Zombie, Ohio

by Scott Kenemore

  Now and then, I saw farmers or Amish, always armed. My interactions with them were always the same. I was sure to wave, but was just as careful to keep my distance. I had to establish that I was human, but I did not want to look inviting. I didn't want to look friendly or approachable. Just human-nothing more. Never did I let anybody get close.

  I stayed on the roads. They were deserted. Nobody was using cars-there was so little gas to spare that car travel was for emergencies only. In a week of wandering, I saw four (moving) vehicles total. One sedan. Two motorcycles. One pickup truck. In every case, I disappeared into the winter wheat or forest at the first sound of the approaching engine. (There were concealment-related advantages to being a zombie. I could jump into a pond and stay below the water indefinitely. I could conceal myself in places that were frill of freezing ice or itchy brambles, with no concern for personal comfort. If necessary, I could, with considerable skill, pretend to be dead.)

  A couple of times, I passed gangs of humans. These terrified me, and I just stayed away. They'd be mostly men, and always armed to the teeth. I hesitate to call them "hunting parties," like they were a group out hunting for food, or hunting zombies for sport. They were gangs. Something in their membership looked mean and criminally inclined. Whenever I crossed a hedge or valley and encountered one of these slow-moving, weapon-toting groups, I just turned around and headed the other way. If I had any notion that they might've seen me, I found a pond and sank below the waterline for a couple of hours, just to be safe.

  The real trick was the small towns. (I had some memory of having once called them "blink towns," because they were so small you could miss them if you blinked when you were driving through. Sometimes they were just four or five houses. Maybe a store and a post office.) Some of them were completely dead and empty, but some like Galen, the town where I'd left the kid-had at least one house where folks were holding out.

  At first, I approached these places with curiosity and longing. Was there some clue here? Some sign among these clapboard homes and quaint country stores as to what my next step should be? Would some way to be a "helpful zombie" present itself? I longed for a friend. I longed to find someone like me (or who liked me). Ideally, another zombie who could talk. A kindred spirit. Yet, time and again, these tiny clumps of homes did nothing but let me down. Sometimes residents emerged to confront me, armed and threatening like a posse. Once, as I meandered innocently down a main drag (such as it was), a sniper from a roof put two bullets in my legs, and it was all I could do to hightail it into the woods. Other towns I avoided altogether upon seeing gun barrels emerge from upstairs windows.

  After a while, I just started to go around them, circumventing them completely if I could. Nothing good was waiting for me in those places.

  After a very lonely week, I found myself on the outskirts of Mount Vernon, the largest city in Knox County. Mount Vernon's population was close to twenty thousand. It had a Bible college, and was the birthplace of Dan Emmett, the guy who wrote the song "Dixie" as a joke to make fun of Southerners (and then they took it seriously and made it their national anthem [or else maybe he ripped it off from some black guys who lived in the area, which is also kind of ironic in its own fashion-but either way, anthropology PhDs have gotten involved in the debate now, so it's boring and not fun anymore]). There's a statue of Emmett on a pillar downtown in a traffic circle. In the summer, teenagers cruise around it in cars with Confederate flags, trying to pick each other up. Churches outnumber ... everything else. It's the kind of place where people still talk about the time Rob Lowe came to stump for Walter Mondale. (I don't think he changed any minds.)

  It's also the kind of place where people get left behind. Where you can't understand why people would ever decide to stick around once they've turned eighteen. But enough of them do that they form a tight-lipped clique of sticking-arounders. And that clique will look at you cross-eyed if you begin to suggest that anything's wrong with sticking around a place like Mount Vernon. It's like a big horrible cycle. Pretty soon, everybody's uncomfortable. It's the kind of place that gave up on trying to be "charming" or "quaint" a long time ago.

  It is what it is. And also, go fuck yourself.

  As I approached Mount Vernon, these impressions-I won't say "memories"-came flooding back. I'd been here before, many times, yet I hadn't looked forward to any of the trips. This was where I'd come when I needed to go to a real supermarket, or hit the state store for some scotch, or send something by UPS. It was a "have-to," not a "want-to" kind of place.

  But I was lost. I was lonely. I was sick of the "blink towns" where people took potshots at me. It had been a disheartening week. Mount Vernon presented a change. Something new. The only game in town, but a game no less. In a perverse way, I found it attractive. (It had only taken an apocalyptic zombie outbreak for Mount Vernon to finally become a "want-to.")

  I crept to its edge along some railroad tracks. Then I climbed a tall hill and stared down into the town enviously, like Grendel looking into Heorot. There were puffs of smoke coming from several of the chimneys, and I often saw flittering flashlight beams pierce the night. Once or twice, I heard far-off shouts. Most of Mount Vernon's twenty thousand residents had apparently not fled to the Columbus Green Zone. (Like I said, these were not the kind of people who left. Not to get a real degree. Not to get a better job. Damn straight not for zombies.)

  These people were taking the President of the United States up on his challenge to keep going to work. And they were probably doing a lot more than that. (I pictured them holding church services and AA meetings and city council hearings as zombies sauntered past. I wouldn't have been surprised to see mothers down below me on their way to a bake sale.)

  I saw fast-food restaurants. A movie theater. A hotel. I stared into these places hard, sensing the familiarity, yet I was hesitant to venture in completely. I didn't want to risk just strutting down Main Street. I needed to take my time, I decided. I needed to enter slowly and carefully.

  For the better part of a day, I crept around the edges of the city in a circle, like the hands on a clock. A few people saw me, but I kept my hat pulled low and always gave a wave. Once, I passed a city graveyard where a larger-scale version of the Kenton College watch was going on. Twenty or thirty men milled about the headstones with flashlights and rifles. At least one of them was reading aloud from a Bible.

  Then, on the south edge of town, I stumbled upon an auto impound lot set back into a valley. It held maybe fifty cars surrounding a single, ancient trailer home with a generator. An older man in a Russian-style hat with earflaps stalked through the lot, drinking from a steaming cup of coffee. He carried a hunting rifle and made periodic stops back inside the trailer. I stayed and watched the scene carefully, because one of the impounded cars that he guarded was mine.

  A tag had been placed on one of the side-view mirrors, and a sheet of copy paper in a plastic sleeve had been taped to what was left of the windshield. But there it was. My car. Still totaled, but no less nine.

  I was intrigued.

  I concealed myself in the trees for hours, watching the guard's patterns. In the late afternoon, a red tow truck appeared. It had the words Final Notice crudely stenciled onto the passenger-side door. It hauled a decrepit Dodge Neon into the lot, and the driver got out and greeted the man in the Russian hat. The car was deposited unceremoniously, inspected and tagged, and then moved to the back of the lot next to mine. The driver got back into the truck and drove away.

  Toward sunset, another man pulled up in an aging Firebird and honked the horn. The man in the Russian hat emerged from the trailer, locked the fence around the impound lot, and got into the Firebird. The tires squealed as the car tore away into the darkness.

  I now had the lot to myself, but could hardly see anything. The winter night had fallen quickly, and most of Mount Vernon was without power. There were no streetlights or lamps. Nothing. I fumbled toward the lot in the darkness, my hands outstretched to feel my way. I reached the fence,
and began to consider a way to scale it. The top was lined with evil-looking barbed wire.

  I was a zombie, so just saying "fuck it" and climbing over anyway was a real option. The barbs wouldn't cause me pain, but they would probably rip me all to hell-probably worse than a living person because I would feel no pain when the barbs entered my skin. Also, something about carrying Peter Mellor's 175-plus pounds over a wire fence with just my hands felt like a bad idea. I pictured pulling the skin off my fingers-or losing entire limbswithout even noticing. That would fucking suck.

  In the end, I decided to tunnel under the fence like a dog. I picked what I hoped was an inconspicuous place in the back of the lot and started digging. The ground was hard. I used sticks to help me dig, my movements slow and methodical.

  It took all night. Just before dawn broke, I finally shimmied my way underneath the impound lot fence. I had no clue when the guard started his shift, but something told me I didn't have much time. (The Mount Vernonites seemed like the kind of people who rose at dark-thirty.) Already, I seemed to hear the distant din of an approaching engine.

  After taking a moment to brush the dirt off my clothes, I made my way over to what was left of my car. The thing was ruined, of course. Destroyed. Totaled. (I was impressed, in fact, that they'd been able to haul it to this lot in one piece.) The tag on the sideview mirror appeared to be a storage number, written with a black permanent marker. The photocopied page, however, was a more interesting matter.

  It was an accident report, filled out in an almost illegible hand with a ballpoint pen. A series of notes at the top outlined the basics: The make and model of the car. The license plate number. (Then they would know whose car it was, if there was still any way to run a license plate ...) The location where the car had been found. The date upon which it had been taken to the impound lot. Then, at the bottom of the form, under Other, had been hastily scrawled: "Brake lines cut!" It was underlined three times.

  I read it again. Then again.

  Brake lines cut!

  My breath had already been taken away, but this idea affected me deeply. I began to feel light-headed. Brake lines cut? Like, on purpose? All this time, I'd assumed I'd crashed my car because I was driving too fast on a snowy road. But there, in my cold, dead hands, was striking evidence to the contrary. I'd crashed (and had diem because my brake lines had been cut.

  That meant ...

  That meant ...

  Murder.

  Had to be. There were a million more sensible ways to commit suicide. Nobody-not even alcoholic, oversexed college professors-cut his own brake lines. College professors probably didn't know {tow to cut brake lines. (I searched my patchy zombie memory for anything on car maintenance, and found little beyond the replacement of gasoline and washer fluid.)

  But then there was no time to consider it further. More suddenly than seemed possible, a Firebird with two armed men inside was pulling up in front of the impound lot. Though still distant, the car's headlights fell upon me. Both men jumped out.

  "Hey you!" a voice called angrily from the Firebird.

  I grabbed the photocopied form and took off running. I heard anxious footfalls, and someone hastily fiddling with a ring of keys.

  "How'd he get over the fence?" one man said to the other.

  I ran through the rows of cars and headed for my hole at the back of the lot. The two men struggled to get the gate open. I could hear their frustration. I looked back over my shoulder as I ran, and saw that one of them had readied his rifle.

  "Stop or I'll shoot!" he shouted.

  I did no such thing.

  Three seconds later, I was rewarded with a rifle bullet through the shoulder. The Vernonites could shoot-I had to give them that. (Some part of me had known they would be able to.) The slug didn't slow me. I kept on going. A second shot rang out, but this one zinged past me and ricocheted off an ancient Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera.

  "It's okay," I heard one of them say. "He's trapped back there. He's not getting out."

  "I think you hit him," the other said. "Let's let him bleed for a while."

  An instant later, I was on my belly and shimmying underneath the fence. I heard the men finally get the gate open as I scuttled away into the woods.

  There was no doubt about it. My ability to move quickly was getting worse and worse. My legs and joints seemed to be growing unnaturally stiff, and not just when I tried to run. Half the time, they operated as though they had minds of their own. Going along at any clip faster than a stride was dangerous. It felt like dancing in leg braces. (You could do it, but Jesus, why would you?)

  I fled the city and trekked into the forest. I walked until I could hear no horns, smell no smoke.

  It began to sleet. I stopped in the shelter of a wildly twisting tree in a clearing. Without any breath to catch, I needed no recovery time to turn my attention once again to the piece of paper I still clutched in my hand. Brake lines cut! The words hadn't been scrawled in the clearest of hands, but I'd be kidding myself to think they said anything other than that. It was right there. Underlined three times.

  Even so, I stared at it like a magic-eye picture, hoping that if I relaxed my eyes, another picture-another message-might become clear. As much as I wanted to see something else, it was the same every time. Brake lines cut!

  Whoever Peter Mellor was-whoever I was-somebody had wanted to kill him.

  I stayed under that tree until the sleet let up, thinking about being murdered and absently fingering my new bullet hole. It was a lot to take in. Here, I'd been having fantasies of being some kind of "good zombie," waxing fanciful about finding a way to use my powers to help people. I now found myself feeling less beneficent. Being murdered will do that to you.

  I hadn't thought that I-or the original Peter Mellor-had been a good man, exactly, but neither did I think I'd been some sort of Hitler. I was an oversexed disappointment who'd started drinking too much, true. But I had called only for the annexation of liquor bottles and vaginas, not Poland. There were far worse things one could do ...

  But this piece of paper in my hand said another thing entirely. It said that I was the kind of guy whom somebody wanted dead. That I had done something to make somebody want to kill me. And not just want to-to actually go through with it. I regarded the piece of photocopied paper through a zombie's cold, nonlubricating eyes. I was dead. The car accident had killed me. I was a murdered man. Yet, like in that old song by The Highwaymen, I was still around. (I seemed to hear Willie Nelson singing "I was a zombie ..." somewhere in a memory.)

  Who had wanted me dead?

  My list of suspects-like my mind-was hazy and full of holes.

  Sam had said something about a classics professor at the college killing himself after I'd slept with his wife. That felt like the most obvious lead. Maybe the wife had decided to take me out. Maybe one of her friends, or one of their kids. Maybe just someone in the community who thought I was a fuck for sleeping around. (This part of the country was rife with scary churches. A zealous congregant could have heard of my case and decided I should pay the ultimate price for coveting my neighbor's wife.)

  And all of this assumed-that' that there was not something else I'd done. Something worse than transgressive sex. Something, perhaps, that I'd kept secret even from Sam.

  I tried to think of things that got people killed. Gambling debts. Blackmail. Vendettas. Consorting with criminals. All of these were possibilities. I looked down at my pale hands and wondered what they had done in a previous life. Had they strangled someone? Stolen money from a gangster? Bet the company payroll on black?

  People wanted to kill me because I was a zombie, but apparently they'd wanted to kill me as a human too.

  I was a wanted man, both ways.

  I stayed there, letting it sink in. It took most of the day.

  Around dusk, a zombie approached me. He was a loud, blustering fellow (as zombies go). I heard his moans and heavy footsteps as he stalked through the woods. I let him approach, hoping the comp
any might do me good.

  He emerged from the trees and stepped confidently into the clearing, walking right up to me. He had been a tall, barrel-chested man. He wore a blaze-orange vest and hat, and a rattling canteen was still strapped to his waist. Half his face had rotted away, and the rest of it had turned blue. His hair was full of wet weeds and worms. It looked like he'd been underwater, and for some time. As he drew closer, I spotted two old wounds where rifle bullets had gone into his hack. A hunting accident. (Or-considering the placement of the wounds-more likely a "hunting accident.")

  The zombie regarded me cautiously, emitting a low moan.

  "Yeah," I said. "You and me both."

  The idea made me smile. We had both been killed. Murder will out-and here it was, "outing" right in front of us.

  The visiting zombie sniffed the air for a moment, then began to walk slowly in the direction of the impound lot. Likely he had scented the humans. I let him get ten feet before stopping him.

  "Hey, buddy, you don't want to go there," I said, taking him gently by the shoulder. He regarded me with genial confusion, like a doddering grandfather pleased to be set right by a nurse or caretaker.

  "Here," I said, tugging him east. "C'mon. Let's go this way instead."

  And we did.

  It didn't take long for me to name him Hunter. It was a bit easy, true, but nobody was around to criticize obvious puns. They were only around to shoot at us.

  We made our way east, away from Mount Vernon, through woods and across farms and fields. But that's not to say we were safe from humans. We stuck to the trees as much as we could. For most of the walk I heard no one other than ourselves, but these were dangerous times. Sometimes humans just suddenly appeared, and even the Amish were packin'.

  I moved slowly, but Hunter moved slower. One of his shoes was gone, and the exposed foot had rotted away into a kind of crumpled meat-claw. He was quiet compared to a human, but loud for a zombie. His moans ranged from gentle and tentative-like a confused engineer, puzzling over a blueprint-to anguished and urgent-like a woman in labor.