“I appreciate this, friend,” he says. “Look, can I give you a couple of dollars?”
Here I had been afraid this was going to be a swindle, and now the guy is offering me money. Man, I am some kind of fuck.
“No,” I tell him, privately embarrassed. “This was my good deed for the day.”
“Well then,” he says, extending his glove to me. “Thank you.”
We shake hands, and he begins to replace the tire.
A few minutes later, I am upstairs at my desk with a cup of hot chocolate and a browser window containing Google Image results for “Strawberry Brite Vagina Dentata drummer.” The results look pretty good.
I hear the car outside slowly pull away.
And that’s when I realize I have forgotten to bring the sledgehammer back up with me.
Fuck. Back into the cold once more.
Reluctantly, I leave the appealing search results behind and put my coat on. I trudge down the stairs and walk back outside into the winter chill.
The hammer has been thoughtfully propped against an oak next to the sidewalk, a final kindly gesture on the part of the man with the flat.
I walk over and pick up the hammer. Then I stop dead in my tracks.
Standing in front of my building is a young woman in a thin yellow dress. She has pleasing features and pale skin with a few freckles. She could be one of my neighbors from the building next door, but I can’t place her face. Though underdressed for the weather, she doesn’t shiver. Her skin is unmarked by goosebumps or windburn.
She also has what appears to be a baby’s half-eaten arm dangling from her mouth. The front of her dress is covered in blood. (In the first instant, I had mistaken the crimson blotches for an artistic pattern woven in, but when she approaches I see that it’s definitely blood.) She is looking at me. Her eyes are an unnatural milky-white, as if colored by layers of cataract. She takes one shambling step forward, continuing to masticate the arm like a carnival treat on a stick. Her expression is placid and curious.
“Is that a Halloween costume?” I whisper. (I’m afraid to say anything loud. Afraid to alert the universe. Afraid to make it real.
The young woman takes another shuddering step toward me...then another. She draws nearer, and nearer still. Then the baby arm drops from her mouth and her hands stretch forward as if to strangle me. Her mouth gapes and shows me hideous cruor teeth. Her lips curl into a smile.
My adrenaline surges. Fight or flight, I wonder?
Then I remember that I’m holding a sledgehammer.
Without thinking, I raise the hammer. (I’ve never been a strong guy, but I’m, you know, big. I can knock somebody down when I have to. In this instant of calculation, I feel confident I can take out this waifish woman, especially if I can just get my weight behind the hammer.) At the same time, she lunges forward and tries to scratch my face with her long fingernails.
I flinch back—reacting without thinking—and send the sixteen-pound hammer careening down into her.
If I had not flinched, the hammer might have obliterated her head. Instead, it enters her chest up to the handle. There is a moment of resistance when the head of the hammer meets her ribs, but only a moment. It smashes through them and sinks deep inside her chest cavity.
I am speechless. I release my grip on the cedar handle and take a step back.
The bloody woman does not fall.
She does not wince.
She does not scream.
Her legs buckle for a moment, adjusting to the weight of the hammer, but then she gains her footing once more, and takes another step toward me, the handle still protruding from her chest.
That’s when I realize something is very, very wrong.
Leopold Mack
I arrive late.
My car is running on the donut, which has almost no traction in the snow.
Yes, I had a flat, but let’s be honest, I’m late because I fucked off and went to Merrillville. I’m late because I chose to be selfish and put my own pleasure over being present and available for my flock, which is supposed to be part of a pastor’s job. Maybe if I hadn’t driven to Merrillville, the tire wouldn’t have gone flat.
I get out of the car and stare up at Ms. Washington’s house, feeling even more like a bad pastor. It echoes again and again, like a heartbeat in my chest. Bad pastor. Bad pastor. Bad pastor.
I take a deep breath and flap my arms, getting the blood flowing. You can do this, Mack. You can do this.
I walk up to Ms. Washington’s front stoop and press the bell. (Just one bell. Ms. Washington inherited the whole place.)
“Oeah?” is the croak that comes back at me through the tiny, tinny speaker. The response is instant, as if she has been sitting next to the intercom, waiting for me, anxious and scared and in need of consultation with a man of God. (Bad pastor. Bad pastor. Bad pastor.)
“Ms. Washington, it’s Pastor Mack,” I call back, loudly and clearly. “I got your message on my phone.”
“Oh Pastor,” she responds. “One moment.”
I hear a series of latches being unfastened, and the front door creaks ajar. A wave of smoke spills out, as if announcing the arrival of a denizen of the Pit. But the stout figure before me is no devil. It’s just old Ms. Washington, puffing on a menthol and wearing her pink housecoat.
“Ms. Washington,” I say again as she admits me. I receive a smoky, minty kiss on the cheek and am all but physically tugged inside.
“Oh Pastor Mack,” she says. “I’m so glad you could come up north on a snowy night like this.”
We take a seat in her kitchen.
“Yes,” I say as she lights another cigarette. “I would have liked to have come sooner, but I had . . . obligations.”
“Of course you did” Ms. Washington croaks. She offers me a glass of water, which I accept.
“Also, a flat tire,” I say, taking the water.
“My lands!” exclaims Ms. Washington. “In this weather!? We should thank the Lord that you made it here in one piece. Don’t tell me you tried changing it yourself! In the snow!?”
“I was . . . blessed with a helpful white boy,” I tell her. “It wasn’t so bad with two.”
“Pastor, now I feel horrible putting you through all of this,” Ms.Washington says.
She doesn’t have to tell me about feeling horrible.
“It’s no matter,” I respond. “I’m here now. Please tell me how I can be of service.”
Ms. Washington takes a seat and considers where to begin.
“This isn’t about me exactly,” Ms. Washington says, taking a pull on her smoke. “This concerns my neighbor, Miss Khan. But Pastor, she needs your help if anybody ever did!”
“Miss Khan?” I ask, as the name is entirely unfamiliar to me. “You haven’t mentioned her before.”
“Maybe I haven’t,” agrees Ms. Washington. “A young thing. Lives in the apartment next door. Always see her when I’m working in my garden and she’s coming back from jogging in the park. She works as a flight attendant, I believe.”
I stare hard into the ample forehead of Ms. Washington. This is a conversation I’ve had before. My friend—or neighbor—has a problem, Pastor. What should they do, Pastor? What should we do?
From what Ms. Washington has said thus far, I’m guessing the problem will be a boyfriend or husband who’s physically abusive. That’s one I get a lot. Most people can’t understand why a woman stays with a man who beats her, but there is always a mitigating circumstance. Always a thing that makes it “not that easy.” She has no finances. She has nowhere else to go. She has had children with him.
If it’s not that, then it will almost certainly be a suspected drug habit or drinking problem—likely compounded by a correlating suspicion that children are being neglected. These s uspicions— when they’re accurate—are some of the most difficult for me to assist with. (If the troubled person cannot be convinced that they have a problem, then it comes down to a series of difficult binaries; choices where it’s e
ither this or that. We either call child protective services, or we don’t. We either call the police, or we don’t. We stage an intervention, or we wait until something happens again.)
A final possibility—a rare one, but something I still see consistently—will be a request that I use my connections in the community to lobby for some sort of minor municipal change that will benefit the neighbor. Pastor, that bus stop needs to be moved to the other side of the street—all those people right outside the window! Pastor, that traffic light just changes too fast— I can’t haul my old bones across the crosswalk in time. Pastor, our new property assessment can’t be right . . . can it?
So I have—or at least think I have—some idea of what Ms. Washington will ask about on behalf of her friend, Ms. Khan.
And I am totally wrong.
Ms. Washington takes another deep drag and says, “I ain’t seen Ms. Khan for almost two weeks. And normally, I don’t pay it no mind when she don’t come around. We just been missin’ each other. She’s flying all over the world. She gets free tickets, you know, with that job? And the men she carries on with? The trips they take together? Mmm-hmm. And so I haven’t seen Ms. Khan, precious little thing. Then, this evening, I go out to my box to get the mail and she’s standing out in the cold—in the cold, Pastor— wearing nothing but her exercising top and those yoga pants. Can you imagine?”
I nod as if I can.
“And I ask her how she’s been, but she won’t say a word to me,” Ms. Washington continues. “Not a word. She won’t even communicate. She looks lost. And my mind says: Something is not right with this young woman! She is freezing outside in just her exercise clothes. I have got to get her someplace warm.”
I nod again.
“But she won’t go back into her building,” Ms. Washington continues, sounding genuinely exasperated. “So I think, maybe she just needs to come inside and have a cup of tea with me. Warm up, you know? And if that doesn’t work, I say to myself, I’m going to call the hospital. So I take her by the hand and bring her into my house. I try to make her to sit in a chair—the same one where you’re sitting now, Pastor—but she won’t. She just wanders through my house. She is bumping around, knocking things over, like she doesn’t even see them! I cannot, for the life of me, understand. Then something happens you won’t believe!”
As if to punctuate this declamation, a loud scratching sound— like a dog trying to open a door—rises from the back of the house. It falls away after just a few seconds.
Ms. Washington looks over her shoulder uneasily.
“What happened?” I press, following her gaze toward the mysterious noise.
“She got . . . bitey” Ms. Washington whispers seriously—as if this is something more sinful than sex or drugs or rock and roll.
“She got . . . ?” I try, hoping for more explanation.
“She tried to bite me!” Ms. Washington answers, vibrating nervously like a round mound of pudding. “She snapped at me. With her teeth! I asked her what she was doing. I said I was trying to help her. I told her to stop. But she wouldn’t listen. No sir! She got this mean look in her eyes. Her eyes had started to get sort of milky and dark at the same time. They had this look like she could see me, but she didn’t see me. You follow? She didn’t know me anymore. And I tried telling her, ‘Ms. Khan, we’ve known one another since I moved into this house! Tell me why you are trying to bite me!’ But she didn’t say a thing; only kept biting. That’s when I locked her in the guest bedroom.”
Again, on cue, the scratching noise rises and falls. That dog really, really wants out.
“Is that her?” I ask, as I point in the direction of the scratching.
“When I saw that look in her eyes—my lands, it was horrible! Just so horrible!—I knew I had to call you, Pastor.” Ms. Washington replies, ignoring my question.
“Show me where she is right now!” I say, rising to my feet. “We need to call an ambulance.”
“No!” entreats Ms. Washington. “This is no sickness! This isn’t medical! Pastor . . . can’t you tell? This is possession!”
I lower my head and look hard at Ms. Washington. She stares back at me, unwavering.
“Take one look in her eyes, and you’ll see it. Just be careful of the biting.”
Ms. Washington rises to her feet and slowly conducts me to the back of her house. As I trail her, I take the phone from my pocket and prepare to dial 911.
This is a surprise. A venerable and usually likeable congregant who has suddenly gone batshit crazy, confining another human in the back of her house? It’s a surprise. A big damn surprise. And totally new. I’ve never seen this one before.
As we walk toward the back of her pleasantly appointed home—past a collection of dream-catchers, matching rugs and table runners, and a framed photograph of herself at last summer’s “Witness to Fitness” event at the church (stretching out her XXL t-shirt and smoking a KOOL), I wonder for how long I have been missing the signs of dementia. I see her face in the pews every week without fail, but it’s been a long time since Ms. Washington and I really talked. Too long, apparently.
We near the end of a hallway at the back of the house. It terminates in front of a thick white door. I can sense the presence of another human behind it, though the scratching sounds have temporarily stopped.
“Now . . . I’m going to open this just enough for you to see,” says Ms. Washington. “But Pastor, don’t you go sticking your fingers anywhere near her!”
I look at Ms. Washington doubtfully and prepare to dial for emergency services.
She then opens the door, and I forget all about my phone call.
Inside the quilt-festooned guest room stands an athletic, Asian woman in a sports bra and yoga pants. She looks insane...utterly insane. She’s rocking back and forth—very slowly—on the balls of her feet. A thin rivulet of red drool falls continuously from the corner of her mouth. It has pooled on the floor beneath her. Her face is a mask of living death.
It’s like everything I’ve seen before—and nothing I’ve ever seen before. What can I compare it to? What can’t I compare it to?
I think of the wasted addicts I’ve seen dying in back alleys on hot Chicago summer nights. The empty stares. The snot and spit and plasma. The numbed, destroyed facial muscles. I mean the ones who are really, really far gone.
I think of the people inside the group homes run by the Illinois Alliance on Mental Illness—the ones that I thought may be were past being in a group home. The ones who give you the feeling that maybe there is not an entire person in there anymore. The ones that make you think things about euthanasia and assisted suicide that a pastor probably shouldn’t.
Something about her is already cadaverous, and so I also think of the many—too many—dead bodies I’ve had to identify at the Cook County Morgue over the years. That dead stare coming up at you from the metal examining table. The organs that no longer function, in a chest splayed like an anatomy lesson. The outstretched tongue taking in one final taste of the air.
Jesus Christ.
I take a step past Ms. Washington to see Ms. Khan more clearly, and the confined woman suddenly starts. Violently. There is something else here. Yet another aspect is revealed.
In the face of this woman, I now also detect a murderousness. It is something I have seen only a handful of times in my life. And I thank God for that fact.
I got my first look when I was just nineteen years old, in a jungle in Southeast Asia. I’ve seen it on the faces of gangbangers when I’m called in—usually as a last ditch effort—to talk them down from a revenge killing. To convince them not to head out with a gun to kill the killer of their fallen friend.
Now I see that same angry madness in this woman’s face.
Before I can speak, she lunges forward and emits a low moan. Ms. Washington expertly stops the door with her foot, preventing the insane woman from breaking through. (The woman is considerably athletic, but Ms. Washington has mass going for her in a big way.)
; “You see!” Ms. Washington exhorts as Ms. Khan begins clawing at the door with her fingernails. “Possession! Demonic spirits! I’m sure of it, Pastor Mack. This is a young lady who is being corrupted from the other side”
I don’t believe Ms. Washington for a moment. But also, I find—in this strange, horrifying moment—that I can’t think of what else it could be.
Before I can formulate any answer, Ms. Washington makes a fatal mistake.
“Don’t you believe me?” Ms. Washington says, noticing the bewilderment and hesitation on my face. “If you need to take a second look, Pastor, you be my guest and go ahead.”
Ms. Washington takes her foot away from the door, which opens it another crack. Then her foot slips, and the crack becomes a two-foot opening. The thing that was Ms. Khan reaches its sinewy arms through and grabs Ms. Washington by the throat.
“Oh my Lo-” manages Ms. Washington as the thing’s arms close around her neck.
I try to jump between the two, but my boots are slick with snow. We all three lose our footing and tumble to the hardwood floor of the hallway.
My trench coat gets tangled and goes up in my face. Then I hear a horrible noise like a basketball being punctured with a knife.
By the time I push the coat out of my eyes and get propped up on an elbow, the Khan-thing has already bitten away the throat of Ms. Washington. There is blood everywhere. Ms. Washington looks toward the ceiling, dead-eyed, as the Khan-thing chews at what used to be her ample neck.
(Ms. Washington was heavy and she went down hard. She hit her head and died in the fall. She was at least unconscious when the thing bit through her windpipe. This is what I tell myself to stay sane.)
Oh Jesus, there is a lot of blood.
I spring to my feet and leap backwards, away from the women. The Khan-thing no longer acknowledges my presence. It merely feeds on the flesh of Ms. Washington.
“Hey!” I manage to yell out, treating this creature as if it’s a
dog.
The thing gives no sign that it has heard me. What the fuck is going on?
I am paralyzed with fear. Do I call the police? Do I run? Do I attempt to subdue this monster inside the body of an athletic Asian woman? (Should I try to kill her? My mind and heart are both racing at the possibilities.)
Zombie, Illinois Page 5
