Year of the Dead

by Jack J. Lee

  After the EMP, the Riverside ward members had been forced to rely on candles for light, and by candlelight they watched one member of their ward die every night. Initially, ward members tried to fight the vampire, first with guns until the vampire destroyed their guns, and then with clubs and knives, but they were never able to hurt it. All the men who attacked the vampire were wounded with cuts to their bellies like mine or had their arms broken. The wounded men were always the first to be killed. After a couple futile attempts to hurt the vampire, the ward members just watched the men die.

  Their vampire almost always came around 1:00 in the morning. It would pick out a man, then cut him on an arm or leg with a claw, and use its long tongue to lap at the bleeding wound. After a few minutes, it would let the man run away. The vampire would watch the man run then jump on him. The vampire moved like an insect or a spider. It often ran on all fours and could jump thirty to fifty feet. Sometimes its limbs moved so fast they could barely be seen. For hours the vampire would let its victim run and then catch him and lick at the wound it had made. When the victim finally couldn’t run any longer due to wounds and blood loss, the vampire would bite a chunk of flesh and bone from the victim’s wrist or ankle, and suck at the arterial blood as it came from the wound. After the man had died, the vampire would rip out his throat and then hold the body over its head, letting the last of the blood drain into its mouth.

  As the nights went by, the ward members could see the zombies outside their fence were trying to attack the vampire and they had hoped one day a zombie could catch hold of the vampire long enough for the other zombies to swarm it. Zombies were packed all around their fence. The densely-packed mass of zombies was close to fifty feet deep, which was right at the limit of how far a vampire could jump. They kept hoping that, one night, the vampire would miscalculate its jump and land in the middle of a crowd of zombies. They were repeatedly disappointed. The vampire would wait several hundred feet outside their enclosure until the zombies saw it and started toward it. Once the zombies were spread out enough, the vampire just ran through the zombie crowd and jumped over the fence.

  In all the years I’ve known Mark, I’d never seen him angry. Even in the middle of a fight, he looked he was having fun. At worst, I’ve seen him look annoyed. After the Riverside ward rescue, I saw him angry. He was angry with himself for not anticipating what the vampires had been doing to the other wards. On the 19th of November, the very next morning after the rescue, Mark sent about half our SaLTs and reservists down south close to the other wards where we knew people had survived. All day long, people who had heard the gunfire from the preceding two days had been coming to our ward. People holed up in their homes were running out of supplies and came to us in desperation once they heard evidence of other human survivors.

  Mark estimated there had been 500,000 zombies in the greater Salt Lake region at the beginning of the outbreak. We had already killed about 200,000. He sent men to three separate wards at the southern-most edge of the area we had previously explored and cleared of zombies. They were sent with enough ammunition and building supplies to make at least four rooms in a ward house vampire-proof. Their mission was to kill as many zombies as possible and to make as much noise as possible. Hopefully, this would bring out more survivors while we figured out a way to kill the vampires safely. Hiram Rockwell wanted to go out with his men, but Mark overruled him. Mark said he was going to be busy working with me, my partner, Helen, and Frank Burns to come up with a solution to the vampires. It was Hiram’s job to keep our ward secure.

  With the number of new survivors coming to our ward, we needed the SaLTs and the reserves to make sure everyone who had been bitten was quarantined and if a vampire attacked at night, we would be able to protect ourselves. I didn’t envy Hiram and his men. It was never pleasant to secure and quarantine people who didn’t want to be secured. Many of the people who got bit stayed in denial, refusing to admit they were dead. Sometimes these people had friends and family members that were also in denial. Our policy was to give them a choice: stay out of our enclosure and our neighboring areas and work it out on their own, or stay with us but locked in quarantine. Sounds reasonable, right? People tend be unreasonable when dealing with issues involving life and death. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to refuse to voluntarily submit to quarantine and refuse to leave. These people then had to be forcibly locked up. Almost always, these people were armed. It was touchy getting them disarmed and locked up.

  Mark already had an idea for how to take out vampires. It was based on the concept that the first thing a vampire did was to take out bright lights and that Helen had been able to immobilize a vampire with a Taser. Mark didn’t want to risk any of the few remaining light bulbs we had left from the EMP. He brought up the idea of limelights.

  You’ve heard the expression, “He wants to be in the limelight.” It originated in the theater in the 1800s, before electrical lights were used. In those days, a flame generated by a combination of oxygen and hydrogen was directed at a caustic substance called quicklime; this created an intensely bright light that could be focused on a stage. Quicklime is created by heating up limestone to 825 degrees Celsius. Oxygen and hydrogen can be created by running an electrical current through water. We had to find a way to make quicklime. We needed, somehow, to heat up limestone to 825 degrees Celsius and then to pump the hydrogen and oxygen we’d created with electrolysis into small canisters.

  Mark, Helen, and my partner Sam Tucker were going to figure out how to make a stun gun using a 12-volt car battery. The EMP had caused many of the car and truck batteries to explode but car batteries on metal shelves in stores with metal studs in the walls often were ok. The metal studs in the walls of the stores and the metal shelving helped guide the electrical energy of the EMP away from the batteries. The goal was to increase the voltage put out by a car battery from 12.6 volts to 50,000 volts. Watts, or the work done by electricity, = volts x amps.

  You use a transformer to increase the voltage. Transformers only work with alternating currents and batteries have direct current. You need an inverter to change direct currents to alternating currents to be able to use a transformer.

  The theories behind transformers and inverters are simple. Building these devices was not as simple. We were dealing with voltages that could easily kill a person. If the inverter and the transformer we were using were built incorrectly, we could easily cause the car battery to explode, which would spread sulfuric acid everywhere. We had to make sure when we built these devices that they were sturdy and reliable.

  Frank and I worked on getting the limelight ready. We got a working limelight ready in two days. It took us another two days to get six functional limelights. Mark, Helen, and Sam worked on the vampire stun-gun. It took four days to get a working vampire stun-gun, or VSG, that was reliable. It took another three days to make a total of six VSGs. The VSG was a limelight surrounded by steel prongs at the end of a six-foot-long fiberglass pole; the steel prongs were attached by an electrical cord to a power box holding a transformer, inverter, and car battery. The power box could be carried in a backpack. Our limelights were made up of a small cylinder of quicklime next to a small canister of oxygen and hydrogen gas. Salvaged parabolic mirrors from headlights were used to focus the limelight. There were twelve steel prongs set around the light in six sets of two prongs, two inches apart. Each of these six sets of two prongs had a cathode and an anode. If a vampire touched any cathode and anode at the same time, a 60,000-volt current would run through the vampire until the stun-gun was turned off.

  The plan was to hunt vampires in pairs. One man carried and operated the VSG and the other carried a .300 Win Mag rifle. Any vampire that tried to destroy a limelight would touch at least two of the prongs surrounding the light, which would then send a 60,000 volt current through the vampire, freezing it in place. His partner would then blow a hole in the vamp’s head at close range. We were ready to kill vampires.

  The men Mark had sent off had return
ed. They estimated they had killed another 100,000-or-so zombies. They came back with another 47 survivors. On Thanksgiving Day, Mark, Hiram and the SaLTs took off to rescue the remaining wards in the Salt Lake region.

  Chapter 35: Hiram Rockwell, November 25th to November 28th, Year 1

  It was good to be back in the field again. I wanted to kill some vampires. I’m happiest being a soldier. It was necessary sometimes to act like a policeman, but it didn’t mean I liked it. We were a small enough community that crime wasn’t a big issue. At this point, zombies around the ward weren’t a big problem. We had cleared out almost all of them and the zombie traps were working well. The major problem was dealing with recently-bitten civilians. They weren’t the enemy but they were dangerous and it was hard not treating them like the enemy. I told the Director that soldiers made bad policemen. We needed to start a dedicated police force.

  The ward we were going to rescue next was the Little Cottonwood Nineteenth Ward on 6180 South Glenoaks Street. We were able to drive our armored trucks within a few blocks of this ward. The numbers of zombies were really down. When the outbreak had first occurred, they had seemed endless, but with all the zombies we had taken out, you could go a few blocks without seeing a single one. There were about twenty to thirty thousand zombies around Little Cottonwood. It didn’t take long to clear them out and we were able to get into the enclosure.

  Glenoaks had been attacked by multiple vampires on October 10th, like everywhere else. They had lost a lot of men, just as we had in that first attack. They hadn’t seen a vampire until a week ago, when a single vampire started attacking them at night. We now knew where the Riverside vampire had gone. The Glenoaks men had tried to fight back, and many of them were wounded. The most common injury was broken bones. In the past week, all the men with belly wounds had either died due to their injuries or had been killed by the vampire.

  Alan Redding, our nurse, was with us. He had brought all the medical supplies he and Mayor Bingham thought would be helpful. One of the Glenoaks survivors was Dr. Al Martin. He was an ob/gyn. Dr. Martin had a broken right arm but he helped Alan take care of the wounded as best he could.

  We had three men armed with VSGs (Vampire Stun Guns) and the rest of us were armed with big-game hunting rifles we knew could kill a vampire. We waited for night fall. The Director and Frank were the duo who were first up to take it out. I was on the back-up team.

  At 1:06 a.m., the vampire dropped through the hole in the ceiling it had previously made in the ward’s gymnasium. The Director flipped on his VSG. The light was almost blinding in its brightness. As expected, the vampire jumped immediately to the light. It swiped at the light with one claw-filled hand, and as it did, an arc of electricity burst from the VSG prongs and struck the vampire, knocking it to the ground. The Director immediately stabbed down with VSG. The vampire on the ground shook as the electricity ran through it. The smell of burnt flesh filled the air. Frank Burns shot the vampire through the head and then through the heart. It was all over. The right technology had made easy what had previously been extremely difficult.

  We radioed back home. Helen Hansen had figured out how to boost the range of our walkie-talkies so we could stay in radio contact. As the Director explained to Art Bingham how easy it had been to take out the vampire, we could hear cheers in the background when Art spoke. I think all of us here had been in a mild state of shock. It had been so easy. There was pandemonium. There was so much cheering and shouting the Director stopped trying to talk on the radio.

  The next morning we waited until the reserves came to the ward with vehicles to transport the entire ward back home. The SaLTs headed to the other two wards that needed to be rescued. They were easy. These wards had even fewer zombies around them than did the Glenoaks ward. Other than the initial attack by multiple vampires on October 10th, these wards had not been attacked.

  Chapter 36: Jim Wright, December 2nd to December 20th, Year 1

  On December 2nd, we celebrated Thanksgiving a week late with a huge party that included everyone in our community. By then we had nearly 2,500 people. We were bursting out of our seams with people. We cleared out all the cars and vehicles in our enclosure and built a huge two-story dormitory that could sleep 1,500 people. We fit so many people into this dormitory it didn’t need to be heated. The heat coming off the packed human bodies was enough to keep it warm. We had barely enough toilets and shower facilities for the residents. I got in touch with Evan Meese immediately to have him dig a well for my house.

  Despite the overcrowding, morale was good. It may have just been canned foods and cereal for Thanksgiving dinner, but it was better than what many of our new arrivals had had for months. For many, it was the height of luxury to be able to eat and drink as much as they wanted. Many of them had been on tight rations before arriving. If we hadn’t had so many new residents, we probably would have grumbled about not having fresh turkey and all the things people have been brought up to expect with Thanksgiving, but when you saw so many people being so grateful, you understood how lucky we were.

  It was almost impossible now to find a zombie within five miles of our ward. Everyone could see the living arrangements were temporary. People were moving out into individual homes as fast as possible. All of the vehicles that had been abandoned on our streets had been taken to parking lots that we had turned into automobile graveyards. The effectiveness of the VSGs had surprised everyone. Mark Jones had been able to save four diesel trucks from the EMP by placing them in Faraday-cage garages. We now had four armored patrol vehicles touring around the neighborhoods we had taken back, and driving with their headlights on. These vehicles were encased in steel wire fencing that could be electrified. They had a metal platform in front of the headlights that a vampire could stand on when it went for the lights. The windshields were removed so the men in the cab of the truck could shoot at zombies and vampires in front of them.

  Twice in December, a patrol vehicle was attacked by a vampire. It seemed vampires couldn’t help themselves; they instinctively attacked every artificial light they saw. Both attacks went the same way. A vampire would jump to the front of the truck and grab on to the protective fencing to try to destroy the headlights; they landed on the platform that had been conveniently provided for them. The fence and the platform would then be electrified, freezing the vampire in place, and then the men in the truck would shoot the vampire.

  The pace of construction rose geometrically. Every person who survived had too much work to do. Up until Thanksgiving, Helen Hansen had been the only woman who wanted to be in the reserves. After the Riverside ward joined us, ninety-eight women wanted to join. These women were led by Emma Dietrich, who had been the Riverside second ward’s Relief Society President before the zombie outbreak. Every LDS ward has a women-only organization called the Relief Society that is there to help women and their families. Emma Dietrich was a 57-year-old grandmother who had helplessly watched her husband, a son, and a son-in-law be tortured and killed by a vampire. Even before the zombie outbreak she had been a formidable woman. Now she was a force of nature. She refused to ever be helpless again. Most of the women from the Riverside ward agreed with her, and almost all those who could physically handle being in the reserves volunteered. There were so many women now that Mark set up a separate service he called the Valkyries, made up only of women. Emma was appointed Captain. The primary purpose of the Valkyries was homeland defense.

  As November turned into December, I could see Art Bingham get more and more stressed. Cheryl was worried too, but Art frankly looked like hell. He had been in contact with his youngest daughter and her husband until the EMP. He was anxious to find out how she was doing, but he also understood the SaLTs had to be properly prepared before they could make an expedition over forty miles to our south. On December 5th, Mark came to visit me. I knew him well enough to know this was not just a social call.

  “Hey Jim, how’s your belly?”

  “Getting better. I can cough without any pain now.
”

  “You know we need more SaLTs, right?”

  “Yeah, don’t know if I can handle a twenty-mile run right now.”

  “Oh yeah, Jim, you probably won’t be able to run much for another month or two but when we go to Provo we’ll need four drivers. It would help if the drivers could also shoot. You interested?”

  I was cursing inside my head. I had been hoping for another couple of months until I was completely healed. I said “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  Mark smiled. That fucker knew exactly what was going on in my head and he found it amusing. “That’s good, Jim.”

  On December 7th, the SaLTs left to go to Provo. I left with them. We had twenty-four men squeezed into four trucks. All of us drivers were the walking wounded who were good with a gun. Cheryl was semi-hysterical when I left. She wanted her sister rescued but she was also worried about me. Her father, on the other hand, was entirely joyous. He knew even better than I did how changeable Cheryl was. I could tell he thought I would be gone from Cheryl’s life in a few weeks. I couldn’t blame him; I thought so, too. I could tell he was praying his daughter Tara was ok. He wasn’t worried about me at all.

  I thought that I would be spending all my time driving. I should have known better. Mark had asked Dr. Martin, the ob/gyn, to examine my belly before we left. Dr. Martin told me and Mark that my wound had healed enough to start some low-grade strengthening exercises. I hadn’t thought much about that examination, but I should have. Once we got on I-15 and had gone the ten miles that had previously been cleared by the SaLTs, Hiram Rockwell told us to unload and start walking down the highway to make sure any zombie trapped in a vehicle was taken care of and to help clear the road.