Zombie, Illinois (36 page)

Behind the two mummies is a fresher, newer zombie—so fresh that at first we mistake him for a human. It's a city worker. African American, maybe late 40s. He wears a bright orange hard hat and a reflective yellow Streets and Sanitation vest over his work overalls. His lower jaw hangs open expectantly like someone in the thrall of a good anecdote—the punch line always an instant away.

“Look out, m'man!” Mack says instinctively when the zombie lopes into view.

“Zombie!” I advise Mack. “Look at the eyes”

Or rather, the lack of them. The city worker's organs of sight have been eaten out of his head, probably by rats.

“Dang” says Mack. “This guy couldn't be more than a week

old.”

“Here, let me get his hat off.”

I carefully reach in with the Maglite and knock the zombie's hardhat away. The creature roars and tries to seize me, but I'm too quick.

BLAM!

Mack finishes it off. The former city worker falls to the tunnel floor and takes his place next to the crusty mummies.

We step over the motionless corpses of corpses and continue

our lonely parade down the tunnel.

“What time is it?” I ask, handing him back the flashlight. “I've lost all sense of time.”

“Don't you wear a watch, young lady?”

“No, I use my cell phone like a
normal person.
My guess is five in the morning. I'm hungry and thirsty and I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

“I understand those feelings,” Mack says, bending the light to check his wristwatch. “Wow. It's closer to seven.”

“It'll be light out soon. I mean...up there.”

No sooner are the words out of my mouth than the strong brilliant beam of Mack's Maglite flickers and grows dim.

“Oh shit” I whisper, as if it will hear us. (I shouldn't have mentioned the word light. I have somehow upset the heavy metal cylinder that is the difference between life and death for us right now. It heard me. It knows.)

“Ehh, I'm not surprised” Mack says unperturbedly, as if the dire implications of this development are not clear to him. “I can't remember when I last replaced the batteries.”

I look at Mack, now less distinct in the limited glow.

“Should we, like, turn it off for a while? Maybe just shine it every few feet. It'll be like coasting in your car when it's almost out of gas. Sort of.”

“I don't—”

Scott Kenemore

And that's all Mack has time to say before the flashlight fails completely and we are plunged into darkness. “Omigod.”

“Come to me, child. Follow my voice. I'm right here.”

I walk in the darkest blackness I have ever seen. It's coal black. Blue-black. Make you think your eyes are broken black.

“Omigod,” I say again. I reach out and find Mack's slick leather coat in the darkness. Then his arm. Then his hand. It is warm, and I grip it hard.

“Here,” he says. “I've got you.”

The utter, smothering nature of this darkness is more than I can describe. It's not like being in a darkened room. It's like your optic nerves got pulled out of your head. That part of you is gone. You don't just “not see.” You forget what seeing was ever like.

This is it.

Game over.

Unless.

“Can you do anything with the light, Mack? Can you fix it?”

“It's the batteries. I think if we wait a few minutes, they will charge back up a bit. Then I think we should do your plan of flicking it on and off. I think we'll
have
to do that”

“Jesus, this is horrible.”

“It's okay,” says Mack. Somehow, he is not terrified. I huddle close. I can smell Mack's musk, aftershave, and sweat. I can smell the horrible oil stench of the tunnel. I can hear...

Wait.

“Mack, do you hear that?”

We both listen. “Yes,” he says.

“It's like a scraping.a metal scraping.”

Suddenly, the tunnel in front of us grows perceptibly brighter. There is a thin blue light against the darkness. We can begin to see the outlines of the track in the floor. I can see Mack's face and just how scared he looks (despite his air of confidence). I'm sure I look the same.

“What
is
that?” I whisper.

Mack's eyes go back and forth as he searches for an explanation. Then it hits him.

“That's our only chance! That's what it is!”

He takes off down the tunnel as fast as his bad hip will carry him, nearly casting me to the floor in the process.

“What?” I say, stumbling forward.

“Someone has opened up a shaft! A shaft to the surface! A way out! Come on!”

“What if it's someone who isn't friendly?” I object, running after him.

“We're takin' that chance!” Mack replies.

I follow him around the gentle curve of the tunnel. The blue-white glow becomes more and more pronounced. I can see the walls of the tunnel and Mack's flopping jacket as he races forward.

“Hello!!!!” Mack calls as he runs. “Hellooooo!!! Is anyone there!!! We're down here!!! Don't close it up!!!”

We round a long corner and finally see the source. A two-foot beam of light penetrates the darkness. It's so bright that it forces me to squint. Mack shields his eyes with his forearm but doesn't stop running.

A manhole-like covering at the top of the tunnel has been pried open. There are stone footholds and a metal handrail set into the wall below it. I force myself to head directly for this makeshift ladder, so that even if the light from above is extinguished I won't run past.

Mack speeds ahead and stops only when he stands underneath the opening, directly in the beam. I catch up and hunker at the edge of the light. After so many hours beneath the city, we've become like moles. We shield our eyes and struggle to glimpse the topside world.

“Hello there!” Mack calls up to the opening.

Both of us squint and try to see. An enormous figure looms into of the circle of light above us, blocking nearly half the beam. It's a man—a giant man—thick-necked like a football player and wearing a turtleneck sweater to increase his general girth.

A voice, eerily similar to Mack's, booms down.

“Hello down there!” it says. “I heard y'all could use you some

light.”

Mack claps his hands and dances around, once, in a circle—rotating in the beam like a brilliant jewel in a motorized display case.

“The
entrance of thy words giveth light!”Mack
cries, a smile curling to his lips.

“Mmm hmm,” returns the voice, with playful skepticism. “In this case though, I believe my light giveth light. The light from the sun, that is. What you doing down in that sloppy old tunnel, Pastor Mack? Oh, hang on, your man here tried to tell me...”

“My man?” Mack asks.

Another head appears in the opening above. It has a familiar shape. And thick black glasses.

“Ben?” I call out. “Ben, is that you?”

“Yeah,” Ben's voice descends. “Come up here! You're almost

to Oak Park!”

“My Good Samaritan!!!” Mack says, and erupts into laughter.

I look on, scarce believing my eyes. Mack continues to rotate.

He is dancing. He holds out his arms.

“My Good Samaritan!” Mack cries out again. “Hallelujah!”

And he stays there for a while like that, just rotating.

Back on the surface world, we learn that we are at the edge of a mostly African-American west side neighborhood called Austin. It abuts Oak Park. We are practically there. In our time in the tunnels, we've traveled something like eight miles.

The large, turtlenecked man is an old friend of Mack's. (Mack introduces us when he gets through hugging him, which is after a damn while.)

“This is Moses Rivers” Mack explains enthusiastically, “Pastor of The Church of Christ in God.”

“We go by ‘cockage,'” he says in a baritone equal to Mack's. After an awkward moment, I realize he is parsing “COCIG.”

I take a look around. The streets in this neighborhood were pretty bleak
before
a zombie outbreak. Now they are doubly so. There's a mix of single family homes and apartment buildings, but nearly half of them are board-ups. The ones that were not closed by the city for tax delinquency or abandoned have been barricaded against the walking dead. Empty lots full of trash and detritus separate the homes like pits of decay separating teeth in a smile. (It is in one of these undeveloped lots that Pastor Rivers

Scott Kenemore

has accessed the tunnels to free us, removing the bolts on a square plate set into the ground.) At the end of the block is a no-name cell phone store and a fish-fry shack, both burned and looted. On the sidewalk across the street from us is an old brown couch with two elderly men relaxing on it. It takes me a few moments to realize that both of them are dead.

Ben Bennington, still apparently hale and whole, is standing next to Pastor Rivers. Mack hugs him next, just for good measure.

“Wow . . . good to see you, too,” Ben says.

“What happened, Ben?” I ask urgently. “We were sure those zombies got you.”

Ben looks at Pastor Rivers and says, “You want to tell them?”

Rivers shrugs.

“Since these things first started coming up, we've been trying to stamp ‘em out and clear the neighborhood,” Rivers begins. “Try to ensure everybody in the congregation was safe.”

“Just like what we did at Mack's church!” Ben says brightly.

“I don't envy Pastor Mack” Rivers says. “You're right between the lake and Crenshaw Cemetery. Plus, your congregation is bigger than mine. We get a lot of bodies out here on the west side, but the police usually find ‘em a few hours after they drop. Down in South Shore, you boys got a whole other story. Put a body in that lake, ain't no tellin' how long it stays down. Anyway, we been at this since last night. And those
things
kept coming up long after I was sure there couldn't be no more. I got to thinking they could be coming from the old tunnels, ‘cause I was seeing ones that were old.
Real
old. Men that had died back in my grandfather's days, rotted down to almost nothing but bones and a suit.”

“We saw a lot of that in the tunnels” I say. “You were right.”

“There are three entrances I know of here in Austin,” mentions Pastor Rivers. “First one I tried, there weren't nothin' below. Empty and spider webs. The second opening—it's inside an old sausage plant off Central Avenue—I look inside and what do I see but this young man about to get hisself eaten by a bunch of the damn things. I reach down and grab him, hoist him back up to the factory floor, and close that door. All in about two seconds.”

“But we didn't see that!” I object. “How did you...?”

“There was a hatch right above the lip of that pit,” Ben says. “We were so distracted looking down at the zombies that we didn't even notice it. When Pastor Rivers grabbed me, I had no idea what was happening. The interior of the sausage plant was dark too.”

“Mmm hmm,” agrees Rivers. “You take it from here, young man.”

Ben looks sheepish for a moment.

“Come now,” Rivers cajoles. “The dead are walkin', son. Ain't no time to worry what people think.”

Mack and I exchange the briefest of glances at this comment. I say nothing though. His secret is safe with me.

“I passed out,” Ben says quietly. “I didn't know what was happening. I saw the zombies coming, and I was worried about making that jump into the pit. Then there were these hands pulling me around the waist—pulling me up out of nowhere— and I got lightheaded and that was it.”

“I thought he might be dead or about to come back as one of those
things,”
Rivers tells us. “He was out a good twenty minutes. When he woke up normal and explained what you all were doing, we went back and opened the hatch. We looked and looked, but you were already gone. Our only chance was to try to catch you further down the line, at
this
hatch. But we scurried and done it.”