Zombie, Illinois (32 page)

“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?

After a moment, I do. It is the long, low roar again. Louder. Closer.

“Oh hell,” Maria whispers. “That's ahead of us. That's the way we're going.”

“What is it?” I ask.

Nobody responds.

Mack lowers his hand and continues forward.

Part of me wants to turn around and run back to the hatch. Fuck the Pulitzer. Fuck it all. Whatever I encounter above, it's got to be better than this. (What are we below, anyway? Chinatown? Bridgeport? Those neighborhoods would probably be okay.) But fleeing the tunnels, I realize, would mean going it alone. Increasingly, it feels like the most valuable—and rare—things in this outbreak are people I can trust. I may not like where Mack and Maria are taking me, but think I can trust them. For the time being, at least, I decide I'll go with that.

The markings on the doorways of abandoned houses after Hurricane Katrina were utilitarian. There was no artistry to them. Their goal was to make mathematical and impersonal the most devastatingly personal information. The people in here are dead. This is how many corpses you can expect to find. (Or—in the case of the Katrina searchers who merely put a stripe down the front of a door—this house contains an
unknown
number of corpses, a more harrowing prospect entirely.)

The spray-painted designs on the boarded-off side passages are part of a code, but they are also decorated with verve and wit. As we continue to pass more of them, the skulls begin to wear hats, to smile and leer, and even to have little stick-figure bodies underneath them. Some hold things like guns, sticks, or swords. Some gesture or even dance. The skulls begin to feel more like characters from the Sunday funnies than utilitarian warnings of dangers beyond.

Then—it happens!—we find a board-up with some actual written words on it. Sort of.

“FUBAR,” Ben announces, reading the orange letters on the front of the boards. They have been painted beneath a winking, leering skull who wears a crudely crafted bow-tie.

“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition,” Maria announces proudly.

“That expression has been around since before the Second World War,” I inform my young friends. “Look at the age of that paint. This guy is from before you were born.”

Ben looks at the board-up silently, like he's trying to guess at what it could mean.

“Are all the coal tunnels like this?” Maria asks. It's a good question.

I can remember watching a TV series on the local PBS affiliate a couple of years ago that explored the history of Chicago's neighborhoods. In one episode, the genial bald-headed host mentioned that coal tunnels ran beneath a particular neighborhood. There were even some quick cutaway shots, purportedly showing the contemporary state of the tunnels' i nterior. I'm starting to think that what the PBS program showed us were either not the real coal tunnels or just a tiny s howroom-area they keep clean for TV crews. What they showed us on television looked
nothing
like this.

“I don't know,” I tell Maria. “But I'll tell you something. Whatever's down these blocked-up passages, people want to forget about it.”

We continue northwest along the ancient tracks. Our footfalls echo off the walls. So do our voices.

“I wonder what my mother is doing right now,” Maria whispers. “And my sister. God, I hope they're okay.”

“I'm sure they're fine,” I say to Maria.

“If they're fine, then why are we down here in these tunnels?” observes Ben.

“We're down here to make sure they
stay
fine,” I shoot back.

We reach an intersection where the tunnel splits three ways. I take us up the middle path, heading north. After perhaps thirty yards, it splits three ways again.

“What do you think?” Maria asks.

“This is good,” I say. “These junctions mean we're inside what used to be the busiest part of the tunnels, right near the Loop. We're making progress. We should keep going north.”

We ignore the tracks veering east and west and stay on the center thoroughfare. New intersections continue to come, but we ignore them. Most of the side passages in this part are not boarded up. Now and then we explore them with our lights, but usually detect nothing. There are more stairways set into the tunnel walls with hatches above. Ben stares at them longingly.

Underneath what I estimate to be the West Loop, we sight two humanoid figures on the track ahead of us. They wear suits— one brown, one black pinstripe—and have rotted, ghastly features. They're huddled to one side of the tunnel, but not motionless. They appear to be attempting to climb over one another. We watch as one gets a few feet off the ground, slowly loses his balance, and falls to the floor with a thud. A moment later, the other uses him like a stepstool.

“They're trying to get up to that hatch,” Maria says, spotting a sealed opening in the ceiling with her beam. “There must be people on the other side.”

No sooner does Maria utter these words, than the zombies stop trying to climb. Both of their heads swivel around in slow unison. Brown Suit manages what looks like a smile. They begin walking toward us.

“I'll do these,” I say, stepping forward. “Hold your ears.”

I walk up to the zombies and draw my gun. Brown Suit's smile grows even wider as I get close, revealing horrible black-green teeth.

BLAM! BLAM!

My handgun thunders in the cavernous depths. I put a hole through each zombie's forehead. They go down, still.

“Evil bastards” Maria says, pausing to spit on the corpses as we continue past.

I smile.

To me, it feels like zombies are more a force of nature than a sentient, evil entity. Back in divinity school, I had to learn about all kinds of evil. Believe me, I'm an expert now. But which kind of evil are zombies? That question is still a head scratcher. One morning (or evening), zombies are just
there,
with the s uddenness of a crashing tidal wave or a ground-rending earthquake. You wake up, and they're out on your lawn chasing down the mailman. Zombies kill and eat people, yes, but so do Bengal tigers and great white sharks. Where's the evil there?

I think, to get at real, Biblical-level, brimstone and hellfire evil, you need humans.
Living
humans. You need them for things like neglect, contempt, hatred, and avarice. Certainly, these forces are the reason why we are now 20 feet below the surface of the city, racing to prevent the new mayor from being murdered. The zombies aren't trying to kill Maria's father any more than they're trying to kill Maria herself, or Ben, or me. The
humans
are the ones with murder in their souls. The
humans
are the ones who discriminate.

Zombies are just the natural disaster. The opening in the rift for evil to come on through.

Somewhere below the northwest Loop, Ben's flashlight goes out.

“Dammit” he says, banging on the side of the light. “What the hell?”

We stop and try to fix it. We remove the batteries and r einsert them. We unscrew the back and look at the wiring inside. No luck.

“Did you
do
something to it?” Maria asks accusingly.

“No,” Ben insists. “The beam got dim and went black.”

“It's just out of juice,” I tell them. “Don't worry. We've got two lights left. C'mon. We keep moving”

“Should I still be in back?” Ben asks, a tremor creeping into his voice. “I mean, you each have a gun and a flashlight. Now I just have this baton and no flashlight.

“Does it make sense for you to go
first
if you don't have a

flashlight?” Maria asks, crossing her arms.

“I guess not,” says Ben, suitably silenced.

After a half-hour of walking, we arrive in front of yet another boarded-up passageway. The skeleton face painted on the boards has two blacked-out teeth, an “X” over its right eye, and a conical hat like a wizard.

“That's a new kind of hat” Ben observes from the rear.

“Ehh, the other ones were more interesting,” Maria says. “A pointy hat isn't that creative.”

We stand there looking at it. There is an awkward silence as Ben and Maria wonder why I do not continue down the open tunnel ahead.

“What's up, Mack?” Maria finally says. “You see something interesting?”

“We have to go this way,” I respond soberly. “Down
this
tunnel.”

“Excuse me?” In the ambient glow from her flashlight, I can see her raise a skeptical eyebrow.

“Yes,” I say, turning my Maglite over to show her the compass in the handle. “Take a look. For the last mile or so, this tunnel has been curving—first north, and then back east. I think we've reached the northwest corner of the Loop. Now we need a tunnel that will take us further west, out to Oak Park.”

Maria says, “But how do you know it's this one? Why don't we scout ahead and see if there's an
open
tunnel heading off west?”

“It's this one,” I assure her. “Look.”

I point to an almost imperceptible engraving in the brick wall beside us. Covered in a hundred years of soot and grease, it reads simply: Oak Park Junction.

“Oh,” Maria says, slouching her shoulders in defeat.

“How do we get inside?” Ben asks.

It is a reasonable question.

“These boards look old,” I say. “Let's see what your nightstick can do.”

Ben creeps to the front of the board-up. The wizard-hatted skull stares back at him, smiling. Ben selects a point off to the side where the boards look thinner, and begins to hammer.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

Right away, we see that this will work. The boards surrender easily to Ben's blows. Bits of wood caked in tunnel-dust fall to the ground. Large holes begin to appear.

“This is gonna be no problem,” Ben says, pausing to kick away the debris at his feet. He has made an opening roughly the size of a computer screen. We can see into the blackness of the tunnel beyond.

Suddenly, the blackness forms into the shapes of a skeletal hand, and reaches out through the gaping hole toward him.

“Look out,” I say, rushing forward. Ben is not paying attention and is fiddling with bits of wood that have gone into his shoes. He looks up but does not immediately see the arm. I grab Ben around the waist and pull him forcibly backward. At the same moment, the hand lurches forward and rakes its claws against his police helmet.

“Jesus!” Ben says, jumping backward into my arms.

“You're okay,” I say, setting him down.

A pair of zombies, black as coke, are visible through the hole that Ben has created. They have eyeless faces. Their skins are withered like Egyptian mummies in a museum. Their silent mouths open and close noiselessly like Jazz Age automatons. Their decomposed nose-holes sniff the air.

“Fuck
me,”
Ben says, still alarmed. “They were right on the other side of the boards! We didn't hear them or anything!”