Chicago Fell First: A Zombie Novel

by Smith, Aaron

  “Claire, stay safe,” Danielle said as she departed.

  Chapter 5

  Douglas Clancy had never been to Bellamy before. He had heard of it, not that there had been much to hear. He found it easily enough, but spent half a day driving there, so far from Chicago. But a job was a job and he needed the money, so he went and found the sleepy little town with its one main street lined with the sort of establishments he expected to find on the one prominent avenue.

  The residents called his destination a mall, but it was really just a small shopping center with a bank, an ice cream place that he assumed was probably closed in the winter, a little used book shop, a Laundromat and a diner that had not, Doug guessed, been updated or remodeled since the late seventies. The diner was the place that had called him. Their old Pac-Man machine, a relic from a bygone era, had finally broken down. The diner’s owner said he had a terrible time finding anyone who would even attempt to repair such an old machine. Doug smiled at the opportunity to work on such a project. They just don’t make them like that anymore, he thought as he parked and got out his tools. He had even told the proprietor that he could probably make more selling the machine to a collector than having it repaired to sit there and collect its few quarters a week, but the owner was the sentimental type and wanted Pac-Man back in working order. He had agreed to Doug’s fee and so the trip had been made.

  The streets of Chicago became an odd blend of chaos and emptiness. As Danielle drove, she noted that her car, the little hybrid she had borrowed from Claire, was among the few civilian vehicles moving about the city. There was activity, but mostly police cars and ambulances, some with sirens and lights on while others cruised silently, watching, investigating, patrolling.

  Danielle easily dug up the home address of Katherine’s sister Phyllis. Normally it would have been about a fifteen-minute drive, but the day’s unfolding events had mutated the city’s normal flow of traffic. Thanks to a few detours and adjustments, Danielle made it in thirty minutes, which she thought wasn’t too bad, considering the circumstances.

  Chicago is a big, bustling city to those who have only seen it in movies, and much of it is that way; but it has quieter sections too, residential areas of well-kept houses with nice front yards and plenty of tall, full trees lining the streets. Those neighborhoods look much as they did in the fifties or sixties, except for the newer models of cars that sit in the driveways or along the curbs. It was to one of those areas of square blocks filled with handsome houses that Danielle Hayes drove. She found the streets eerily empty and assumed that most residents here, like in her own building, were inside, glued to the TV, fascinated by the unfolding horror in the center of the city. She found the right house and parked along the street in front of the freshly landscaped lawn. Before she opened the car door, she began to feel nervous.

  What was she doing there? What would she say? Was she supposed to ring the doorbell and tell whoever answered that Katherine and her young son and the boy’s father were dead, presumably, and that the child had killed them? How, Danielle wondered, do you even make words like that come out of your mouth?

  But she had made a promise and intended to keep it. She finally stepped out of the car and began a slow, nervous walk to the front door.

  She almost pressed a finger to the doorbell, but stopped. The door was open, just a crack, but enough to cause hesitation. She stood for a moment and listened, straining for any hint of sound that might come from behind the door, but there was nothing.

  She turned and walked back to the car, and retrieved the crutch she had brought with her. Now armed, she retraced her route to the front door and opened it, slowly and cautiously.

  The doorway led directly into the living room. Danielle stepped inside. One lamp was lit and she saw nobody. She stepped farther in, went through the living room, proceeded into the kitchen, and stopped.

  The floor was covered in blood. A woman was on the floor, a man crouched over her, feasting, chewing fervently, grunting and wheezing as he ate. Danielle wanted to turn and flee, but the part of her soul that was a scientist made her do the opposite. She stepped closer, craning her neck for a better view.

  The woman’s face had been bashed in, made into a crushed mask of broken bone and shattered flesh. Her shirt had been torn apart and pieces had been ripped from the left breast. Danielle stared in horror, trying to make herself turn and run. She hesitated too long.

  The thing that had been a man turned its head in her direction, stared for an instant, and sprung to its feet, faster than those at the hospital had seemed to move. It charged.

  Danielle’s thoughts were overridden by instinct, the animal urge for survival. She moved aside, just managing to avoid the clumsy groping claw. As it moved past her, she swung her crutch downward and slammed it into the backs of the thing’s knees. It fell. It immediately tried to scramble back up, but Danielle was acting on impulse rather than emotion. Something deep within her enforced the idea that what she was encountering, although it moved like a living man, was no more alive than the cadavers she had grown used to handling at school. Dead tissue, it’s only dead tissue!

  She slammed the end of the crutch down into the face, cracking the bridge of the nose and destroying both eyes in one ruthless hit. She pulled her weapon free of the hole it had made, and backed out of the kitchen. Once clear, she took a few running steps to the door, but stopped.

  The child, Katherine’s other son, where is he? What was his name again?

  “Brian?” she called out, realized her mistake, tried again, “Brandon? Brandon, are you here? Brandon, I’m here to help you, I’m a friend of your mom! Hello?”

  She listened, trying to divide her attention between listening for any sign of the little boy and any hint that the creature she had just blinded would find its way to her and attack again.

  Despite the fear she felt and the adrenaline that rushed through her like fire, Danielle actually smiled when the little boy peeked cautiously out from behind the couch. He was small, about seven or eight, she guessed, and looked very afraid.

  “Come on, Brandon,” Danielle said, trying to sound reassuring, taking a step toward the boy. “We have to get out of here.”

  Brandon emerged from his hiding spot, walked toward Danielle.

  “Why did Uncle Martin hurt Aunt Phyllis? Is she dead?”

  Danielle wouldn’t lie, and saw no reason to after what the child had seen.

  “Yes, Brandon, she is. Come with me. We can’t stay here.”

  She grabbed hold of his hand and quickly dragged him out the front door, got him into her car, tossed the crutch into the back seat after brushing its tip against the grass to try to leave behind some of the blood and eyeball glop.

  “Where are we going?” Brandon asked as Danielle began to drive away from the little house of death. “You’re a stranger … I shouldn’t go with you … but it was worse in there. But where are we going?”

  “I haven’t quite figured that out yet,” Danielle admitted. She wondered how she was going to explain about his parents and brother.

  The resurrection of Pac-Man took just under three hours. Some sweat, some swearing, a few adjustments and the familiar beeping sound of a little round yellow being navigating his way through a maze of dots and avoiding those colorful ghosts resumed.

  Doug rubbed his hands together in satisfaction and smiled. He put his tools back in their case, went to secure them in his trunk, and headed back into the diner to collect his payment. As he approached the door again, he noted the name of the establishment and laughed. “Mirage.” Did that mean the food looked good but tasted like sand?

  Doug realized he was hungry. It was nearing dusk and he hadn’t eaten all day. Food sounded like a good idea before the long drive home. He got his check from the owner and selected a booth along the wall.

  “How’s the patient?” the waitress said as she came over and stood beside Doug’s table. It took Doug a second to realize what she meant.

  “Pac-M
an’s alive and well,” he reported, looking up at her and smiling without realizing it. She was attractive in a petite, cute sort of way. Her hair was brownish-blonde with a hint of red to it, her glasses looked appropriate for her face, balanced on the bridge of a slightly upturned nose, and she had an aura of polite intelligence about her that Doug immediately noticed.

  “Good, glad he’s okay,” she said. Her name was sewn onto the breast pocket of her white uniform blouse. “KACEY,” it said in bright blue lettering. “What can I get for you?” she asked.

  He hadn’t even read the menu, so he improvised. Certain things were common to all diners.

  “I’ll have a turkey sandwich, side of fries and a Coke.”

  Kacey scribbled the order down on the pad she took from her apron pocket. Doug watched and his shadow-self began to see through his eyes. He watched her fingers as they manipulated the pen across the paper, applying just the right pressure in just the right pattern to form the words on the sheet. Those fingers were being guided, he knew, by the muscles in her hands which were in turn guided by those in her arm and all those actions began with electrical impulses sent from her brain, which was cooperating with her eyes that sat behind the spectacles held up by that cute little nose. The fingers at the end of that brain-guided arm were composed of various segments, joints working in tandem with fingertip nerves made sensitive by their partnership with the circulatory system. Kacey was a glorious machine and Douglas was fascinated.

  “I’ll have this out in a few,” she said, breaking the spell. Doug coughed and looked down at the placemat on the table, forcing his shadow-self back to its hiding place.

  Kacey returned a minute later with the Coke. She set it down on the table, dropped the paper-wrapped straw beside it. She did not walk away, but stood there for a second, staring at Doug before speaking.

  “You don’t live in Bellamy.” It wasn’t a question, but a flat, matter-of-fact statement. Doug guessed the Mirage Diner rarely saw outsiders.

  “No,” he responded, “I don’t.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Chicago.”

  “And you came all the way out here to fix a video game?”

  “Yeah … well, not many people know how to fix those old machines anymore.”

  “Yeah,” Kacey laughed a little, “that thing’s older than I am. It might be older than you, too.”

  Doug shook his head as he did the math. “Not quite. That’s an eighty-three model. I’m thirty.”

  “Oh, okay,” Kacey said. “I’m twenty-one.”

  Alarms went off in Doug’s head. Why was she telling him her age? Why was this conversation happening? Something about her tone alerted him. Was she really so unused to seeing anyone from out of town that she had let her fascination send her into a state of flirtation? The thing that scared Doug was that he found her attractive as well, and that, he knew, could be a dangerous thing.

  “Miss!” cried out a customer at another table, one of just a half dozen people eating at that time, coaxing a sigh of relief out of Doug.

  “I’ll be back with your food,” Kacey promised, darting away to see what was needed at the other spot.

  Doug’s mind was split. He had been caught off guard by the unexpected attention from the waitress, and he certainly was attracted to her, as she seemed to be to him. But he knew that he could, if he didn’t proceed very, very carefully, be hazardous to the health of anyone he came into contact with. Still, he thought, he had been aware of his other side, his inner demons, for so long and there had been no disasters yet. The question in his mind was one of how far he could trust himself. In the background, he could hear that other customer making a request.

  “Turn the TV on, will you? I want to see what happened with that shit that was going on in Chicago.”

  The wall-mounted television clicked on. Doug had driven to Bellamy with CDs playing in the car and had no idea what news story the woman at that other table was talking about. In minutes though, Doug was shocked by what he heard.

  An outbreak of violence in the downtown area with multiple deaths. Civilians killing civilians. Police also killing civilians. Reports, officially unconfirmed, of cannibalism and what seemed to be corpses getting up to attack again; and claims that the mayhem and horror had begun to spread outward into the suburbs and away from the center of Chicago. Authorities were advising those in Chicago to remain inside behind locked doors and those outside the city to avoid it. Even the voices of the commentators sounded confused, on edge.

  Doug took a long sip of his soda and stared at the TV, his eyes glued to the pale, scared reporter and footage of helicopters circling over very familiar city streets. He finally looked away. He had to, just to verify for himself that he was not experiencing a nightmare. He had to see something other than the strange spectacle on the screen. He turned his head and saw the interior of the Mirage; the other diners stared as intently at the TV as Doug had, their faces like those of rubberneckers passing a horrific car crash.

  Even Kacey was mesmerized by the reports of Chicago’s chaos, staring up at the television with a glazed expression until the loud chime of the bell from the kitchen told her that an order was up. She scurried over to the window in the wall that separated the dining area from the kitchen and picked up the plate from the ledge. She carried Doug's order to him without spilling anything, despite her attention on the TV.

  “Weird, huh?” she said rhetorically.

  “Interesting,” Doug answered, realized how odd that word might seem under the circumstances and added, “terrible!” Indeed he did think it was terrible.

  Despite his frequent inner turmoil, he never consciously wished suffering, and certainly not death, upon anyone—but he was fascinated by what the news reports had told him so far. He felt an uncomfortable mixture of revulsion and attraction at that moment. He looked down at his food and tried to think about his hunger, hoping his focus on his empty stomach would distract him from thoughts of the mayhem in Chicago. He picked up a fry, and then realized that Kacey was still there.

  “Listen to them,” the young waitress said softly, with the hushed voice of one still shocked by what she was learning. Doug thought she meant the reporters and almost insisted that he was listening, but realized she meant the other people in the diner.

  “It’s bullshit,” one man muttered, “more damn liberal propaganda, trying to turn us into socialists!”

  “It’s the end of the world,” a woman said, almost joyfully. “The Rapture will take me soon. We should pray!”

  The chatter went on in the background but Doug tuned it out, looked up at the TV again, saw that what had already been reported was being repeated, and turned to Kacey again. She was still standing there.

  “I guess you can’t go back to Chicago tonight,” she said.

  Doug nodded. He knew she was right. If things really were as bad as the news said, even if he could get back to the vicinity of the city, he would probably find traffic so tangled that it would take hours to get home—assuming the heavy police activity didn’t have his area blocked off.

  “Is there a motel in town?” he asked.

  “Not in Bellamy,” Kacey told him. “There’s a Holiday Inn about ten miles from here.”

  “Thanks,” Doug said. “Can you give me directions after I eat?”

  “Sure,” Kacey nodded and walked away to tend to her other customers.

  Doug finally got to eat. He devoured his sandwich and fries, downed his drink, sat back and looked up at the TV again. The day had not turned out as expected. Part of him was so intrigued by the news reports that he wanted to rush back to Chicago and witness the carnage for himself, but he quickly discarded that idea. He would take a room at that Holiday Inn and hope the situation back home was resolved by morning. He convinced himself that the news was blowing the whole thing out of proportion. He chewed the ice left behind in his glass and waited for the check and directions.

  When Kacey returned to the booth, she dropped the
check on the table, scooped up the empty dishes, took a step away, but pivoted and faced Doug again. Doug got the impression that Kacey had suddenly become nervous. She hesitated for a moment, but finally spoke.

  “You don’t need those directions right away, do you?”

  “Well it would help,” Doug answered, trying to keep the sarcasm in check, “if I’m going to find the place.”

  “You can have them whenever you want,” Kacey told him, “but I thought maybe you’d want to stay here for a while.”

  “I’m done eating. Why would I stay in the diner?”

  “I don’t mean in the diner,” Kacey said, turning slightly red in the face. “I mean in Bellamy. It’s still early and I get off work soon and … shit … I feel stupid for asking … but I haven’t seen anybody for weeks that I haven’t seen every week for most of my life. People who don’t live around here don’t usually come here and you seem nice and I thought maybe we could talk.”

  “I might not be as nice as I seem,” Doug snapped, not trusting himself. He immediately regretted it and forced himself to smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude. You surprised me. I guess I could hang out for a while before I go. Sure, why not?”

  “Cool,” Kacey said. “I’ll be done in half an hour or so.”

  “Okay,” Doug agreed. “I’ll be outside. It’s warm out. I’ll sit by my car. It’s the …”

  “I’ll find it,” Kacey assured him. “It’s not like there’s any other cars out there that I haven’t seen before.” She walked away with the dishes.

  Doug dropped a ten-dollar tip on the table, far more than the etiquette of gratuity called for. He got up, brushed a few crumbs from his jeans, and walked over to the register. He got his change, dropped it into his pocket, and walked out of the Mirage.