A Zombie's History of the United States (12 page)

The only reason we know what occurred within the Alamo is because of Travis’s slave Joe, who miraculously survived the ordeal. Joe told his story to Houston, who then recounted what he’d heard in a letter, sent to the rest of the Texian Army command and to U.S. President Andrew Jackson:

According to the slave Joe, there was commotion that arose in one of the barracks round 2 in the am. One of the soldiers came running into the barracks, waking everyone and taking his firearm. The soldier was followed into the barracks by a woman, who was bloodied and beaten looking. The men recognized her as the Wife of nother soldier. The first soldier made to shoot her but the Men ahanded him. But then this Wife began attacking the Men who had made to protect her. Seems she was afflict of undying. She was put down quick enough. And then it would seem this first soldier was a denier, eventually turning on the Men himself. Soon Hell had sprung.

Piecing together the little information we have, it seems most likely that Col. Neill and his men had not done as thorough a job as they’d thought cleaning out all the zombies before they moved into the Alamo. One or more zombies would seem to have remained, possibly in the mission’s wine cellar, which fits logically with Bowie’s story of hearing groans coming from “below.” We can also extrapolate that this soldier from Joe’s story was maybe doing some things he should not be doing with another soldier’s wife, and that in looking for a secret place for their dalliance, they unhappily stumbled upon this remaining zombie. However exactly it started, the end result was the same, and several of the soldiers were bitten during this initial episode.

Artist’s depiction of Jim Bowie’s impressive feat: de-animating the entire zombie horde that formed at the Alamo shortly before having to de-animate himself.

The zombism spread quickly and the Texian’s defenses were now working against them. Knowing an attack from Santa Anna was eminent, Travis had ordered the entrance barricaded. In the commotion, this now served to make the Alamo a prison. So did the modifications the citizens of Béxar had made when converting the mission into a zombie corral—all windows had long ago been boarded up. The soldiers were trapped and all their artillery was facing out toward the Mexicans.

In the darkness a madness took over. The Men apparently began to fire wildly, hitting both living and unliving alike. The slave was with Travis as he tried to rein the kaos but Travis got killed all the same.

Joe ended up hiding in the hospital room where Bowie was the sole patient. Joe informed Bowie what was going on and sealed off the door by moving furniture in front of it. After about an hour, the gunshots slowly faded away, and all Joe and Bowie could hear were the groans of countless zombies.

Then Bowie decided something needing doing about the situation. Why he did not stay put escapes me but Bowie grabbed that damn knife of his and demanded the negro unblock the door.

Sweating, ill, and barely able to walk, Bowie was seized with a bloodlust. According to Joe, Bowie attacked the zombies with an unparalleled frenzy, killing them left and right. He was also taking a lot of bites, but this did not slow his fury. With his knife, and grabbing the rifles of fallen soldiers, Bowie somehow managed the impossible feat of de-animating every single zombie within the Alamo, single-handedly. How many zombies there were, we do not know, but Joe estimated that there were at least two dozen.

BITE DENIERS

When Houston says that the soldier in Joe’s story was a “denier,” he means the man was a “bite denier,” as it was known at the time. Bite deniers are individuals who are bitten by a zombie, but lie about it to others. Bite denial is a common response and is brought on by a variety of different motivations. Sometimes the denial is psychological; the denier is simply in denial over having been infected. In other cases, the denier may simply be afraid of what will happen if others know the truth.

Those in the military especially looked down on bite deniers. Bite denial was seen as base cowardice. Such denial put others in danger, the Alamo being an apt example. If the man from Joe’s story had revealed himself to have been bitten, he could have been killed before becoming a zombie and infecting even more people.

When it were done Bowie was left hunched on the ground, covered in bites. Joe offered to do the duty to Bowie with a rifle but Bowie refused. Mad man had set in his mind to put his own knife into his skull.

So Skuller lived up to its name until the bitter end. How Bowie managed it, either Joe did not say or Houston did not elaborate on, but somehow Bowie found a way to plunge his famous knife into his own brain.

When word spread about the Alamo, everyone just assumed that Santa Anna had done the slaughter. Houston and the rest of the Texian Army leaders saw an opportunity and helped fan the flames. Santa Anna did little to discourage this rumor. South of the border the supposed slaughter was viewed as a great victory, whereas the truth was somewhat embarrassing.

So a legend was born. Now you can remember the truth.

FIVE

A Nation Devoured ZOMBIES DURING THE CIVIL WAR ERA

The brave men, living and undead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

—Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

The fight over slavery is the painting-with-broad-strokes cause of the American Civil War, but the reality is less glamorously, good versus evil. The root of the North-South conflict was Sectionalism. Following the American Revolution, the North industrialized, which led to urbanization, which in turn phased out slavery. The South continued its plantation-based economy, expanding into fresh territory such as Alabama and Georgia to meet the rising demand for cotton. As the economies of the North and South drifted apart, culture and politics naturally followed suit. Northerners were embracing progress, Southerners were embracing tradition, and like childhood friends, they were now growing apart in adulthood. Slavery simply became the mascot of this friction.

The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history. This chapter’s purpose is not to describe, defend, or demonize the war itself. We are here to look at the untold stories of this tumultuous era—of the zombie slaves, zombie literature, zombie soldiers, and…

First zombie president?

The Hybrid Zombie

Prometheus was punished eternal for affronting the
Will of the gods by giving Man fire. What shall my
judgment be for what I have given?

—Dr. Benjamin Rush, letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 15, 1813

After William Clark killed Meriwether Lewis in 1809, the only people who knew the truth of what Lewis had become, and lived to continue knowing it, were Clark and Thomas Jefferson. What both men were left not knowing was—what exactly
had
Lewis become? Jefferson notes in his journal that Lewis had “many attributes one associates with a Dead, yet in outward action he had all appearances of Humanity.” Lewis had been neither man nor zombie. He had somehow been something in between.

For Jefferson, it was clear that, whatever Lewis had become, it was either Lewis’s Mandan root elixir, or a combination of the elixir and Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “miracle” powder, that had made him that way. The scientifically minded Jefferson simply had to know more, but intelligent and skilled as he was in countless things, such mad science was well beyond him. So in November of 1809, Jefferson sent a cryptic letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, inviting him to Monticello for “an Experiment of gravest nature.”

Jefferson’s reputation had been damaged by some missteps during his presidency, notably the disastrous Embargo Act of 1807, which restricted American ships from engaging in foreign trade. Now that he was out of office, he saw curing zombism as a chance to create a different legacy.

Over the course of four years, Jefferson and Rush conducted a variety of experiments with Rush’s Miracle and the Mandan root. Unfortunately, as time went on Jefferson recorded less and less in his private journals, and Dr. Rush later destroyed all his own records and correspondence relating their experiments. We are thus left to piece things together through conjecture.

We know that their first human trial was in March 1810, and that their first test subject was a Greek immigrant and sailor named Nikolas Stukas. We know there were many other human test subjects after Stukas, but where and how Jefferson and Rush acquired them, what precisely was done to them, and what finally became of them, we do not know. What we do know is that they never discovered a cure for zombism. Tragically to the contrary, they ended up releasing the zombie-human hybridization contagion into the world.

Lewis never bit anyone who lived. Had this happened he would have discovered himself with another zombie-human hybrid. If Rush ever determined how exactly his concoction and the Mandan root caused the zombie virus to mutate, that knowledge was destroyed along with the ingredients to Rush’s Miracle. But mutate the virus did. As a zombie bite yields another zombie, the bite of a zombie-human hybrid yields another hybrid. This surely became clear to Rush and Jefferson when their first test subject, the Greek sailor Stukas, fled Monticello and went on a feeding spree, infecting numerous others before his eventual capture and execution.

This did not stop Rush and Jefferson from continuing with their experiments, though it would seem they now kept their test subjects under closer observation. There wasn’t another accident until January 1811, when an unnamed female African slave attacked and fed upon three unfortunate souls in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, before eventually being caught. The slave told her apprehenders that Thomas Jefferson had done this too her, which fortunately for Jefferson, sounded too preposterous to believe. A similar incident happened again in June of that year, when eight people were found devoured over the course of two weeks, the culprit never apprehended. How many zombie-human hybrids Jefferson and Rush accidentally (or purposely, we do not really know) loosed into the world is uncertain.

On August 15, 1813, Dr. Benjamin Rush sealed and sent the letter to Jefferson from which the quote at the top of this section was taken. Then he proceeded to burn all his journals and letters in which he made any mention of the zombie-human hybrids. Four days later he was found dead at the age of sixty-seven. What exactly he died from was not determined at the time. He was old for the period, but given the grim nature of his goodbye letter to Jefferson and his skill with chemicals, it is also quite likely that he committed suicide by a poison of his design.

People had once thought that witches could make a man a zombie while he still lived. Now it had become somewhat of a reality, and people were beginning to take notice. In 1816, Timothy Treddstone, a Virginia wood-worker, turned himself in to the chaplain of his church, believing himself possessed after attacking and eating a neighbor. Treddstone’s story became a media sensation when the church vowed to cure him of his demon. This inspired several other zombie-human hybrids to come forward in the hopes that they too might receive holy healing. Eventually, the hybrids were all put to the flames when it became clear they could not be rid of their hungers.