Zombie, Ohio

by Scott Kenemore

  "Drop your weapons, or we start shooting!" the voice called again. "This is over. You can accept that fact, or you can die. Right now. It's your choice."

  "Holy shit!" I heard Puckett cry. "Bleckner? Is that you? You're with them?"

  I tried to follow Puckett's gaze from my position at the rear. The music professor appeared to be addressing a heavy man with severe eyebrows and white hair. He was older, perhaps sixty-five, and looked out of place among the others. Was this the same man I had met on the day Sam had driven me to Vanessa's house? The outline looked right, yet here he was, almost impossibly out of place. The rest of the gang members looked like-well, gang members. They had a criminal leer in their eyes, unkempt hair, and beards. A couple had face tattoos. At least one swastika was on display.

  Bleckner looked more like a pregnant woman pretending to be a gang member, with his great belly and soft, womanly hands. His skin was pasty, well preserved from a lifetime of careful sunscreening. His nails, even from this distance, looked manicured (or at least, not bitten). And yet, like some of those around him, he wore a crudely fashioned headband and greasepaint under his eyes like a football player. A black leather vest had been placed over his white collared shirt, now grievously pit-stained. He might have been an improvised pirate at the office Halloween party, except the shotgun in his hand was very real, as was the maniacal glare in his eye as he leveled the weapon at Vanessa's terrified children.

  The girls froze where they were, and the fat pirate approached.

  "All of you: Set down your guns or you die," Bleckner cried. His double chin wobbled as he gripped Vanessa's daughter Sarah by the shoulder and put his shotgun barrel into her ear. That was all I needed. I dropped several pounds of metal to the ground as quickly as I could. My compatriots did as well. We raised our hands like a row of tellers in a bank stickup. In moments, we had gone from being steps away from freedom to cowering in front of an armed gang. (Now I felt bad for having even provided a brief glimmer of hope for these people, who had been better off in their valley. But this feeling only lasted for a moment. The new terror of what was happening was overwhelming, and there was no time to reflect.)

  Only one of us did not seem terrified. Although he had tossed his weapons down like the rest of us, Puckett, the music professor, still appeared more angry than frightened.

  "I don't fucking believe this, Bleckner," Puckett roared, addressing the man with no fear. "You said you went to Toledo!"

  Bleckner smiled back evilly, with obvious relish. The gangsters began to collect our guns.

  With my hands still raised high, I walked over to Puckett.

  "Who is this guy?" I asked. "I met him, but I didn't really meet him. Sam said he was my boss."

  "He's the Kenton College provost," replied Puckett. "I always thought he was a real dickhead, but Christ, I never thought he was capable of something like dais."

  Bleckner appeared to be taking stock of our defenseless group with evident glee.

  "This place was going to be yours, one way or another, eh?!" Puckett said to him, baiting the man. (This Puckett was brave-or suicidal.) Bleckner strode over to Puckett. Then the fat provost saw me, and his jaw dropped.

  "Lord!" Bleckner cried, genuinely stunned. "Pete Mellor? Is that you?"

  I stepped forward and allowed him to examine me. The startled provost looked me up and down like I was a magic trick and he was trying to guess how I was done.

  "You look like you have become a zombie, Peter," he said matter-of-factly.

  I nodded.

  "And yet you can understand me?"

  I nodded again.

  He met my eyes, and the smile returned to his face. He began laughing through his teeth. It was alarming-a deep, evil, and profoundly insane laugh. A laugh that told you to look out, because this person was capable of doing anything to anyone if it so pleased him-PhD or no.

  "Well, hell yeah!" Bleckner cried, moving his hand away from Vanessa's daughter to slap me on the shoulder like an old friend. Puckett backed away from us, disgusted.

  "Just when I thought this day couldn't get any better!" Bleckner said. "A tame zombie! Hot damn! Now tell me, can you talk, Peter?"

  "Of course I can talk," I told him. "Just not loud."

  Though I would have declared it a physical impossibility, his smile widened even further. "Wonderful!" the gleeful provost cried. "Pete, you were always one of my favorites! You know that, right? But what happened to you? You weren't like this the last time I saw you.

  "Actually, I was," I told him. "I died in a car accident. I just ... hadn't realized it yet."

  "Astounding!" quipped the provost. "Wonderful! I love it!"

  "Uh, yeah," I said. "Say, how about you point that gun at me, and not at that little girl? Point it right at my head, if you want. That's a kill shot for a zombie."

  "Oh, Pete," Bleckner said, declining to reposition the gun in any way. "You were always so serious. Don't you see that it's not that kind of a world anymore?"

  I shook my head no. It was true. I didn't see that at all.

  "This wonderful thing has come along," Bleckner said. He leaned in to me. For a moment, I thought he might actually kiss meright on my moldering zombie lips.

  "You have come along," said Bleckner, with what seemed to be heartfelt appreciation. "You wonderful, magical, undead creatures came along, and you wiped it all away. All the pretense. All the bullshit. All of the egos. All of it's gone! Because of you! You purified this place-this world! You created a world that made sense again.

  "What `makes sense' about putting a gun in a little girl's ear?" I asked him rhetorically.

  "Yeah," Puckett agreed from next to me.

  Bleckner's smile adjusted itself. (The expression was tireless, as if induced by a drug.) His face now seemed to say "Aha! But I have found the solution!," like a detective hitting upon an important clue.

  "I take it that your memory isn't what it once was," said Bleckner. "Is that right? Have I guessed it? You cannot remember everything from life?"

  "I remember enough to know you don't shoot children," I told him. "But sure, I've forgotten some stuff."

  "I knew it," Bleckner cried. "For if you had your memory, you would recall the many evenings we spent together, you and me. The faculty parties where the mulled wine had loosened your tongue-along with the flask of scotch you always carried in your jacket pocket. `Flasking it,' you used to say. Ha! You offered it to me on more than one occasion when we were out of sight of the college president and his buffoons ... Like Puckett here.

  "I take it, Peter, that your zombified brain has let these memories fade?"

  "I guess so," I said, feeling no sympathy for this man, even if we had once shared liquor. He looked like a joke-an evil joke-and he was holding a gun to a child.

  "I'm sure we had a few drinks together," I told him. "But from what I've heard, I probably had a few drinks with a lot of people."

  "It was more than that," he said. "We saw eye to eye on a lot of things. On the important things."

  "Why don't you let the little girl go?" I asked him again.

  Bleckner shook his head to indicate my error, but with an avuncular smile. His expression said that I was a generally bright child who had, nevertheless, just suggested that two plus two was five.

  "No, I've got a better idea," he said. "Why don't the three of us take a walk together, eh? You, me, and the girl."

  He turned to the rest of his gang. Some of them were standing stationary, pointing their guns at their new prisoners. Others were milling about, or were still picking up the weapons and equipment that had been dropped.

  "All right," Bleckner said to his new colleagues. "Get these people up the hill. Put them in Gunther Hall, in the old dance building. I'll be with you shortly. And listen! No fun begins until I get there-got it?"

  I cringed as I imagined what "fun" might encompass in this situation.

  The gangsters turned their guns toward the prisoners and they all began a slow, deliberate march
up the hill.

  "Sarah-" began Vanessa.

  "She'll be fine," I said in a hoarse shout. "Don't worry."

  A wiry, mustachioed gang member pushed Vanessa in the back with a rifle butt and got her moving. As she began her reluctant uphill trudge, she repeatedly turned toward the three of us: Sarah, Bleckner, and myself.

  I had once saved a young member of Vanessa's family from a rapist on an ATV. I was determined, now, to prove myself a protector a second time.

  "I'll watch out for her," I shouted up to Vanessa as she climbed the hill with the others. "I'll keep her safe!"

  "Good," Bleckner said from next to me in a quiet voice. "I'm counting on that."

  People like nice landscaping. Colleges know that, and behave accordingly. It helps with the final sale when visiting high school seniors can imagine themselves striding to class across newly mown lawns, attending outdoor study sessions in hillside gardens, and generally frolicking among topiary.

  It was clear that Kenton College had taken great pains (and expense) to cultivate and maintain the grassy areas on the side of the hill where Bleckner marched us. There were fancy shrubs and hedges and even a couple of statues. The leaves from all the nearby trees had been collected and removed at the end of the fall. The lawns, where they abutted a roadway or a path, had been nicely edged. The paths themselves had been replenished yearly with fresh gravel, and even a boulder that was spray-painted with the insignia of a fraternity had been encircled respectfully with cedar chips.

  But even a few weeks of unsupervised growth could leave things looking amiss, and it had been months since the college gardeners had reported for work. The lawns beneath our feet were long overdue for their first spring cutting. The topiary bushes were shaggy and in need of a trim. Twigs and trash had blown across the fields and lingered there. This subtle degree of disrepair added to the feeling of wrongness or brokenness at the college. Bleckner looked it over and seemed to derive deep consolation from the disorder.

  Mostly, I just looked at Sarah and tried to think of a way to get her away from the man with the gun. Vanessa's daughter seemed to be holding up, but anybody would be terrified in that situation. (Maybe, I reasoned, she's just too hungry and tired to care.)

  "What do you think, Mellor?" Bleckner said as he strode, the little girl still held firmly at the end of his arm. "It's all ours, eh?"

  "Okay, stop," I told him, rather like an adolescent. "Just stop. What makes you think you and I are on the same team? I still remember a few things about my life at this college. You're familiar, but I damn sure don't remember being friends with you."

  "We weren't fast friends, maybe, but we agreed on so much!" Bleckner insisted. "The oppressiveness of the college culture. The censorship of our lectures. The increasingly thick veil of political correctness."

  "Political correctness?" I returned. "That's what this is about? They want you to say `Native American' instead of `Indian,' so it follows that you should kill little girls?"

  "Don't you see ... it's just one more denial of reality!" Bleckner boomed, and then his face fell. "It makes me so sad, what happened to this place. Colleges and universities used to be about the search for truth. I'm old enough that I can remember those good old days, back when I was an undergraduate. Search for truth. That was the gig, since they founded Oxford in the 1100s, and probably earlier than that. Search for truth. But then these damn hippies came along-they don't wear flowers and beads and those little dresses that look like welder's smocks anymore, but they're certainly hippies-and they decided that the project of a college is not the search for truth. It's the search for nice."

  I regarded him absently, thinking it would be "nice" if he pointed the gun away from Sarah.

  "The hippies went poof! And suddenly, it wasn't about the real world anymore. And you, as a professor of philosophy-where things are either true or not true-were quick to agree with me on this point, whether you remember now or not. Instead of searching for what was true in the world, our job became painting a picture of a world that was `nice' for all of these nice tuition-paying students. Our task was to create a phony world for them, where facts that aren't `nice' were swept under the rug, whether or not they were facts!"

  "Sounds terrible," I said, trying to comport sarcasm through a zombie's breathy rasp.

  "You jest, but in a few short years this college became Bizarro World," said Bleckner. "Giving dumb students Fs wasn't `nice,' so you had grade inflation, and suddenly everybody who came to class had to get at least a C. Whites and Asians were 90 percent of the Kenton College student population, but only 75 percent of the national population-so of course we relaxed our standards for certain minority applicants and created Affirmative Action policies, because the idea that some groups got better SAT scores than others wasn't `nice.' We decided we had to `correct reality' to fix this lack of niceness.

  "When I got the chance to become provost, I thought getting out of the classroom and into administration would save what sanity I had left. But it only got worse! The absurdities compounded! The college added a women's studies department, as though it were math or music. The fact that women weren't studied as much as menbecause they hadn't done as much as men wasn't `nice,' so I had to approve this new department to correct the truth. And shamefully, I did! And with their appetites thus whetted, it couldn't stop there, could it? Men talked more than women-or apparently they did; it was news to me-so I allowed a female professor to forbid men from talking in her classes. Even the hard sciences were smothered by `nice.' Forget studying human biology. So what if it could lead to cures for sickle cell or Tay-Sachs? Studying ways that human races were biologically different from one another wasn't `nice,' so it was defacto forbidden!"

  "Killing people isn't nice either," I told him.

  "Which is why I'm doing it," Bleckner returned. "Don't you see? It's funny ... You and I always used to say how we wished we could get rid of these people. Wash them and all their hippie bullshit away. And now it's happened! Now the `nice' police are gone! And I'd love to take all the credit, but in truth, it's yours. You walking dead have made it happen. In a world of zombies, there is no time for `nice' and no room for postmodern tyrants. The forbidden ideas are now ... bidden! I can do what I want, and say what I want, even if it isn't `nice'."

  "So that's why you fell in with a gang of killers?" I asked aggressively.

  -Fell in with' is hardly sufficient, Peter," Bleckner returned stuffily. "Clearly, I am their leader."

  "Fine," I said. "You became their leader, then. Why? Because these bikers and ex-cons are somehow... authentic?"

  "Exactly!" Bleckner boomed.

  "Look, maybe I once agreed with you on some things," I told him. "Maybe I wanted to give stupid kids Fs and just say black instead of African-American, but I'm pretty sure I didn't want to kill people."

  "The dried blood down your gullet says otherwise," chided Bleckner. For the first time, Sarah looked up at me with the detached expression of terror she had previously reserved only for Bleckner.

  I hated him even more.

  "Look, I'm not perfect," I said, as much to Sarah as to her captor. "Yeah, I ate some people. But most of them were bad and deserved it. One of them was trying to rape this little girl's cousin. Some weren't bad, though, and fine, I admit that. I shouldn't have eaten good people who were just trying to survive, like everyone else. I'm sorry I did it."

  "Ahh!" seized Bleckner, "that's where you're wrong. Don't you see? It's in your nature to eat people just as it's in the nature of my gang to take what we want, to kill our enemies, and to fuck good-looking women-whether or not they're receptive to the idea. These are things I've always wanted to do, but I've never before been allowed to acknowledge I even had these inclinations, much less carry them out. Now, not only can I say it, I can do it!"

  I frowned.

  "I see you're not convinced," said Bleckner, changing his tone slightly. "I'll make my intentions plain. I like the idea of a walking, talking-well, I suppose all zombie
s walk-then, a talking, thinking, aware zombie in my gang. And if it used to see eye to eye with me in life, then so much the better! Now, I understand that your girlfriend and your friend Sam are dear to you. We can arrange it so they are not hurt."

  "Fuck Sam," I said (without thinking). "I think he's the one who killed me."

  Bleckner's characteristic smile returned. I instantly regretted my candor, though I didn't know how he would use the information.

  "Vanessa, then," he said. "I think I met her at a couple of faculty functions, actually. Just before all this started happening. Charming woman.

  "Her sister and their daughters, too," I said. "Any deal has to involve them as well."

  "Of course, my friend," Bleckner said, without taking his hand off of the little girl. "Whether or not you believe me, this is the best way things could have turned out for them. It was a hopeless fight against us. Maybe you're wondering what allowed us to finally overpower your friends at the top of the hill? Here, take a look."

  He opened his ill-fitting vest. Inside were secreted a number of powerful-looking hand grenades.

  I had the urge to reach over and pull the pin from one. To kill him, even if it meant exploding myself in the process. That would show him.

  But then, Sarah was here.

  I suddenly realized that this was why he had brought her along on our walk. A zombie's attachment to physical existence might be questionable; dying might be nothing to something that was already dead. But a zombie who had taken great pains to rescue little girls was another matter entirely.

  I looked at the grenades and nodded.

  "Just delivered from the National Guard armory in Danville," he said. "If you hadn't shown up and killed my sentries, we would have eventually pitched these little guys down on that school bus and made short work of everybody. They'd have been exploded before they knew what was happening. These little things are quite remarkable."

  Bleckner prattled on, chummily. I began wondering what was going to happen when the military helicopters showed up-if they showed up-and if we still had some sort of a chance. I reasoned that the gang would be alarmed when the U.S. Army unexpectedly descended from the sky at the top of the hill. (The foliage on the Kenton College hill was rather like a monk's tonsure, with the top bare to the sun.) An alarmed gang could do many things. It could run away, true. But it could also start the indiscriminate killing of hostages.