Zombie, Illinois (30 page)

“Hate to burst your bubble, but look at this,” I say, directing Ben's attention to some of the smaller headlines further down the front page. These subheads report that people are starting to see walking corpses all over the country. In Mexico and Canada, too. The president has been called back from a summit in Japan and has scheduled a joint press conference with the CDC the moment he lands.

“Oh,” says Ben, the excitement draining somewhat from his face.

“Look on the bright side,” I tell him. “Even if it starts happening other places, it looks like we were
first.”

Ben tilts his head back and forth, considering this. A little bit of his smile returns.

Suddenly, the door at the back of the station bursts open, and four large men walk into the room. Luckily, one of them is Mack. The other three are thugs in orange jumpsuits. Mack is wearing a riot helmet with a clear plastic visor and pointing his handgun at the men.

“There you go,” Mack says to them, gesturing to the door. “Stick to the south side, but stay away from the Harold Washington Cultural Center. That place is poison. If somebody doesn't seem right—or doesn't seem
alive
—you just run the other way. The dead are mostly frozen, but they get faster when they have a chance to thaw.”

The prisoners brush past us and head out the door. They are tough men with hard faces. Men from neighborhoods where a smile indicates weakness and where eye contact with the wrong stranger can get you jumped. They don't seem particularly i nterested in Mack's description of the zombie outbreak into which they are about to set foot. Their expressions say
Leave me alone. I can handle this, whatever it is.

The men exit the police station and head off in different directions.

“Really?” I say to Mack.

“They were going to starve down there,” Mack says. “The cops just left them?” Ben asks. “That's a pretty shitty thing to do.”

“I don't think they planned to,” Mack replies. “Think about it. The zombies start to rise up, and most of the police are called out. The emergencies all around the city get worse and worse. Eventually, you have a skeleton crew holding down the entire station. Then the lines of communication go down completely. The remaining officers start saying ‘Forget it' and go home to protect their own families. I'll bet the last guy in here didn't even know he was the last.”

Ben frowns. He clearly still thinks it was shitty to leave the prisoners.

“Ben found some flashlights,” I say brightly. “How did you

fare?”

“Badly,” says Mack. “Most everything is locked up. It was lucky that the doors to the cells were automated, or I wouldn't have gotten them open either. I found this helmet though, and
this.”

From his pocket, Mack produces a heavy plastic nightstick.

“Fuck...” I exhale. “No guns at all? Not even Tasers or tear gas?”

Mack shakes his head.

“And we need to get moving,” he says. “I don't want to risk Mogk's people running into us before we get into the tunnels.”

“But I don't even have a gun!” I protest.

“Here,” Mack says. He hands me the truncheon and places his helmet on my head.

“This feels like a bad Halloween costume,” I object.

“Wait,” says Ben, throwing up his hands. “Just.wait.”

He walks over and gives me his handgun.

“You should have this. I hardly know how to shoot it, and you're evidently an excellent shot. I don't even know if the thing has any bullets left.”

“Eight,” I say, checking. “Seven in the clip and one in the chamber.”

I trade with Ben—giving him the stick and riot helmet. He holds the stick between his legs and awkwardly works the helmet onto his head. Then he raises the nightstick with both hands on the hilt, like it's a sword.

“You look good,” I tell him as we leave the abandoned police

station. “Official.”

“Thanks,” he says grumpily, as though it is little consolation.

The giant warehouse where Mack's uncle used to work looms into view just north of the station. The dark streets are perfectly empty. There is a sense of impending doom as we get closer. I believe we all share it. Ben makes one last attempt to change our minds.

“I just think it sounds risky to go down into these tunnels,” he says from underneath his clear plastic visor. (He says it quietly, like he wants us to think he's just talking to himself.) “I don't know if it makes sense when you look at the big picture.”

I look over to Mack, wondering if we should acknowledge Ben's whining.

“I think...” Mack begins casually, keeping his eyes on the warehouse, “that everything after this is a risk that doesn't make sense. But going into the tunnels now is maybe the one thing that does.”

We reach the edge of the abandoned warehouse property. There's a chain link fence around it that has long since been compromised with wire cutters. We pick the nearest hole and duck through.

“I don't know what happens tomorrow,” Mack continues. “I don't know what happens when the sun comes up. Zombies throughout the state.maybe throughout the whole country.”

“The zombies are popping up all over,” I tell him. “We saw it on the internet at the police station.”

“Tomorrow is a mystery,” Mack continues. “But
tonight,
we have the chance to do something right. Something that restores order and decency. Something that helps people.Tomorrow, we might not have that chance.”

The warehouse is enormous and old. One exterior wall features the ghost of a print advertisement for a brand of chewing tobacco that hasn't existed for sixty years. The walls are brick, but the ancient, slanted roof is made of wood—weather worn and mostly warped.

“This place looks like a haunted house,” Ben says.

He's right, it totally does. Or at least the kind of place that that a bunch of art students rent out around Halloween and charge $20 a pop to scare people with fake blood and plastic monsters.

“It hasn't been operational for a while,” Mack replies. “Closed down right after my uncle retired. Whoever owns it is just waiting to sell the land it sits on. It might be abandoned. I really don't know.”

Ben says nothing, but I notice a little fog building on the inside of his riot helmet.

“Around back,” Mack says.

We hoof it along the side of the warehouse and turn the corner. There we find loading docks for trucks and a wall of ancient, rusted garage doors. Everything is covered with graffiti, but it looks like graffiti from 1980. (Even taggers got bored with this place many years ago.) Mack stalks over to a metal door with “Authorized Personnel Only” stenciled over it.

“We could try to kick it down” Mack says. “But I wonder...”

He feels along the dirty ledge above the door.

“I don't damn believe it.”

We watch as Mack's hand comes away with a key. It's filthy and sticky, covered in grease and years of dust.

“They used to leave the key here in my uncle's day. I wonder if the current owners even know it's here.”

Mack brushes the gunk and grease off of the key. Then he uses it to open the door.

I look over at Ben. There is a pea-soup level of fog on his mask.

“Maybe you should wear that thing with the visor up. For now, at least.”

“Yeah,” he says, adjusting the helmet. “That might be a good idea.”

We take out our flashlights and turn them on. Only two of the flashlights from the police station actually work. Ben and I each take one. They are good, but Mack's giant Maglite is even better.

Ben and I form up behind Mack, and we make our way into the building. Inside is a stench like burned grease or motor oil and old, undisturbed machinery.

We enter a shipping bay, which is only a small part of the l arger warehouse. There are broken pallets and stacks of tires against the wall. Everything is covered with dust. Our footsteps echo. The warehouse door swings closed behind us.

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.”

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.