Zombie, Illinois (21 page)

“I ask myself that every time I meet an alderman,” Ben says quietly.

That makes me smile.

Then there is a crackle of gunfire, maybe a block away from us. Someone—a woman—screams for five full seconds at the top of her lungs. Then she stops with a horrible gurgle.

“We need to keep moving,” I say, looking warily in the direction of the scream.

“Back to the church, you think?” Ben asks. “Do we even know the way? I always have to use a GPS whenever I drive below 35th Street”

“No. What we should do is go find my father. I mean.. .that's what
I'm
going to do. You can come along if you like.”

Ben seems to consider it.

“Where is your aunt's house exactly?”

I describe a route to the house a few blocks to the northeast where my aunt has lived for nearly sixty years. It will take us through one of the south side's nicer residential areas, across a city park, and then back into a less-nice residential area.

“How many bullets do we have left?” Ben asks.

I inventory the clip of my automatic and see that I have three.

“I don't know how to check on an AK” Ben says, “but I already squeezed a few off. It could be empty.”

“Yeah, well don't throw it away just yet. We're not just worried about zombies out there. Looks count for a lot. An AK pointed in your face will make you think twice, whoever you are.”

Ben nods and grips his weapon resolutely.

“Do you think your dad will tell us what's going on?”

“Honestly, probably not, but I'm damn sure going to ask him”

We head out into the neighborhoods due northeast. It gets fancy real fast. These are nice homes, ones with fences and yards. A lot of African Americans who make it big but still want the street cred of being able to say they live “on the south side of Chicago” buy homes here. There are also a lot of University of Chicago professors and real estate speculators. It's a weird little pocket.

We mostly stick to the backyards and avoid the main streets. We trail along wooden fences and scurry through flowerbeds. On any other night we'd look like burglars casing a joint. These massive houses are quiet and dead. Some give me the feeling of actually being abandoned, but others exude the sense of people hiding inside with the lights off. It's weird how you can tell, but you can. Empty or not, we treat nowhere as safe. Every window, every bush, every abandoned automobile holds the potential for an ambush. The snow continues to fall, silently, all around us as we move.

We pause beside a backyard swing set creaking in the wind. I narrow my eyes and contemplate the rest of the route ahead. We're almost to the park. Once through, we'll almost be home-free. Right at my aunt's house. I blow on my fingers to warm them up, and then wrap them back around my handgun.

“Where'd you learn to shoot?” Ben asks as we begin creeping forward again.

I shrug and say, “I grew up in Logan Square back when it was
Logan Square,
you know?” This seems to satisfy him.

Suddenly—as if the universe has heard our conversation topic—we hear gunshots. Something ricochets off the swing set with a loud
piiiing
that seems to go on forever. We both hit the ground.

The gunshots continue. They're maybe half a block away. It sounds like a back and forth—two groups out to kill each other. Two groups that don't particularly care how much ammunition is being expended. They only seem to be using handguns . . . so far.

“I think that was a stray,” I whisper.

“Huh,” Ben manages from his cowering position.

“I don't think they see us. They just hit the swing accidentally.”

Moments later, the guns stop. The silence is deafening. The snow muffles all. All at once, it feels like it didn't really happen.

“Is that the way we need to go?” Ben asks with some trepidation, nodding ahead in the direction of the shooters.

I nod back.

“You want me to go take a look?”

And it's small. It's almost nonchalant, as if he's asking if he can take my coat or get me a drink of water. Except he's asking if he can scout ahead to see if we'll be shot at and killed.

In the midst of a survival scenario, he wants to make me feel comfortable. For an old guy, he's a gentleman.

But I say no. I can handle myself. And if anybody goes first, I want it to be me.

“Let's go together, then,” says Ben.

We rise to our feet and carefully survey the homes ahead of us. I scan for movement or light, detecting neither. The wind picks up and makes me squint.

The nearest house is a giant, prairie style structure. Must be worth millions. As we get closer and closer, the area starts to look more familiar. It turns out Ben is thinking the same thing.

“Wait, where do I know this neighborhood from?” he whispers from above his AK.

“A lot of famous people live here. Obama's house is down the block. Then you got the Nation of Islam leaders over yonder. A few of the old synagogues are still operational too.”

“Fuck” Ben whispers. “I forgot about Obama.”

“His home's right over there, though I'm sure he's not in it.”

“Do you think there are any Secret Service?”

The wind whips up again. For a moment, it's so fierce we can't even talk.

“Gotta be,” I say when it dies. “Of course, they're there to do Secret Service shit, not to help us.”

“I wonder.” Ben begins to say, then stops dead in his tracks. We can now see around the side of the prairie style house, and the street is full of bodies. At least four corpses are splayed across the road.

We stand stock still, like cockroaches hoping not to be noticed when the lights go on.

“Speak of the fucking devil” Ben whispers. I take a closer look, and see what he means.

The dead men in the street before us are wearing overcoats with suits underneath. Two of them still have guns in their cold, dead hands. One has a visible earpiece.

“What the fuck?” Ben asks no one.

We edge around the side of the house and get closer. Four more bodies come in to view. That's eight total. Jesus. Nearby, a driverless car is running. A cheap-looking stencil on the door identifies it as belonging to a Black Islamic organization. Three quarters of the cadavers on the street are black men.

We don't have to ask what happened. Somehow it's obvious. They killed each other.

Ben and I look at each other. We both know it.

“Do Secret Service people and Islamic security not like each other? Is that a thing?”

“Government secret service versus religious secret service,” Ben pronounces, not answering my question. “I could write a whole
series
of articles about this. Government versus religion, settled in a Chicago street fight. This is some Pulitzer shit right here.”

“Pulitzer . . . is that the thing Roger Ebert always brags about having?”

“Yeah,” Ben replies. “Not that the Pulitzers are necessarily going to exist anymore. But if this is
localized
—if this is just happening in Chicago—then yeah, I think I got a shot”

“What would you write about this? To get a Pulitzer, I mean?”

I don't know if I mean “this” as in the shootout that just happened or “this” the entire zombie outbreak. I don't think Ben does either. He thinks and rubs his chin a moment.

“The interesting thing about cities isn't what they do when people
are
looking,” Ben says. “It's what they do when they think
nobody's
looking. Like, the shit the city is proud of? The shining skyscrapers downtown, the sports stadiums, the public art? You can't judge a city by that. That only tells you what the rich people are doing on a good day. It's what people do on a bad day—a bad day when there are no security cameras watching— that tells you what you really want to know. It's how people act during a blackout, a hurricane, or a siege that tells you the truth about a city.”

“I think these guys wanted to kill each other,” I tell him.

We look down at the corpses some more. Some could be peacefully sleeping, but others have twisted faces as if they died in anguish. I get curious.

“If you die with a grimace on your face, does it stay that way?” I whisper. “It seems like your face would just . . .
relax,
you know? But apparently not.”

“Apparently not,” echoes Ben.

We stand there a moment longer, shivering and looking at the dead men. Before long, one of them begins to twitch his legs. “We should move along.”

Ben agrees. Each of us pockets a dead man's handgun and we continue down the snowy street.

The rest of the journey to the park is uneventful. We draw our guns on a shuddering figure in an alley, only to find out it's merely a homeless man. He seems intoxicated and insane. He's not coher-ent, so we just pass him by.

“You know what this is like?” I say to Ben as we enter the park and begin to creep through the trees. “This is like the first day when the snow melts in the spring. You know what I mean? That day when all the trash and dog poop and plastic bags are suddenly there on the street?”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “I totally do.”

When it snows in Chicago—like the big snow, the one in January that's gonna stick around for a while—Chicagoans start to notice that they can stop looking for a trash can when they have to throw something away. If they drop a cigarette butt or candy wrapper, the snow will cover it. If they fail to clean up after Fido does his business, no one is the wiser. It's kind of a test to see if we'll keep putting rubbish in its place, even if nobody can tell if we did. And it's a test Chicagoans always fail. Each year when the temperature shoots up to fifty, we step outside—breathing in that invigorating spring air—and we're confronted with our own bad citizenship. The sidewalks and yards are strewn with our trash and animal shit. All the things we tried to conceal are staring us—and everybody else—in the face.

“The criminals of this city thought they could hide dead bodies under the ground and under the water,” I say to Ben. “They're just like litterbugs in mid-January. They convince themselves nature will conceal what they did...but it never does”

“At least not this time,” Ben replies dourly.

We trudge deeper into the park. On the far side—where we're headed—looms an old National Guard armory. It's a giant stone building from the 1920s with twenty-foot statues of medieval knights and WWI soldiers built into its columns. It has a crenulated rooftop like a castle and flat grates on one side—possibly meant to mimic a portcullis—where heat escapes. On cold evenings, the homeless crowd around and bivouac there by the grates. As we get close, I can see the clothing, blankets, and sleeping bags that comprise their impromptu tent city.

As we get even closer I can see it's all been ripped to shreds.

The tattered blankets of the homeless are covered with blood and body parts, and there are empty husks of eaten-out corpses. The zombies have found this place and they have fed. The residents were likely sleeping restfully, lulled by the warm grates. With no cell phones or televisions, they would have been perfectly unaware of the outbreak. It is horrible to imagine their collective surprise.

Next to a plastic bottle of vodka lies a severed human jaw. I hope the homeless here were drunk. I hope they were all passed out and beyond consciousness when the zombies attacked. Still, there are signs of resistance and panic—not least of which is a scrabble of bloody handprints extending seven feet up the side of an armory wall. This was a massacre. People make fun of how easy it's supposed to be to get away from a zombie, but when you're freezing, drunk, and clinically insane.well, it's more easily said than done.

We pass the armory and head out into the street again. These streets aren't so nice. Obama never lived here. Not even
before
he was president.

A block in, we spot a mob of the undead up ahead. They have fresh gore on their faces and it glistens in the flickering streetlights. It's also clear at a glance that these are Lake Michigan zombies. Their skin shows signs of having been eaten away by water and sea creatures. Some are wrapped in a sticky blackness that could be rotted skin or could just be gunk from the bottom of the lake. Others lack skin entirely and look like horrible walking anatomy charts. It is only a moment before they start moving in our direction.