Zombie, Illinois

by Scott Kenemore

  “I never knew myself, pastor...until tonight.”

  She pauses, drifting off again.

  “Who was it, child?” I entreat, shaking her as if to jostle a sleeper awake. “You need to tell me.”

  “All of them,” she says quietly. “Pastor...it was all of them” Then she is gone.

  I say a prayer for the cemetery manager—a quick one, lest she decide to reanimate and come after me—and hurriedly make for the front gates. They appear to be ajar. At least I’m not trapped inside with these bodies. A small blessing, but I’ll take all I can get tonight.

  I pass the pile of burned zombies on my way out. It’s like something out of a Holocaust documentary. The stuff of nightmares.

  Despite the gruesomeness surrounding me, I feel strangely invigorated. I am, so far, still alive. And I think I have my first clue about what the Hell is going on. The cemetery manager wasn’t able to tell me much, but it’s enough to get me started. Someone brought her bodies to bury—illegally and secretly— no questions asked. Who was it? “All of them.” Whatever that means. She also told me who shot her. She named a name. And it chills my bones.

  Shawn Michael Recinto.

  He works for Alderman Marja Mogk, whose ward technically contains this graveyard. He’s her assistant, her #1 guy. I’ve met him at community functions all around the south side. He’s a memorable person, to say the least. A tall, smiling man. Physically huge. Played one season as a backup wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys after college. Didn’t manage his money well. Ended up back in Chicago looking for a job. Found one with Marja.

  Lots of aldermen like to surround themselves with guys like Shawn Michael, especially aldermen who are physically small or female. Drivers. Assistants. Chiefs of staff. Call them whatever you want. They’re tough guys on the payroll who do whatever the alderman says. A guy like Recinto is not technically hired muscle, but if anybody ever wanted to start some shit, there’s no question he’d be able to handle it. (In my darker moments, I have also wondered if Marja sleeps with Shawn Michael. I doubt I am the only one who ponders this.)

  Anyhow, what in the name of the Lord is Shawn Michael doing executing a graveyard caretaker? What is he doing with a bunch of people with guns? Why is he piling up zombies and setting them on fire?

  I pass through the cemetery’s iron gates.

  The streets outside are dead. The houses quiet and dark. (I’m guessing anybody who looked out a window and saw what was happening in the cemetery has drawn the shades, hidden under the bed, and prayed not to be discovered.) The streetlights above me blink intermittently. Sirens wail in the distance—not police sirens. Other sirens. Air raid.

  I have no food, no car, and no gun. But I am damn straight about to get some answers.

  You’ve been bad, Chicago. I don’t know exactly what you did...yet. But I know it was bad...really, really bad. Forget the bribes and backscratching and giving your relatives jobs. This is a whole new level of bad. Pastor Mack is coming to hold you accountable. Somebody, somewhere, is about to get the whoopin’ of their lives.

  And it looks like I might have to be the one to deliver it.

  Maria Ramirez

  After we have run and then walked for what seems like forever, we stop to rest in front of a looted convenience store. The back door has been pried open with a crowbar, and there is a pallet of neon green energy drinks sitting outside in the snow. We look at one another and wordlessly head for the pallet. Ben and I each drink two of them, relaxing against the store wall to catch our breath.

  Between gasps of air and gulps of colored sugar-water, Ben starts to pick my brain.

  “Did you know that shooter?” he gasps. “How did he have that letter from your dad?”

  “No, and I don’t know. Do you think Mack’s okay? Did he get shot when he fell over the wall?”

  “I couldn’t tell. He might have been hit in the back or he might have jumped into the graveyard on his own. It all happened so fast.”

  “Who the fuck were those people? What were they doing in there?”

  “I described everything as well as I could. You know as much as I do.”

  “Well.they were inside my dad’s house earlier tonight. We know that for sure.”

  “Huh?” says Ben, a look of consternation settling over his face.

  “This note from my dad.he left it for me inside his house. I was supposed to find it. It says he’s taking my mother and sister to our aunt’s place in Hyde Park. Except.for some reason.he doesn’t say that exactly. He’s vague and uses code.”

  If I were being more forthcoming with Ben, I would tell him that it is unlike my brash, commanding father to communicate in subtle, high-context language. And the fact that he’s done so scares me deeply.

  I don’t want to look at it again, yet I force myself to bring the note out of my pocket and read it to Ben in English.

  “Dear Maria,

  Your mother and sister are with me and safe. We are heading to the place where your mother and I had our first date. Meet us as soon as you can. My cell phone is broken. Don’t talk to anybody from the city, or any other aldermen. Come right away.”

  I put the note back in my pocket.

  “My mother and father had their first date in my aunt’s kitchen,” I explain. “It’s a famous family story. He was supposed to take her to the movies, but they got snowed in by a big blizzard, so instead my aunt cooked them dinner, and they watched TV. My father’s referring to it so that anyone outside of the family who reads this note won’t know where he means. But why? Why would he do that? It’s like he expected his house to get broken into, right?”

  Ben opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. His eyebrows and eyes dance back and forth. He’s asking himself if he’s heard me right.

  He has.

  “Yes,” I tell him, rolling my eyes. “The note says other aldermen.”

  “Your dad is?”

  “Frankie Munoz. Alderman for the Fifty-First Ward. Farrell Park”

  Ben looks at me with an expression that neatly comports the entirety of “And when the fuck were you going to tell me that?”

  “You have different last names. When I met you, you said your last name was Ramirez.”

  “I go by my mother’s name.”

  “Oh,” Ben says cautiously. “Any reason for that?”

  “Yeah. I—what’s it called again? Oh yeah—hate him. I hate my dad. That’s the reason.”

  Ben furrows his brow.

  “You hate your dad. You hate Pastor Mack. Who do you like?” “Other than my mother? Not too many people over thirty.” I watch Ben swallow hard.

  “Does your dad have a lot of enemies? I mean, more than a typical alderman? Is there anybody who’d use a zombie outbreak as an excuse to break into his house?”

  I shake my head. Not to indicate no, but because I don’t like to think about this. My father’s always been such a shit. Sometimes I fear that—as bad as he was when he lived with us—my mother and I only saw a small swath of his crimes.

  “I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “But probably yes, he does.”

  “What interests me,” Ben says, clearly trying to be tactful, “is that the guy who had the note on him was part of the cemetery extermination group. They were the same group.”

  “That seems pretty clear, but I don’t know how they’re connected. Maybe zombies breaking out are a chance to kill everybody you don’t like all at once—human and zombie both.”

  “You know, come to think of it, I’ve met your dad a couple of times at city events where I was reporting.” “And what did you think?” Ben shrugs.

  “I never really formed an opinion. The paper I work for covers business, and there’s not a lot in his ward. Maybe a new dry cleaner opens up or a bank opens a new branch; that’s about it. But I know he’s the last Latino alderman on the south side. You’ve got this little pocket of Latino residents here in Farrell Park. They barely have a majority. Maybe Latinos were fifty-five percent as of
the last census. And they’re about to release a new one and redraw the ward maps like they do every ten years. He’s a transplant, right? Most aldermen grow up in the neighborhood they represent. But your dad didn’t?”

  “No, he didn’t. We grew up in Logan Square. My dad ran the Boys and Girls Club there. When he left my mom about ten years ago, he and his new lady moved down here. He got a similar job at a community center. Pretty soon he was running it. Then he ran for alderman. I couldn’t believe it when he got elected. I wanted to fucking die. How can the universe reward someone for being a pushy, bullying asshole?”

  “I ask myself that every time I meet an alderman,” Ben says quietly.

  That makes me smile.

  Then there is a crackle of gunfire, maybe a block away from us. Someone—a woman—screams for five full seconds at the top of her lungs. Then she stops with a horrible gurgle.

  “We need to keep moving,” I say, looking warily in the direction of the scream.

  “Back to the church, you think?” Ben asks. “Do we even know the way? I always have to use a GPS whenever I drive below 35th Street”

  “No. What we should do is go find my father. I mean.. .that’s what I’m going to do. You can come along if you like.”

  Ben seems to consider it.

  “Where is your aunt’s house exactly?”

  I describe a route to the house a few blocks to the northeast where my aunt has lived for nearly sixty years. It will take us through one of the south side’s nicer residential areas, across a city park, and then back into a less-nice residential area.

  “How many bullets do we have left?” Ben asks.

  I inventory the clip of my automatic and see that I have three.

  “I don’t know how to check on an AK” Ben says, “but I already squeezed a few off. It could be empty.”

  “Yeah, well don’t throw it away just yet. We’re not just worried about zombies out there. Looks count for a lot. An AK pointed in your face will make you think twice, whoever you are.”

  Ben nods and grips his weapon resolutely.

  “Do you think your dad will tell us what’s going on?”

  “Honestly, probably not, but I’m damn sure going to ask him”

  We head out into the neighborhoods due northeast. It gets fancy real fast. These are nice homes, ones with fences and yards. A lot of African Americans who make it big but still want the street cred of being able to say they live “on the south side of Chicago” buy homes here. There are also a lot of University of Chicago professors and real estate speculators. It’s a weird little pocket.

  We mostly stick to the backyards and avoid the main streets. We trail along wooden fences and scurry through flowerbeds. On any other night we’d look like burglars casing a joint. These massive houses are quiet and dead. Some give me the feeling of actually being abandoned, but others exude the sense of people hiding inside with the lights off. It’s weird how you can tell, but you can. Empty or not, we treat nowhere as safe. Every window, every bush, every abandoned automobile holds the potential for an ambush. The snow continues to fall, silently, all around us as we move.

  We pause beside a backyard swing set creaking in the wind. I narrow my eyes and contemplate the rest of the route ahead. We’re almost to the park. Once through, we’ll almost be home-free. Right at my aunt’s house. I blow on my fingers to warm them up, and then wrap them back around my handgun.

  “Where’d you learn to shoot?” Ben asks as we begin creeping forward again.

  I shrug and say, “I grew up in Logan Square back when it was Logan Square, you know?” This seems to satisfy him.

  Suddenly—as if the universe has heard our conversation topic—we hear gunshots. Something ricochets off the swing set with a loud piiiing that seems to go on forever. We both hit the ground.

  The gunshots continue. They’re maybe half a block away. It sounds like a back and forth—two groups out to kill each other. Two groups that don’t particularly care how much ammunition is being expended. They only seem to be using handguns . . . so far.

  “I think that was a stray,” I whisper.

  “Huh,” Ben manages from his cowering position.

  “I don’t think they see us. They just hit the swing accidentally.”

  Moments later, the guns stop. The silence is deafening. The snow muffles all. All at once, it feels like it didn’t really happen.

  “Is that the way we need to go?” Ben asks with some trepidation, nodding ahead in the direction of the shooters.

  I nod back.

  “You want me to go take a look?”

  And it’s small. It’s almost nonchalant, as if he’s asking if he can take my coat or get me a drink of water. Except he’s asking if he can scout ahead to see if we’ll be shot at and killed.

  In the midst of a survival scenario, he wants to make me feel comfortable. For an old guy, he’s a gentleman.

  But I say no. I can handle myself. And if anybody goes first, I want it to be me.

  “Let’s go together, then,” says Ben.

  We rise to our feet and carefully survey the homes ahead of us. I scan for movement or light, detecting neither. The wind picks up and makes me squint.

  The nearest house is a giant, prairie style structure. Must be worth millions. As we get closer and closer, the area starts to look more familiar. It turns out Ben is thinking the same thing.

  “Wait, where do I know this neighborhood from?” he whispers from above his AK.

  “A lot of famous people live here. Obama’s house is down the block. Then you got the Nation of Islam leaders over yonder. A few of the old synagogues are still operational too.”

  “Fuck” Ben whispers. “I forgot about Obama.”

  “His home’s right over there, though I’m sure he’s not in it.”

  “Do you think there are any Secret Service?”

  The wind whips up again. For a moment, it’s so fierce we can’t even talk.

  “Gotta be,” I say when it dies. “Of course, they’re there to do Secret Service shit, not to help us.”

  “I wonder.” Ben begins to say, then stops dead in his tracks. We can now see around the side of the prairie style house, and the street is full of bodies. At least four corpses are splayed across the road.

  We stand stock still, like cockroaches hoping not to be noticed when the lights go on.

  “Speak of the fucking devil” Ben whispers. I take a closer look, and see what he means.

  The dead men in the street before us are wearing overcoats with suits underneath. Two of them still have guns in their cold, dead hands. One has a visible earpiece.

  “What the fuck?” Ben asks no one.

  We edge around the side of the house and get closer. Four more bodies come in to view. That’s eight total. Jesus. Nearby, a driverless car is running. A cheap-looking stencil on the door identifies it as belonging to a Black Islamic organization. Three quarters of the cadavers on the street are black men.

  We don’t have to ask what happened. Somehow it’s obvious. They killed each other.

  Ben and I look at each other. We both know it.

  “Do Secret Service people and Islamic security not like each other? Is that a thing?”

  “Government secret service versus religious secret service,” Ben pronounces, not answering my question. “I could write a whole series of articles about this. Government versus religion, settled in a Chicago street fight. This is some Pulitzer shit right here.”

  “Pulitzer . . . is that the thing Roger Ebert always brags about having?”

  “Yeah,” Ben replies. “Not that the Pulitzers are necessarily going to exist anymore. But if this is localized—if this is just happening in Chicago—then yeah, I think I got a shot”

  “What would you write about this? To get a Pulitzer, I mean?”

  I don’t know if I mean “this” as in the shootout that just happened or “this” the entire zombie outbreak. I don’t think Ben does either. He thinks and rubs his chin a moment.<
br />
  “The interesting thing about cities isn’t what they do when people are looking,” Ben says. “It’s what they do when they think nobody’s looking. Like, the shit the city is proud of? The shining skyscrapers downtown, the sports stadiums, the public art? You can’t judge a city by that. That only tells you what the rich people are doing on a good day. It’s what people do on a bad day—a bad day when there are no security cameras watching— that tells you what you really want to know. It’s how people act during a blackout, a hurricane, or a siege that tells you the truth about a city.”

  “I think these guys wanted to kill each other,” I tell him.

  We look down at the corpses some more. Some could be peacefully sleeping, but others have twisted faces as if they died in anguish. I get curious.

  “If you die with a grimace on your face, does it stay that way?” I whisper. “It seems like your face would just . . . relax, you know? But apparently not.”

  “Apparently not,” echoes Ben.

  We stand there a moment longer, shivering and looking at the dead men. Before long, one of them begins to twitch his legs. “We should move along.”

  Ben agrees. Each of us pockets a dead man’s handgun and we continue down the snowy street.

  The rest of the journey to the park is uneventful. We draw our guns on a shuddering figure in an alley, only to find out it’s merely a homeless man. He seems intoxicated and insane. He’s not coher-ent, so we just pass him by.

  “You know what this is like?” I say to Ben as we enter the park and begin to creep through the trees. “This is like the first day when the snow melts in the spring. You know what I mean? That day when all the trash and dog poop and plastic bags are suddenly there on the street?”

  “Yeah,” Ben says. “I totally do.”

  When it snows in Chicago—like the big snow, the one in January that’s gonna stick around for a while—Chicagoans start to notice that they can stop looking for a trash can when they have to throw something away. If they drop a cigarette butt or candy wrapper, the snow will cover it. If they fail to clean up after Fido does his business, no one is the wiser. It’s kind of a test to see if we’ll keep putting rubbish in its place, even if nobody can tell if we did. And it’s a test Chicagoans always fail. Each year when the temperature shoots up to fifty, we step outside—breathing in that invigorating spring air—and we’re confronted with our own bad citizenship. The sidewalks and yards are strewn with our trash and animal shit. All the things we tried to conceal are staring us—and everybody else—in the face.