Year of the Dead Read online

  Year of the Dead

  Copyright 2010 Jack J. Lee

  Version 4

  Edited by:

  Jynna Gillispie

  Deck Deckert

  Edit911

  “Vampires and Zombies, oh my heck!”

  Anonymous survivor, Salt Lake City, Utah

  Table of Contents:

  Dedication:

  Prologue: Mark Jones, September 14th, Year 1

  Chapter 1: Zutar Probe, October 5th, Year 0

  Chapter 2: Mark Jones, September 13th, Year 1

  Chapter 3: Mark Jones, September 13th, Year 1

  Chapter 4: Mark Jones, September 13th to September 14th, Year 1

  Chapter 5: Zutar Probe, January 6th, Year 1

  Chapter 6: Art Bingham, March 13th to September 11th, Year 1

  Chapter 7: Art Bingham, September 11th to September 12th, Year 1

  Chapter 8: Art Bingham, September 13th, Year 1

  Chapter 9: Jim Wright, October 8th, Year 1

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

  Chapter 11: Mark Jones, September 14th, Year 1

  Chapter 12: Mark Jones, September 15th, Year 1

  Chapter 13: Mark Jones, September 15th, Year 1

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

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

  Chapter 16: Art Bingham, September 13th to 16th, Year 1

  Chapter 17: Mark Jones, September 16th, Year 1

  Chapter 18: Zutar Probe, October 9th, 9:30 p.m., Year 1

  Chapter 19: Helen Hanson, September 16th to October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 20: Jim Wright, October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 21: Mark Jones, September 16th to October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 22: Jim Wright, October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 23: Mark Jones, October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 24: Mike Smith, September 11th to October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 25: Hiram Rockwell, October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 26: Helen Hansen, October 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 27: Mark Jones, October 9th to 10th, Year 1

  Chapter 28: Hiram Rockwell, October 10th, Year 1

  Chapter 29: Mark Jones, October 10th, Year 1

  Chapter 30: Helen Hansen, October 10th, Year 1

  Chapter 31: Jim Wright, October 10th to November 1st, Year 1

  Chapter 32: Hiram Rockwell, October 10th to November 18th, Year 1

  Chapter 33: Peter Bingham, October 10th to November 22nd, Year 1

  Chapter 34: Jim Wright, November 1st to November 25th, Year 1

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

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

  Chapter 37: Jim Wright, December 20th to 25th, Year 1

  Chapter 38: Mark Jones, December 25th, Year 1

  Sample of Book II in the Sustainable Earth Series: Death by Revelation

  Appendix A: How We Built Suppressors (Excerpt from lecture given by Jim Wright to students at Salt Lake Academy)

  Appendix B: How We Built Vampire Stun Guns (Excerpt from lecture given by Jim Wright to students at Salt Lake Academy)

  Dedication:

  I could never have written this book without the support of my wife. Rose, I love you. Thank you for being willing to put up with all my obsessions. Without you this book would not be possible.

  I would like to thank all my friends and family who were willing to read my book in its unedited form with all my mistakes. I’m grateful that you were willing to listen to me go on and on about my ideas. Dad, Mike, Bill, Brandon and James, your comments and suggestions mattered.

  Bart, without you, so many details of this book would have been wrong. Thanks for being such a good sport.

  Jason, you and I both know how lost I would have been without your technical help.

  My manuscript was greatly improved by Jynna Gillispie, Deck Deckert of A-1 Editing Service, and the editors of Edit911. James Bourne is the artist that drew my cover art; he did a wonderful job.

  Prologue: Mark Jones, September 14th, Year 1

  Crushing a throat is not as easy as it might seem. The thyroid cartilage—the medical term for the “Adam’s apple”—can wiggle or move out of the way if you don’t hit it just right. An off-angle hit will just move it, causing moderate pain and a gag reflex. When fighting something stronger and faster than you, you’re playing the percentages; you don’t have time to waste on a blow that may only be annoying. I’d already hit the vampire with enough force to knock down a human, but it hadn’t budged. So instead of trying to crush the vampire’s throat, I chose to rip it out.

  If you grab the Adam’s apple like I was planning to, it’s exposed without bone or muscle protecting it. In positioning my right hand as if reaching for a cup, I imagined I was reaching for the vamp’s spinal cord, placing my thumb to one side of its Adam’s apple and my fingers to the other side. It was charging at me as fast as it could. I went into the classic thrust position of fencing—left leg pointing straight behind me, left knee locked, and left foot braced perpendicular to the line of my leg. My shoulders were in line with my legs—right arm straight, elbow locked, and shoulder positioned so the entire weight of my body was supporting my arm.

  The force of my braced body hit the resistance of the vamp’s throat. The momentum of its charge helped push my fingers and thumb deep into its neck between the thyroid cartilage and the muscles on either side. I’m only human, so my fingers bounced off the vamp’s spinal cord, but by then, it had realized that something was wrong. That bounce allowed me to flex my fingers and grip the thyroid cartilage from behind and, as the vamp instinctively pulled away, I ripped the thyroid cartilage out. A burst of arterial blood drenched my face. I had torn one of the vampire’s carotid arteries along with its throat.

  The vamp I was fighting had been expecting easy prey. It had no reason to believe I would be different from any other human it had encountered. Having its throat pulled out stunned it and gave me the few seconds I needed to wrap my left hand around the back of its head, grabbing its chin from behind. With the palm of my right hand on the far side of its chin, I rolled the vampire’s head back, extending and twisting my whole body. If the vamp hadn’t been stunned, or if it had resisted me, I don’t think I could have snapped its spine. Its hesitation gave me the split second I needed as I rotated its head. Once I’d turned his head around backwards, I felt a sharp snap. The vamp went limp. Yesterday, I would have stopped at this point but a lot had happened in the last day and I was paranoid. Yesterday, I didn’t believe in vampires and now I was killing one.

  I’m a product of American pop culture. I’ve read vampire books and watched vampire movies. According to some of the books, you have to spike a vampire’s heart with a wooden stake and cut off its head to be sure it’s dead. So I kept twisting the vamp’s head like it was the cap on a cheap bottle of wine. The resistance against the twisting at first increased a lot, then suddenly decreased. I got out a folding knife and cut its head off. By then, the vamp’s neck muscles, ligaments, and bones had been severely traumatized. It was easy to cut off its head. Its body was hot to touch. Instead of the normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for a human, it felt like it was at least 120 degrees.

  I looked around. I didn’t see a piece of wood that I could use as a stake. Last summer I visited Teotihuacan, the ruins near Mexico City. The guide I hired at the time took particular pleasure in describing how the Totonac priests, who had built this city, cut the hearts out of the sacrificial victims. The guide explained that the Aztecs came after the Totonac and learned how to cut out hearts from them. Remembering what the guide described, I took my knife and cut between the left third and fourth ribs. I reached with both hands into the
cut and pulled up and out on the ribs. The rib cage is designed to resist compression forces or blows from the outside, but not to resist forces from the inside. The ribs pulled out with surprising ease. I cut out the exposed heart. With its head cut off and its heart outside its body, I was sure this vamp wasn’t going to reanimate.

  I suddenly realized that my whole body was trembling. I slowly lowered myself to the ground. My legs were weak and it was either sit down or fall down. I had blood on my hands, face, neck and chest. I think some blood got into my eye, and none of that blood was mine. Man, I hope that whatever bug, virus, or bacteria creates vamps is in its saliva not its blood or else I’m screwed.

  I knew I should be washing blood off me right away but all I could do was shake.

  Chapter 1: Zutar Probe, October 5th, Year 0

  The Zutar Environment Sustainability Species Protection (ESSP) probe went into Earth Orbit on October 5th. It sent a message back to its base station it was overdue for resupply and a maintenance overhaul. The same message had been sent for millions of years without a response. The AI controlling the ESSP reasoned the Zutar were most likely extinct. Their extinction did not affect its mission or its programmed need to send updates on a regular basis.

  The probe had been in continuous operation for 40.89 million years—the last 39 million without maintenance or new supplies. Its batteries were losing ability to hold a charge. It had supplies for just one more mission. The ESSP studied Earth according to its programmed directives.

  Its primary directive was to study the biology and chemistry of all planets that could sustain intelligent life. Earth had one sapient species, Homo Sapiens/humans. Human settlements engulfed 90% of the planet’s land mass. Human technology depended on the unsustainable use of hydrocarbons and nuclear fission without the ability to eliminate toxic waste products. The likelihood of human extinction due to environmental degradation within ten human generations was 91.02%. The probability of concurrent mass extinctions of other Earth flora and fauna was 97.3%.

  The probe’s secondary directive was to preserve distinct and unique planetary environments and biodiversity. There were too many humans on Earth. For its biosphere to survive, the number of humans needed to drop from 6.8 billion to less than 100 million.

  The final directive was to use the the least intrusive method possible for all interventions. If genetic manipulation was required, end results had to be consistent with indigenous biology. The existence of other more advanced civilizations must be kept hidden. It was best for aboriginal cultures to believe they were alone; as such, interventions had to be consistent with the original culture.

  The probe accessed electronic human media. It discovered that humans entertained themselves with stories of massive human die-offs. Numerous books and movies described zombie outbreaks ending human civilization. The AI determined a zombie plague was the most effective way to achieve its three directives.

  Chapter 2: Mark Jones, September 13th, Year 1

  My name is Mark Jones. I’m a 46-year-old trust-fund baby, living in Sugar House, Utah, an older suburb of Salt Lake City. I lost my parents when I was 22 and ever since I’ve had a trust fund that paid me 300 thousand dollars a year.

  The only reason to work is because you need the money. I don’t need the money. I’m not interested in getting a job and I am always looking for something to distract me. One of the ways I distract myself is by taking on projects that use up a lot of time, like running a 100-mile race. The most famous 100-mile race in Utah is the Wasatch 100—a hundred-mile, 5700-feet-of-elevation-gain-trail run that goes from Layton to Sundance every September. My goal was to run the race in less than 30 hours.

  For the last six months I had been spending from 30 to 50 hours a week running the mountain trails around Salt Lake and Park City. My respect for the guys, who do this kind of stuff, while working and having families, went up a lot. After eight hours of running in the mountains surrounded by some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, all I wanted to do when I got home was to eat a huge meal, drink one or two beers, watch a documentary from the History Channel I had TiVo’d, and go to sleep. It was one of the most Zen periods of my life.

  While I was training, I didn’t read a newspaper, surf the web, or watch the news. When I needed a break I’d call some friends and go out to a B-grade action movie and/or a sports bar. There wasn’t much call at a movie or sports bar to talk about current events.

  On September 10th and 11th, I ran the Wasatch 100. I had heard great things about how well-supported the race was. It wasn’t. There was hardly any support and there were surprisingly few runners; it took me 25 hours and 32 minutes to complete the race. I had trained properly so the lack of support wasn’t a big issue. Afterwards I went home and slept almost continuously for 48 hours.

  My home was built in the 1950s. It’s one of those post-World War II brick homes with real hardwood floors, a detached garage and a small fenced-in back yard. I had 1000 feet of finished space on the main floor; a small cubbyhole of a finished attic that could have been, but never was, used as a guest bedroom; and a finished basement that I used as my bedroom. I bought the house ten years ago and for the first six years I spent all my time working on the house.

  In the basement I have no windows. I generally sleep whenever I am tired, which as often as not is during the day. After the Wasatch 100, all I did was sleep, occasionally getting up to drink some Gatorade, eat some cold pasta out of the can, and go to the bathroom. Two days later I felt human. I looked at the alarm clock and it was 10 a.m. I’d had enough of the darkness and wanted to see the sunlight. I got out of bed, threw on my robe and went to my upstairs kitchen. The only place I have to sit is a single stool next to the island. I have a coffee maker and a small laptop I use to surf the news. These two appliances were the only things I used on the main floor.

  I made some coffee and started up the laptop for the first time in months. My Yahoo homepage didn’t come up. I checked my wireless signal strength and it was good. After working on this for a few minutes and getting frustrated for the first time since I’d walked upstairs, I looked out my windows. What the fuck! My entire neighborhood looked like a set from a zombie movie. There was a car turned over in front of my house, multiple car wrecks, a house three doors down looked like it had been burned, and I saw two of my neighbors in zombie costume wandering in the street.

  Because of where I live, I couldn’t escape the fact that all three High School Musicals were filmed in Utah. It is cheaper to shoot films here than in California but it had to be expensive as hell to set up a zombie scene on a residential street, much less burn down a house. I couldn’t get my home page to work or log onto the Salt Lake Tribune or Deseret News websites to find out what was happening, so I put in a Google search for the terms zombie and Sugar House, Utah. The only thing that came up were articles that had been cached and all those articles were about zombie outbreaks. I was thinking that this had to be a joke. . I have some acquaintances that had the IT know-how to mess with my home network, but we weren’t good enough friends for them to bother playing an elaborate prank on me. I read some of the articles. It was an incredibly detailed batch of fake archived news stories about a zombie outbreak that had started in Africa and spread throughout the world.

  These articles were intense. They were labeled as being from Fox News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of other papers whose names I didn’t recognize. I remember when that indie movie, “The Blair Witch Project” came out. One of the coolest things about that movie was the website that gave the background to the movie. This website had eye witness reports, blogs, newspaper articles and everything else you could think of, giving the appearance of a real documentary. Everyone I knew that had checked out the website before the movie went to see it. Some production company had obviously decided to do “The Blair Witch Project” with a lot more money. This was too involved and cost too much money to be a prank.

  One of the first things I did when
I started working on my house was to install one of the best surveillance systems on the market. The cameras outside my house are all disguised. I have enough hard drive space dedicated to these cameras to hold about a week’s worth of video.

  I thought it would be cool to observe the movie crew setting up in my neighborhood so I logged on to my laptop and backed up to the surveillance tapes on September 11th to when I had come home from the race and then fast-forwarded the video from then. September 11th; hmm, I thought the producers of this movie were pushing the boundaries of taste in choosing this date. An hour into the video replay, I realized I had just missed being awake for the show. I saw neighbors coming out of their homes with their bags and loading up their cars and trucks within minutes of each other.

  Wow, this was realistic. I wondered why I hadn’t been contacted to take part in the filming. Everyone was leaving at the same time. There were quite a few people who looked sick, were moving slowly or were getting help from relatives to get into their vehicles. I saw a traffic jam form in a cul-de-sac in a quiet residential neighborhood street. I couldn’t believe the amount of detail that was being put into this movie. None of these people were professional actors. They were clearly my neighbors. I was really surprised by the quality of the acting. Everyone, including kids like 6-year-old Sarah from a few doors down, was in character.

  Even though there was no sound, I was really enjoying the show. I made a note to myself not to overwrite this footage. The traffic jam had cleared and there were only a few neighbors left in their homes. Most of those were also packing up their cars and getting ready to leave when the zombie attack started. It occurred over a period of minutes, but all the people who looked sick started attacking everyone else. With all the biting and the screaming, it was just like a Romero movie. One lady—Mary somebody—was swarmed by five zombies and was knocked off her feet right in front of my house. The zombies started devouring her. This was hilarious and really well acted. Most surveillance cameras take such low quality video that facial features can barely be recognized. My cameras take high-def video.