Zombie, Illinois

by Scott Kenemore

  For that, you need a man in a shiny pink tie who knows a lot about Jesus.

  I emerge from my dressing room to find my new friend looking into the TV set. He appears bewildered, as if by the technology itself.

  “Pastor Mack, you won’t believe this. Zombies are coming up all over town. The mayor just got eaten. This is fucking crazy!” “Mmm hmm,” I pronounce evenly.

  “Pastor you . . . damn,” he says, turning in my direction. “You clean up nice.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “My congregants expect it.”

  This is true, and something many folks in the white community don’t fully grasp. When they see the pastor of a poor congregation driving a nice car and dressed to the nines, they shake their heads suspiciously and look at you like, “Is this how you should be spending your congregation’s money, when they struggle to pay their heating bills? When they use usurious payday loan stores to get to the end of the month? When they have children who can’t concentrate in school ‘cause they’re so hungry? Can’t you just be modest? You know . . . like the pastor in our white neighborhood?”

  What the people behind these accusatory glances fail to understand is that a pastor in the ghetto of Chicago has to do a lot more. In addition to his duties in the pulpit, the south side pastor often has to be a policeman, a financial advisor, a marriage counselor, a lobbyist, and a community organizer. The pastor is the advocate of the people. He’s the one who’ll go to bat for you. And when you need a new hospital in your community, or better teachers in your schools, or youth programs not to be shut down just because of a recession, you want your advocate to be as impressive as he possibly can. He has to look like a man who can make things happen. Like a man who you can’t dismiss with a department secretary or fluster with paperwork or city permits. For whatever reason, a nice suit and automobile seem to really help make that happen.

  Ben turns his head to the side, as if something important has occurred to him.

  “What on earth are you going to tell the people out in your church?” he asks. “What is there to say at a time like this?”

  “You know those verses in Matthew and Mark about how, one day, the first will be last, and the last will be first?”

  Ben nods.

  “I think I’ll start there.”

  I walk over to my desk and unlock the drawer containing my father’s Bible, the one he held on his deathbed. I pick it up and place it tenderly in the crook of my arm. (Tonight, I think to myself, we’re using the good china) It doesn’t get any bigger than this . . . or at least I hope to God it doesn’t . . .

  I grip the book tightly for a moment—thinking of my father—and take a deep breath. The book feels good in my hands.

  “All right” I say to Ben. “I think it’s time.”

  Maria Ramirez

  Fathers...

  They’re not my favorite subject, but let me tell you a bit about mine. It will pass the time while we make this long-ass drive down to the south side (which is not a place I like to drive normally and really not where I want to be going on the night of a zombie outbreak).

  I probably don’t have to tell you about growing up in a fucked up family. Lucky for me (I guess), the only thing that was fucked up in our house was my dad. He grew up in Logan Square back when it was really tough. Back before the gangs all had three names that went “adjective-Latin-plural noun” (like Insane Latin Kings, Hardcore Latin Tigers, or Crazy Latin Playboys). In my dad’s day, they just had one name—like the Broncos or the Devils—and they were much, much meaner. My dad was a perfect fit for them. He was a thug and an abuser of women. He hit my mother about once a week, but the emotional abuse was always worse. He was like an alcoholic, but he didn’t need the booze to change personalities. He did that on his own, for what seemed like no reason at all.

  His main vice was women who were not my mom.

  I was still a little girl when I figured out what my parents were fighting about night after night: my father’s girlfriends. I think my poor mother lived in denial for the first twenty years of her marriage. She’d see things or hear rumors but sort of forced herself to look the other way. Then—when I was fifteen or so—it all came crashing down.

  Some of my mother’s friends in the neighborhood just couldn’t keep silent any longer and told her about a new string of women he had. Women my mother knew. Women half her age. That was when the fights got crazy, and the hitting started happening every night. I used to hold Yuliana’s ears and hum so she wouldn’t have to hear it, but we’d wake up the next day and mom would have black eyes or bruises. (Sometimes, when we couldn’t see the bruises, it was worse—’cause you heard the hit-ting and you knew the bruises were there under her clothes.)

  I wish I could say I was the one who stood up to him, but it wasn’t me. Really, none of us did. He eventually got tired of dealing with my mother and left on his own. He started living with a girlfriend, some high-up administrator who worked for the city. After a year or so, he moved to a different neighborhood to live with her and divorced my mother. Then he left that woman and took up with a new one. And then one after that.

  Now, of course, he is all contrition.

  I’m proud of my mother for never taking him back. He has tried in his horrible, cloying way to weasel back into our household a couple of times. We have not allowed that to happen. We’ve shown him that we can support ourselves. I mean, it’s me who does the financial supporting of our household, but I would be nothing without my mother and sister. We’re a team.

  Which is why it’s disappointing and confusing and worrying that two thirds of the team just decided to high-tail it for my fucking father’s house. He lives on the edge of the south side in a sketchy neighborhood called Farrell Park. What the fuck possessed my mother and sister to go there with him? It’s sure not going to be safer than Logan Square.

  Then I have a thought that makes me really, really sad.

  What if all the progress that we’ve made since my father left doesn’t matter? What if all that strength I thought we had—as three women banding together to stand against the world—wasn’t as strong as I thought it was? Sure, we’ve had some times when the three of us were tested. There have been money troubles and cancer scares and even an actual stalker (who is now doing fourteen months in Statesville, thank you very much). Those sure felt like real tests at the time. But maybe they meant nothing . . . maybe, when zombies come out of the ground, we are really just a group of weak women who want a big fatherly man to protect us, even if he hits and cheats and makes you feel like shit. Maybe we only thought we were strong.

  It’s like no matter how much we work out and lift weights, we’ll still never be stronger than most men. Maybe we have been lifting our little five-pound aerobic dumbbells all this time— convincing ourselves that we were getting “totally strong”— and then when a situation happened where we needed a real, actual tough person we were like, “It’s not us! We just made little girl muscles. All this work has been for no real progress! We still need a man!”

  I don’t feel that way . . . but now I’ve got a horrible suspicion that my mother and my sister do.

  Christ.

  I hit the gas pedal and speed south toward my father’s house. This is not how I wanted to spend the zombie apocalypse.

  Ben Bennington

  I file back into the crowded church. All eyes are on me. I have emerged from the pastor’s private office. The sanctum sanctorum. People are wondering who I am and what I have to do with whatever is going to happen. The congregation is now silent, like music fans waiting breathlessly for a performance. Am I the man who walks onstage to introduce the performer?

  No.

  The men from Pastor Mack’s praetorian guard motion me over to a pew in the front row. I quickly join them, planting myself on a well-worn wooden seat. I look up to the pulpit, waiting for Pastor Mack like all the rest.

  Moments later, he emerges. Resplendent in his thousand-dollar suit and shining tie, Mack has the majesty of
a dragon. It is otherworldly.

  It suddenly feels impossible that this can be the same frustrated commuter I helped with a flat tire hours before. This man is powerful. This man is collected. This man would certainly have no problem getting a tire with frozen bolts off his car. Can it be the same person? Somehow it is. I look around. The people next to me are similarly transfixed by the pastor. Unlike him, they are wearing whatever they had on when the outbreak started. With the exception of one older woman who has topped off her Minnie Mouse sweat suit with an elaborate church hat, few have thought to dress for the occasion. Some people have on uniforms from their jobs or even pajamas. Initially, this gives the church a casual feel, as if it is being used as a community center or a giant AA meeting. But such is the power of Mack’s suit that suddenly it is Sunday, and we are—all of us—sporting our finest. We are all made formal by his majesty.

  For a moment there is silence—I mean complete, pin drop silence.

  Then a woman in the back says, “Pastor!” in a voice that’s happy, but also a little hurt. It’s a tone that says, “How could you have left us for so long?” and “Please, don’t ever leave again.”

  Her voice is joined by others, and then others still. A ground-swell of cries and applause echoes off of the walls of the church. People shout, “Pastor, what’s happening?” or “Pastor, save us”

  Others simply stand and applaud. I find myself clapping along.

  Mack holds a small leather-bound Bible and a pair of reading glasses. He frowns like a stoic gargoyle intended to illustrate resolve. He carefully puts on his glasses. They nearly dangle off the end of his nose.

  Mack opens the Bible and places it on the lectern before him. He grips a microphone on an umbilical holder and bends it up to his mouth. Then he raises his eyes and looks out over the congregation. This is, apparently, the cue to fall silent, because that’s what everybody does. There is electricity in the air. Every few moments, someone cannot contain herself and lets loose with another “Praise you, Pastor Mack!” and is hushed accordingly.

  He begins to speak.

  “Let us pray,” Mack begins, opening the good book.

  “In green pastures you let me graze; to safe waters you lead me; you restore my strength. You guide me along the right path for the sake of your name. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

  “Amen.”

  The church echoes with a resounding “Amen.”

  For the first time tonight, I see hope in the eyes of people. Not alarm. Not confusion. Not fear. Hope. This opening invocation has not offered any specifics for how to survive a zombie outbreak, but the parishioners are relieved just to hear Mack’s voice. Someone is in charge. Someone is explaining things. Daddy is here.

  The voice with which Mack reads from the Bible is unlike his speaking voice. It’s superior to his speaking voice. Not just different. Better. Sonorous and musical. It feels like it doesn’t lie.

  Mack closes his Bible, looks down at the congregation, and says, “Thank God.”

  There is kind of an awkward silence. (One person manages a “Hallelujah,” but it’s quiet and half-assed. Nobody knows what Mack means yet.)

  “Thank God for this” Mack says.

  “Is it the end?” shouts a congregant.

  “Is it the Judgment Day, Pastor?” asks another.

  Mack closes his eyes and raises a hand above his head.

  “Brothers and sisters, I can’t tell you what is happening. I can’t tell you why—near as I can reckon—the dead are coming back to life. I can’t tell you what has roused the sleeping from their slumbers and made them walk on earth once more. And yet surely it is so.You have seen evidence yourselves, haven’t you brothers and sisters?”

  There is a murmur of assent from the audience.

  A very tall woman in thick glasses and a floral dress announces that earlier this evening, she saw her dead brother attacking people in the park. Then a man in blue work overalls shouts that he saw a dead baby crawling out of a dumpster in an alley. He knew it was dead because it was in two pieces. A grim silence descends.

  “Now, I have seen things like this myself,” Mack intones. “And while no one could be pleased about it, I thank God—I thank God—that we are a congregation in a neighborhood like South Shore. I thank God that we have not been allowed to become dependent on easy things. I thank God that we have been tested.-.because it has made us strong.”

  Several “Amens” echo through the church, though tentative and uneasy.

  “I do not need to tell you that this city has failed you. I do not need to tell you the ways in which this . . . place . . . Chicago, Illinois.has aligned against us. And I have tried—oh how I’ve tried—to do the best I could for you.”

  “You have, Pastor!” someone shouts. “You’re a good man, Pastor!” says another. Others still murmur in nonspecific adulation.

  Mack waves them off.

  Then Mack looks at me. Right. At. Me.

  “Even the forces in this city that claim to have an interest in truth and justice have failed you. Just the other day I was thinking xabout how the newspapers in this city disable the feedback on the internet every time they report on a crime committed by a person from our neighborhood. Now why is that? Why do they do that?”

  The audience is silent. He has lost them. Why is he bringing up the internet when there are actual zombies knocking on our doors?

  “Now.if you ask them, they say they don’t want to provide a platform for racism. They say that it gives redneck chuckleheads from the suburbs a chance to write that they aren’t at all surprised that blacks are killing one another, because blacks are ignorant, violent, and spoiled by a welfare state. Then that same Chicago newspaper will run front-page editorials about how we are a post-racial society and show us a picture of Obama out riding his bike with his little safety helmet. They will say because we elected a black man from Chicago’s south side to the White House, things must have changed in Chicago. They say you don’t see real racism anymore, not like you used to.

  “Sure. You don’t see it anymore . . . when you refuse to show it. But that radio silence—or internet silence—doesn’t mean that in every collar county suburb there aren’t legions of racists who still refuse to hire blacks. That doesn’t mean that—even here in the twenty-first century—there aren’t bigots teaching their children to hate people based on the color of their skin. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t force us to rely on ourselves. To become strong. To become blessed.”

  “Amens” echo off the church walls, but again, they are tentative.

  Mack adjusts the microphone, pauses dramatically for an instant, and then continues.

  “Nothing could be more helpful to an understanding of race relations in this city than for them to enable comments on stories about black on black crime, or black on white crime, or, for that matter, white on black crime, and Latino on black crime, and so on and so forth. Certainly, it would reveal more than any undercover expose.

  “Will it ‘give racists a voice,’ as they fear? Absolutely. And then people will be reminded just how racist everybody still is. They’ll remember that racism is why young men in our communities aren’t getting jobs. Why nobody wants to invest in our neighborhoods.

  “Just because you don’t read it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Doesn’t mean it’s not prevalent everywhere. Doesn’t mean it’s not determining how people vote, where they choose to live, and where they choose to open businesses.

  “Can you imagine if it was the 1850s and the papers in the North thought the best way to fight slavery was to not report it? Can you imagine?”

  This gets several “Amens” and one “Tell it, preacher!”

  Mack continues.

  “And yet, you have become resourceful. You have become like the heartiest plants that can thrive in the most inhospitable soil. You have learned to create community—a vibrant, beautifu
l, blessed community—in this hostile soil. You are surrounded on all sides like Elisha in the Book of Kings—and though you have been tested, your faith has not wavered. And tonight, I think, brothers and sisters . . . the good Lord is going to show you how blessed you truly are.”

  Mack pauses, and there is a cautious swell of approval from the congregation.

  “You’ve learned to survive in one of the hardest neighborhoods in Chicago. You know how to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, without any help from the city. You know how to keep safe from crime without help from police. We don’t have security systems on our apartments . . . we have bars on the doors and ten different locks!”

  Some Amens.

  “We don’t depend on the police to come when we call . . . so we call for Pookie across the alley to come over with his baseball

  bat!”

  Some more Amens.

  “We do what we have to do. We do what no north side neighborhood in this city does—not Lincoln Park, not Wrigleyville, not Wicker Park, not Old Town. We handle our business. We depend on ourselves, on our friends, and on our neighbors to do what the city can’t or won’t. We know one another. We know what protects us, and we know it sure isn’t the CPD!”