Zombie, Illinois (33 page)

“These look too dried out to groan,” I observe.

“They just blend right into the black walls!” Ben says. “That one tried to claw my eyes out. Man . . . fuck this place!”

“Now, now,” I tell him. “There are only a couple. Let me put them out of their misery, and then you keep on hacking away. You were making good progress.”

“This is like a reverse zombie movie...” Maria quips from behind us. “The zombies are barricaded inside, and we're breaking through to get at
them.”

“Just shoot those fucking things,” Ben says, taking off his helmet to wipe the sweat from his brow.

“All right” I say, drawing the Glock. “Here we go.”

As Ben and Maria plug their ears, I expend four more valuable bullets on the shadowy mummy zombies. They're so old and brittle I expect them to just explode under the force of my bullets. They don't. My first two shots miss—one entirely. Another goes into a zombie's chest. The penetrated zombie shrugs it off, remaining upright. I squint down the barrel of the Glock and risk another step forward, standing closer to the zombies. That does the trick. Two headshots later, it is done.

“Good shooting, Mack,” Maria says. She is just being kind, as she probably could have done better herself.

Maria creeps to the screen-sized opening and peeks through with her flashlight.

“Yeah, that's all of them,” she announces.

“Good,” I say. “Now Ben, you can finish the job.”

We smash a man-sized hole through the barrier and squeeze inside. The passageway beyond is filthy and soot-smeared. It smells dank, like slime and mildew. There is a strange, persistent humidity, even in the winter air. The walls are composed of old bricks— once a healthy red, but now aged and stained to near blackness. The rail tracks below our feet lead off into the darkness beyond. The floor is dusty. There are also two sets of coal-black footprints leading up to the barrier.

“The zombies,” Maria observes.

“Yes,” I say. “This is as far as they got.”

“Two sets of footprints.so maybe there were only two of them?” Ben tries.

“I sure hope you're right,” I tell him.

The overriding sensation conjured by this side tunnel is decay. This is a place that has been forgotten so long that it has rotted away. Nobody was meant to see the inside of it—the very sights we are seeing now—ever again. It had been boarded up for the last time and was waiting patiently for the city to get up the gumption and funding to fill it in with concrete.

Funny how zombies change things.

The floor of this passageway is quiet. The dust and gunk on the floor have gained the upper hand. It is thick enough to pad our footfalls like snow. (It occurs to me that—in addition to not hearing ourselves—this also means it's now more difficult for us to hear approaching zombies.)

We advance down the pitch-dark shaft. The number of pipes lining the walls dwindles from three to two, and then to one. Hatches to the world above cease to appear with any regularity. Privately, I start to wonder if there
will
be a functional hatch once we get to Oak Park. There has to be an opening. Has to be. But might it be sealed? Blocked from above? Quite possibly. There is no way to know

After about twenty minutes of walking, we encounter an empty suit of clothes. When my flashlight finds it, I freeze and train my gun. Maria and Ben freeze as well. I'm expecting a zombie to rise up out of it, but that doesn't happen. Maria gets brave and walks up to it. She gives the clothes a little kick. Her foot reveals only a gray pinstripe suit. It is many years old. Trousers, jacket, and vest. Three piece.

“They sure like suits down here,” Maria says.

“I should have worn one like Mack did,” Ben jokes. “Then I'd fit in.”

They both look at me in my pinstripes and pink tie and smile.

We encounter an empty, rusted bucket. It has been rendered unusable by what looks like a blow from an axe. Maria moves it with her foot and it gives a
grrrrrr
scraping sound against the floor. We leave it where it is and continue down the dark passageway.

Then after perhaps a quarter mile's walk, we hear something. Soft, but distinct.

Grrrrrrrr.

“Did you hear—?” Maria begins. “Yes,” I whisper.

Four hundred yards behind us, someone, or
something,
has— as they say—kicked the bucket.

“We're not alone in this shaft,” Maria whispers.

“I never thought we were,” I whisper back.

“Let's pick up the pace,” Ben rasps from his position at our rear guard. “Zombies can't catch us if we move fast”

“We're going as fast as is prudent,” I tell him.

“Then go faster than's
prudent”
he shoots back. “Come on, chop chop.”

I listen again for movement in either direction. I shine my beam back behind Ben. The bucket is out of sight, and so is whatever moved it . . . for now.

I turn back around, and we continue down the passage, perhaps walking a little faster than before.

The blackness before me becomes crushingly uniform. It is like snow blindness. I shine my light around to break up the monotony, but it is difficult to do anything with it. This much blackness—in a tunnel, under a big city, in the middle of the night—takes the upper hand. Just the thought of it is crushing. The blackness is in charge. It hangs over us like a funereal pall.

“We're over halfway there,” I say, as much to cheer myself as the others.

Ben jumps a little, rattling his riot helmet. He is that much on edge.

Good, I think. It's not just me.

After what feels like a mile, the tunnel begins to widen. Not subtly. The walls are suddenly twice as far apart. This means more places you have to shine your flashlight to check for zombies. We also begin to hear noises. They are coming from a spot straight ahead.

“What is this, Mack?” Maria asks, like I'm the authority.

“The tunnel is getting bigger,” I tell her. “Widening.”

“I can see that,” she responds. “What's that noise? Is it water? Machines?”

“It sounds like a rustling, but also like a clicking,” Ben offers from the rear. “Could be we're going underneath a factory. Or, ooh, maybe a power plant!”

“I don't think so,” I tell him.

“What is it then?” Ben asks aggressively. “Listen, that's like, clicks and taps and.rustling. What could that be?”

“I don't know,” I answer honestly. “But I bet we find out in just a second.”

We continue down the widened tunnel, looking left and right for zombies. There begins to be something more than dust and grime underfoot. There is a slickness and squishiness that wasn't there before. Oil? Grease? Maybe. The air begins to smell like the inside of a machine shop. The strange rustling grows l ouder. It makes me think of reeds swaying in the wind. Reeds and rain.

And here I have to watch myself. The sounds combine with the fear and the gun in my hand, and I know I am on a slippery slope that leads back to that scared nineteen-year-old kid in Vietnam. I think of the small metal cross I wear on a chain beneath my clothes and let myself notice it against my chest. I take deep breaths. I force myself to keep moving.

The tunnel gets even bigger.

“Are we going down, or is the ceiling getting taller?” Maria asks. “Could be a little of both” I say.

The shuffling, scratching noise becomes even louder. Even more disconcertingly, the coal car tracks—which have been with us the entire way on the tunnel floor—appear to end up ahead, simply terminating into darkness. I would say we're now looking into a flat, empty wall, except that the sounds are near to cavernous. These noises aren't bouncing back off a wall, they're echoing into the darkness.

“What
is
this?” whispers Maria.

“I don't know, but tread carefully,” I say.

We edge forward. Our flashlights trace the grimy floor inch by inch. Then, suddenly, we are all starkly aware of what we're seeing.

The tracks appear to end because they have fallen forward into a miniature ravine. It is perhaps 40 feet across and 7 or 8 feet deep. It is filled with metal drums and ruined coal equipment. (The tracks resume on the far side of the depression, beyond which the tunnel appears to continue.) The ravine is also filled with a terrifying collection of writhing, gibbering things that used to be human. Their jarring bones and scampering feet combine to form the strange sound we hear. Hundreds of zombies—whole and half-formed—are clamoring to get out. This pit is the lowest of the low. All the human things that Chicago throws away drifted deeper and deeper until they reached this point. The coal tunnels are the lowest point in Chicago, and this pit is the lowest point in the tunnels.

The eyeless, toothless faces below sense our proximity and scuttle toward us. They are stopped only by the steep edge of the rift. My heart jumps to my throat, my knees go weak, and, catastrophically, I lose my grip on my Maglite. It rolls forward onto the ground— rolling, rolling—and falls down over the edge of the pit.

I can only stand at the edge and look on in horror.

My errant flashlight shows me horrible things as it rolls to the bottom of the pit. If I could purge them from my mind, I would. I ask God, what can be the benefit to showing me such things? What can be the point of a floor filled with flapping, half formed human fetuses, gasping for brains like little fish gasping for water? What makes me a better Christian to know that dusty, legless mummies will drag themselves on stumps to gnash a single tooth in my direction? What is the lesson for me in a trio of freshly killed girl scouts—still in their uniforms—that look like they could be from my neighborhood: hair carefully braided, little black shiny shoes, and throats slit almost to the point of decapitation?

I start swearing. I can't tell if I'm swearing at the zombies or God or just my flashlight. I don't care anymore. (Either way, bad pastor.
Very
bad pastor.) I swear and swear and swear, all at the top of my lungs. There is no point to whispering now. The ravine of scuttling zombies is well aware of our presence.

When I calm down, I turn back to my compatriots. In the glow of our remaining flashlight, their faces reveal that we are— all of us—all at a loss.

“It makes sense,” Maria says, looking down at my flashlight. “The zombies walking around in the tunnel try to cross the pit, but they fall in and can't get back out. They start to collect, and pretty soon you've got this big group. I guess a pit is a good zombie defense, if you think about it”

“It's not so good if you need to get to the other side,” I observe. “Which we definitely do.”

“I'll bet this was some kind of service depot,” Ben says, observing the entirety of the widened corridor. “Maybe it was where they repaired the coal cars or loaded them.”

“What happened to this place?” Maria wonders, still looking down into the pit as if hypnotized by the gnashing, writhing zombies. “Why is the track broken?”

“I dunno,” Ben answers. “A minor earthquake? Shitty construction? Supports that collapsed due to age? Your guess is as good as mine.”

I kick the grimy ground in frustration and try to think of what to do next.

“We have to get to the other side somehow. Look across— I mean straight across—from where we're standing. Maria, hit it with your light. There! See, on the other side? Those broken tracks dangle down into the pit. I bet you could climb them like a ladder.”

There is a moment of silence as my friends contemplate that.

“Maybe,” Ben eventually allows. “But they might be brittle and break.”

“We won't know until we try, will we?” Maria says. Her tone is not optimistic. It's grim. The idea ofjumping down into the pit and not finding a way out again is awful. Even if the tracks on the other side
will
work like a ladder, it's still awful. Descending into a pit filled with the undead—for any reason—seems like the most insane thing you could do. Something you would only do if you had no other choice...