Zombie, Illinois (12 page)

The stares don't stop as we get further in, though people do start to fall silent. I am probably the only person present who is not a part of this congregation. I am definitely the only white person.

Some onlookers give me the same hopeful looks they give Mack, hoping perhaps that I am part of an ecclesiastical team here to explain what is happening and to save the day. Others appear merely confused or annoyed by the uninvited interloper.

The church does not have a high ceiling—or even a peaked ceiling for that matter—but it does feel holy. Maybe a better word is regal, like where a king lives. That kind of ancient, lofty place. Special.

Yeah, this is
definitely
the kind of place you run to in a zombie outbreak. No question.

Ahead of us is the altar. To one side is a choir loft and a nest for musicians. An unattended drum set and piano sit silently. The carpet beneath our feet is red and well worn. It, too, exudes a feeling of old royalty.

His hand still on my shoulder, Mack leans in and says, “I have an important question for you, Ben”

“Sure,” I say, advancing with him toward the old oak pulpit that now looms above us.

“The newspaper where you work—
Brain's,
right? Does it cover crime?”

I look him up and down, trying to make sense of this query.

“Um, sometimes” I answer honestly. “Like white collar crime, or when a business gets robbed. We might report that. It's a business magazine, but you knew that.”

“Uh huh,” says Mack, never averting his gaze from the pulpit. “And when you report a crime, does
Brain's
disable the online comments when it's a story about a crime committed by a minority? Say, when a black person robs a white person?”

Mack's tone is mischievous. It's the last thing I expected to be asked about, here, in the midst of his congregants.

“I've never heard that we do,” I answer and believe it to be the truth. “I mean, not as far as I know we don't. What do you.

Why . . .”

“Good” he says. “That's all I need” I swallow hard.

“I should go get vested,” Mack says. “Why don't you come along?”

“Oh, okay,” I say, still not entirely sure what that means.

We near the pulpit and break off to the side. There is a small door which admits us to a hallway crowded with costumes and props. It feels like the backstage of a play. Choir robes and sheaves of printed music are folded in piles or placed atop the large boxes that line the walls. Musical instruments are strewn higgledy-piggledy. A few steps down this dim hallway, and we pass through another door and into Mack's office.

It has the same regal red carpeting but looks fresher, not as worn. There is a desk full of papers, knickknacks, and an aging computer with an old-timey cathode monitor. Photographs of smiling people locking arms at church events cover the walls. There are several bookcases crammed to bursting with religious texts. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln, MLK, and Obama complete the decorations. Six or seven dog-eared copies of the Bible sit in different places around the room, each containing at least a hundred day-glo Post-it notes.

Mack gestures to an old TV in the corner and says, “Why don't you see if you can find us some news?”

With that, he passes through a doorway set into the wood paneling behind his desk. It closes silently. Just like that, Mack has vanished, leaving me alone in this cluttered room. It smells like pipe tobacco and old library books.

I take a deep breath and approach the pastor's small, dingy television. What are we going to get? Cable feels out of the question. Does it even have a digital converter box?

I find a power button and turn it on. The old TV—standard definition (do I even have to say it?)—winks to life. And what it shows me changes everything.

Every virus has an epicenter. Every outbreak starts somewhere— in a lab or a jungle or wherever. Things have beginnings. There is always a point of origin.

We know that AIDS started in Sub-Saharan Africa, but then spread all over the world. We know that, for most of history, English and Spanish were spoken by only two tiny European kingdoms . . . now half the world speaks at least one of those languages. And that hilarious cat video your mom likes so much—the one that now has 25 million YouTube views and counting? It started out on a site that was previously lucky to get twenty-five hits a week.

And so with the undead.

Though it would eventually consume the entire world, we know that the great zombie outbreak—for whatever reason (accident, dumb luck, destiny)—had its epicenter in the State of Illinois. Corpses around the world had been inexplicably shuffling their feet or blinking their eyes for weeks. But when they finally decided to stop mucking about and start eating people, the corpses in Illinois got a head start on the rest of the world by just a few hours.

When Mack's tiny office television finally boots up, it shows me a local network newscast. They have broken in over the standard late night comedians and talk shows to bring news of . . .
something,
but they're not sure what. At least, they want to
act
like they're not sure. Nobody wants to be the first to make the call. Nobody wants to use the “z” word prematurely. (Can you imagine a news bureau calling “Zombie Outbreak” and then being wrong? It'd make “Dewey Defeats Truman” look like a fucking typo.) A graphic at the bottom of the screen merely announces “Violence Crisis.”

Well yes, I think to myself. Zombies
do
involve violence. They got that much right.

The veteran newsman in the anchor chair looks pleased to actually have some real news to report for once. Years of gently informing viewers about predicable aldermanic scandals, foreseeable gang violence, and annual neighborhood festivals have not addled him. His sonorous voice does not shake or stammer. This is his hour and he knows it. You can see it in his steely eyes. In his radiant silver hair. This is the big one. After all these years. Finally.

Footage begins to come in from all over the state. The anchor does his best to narrate. Many of the shots show locations I've visited for work; places where my friends live; towns I've heard of in television commercials for carpet warehouses or car dealerships, but haven't gotten around to visiting.

The rushed-looking reporters doing remotes from the field are visibly struggling to maintain their composure as they tell tales of people attacked, gangs of vigilantes, and unexplained concentrations of violence around cemeteries. None of them mention the z-word. They have few concrete answers, either for the anchor or for the viewers at home.

After a few minutes, we're informed that new footage has just arrived. The anchor attempts to narrate. He is coming to this cold, as are we all.

The first shots are from the streets of downtown Chicago. They show people gathered on corners with guns, police and emergency vehicles rushing to and fro, and city officials looking into the camera and shrugging. Basically, it is what Mack and I saw on our drive down to the church, but even more so.

The next selection of footage takes us north to Zion, Illinois—a small, traditionally religious town. The fervent residents have barricaded themselves into a large church (as, I note, have we). Unfortunately—the anchor reminds us, drawing on his Illinois history—the zealous city founders designed Zion so that all roads would lead to its central church. (The roadmaps of Zion look like a British flag with a church in the middle.) A camera crew sent down from Milwaukee captures the residents' final moments as the barricaded church doors give way and a horde of filthy zombies forces its way inside. We have only a moment to see it; the camera—apparently shooting from the window of a moving news van—is soon driven away at top speed.

Then, abruptly, another shot. Handheld. Shaky. The anchor tells us we are looking at an area downstate along the Kankakee River. Zombies are attempting to cross a bridge that spans the river, and a team of stalwart construction workers are preventing them. Having converted their construction equipment into weapons, the workers dump sacks of nails into a long-range mulcher. The resulting blasts cut down huge swaths of zombies (and send others skittering out over the rails and into the water below). When they're out of nails, the workers break out pickaxes and chainsaws. They close on the zombies to finish them off.

The camera cuts away. Another shot. Amateur footage that the anchor believes is from Joliet or Romeoville, taken while there was still a little daylight left. It shows what appears to be a hot dog stand with life size statues of Jake and Elwood Blues on top of it. A zombie has also climbed onto the roof with the statues. The camera zooms in. It is a desiccated, moldering cadaver with only one eye and only one arm. It lopes pitifully around Elwood and Jake, examining them. After a few moments, its lone eye appears to fix on the camera operator, some 30 or 40 feet away. The zombie then straggles toward the edge of the roof and steps off, falling 15 feet to the concrete below in full faceplant. It remains prone for a moment, then slowly rights itself and rises. It begins a slow lope toward the camera. The footage then becomes a messy blur as the camera operator sprints away.

Then another shot. This time from a marina up near the Wisconsin border. It shows the walking dead crawling up out of man-made shoals and onto land. A lone frozen zombie shuffles across an empty winterized dock. An overalled local in a CAT baseball cap saunters into shot and prods the zombie with a long dowel. The zombie begins to moan and flail its arms. The man looks back at the camera and smiles. Keeps poking. A moment later he misses the zombie and begins to lose his balance on the icy wood underfoot. The zombie lunges in and bites for his throat. The feed goes black.

Back to Chicago again. More random clips from the Loop. These are the places I walk every day. Places I have lunch or meet friends after work. The guardhouses along the Chicago River are being attacked by crowds of zombies. People trapped inside are trying to push them away with long poles. The zombies are smashing windows and forcing their way in. Along Michigan Avenue, shop windows are broken and retail displays upended and destroyed. One shot shows a multi-level store s elling cookware. Shoppers and staff have retreated to an upper level and are raining down pots and pans on the undead figures slowly working to climb the escalators.

Then the station cuts back to the newsreader, who asks a reasonable question. Where, then, is the mayor during all of this? Why has he not given a speech to calm the souls of his city's populace? This is his Rudy Giuliani moment, yet he has not appeared. There has been no press conference with him standing alongside the governor—both men covered in dust and zombie parts, perhaps carrying chainsaws—urging the citizenry to keep calm and carry on.

Then a producer talks into the newsreader's earpiece. The newsman's face falls as the implications of whatever he's been told become clear. The mayor's office, says the anchor, has just confirmed that the Mayor of Chicago's itinerary for this evening included a trip to Mt. Carmel Cemetery with his family to pay respects to his wife's departed relatives.

Good God, I think. Mt. Carmel! Those massive, endless fields of graves!

And then the broadcast cuts away to, yes, the sequence you have doubtless seen so many times already—that shaky helicopter footage that was broadcast all around the world, the thing that everyone, everywhere thinks of when they picture the outbreak in Chicago.

I'm sure you're already familiar, but I'll try to describe how it struck me that first time.

The news helicopter hovers over the great, suburban cemetery with its well-manicured lawns and stoic mausoleums. The snow-dappled paths between the monuments spread out below like a skein. The mayor's motorcade is there—two jet black SUVs. But while the helicopter's searchlight finds the cars, there is no sign of the people who should be inside them. The doors of the SUVs hang open, despite the chill.

Then, in the darkness that surrounds the spotlight, there appears a furtive movement. Something in the shadows is shifting. Is it only the play of the beam against the headstones? Or is it... something else? The operator zooms out and begins to explore the periphery around the mayor's motorcade. This exploration reveals . . . zombies. Lots and lots of zombies.

The ancient creaking corpses stumble like drunk men around the network of tombs. They are wearing grave clothes and covered in dirt and snow. Occasionally, they pause and become hard to notice. They camouflage themselves against the headstones. Then they move again—just a little—and stand out. It is like looking at a Thanksgiving turkey and realizing, very slowly, that it is entirely riddled with squirming translucent maggots.

Moments later, there is a flash from a firearm in the periphery of the shot. The camera follows. Red and white fire spits out into the darkness—tiny pops of handgun discharge. The shaky spotlight swivels wildly toward the source.

Then...the scene. The one we all know. (So often, in playback, it is censored. Well, I can tell you it wasn't censored the night it went live.)