Zombie, Illinois (7 page)

So I have—or at least
think
I have—some idea of what Ms. Washington will ask about on behalf of her friend, Ms. Khan.

And I am totally wrong.

Ms. Washington takes another deep drag and says, “I ain't seen Ms. Khan for almost two weeks. And normally, I don't pay it no mind when she don't come around. We just been missin' each other. She's flying all over the world. She gets free tickets, you know, with that job? And the men she carries on with? The trips they take together? Mmm-hmm. And so I haven't seen Ms. Khan, precious little thing. Then, this evening, I go out to my box to get the mail and she's standing out in the cold—in the
cold,
Pastor— wearing nothing but her exercising top and those yoga pants. Can you imagine?”

I nod as if I can.

“And I ask her how she's been, but she won't say a word to me,” Ms. Washington continues. “Not a word. She won't even communicate. She looks lost. And my mind says: Something is not right with this young woman! She is freezing outside in just her exercise clothes. I have got to get her someplace warm.”

I nod again.

“But she won't go back into her building,” Ms. Washington continues, sounding genuinely exasperated. “So I think, maybe she just needs to come inside and have a cup of tea with me. Warm up, you know? And if that doesn't work, I say to myself, I'm going to call the hospital. So I take her by the hand and bring her into my house. I try to make her to sit in a chair—the same one where you're sitting now, Pastor—but she won't. She just
wanders
through my house. She is bumping around, knocking things over, like she doesn't even see them! I cannot, for the life of me, understand. Then something happens you won't believe!”

As if to punctuate this declamation, a loud scratching sound— like a dog trying to open a door—rises from the back of the house. It falls away after just a few seconds.

Ms. Washington looks over her shoulder uneasily.

“What happened?” I press, following her gaze toward the mysterious noise.

“She got . . .
bitey”
Ms. Washington whispers seriously—as if this is something more sinful than sex or drugs or rock and roll.

“She got . . . ?” I try, hoping for more explanation.

“She tried to
bite
me!” Ms. Washington answers, vibrating nervously like a round mound of pudding. “She snapped at me. With her
teeth!
I asked her what she was doing. I said I was trying to
help
her. I told her to stop. But she wouldn't listen. No sir! She got this mean look in her eyes. Her eyes had started to get sort of milky and dark at the same time. They had this look like she could see me, but she
didn't
see me. You follow? She didn't know me anymore. And I tried telling her, ‘Ms. Khan, we've known one another since I moved into this house! Tell me why you are trying to bite me!' But she didn't say a thing; only
kept
biting. That's when I locked her in the guest bedroom.”

Again, on cue, the scratching noise rises and falls. That dog really,
really
wants out.

“Is that
her?”
I ask, as I point in the direction of the scratching.

“When I saw that look in her eyes—my lands, it was horrible! Just so horrible!—I knew I had to call you, Pastor.” Ms. Washington replies, ignoring my question.

“Show me where she is right now!” I say, rising to my feet. “We need to call an ambulance.”

“No!” entreats Ms. Washington. “This is no sickness! This isn't medical! Pastor . . . can't you tell? This is
possession!”

I lower my head and look hard at Ms. Washington. She stares back at me, unwavering.

“Take one look in her eyes, and you'll see it. Just be careful of the biting.”

Ms. Washington rises to her feet and slowly conducts me to the back of her house. As I trail her, I take the phone from my pocket and prepare to dial 911.

This is a surprise. A venerable and usually likeable congregant who has suddenly gone batshit crazy, confining another human in the back of her house? It's a surprise. A big damn surprise. And totally new. I've never seen
this
one before.

As we walk toward the back of her pleasantly appointed home—past a collection of dream-catchers, matching rugs and table runners, and a framed photograph of herself at last summer's “Witness to Fitness” event at the church (stretching out her XXL t-shirt and smoking a KOOL), I wonder for how long I have been missing the signs of dementia. I see her face in the pews every week without fail, but it's been a long time since Ms. Washington and I really talked. Too long, apparently.

We near the end of a hallway at the back of the house. It terminates in front of a thick white door. I can sense the presence of another human behind it, though the scratching sounds have temporarily stopped.

“Now . . . I'm going to open this just enough for you to see,” says Ms. Washington. “But Pastor, don't you go sticking your fingers anywhere near her!”

I look at Ms. Washington doubtfully and prepare to dial for emergency services.

She then opens the door, and I forget all about my phone call.

Inside the quilt-festooned guest room stands an athletic, Asian woman in a sports bra and yoga pants. She looks insane...utterly insane. She's rocking back and forth—very slowly—on the balls of her feet. A thin rivulet of red drool falls continuously from the corner of her mouth. It has pooled on the floor beneath her. Her face is a mask of living death.

It's like everything I've seen before—and nothing I've ever seen before. What can I compare it to? What
can't
I compare it to?

I think of the wasted addicts I've seen dying in back alleys on hot Chicago summer nights. The empty stares. The snot and spit and plasma. The numbed, destroyed facial muscles. I mean the ones who are really, really far gone.

I think of the people inside the group homes run by the Illinois Alliance on Mental Illness—the ones that I thought may be were past being in a group home. The ones who give you the feeling that maybe there is not an entire person in there anymore. The ones that make you think things about euthanasia and assisted suicide that a pastor probably shouldn't.

Something about her is already cadaverous, and so I also think of the many—too many—dead bodies I've had to identify at the Cook County Morgue over the years. That dead stare coming up at you from the metal examining table. The organs that no longer function, in a chest splayed like an anatomy lesson. The outstretched tongue taking in one final taste of the air.

Jesus Christ.

I take a step past Ms. Washington to see Ms. Khan more clearly, and the confined woman suddenly starts. Violently. There is something else here. Yet another aspect is revealed.

In the face of this woman, I now also detect a murderousness. It is something I have seen only a handful of times in my life. And I thank God for that fact.

I got my first look when I was just nineteen years old, in a jungle in Southeast Asia. I've seen it on the faces of gangbangers when I'm called in—usually as a last ditch effort—to talk them down from a revenge killing. To convince them not to head out with a gun to kill the killer of their fallen friend.

Now I see that same angry madness in this woman's face.

Before I can speak, she lunges forward and emits a low moan. Ms. Washington expertly stops the door with her foot, preventing the insane woman from breaking through. (The woman is considerably athletic, but Ms. Washington has mass going for her in a big way.)

“You
see!”
Ms. Washington exhorts as Ms. Khan begins clawing at the door with her fingernails. “Possession! Demonic spirits! I'm sure of it, Pastor Mack. This is a young lady who is being corrupted from
the other side”

I don't believe Ms. Washington for a moment. But also, I find—in this strange, horrifying moment—that I can't think of what else it could be.

Before I can formulate any answer, Ms. Washington makes a fatal mistake.

“Don't you
believe
me?” Ms. Washington says, noticing the bewilderment and hesitation on my face. “If you need to take a second look, Pastor, you be my guest and go ahead.”

Ms. Washington takes her foot away from the door, which opens it another crack. Then her foot slips, and the crack becomes a two-foot opening. The thing that was Ms. Khan reaches its sinewy arms through and grabs Ms. Washington by the throat.

“Oh my Lo-” manages Ms. Washington as the thing's arms close around her neck.

I try to jump between the two, but my boots are slick with snow. We all three lose our footing and tumble to the hardwood floor of the hallway.

My trench coat gets tangled and goes up in my face. Then I hear a horrible noise like a basketball being punctured with a knife.

By the time I push the coat out of my eyes and get propped up on an elbow, the Khan-thing has already bitten away the throat of Ms. Washington. There is blood everywhere. Ms. Washington looks toward the ceiling, dead-eyed, as the Khan-thing chews at what used to be her ample neck.

(Ms. Washington was heavy and she went down hard. She hit her head and died in the fall. She was at least unconscious when the thing bit through her windpipe. This is what I tell myself to stay sane.)

Oh Jesus, there is a lot of blood.

I spring to my feet and leap backwards, away from the women. The Khan-thing no longer acknowledges my presence. It merely feeds on the flesh of Ms. Washington.

“Hey!” I manage to yell out, treating this creature as if it's a

dog.

The thing gives no sign that it has heard me.
What the fuck is going on?

I am paralyzed with fear. Do I call the police? Do I run? Do I attempt to subdue this monster inside the body of an athletic Asian woman? (Should I try to
kill
her? My mind and heart are both racing at the possibilities.)

Then, something astonishing happens.

I hear a
“fwack”
from the entryway of Ms. Washington's house. The wind has blown her front door open. And the sound is followed by the steady shuffling of feet.

“Hello?” I cry out, afraid to take my eyes off the gorging Khan-thing. “Is someone there?”

The feet shuffle closer. From the corner of my eye, I see a body round the corner at the far end of the hallway. I risk a glance. Then a do I a double take.

The figure rounding the corner is a Latin man in his late 50s with an ample belly, wearing blue jeans and the remains of a well-stretched wife beater. I say “remains” because the lower half of the wife beater has been blown away—as has much of his chest—by what was almost certainly a close-range shotgun blast. There is a gaping hole, and I can see his heart, which is
not beating.

The man's eyes are rolling but aware. His arms extend in front of him, like a sleepwalker. He begins to advance. I should be scared, but all I can think about is how that heart isn't beating. He is a corpse.. .and yet.. .he walks.

The walking dead man lumbers down the hall. He moves nearer, then nearer still. I am terrified. My brain races for some frame of reference, for something—anything—that explains this.

I've seen some shit, okay. In my many years on this earth, I have seen some
shit.
I've seen things I don't need to tell you specifically, at least not here. I've seen things that I would not have hesitated to call “unthinkable.”

People like to throw around that word. I am among them, I admit it! It's unthinkable that two-fifths of my platoon were killed in a single mortar attack. It's unthinkable that there are 400 young black men killed in the City of Chicago each year. It's unthinkable that the people we love the most pass away and then aren't there anymore.

Unthinkable, right?

But this is something else entirely. This leaves me with a feeling of alarm, like I've stumbled onto a plane of existence where I shouldn't be. This is the fourth dimension. This is Hades. I'm an existential trespasser. I have walked in, and now I want to walk out again.

The thing that used to be a Latin man walks right up to me. I let it. I'm not convinced I have the power to stop it. Besides, I'm at the end of the hallway, and there is nowhere to run.

Then the thing notices Ms. Khan feasting on the body of Ms. Washington, and it abruptly changes course. It brushes past me, and gradually kneels down—clumsily—next to Ms. Washington's corpse. It reaches for her bloated, diabetic, arthritic leg, and tucks in. It chews away slowly and methodically. There is clearly nowhere on Earth it would rather be.

“Move Mack!”

The voice is inside my head, but it feels real, like someone shouting it. It's a combination of my father, my high school football coach, and my drill sergeant. All three of those men are dead now. Whether it is their spirits coming through the void to save me or only my memories, it does the job. They command me to move. To fight my paralyzed legs and to get out of that house. To save figuring out what the Hell is happening for later.

And I do.

I take one last glance at the horrible things feasting on Ms. Washington, and then I run without looking back.

“Ever wish you played the piccolo instead?”

That's a smartass comment you hear all the time when you're a drummer and it's time to load-out. The guitarists have an amp, a guitar, and maybe one gear bag. You've got a small mountain of heavy drum cases and hardware to carry.

And, I mean, okay. The joke has a point. Drummers have the most shit to lug. But also, what the joke neglects to account for is that when you're the drummer,
you're the drummer.
You get to be the one to play the drums.

That's a pretty fair trade-off, if you ask me.

After the show at the Trump Tower, I load my drums into their black plastic cases, load those cases into the freight elevator, and take it down to the basement parking level underneath the giant building. The other girls have finished loading by the time I arrive in the parking bay. They're already warming up their cars to drive home. We wave goodbye and shout “Good gig” to one another.