Zombies? In Cleveland?
At some point in the future, something happens — McHugh doesn’t quite say what — and cities suddenly begin to be plagued by zombies, so much so that it “seemed like the end of the world,” until the government got them “under control.” Cleveland, however, has been left a “zombie preserve” — and a dumping ground for hard-core inmates from prisons around the country. Inside the city, Cahill and various felons survive as well as they can, scavenging from deserted buildings, dodging the flesh-eaters, checking each other for telltale scratches after any encounter.
Still, “life in the zombie preserve really wasn’t as bad as Cahill had expected. He’d been dumped off the bus and then spent a day skulking around expecting zombies to come boiling out of the floor like rats and eat him alive. He’d heard that the life expectancy of a guy in a preserve was something like two and a half days.”
Luckily, Cahill joins a group that has fortified part of the Flats, once home to neon-lit bars and restaurants, with a perimeter of junked cars and rubbish, creating the kind of urban compound one associates with “Escape from New York” or “The Road Warrior.” Now zombies are mainly encountered only during scavenging forays into downtown. McHugh’s story really kicks in when a foraging party chances upon a zombie:
“She was black and her hair had once been in cornrows, though now half of it was loose and tangled. They all stopped and stood stock still. No one knew how zombies ‘saw’ people. Maybe infrared, like pit vipers. Maybe smell. Cahill could not tell from this far if she was sniffing. Or listening. Or maybe even tasting the air. Taste was one of the most primitive senses. Primitive as smell. Smelling with the tongue.
“She went from standing there to loping towards them. That was one of the things about zombies. They didn’t lean. They didn’t anticipate. One minute they were standing there, the next minute they were running towards you. They didn’t lead with their eyes or their chins. They were never surprised. They just were. As inexorable as rain. She didn’t look as she ran, even though she was running through debris and rubble, placing her feet and sometimes barely leaping.”
And then she is on them, and the men start to swing their heavy metal pipes.
McHugh’s narrative pace never lets up, though “The Naturalist” soon morphs into something far more than just a zombie horror story. Cahill wants to understand the creatures, and he’s willing to go to inhuman lengths to do so.
.JPG)
Loading...
Comments