Year of the Dead

by Jack J. Lee

  Having anybody around, even Ryan, was better than not having company. Secretly I hoped that if anyone of us spontaneously turned into a zombie, it would be Ryan. I don’t know if being a lawyer makes you annoying or if annoying people become lawyers, but Ryan was the epitome of an annoying lawyer. I would have been upset about shooting him in the head but not as upset as I would be if I had to shoot Frank. As the days and weeks passed, the thought of shooting Ryan in the head was becoming less and less distressing.

  I was glad I invited Frank and Ryan to move in with me. Even with the risk of their turning into zombies, I don’t know how I’d be handling things if I’d been alone in this house.

  On the 11th when the alarm sirens went off, we all thought it was a test. I mean, come on: the 11th! So we had filled the two bathtubs in the house full of water and then went up to the second floor windows that weren’t boarded up. It was a zoo out there. At every house on the street other than ours, families were loading up their cars and taking off. About one-in-four of the people on the street looked sick. Some of them were vomiting and others needed help from their families to get into their vehicles. At the time we were glad we weren’t part of the mess on the street. A few minutes of watching the craziness down there went a long way, so we went back to our rooms.

  When the screaming started about an hour later, we all went back to the window. This was the real thing; the zombs were here. Some of these zombies were clearly our neighbors that had been human an hour ago. All of us ran for our rifles. It ended up that only one of us had room to shoot at a time. Frank was the best shot, so he went first. We all belong to a club of air-gun enthusiasts. We had been talking for months about the best way kill zombies and had decided we would use a .22-caliber air rifle. This is not the Daisy BB-gun you had as a kid. Our rifle sends a .22-caliber lead pellet out at 1250 feet-per-second and costs over $500 new, more than a lot of regular rifles. It hits a target with almost as much force as a .22 long rifle bullet. The rifle has an air canister that is precharged by either a hand pump or from a scuba tank. The pellet speed can be dialed up or down, at full power the tank will give you 25 shots. It was lucky for us we were into air guns because within a month of the first confirmed zombie attack in Africa, there weren’t any bullets to buy.

  The US has a huge number of gun owners and a lot of them are paranoid that one day a Democrat-controlled government is going to take away their guns. Clinton’s assault weapon ban confirmed all their fears. When Obama first got elected, there was a run on bullets for awhile because a rumor got spread that he would put a tax on bullets that would make them unaffordable. A bullet will last centuries if stored correctly so there isn’t much to lose by buying more bullets than you need. So pretty much anytime something makes gun owners paranoid, a certain number of them will go to a gun store and buy up every box of ammo they can afford. It doesn’t take many of these guys for a gun store to run out of bullets. The zombie outbreak in Africa made gun owners paranoid.

  Twenty-two-caliber lead pellets are usually thought of as toys so it wasn’t difficult for us to buy as many pellets as we needed. We each probably had close to a hundred thousand pellets; lead pellets are cheap and don’t take up much room. Before the zombie outbreaks, we were into target shooting and for the best results in target shooting you have to make your own pellets, so we also all had lead molds and a bunch of lead stock to make more pellets if we wanted.

  If you don’t know much about guns, you might think the best way to kill a zombie would be with a big-caliber high-powered rifle, but you would be wrong. The reason hunters and soldiers use large-caliber bullets and or high-speed bullets is to cause massive soft-tissue damage. This is the most effective way to kill living animals or humans. Massive soft-tissue damage doesn’t do much to a zombie. The only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain. The best way to do this is to use a bullet that is just strong enough to penetrate the skull but too weak to exit. When this happens, the bullet is trapped in the skull and bounces inside destroying the brain. A .22-caliber air pellet does this perfectly. You have to hit a skull square on so it doesn’t ricochet off. All three of us were good enough shots to be able to do this consistently.

  Like clockwork, every couple seconds Frank got a shot off. I spotted for him. It’s much easier to shoot accurately if you have a spotter helping to pick your targets, and if you miss, to show you which direction you missed in and how far off-target you were. All military snipers have spotters. Frank was on fire. He got 25 shots off and 25 kills. Air guns don’t make much noise so I don’t think anyone on my street, either the zombies or our neighbors, knew Frank was shooting, but I know he saved lives.

  After Frank emptied out his air canister, he ran down to the basement to recharge it from his scuba tank. I took my turn. I got 23 kills while I was shooting and Ryan was spotting for me. Ryan got the same count as me. We kept on taking turns shooting, spotting, and refilling our canisters for hours. By the time we stopped, even with all the ones we killed there were thousands of zombs on our street.

  As of the last census, there were more than a million people in the greater Salt Lake metropolitan area. I hoped to hell that there weren’t that many zombies. We had each taken out hundreds of zombs. Many of them used to be our neighbors. You would think we would be all shaken up by this. None of us had ever killed anyone before, but the zombies we had taken out were so clearly not human any longer that none of us were badly shaken. I think it would have been different if one of us turned zombie, but this hadn’t happened.

  For the past weeks, Frank, Ryan, and I had been playing games on our laptops, shooting a few zombies, and just hanging out, hoping the government, army, LDS Church, or whatever would get their acts together. We used our gas generator to recharge our laptop and cell phone batteries. We had enough water to last us another two weeks tops. None of us wanted to talk about what we would do then.

  I was in the middle of my once-daily dreaded shit when my cell phone rang. I answered.

  “Jim, its Mark. Want to go to out for some beers?”

  “Mark, uh Mark, what the fuck?”

  “Just kidding, man. I’m in a house a few doors down from you across the street. I can see your ass hanging out the window and I know you’re busy. Great shot; you just dropped a load on top of the bald zombie’s head.”

  “Mark, what the fuck!”

  “Jim, I can see you’re kind of busy. I don’t know what the proper etiquette is when one person in a conversation has his bare ass pointing to another. I haven’t been in this situation before. Why don’t you finish and call me back.”

  Chapter 10: Jim Wright, October 8th, 4 p.m., Year 1

  After I finished my business, I called out, “Frank, Ryan, get your asses here. I just got off the phone with Mark Jones. He wants us to call him back.”

  I met Mark for the first time about a month after I’d gotten divorced. I had a lot more free time so I hooked up with the Wasatch Mountain Club and went on a couple of club-organized Tuesday evening mountain bike rides. Mark and I hit it off and ever since then we go out every couple of weeks or so for some beers or to a movie. The best and shortest description of Mark was made by Ryan, who met Mark for the first time in early June when he and Frank moved in. I had invited Mark over for some pizza and beers with us. Mark only lives a couple streets over. Ryan commented after Mark left “that fucker is a real-life Bruce Wayne.” Ryan was right. Mark is rich. He doesn’t work. He has an underground hideaway you can get a car into. He even fights crime. He is Batman.

  Shortly after I met Mark, he made the local newspapers. He and I had gone downtown to see a local Ultimate Fighting Championship fight. MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) is huge in Utah, with weekly bouts in a couple of different venues downtown. In the 1990s, Mark used to compete. He never talked much about it but I heard from other guys that he kicked ass. We had stopped for gas and were in the convenience store when two Tongan gangbangers tried to rob the store and us. A bunch of Tongans converted to Mormonism and moved
to Utah. It is a common story of ethnic migration. Hardworking parents move to the US for a better life. Some of their kids, instead of taking advantage of their parent’s hard work, wasted their opportunities and became gangbangers.

  These guys had the gangbanger look down. Both were covered with tattoos and both had that square block Polynesian look, six foot tall and about as wide. The one with the shaved head went up to the clerk, pulled out a gun, and told him to open the cash register. The one with the flat-top haircut walked toward us with one of the largest bowie knives I’ve ever seen. The blade had to be over a foot long.

  I’m 6’3” but I weigh 175 pounds on a good day. I’m an average lover and I’m a much worse fighter. The last time I was in a fight was when I was twelve, and I got my ass kicked. Mark is maybe 5’9” if he is wearing shoes and he weighs less than I do. The flat-top guy had to weigh close to 300 pounds and it looked like a lot of that was muscle. When gangbanger told me to give him my wallet, I said “sure” and reached into my pocket to give it to him.

  At the time, Mark had the door of the cooler open and was reaching for a can of Bud Light. Instead of saying what I expected him to—like “Sure, I’ll give you my wallet”—Mark said something completely off the wall, “You think your friend wants a beer?” Both the Tongan and I paused, like you do when someone says something that makes no sense at all and you’re trying to figure it out. We were both thinking “Did he say what I think he said and why would he say that?”, Mark proceeds to wind up like a major league baseball pitcher and throws that can of Bud Light at the shaved guy’s head. The can must have been going close to eighty miles an hour when it hit the back of his head. It exploded and the guy just collapsed. I read in the Salt Lake Tribune that his skull was fractured and he was in a coma for three days.

  The one with the knife, not surprisingly, then decided to stab Mark. Calmly, like he had all the time in the world, Mark stepped to the outside of Flat-top’s arm, grabbed his right wrist with his own right hand, then pushed his left palm into the back of the guy’s right elbow while it was straight. I heard a crack and then saw the gangbanger’s right elbow bend the wrong way. The poor guy screamed, dropped the knife from his right hand and reached for Mark with his left. Mark then did the same thing to the guy’s left elbow and then, for good measure, kicked Flat-top’s left knee and broke it.

  The Salt Lake Tribune, the more liberal of our two local newspapers, had an editorial recommending Mark be prosecuted for use of excessive force. According to the Tribune, Mark should have given the gangbangers his wallet instead of permanently harming them physically. Utah is one of the reddest states in the Union; no prosecutor who wanted to keep his job was willing to take this case.

  When straight guys meet Mark, they have one of two reactions. 1. They hate him because he is an arrogant, cocky son-of-a-bitch and, as a friend of Mark’s, I have to say they are right; or 2. They get a man-crush because “Dude! He is cool”. He’s the closest thing to a real-life superhero that most guys will ever meet. I’m a 33-year-old guy that reads comic books and plays with air guns. I had a man-crush. Ryan had an unusual reaction. He both hated Mark and had a man-crush, explaining the term “fucker” and the comparison to Batman.

  Mark and I weren’t that close. On average we’d see each other a couple times a month. Mark came over to the house when Frank and Ryan moved in with me. We all went out for beers to a sports bar a few times afterwards. After hanging out with Mark a couple times, Frank and Ryan were convinced Mark was a mutant. You have to understand that, in June, everyone in the US was panicking because of the zombies. People in the US split into three major groups: the largest group thought it was a possibility the US would be overrun by zombies and procrastinated preparing; a smaller group thought an outbreak in the US was a real probability and started preparing; and the smallest group, which kept getting smaller, refused to believe an outbreak in the US was possible.

  People got uncomfortable talking about their disaster prep, because you didn’t want to brag if you were more prepared, or to get jealous if you were less prepared, or stress out someone who thought the government was going to protect them. Regardless of what you were doing or what you believed, it was stressful. Almost all social gatherings were tense. My house was the only one on our street with boarded-up windows. Our active LDS neighbors planned on holing up in the ward. Our non-LDS neighbors had plans to leave the city for cabins and homes in more rural areas, or kept on talking about how they were going to board up their windows, but never got around to it.

  I’m a computer programmer, Frank is a mechanical engineer, and Ryan is a lawyer, so we all made a decent living. None of us would have ever considered moving in with each other if it weren’t for zombies and the need to have each other’s back. It was a nerve-wracking time. Frank, Ryan, and I were all single guys without families in Utah who didn’t go to church. We ended up with each other because we didn’t know anyone else and because we felt better off being in a small group where everyone was competent than being in a large group potentially filled with idiots. Ryan can be annoying but he’s definitely not an idiot. I used to be a Temple-recommend member of the LDS Church; I know all about being forced to spend time in groups with a decent percentage of idiots.

  I’m not saying that all Mormons are idiots. The LDS Church was one of the few large organizations that actually had its act together in terms of disaster prep and I was a practicing Mormon until three years ago. By definition, fifty percent of every large group that lets anyone join is below average. I’m a computer programmer. I know how much an idiot can screw up a group project; every group is as smart as the dumbest member. I didn’t want my life to depend on someone who had at least a 50% chance of being below average.

  We knew Mark had a house that was completely energy- and water-independent, so a certain degree of comfort with all the craziness was reasonable, but it was clear to us that Mark wasn’t worried at all. He acted like he didn’t even notice there was a zombie problem. Ryan just couldn’t grasp how Mark could be so comfortable going solo, and kept asking Mark if he planned on getting any roommates. I think Ryan was trying to finagle an invite for all of us to move into Mark’s house. I knew Mark well enough to know that wouldn’t happen. On occasion, Mark would smile and say living with others wasn’t his style or would just look mildly annoyed and ignore Ryan. It was amazing that Mark seemed more concerned about running the Wasatch 100 than preparing for a zombie outbreak. It figures that of all the people in the world, it would be Mark who would be the first to call us.

  Once Frank and Ryan got to me, I pulled out my cell and called Mark. He answered right away.

  “Mark it’s me. I’ve got you on speaker phone. Frank and Ryan are here.”

  “Hey, guys, how you doing?”

  “Mark, you saw my ass hanging out the window. How you do you think we’re doing”.

  “Ok, enough of the small talk. The part of you that I saw looked pretty healthy. Are Frank and Ryan doing Ok?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “You probably noticed most zombies wandering around outside weren’t bitten. If any of you gets sick and begin to vomit, you need to tie that guy up quickly because that’s a warning sign of a zombie conversion.”

  “None of us have been sick. Mark, we’re going to run out of water soon. You have any ideas?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got some. I bet you about half the population of Salt Lake got turned into zombies within a couple hours on the 11th. That means that there are about 500 thousand zombies around here.”

  “Shit, that’s not good”.

  “It’s actually better than you might think. Most of them are gathered by the tens of thousands around the LDS wards. Zombies are attracted to sound and the wards have been shooting off rounds like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve been scoping out your house for a couple hours. I saw Ryan using an air rifle to take out a few zombies. Whenever one of you comes into sight, zombies start screaming and in few minutes there are a couple thousand of them in
front of your house. When you guys are out of sight, the number of zombies in front of your house thins out to a less than a thousand.

  I know the number of zombies in front of your house seem endless, but if you take out a couple thousand of them, you will have gotten rid of most of the zombies in your neighborhood. Then it will be safe for you to leave your house and come to mine. My house has plenty of water. Whatever you guys do, don’t use real guns. Keep on using your air guns. The sound of a gunshot will bring zombies for miles around.”

  “OK, we’ll start right away.”

  “One other thing, and this is important. You got to do everything in the daylight or be within ten feet of at least two 100-watt electric blubs at all times.”

  “Why?”

  “The fun doesn’t stop with zombies. We also have to deal with vampires.”

  “Mark, you’re shitting me.”

  “Wish I was, Jim. I killed a vampire a month ago. It was a tough son-of-a-bitch. I got lucky. It should have killed me. I’ve been playing around with its dead body and if you expose it to sunlight, or to the equivalent of two 100-watt bulbs, its flesh starts to melt. It’s around four now. It’s going to get dark enough in three hours to be dangerous. Close up all your windows then and board them up temporarily. Turn on every light you have in your house and stay in one room. It takes at least 15 minutes of exposure to strong light for a vamp’s skin to start melting, so being in the light is not absolute protection. You got enough power in your generator to make it through the night?”

  “We got enough gas to last a month but I wouldn’t want to depend on it for more. Wait, if we start having to use our air-compressor to constantly fill up our scuba tanks, which we’ll have to do if we need to shoot a couple thousand zombies, we’ll have enough power to barely last a few days.”