Zombie, Illinois

by Scott Kenemore

  The air is thick with particles. It picks up our beams and makes them stand out like lasers in a movie. Mack conducts us cautiously but steadily, like he knows where he’s going. Then he stops and puts his hands to his temple like he doesn’t.

  “It used to be right there,” Mack says, standing at the entrance to what looks like a machine shop. Unless...”

  Mack strides into the dark, greasy room and takes a knee. The floor is covered with a fibrous workshop mat, something half carpet and half plastic. Mack begins to pick at the corner. It’s been glued to the floor, but it starts to come up easily when Mack puts his back into it.

  “Here, help me out,” he says.

  Ben and I set down our flashlights and help Mack pull up the flooring. It makes a ripping sound like tearing cloth that echoes off the warehouse walls. After a minute or so, Mack stops.

  “Look, there.”

  We look.

  Our ripping has revealed a metal square set into the floor. Its edges have been filled in with caulk. It looks like it hasn’t been opened in years. I’m not even sure it’s something that’s designed to open.

  I retrieve my flashlight and cast a doubtful look at Mack.

  “Just need to pry it up,” he says. “It’ll open. Trust me.”

  Ben is looking down at the caulked-shut square in the floor and shaking his head.

  “Wow, just wow,” Ben says. “I can’t believe we’re about to do this.”

  “Stand aside,” says Mack, who suddenly has a grease-covered crowbar in his hand.

  We watch as Mack uses the hooked end of the crowbar to scrape away the caulk. Then he jams the crowbar into the opening and pries up the metal square. It falls to the side with a Conk. A dark hole in the floor beckons.

  “Wow,” Ben says again.

  Mack shines his light down into the hole. We creep in close to take a look. There are metal handholds reaching from the tunnel opening down to the floor below. At the bottom of the shaft is a stone floor with what looks like a metal track set into it.

  “Come on,” says Mack, holding his flashlight in his armpit. He begins his descent into the shaft. “It’s now or never.”

  Ben Bennington

  The smell . . . my god.

  We make it down into the tunnel just fine. (The handholds are precarious and slippery, but we all manage it.) The walls are fairly close (and a bright concrete-white), so there’s a lot of light refraction. The floors are caked in grime, but the walls are clean. The tunnel is maybe six feet wide.

  “This is one of the narrower, side shafts” Mack pronounces. “It’ll widen up when we get further in.”

  Our voices echo, though not overmuch. The thing that gets you, though—or gets me, anyway—is the smell. Stagnant water. Filth. Grime. Nightmares.

  They say that nothing can trigger memories like smells. Your mom’s apple pie hot out of the oven takes you back to being six and smelling it for the first time. The stench of sweat and metal at a gym can transport you to high school football practice, j uicing up for the big game against a crosstown rival. Smells transport you. Smells let you recall a feeling and a place and an attitude about the world that you thought your brain had long ago lost forever (or at least drowned to death in Vicodin and beer).

  The thing about these tunnels, though, is that they bring back memories I never knew I had.

  Can I “remember” the feeling of being suffocated and gasping for breath under blankets that smelled like mold? Can I—in any technical sense of the word—”recall” being trapped at the bottom of a well and screaming for help while no one comes to my rescue? Have I fallen into a machine used to grind animals into meat and waited for the device to be turned on in cold sweaty terror?

  No. They are not memories. These are things from dreams. From my nightmares. Things from my lizard brain that is millions of years old. This horrible place brings these things alive, forces them to the fore of my consciousness.

  And all of it—all of this “memory”—screams a differently

  worded version of the same message:You should not be down here.

  Mack leads us down the tributary tunnel and into the wide central corridor where mine cars used to carry coal. There are two sets of tracks underfoot. This corridor is larger, both wider and taller. The walls are lined with pipes—some appearing to date back to the tunnel’s origins, while others seem more recent. There are also markings along the walls every few feet; they’re like something the city would do on your lawn when they’re looking for gas lines. Little, coded doodles in spray paint. I wonder what they mean?

  Mack checks the compass on the bottom of his flashlight.

  “Excellent, this heads directly northwest.”

  Mack smiles at us as if to say we should be cheered by the news. I shudder and pull the riot helmet mask down.

  We fall into a formation. Mack leads the way, Maria follows, and I take up the rear. The strange smells seem to change every fifty feet or so, but their effect on me remains consistent. Every scent in this place is otherworldly and terrifying.

  I open my mouth to speak, but have second thoughts. In most situations like this, you’d talk to pass the time. Certainly, when I feel this nervous and uncomfortable, I find that talking helps me not go crazy.. .but one look at the back of Mack’s head is enough to tell me that he’s all ears. He’s focused, listening intently for anything ahead of us.or behind. His chin is up as though he’s sniffing the air. His gun stays in his coat.for now. I look to Maria, and see that her weapon is in her hand.

  It occurs to me—absurdly, perhaps just to break the t error I feel—that if this were a video game, it would be a really, really lousy one. In video games, there tend to be finite waves of zombies and you have infinite ammunition. This is the opposite of that. The zombies may verge on the infinite, and we have something like twenty bullets between us.

  A very bad video game indeed.

  I risk a couple of glances backward with my flashlight. Nothing.

  It’s hard to imagine that a slow-moving zombie could sneak up behind us. We’re walking at a pretty good clip. Still, the idea unnerves me. Three sets of footfalls going “clip-clop, clip-clop” get confusing pretty quickly. Would I be able to notice if a fourth set came into the mix? If I’m being honest, probably not.

  After perhaps ten minutes of silent walking, we arrive at another side-shaft. It looks almost identical to the one that led off to the warehouse. Mack does not pause to investigate or even shine his flashlight beam down its inky depths. He keeps us moving right on past it. Then, after perhaps five minutes more, we pass another side-shaft. It is boarded up. At this one, we do pause.

  The shaft has been covered with a large central plank, and then several wooden ties have been added around the edges, creating a pretty tight seal. Access is prevented. Still, there are small openings and little slots in the wood where I can shine my flashlight through. I do this, but the beam reveals nothing beyond.

  Mack clears his throat and taps the front of the boards with his flashlight. I follow with my eyes.

  A crude skull and crossbones has been spray painted on the front of the board-up in bright orange paint. The skull has three teeth, and there is an “X” over its right eye.

  “Is that a joke?” Maria whispers. It is the first time in a while that any of us has spoken.

  Mack has no answer.

  We continue down the tunnel, and there we find two more like it. But not exactly like it.

  The next side-shaft is similarly boarded and also features an orange skull. Like the previous one, it has three teeth, but the “X” is over its left eye. It also has a line above it—slanting down from left to right—like an incompletely drawn hat.

  A few minutes later, another boarded up shaft and another orange skull painting. This one looks much older. The paint used to render it might once have been orange, but now is a faded dark brown. The woodwork that seals the passage looks older as well. No part of it has been built with aesthetics in mind. This is purely
functional. Something no one is meant to see.

  Again, the skull is different. This one has three teeth, but the central tooth is colored-in. It has no “X” in its eyes. We peer through the holes in the slapdash board-up with our flashlights. There is nothing beyond.

  Then Mack says, “It’s a code.”

  Maria and I look at one another.

  “A code?” Maria whispers. “What kind of code? Why?” I think for a moment and risk a guess.

  “Like on the houses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Mack answers. “The different details on the face have to mean different things about what’s down the shafts.”

  “I wouldn’t say they’re ‘faces’ exactly,” quips Maria. “Look at the mushroom-shape. Those are clearly skeleton heads. Skulls”

  Mack ignores this.

  “The crosses over the eyes are signals,” he says. “So are the other markings. I just wish I knew what they meant. Down in New Orleans, there was a system. If you looked close, you could figure out what the search teams had found inside. D.B. stood for ‘dead bodies.’ G.L. was ‘gas leak’ and so on. You could make an educated guess. These. skull.pictures, though? I can’t even begin to theorize.”

  “Shhhhh!” Maria says, putting her gun to her lips like a giant librarian’s finger. “Listen to that.”

  “What?” I say after a moment, hearing nothing.

  I look to Mack. He shrugs and shakes his head.

  “Be totally quiet and listen,” Maria says, scolding me.

  We do.

  At first nothing. Maria’s final word—”listen”—echoes down the tunnels and is followed by silence. The tunnels are deep enough to block out noises from the street above. When the three of us do not move, the silence descends like thick, muffling snow.

  Just as I’m about to insist to Maria that there’s nothing to hear, we do make out a noise. The sound of something—or someone—being dragged. It is layered. There is a stutter step at regular intervals (dip...cbp, dip...cbp, clip...) and the pshhhhhh of something dragged along the tunnel floor behind the footfalls.

  We look at one another and nod, indicating that each of us has heard it.

  “Where’s it coming from?” I ask. I shine my flashlight down the tunnel behind us frantically. There is nothing there.

  “I don’t see anything ahead,” Mack announces, shining his

  light.

  Then it occurs to me that the sound might be coming from the other side of the walled off tunnel. I put my face close to the brownish skeleton and take a listen.

  “It’s close,” whispers Maria.

  We fall silent once more. Our flashlight beams scour the t unnel as we attempt to locate the source of the approaching sound. It’s still there, and it’s getting louder. I start to think it’s coming from somewhere above us. I wonder if the tunnels are layered. Are there tunnels on top of tunnels? Places where the coal and subway tunnels intersect?

  “There!” says Mack. “Up ahead. Look.”

  We train our flashlights forward down the tunnel. At first, I can discern only movement. (Maybe it is simply the combined motion of our beams that I’m seeing...) Then, something comes into view with the unmistakable piston-motion of human hips and legs. But it’s just hips and legs. We are seeing the lower half of a human being—in tattered tan pants—walking toward us down the corridor. A pair of pants and shoes walking by themselves. It takes a moment for this fact to register.

  “I thought they had to have a head,” I say.

  I look over at Mack. He shrugs as if to say That’s what I thought too, but apparently...

  Then the thing gets closer and we hear a familiar moan.

  “Look” whispers Maria. “It’s not just a pair of legs”

  She’s right. As it gets nearer to us, we can see the walking thing at more of an angle. This new perspective reveals that the legs are trailing a torso, shoulders, head, and arms behind them. This is a body whose back has been broken in many places. The thing comes toward us, dragging its upper half behind it like a wounded animal dragging its viscera.

  “How does it even see where it’s going?” I whisper.

  “I don’t think it can,” says Mack.

  “Can it tell we’re here?” asks Maria.

  As if in answer, the bedraggled zombie speaks a low, brief nonsensical sentence. Really, it’s more of a series of guttural burps. It is like human speech in so many ways, but, ultimately, isn’t. And it’s completely chilling.

  “Oh fuck,” I say.

  “It’s getting closer,” Maria says. “What do we do?” Maria and Mack draw their weapons. I hold my nightstick at the ready.

  “Don’t shoot it unless you have to,” says Mack. “As far as I can tell, these things can hear. Using guns would be very loud, and I don’t want to attract more. Maybe we can just rush past this dude. I bet it’d take him a while to turn around, broken as he is.”

  Maria and I look at one another and nod. The walking thing steps closer.

  Twenty yards. Ten yards. Five.

  At this distance, we can see that the thing is wearing khakis and dragging a body clad in REI winter wear. The broken s houlders are also dragging a backpack. The hands are gloved. The only exposed flesh is the face, which is horrible to see. It’s a Caucasian man with a short beard, but large chunks of his face have been eaten away, most likely by rats. My guess is he’s one of those urban explorers who investigate old buildings. His eyes— alarmingly and against all reason—are intact. They roll back and forth madly in their sockets, glistening and frozen.

  He appears to have fallen a great distance. I hope for his sake that he died on impact, or at least before the rats got to him.

  The dead explorer looks up from behind his own legs. He does not blink in the blinding glare of our flashlight beams. He begins to gnash his teeth mechanically.

  “What do you think?” Mack asks. “Can you guys get around

  him?”

  We have only a moment before the zombie is upon us. “Yeah” I say. “Let’s do it”

  Mack goes first. Appearing—again—much younger than his years, he lithely bounds over the back-shattered undead man.

  The zombie watches him. It stops for a moment, confused, as Mack flies overhead. Then its horrible eyes roll forward and sight Maria.

  “Come on,” Mack whispers to her urgently. “It’s easy.”

  Maria tucks her gun into her belt, takes a couple of steps backwards, and then leaps past the reclining zombie.

  Out of nowhere, the zombie’s left hand—which had seemed too broken and gnarled to be of any use—shoots up and grips Maria’s leg while she’s midair. Maria gives a little surprised “ugh,” and falls awkwardly to the ground.

  The zombie suddenly folds in on her, wrapping its disgusting broken body around hers like a snake. Its separated spine contorts like a coil.

  “No!” Mack shouts. I raise my nightstick and prepare to descend on the zombie. Maria writhes in its grasp.

  Suddenly, the thing’s head rises from the ground, extending out from the torso on a length of spine. It stares Mack right in the face and gnashes its teeth. Its lips curl into a smile.

  “Holy shit,” I gasp.

  Then a voice says, “Get out of the way!”

  I look and see Maria sitting up. One arm is still caught in the zombie’s coil, but the other is training her weapon on its slowly swaying head.

  “Maria, the noise!” protests Mack, even as the zombie’s head dips in to bite him.

  Maria pulls her trigger.

  The sound is deafening. For a few moments, all I can hear is the report of the gun. It seems to last forever, captured in the echo chamber of the tunnels and repeated again and again. My hands instinctively fly to my ears but encounter the riot helmet. There is a palpable pain in my eardrums.

  When I recover enough to look up, I see that Maria’s bullet has destroyed the zombie’s forehead. The undead explorer lies on the floor of the tunnel, unmovin
g.

  “Oh my God that was loud,” I say.

  “Had to be done,” Maria replies soberly, putting her gun back into her waistband.

  We shine our lights down on the broken, distended zombie, making certain it no longer moves. The twisted wreckage is awful. A body so contorted should be beyond dead. The thought that this thing found a way to live again is deeply unsettling.

  Satisfied that Maria’s bullet has done the job, Mack shines his light back down the tunnel ahead of us. He grows still.

  “Do you guys hear that?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “That gun fucked up my hearing. I can’t—.” Then I stop. I do hear it.

  It is a long, low roar coming from somewhere ahead of us. “What is that?” whispers Maria.

  “I’m not certain,” says Mack, “but it definitely knows we’re here.”

  We trudge on, heading generally northwest. The pipes lining the walls increase in number, giving the passage an industrial feel. There are also lights fitted into the walls at regular intervals, but they are not functioning. Eventually, we encounter a ladder built into the side of the tunnel with a hatch above. A way out, if we want it.

  “I thought you said these would be every quarter mile or something,” Maria says.

  “I had been misinformed, apparently,” Mack manages. “Yeah, apparently,” Maria returns.

  I gaze up at the hatch. Suddenly, I want with great intensity to stick my head back above ground and breathe air that does not smell like confinement and nightmares. The lure of it calls to me like water to a thirsty man. Just a little sip would slake me.

  “Maybe we should go up and take a look,” I try. “See where we are? Get our bearings?”

  Mack gives me an Are you serious? expression.

  “I know where we are,” Mack says. “There’s a long way to go still. We keep on in the tunnel.”

  I stare up longingly at the hatch a few moments longer.

  “Damn...” I whisper softly. “Okay.”

  We continue down the passageway.

  After ten steps, Mack raises his hand and freezes. For a moment, I’m hopeful that he’s changed his mind about the hatch. Then his free hand goes to his ear. He looks back at us and raises an eyebrow. Do we hear it too?