Zombie, Illinois (18 page)

We head northwest. It's a short drive to Crenshaw. The streets are mostly empty. A couple of times, we pass shambling, huddled figures in the shadows—maybe they are zombies and maybe they are cold, confused humans. Whatever the case, Mack never slows the car to investigate. All along the avenues and boulevards, the lights intermittently flicker and dim. (At least Mack has a flashlight. Suddenly, I want one too.)

We draw close to the cemetery, which is surrounded by a massive wall of pink and red bricks. The cemetery has a mixed history. Its inhumed residents tell the story of immigration and emigration on the city's south side. The earliest, oldest graves— the ones from the 1800s—are all white Protestants. Then from the 1920s to the 1950s, the internments are solidly Jewish. Finally, from 1950s on, they are almost exclusively African American.

“Crenshaw was creepy enough before,” Ben says. “I really don't wanna see it in a zombie outbreak.”

Mack slowly pilots the car along the exterior of the cemetery wall, apparently looking for the entrance.

“How do you figure, son?” says Ensign Perry.

(He called him ‘son.' LOL. Ben is
totally
old.)

“Crenshaw is located at the epicenter of a lot of bad shit, if you'll pardon my French,” Ben tells him. “I'm a political news reporter, so I have to follow this stuff. You've got some real messed up local politics because this location is where three wards touch. Crenshaw is technically in Royko Square, the Fifty-Third Ward. Marja Mogk is the alderman, and it's, you know.a black neigh borhood. But then just a couple of blocks west is the Fifty-First Ward, Farrell Park, which is Latino. And to the north and east is the Fifty-Second Ward, where Igor Szuter is the alderman, which is mostly white. It's like a racial and political nexus, and it all meets right at this cemetery.”

Ben takes a breath. “Then, of course, there's Burge Wheeler. But I don't need to tell you all about that.”

He's right. He doesn't.

I don't keep up with city politics—which just seem like a bunch of ugly, old people arguing about boring things—but even
I
know about Burge Wheeler. He didn't make the national news, but in Illinois, he was unmissable.

Burge Wheeler was a police commander who ran the precinct around Royko Square until about three years ago. He was a decorated Vietnam veteran. In the 1980s he'd gained a reputation as a kind of hero-cop. He saved kids from burning buildings, got in shootouts with drug dealers, and once stuck his finger in the firing-pin of a suicide's gun—saving the woman's life and almost severing his finger in the process. He also had one of the best arrest and conviction records of any precinct in the city. The papers said Wheeler's clearance rate for murders was close to sixty percent, which is unheard of in
any
Chicago neighborhood, much less a low-income, high-crime one. He was held up as a model for the rest of the department to follow. He was proof that one brave, determined cop
can
make a difference.

Then, in the 2000s, some law students at Northwestern started examining some of Wheeler's old arrests as part of a class project. Suspects brought in by Wheeler had an unusually high confession-rate, and it was these confession cases the students examined. They started filing motions for retroactive DNA testing in cases where no DNA tests had been done, and in almost every instance, the DNA between convicted perpetrator and that found at the crime scene did not match.

The students and their professors organized appeals. Scores of criminals arrested by Burge Wheeler began to have their convictions overturned. When asked about their confessions years before, they told tales of secret torture rooms in police station basements where Wheeler presided personally, using techniques he remembered from Vietnam. There were beatings, whippings, electrocutions, and more. Burge had waterboarded for years (in a time before most people knew what waterboarding was). He had burned suspects' testicles with his cigarette lighter. He had threatened to kill suspects' family members and friends (or just suspects themselves). And it had worked. The men he arrested, almost uniformly, confessed. The suspects Wheeler and his men grabbed off the streets—when they needed to “solve” a crime— were always young black men and always known gang members or thugs. They had no idea of their legal rights and believed Wheeler when he said they could be killed on his whim. They were people everybody in the community would believe were guilty. They were seldom missed.

The floodgates opened around 2010, just as Wheeler was preparing to retire and move to Florida. With all the falsely convicted offenders pointing together to a single man, the public outcry became too much. Internal Affairs launched an investigation, and Wheeler's old cronies quickly flipped on him in exchange for immunity. One by one, current and retired police officers stepped forward to confirm tales of Burge Wheeler requesting to be left alone with suspects in holding cells, Burge Wheeler bragging of coerced confessions, and suspects who routinely displayed mysterious injuries after private interrogations.

The Feds swooped in, and there was a quick trial. Many said the mayor had put in a word to keep it brief, to make Burge Wheeler the sole scapegoat. And he was. The Feds had been reminded that they didn't need to try and convict every dirty cop on the south side of Chicago. Keep it to one guy. Get in and get out. Make a quick, surgical incursion. Don't linger too long in a neighborhood like Royko Square. Don't let too many of its residents take the stand and start talking about the things they've seen over the years. (They say that sunlight's the best disinfectant, but both the mayor and the prosecutors knew they didn't have enough to scrub clean the south side of Chicago.
Nobody
has that much.)

So anyhow, it was a quick trial. Burge Wheeler was overwhelmingly guilty, and so he was found. But the prosecutors went for what they knew they could get, which turned out to be things like perjury and lying about having followed proper interrogation procedures. (The actual incidents of torture were hard to prove. Wheeler was a master at beating and strangling and burning in such a way that no marks were left. And any scars that
did
crop up had had twenty years to fade.) The sentence he received was far less than anyone thought the man deserved. Though in his late sixties and now an amorphous blob of cholesterol and broken blood vessels, Burge Wheeler would probably
not
die in jail.

Has justice been done? Can it
ever
be done? Nobody knows.

But when Ben reminds us that we're driving into Burge Wheeler's old neighborhood—in addition to driving into a graveyard in the middle of a zombie outbreak—it adds another layer and makes it even more unnerving. This is a place with a horrible history. This is a place where secret things have been done. And maybe, just maybe, the things we know are only the tip of the iceberg.

From the front seat, Mack says, “Hush now.”

We do.

A moment later, I hear gunshots coming from within the graveyard.

“Holy cow, people are in there,” I say. “They might need help.”

Mack responds by turning off the headlights on his car.

“I'm not sure they want our help,” Mack says cautiously. “Or that they'd take kindly to being interrupted. Best to be cautious for now.”

We continue to follow the road around the outer wall of the graveyard. Then, abruptly—with no entrance yet in sight—Mack pulls to a halt and kills the engine.

“Mr. Perry,” Mack says, “tell me again what Aisha and Alexia said they saw.”

The gunfire inside the cemetery crackles again. Mr. Perry shifts uneasily in his seat.

“It was very odd,” begins Perry. “This was when they were leaving their house and heading for the church. They said they passed a group of cars that looked like police, but unmarked. Or maybe government. Some had those special license plates that city workers use. And everybody had guns. Alexia and Aisha said they looked into the cemetery and saw there were already walking corpses, but they weren't by where the headstones are. Of course, you can't trust Alexia half the time. And Aisha, she does like a drink.”

“Well, somebody's in the graveyard,” Ben points out. “And from the sound of it, they're packing heat.”

“Is the city sending teams into graveyards . . . to put down the zombies?” I ask. “That's
good,
right?”

Ben laughs—a deep, thunderous belly laugh.

“Has the city ever done
anything
to make you think it could be that organized? Has it
ever
dealt with a disaster bigger than needing to move snow? Kiddo, I just saw the mayor get his brain eaten on live TV. I don't know if anybody is even in charge right now . . . but it's Chicago, so there are at least fifty-some people who think they ought to be. Can you imagine them coordinating and cooperating this fast to put down zombies?”

“I agree,” says Mack. “The city doesn't work like this. That's why I want to take a look.”

Mack gets out of the car like we've arrived at our destination. I wonder how this can be, because all that faces us is the pinkish red brick of the cemetery wall. Puzzled, the rest of us follow him out into the chilly night air. A wind whips up, and I hear a gentle creaking somewhere nearby. I crane my neck and detect its source.

On the other side of the graveyard wall—which is perhaps eight feet high—is an ancient oak tree. Its thick, heavy branches sway almost imperceptibly in the wind. I look up above us and see that one of the thickest branches extends out over the graveyard wall and hovers just above the sidewalk.

“I used to climb up this way when I was a little boy,” says Mack, handing his shotgun to Ben. “We liked to run around inside Crenshaw at night, just because we could. Simpler times.”

Mack looks old—I mean, I said Ben was old before, but Mack is properly ancient—but he manages a running jump, presses up off the wall with his foot, and grips the oak branch with both hands. He runs up the side of the wall with his feet and eventually pulls himself up until he's sitting on the wall. He's definitely done this before.

“Okay,” he says, extending an open hand. Ben tosses him the shotgun.

“What do you see, Pastor Mack?” Mr. Perry calls hoarsely.

Mack stares intently into the graveyard like a man looking out to sea for a distant ship.

“Anything?” Perry asks after a moment.

There is another ripple of gunfire in the distance.

“It may have been too long since I last went to the eye doctor,” Mack finally allows, squinting into the darkness and shielding his brow from the sputtering streetlights' glare.

“Don't look at
me,”
says Mr. Perry. “I can hardly pass the seeing test at the license branch.”

For a moment, the group appears to consider me. At barely five feet tall, it is doubtful that I could make the leap up onto the branch.

So that leaves...

There's a bit of emasculation involved when a man who is about seventy has an easier time climbing up onto a wall than you do. And a cute girl is watching.

But hey, you do what you have to.

Once my fat ass is finally up there—with more than a little help from an aging pastor—I follow Mack's gaze and look deep into the graveyard. My glasses are new, so I'm sure I can see things 20/20. The scene before me is crystal clear. And it makes
no
fucking sense.

“I can't tell . . . I mean, I don't . . . I don't understand what I'm seeing.”

“Just tell us what's over there,” Mack says, putting a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Describe it plainly. You don't have to understand it.”

It feels good to have Mack's hand on my shoulder. Reassuring. He has that kind of effect on people.

I swallow deeply and look back into the graveyard.

“Okay, to start with, there are five or six cars parked near the entrance. The cars have their hazards on. There are a group of people—like ten or fifteen—on the far side of the graveyard. It's hard to see them through the trees and graves. Most of them have guns. Long guns, as well as handguns. They are standing around a heap of dead bodies. Dead zombies, got to be. It's giant. A hundred of them, at least. Now the people with guns are waiting. A couple of them are smoking cigarettes”

“Do you recognize anyone?” Mack asks. “No, it's hard to see their faces.”

“They're probably just some concerned citizens who came to put down the zombies,” Maria insists from the sidewalk below.

“Yes.” Mack says hesitantly. “I'm still not sure.”

“What do the cemetery grounds look like?” Maria asks. “Have the zombies dug out of their coffins?”

“Only a handful of the graves look opened. In a few places I can see where something pushed away the dirt and crawled out, yeah. But there aren't many. Way fewer than I was expecting”

“It's just as I thought!” Mack says. “The cemeteries are a canard. A paper tiger. Most of the zombies can't escape. They're trapped inside their coffins, and by six feet of dirt. They're too rotted to get out, or the coffins are just too strong.”

“But
some
are,” I say, gesturing to the pile of zombies on the far side of the graveyard. “Plus, I saw Al Capone eat the mayor's brain on TV. That was real. The TV anchor nearly shit himself”

“I'm not saying 5 or 10 percent don't get out” Mack says. “Just that most don't. Also, the cemetery at Mt. Carmel— where the mayor was—is different than here at Crenshaw. It has mausoleums where all a zombie has to do is sit up and open the door.”

Then I see something.

“Wait a minute,” I say, touching Mack on the shoulder. “There's movement and activity. The people over by the cars are doing something.”

“What?” Mack whispers. “All I see is blurry movement.”

“Two guys just got big green gas cans out of the back of an SUV, dumping it on the pile. Yep. They're going to burn the zombies.”