Sara Robertson and her sister Rebecca were on their way to Cutter's Gulch to begin work as school teachers when their stagecoach was attacked by a mass of flesh eating zombies.
In the ensuing fight, the stagecoach driver, the horses, and all the passengers besides Sara and Rebecca were killed, and they managed to escape from the zombies with only the clothes on their backs.
After three days of wandering through the wilderness, they happened upon the campsite of John Stanford and Edward Hicks, two Civil War veterans. By then the sisters were delirious with hunger, dehydration, and sleep deprivation, and in between ravenous bites of food and gulps of water, they told John and Edward about how a band of crazed murderers had attacked their stagecoach and eaten the flesh of the other passengers. John and Edward had heard--and then immediately dismissed--similar stories before, but they couldn't deny that something had scared the hell out the two women. They took turns sleeping while the other one kept watch.
The next morning, the sisters begged John and Edward to escort them the rest of the way to Cutter's Gulch. The murderers who had attacked their stagecoach were still on the loose, and someone had to warn the town.
At the mention of Cutter's Gulch, the men bristled. Up until two weeks ago, they had been part of a cavalry unit charged with keeping watch on the mining town; however, they'd been run out of town when their commanding officer found out about their "homosexual tendencies" and nobody else in their unit or the town had spoken up for them, despite the fact that they'd been among the best officers in their unit. The prospect of helping those people didn't hold much appeal to John and Edward.
And as far Sara and Rebecca's teaching jobs were concerned, John and Edward said, it was common knowledge that the town regularly lured young women there with the promise of such work only to force them to work at one of the town's brothels once they arrived. The few children who actually lived in Cutter's Gulch were homeless orphans who worked in the mines, and there were no schools there at all.
The four of them then weighed the pros and cons of venturing into Cutter's Gulch to warn the people that had exiled them to the wilderness because of their sexuality (in the case of John and Edward) or conspired to conscript them into sexual slavery (in the case of Sara and Rebecca).
After much deliberation, however, they decided the town had to be warned. Even though the adults may not have merited their help, the children did.
The next morning at dawn, they armed themselves with all the weapons they had and headed back to Cutter's Gulch.
They were too late.
They arrived to chaos; the town was teeming with zombies. The sheriff's office, Cutter's Gulch Bank & Trust, and Sherman's Hotel had all been burnt to the ground. Only smoldering timbers and ashes remained.
The windows on all the other businesses--Tinkerton's Livery, First Church of the Holy Redeemer, Millstone's Dry Goods, and Blackwell's Saloon--were all broken and/or boarded over. Same with the doors. Severed limbs and bloody bodies were scattered throughout the streets, and everywhere they looked zombies lumbered about.
The zombies were slow and uncoordinated. The foursome figured as long as they kept their eyes open and didn't get caught off guard, they would be fine. They worked their way down the main street, dispensing zombies as they went, quickly learning that the more damage was done to the head, the faster they went down. They were versatile and efficient. When a pick axe got stuck in a zombie's head, they switched to a sledgehammer. When the sledgehammer's handle broke after repeated blows, new weapons were easy to come by. The dry goods store had axes, hacksaws, and hammers. The livery had all manner of steel rods, hammers, and tongs. And guns? They were everywhere.
It was a long and exhausting day, but at the end of it, the four of them had put every zombie in Cutter's Gulch out of commission without suffering any injuries. They found no other survivors. Everyone in town had either been killed or turned into a zombie.
Rather than burying the bodies, they burned them en mass. The fire burned so high and bright that it attracted all the other zombies in the region of which there were thousands.
However, the fire also attracted all the other exiles in the area, all those who had been banished from the Cutter's Gulches throughout the Western states. Among the first to join them: a band of railroad workers from China who'd been kicked out of their camp by a zealously religious railroad baron when they refused to renounce Buddhism; a collection of Westernized Cherokees who'd been run out of town after advocating for fairer government treatment of their tribe; and a group of former slaves who had revolted against their owners and been on the run ever since.
Despite their cultural and linguistic differences, these and several other downtrodden societal outcasts banded together and dedicated the rest of their lives to wandering the Wild West and ridding the United States and her western territories of the zombie scourge. In doing so, they saved the country from certain destruction by the walking dead, a fact that gets nary a mention in U.S. history books.
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