Mack speeds ahead and stops only when he stands underneath the opening, directly in the beam. I catch up and hunker at the edge of the light. After so many hours beneath the city, we’ve become like moles. We shield our eyes and struggle to glimpse the topside world.
“Hello there!” Mack calls up to the opening.
Both of us squint and try to see. An enormous figure looms into of the circle of light above us, blocking nearly half the beam. It’s a man—a giant man—thick-necked like a football player and wearing a turtleneck sweater to increase his general girth.
A voice, eerily similar to Mack’s, booms down.
“Hello down there!” it says. “I heard y’all could use you some
light.”
Mack claps his hands and dances around, once, in a circle—rotating in the beam like a brilliant jewel in a motorized display case.
“The entrance of thy words giveth light!”Mack cries, a smile curling to his lips.
“Mmm hmm,” returns the voice, with playful skepticism. “In this case though, I believe my light giveth light. The light from the sun, that is. What you doing down in that sloppy old tunnel, Pastor Mack? Oh, hang on, your man here tried to tell me...”
“My man?” Mack asks.
Another head appears in the opening above. It has a familiar shape. And thick black glasses.
“Ben?” I call out. “Ben, is that you?”
“Yeah,” Ben’s voice descends. “Come up here! You’re almost
to Oak Park!”
“My Good Samaritan!!!” Mack says, and erupts into laughter.
I look on, scarce believing my eyes. Mack continues to rotate.
He is dancing. He holds out his arms.
“My Good Samaritan!” Mack cries out again. “Hallelujah!”
And he stays there for a while like that, just rotating.
Back on the surface world, we learn that we are at the edge of a mostly African-American west side neighborhood called Austin. It abuts Oak Park. We are practically there. In our time in the tunnels, we’ve traveled something like eight miles.
The large, turtlenecked man is an old friend of Mack’s. (Mack introduces us when he gets through hugging him, which is after a damn while.)
“This is Moses Rivers” Mack explains enthusiastically, “Pastor of The Church of Christ in God.”
“We go by ‘cockage,’” he says in a baritone equal to Mack’s. After an awkward moment, I realize he is parsing “COCIG.”
I take a look around. The streets in this neighborhood were pretty bleak before a zombie outbreak. Now they are doubly so. There’s a mix of single family homes and apartment buildings, but nearly half of them are board-ups. The ones that were not closed by the city for tax delinquency or abandoned have been barricaded against the walking dead. Empty lots full of trash and detritus separate the homes like pits of decay separating teeth in a smile. (It is in one of these undeveloped lots that Pastor Rivers
Scott Kenemore
has accessed the tunnels to free us, removing the bolts on a square plate set into the ground.) At the end of the block is a no-name cell phone store and a fish-fry shack, both burned and looted. On the sidewalk across the street from us is an old brown couch with two elderly men relaxing on it. It takes me a few moments to realize that both of them are dead.
Ben Bennington, still apparently hale and whole, is standing next to Pastor Rivers. Mack hugs him next, just for good measure.
“Wow . . . good to see you, too,” Ben says.
“What happened, Ben?” I ask urgently. “We were sure those zombies got you.”
Ben looks at Pastor Rivers and says, “You want to tell them?”
Rivers shrugs.
“Since these things first started coming up, we’ve been trying to stamp ‘em out and clear the neighborhood,” Rivers begins. “Try to ensure everybody in the congregation was safe.”
“Just like what we did at Mack’s church!” Ben says brightly.
“I don’t envy Pastor Mack” Rivers says. “You’re right between the lake and Crenshaw Cemetery. Plus, your congregation is bigger than mine. We get a lot of bodies out here on the west side, but the police usually find ‘em a few hours after they drop. Down in South Shore, you boys got a whole other story. Put a body in that lake, ain’t no tellin’ how long it stays down. Anyway, we been at this since last night. And those things kept coming up long after I was sure there couldn’t be no more. I got to thinking they could be coming from the old tunnels, ‘cause I was seeing ones that were old. Real old. Men that had died back in my grandfather’s days, rotted down to almost nothing but bones and a suit.”
“We saw a lot of that in the tunnels” I say. “You were right.”
“There are three entrances I know of here in Austin,” mentions Pastor Rivers. “First one I tried, there weren’t nothin’ below. Empty and spider webs. The second opening—it’s inside an old sausage plant off Central Avenue—I look inside and what do I see but this young man about to get hisself eaten by a bunch of the damn things. I reach down and grab him, hoist him back up to the factory floor, and close that door. All in about two seconds.”
“But we didn’t see that!” I object. “How did you...?”
“There was a hatch right above the lip of that pit,” Ben says. “We were so distracted looking down at the zombies that we didn’t even notice it. When Pastor Rivers grabbed me, I had no idea what was happening. The interior of the sausage plant was dark too.”
“Mmm hmm,” agrees Rivers. “You take it from here, young man.”
Ben looks sheepish for a moment.
“Come now,” Rivers cajoles. “The dead are walkin’, son. Ain’t no time to worry what people think.”
Mack and I exchange the briefest of glances at this comment. I say nothing though. His secret is safe with me.
“I passed out,” Ben says quietly. “I didn’t know what was happening. I saw the zombies coming, and I was worried about making that jump into the pit. Then there were these hands pulling me around the waist—pulling me up out of nowhere— and I got lightheaded and that was it.”
“I thought he might be dead or about to come back as one of those things,” Rivers tells us. “He was out a good twenty minutes. When he woke up normal and explained what you all were doing, we went back and opened the hatch. We looked and looked, but you were already gone. Our only chance was to try to catch you further down the line, at this hatch. But we scurried and done it.”
“In the nick of time, too,” says Mack. “We lost our light.”
“Damn,” replies Rivers. “Down there with those things. in the dark. Ouch”
“Yeah, it was pretty ‘ouch’ there for a while,” I say.
“Did Ben tell you what we’re trying to do?” Mack asks. “What we’re up against?”
Rivers nods. “He did, and I ain’t surprised. Disappointed maybe, but not surprised. You always could smell the stank coming off Marja Mogk from about a mile away. She’s got some allies out here on the west side, too. But I don’t know if she’s been able to get to them yet.”
“Are the phones and everything still down?” I ask, remembering my cell in my pocket.
“Oh yeah,” says Pastor Rivers. “Internets too.”
“Then we’ve still got a chance to get to my father.before she does,” I say.
“I can drive you the rest of the way,” says Rivers. “South part of Austin is jammed up good. People got stuck trying to get on the expressway and abandoned they cars around midnight. Where we are though—a bit north of the highway—we got a straight shot into Oak Park.”
“Sounds good to me,” I tell him. “After all that walking, I will damn-straight accept a ride.”
Rivers’s car is not as nice as Mack’s but still has the preacher look to it. (Mack’s house of worship might not be a clean new mega-church with ten thousand parishioners, but it could still look plenty enviable to a west side startup congregation operating out of a storefront that gets fifty attendees on a good
Sunday.) We pile in. I take a spot in the back seat next to Ben. As we wait for the heater to kick in, I realize just how tired and hungry I am. Ben seems to sense this.
“Here you go,” Ben says, producing a half-eaten stick of beef jerky from under his coat. “Rivers gave it to me.”
“Ugh” I say. “That stuff”
“Do you want it?”
“Of course I do,” I tell him. I grab the preserved sausage stick and take a bite. Meaty saltiness washes over me. Balm of Gilead. Ambrosia. I have never tasted anything so fine. My stomach rumbles as I begin to fill it with processed meat.
I give Rivers my cousin’s address and he pulls the car away from the curb.
The neighborhoods through which we pass show signs of chaos and carnage but are quiet for the moment. In the cool light of dawn, they reveal themselves as utterly still. Abandoned cars are everywhere. Many streets are blocked—some with personal cars but some with police cruisers and fire trucks, as if as part of some coordinated municipal effort. A garbage truck has been used to completely cut off traffic to a side street. A fire truck’s ladder has been extended horizontally to prevent automobile traffic from taking an exit. Was this some mad, last-ditch attempt to funnel people away from the highway? It seems impossible to tell. Rivers appears to know the neighborhood, however, and easily maneuvers us around the blockage, driving across yards and up on sidewalks when he has to.
Corpses litter the landscape, especially in the gutters. From a distance, they look like piles of clothes. Some are dead zombies, shot through their stinking heads. Others are human, either too destroyed and dashed to reanimate...or too recent for reanimation to have yet occurred.
We mostly ride in silence. Going from the stark alien darkness of the tunnels to the familiar inside of an automobile is jarring. I think we are all letting it sink in. I can’t speak for the others, but I feel like I could sleep for about a year.
“You inhaled that sausage,” Ben observes.
“Got any more?”
“Nope, that was the last one.”
I frown, wanting about ten more of them. Then something occurs to me.
“Is there anything on the radio?”
“Ehh, wasn’t much before,” Rivers replies with some amusement. “Let’s see if they got their act together.”
Rivers turns on the radio and begins scanning through channels. Most of them—the stations I recognize—seem to be gone. The ones that do come in are all playing the same recorded message. It starts with the distorted whine of the Emergency Broadcast Service. Then a computerized-sounding voice comes on. It advises residents to stay inside their homes, obey any orders from police or military, and, oddly, to “give no comfort or aid to aggressive foreign elements.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I ask after the message has repeated a couple of times.
“I don’t think they had a pre-recorded emergency message for ‘Zombie Outbreak’ waiting in the can” says Mack. “They probably went with whatever seemed closest.”
“Yessir,” agrees Pastor Rivers with a laugh. “That one sounds like ‘Russkie Invasion’ to me. Somebody must’a had to dig through the archives for that.”
“I bet you’re right,” says Mack.
“The radio mentions army and police,” I say. “Have you seen any army or police?”
“Not on duty and not alive,” Rivers replies, shaking his head.
We enter the strip where Austin ends and Oak Park begins. Normally, I would observe that the homes get a little nicer as we continue west, but what’s “nicer” when it would be “nice” not to get eaten by zombies or killed by looters? Is a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style house an advantage if your long, low front window and the grand piano behind it are no longer protected by a security system?
Despite some architectural setbacks, I see evidence that the upper middle class have done their best to hunker down against the walking dead. Ignoring carefully maintained yards, SUVs have been driven across flowerbeds and parked in front of vulnerable glass doors. Windows have been boarded up with broken furniture and nailed shut. In one case, a Harvard University flag has been used to tie down the opening to a cellar door.
A few houses have been left utterly undefended by residents who I assume simply headed for the hills. These are almost uniformly ransacked—windows smashed, doors torn from hinges, possessions scattered everywhere (sometimes out across the front lawns). There are also signs of zombie attacks. Alarming red swaths of blood smeared across white picket fences and garage doors. Bright red handprints—some, heartbreakingly, child-sized—mottle the sides of houses like art projects. (These are not the aftermath of looters and gun-packing criminals. No thief bothers to draw that much blood. These victims were sanguinated by hordes of dragging, scratching, biting zombies.)
It doesn’t take much for me to imagine the confused residents of this neighborhood in the first moments of the attack. I see them running across lawns in mounting terror, searching in vain for loved ones, and finding themselves cornered in back yards by stumbling undead.
It happened here too. And if my family—my father, mother, and sister—made it out here, then what did they find? Was my cousin Franco one of the ones to turn his house into a fort, or was he one of the ones who fled? I look at the alternately fortified and destroyed homes and wonder which kind we’re going to find.
“It’s down here,” I call up to the front. “Take a left after the playground.if you can.”
The neighborhood is so utterly changed by the outbreak that it’s hard for me to recognize where we are. I’m mostly going by street names.
“Quick question, everybody,” I say to the whole car. “What happens when we get there?”
“I talked to Pastor Rivers already,” Ben says. “We discussed escape plans for the mayor.”
“You knew you could trust him?” I shoot back, forgetting for a moment that Rivers is inside the car with us.
“He saved me from zombies, didn’t he? Plus, I didn’t have much of a choice. I had to tell him my story. It was him or nothing.”
“The young lady has a reasonable concern,” Rivers allows from the front seat. “There are a lot of corrupt people who’d love to help Mogk take over the city. A lot of ‘em would do it for next to nothing. For a scrap. For a sandwich. There’s people in this town dyin’ to sell out somebody, just so they can get a little bit ahead. When you ran into me, you got lucky. I’m incorruptible.”
“So what did you decide?” I ask.
“What you need—what your father and all your family members need—is somewhere to hide,” Rivers says. “Somewhere with no connection to the rest of your lives. Your priority is to put the mayor someplace where Marja Mogk’s people will never think to look.”
“Like?” I ask.
“Like how ‘bout the basement of a church in Austin?” Rivers suggests.
I nod. That sounds okay.
“Gonna be a tight squeeze to fit everybody in this car,” I point out. I hope the Pastor will not think I am criticizing his smaller size preacher car. I am only stating a fact.
“If sitting in laps is our biggest problem, we are gonna be a blessed group of people,” says Mack.
Moments later, Franco’s house comes into view. I take a deep breath. Whatever’s going to happen, it happens now.
Ben Bennington
The Oak Park home containing the new mayor of Chicago is at the end of a block filled with burned-out cars and bodies littering the gutters. It looks like TV footage from a third world country, not a city in the United States. The house is, compared to its neighbors, relatively modest—a white, two-story affair; probably no more than two bedrooms. It has not been abandoned to zombies and criminals, which we are very relieved to see. Indeed, in stark contrast to some of its smashed and looted neighbors, it has been protected in a variety of ways. Furniture and boxes have been heaped against windows. Two cars have been parked in front of the garage door, blocking access. Another car has been parked against a side doo
r, with its front bumper physically pinning the door shut. Every shutter has been closed, and every shade has been lowered. Somebody has definitely battened down the hatches.
It’s eight in the morning now, but the house is still dark. At Mack’s insistence, Rivers pulls his car to the side of the road some distance away. We step outside into the bracing cold street. I can’t tell if the temperature has fallen or if I’m just weak from exhaustion. Probably both.
“Careful now,” Mack says, drawing his Glock.
“Put that away!” Maria objects. “You want to scare them?”
“No, but I might want to scare some other people.”
Maria seems to consider this and draws her own gun.
We stay in a tight bunch, cutting through front yards and staying close to trees and fences, as if taking cover from snipers above. Maria takes the lead. At one point, I stop to rest against a five-foot iron fence with pointed, spear-like tips. After a moment, I notice that a human eyeball has been impaled on the tip nearest me. (Is it my imagination, or is it looking at me?)
In a few moments, we are in front of the right house. “Franco!” Maria calls loudly. “Franco, it’s me!” We head up the driveway.
“Rifle on us,” Mack says from the corner of his mouth. “Upstairs window. You recognize him?”
Maria takes a glance at the bedroom window from which a gun barrel is emerging.
“No,” Maria says. “I don’t.”
Maria stops advancing. So do the rest of us. There’s this awful moment where we all start to wonder if we’ve got the wrong place, or if Marja Mogk’s people have beat us here and we’re walking into an ambush. Then the front door opens and a man about my age in a Blackhawks jersey steps onto the porch. He holds a handgun but keeps it pointed at the ground.
“Maria?” the man asks.
“Franco!” Maria returns with relief.
“Maria, who are these people? What’s going on?”
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