Zombie, Indiana

by Scott Kenemore

  They no longer counted themselves pursued by the looters, but neither did they choose to slacken their pace. Or risk going back.

  Something in Steven’s intense marching style made Kesha wonder if he could even stand to go back. He was like a boy leaving home for the first time. Running away. Maybe that’s how human brains work, thought Kesha. You see something like your mother and your home getting shot up by criminals, and you just got to start walking. It doesn’t matter where.

  An hour into their journey, they encountered a living dead man—a hunter dangling from a metal ladder leading precariously up to a tree stand. The hunter’s ankle was caught in the rungs of the ladder. Now, as a zombie, he lacked the wits to extricate himself. When Kesha and Steven approached, he began gesticulating and growling wildly, but it was clear he would not free himself anytime soon.

  “Look for his gun,” Steven said. “Maybe we could use it.”

  Giving the zombie a wide berth, they scoured the nearby bushes and shrubs, but detected nothing. The zombie growled and swatted the air with his mitts.

  “Maybe it’s up on that stand . . . up in the tree?” Kesha tried.

  “I don’t think so,” Steven said with a grim shake of his head. “I think somebody else already got it.”

  Kesha gave the surrounding woods a quick glance, as if there might be another clue to what had happened. She saw nothing. The only movement was the wind in the trees.

  “C’mon,” said Steven, and they left the dangling zombie where it was. It swung its arms as the teenagers walked away. Blackish drool seeped slowly from its mouth and ran down over its eyes and forehead. It continued to gesticulate long after it had been left alone.

  After another hour, Kesha put her hand on Steven’s shoulder to halt him.

  “What?” the boy said, flinching. His voice was loud and angry.

  “I hear water running,” Kesha said. “Can you hear it?”

  “There are a lot of little creeks around here,” Steven said. “So?”

  “This sounds bigger,” Kesha said. “It sounds almost like a waterfall.”

  “There could be a little one, I suppose,” Steven allowed.

  “Let’s go see,” said Kesha. She shifted their course to the direction of the water. Steven didn’t seem to mind Kesha taking the lead, as long as they kept walking.

  They soon discovered a small creek, no more than an inch deep and a couple of feet wide. They followed it. The sound of running water got louder. The wind smelled like water, too.

  “Yeah, okay,” Steven said. “I can hear it now.”

  They followed the creek up a shallow hill until they stood at the top, looking down into a large clearing. Through the clearing flowed a more substantial creek that did indeed cascade over a series of moss-covered rocks. There was also what appeared to be a cave set into the side of a hill. Kesha opened her mouth to say something, but Steven put up his hand to stay her. Then he pointed down at the mouth of the cave. After a moment, Kesha noticed the barrel of a rifle protruding from it.

  “What do we do?” Kesha whispered.

  Steven thought for a few seconds, and then answered, “I don’t see what we’d gain by going over there. Like, no reason says we have to go this way.”

  Kesha nodded. “Backtrack, then, to where we were?”

  “Sounds good,” Steven said.

  They turned to depart.

  Instants later, both of them fell to the leafy ground as a rifle report echoed across the clearing.

  “Fuck!” said Steven. “They saw us.”

  Kesha risked a glance back at the cave. Sure enough, the weapon was now being pointed in their direction. But it was held by a young woman whom Kesha recognized. She was wearing pink shorts and a white top that was smeared with mud and grime. She had shoulder-length brown hair and a brand-new pair of Keds with bright yellow laces. And she looked painfully sunburned.

  “Sara!” Kesha cried out.

  Kesha’s voice echoed across the clearing, like the gunshot before it.

  Obviously surprised, the young woman below them hesitated.

  “Sara Lindsay!” Kesha cried again. “It’s Kesha Washington! Kesha Washington from school!”

  The girl with the rifle stood rigid, still unsure.

  “Who’s that man?” Sara called back. “I saw a strange man!”

  Her straining voice betrayed a girl who was exhausted, confused, and very terrified.

  “His name is Steven,” Kesha called back. “He’s friendly. He’s been helping me. I’m gonna stand up now. Please don’t shoot me . . .”

  Kesha rose to her knees, and then to her feet. Some thirty yards away, Sara lowered the gun.

  Kesha began to pick her way through the foliage in the direction of the cave.

  “C’mon, Steven,” she whispered.

  Steven stood, but seemed less keen to advance, perhaps because he had been the target.

  “What happened to you?” Sara called.

  “I got trapped for a while after our boats turned over, but then I made it out,” Kesha answered back. “A policeman came and found me.”

  Sara turned her head and whispered something into the mouth of the cave. Kesha realized that Sara was not alone.

  “What happened to you?” Kesha asked, now close enough to speak at a more-or-less normal volume.

  Sara did not respond. Instead, she stood where she was and looked hopefully into the mouth of the cave. Someone inside said something to Sara, and she nodded. Kesha stepped closer. Moments later, two other girls emerged. One was Tara Welch, another of Kesha’s classmates. The other, limping on a broken ankle and supported by Tara, was Madison Burleson, daughter of the governor of Indiana.

  Both Sara and Tara closed ranks around Madison. Sara did not raise the rifle, but neither did she set it down.

  Though she was injured, exhausted, and starved, it was clear that Madison was still in command of their group.

  Kesha and Steven came to a halt in front of them. Kesha looked deep into the eyes of the governor’s daughter. Madison stared back, doing her best to betray no weakness, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary.

  “Do you have any food?” Madison asked.

  Kesha shook her head no. The pained disappointment on the faces of her classmates was almost palpable.

  Then Steven said, “I have something, actually.”

  He reached into the front pocket of his trousers and came up with a mushy, wet, malformed hot dog and bun wrapped in tin foil—leftovers from one of the carnival trucks.

  “I grabbed it before we went to move the cars,” he explained. “I thought I might get hungry if we stayed out a while. You all can have it though.”

  Steven handed the mushed-up hot dog to the girls. They quickly broke it into three pieces and consumed it. Kesha noted they made certain that Madison got the biggest piece.

  “You have no idea how hungry we are,” Sara shared after inhaling her fraction of the hot dog. “We haven’t had anything to eat in, like, a day. We’ve been drinking water from that creek. We all probably have rabies and tapeworms and a million other things now. Does your cell phone work? Our cell phones all don’t work.”

  Kesha shook her head no.

  “I lost my phone in the caverns, but nobody’s phone works,” Kesha said.

  Sara looked dejected.

  “Have you got anything else to eat?” Tara asked hopefully.

  Steven shook his head.

  “What happened to you guys?” Kesha asked. “I could tell that I wasn’t the only one who made it out of the caverns. There were bloodstains leading out and stuff.”

  “I don’t know how many of us got out,” Sara said. “We were feeling our way in the dark. Nobody knew what was happening. We were using our cell phone screens for light. It was awful.”

  Sara looked back at Madison, as if asking permission to divulge something. Kesha already knew what it was going to be. It seemed absurd that they should hesitate to make it official. Even so, the deputies waited
until Madison gave the smallest of nods.

  “Madison broke her ankle when we were almost outside the cave,” Sara said. “There was a wet spot on the ground. All of us were slipping and falling. Tripping over each other. Madison fell really hard.”

  “We couldn’t move fast after that,” said Tara, taking up the narrative. “We had to support Madison every step of the way. And we couldn’t find any adults who weren’t crazy. People had guns and were acting like nut jobs. And we kept running into more of those things. We had to spend the night in the forest. We got this gun from a hunter who was dead.”

  “Yeah,” Steven said. “I think we ran into him a ways back.”

  Madison, supporting herself on Tara, hobbled forward. Slightly restored by her hot dog third, Madison assumed the slow, clear, authoritative cadence of a leader in crisis.

  “We have got to get back up to Indianapolis,” Madison said firmly. “I have to find my father before it’s too late.”

  “That’s what I want, too,” said Kesha. “I really want to get back to my dad.”

  Madison shook her head no, and her face said that Kesha had not responded correctly. That Kesha still did not understand.

  “My father is going to do something bad if I don’t reach him soon,” Madison said with an eerie certainty. “Something very, very bad. He’s not a good person.”

  Kesha had never heard Madison talk like this. In a world of upper-crust sensibilities and inherited wealth, ideas like “good” and “bad” were hardly ever mentioned in regard to one’s parents. (Someone’s father might be behind the discharge of, say, 23.1 parts per trillion of mercury into the waters of Lake Michigan each year. But if this discharge meant that his daughter got a brand new BMW and a sweet sixteen party to rival the ones they showed on MTV? Well then . . . who was to say what was good and what was bad? Certainly—it seemed from the dialogues in the school’s cafeteria and along its hallways—not the students at Kesha’s school.)

  And yet here it was. The word “bad.” Applied to her own father. Her father, whose power had fundamentally greased the wheels of Madison’s life since the day she was born.

  “I don’t understand,” said Kesha. “What’s he going to do? I mean, what can he do about zombies? He’s the governor.”

  Kesha said this final sentence quietly. Her father’s position was always top of mind when you spoke to Madison, yet also the first thing you remembered never to mention. Now, somehow, all bets were off. When you were in the forest drinking from a stream and eating day-old carny dogs, you said what you had to say.

  “He can do something bad,” Madison said. “You have to trust me on this, okay? You have to trust me. I’ve heard him talking about things. Things that scare me to death.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Kesha said.

  “Look!” Madison cried. “You want to know what’s happening? Why the dead people are getting back up? I think my dad knows. I think he . . .”

  Madison began to cry.

  Despite herself, Kesha was deeply touched. Since they were putting it all on the table, Kesha decided to volunteer something. Something that, just twenty-four hours earlier, she would have been utterly petrified if any of her classmates had discovered.

  “Do you know about my mom?” Kesha asked Madison. “Angelica Burnett? She’s a member of the city council. She and your dad . . .”

  Madison looked up and smiled through her tears.

  “No . . . I actually didn’t,” Madison said. “I sure believe it, though. I know about all the other women. Adults always think we won’t find out about stuff like that, but we always do.”

  “Right?” Kesha said. “How can they think we won’t?”

  Madison’s expression turned sour again.

  “My dad has been doing some bad things,” Madison continued. “Things I hear him talking about on his cell phone late at night, when he thinks the rest of the house is asleep. The state is sick because of him. Now these zombies are everywhere, and people are doing bad things to each other. And my dad’s not going to fix it. Unless we force him to.”

  Kesha and Steven looked at one another. How could a group of teenagers force the governor of a state to do anything? It seemed a ridiculous notion.

  A few moments later, Madison was able to stop crying, and the group began to discuss their next steps.

  Kesha told the girls how she had fled from the caverns with the policeman, and then ended up at the carnival in the valley. Then she described how she and Steven had run for their lives the next morning when the carnival had come under attack.

  “The carnival sounds good,” Tara said. “If we could ever find it again.”

  “Yes,” echoed Sara. “Maybe we should go there. It had hot dogs and cars and people.”

  “Were you even listening to Kesha?” Madison said. “It got taken over by criminals with guns. You want to go get killed?”

  “Maybe the criminals will be gone now,” Tara tried. “Like, they’ve taken what they wanted and left?”

  Madison just shook her head.

  “I think we should just go north until we find a road,” Kesha offered. “Then maybe someone can give us a ride up to Indy.”

  “Or we can make them,” Sara said, hoisting the rifle. “This is a matter of, like, state security. The ends will totes justify the means.”

  “Omigod, totes,” Tara added.

  “Which way is north though?” Sara asked. “The map on my phone won’t work.”

  “It’s that way,” Steven said.

  “You can just tell?” Tara asked skeptically, still unsure of this scruffy outsider with his lower-class accent.

  “The sun sets in the west and the moss grows on the north sides of the trees—so yeah . . . I can just tell,” Steven said.

  “Are you able to walk?” Kesha asked Madison. “It doesn’t even look like you should be standing on that.”

  Everyone looked down at Madison’s ankle, which was swelled to the size of a tennis ball.

  “No, I can’t really walk,” Madison said. “It takes Sara and Tara both to support me, and we have to go really slow.”

  “That’s not going to work,” Kesha observed. “Not if we want to get back to Indianapolis any time soon. What about him?”

  Steven realized he had been indicated.

  “What about me?” asked the lanky teenager.

  “Can you carry her?” Kesha asked.

  Sara and Tara exchanged a horrified glance. The scion of the Hoosier State—with a backside meant for Mercedes and Lexuses—reduced to using a sweaty carnival worker as her chariot? Had they fallen so far? Had it really come to this?

  For her part, Madison seemed more pragmatic.

  “Maybe piggyback would work?” the governor’s daughter said. “Do you think you could carry me?”

  “Only one way to know,” Steven said, kneeling down.

  Sara and Tara both opened their mouths to object, but nothing came out. What could they say? The queen had selected her steed. There was nothing more to discuss.

  Kesha helped Madison hobble over to Steven and swing her legs over his back.

  “Here we go,” he said. “Hang on tight. One, two, three . . .”

  Steven carefully stood.

  Madison gave a small whimper of pain as her foot jostled once against Steven’s side. After that, she seemed fine.

  “Gee,” Steven said. “You weigh nothing.”

  He took turns turning right and left, and then took a few steps forward. If it was uncomfortable for Madison, she did not complain.

  “Will that work?” Kesha asked.

  “I think it’s got to,” Madison said.

  With no further fanfare, they set off into the woods. Steven and Madison led the way north. Sara and Tara followed like good retainers. Kesha assumed the rear guard.

  The trees were still thick with late summer leaves, but looking up through the waving branches, Kesha could tell that sun was already past its apex in the sky. From here on out, it would only ge
t darker.

  16

  “What in the actual fuck, Hank?”

  The governor chose to forgive his chief of staff for the overly familiar choice of words. The man had had a long day. Both of them had. Hell, when he thought about it, Burleson was surprised they hadn’t already snapped at one another. Both men were running on a mix of anxiety, fear, and the piss-poor food from the lunchroom in the basement of the capitol building.

  They had been lost—for the past four or five hours—in a sea of piecemeal information that never seemed to stop coming. IMPD officers, capitol security guards—really, anyone who had a badge and a gun and had shown up for work—were being used as messengers to gather information from what remained of the municipal entities throughout the city.

  Not knowing was the hardest part for Burleson.

  “I feel like Lincoln waiting to hear what was happening at Gettysburg,” the governor had remarked.

  “At least Lincoln had telegraphs,” Huggins had shot back. “We don’t even have that.”

  What came back—when information came back at all—usually wasn’t good.

  Foremost on the governor’s mind was restoring electricity to Indianapolis. According to the reports coming in, the entire state appeared to be blacked out. Not a single city from Gary to Evansville had a working grid. Yet it also appeared that Indy was the area where headway would be the most difficult. Few IPL employees had shown up for work, and the crews they had could not promise any progress in the short term. (Burleson was not surprised. The Great Blackout of 2003—the one that had taken out the entire northeastern United States—had resulted from nothing more than a tree falling on some power lines in Ohio, followed by a few computer glitches at crucial points. Indiana’s power grid had never faced a challenge like this. Nobody’s had. Walking dead people everywhere—walking into power lines, fouling up machinery, scaring away necessary workers. It was uncharted territory.)