Year of the Dead

by Jack J. Lee

  “Come on you fuckers!”

  Nothing came. I waited. Still nothing came. I took off my backpack and jacket. I touched where mom had had been biting me. There was no blood. She hadn’t broken skin. The strap of my backpack and the leather jacket had prevented her from getting her teeth into me.

  I checked the windows and doors to make sure they were all closed. I smashed all the zombie heads one more time to make sure they stayed dead. I then took the dining room table top off. The table top was held on by screws, so I didn’t have to use the skill-saw. Good thing, the battery was about dead. It was awkward carrying the table top while also holding my mace, but I had done this 11 times before and I was almost used to it. I made it back to my house.

  I wanted to sit down in my bedroom, listen to some music and get drunk, but I had windows all around my main floor that some zombie could just walk through. I had been lucky for four days. I couldn’t keep depending on luck.

  Then it struck me how funny this was. I needed to do shit that I didn’t want to because I had to. This is how the rest of world felt about going to work before the 11th; it took the end of the world, zombies, and vampires to make me do something I didn’t want to. I was some piece of work.

  I finished boarding up my windows a little before midnight. I had boarded them from the inside; it was too dangerous to work outside. I used wood screws every six inches and made sure all the screws were solidly in the wood studs around the windows. I reinforced both my outside doors and my door from the main floor to the basement bedroom. I put in a wooden door across the upstairs window so I could lock it up when I wasn’t shooting from it.

  The house was now zombie-proof but it wasn’t vampire-proof. A vampire could rip through my roof like it was tissue paper and there was no way I could reinforce it by myself in a reasonable period of time. My defense against vampires was to keep lights on at all times and sleep in my lair instead of my bedroom. My lair was made of reinforced concrete and the doors to the lair from my garage and bedroom were commercial metal blast doors. The freight elevator in the garage was made of industrial steel and could be locked from my lair. I could only use the garage, bedroom and the rest of my house in daylight.

  Chapter 14: Mark Jones, September 16th, Year 1

  I woke up at first light again. I promised myself that today I would take a break every few hours. If mommy zombie hadn’t tried to take a bite out of my shoulder where it was protected by my backpack strap and jacket, if she had bit me in the neck or on the back of my head, I would be dead. I couldn’t let myself get that tired again. I absolutely had to stay alert.

  I went upstairs to my second floor and opened the window to my front yard. There were eight zombies eating bait. It took just a few minutes to take care of them.

  My house was now boarded up. Today, I was going to explore, but first I had to make sure that if a swarm of zombies were chasing me, I could lose them. Zombies didn’t seem to have much of a memory. Apparently, for zombies it was basically out-of-sight for a half hour or more, out-of-mind. I went next door to the Jacksons with a pry bar and my cordless skill-saw. The Jacksons still had the original hardwood floor that was installed when their house was built in the 1950s. The floor was just planks of wood on top of beams. If I pulled up a 6-foot gap in the floors and cut out the crossbeams, I could easily jump over the gap but zombies couldn’t. If I destroyed the basement stairs, there would be no way any zombies that fell into the hole could get out of the basement. I planned on staying in the light while cutting the hole in the floor all the way across the house from the top. I would cut away the basement stairs from the top, again staying in the light as much as possible. If there was a vampire in the basement I wouldn’t make it easy for it to get to me.

  I got the Jackson house done, and then the house directly across the street from it which had been owned by the Harrisons. My plan was to jump into the Harrisons’ yard, nail as many zombies with my bow as were following me over the fence, and then take off into the Harrison’s house and hopefully lose them because of a 6-foot gap in the floor. I left my bow and a quiver of arrows on top of a large patio table. The table was about ten feet away from the fence I planned on coming over. It was too hard to run while carrying both my mace and bow. I reminded myself again that I needed to figure out a way to carry both. My plan was to clear out one area of zombies and then slowly make my way to the fire station, eliminating zombies as I went.

  Hopefully, the fire station would have a thermal camera. Zombies weren’t too bad, but vampires sucked. I never wanted to have to go hand-to-hand with one again. Having a camera would allow me to see vampires through walls and help me avoid them. I needed to head two-and-a-half miles northwest to get to the fire station. I was going to make a quarter-mile detour due east to check out the ward closest to my house; this is the ward where I thought the gunshots were coming from the other day.

  I walked out into my street and headed past the stop sign. I saw three zombies. One was dressed like a construction worker, wearing a hard hat. The first one that saw me began to scream and all three headed my way. I walked away from them at the same speed they were using to head my way. I didn’t want any of them to lose sight of me. I lead them into the backyard next to the Harrisons’ then used the 6-inch wooden step I had installed to get over the fence. I had plenty of time to get over it and to get on top of the patio table. I picked up my bow. The three zombies slowly climbed over the fence. I was just ten feet away from them. It was no big deal to nail each zombie in the face. I aimed for their open mouths. The arrows went through the back of their mouths in to the base of their skulls, dropping them immediately. The hard hat wasn’t a big deal.

  It was simple to then smash in their heads for extra safety and drag them in front of my house with the other bait. The pile of bodies in front of my house was getting out of hand. I needed to figure out soon what to do with them; another thing to figure out later. Thank God their bodies didn’t smell.

  I went down the street and past the stop sign again. A half-block up the street another group of zombies saw me. It was time to go back to the Harrisons’. Again I kept my pace slow, at the same speed as the zombies coming toward me. It was simple to nail them in the head while they climbed over the fence. The pile of bodies in front of my house got larger. This was going much better than I thought it would.

  I took five more trips up and down my street, bringing in zombies and then killing them before I got within sight of the ward. Holy shit! The ward was surrounded by zombies. They were mashed tight against fence. There were thousands of them, maybe even a hundred thousand. There had to be people alive in the ward. Only the presence of living, moving, breathing humans could keep so many zombies in sight. I hoped they would last for as long as possible. The only reason zombies were so sparse around my house was because the ward was keeping so many of them occupied. If I was going to survive, I needed help. I needed to make sure the people in the ward stayed alive.

  One of the problems I had with all the end-of-the-world movies I had seen before the 11th was in almost all of them—except for the one where people hid out in a shopping mall, which, by the way, is my favorite zombie movie—surviving humans wandered around going from town to town, losing people to ambush in every town. The only way to survive for long when everything is out to get you is to control your environment. There is absolutely no way to control your environment when you are constantly moving from town to town. People who flee without a plan are just victims, refugees hoping to find someplace, somewhere, where someone else will save them. The life expectancy of a refugee in this world was going to be nil.

  I’m not a victim. A zombie or a vampire might get me but God damn it, I wasn’t going to run and I would take a hell of a lot them with me. Better yet, I wasn’t going to die; I was going to kill every single zombie and vampire that got in my way, and the only way I was going to do this was with other people. I have flaws. God knows, every woman I have ever dated has been happy to tell me what they are
. For my entire life, I have been a completely selfish bastard and a loner. I don’t have any friends, just some I guys I drink with. The funniest, most entertaining guy I know has always been me and the only guy I ever needed to have around was me. I’m my own hero. When I say this to other people, they laugh because they think I’m joking. I’m not. I’m serious. The person I’ve admired most has always been me.

  If I was going to survive, I needed to have people I could trust. If there were tens of thousands of zombies in just the few blocks from my house, there had to be hundreds of thousands in the greater Salt Lake area, and who knows how many millions in Utah. If I was going to control my environment, I needed every single human who was still alive on my side. For the past three days, I had been staying alive one day at a time. I needed to start thinking about how to get rid of the hundreds of thousands of zombies and whatever number of vampires in this city.

  Chapter 15: Helen Hansen, September 16th, Year 1

  My name is Helen Hansen. Five days ago the world had ended and my mother wanted to know why I didn’t have a boyfriend. I was on Skype with my family in Nebraska.

  “Mom, I’m in a barricade surrounded by thousands of zombies. I really do have more pressing problems than not having a boyfriend.”

  “Honey, first it was getting a college degree, next it was getting a PhD from MIT, then it was because you needed to get tenure, now its zombies. Sounds to me, you keep on finding excuses.”

  I started laughing. The last five days had been so stressful. Like always, talking to my family was making me laugh and want to tear out my hair at the same time. What was so infuriating and so funny about this conversation was my mother was serious.

  I had been on Skype with my family in Nebraska almost every day since March 21st, when my father called me and asked me to quit my job as a tenured professor in the Engineering department of the University of Utah. My father is the CEO of one of the largest incorporated family farms in the United States. All six of my younger brothers work for the family corporation. Almost all family-owned farms in the United States lose money. Every year the average age of farmers gets older as their children leave the farm. My family’s farm has consistently been one of the most profitable in the United States.

  Each year, when my father is planning the next year’s crop, he has to predict what the government will do, global politics, the weather in Nebraska, and the global weather. The difference between successful and failed farmers is in how well they plan for the future. My father has been successful enough in his predictions that almost every year he made enough profits to buy more land. Some of his success was based on luck but most of it was based on his attention to any news that could affect the future prices of crops.

  My father had been watching the situation in Kenya since January when the first rumors of zombies came out. He had been following the media stories about the zombie outbreaks, and using Google Earth and a paid satellite service to look at satellite pictures of the zombie-affected areas. In the past, before the zombie outbreaks, he had used satellite images to research how much corn and soybeans were being planted and harvested in the world. My father noticed immediately that as soon as a zombie outbreak occurred, the nighttime views from satellites showed almost a complete absence of artificial lighting. Since all communication from the zombie-outbreak areas stopped within hours of the outbreak, no one knew what was taking out the power and communication, but it had to be more than zombies. Until governments understood what was going on, he didn’t think they would be able to stop the spread of zombies.

  My father is a rich man and has always contributed the maximum allowable to politicians’ campaign funds, both as an individual and through our family corporation. He had spoken to both of Nebraska’s senators and he wasn’t convinced any government including the US could effectively prevent the spread of the zombie outbreak. He told me he was only going to plant enough seed to cover overhead this year. He was going to use all the money he had available to prepare for a zombie outbreak in the US. He wanted me to quit my job and move back to Nebraska.

  I love my family, but there is a reason I moved from Nebraska when I was 18 to go to college and never moved back. I love my family but I love them from a distance. Every holiday I spent in Nebraska, every 3rd relative and in-law would ask when I was going to get married and have a family. The idea that a heterosexual woman could be content to be single in her 30s just didn’t make sense to my family. No one ever asked me when I was visiting if I was gay, but I know my family. They were concerned about the possibility. My mother is a matriarch. She is smart and competent and is my father’s main advisor and is the only person in our family who can overrule my father. She couldn’t understand why any woman would want to be single and not have a family. I won’t say death was preferable to living the rest of my life surrounded by relatives, but I’ve thought it often.

  My father had proven his ability to accurately predict the future year after year. I knew a zombie outbreak in the US was a possibility and I would make preparations for such a possibility. I was going to hope, however, that it wouldn’t happen and I wasn’t about to give up my career.

  In the five years I’ve been living in Utah, I’ve made some close friends but none of them were in my field. Most of my friends were in the Humanities departments. I was the only female professor in Engineering. My male colleagues are older and married and it didn’t help that I had gotten my PhD at an unusually young age from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and by the time I got my assistant professor’s position, I had two patents that were making me close to six figures in royalties a year. Office politics in academia are always ugly and for a variety of reasons none of the people I was close to were in my department.

  People outside Utah know it’s one of the reddest states in the union, and think it is filled with polygamist Mormons. The rest of Utah may be largely Republican but Salt Lake County, like most urban areas, is reliably Democrat. There are lots of universities in Utah but the ones with a strong rivalry are the University of Utah, a public school, and Brigham Young University, a private school run by the LDS Church. Few of the professors at the University of Utah, especially in the Humanities departments, are Mormons.

  My friends in the Humanities departments at the University were mostly single women; the ones who were married were childless. They all reliably vote Democrat; I do too. We all had the typical academic political beliefs and lifestyles. The only difference between me and my friends was that I didn’t believe conservatives were stupid. I know if I directly asked any one of my friends whether they thought Republicans were dumber than Democrats, they would answer ‘no,’ but that wasn’t the way most of them acted.

  When they found out I had grown up on a farm and my family still ran it, most of my friends asked if I was the first person in my family to get an education. My father is a farmer who earned an MBA from Harvard, and who runs a multimillion-dollar corporation. Two of my brothers have PhDs and three of them have Masters Degrees. The only reason my youngest brother doesn’t have a post-graduate degree is because he just graduated from college. I was amazed to find that all my friends at the University seemed to believe it took no intelligence to run a successful farm or business. I am a liberal myself but it became clear to me that most highly-educated liberals think that conservatives are either unintelligent (i.e., Bush) or evil (i.e., Cheney). I’m the first and only Hansen in three generations to be a registered Democrat, but the rest of my family is neither stupid nor evil.

  When it became clear in mid-April that all of Europe was overrun with zombies, it seemed the only conversation anyone had was whether they thought there would be a zombie outbreak in the US, and if there was, what they were going to do about it. My friends separated into three main camps: one planned on going to a government-designated disaster center that was not fortified or supplied with weapons; the second refused to believe the US government wouldn’t be able to prevent a zombie outbreak; and the third decided to form a c
o-op and set up their own shelter. Progress on the co-op was held up by a bitter argument between those who wanted to arm the co-op and those who thought having guns in a small enclosure was more dangerous than zombies. After all, guns hadn’t prevented zombies from overrunning Africa and Europe.

  I realized then that if there was a zombie outbreak in Utah, most of my friends would die. I decided to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. I would keep my job at the University and hope we didn’t get a zombie outbreak, but I would also join a group that had a reasonable chance of surviving.

  The only Mormon whom I knew well was Orville Johnson, a professor of philosophy. I had worked with him for a year on an advisory council at the University. I figured if any organization would survive a zombie attack, it would be the Mormons. I knew every ward practiced disaster relief even before the zombie outbreaks, and many Mormon families stored a year’s supply of food at their homes in case of a disaster. I contacted him and found out he was the Bishop of the ward that was just a few blocks from my house. I asked him if I could shelter in the ward with him in case of a zombie attack. I made it clear to him I was not religious and I had no intentions of converting to Mormonism, but if I was allowed a place in his ward, I would volunteer at least 30 hours a week of my time setting up wireless cell phone and satellite communications for his ward and the LDS Church. He told me every ward had a ham radio and one or two radio operators, so it wasn’t absolutely necessary to have additional communication options, but it wouldn’t hurt, and I could have a place in his ward.

  I spent the next couple of months setting up the Forest Dale First Ward with satellite data access. I even set the phone system up so if the landline to the ward went off-line, it would automatically connect through the satellite. I thought it would be a good idea to set the ward to handle Skype communications with other wards nearby so the separate wards could coordinate by video conferencing if they needed to. I set up wireless cameras around and in our ward, and by early September had also set up wireless cameras in the two wards closest to us. I set up the cameras to be accessible from all three wards.