Zombie, Illinois (13 page)

The mayor and his wife—and three men in trench coats with guns—are retreating from the inner graveyard back toward their cars. They are surrounded on every side by the walking dead. Two of their police escorts are firing back at the zombies with handguns. Now and then they strike home—one of the zombies is shot in the head and goes down—but there is no way they can win; no way they can hold off a horde that looks as if it might be endless.

One of the police escorts—the one who is not shooting— turns and runs into the darkness. He has gone mad or abandoned his post. He will almost certainly be eaten by zombies.

The remaining policemen have run out of bullets. They decide to make a break for the cars. They aren't going to make it. That's completely clear to anybody watching.

The mayor and his wife have been abandoned. Left to fend for themselves. The mayor puts his arm around his better half and swivels his head. He is looking for something. What can it be? His smarmy charm and empty political promises cannot save him now.

Meanwhile, one of the sprinting policemen dives for an SUV but doesn't make it. He thrashes heroically as he is ripped apart. The remaining policeman fights back against an oncoming wave with the butt of his gun. He is slowly overwhelmed. The mayor and his wife retreat from the cars until they are backed up against the flat wall of an enormous marble mausoleum.

Then it happens.

From the shadows beyond the spotlight, a nightmare figure lopes into view. It wears a traditional Italian funeral suit and has a porcine, jowly demeanor. Few alive today have seen the face in life, but there is no not-recognizing it.

Good God. It is Capone.

Even as I watch in horror, some part of my brain begins working. I start to remember that the people buried out in Mt. Carmel are some of Chicago's most famous—yes—but also its most infamous.

Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci, Sam “The Cigar” Giancana, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn . . . and, of course, Capone himself. All of them are out there in Mount Carmel. It's full of gangsters. Men the city would prefer to keep buried (in more than one sense). Men the Mayor of Chicago had hoped to make the world forget.

As Capone stumbles forward and sinks his flabby, rotting maw into the mayor's forehead, you just have time to see an expression of complete surrender cross the mayor's face. This is rare. The mayor isn't the kind of guy who likes to lose. This surrender is profound and deep. He's not just surrendering his life. It is an “Okay, I give up” that goes far beyond the stare of a condemned man. Yes, in that remarkable, horrible, haunting instant, you just have time to see the Mayor of Chicago realize that he—like the city itself—will
never
escape from Capone.

“So the mayor . . .” the anchor begins soberly. “The mayor is now having his brains eaten by what I'm going to go ahead and call a zombie. A zombie that, in this reporter's opinion, looks a whole lot like Al Capone.”

He doesn't say more. He doesn't have to.

What kind of tie do you wear to the apocalypse?

I stand in my dressing room and eventually select a bright pink one with shiny, iridescent stitching. I consider for a moment, and decide that, yes, it will complement the gray-black pinstripe suit I have already donned.

It could be worse, I think as I attempt my Windsor knot and consider the task before me. I could be a downstate Pentecostal preacher trying to explain to a roomful of corn-fed farmers why they are not being lifted physically to the heavens right now. Indeed, I have said little about the end times during the course of my Sunday sermons. I have always been focused—perhaps too focused—on the times at hand. (Why eschatology connects with rural white preachers, and not inner-city black ones, remains a mystery.)

I don't know what's going on. I don't know if this is truly the end times or the Rapture. I just know that a lot of people who are scared most of the time anyway are now really, really scared. And they're in
my
church, and they're looking to me for answers. Not to the police. Not to an alderman. To me. People in my neighborhood can't trust the cops. They can't trust their politicians. The only honest person left—if they're lucky—is their preacher.

In other parts of Chicago—the north side, say—the residents have a good relationship with the police. The cops are there to protect them, not to harass them. It's rare in north side neighborhoods to have a family member who was shot to death by Chicago police. Five families in my congregation can claim that distinction.

In other parts of Chicago, you can trust the politicians to be effective...at least sometimes. They occasionally have enough power to bend the mayor's ear and get something done. But in our neighborhoods, it's different. Our politicians can get a boondoggle like the Harold Washington Cultural Center built... and then mismanage it into bankruptcy by putting their no-sense relatives in charge of it. They can bring the south side a conven-tion of church groups (who don't eat out, drink, or ever spend a dime more than they have to), but they can't bring the kind of conventioneers who throw around enough money to actually improve a local economy. They can give speeches in schools about how drugs are bad, but then you see them on the street chatting with guys that everyone knows are running drugs. These people cannot provide real assistance in times of need. They cannot even be trusted to put the needs of the community above their own craven scrabblings to get ahead.

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.”

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.