by D A Madigan
Then, abruptly, half a dozen of the... things, zombies, rabid raiders was what the man on the radio was calling them, whatever they were... came swarming out of an overgrown field to the right of the road and ran up to the van, smacking on it with their hands and screaming. Sheila slammed her foot down on the gas and the van accelerated away from them, screeching around a turn on to Poplar Level Road.
From the CB crackled a voice: "Sorry about that, Galaxy van. I didn't see them in the tall grass."
Sheila keyed the mike and said "Yeah, we're okay. Heading down Poplar Level."
She put the microphone down, and then, her voice low and shaky, said: "Vivian, I'm sorry. I don't think... I don't have anything left. I mean... I don't want to sound cold or heartless but... I probably shouldn't even have..."
Vivian waited. Sheila apparently couldn't finish, so Vivian said "Picked up me and the kids, right?"
Sheila nodded. "I'm sorry."
Vivian shook her head, hugging the kids to her more tightly. "No, ma'am, you don't have to be sorry. I really do understand. And I am grateful for what you've done. But Miss.... Mrs. Sheila. You should try and maybe look at it another way."
Sheila just stared ahead, then swerved the van around another abandoned car. "What's that?"
"Well, without me, you wouldn't have found out about them," Vivian said, nodding to the items she'd put down just behind the driver's side seat. "Now, I'd call that a blessing. A blessing that came from you taking mercy on a stranger with a couple of babies that needed help."
Sheila couldn't help it, she had to laugh. It didn't sound like a particularly glad laugh, though. "A blessing? Is that what's happening to Louisville right now? A blessing?"
Vivian shook her head. "I don't understand that part, Sheila, I surely don't. But man does not understand the ways of the Lord and that's a fact. I do know that He isn't just all love and understanding like some of them Episcopalians want you to think, no. That's Jesus who is all forgiveness. But the Lord himself... He sits in judgment. And this world has a whole lot of evil in it, a whole lot of darkness... and all of it is from fallen Man. It's all man made. All selfishness and cruelty and wickedness. And this... this could be His judgment on us. It surely could. He promised He wouldn't bring any more floods, and He hasn't. But this -- this is the wrath of God, for sure, Mrs. Sheila."
Sheila just shook her head.
"Even if you don't want to see that," Vivian said, "look at it another way. You came and got me out of the goodness and mercy in your heart, because you are a good person. And I heard you talking to your husband about how these things are afraid of fire. Him knowing that might save his life, and your little one's life. And I hear that man up in the helicopter telling people that... people who wouldn't know it if he wasn't up there flying around. That man who is still up there doing his job trying to help people even though he's probably worried about his own folks. That's all blessings flowing from good people doing good things to help each other. And even if you don't look at it that way, well, it still shows something... that people coming together, working together, can help each other. People sticking to themselves, abandoning their fellows, going just for themselves... don't you see that doesn't work? That's what leads to the kind of wickedness that God is bringing judgment down on. People helping each other... that's the way God intended it, Sheila. It surely is. And God is telling us, plain as day, you folks got to help each other if you want to live. You got to."
Sheila had no answer for that.
Vivian said "Now look. We'll go and get your husband and your baby and we'll try and find a safe place for the kids. And I am very thankful to you, Sheila. But after we get everyone safe... then I gotta to try and find a way to help my nana. I GOT to. I hope you understand."
And, again... Sheila just nodded.
vii.
Louisville is a river city. Situated on the south bank of the Ohio River, it is not quite the northernmost spot in the state of Kentucky, for Kentucky's border spikes upward just to the east of Louisville into an odd geographic crown where Covington and several satellite towns lie. But Louisville is at the northernmost spot of its region of Kentucky; beyond it, on the other side of the river, lies Indiana, with its "Hoosiers", whom nearly all Louisvillians, and Kentucky residents, for that matter, hold in a mild, familiar, almost affectionate contempt. Hoosiers, it is said on the south side of the river, cannot drive. Or program their cell phones correctly. Or cover their mouths when they sneeze. Plus, their mamas dress them all funny.
That the residents of Indiana say much the same things about those who live in Kentucky, often with the phrases 'inbred', 'hick', and/or 'hillbilly' thrown in for good measure, makes no never mind.
Politically, Louisville is a small, isolated bubble of blue liberalism in an otherwise all-encompassing ocean of red meat right wing drive time talk radio conservatism. It's the influence all the colleges, plus the large international UPS hub, and no doubt all those Hollywood types rolling in for Derby every year, that accounts for that.
Metro Louisville years ago joined its government with that of Jefferson County, making the Louisville metro area a hugely sprawling one encompassing some 400 square miles geographically, upon which lives (or lived, on the morning of Zombie Day) some 1.3 million people. On the morning of Zombie Day, three days before Hallowe'en, roughly three quarters of those residents would have self-identified as 'white', a little over one fifth thought of themselves as 'black', with the rest divided up amongst various other human ethnicities -- Native American, Hispanic, various flavors of Asian. There were several extremely poor neighborhoods where crime was pretty high; there were a few very affluent neighborhoods where crime was considerably lower. In the poor neighborhoods, crime is much more violent, and while some of it certainly involves drug deals gone bad, most of it has to do with poor people getting drunk or high, losing their tempers, and beating the hell out of each other. Or, sometimes, shooting each other. In the affluent neighborhoods, crime generally consists of daytime break ins by the more pragmatic and enterprising folks from the poor neighborhoods. For this reason, most houses in the affluent neighborhoods have large dogs in them, and police substations sprout like carefully cultivated flowers every few blocks.
If Louisville is (or was) famous for anything, it was the Kentucky Derby, a horse race that draws celebrities from all over the world for a week or so of high society parties leading up to the event. The drunken debauchery is not limited merely to the rich and famous, though; the "Infield" area within the oval track at Churchill Downs is famous as a place where rowdy poor folks go to drink, smoke, get drunk, get high, get loud, get undressed, and wallow in the mud with each other. Plus, there's a big fireworks show, a lot of other novelty races -- the 'Bed Race' is always a crowd-pleaser -- and the day before Derby, another, lesser horse race known as Oaks. In the poorer neighborhoods, especially those mainly populated by folks of color, whole streets are blocked off with fine automobiles generally only brought out from their garages for precisely this purpose, and Derby block parties ensue of an even more lawless nature than is typical for the rest of the City at this time.
All told, Derby is a time for the people of Louisville to let their hair down, pour a drink or four, and go a little crazy.
Most people in Louisville, however, are just like people everywhere else, and on Zombie Day, the vast majority of them were taken completely by surprise by events that many of them had seen enacted only on their TVs and in movie theaters.
In Butchertown, just east of downtown Louisville, Kenny Ahlgren was sitting in front of his TV with a bowl of Corn Pops and a half empty quart of milk. After he finished this bowl he was going to have at least one more, maybe two. He'd get a lot of shit from his wife when she got home and discovered he'd drunk up all the milk, but he didn't give a flying fuck. His Unemployment check paid for the goddam groceries, at the very least, and if he wanted to have a couple of bowls of fucking Corn Pops, he was going to.
Kenny wasn't actually watch
ing a TV program; as soon as his wife had left the house that morning, he'd gone out and stuck his new GIRLS GONE WILD DVD into the player and he'd been watching it for the last hour and a half. He was eating cereal because, having already jerked off three times, the old fire down below needed a little recovery time. But the South would motherfuckin' rise again! And in the meantime, he had these Corn Pops to get through.
Had Kenny been watching an actual TV station, he might have had some warning as to what was going on in the world outside. As it was, he wasn't even aware that when his wife had left the house this morning to go to her job running a cash register at the Pic-Pac out on Eastern Parkway, she hadn't pulled the back door to the apartment all the way closed. He was also not aware that Blanche Tankard, the elderly drunk bitch who lived in the apartment beneath him, had stumbled on her way out to her kitchen earlier that morning, fallen sideways, and struck her head on the corner of her stove hard enough to crack her own skull.
She'd lain unconscious for fifteen minutes on her filthy kitchen linoleum while brain cells died and blood oozed out through her cracked skull to pool beneath her skin, and then, very quietly, she'd died.
Had it been a normal day in Butchertown -- had it not been Zombie Day, a day when the fundamental constants of the universe regarding the behavior of the deceased changed forever -- then, eventually, Blanche's body would have been found and taken away, and the sight of the ambulance pulling out of the apartment building parking lot with the hateful old bitch's sheet covered form on it would doubtless have been occasion for Kenny and his wife to go out to KFC or maybe Captain D's for a celebratory dinner.
If Kenny hadn't been so intent on watching two drunk blonde college coeds on spring break in Fort Lauderdale make out with each other while what had to be a hundred drunk college age guys stood around them in a circle cheering them on, he might have heard the click of the latch on the back door extending itself fully as the door was pushed open from outside by the reanimated corpse of Kenny's one time downstairs neighbor. He might have heard the creak of the hinges, or the shuffle of her fuzzy pink slippers (which hadn't been pink, or, really, even all that fuzzy, since Reagan's second term) coming across his kitchen floor.
It probably wouldn't have made any difference; if he'd heard those things, he would have just gotten up and walked out towards the kitchen to check it out -- and died a minute or so sooner. As it was, though, he had no idea there was anyone -- well, anything, really -- else in the apartment with him, until the gnarled but no longer arthritic hands that had once belonged to that crazy drunken old bitch downstairs grabbed Kenny by his somewhat greasy hair (he hadn't bothered to take a shower yet this morning, as he'd known he'd have Vaseline to wash off after his GIRLS GONE WILD whack off fest was over) and yanked his head back so she -- it -- could bite a big chunk out of Kenny's left cheek.
Kenny screamed as his folding chair was pulled over backwards and he fell to the hardwood floorboards. He'd set up the card table in the living room so he could eat and watch TV at the same time, and he was using a folding chair so as not to get spooge on the couch cushions -- his wife had an eye like a hawk for shit like that -- and now, as he tumbled to the ground with the reanimated corpse of Blanche Tankard chewing avidly into his face, his last coherent thought, somewhat nonsensically, was that if his wife came home and found a GIRLS GONE WILD DVD playing, he was going to be in the motherfucking doghouse for sure.
On the Second Street Bridge, a horde of hungry zombies that had originally spilled out of the Clarke Memorial Hospital in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and that had swollen nearly ten-fold since then as it swept southward along Rte 65, had shut down all northern bound traffic by the simple expedient of flooding all the lanes and swarming over all the vehicles, smashing out all their glass, and dragging the inhabitants out onto the asphalt to be devoured. Southbound traffic was also at a standstill; southbound motorists attempting to flee the oncoming undead mob had blocked lanes and run up on sidewalks and smashed or wedged their vehicles into spaces too small for passage. Many had abandoned their cars in the standstill traffic to attempt to flee on foot into downtown Louisville, and for a few of the more agile, that had worked... for the moment. Most of Louisville's hospitals were ten or twelve blocks from the riverbank, up along Broadway and further south, so at that moment, there were very few reanimated corpses in the downtown area.
Naomi Pickett, a 25 year old cosmetology student who had been coming back from her overnight shift taking calls at Accent, just over the river, found herself running into a parking garage near Second Street down by the river. Huffing and puffing right alongside her was Thomas Ackersby, a 30 something construction worker who had been sent across the river by his crew boss to pick up coffee and donuts at a little restaurant everyone in the crew liked. Along with Randall McKenzie, a fiftyish author and political activist who had been driving into Louisville that morning to visit his son's family, they were all looking for a place where they might be able to sit down, get their breaths back, and take stock of... whatever... was happening to the world around them.
The dark lower levels of the parking garage looked good to them. They could sit down a few minutes, maybe exchange information with each other as to anything the others might know about what was going on, maybe get out their cell phones and check the Internet for news... generally, get their shit together.
Unfortunately, the previous night, when temperatures had dipped below 40, the garage had also looked good to Theodore "Teddy Bear" Boynton, a 46 year old former high school basketball star who had, in the last ten years or so, fallen on extremely hard times. Teddy had a wife, an ex-wife, and four kids (two by each) out there... somewhere. He hadn't seen or spoken with any of them, or with either of his brothers or his sister or his mother or his stepfather, in eleven years. Teddy had had a pretty good job driving a delivery truck for a whiskey distillery in Lexington, but close proximity to the product he delivered had given Teddy perhaps too much of a taste for it, with the end result that he'd lost his license to drive, and then his job, and then his second wife, who had told him in no uncertain terms that he could go to AA and keep living with her and his kids, or he could not go to AA and do whatever the hell else he wanted to do with his life, that did not include living with her and his kids. Teddy had hit the road.
And last night, Teddy, who had long since learned to sleep pretty much anywhere, had wandered into this parking garage, rolled himself up in a tattered but still fully functional Army blanket he'd gotten from a Goodwill in LaGrange, and sat down to sleep in a corner of the garage behind a dust covered Ford Explorer that didn't look like it was going to be going anywhere any time soon. (He'd tried the door handle on the Explorer first, but it had been locked. Even that had been a calculated risk -- if trying the door handle had set off a car alarm, Teddy would have had to find another place to crash that night -- but on the other hand, if the door had been unlocked, Teddy would have had himself first class accommodations, plus, maybe some stale cheese and crackers from the glove compartment, too.)
Unfortunately for Teddy, a decade of the road had worn on him in ways both visible and invisible, and while he had slept last night, a blood vessel in his brain had quietly popped like an old worn out inner tube. Teddy had shuddered, briefly, in his sleep, and then he had been no more.
Had the following day not been Zombie Day, Teddy, like Blanche Tankard, would inevitably have been found by someone -- a parking lot attendant, a security guard, someone -- and trundled off to, probably, the University Hospital morgue for a perfunctory autopsy, before being cremated in the hospital incinerator and having his ashes dumped in an unmarked section of Meadow View Cemetery out on Deering Road in Valley Station.
So it was that Naomi, who was leaning on the hood of an orange Acura and considering calling a cab, (or maybe Terry, the guy she'd been planning to meet for a nooner while her fiance was at work) said, still a little breathlessly, "Okay, so, like, what the FUCK was all that crazy shit?"
Thomas, who was
wondering if he should try to report back to the construction site, and figuring he'd better, because he'd left his own car on the bridge and he was gonna need a ride home, said "Fuck if I know. I saw a lot of people running by my car screaming, and the traffic was totally fucked, and I got out and looked back and saw all these... I don't know what, but they were smashing glass and dragging people out of their cars like maybe twenty feet away from me. So I fuckin' booked."
Randall shook his head. "Zombies. They were zombies. The living dead. It's actually happening. The dead have risen and are attacking the living. It's the end of the world."
Naomi had a real hard time with that. She'd seen a few zombie movies and she was a big fan of THE WALKING DEAD because that actor who played Shane was a hottie patottie. But her fiance was a paramedic in an ambulance crew and he'd told her that zombie apocalypses could never happen. "Dead bodies can't move, babe," he'd said on more than one occasion while they were both passing a bud back and forth as they watched the show. "Ever had a muscle cramp? That's what happens when the tiniest amount of muscle tissue in your body stops getting oxygen from your bloodstream for even a second. Dead bodies got no blood flow. The muscles can't work. Period. There's no way for it to happen."
She started to open her mouth, to tell the other two that whatever was going on, it couldn't possibly be zombies -- maybe some disease that made people crazy, some kind of awful human rabies, maybe, but not zombies -- when the reanimated corpse of Theodore Boynton rose up from behind the truck that Thomas was leaning on and bit a gigantic chunk out of Thomas' neck.
Thomas gurgled and flailed, blood jetting out of his neck and splattering all over the side panels and windshield of the orange Acura. Naomi screamed, jumped to her feet, and bolted out of the garage and back onto Second Street. Randall, who had seen all the original George Romero zombie movies but who had disdained all the modern remakes, stared in horror as the -- zombie, it had to be a zombie -- shoved Thomas down across the hood of the truck he'd been leaning against, almost as if the zombie was going to try and fag-rape him -- and then continued to bite huge chunks of flesh off Thomas' neck and face, as Thomas screamed and thrashed underneath him.