Zombie, Ohio

by Scott Kenemore

  The turkey bobbed its head, as if to say "Thank you."

  "Well, then, it was good to see you once more," I said to the turkey. I turned to the minivan and extended my arm toward the dangling ring of keys.

  "Gobblegobblegobble," went the turkey.

  "No?" I said.

  I tried again, this time taking another step toward the Dodge.

  "Gobblegobblegobble," went the turkey.

  I stopped in my tracks and smiled.

  "I don't think he likes the idea of our taking the van," I said.

  "What, like it's his?" Vanessa said sarcastically. "He's a turkey. He can't drive a van. Or have a van."

  "Tell me," I said to Vanessa, "are there lots of black turkeys like this in Knox County? I have no memory of how frequently you see these creatures."

  "I dunno," she responded. "I think I've seen maybe one or two. Never black like this one, though."

  "That's what I thought," I responded, rubbing my chin.

  "What's what you thought?" Vanessa asked.

  "I mean to say that we're not taking the van," I told her.

  "You're trusting a turkey?" Vanessa asked.

  "I guess," I said. "I mean, you're talking to a zombie. But yeah, I'm not taking that van."

  "So, what then?" Vanessa asked, putting her hands on her hips to rest.

  "So we take the other fork in the road," I told her.

  I hefted my enormous arsenal of guns and set off after the turkey. Eventually, Vanessa followed.

  The turkey (perhaps by this point in the tale he deserves a title, like "Mr. Turkey" [...perhaps not]) bobbed along the dirt road at a steady clip, now and then passing out of sight, but always reappearing. We'd round a bend in the road and lose it, then find it patiently waiting for us at the foot of a tree. It would look directly at us, like an anxious dog, then hop up and continue down the path.

  "You were right," Vanessa said at one point. "I'm glad we didn't take the van. This is so much trippier."

  "That's one word for it," I said. "I'm still trying to figure this guy out. All I know is things have sort of `worked out' whenever I've trusted him."

  "You've seen him before?" Vanessa asked.

  "A couple times," I told her.

  "Makes me think of Buddy Duke," Vanessa said. "You must have heard that old story."

  "If I did, I don't remember it," I said.

  "Funny," she said, "it seems like you were the one who told it to me. Back in the 1950s there was a serial killer in Mount Vernon who was poisoning people. Putting arsenic in milk that the milkmen delivered, putting cyanide on the food people bought at storesthings like that. This was before all the tamper-proof packaging you have today. Once every few months he'd strike. Someone would drink a glass of milk or eat a peppermint candy and fall down dead. Eight people died. Everyone in Knox County was paranoid and terrified. People were driving to Columbus just to buy a jar of pickles."

  "And Buddy Duke was the name of the killer?" I asked.

  Vanessa shook her head.

  "Buddy Duke was a local kid-I say `kid,' but he was nineteen when it happened-who had severe brain damage. In second grade, he'd fallen through a frozen lake and been trapped under the ice for several minutes. They eventually got him out and got his heart beating again, but his mind was never the same. It was beyond being mentally retarded or slow, apparently. It was like some part of him had been left down there underneath the ice.

  "Anyhow, at the height of the poisonings, Buddy Duke killed an old widow named Charlene Crawford with a hammer. He said that a wild turkey had shown him proof that Charlene was the poisoner, and that the turkey was the spirit of a witch who lived in the woods and talked to the dead.

  "Everybody in Mount Vernon was furious at Buddy, of course. Charlene was a pillar of the community. She ran a ladies' luncheon club, volunteered at the YWCA, and so on. And the furious townspeople knew that a judge would never convict Buddy of murder because of his soft brain. He'd almost certainly just be sent to a mental hospital for a few years.

  "So, despite never having shown any suicidal signs, a few days after he'd turned himself in for the killing, Buddy Duke hanged himself with his shoelaces in his cell. The whole town knew that the sheriff and his deputies had done it, and the whole town approved.

  "After that, it took people a few months to notice that there had been no new poisonings in a while. Then, a few years later, Charlene Crawford's daughter sold the widow's property and a new owner installing some landscaping in the back of the house found a secret cellar. In the cellar was a store of twenty different kinds of poison, a journal detailing each of the poisonings, and a lengthy screed against the people of Mount Vernon-written in Charlene Crawford's own hand."

  "That's a good story," I said.

  "It's not a story," Vanessa said. "I looked it up after you told me. All true."

  I thought about this for a while.

  "You know what's weird?" I said.

  "Ummm, everything," Vanessa responded, indicating the whole of Knox County with a giant sweep of her hand.

  "Well, yeah," I told her, "but also-and I'm not saying this is the same witch-turkey the guy saw in the 1950s-I felt like being a zombie meant that I was supposed to be like an empty shell. That the special part of me that might get to be in touch with mystical and supernatural things was gone. Probably, I thought, it was the first thing to go. But maybe that's not the case at all. What if the opposite is true?"

  Vanessa shrugged.

  "Lots of people see things when they're near death," she said. "You know, when they're fevered and injured and so forth. I reviewed a paper for a journal about how the Lakota Indians used to do this thing called a Sun Dance where you suspended yourself from a tree for four days without eating or drinking until you saw spirits."

  "Stuff like that though-don't we know that it's just the brain reacting to stress or something?" I asked.

  "Maybe," said Vanessa. She indicated our avian guide with her hand.

  "And maybe not."

  Wherever the bird was taking us, it was more than simply a quick detour.

  I tried to check the turkey's progress against our maps when I could. It was not always possible. For several hours, the turkey led us down steep inclines that descended into creek beds and through irrigation ditches that fed farms and seemed to curve in large circles. I could use the compass to tell which way was north, but the turkey changed our path so frequently that it was hard to discern in which direction we'd been progressing (or if we'd made "progress" at all). Once, it took us into a cave.

  "A cave?" Vanessa asked as we slinked inside.

  "This is the real test," I told her. "Do we trust this turkey, or not?"

  The cave proved to be little more than a mossy passageway that opened into a wooded valley, and we navigated it easily. Then, at the end of a forest path that terminated at the top of a hill, the turkey was suddenly gone. The field that sloped down in front of us was covered by a thin spring grass in which a mouse would have had trouble hiding-much less a turkey.

  "Do you think it flew away?" Vanessa asked, reading my thoughts.

  "I was just wondering that," I told her. "Maybe a cougar ate it or something."

  We looked around for signs of the turkey (or signs of a cougar).

  "Oh fuck, Peter," Vanessa gasped, putting her hand to her mouth. "Would you look at that!"

  Vanessa gestured off the side of the hill. I followed her finger, half-expecting to see our feathered friend in the jaws of some predator. Instead, I saw an encampment of humans on a distant field. Small and hostile-looking. Motorcycles. Leather. Guns. (Lots of guns.) They had circled their wagons, and appeared to be seated together, eating and drinking.

  "Some kind of biker gang," I said dismissively. "I don't think they're likely to see us up here, though."

  "But Peter, that's the way we came," Vanessa said. "Look! We were just on the other side of that ditch, looping around the edge of that field."

  I thought about it. I wasn't
100 percent sure where we were, but it felt like Vanessa was right. The turkey had taken us along a long, scythe-shaped curve around the edge of that field, keeping us under the cover of elm trees and hillocks. If the bird hadn't done this, we would have walked right into them. Or, had we taken the van, driven right up to them.

  "Fuck," I said, genuinely astonished. "I think you're right."

  We moved off the other side of the hill, away from the biker gang, and continued, generally, toward Gant.

  Bereft of our black-feathered guide, I was once again forced to rely on my map and compass. It soon became clear that the turkey had indeed wended us close to our ultimate destination. Vanessa increasingly required breaks to eat and rest her legs, but even with these, I calculated that we would reach Gant well before sunset.

  One of these breaks took place on an upturned wheelbarrow in the shadow of an abandoned barn. As Vanessa drank from a bottle of water, I drew two revolvers from my considerable selection of armaments and kept watch over the fields. The inside of the barn was empty, save for a few stray tools and what I guessed were tractor parts. A lone tire propped against the barn door got me thinking.

  "Did I tell you I found out how I died?" I asked Vanessa.

  "In a car accident, right?" she said, between gulps.

  "Somebody cut my brakes," I said. "I was fucking murdered."

  I told her the whole story-seeing my car in the impound lot in Mount Vernon, sneaking under the fence, finding the accident report.

  "So I still don't know who it was," I told her. "From what Sam said, I made more than a few enemies in my first few years at Kenton. You know, right, about the guy who killed himself after I fucked his wife? I'm assuming we talked about that back when I was alive. I figure it was someone close to that family."

  Vanessa stopped drinking her water and became very still. Her eyes were unfocused, and an uneasy expression came to her face. I turned and scanned the horizon-afraid she had seen something dangerous approaching-but the coast was clear.

  "You okay?" I asked, assuming her nauseated expression derived from the subject at hand. "I mean, I've gotten to be okay with the fact that I was murdered. Hell, maybe I even deserved it. I don't remember."

  "Are you sure your brakes were cut?" Vanessa said, in a voice that was surprisingly sober. "They didn't just fail or something?"

  "Like I said, the report at the impound lot said they were cut," I told her. "It was underlined three times."

  "Fuck," Vanessa said with a sigh. She put her hand to her forehead like an overwhelmed Southern belle.

  "What?" I said, genuinely curious.

  "Sam worked on your car for you," Vanessa replied. "It was like a favor thing. He did it for a lot of people around Gant. He'd worked as a mechanic to put himself through grad school. He couldn't do all the major surgeries, but he did oil changes and replaced spark plugs and things like that."

  "You think Sam cut my brakes?" I asked.

  "Sam was working on your car the day of your accident," Vanessa said with icy coolness. "He was supposed to be fixing it up for you to come over and see me."

  "But Sam's my friend," I protested. "I have a few memories of him, and they're all good. Why would Sam want to kill me?"

  "Umm, me," Vanessa stated flatly.

  "But you seemed to get along when he dropped me at your sister's house," I said.

  Vanessa shook her head, like I'd just betrayed massive idiocy. "You know he wanted to be more than friends with you, right?" she asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "I got that idea. But I don't think I swung that way, and he knew it. Not that I can swing at all, anymore ... I was just friends with Sam."

  "He's a lonely man, Peter," Vanessa said. "And you're his only friend. When I showed up, it threatened that-threatened the only thing he had. Think about it. You were giving me all the things that he couldn't have, right in front of his face. We were friends and lovers. We held hands. We went to dances. You and I had even talked about moving somewhere together, maybe when the girls got a little older. You wanted to make a fresh start at a new school. Get away from Kenton and all the judgmental eyes. Sam knew that was coming."

  "But if he coveted me ... why would he kill me?" I asked. "I mean, why not kill you?"

  "It makes sense to me," Vanessa said, taking a tug on her bottled water. "If he can't have you, then nobody can. Isn't that how a lot of crimes of passion go?"

  I sat down next to her on the wheelbarrow. Vanessa looked lost in thought. I think we both were.

  "So, what do we do?" I asked her. "Sam's going to be at Kenton when we get there."

  "Fuck if I know," she said. "I don't know how you'd prove he killed you, and even if you did, what then? It's martial law in the cities, but here in the countryside, it's anarchy. I haven't heard about courts out here hearing cases, but there might still be something operating in Mount Vernon. Maybe, if we convinced the people still at Kenton College that he killed you, they'd string him up. Lynch him. Is that what you want?"

  I took a deep, unnecessary breath. It didn't help.

  "I don't know what I want," I said. "But not that."

  I took another breath. My lungs croaked like a broken bellows.

  "As all this goes on, I have fewer and fewer friends," I said. "My world gets smaller and smaller. I don't like it."

  "I know what you mean," she said.

  "Now that I'm with you again, I'm trying hard not to give up on this world, you know?" I sighed. "The last time I did that, I ate a bunch of people."

  "I know you did," Vanessa said. "I know you did."

  "As it stands now, you and a wild turkey are the only ones who've treated me right," I said. I took a few more broken-bellows breaths. Vanessa threw her water bottle on the ground, and a gust of wind blew it away across the fields.

  We got up and moved on.

  When you approach Kenton College from the northeastern fields at the bottom of the hill, the first college building you can see clearly is the tower. It looks dramatic, but it's really just the top of a cafeteria. Like a lot of college buildings, its architecture is vaguely neo-Gothic. One tall gray tower with a big Harry Potter-style dining hall underneath. Vanessa and I sighted the tower in the late afternoon. I couldn't believe our luck. We had found it. Had done it. We had navigated a world of hostile humans and zombies and mysterious turkeys, and had found our way to Kenton College. The only question was: Had it held? Was it still a place ruled by free men and (relatively speaking) good people? Or had it fallen? Was it now the province of gangsters and murderers? We would soon find out.

  "How do we make this approach, d'you think?" Vanessa asked as we marched toward the tower. We were still several hundred yards away from the start of the campus proper. In between here and there were parking lots, paved streets, gravelly service roads, jogging trails, soccer fields and lacrosse fields, football practice fields, folds of wild forest, and intricate college landscaping ... all of which made a clear view of our approach impossible.

  Before I could articulate an answer, we heard three steady rifle shots-Crack! Crack! Crack!-from up near the hill. Vanessa ducked a little.

  "Carefully," I said, cocking my eye at the tower atop Kenton College. "We approach it very carefully."

  Using the cafeteria tower to keep our bearings, we crept through the underbrush, staying away from even the jogging trails, until we reached a large clearing that had once been the school's lacrosse field. Aluminum stands rested to one side of the field, along with a tiny clubhouse where vendors could sell refreshments at games. On the roof of the clubhouse, facing away from us, an elevated chair (like a tennis line judge might use) had been erected. In it, a roughlooking man holding a pair of binoculars and a rifle sat facing the hill.

  "Let's get down," I said to Vanessa. We fell to our stomachs, and I began unpacking some of our ammunition.

  As I'd thought might be the case, the man in the high chair was managing a kind of lazy search pattern with his binoculars, the last phase of which involved a quick
sweep of the woods behind him, where Vanessa and I were hiding. The watchman's glance was less than cursory, however, and there was almost no chance he would ever detect our presence if we stayed prone.

  "Do you recognize him?" Vanessa whispered.

  "No, 'I don't," I said. "He doesn't look like anybody from the college."

  "I'd hope not," Vanessa said. "He looks evil. His smile is mean."

  She was right. His smile was mean.

  We watched the guard for a while. Most of his attention seemed to be focused on an area many yards off where the road approaching Kenton College fell away into a little valley. Near the mouth of the valley were three or four colored clumps on the ground. I couldn't see well, but I guessed they were clothes-maybe clothes with bodies inside of them.

  "Strange that he should be focused in that direction-toward the college," I said.

  "What do you mean?" Vanessa asked.

  "Well, he's a watchman, but he's watching in, not out," I said. "What sense does that make? People could sneak up behind him, just like we did."

  "What's he doing, then?" Vanessa asked.

  "Something's over there, by that valley," I said. "Can you see?"

  Vanessa followed my decaying finger.

  "Are those dead people, those things on the ground?" Vanessa whispered.

  I told her I thought they were.

  "You're right about where he's looking," she whispered. "If you watch him, he's mostly focusing on two places: the college-up the hill-and that valley off to the side where those bodies are."

  "I bet there are more people down in the little valley," I said. "And when they try to come up, he shoots them."

  "So this is like a siege?" Vanessa wondered.

  "Something like that, yeah," I agreed.

  We heard the sound of distant gunshots and shouting from up on the hill. The sentry in the tennis chair heard it too. He fixed his binoculars on the college, and the evil smile returned to his lips. After the shots-a quick cluster of maybe twenty or twenty-five-a noise of distant engines became audible.

  Four ATVs carrying armed men emerged from out of the woods at the side of the hill. They waved to the sentry, hailing him as they approached. The sentry raised his gun and began shooting intermittently-not at the ATVs, but past them, in the direction of the valley.