Year of the Dead Read online

  The zombies were all over Mary and I was having problems seeing all the details of the attack. I expanded the screen shot so I could see her face and part of her right shoulder. I didn’t know her too well. I’d say hello when I saw her in the neighborhood. I didn’t know she was a professional actress. I couldn’t believe she was an amateur because she really looked hysterical. Then I saw it. One of the zombies bit off her nose. This was sick; I mean it’s ok to bite a neck or an arm, but disfigurement of someone’s face, even in a movie? That’s just wrong. This was sick enough to watch again.

  As I watched the scene again, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. This wasn’t the fascinated, entertained sick feeling I’d had moments before. I had this kind of sensation just once before in my life, when I was in college. I had walked into a party at a friend’s apartment. The first thing I focused on was two guys with facial hair on a couch, French-kissing. I had grown up in Ohio; this was the first time I had ever seen two guys making out, and man, were they making out. I must have stood there for a few seconds before my conscious mind could remind me that what they were doing was ok, I was personally ok with it and I needed to move on. To this day I remember that feeling I had in the pit of my stomach. Since then I’ve seen other gay men making out without ever getting the same response. This was the first time since then that I had that same sick feeling.

  I reversed the video again, watching the zombie bite off Mary’s nose one more time. I no longer felt sick; I was terrified. The kind of special effects it took to simulate the blood coming from Mary’s wound, and the appearance of that wound, could only be done with CGI. This wasn’t CGI. This was real.

  I focused my eyes away from my laptop to the street outside my window. Less than 50 feet from me, there were two zombies walking slowly on my sidewalk. They looked like my neighbors the Harrisons, but a deadened, deranged version of that retired couple. For the last hour or so I had been sitting in my tighty-whities and a bathrobe, less than 50 feet away from the zombies, with just a couple of double-paned, thermally efficient windows between me and them.

  So why hadn’t they seen me? I don’t have curtains on any of my windows. It dawned on me the sun was shining on my windows facing the street. The glare from my windows was probably making it difficult to see into my kitchen. Shit; I had come upstairs around 10 a.m. My laptop now said it was 11:12. The closer it got to noon, the less glare I would have on my windows. I had to get out of the kitchen and back downstairs but I had to do it silently and make sure I didn’t need to come back up for awhile. Zombie eyes are probably like humans in being drawn to motion. My sitting here unmoving in front of the laptop was probably as important as the glare from my windows in keeping me hidden from them.

  As slowly as I could, I moved off of my stool and back toward the door to the bedroom stairs. When I hunt, I try not to look at the deer directly. Instead, I use the corners of my eyes to keep them in sight for as long as possible. You would think it wouldn’t matter how you looked at an animal, or for that matter, a human, but a lot of hunters will tell you that animals can tell if someone is staring at them. If you stare at a woman in a bar, she will almost always meet your gaze. All I know is that I have a better chance of bagging a deer if I track it with my peripheral vision than when I stare at it directly. I don’t know if zombies are the same as deer, but why take chances? I kept an eye on the zombies in front of my house through my peripheral vision.

  For the first time since I had gotten upstairs, I scanned all the windows of my house on the main floor. It is basically one room, so the windows on all sides of my house were visible. My backyard and two side yards were empty. I had left the door to my bedroom stairs open, which made it easier for me to slip inside. I closed the door slowly, moving it a couple of inches every minute. I had no place to go, so I had all the time in the world to get this done right. Visible motion was my enemy. If I was seen, I would die.

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

  After I closed the door and locked it, I went downstairs and immediately pulled up all my surveillance cameras in real-time. My 60-inch flat screen was big enough to show me what was in view of every camera around my house. I had made sure when I installed them that there were no blind spots.

  The only zombie action by the house was in the street. In order to protect the privacy of my neighbors, I had purposely not aimed cameras into any of their homes. I now wished I had. I made sure the alarms on my doors and windows were on, and made sure to turn down the alarm volume. I had installed the alarm system myself. I could choose three settings: one setting was the typical high-decibel alarm which, if it went off, would likely bring every zombie within hearing distance to my house; another caused the bedroom light to turn on and flicker without sound; the last would cause Vanilla Ice’s song “Ice Ice Baby” to come on at low volume. This was a song I normally would never play. I set my alarm to Vanilla Ice.

  I went to the wet bar next to my futon and poured myself double bourbon on the rocks. I always knew I was a self-absorbed bastard, but I never thought I’d be so self-involved I would miss the end of the world. Looking back on the last few weeks I could see people had been discussing the zombie outbreaks around me, but I hadn’t noticed. None of the people I had talked to in the past month, including the guys I had gone to bars with since the problems had started, had been close enough friends for me to care about what they were saying—to actually listen instead of faking it. I hadn’t dated anyone, much less slept with anyone, for the past six months. Almost every woman I had ever dated called me narcissistic, and I knew I was a little. I now realized using the adjective ‘little’ was like calling Mount Everest ‘small’.

  I opened up a corner of my flat screen to my DirecTV. This allowed me to keep an eye on my outside camera views. I tried to pull up local TV stations. There was no signal. I tried CNN, Fox, Headline News, and every other news channel. I got nothing. HBO and Showtime were still showing movies, as was the Playboy Channel. The History Channel was still on. It looked as if only the channels that were pre-programmed were on. Every channel or network that required live humans was off the air.

  I went to my stereo and turned the radio on. I got static on all the FM channels I had pre-set. I tuned the radio to the two NPR stations in Salt Lake City and got an American Emergency Broadcast signal. The only signal I got on an AM channel was a repeat loop recording that listed all the local emergency centers that people in the Salt Lake region were supposed to go to. The closest emergency center to my house was the local high school.

  I got back on Google. I put in the search terms zombie outbreak that had been updated in the last six months and got millions of hits. Almost all of the hits were cached, meaning the original websites were down and these had been replicated on Google servers. It took me about an hour to write a C# program that automatically copied all these files onto my own hard drive. I’ve taken a few computer classes and I would never claim to be a programmer, but I can put together a program for something as simple as automating mouse clicks. I have always had a ridiculous amount of digital memory at my house, bought to store thousands of movie files I had never bothered to use. I didn’t know how long Google would be up. I wanted to make sure I could get access to what Google had amassed, even if Google went down.

  My house is unusual for three reasons:

  1. I’m a guy.

  2. I have more money than I need.

  3. I am always looking for ways to kill time.

  I bought my house right around the time that global warming became a big deal. To tell you the truth, I’m agnostic about whether global warming is real or not and I don’t really care. But I like fiddling with interesting technology, and renewable energy is interesting. After I bought my house I put in an array of solar panels and solar water heaters that took up my entire back yard and the roof of my 2.5-car garage. I dug up my entire back yard and put in an underground storage facility I call my lair. I had room for a 20,000-gallon cistern, a fully s
tocked woodworking shop, and some basic metal working equipment. Because of my solar panels, I didn’t need a geothermal heating unit but since I put in a well, I had one installed. I even went independent in my use of the internet. I didn’t use a phone or cable line; I had satellite internet access.

  I was never a survivalist; I never thought there would an apocalypse. By sheer coincidence, my house had become the perfect place to survive a zombie outbreak.

  I logged back on to my outside surveillance video footage. This time I didn’t focus on Mary. I knew how that story would end. I paid attention to which houses on the street were homes the families had evacuated on-time and those that were not. Some of my attacked neighbors had guns. Everyone with a gun got a couple shots off, with mixed effects, but was soon taken down by zombies.

  About a half-hour after the start of the zombie attack on my neighborhood, a cop car with lights flashing arrived. By this time, all my neighbors had multiple zombies on top of them. The driver used his pistol to shoot at some zombies, but he missed. Another cop was in the passenger seat shooting an AR-15 out the window. He almost always shot a zombie in the head. He was an amazing shot. I forgot about keeping quiet; I started cheering, “Come on man, kill them all!” The driver never stopped. He drove 20 to 30 miles an hour, knocking down zombies, and running over the people they were attacking. I don’t know if he was doing this on purpose but he was probably doing the people a favor.

  Being run over didn’t seem to faze the zombies but, for the most part, it put people out of their miseries, either by killing them or sending them into shock. If these creatures were anything like the movie zombies, one bite meant death and all the people he ran over had been bitten. Once the cop reached the cul-de-sac, he dropped his gun and did a bootlegger spin. His pistol wasn’t a loss because I don’t think he had hit a single zombie. All the while his partner was blowing zombie after zombie’s head off. The cop car blew out of the street going at least 50 when it passed the stop sign. It didn’t stop. Man, I hope those guys survived.

  The zombies that were still standing all had their mouths open like they were screaming and most of them tottered slowly after the cop car. Within a few minutes, all the zombies that were capable of walking had left my street following the car, except the ones still gnawing on my ex-neighbors. The zombies that stayed were all clean-platers, chewing every bit of flesh off my neighbors’ bodies. When they got to the bones, they chewed on them like they were dogs. Many of them were smashing my neighbors’ skulls against the concrete sidewalk until the skulls burst open, and then scooping bits of brain out with their hands or just burying their mouths into the open skulls. They seemed to particularly like brains. A couple of zombies had eaten so much, their bellies looked like they were about to explode.

  Within a surprisingly short period of time, all trace of my neighbors was gone. The zombies with distended abdomens left, but new ones who were still hungry kept coming into view and started eating the zombies who had just had their heads shot off by the cop. I didn’t see any instances of an animated zombie attacking another animated zombie, but it looked like dead ones were fair game. The sharpshooter cop had killed close to 20 zombies. Less than two hours later, all those were eaten.

  Once all the free food was gone, the zombie population on my street dropped to just the ‘Harrisons’ and one other zombie that I didn’t recognize. My street had been full of pet dogs and cats. Any time one of these pets showed up on my cameras, the zombies gave a slow motion chase after them and then about an hour later were back on my street. Most of the rest of the footage just showed the three zombies walking up and down my neighborhood. I fast-forwarded through the boring parts but then noticed that the zombies disappeared from view from about 1 to 4 two nights in a row. It looked like zombies slept.

  I was close to the end of the video when I heard gunshots outside my house. I switched to a real-time view on my cameras. The Harrisons and the third zombie, who I had named Bob, took off from view. For about 45 minutes I heard shot after shot. It almost sounded like a machine gun was being fired. Thousands of rounds had to have been shot by the time the shooting stopped. I hoped the poor bastards that were shooting did ok. I wish I could say I had to fight off the urge to grab my rifle and go out and try to help; I wasn’t even tempted. Some years back, I bought a Springfield M1A, a civilian version of the US military firearm used in the Korean War, because I thought it would be fun to shoot. Around the same time I bought a Glock pistol and a Smith & Wesson revolver. After a few months of shooting I lost interest in guns but I never got rid of them.

  I had seen the cops shoot down close to 20 zombies and saw how little that got them. Shooting a gun would bring every single zombie within hearing distance. In a suburb like Sugar House, this probably meant thousands of zombies. If I was going to survive killing a zombie, I needed to do it silently so I wouldn’t get swarmed. I couldn’t be certain, because I didn’t have sound on my cameras, but it looked like when a zombie was hunting, it screamed. When the Harrisons and Bob took off just now, they had their mouths open. This meant if I was attacked, I would need to have either a fast way of getting away or would need to kill every zombie in sight very quickly. I had enough food in my house to last me a few weeks, but sooner or later, I would need to leave my lair and look for food.

  I kept my cameras on real-time views of my empty street while I started reading some of the more relevant Google hits I’d gotten on the zombie outbreak. According to some articles in January, a foundation run by a software billionaire, along with the World Health Organization, announced that there had been a breakthrough in AIDS research and they were going to start human trials in Kenya. Shortly afterwards, there were rumors being spread by Muslim imams that these vaccines were killing people, and after they died they were reanimating from their graves. These were the same bozos who a few years ago had been telling Muslim Kenyans to avoid getting polio vaccines because they were made with pig by-products, so not much attention was given to it at first. But then, fuzzy poor-quality cell phone videos began to be posted on YouTube, showing people being attacked by zombies. The software billionaire hadn’t gotten rich by being stupid or slow, so he started disassociating himself from the vaccine and pledged multiple billions to help counteract the side-effect of the vaccine. This pissed off the UN bureaucrats that ran the WHO and a PR war started between the billionaire and the bureaucrats. This press-release war distracted the news media for a few weeks.

  On March 13th, a CNN news reporter and his entire team were caught on live feed being eaten by zombies. Within a few days the UN, the United States, and all the African countries surrounding Kenya announced a quarantine of Kenya. The US sent a fleet to stop the flow of ships fleeing the Kenyan coast into the Indian Ocean. Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania set up border guards and tried to stop the refugees from getting into their countries. Their attempts probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, but unfortunately, one of the countries bordering Kenya is Somalia, which hasn’t had a functioning government for years. There wasn’t even an attempt to control the border between Kenya and Somalia.

  The idea of zombies in Somalia collectively scared the shit out of the world. The only thing Somalis are known to do well is piracy. The thought of infected Somalis in fast boats caused the world to finally deal with Somali piracy once and for all. Every nation with a functioning navy, even North Korea, sent ships to the Indian Ocean and every Somali boat that didn’t turn back to Somalia after one warning was blown out of the water.

  After Kenya and Somalia, the next known outbreak of zombies was in Ethiopia, which was unfortunate enough to border both of these countries. Sudan, which borders Ethiopia, actually stopped its civil war in order to try to control its border. The Sudanese government armed every willing man, woman, and child who was able to hold a gun and gave them the order to shoot anyone approaching their border.

  George Romero must have been psychic, because the zombies in Africa were exactly like the ones in his first three zombie movie
s, beginning with “Night of the Living Dead.” They were slow, always hungry, attracted to sound and light, and the only way to really de-animate them was to destroy their brain. Getting bitten by a zombie was a death sentence. It took a while to die, depending how serious the bite was, but as soon as the bitten person died, it reanimated as a zombie. Getting splattered by bits of zombie juice didn’t seem to lead to infection. A group in southern California started a church, claiming George Romero was Christ reborn and he was bringing on the end of days.

  The existence of zombies was now a proven fact, but rumors started that people were also getting attacked by vampires. The rumors claimed these vampires were fast and extremely strong. Supposedly, the vamps were able to run down cars going 40 miles per hour, pick up the car, flip it and then open it like a can of Spam. The vamps went out only at night and didn’t like artificial light. Candles and torches didn’t seem to faze them. Some stories claimed a flashlight chased them away and others claimed a flashlight just pissed them off and they were more likely to kill you if you had one. No one was ever able to show a tape of these vamps and it seemed like no one was actually an eyewitness to any vamp attack. It was always “a guy who knew a guy who saw a vamp” kind of story. The consensus among the experts was vampires were a form of hysteria brought on by the knowledge zombies actually existed.

  Obama got his wish: we were now living in a post-partisan world. Once Congress had to deal with zombie outbreaks, all partisan politics disappeared. No one cared what you thought about abortion or taxes. Everyone agreed Americans had to control their borders. This, of course, meant Mexico; no one cared about the Canadians. All the American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were immediately being recalled from the Middle East to be deployed to the Mexican border. The Middle East was right next to Africa. All Americans, including the most diehard right-winger, wanted our troops back immediately as soon as it became clear the zombie outbreak couldn’t be contained in Africa.