Zombie, Illinois (15 page)

We follow Mack to the door at the back of the altar, past his office in the corridor, and then down a side staircase into the basement. The red regal carpet crunches loudly under our feet. Not so much as a word passes between us. Idly, I wonder if Mack will be wearing his expensive suit for the rest of the night. Right now, it looks like yes.

Mack flicks on the lights. The basement before us has been converted into a daycare. It contains toys, posters, and walls of corkboard with children's drawings tacked to it. Mack stalks into the room, and we follow him.

When we're halfway across, the lights flicker for a moment, then turn off completely, then come back on. We look at one another silently, everyone contemplating just how shitty a power failure would be in this situation.

Mack fishes a jangly wad of keys from his pocket and uses one to open a large janitor's closet. We all step inside, joining a floor-waxer and a wall of shelves stocked with paper towels and toilet paper. There is another, much smaller door, at the back of the closet. Mack opens this with a different key, and we step into an even smaller space. It contains a wooden table and an enormous safe. The latter is—I realize after a moment—a gun safe.

Mack flips a switch and a bare light bulb above our heads buzzes to life. The room is so small that most of our group cannot fit inside. I am one of the lucky ones at the front of the pack. Mack takes a knee in front of the safe and carefully punches numbers into a keypad. He then turns a circular flywheel, and the safe creaks open. Inside are more assault rifles and ammunition than I have ever seen in one room. (And that includes the time I did an article about the gun dealerships out in McHenry County.) I'm surprised, as are the other men around me.

“Hey now,” an older man intones with a smile.

“Sheeee, Pastor,” a younger one whispers. “You been holdin' out on us.”

Mack carefully withdraws the weapons and places them on the table. There are easily as many guns as men in our group.

“Why do you have all these?” I can't stop myself from asking. Mack begins to pass out the weapons.

“A couple of you know that I do my own gun buyback program,” Mack says. “It's a standing offer to anyone in the community. Private. No questions asked.”

“Mmm hmm,” says one of the men next to me, indicating either that he knew of the program or just thinks that gun buy-back programs are good.

“Well...what'd you
think
I did with all the guns?” Mack says with a grin.

We all laugh . . . nervously.

“You out to give the cops some competition?” I ask, as Mack gives me a semi-automatic AK-47. “In the gun buyback department, I mean.”

He shakes his head.

“The cops offer folks fifty or a hundred bucks for a gun,” Mack says. “That'll convince somebody to get rid of their grand-pappy's rusted rifle from World War II, but not much else. I offer more—a lot more—and I make sure that the gang members around here know it. When one of them decides he's ready to get out of the game—
really
get out and change his ways—he knows bringing me his weapons will result in some serious money. Usually a G or two. Sometimes more. That's enough to help a young man start a new life. Rent himself a place in a new neighborhood away from his gang friends. Buy himself some work clothes. Clean up and get it together.”

“Thassright,” agrees a newly-armed parishioner next to me.

“Of course, my offer is one of the reasons why this church still has a leaky roof and a pipe organ that sounds like a constipated cat,” observes Mack.

We laugh a little more at this, but just a little.

By the time everyone is equipped with a ponderous and heavy firearm, we depart from the cramped closet and walk back into the basement. My weapon is new and strange, and I feel terrified. I haven't shot a gun since I was a Boy Scout back in Iowa. Am I really expected to use an AK to fight these ‘things?' Apparently so.

“Now,” says Mack, “the plan is simple. Defend South Shore. Help those who can't help themselves. As I see it, the zombies are gonna come at us from two sides—east and west.”

Next to me, one of the younger men wrinkles his nose and says, “East? East is the lake, Pastor.”

“Have you been to the lake tonight?” Mack asks the young man. “Did you drive up Lake Shore two hours ago, like I did? Did you see what I saw? All of the bodies that gangsters and gangs-tas ever dumped into Lake Michigan are getting back on their feet and walking ashore tonight. They're hungry for my brain and yours. They're coming for us.”

“Understood, Pastor,” says the questioner, cowed.

“And on the other side,” continues Mack, “you got that massive cemetery, Crenshaw. I'm no expert, but I think we can expect some action from there as well.”

The men murmur agreement.

“If you can hit them in the brain, it's an instant kill,” says a man in a faded green beret. “You know . . . kills them
again.”

“Yes” says Mack. It's unclear if he is hearing this information for the first time or if he already knows it.

“I already kilt one up at my place,” says Green Beret. “Torso didn't do nothing. One through the head, it went down,
splat.
I just wish it hadn't been my old friend Keith, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Mack. “I know.”

We look at one another, then over at the stairs leading back up to the church. Back up to South Shore. Back up—I realize on some level—to what may very possibly be our deaths.

“All right,” says Mack, deadly serious. “Now it's time for a real prayer.”

The men all take a knee around Mack, like we're at football practice and he's the coach. I follow suit, wondering what a “real” prayer might be. We fall silent. There is only the distant noise of the parishioners upstairs, chattering away nervously.

Mack closes his eyes and raises one hand like he's swearing on the Bible in court.

“O Lord. You know what's going on. You know what kind of test this is you're giving us and why. You know what this is. And we don't.”

I expect a round of “Amens” or murmurs of agreement to follow. There is nothing. The men stay silent. This is different from upstairs.

“Lord, please give us the wisdom to accept that
you
know what's going on,” Mack continues. “Please allow us to trust that
you
have a plan—and a reason—for what is now occurring in our community, in our City of Chicago, and in our State of Illinois. Please grant these men around me the strength to protect our loved ones from the walking dead. Help them to understand that you have always called upon the righteous to stand with you in times of turbulence and to protect those who could not protect themselves. Lord, please make these men protectors. Arm them. Make them mighty. Though some are young, grant them judgment beyond their years. Though some are old, grant them the strength of youth. Help all of us to serve you in everything that we do. Amen.”

And here we do speak, and we say, “Amen.”

The AK-47 starts to feel lighter in my arms.

We stand up and face the stairs.

It is time to go kill zombies.

We follow Mack back upstairs. The parishioners look at our guns and fall silent. Again, every eye is trained on us. Children are hushed. Every person we pass takes a few steps back. An old woman halfway up the central aisle whispers, “Bless you boys.”

We walk to the front of the church, and Mack opens the doors. Not gently or slowly. He throws them wide open.

We are not greeted by a slavering mob of zombies.. .but what lies beyond is hardly encouraging.

We step outside into it. We can breathe it in our lungs and see it all over the horizon. We can smell it and hear it. It is every-where.The
wrong.

Nothing is what it should be. The city noises are all incorrect. Where we ought to be hearing cars and commerce, there are only distant shouts and occasional pops that are probably gunfire. Half of the businesses and buildings near the church appear to have lost power. The streetlights are still on, but many flicker continually. Some give off a sickly yellow hue that feels unnatural, a consequence of either too much or not enough power. Turning north, where the Loop and Chicago's tallest building rise in the distance, we can see what look like giant fires. The cold somehow makes the smell sharper and more distinct. Things are burning. Things that shouldn't be burning are burning. It's not a nice smell, like logs on a fire. It's metallic and industrial.

Burning, burning, burning.

Then another smell hits me. Seaweed, docks, and dead fish come to mind.

A man next to me screams, “Look out!”

I turn and see a zombie stumbling around the corner of the church. He has on a bright white jacket and a do-rag. He has two gunshot wounds in his chest. He is sniffing the air and rolling his eyes like a malfunctioning automaton. The zombie shambles slowly, more or less in our direction.

“Damn” says a member of our armed contingent.

“I've seen that boy around” says another. “His name was Lester. Never was no good.”

Mack steps forward, marching seriously until he stands right in front of the zombie. It is as though he's greeting an old friend. The undead man flails his arms like he's covered in an invisible sackcloth that he's trying to slough off.

“You need some help there, Pastor?” I ask, genuinely worried.

Mack waves me off and draws closer to the zombie. Then closer still. The men around me smile genially at one another, as if to say they've seen this before.

“What's he doing?” I whisper to no one in particular. “He's going to get bitten.”

“Pfft,” says an older man in a black leather jacket. “How long you known Pastor Mack, son?”

“I met him tonight,” I answer honestly.

“I see,” he responds, like a detective making deductions. “Then maybe you haven't seen him standing up to the dealers when they forget what he said about selling on certain corners, or the times he's gone to stare-down a whole family who are bent on making a revenge killing. You should step back and watch the man work. You'll learn a lot.”

I do.

Mack leans in and gets even closer to the stinking zombie— like reach out and touch it close—and the thing still does not strike. Mostly, it lumbers like a constricted, half-blind drunk. Like its skin doesn't fit. Like it's trying to sober up.

Suddenly, the zombie seems to find a new flexibility in its arms. It begins to move its previously stiff fingers and bend its arms back and forth at the elbow. In a flash, it flexes its knees and lunges forward at Mack. Before I can speak or think, we hear a deafening report. The zombie's forehead explodes. Its legs go limp. It collapses in a heap at the pastor's feet.

Mack turns, and we just have time to see the glint of a burnished nickel disappear back inside his leather jacket.

“They're frozen,” announces Mack. “The ones from the lake are frozen and stiff with ice. This is good news for us. If we can approach them—and hit them right away—we can put them down before they have a chance to get flexible again.”

We all nod. Mack peeks around the corner of the church to see if there are any additional zombies. There does not appear to be, but Mack still stands there, staring toward the lake, for a long, long time.

“See, that's Pastor Mack,” the old man in the leather jacket whispers. “Always learning himself something new.” “Yeah,” I say. “I see what you mean.”

Sometimes the first
are
last. And, accordingly, the last are first.

For all that's been written and said about the outbreak in Chicago—about those first twenty-four hours especially—I've never seen a write-up of what the murder rate was like in differ-ent neighborhoods. And I mean murder by zombie
or otherwise.

I know that in north side neighborhoods, it was high. Too high. I'm not happy about that. I hope that's clear to you. I didn't want to know that rich people would prove twice as violent as poor people. I didn't want live-in domestics to rise up against their masters and abscond with the silver and credit cards into the zombie-filled night. I didn't want the expensive electronic security systems—all suddenly rendered useless—to create an environment where the most defended homes were suddenly the most defenseless. I didn't want the cops who patrolled the rich neighborhoods to abandon their beats and go protect their own families.