My office is in a fairly rough section of town. The rent on the building was cheap enough that we could hire an outside company to provide two security guards to work around the clock, and still come out ahead on the rent in a more desirable part of town. The employees were safe enough walking from the building to the parking garage. Even the call center employees who left at three in the morning could get an escort to their cars. This morning, Chuck was the guard on duty patrolling the garage, and I waved to him as I passed by.
“Good morning, Chuck. Looks like it’s going to be hot out again today!”
“Morning, Tookes. I’m going to be sweating in my uniform by ten am!” Most people who know me call me Tookes. My constant refrain is ‘rhymes with kooks, not cooks’. It helped make it stick in people’s heads.
As I stepped away from Chuck, we both twitched as we heard gunshots loud enough to be fairly close, within a couple of blocks. I hurried inside the building, the last thing I saw before the door closed was Chuck speaking into his radio.
My office is along the back of the building. I had a great view of an alley and of a cinderblock wall that blocked the industrial looking train tracks out back. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, at least it wasn’t a cube. Most mornings around ten-thirty my stomach started rumbling for its mid-morning coffee and bagel. There was a small café on the ground floor of the building, like every other day I walked in and said, “Good Morning, Bev!”
“Good morning, Tookes,” said Bev, the manager of the store, “The usual?” She got right to work toasting a plain bagel for me without even waiting for my response.
One end of the store was all glass with a door in the middle. I watched out the window while Bev toasted my bagel. A stumbling figure walking across the street got my attention. It wasn’t because he was jaywalking, that was commonplace in this industrial city, but because he was clearly drunk at ten in the morning. He staggered into the one-way road right in front of a red car. The driver of the Toyota Camry started yelling at the guy who turned slowly and lurched towards the driver side window. “Hey Bev, did you see that? Looks like we’re going to see a fight,” I said, “Get ready to call 911.”
I stepped towards the door as the drunk started pounding on the driver side-window of the Camry. The driver didn’t wait around; the Camry sped off up the street and squealed around the corner onto Maple Avenue. The drunk held his hands out and started stumbling after the red car, but gave up after only a few steps and finished his walk across the street and into the open doorway of an apartment building.
Down the street, I noticed another drunk and thought, ‘This is getting ridiculous, even for York.’ This second drunk was really in bad shape. He looked like he’d twisted his ankle. One leg of his pants was torn almost completely off, and his tee shirt was in shreds. He walked up to a passer-by; I assumed to ask him for some change. The pedestrian shoved him, and the drunk bit him!
“Holy shit Bev! That drunk just bit some guy! Call 911!” I ran over towards the combatants, and by now, the drunk had the guy down on the ground. As I was running up, the drunk bit the pedestrian in the throat and ripped a substantial chunk out. That stopped me dead in my tracks. The guy bit again, pulling strings of flesh between his teeth. I watched a vein stretch and pop. The victim let out a guttural yell as blood spurted out of his neck, which was abruptly halted when the drunk took a third bite directly on the center of the throat.
I was close enough now to see that clearly the drunk wasn’t just drunk, he was really sick. I was close enough to see him swallow the bits he ripped out of the man’s throat. I realized this wasn’t an attack. It was a feeding.
Immediately ‘zombie’ came to mind. Not just because I’d seen every Romero movie, but also because Candi and I had been joking about zombies the past weekend. On the Baltimore Sun’s website, there had been a story about a huge fight in a parking garage a few days earlier. All of the survivors of that fight claimed that a woman and a man had rushed into the garage and started biting and even killing people. Two people told stories of the woman eating her victims, and how she was insanely strong and really fast. It was almost like something out of a movie, they said. In all, thirty-two people were killed.
‘Maybe they’re zombies,’ I thought to myself. Candi would never believe it. Fearing for my own safety, and knowing there was nothing I could do for the guy with his throat missing, I turned and ran back into the building to wait for the ambulance and police. The homeless guy got up off the pedestrian. I watched him as he walked down the road, slow and stumbling. That was when the police sirens first came within earshot. ‘At least they’re Romero zombies, not rage zombies like in 28 Days Later,’ I mused to myself. It’s amazing what coping mechanisms our brains create.
The attacker turned left down an alley when I saw the police cars. I ran back outside to discuss what I saw with the police. I suppose it’s a holdover from my troubled youth that I’m always hesitant to talk to the police. I’d had a hard time with it ever since I got busted blowing up mailboxes with pipe bombs in my neighborhood. Maybe it was all the things I did that I didn’t get in trouble for. Or, maybe that’s a natural instinct that everyone has. Two police cars came to a stop at the downed pedestrian, and I approached the first officer out of the cruiser.
“The attacker went down the Grant Street Alley, just a minute ago. He’s moving slowly,” I yelled to the cop as I crossed the street. A second police officer had exited the first cruiser and started that way at a trot with his hand on his sidearm. The first officer went to the downed pedestrian and radioed for the ambulance to hurry. The man was in a large maroon pool of his own blood. Even with his neck completely torn out, the blood appeared to have stopped flowing and the pool wasn’t getting any larger. I had no doubt the pedestrian was dead.
From my vantage point by the police cars, I could see parts of his vertebrae exposed all the way through his neck, and strings of gore. It looked like the victim had swallowed a huge firecracker. The bits of torn flesh laid outward down the sides of his neck. Drying blood streaks covered him from chin to navel. The two police officers from the second car also split up, one of them sprinting after the attacker, and one of them walking towards me.
I relayed the story, in detail of what I had seen. At the last minute, I included the information about the first drunk and the Camry. As soon as I finished, he asked me to point out which building the first guy went into and ran off, yelling over his shoulder to stay right there. Something tickled my brain about that, that he so quickly ran to that apartment, but before I had any time to process it, I heard three gunshots from the alleyway, followed by two more. After a pause of about ten seconds, I heard both officers empty the remaining bullets in their weapons.
That was enough for me, “I’m going inside!” I yelled to the first cop standing over the dead pedestrian. He motioned me to go without ever taking his eyes off the corpse, his hand on his gun. It was much later that I realized he was waiting for the victim to stand back up. I turned to open the door to my office building when the first cops partner came walking out of the alley holding his left hand; even from my position across the street, I could see he was bleeding profusely. He was missing his pinky.
I walked through the café and up the stairs back to my desk. When I got there, I pulled up every news site I could think of. CNN.com, newyorktimes.com, I even pulled up foxnews.com to see how they were blaming democrats for the zombies. There was not a single word about zombies on any of the big news sites.