
I’m not into sadomasochism; sometimes you have to do the job in front of you. She orgasmed before I mounted her from behind; she enjoyed pain more than sex. After I was done, I had her clean me off with her mouth.
Once we were finished, she got dressed. I let her keep the knife. She was presentable. I had taken care not to leave any bruises or signs of trauma to her face or hands. She was wearing the typical FLDS dress which covered her neck, her arms to her wrists and her legs to her ankle. I called out to Nephi and told him to get Tom.
I had everyone else leave the room and spoke to Tom alone. “We need to talk about your parents.”
“Mr. Levin, I don’t blame you for what happened with my father. He needed to die. If I could have, I would have killed him myself.”
“Tom, I have a favor to ask you. You are my disciple. You are important to me. I want you to understand that you have the right to refuse me. Tom, you know that your mother has the same issues as your father.”
Tom looked down. He nodded.
“Your mother needs a master, a man who can control her. Otherwise she is too dangerous to be allowed to live. I’d rather not have to execute her. Do you understand the situation?”
Tom continued to look down and quietly said, “Yes.”
“The only man I know who can control your mother is me. That means to keep her under control, I have to marry her. You’re now the man in your family. Do I have permission to marry her?”
Tom didn’t know what to say. He just nodded.
“Thank you, Tom.”
We walked out of City Hall together and announced that Rachel and I were engaged. Most of the FLDS reacted with shock. By the way they reacted, I got the feeling that most of the men would have rather dipped their equipment in acid than be with her. It was a reasonable point of view.
I met again with the FLDS hierarchy. I explained to them that Rachel would be different from my other wives. Unlike my other wives, she would continue to live in Colorado City. I needed someone I could trust to take care of things when I wasn’t around. For the first time I saw the assholes smile. I had given power to one of their own; I proved they could live with me.
Two thousand FLDS moved to New Zion. Most of them were living in barracks but morale was high. My followers were convinced they were building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
The most common building material in the Middle East is mud brick. All you need to make mud brick is water, clay, and straw. We had plenty of all three in New Zion. We rigged up large electric ovens to make fired brick. The plan was to cover all the outside and load-bearing walls with fired brick and use mud brick everywhere else. Keep water away from mud brick and it is almost as strong as concrete.
The original fortifications on my ranch included a wall surrounding two acres of land around a central tower with mines buried inside and outside those walls. We were building apartments inside those original walls at the edge of where I had laid mines. The apartments were going to be two stories high and about 40 feet deep with flat roofs that could be used as decks. All windows and doors faced inside the compound. Once the apartments were built we would have more protection and living space.
Within days of my announcement that any woman could get a divorce by just asking for one, a majority of the younger married women left their husbands and moved to New Zion. Most of these women were decades younger than their ex-husbands. They quickly remarried men closer to their age. Reality typically doesn’t sink in for newlyweds for at least a couple of months. New Zion became disgustingly happy. Public displays of affection and laughter abounded.
Most of the younger FLDS moved to New Zion. Most of the older ones that used to have all the power and wealth stayed in Hildale and Colorado City. I decided that the term go-alongs was no longer valid; they were now believers. The FLDS that stayed in their old homes took up my suggestion of taking advantage of the gentiles with a vengeance.
Some of the younger men wanted to be able to have slaves and stayed with the assholes. Some of the older ones, like Lavel Sondermann, moved to New Zion with all of his wives. Mostly there was a generational division of the old versus young, of the haves against the have-nots.
I convinced the believers we were part of God’s experiment. Our Heavenly Father wanted to see which approach to gentiles was better: should we abuse the gentiles or should we try to convert them with good works? The wonderful thing about being a fake prophet is that for the most important matters of faith and religion, logic isn’t necessary.
New Zion bordered the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation. The Paiute had cherry and apple orchards, cattle and sheep on their reservation along with a convenience store gas station. Unlike the FLDS who had been expecting an apocalypse, the Paiutes were surprised when half of them got infected with the zombie virus. Surprise of this sort is deadly. Even before the Outbreak there had been less than 200 Paiutes. Only 28 survived.
It helped that the believers already had a longstanding relationship with the Paiutes. They hadn’t been friendly but they had been neighbors for all their lives. They had a habit of treating the Paiutes like human beings. I had prepared for the Outbreak by making sure I had a supply of gold coins. Since the Outbreak, paper money was useless. I used gold to buy supplies from the Paiutes.
The apples in the Reservation’s orchard were ready to harvest and there was no way the surviving Paiutes could have done the job. Indian reservations are always made up of the worst land. If there had been great pasture and water available, the tribe would have been able to raise tens of thousands of cattle on their one hundred eighty-eight square mile range. Most years the Paiutes were able to raise 5,000 cattle and a couple hundred sheep. It was getting late in the year and they had sold most of their cattle. They still had a couple thousand head left as breeding stock. They used their sheep for wool so they still had all of their sheep. I bought 1,000 cattle from the Paiutes along with a hundred sheep. I bought most of their apples which we harvested ourselves and dried. I tried to buy some horses but the Paiutes refused to sell the few that they had left. Horses were kept in barns and corrals close to the Paiutes’ homes. Zombies had gotten to most of them.
St. George was forty miles west of Colorado City and fifty-six miles west of New Zion. In the last decade St. George had become a retirement community of about 75,000 people. The zombie virus preferentially infected the sick and the elderly. St. George was likely a death trap filled with tens of thousands of zombies.
Within 24 hours of the outbreak, Colorado City and Hildale had lost all power. Zombies weren’t as dangerous in small towns of just a few thousand people; there simply weren’t enough of them. With supplies low, the Colorado City FLDS began preying on the survivors in the small towns of Hurricane, La Verkin, and Toquerville. In addition to capturing gentile survivors, the assholes scavenged supplies such as fuel for generators, canned goods, and dried food. We started trading fresh meat and milk to the Colorado City FLDS for them.
On the western border of the Indian Reservation about 20 miles away from New Zion was a small town, Fredonia, which used to have a population of about 1,000 people. The town most likely had close to 400 zombies. We had a couple hundred rifles and a limited amount of ammunition. I had some thoughts on how to clear out zombies without guns. Fredonia was the perfect place to test my ideas.
Modern ammunition requires smokeless powder and a primer. It’s not difficult to make smokeless powder. There are multiple kinds. The easiest to make is nitrocellulose. The ingredients to make it are readily available: nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and 100% pure cotton. I’ve made nitrocellulose before. I know that it takes an advanced, usually proprietary, industrial process to make modern noncorrosive non-mercuric primers; I don’t know much else.
The US military has studied the ratio of bullets fired versus enemies killed since WWII. According to these studies the number of bullets that need to make one battle field kill is tens of thousands to one. In Vietnam it supposedly took 52,000 rounds to kill one Vietcong. I’m not sure that I believe this number. But, I know in life and death situations, men consistently miss easy shots. My best guess was my men on average would take 20 to 30 shots to kill one zombie. Bullets were an irreplaceable resource. We couldn’t afford to waste them on zombies when we had to worry about the most dangerous predator, other humans.
Before the Outbreak, the LDS Church surrounded their wards with ten feet high chain link fences topped by six feet of razor wire. These fences were effective. The Colorado City FLDS gathered most of their slaves from these wards. The FLDS dressed their men in National Guard Uniforms. Unsuspecting survivors who thought they were being rescued were easy prey.
I sent a salvage crew to an empty ward and had the fence taken down. I had it cut into sections that could be assembled into a circular enclosure big enough to hold a hundred men. Bars projected from the fence pieces so that men could hold them in place from 4 feet away.
My men had to work together as a unit to make my plan work. After weeks of training, I decided we were ready to clear out Fredonia. We had trailers that could hold fifty men. As long as the grade wasn’t too steep and we kept the speed down, our trucks could pull them. We stopped at the outskirts of town. I had my men clear a section of the road of wrecked and abandoned vehicles and debris.
One of the wrecked cars had zombies. The top of the car had been crushed to the point that the windows were too small for the zombies to fit through. When we got close, one of the zombies stuffed its head out of the driver side window and screamed. Deep cuts oozed black sludge from its face as it scraped its head against the small opening. Graydon walked over and smashed its head in with an axe. One of my men went to the passenger’s side and punctured the other zombie’s skull with his spear.
As soon as we got the area cleared we began to assemble our fence. We could see zombies coming towards us. Nephi Daniels was our best shot. He took down five zombies while we worked. Every zombie within hearing distance of our gunshots headed toward us. We could see a crowd of them lurching closer and closer.
My men were split into three groups. Fencemen held the fence in one position. We didn’t have the ability to lock the fence in place; it had to be held in position. Spearmen had eight feet long hardwood poles topped by a four inch spike; their task was to nail zombies in the head through the fence. My disciples and I were armed with axes; our job was to take out any zombie that might make it over the fence.
In the beginning only a couple zombies reached our fence at a time. My men took these zombies out easily. Eventually our entire fence was swarmed. Shambling bodies straight out of a B grade horror movie screamed at us and tore at our fence. Spearmen screamed back as they slammed their spears into zombie brains and grunted as they pulled their points out. Fencemen yelled, “Heave! Heave! Heave!”, as they pushed back against the zombies pushing at them.
Suddenly a section of our fence started collapsing inward; three men were on the ground. Razor wire kept zombies from climbing over our fence but did not extend to cover the areas where the modular pieces joined. A zombie had climbed up and over one of these sections and landed on the downed fencemen. Tom Marsden leaped on top of the zombie and grabbed it by the hair and dragged it to the center of our enclosure.
I ran to the empty space in our fence and grabbed hold of the bar. I screamed, “Heave!” and two others joined me. We were able to push the fence back into position. I saw a spear-point flash past my shoulder and enter the head of a zombie as it pushed at the chain-link between us. My world focused on to just one point, the six foot wide chain-link fence piece in front of me as I pushed and pulled on the bar to keep it in place. The mass of zombies thinned and then finally our fence was clear. A carpet of the dead lay all around us.
I turned and for the first time saw the face of the spearman behind me. It was Graydon. We walked together to the center of our enclosure where Tom and the rest of my disciples waited. Tom still had the zombie. He crouched over it, hands gripped tightly in the zombie’s matted hair keeping it face down on the ground. Whenever the zombie pushed its body up, Tom slammed its face back into the asphalt. He had done this so many times that the zombie no longer had facial features, just a mass of macerated flesh.
Nephi Daniels turned towards Tom with horror on his face. “Tom! Damn it! Just kill it.”
Tom blinked. He paused. I could see him become aware of what he had been doing. He looked down at his hands with disgust. He stood up quickly and before the zombie could move, he stomped his boot down on the back of its skull. The zombie stopped moving.
I walked to the men who had been knocked down by the zombie. All of them could walk. One had a few scrapes; he hadn’t been bitten. The other two weren’t as lucky. I lay my hands upon the two.
“My brothers, praise our Father for you have been granted entry into his Kingdom. Leave this world for one that is better.” I anointed these wounded men’s heads with oil with one hand; I used the other to inject a gram of potassium cyanide mixed with fentanyl into them. Fentanyl is the most powerful narcotic available in the US. It gives a high multiple times more powerful than heroin. Cyanide in the past hadn’t been my first choice as a poison. It’s too easy to detect in an autopsy; autopsies were no longer an issue. The advantage of cyanide is that it causes unconsciousness in less than ten seconds. The men I blessed died almost instantaneously with ecstasy written clearly on their faces. My men saw the reward of being bitten while doing God’s work.
I looked at the faces around me. I saw awe and wonder. No one looked frightened. My men were now blooded. It’s rough the first time you do anything especially when it involves risking your life. The zombie most likely made it over our fence because someone panicked. Panic was now much less likely.
There were improvements we could make. The next time we did this, we needed different spears. The wooden shafts got caught too often on the chain-links. Longer thicker spear-points would be less likely to get caught. We needed more men in reserve and they needed to be armed with spears rather than axes. Battle plans rarely survive contact with an enemy especially ones that have never been tested. A loss of just two men was better than I had expected.
We had used the fence when we were outnumbered but it wasn’t needed in the city limits. There were a couple zombies left in Fredonia trapped inside buildings. My men handled them easily with just their spears. We didn’t find any survivors.
My men and I took Fredonia apart. There were a couple hundred homes. We took everything. Every mobile home was taken back to Zion. Frame houses were broken apart for the wood studs. We salvaged metal roofs and aluminum siding. We took guns, ammo, canned and dried food, sinks, toilets, appliances, hot water heaters, furnaces and anything else we thought could be useful. Every working vehicle was brought back.
Chapter 19: Helen Hansen, April 10th, Year 1
As soon as I got to my porch, a visibly upset Cecilia opened the door.
“Helen, what happened to Mike?”
I had just come from an emergency council meeting on the FLDS attack on our men which had been called as soon as the information had been radioed back to Salt Lake City. It was amazing how fast rumors flew within our community.
“Mike and Alex are fine. Wayne, Hiram and eight other SaLTs have been captured.”
Cecilia collapsed on to the couch, her hands to her face.
“Oh my God! What happened?”
I sat next to her and she turned to me like a hurt child. I put my arms around her.
“Hiram and half of the southern Utah expedition walked into an FLDS trap. Mike and Alex were up in the air in the PPC; they got word back to the others. One of the APCs was captured. Mark and the rest of the SaLTs are going to head down south tomorrow. It was a unanimous decision by the council; if the
FLDS harm any of our men, we will be at war.”
She was appalled. “Helen, so many people have died already. How is it possible that we could be at war? Are we humans that stupid?”
I did not have an answer for her. I could only hug her while she worried about her friends. Mike was ten years younger than Cecilia. He loved red meat; she was a vegetarian. When it used to matter, he had been a partisan Republican. It didn’t make any sense that they would be in love. When they were together for very long, they fought like cats and dogs, which is why she lived with me. Yet something about them worked.
Women outnumbered men in the Fortress three to one and Mike was charming, funny, and exotic. He got a lot of attention from women. Although Mike was always friendly, women that spent time with him could easily tell he was in love with Cecilia.
I’ve known Cecilia for years. She usually had a harem of men that desperately wanted to be more than friends but most didn’t last more than a few dates. I’d never seen her so wrapped up in a man. When her relationship with Mike was going well, she was on clouds; when it wasn’t, I spent a lot of time listening.
A couple of months before the Outbreak, Cecilia and I got into a stupid fight and stopped talking. For months after September 11th, I thought she had died. I regretted that argument every single day until November 3rd, when Mike Kim flew a powered parachute into our fortified ward. I learned then that Cecilia had survived the Outbreak in Mike’s house.
