Illinoir

Ooooh. Scary Zombie (wearing NU hat)! Word count: 9023. Also: Northwestern 28 - Nebraska 25!

The door to the morgue had been left open, and Basadi stumbled through it, and then proceeded to wander the basement of the hospital, walking the hallways throughout the night, circling the floor again and again. Fortunately for the rest of the patients and staff, the basement was vacant and Westphail doesn’t provide its victims with the wherewithal to contend with doors, nor a working knowledge of elevators. It wasn’t until 7 the next morning when the coroner, a middle-aged man named Baruti Melesi, arrived for work that anybody knew something was amiss.
Melesi later told news reporters that he first had an inkling that something was wrong, not when he saw that Basadi’s body was missing, but when he heard a low moan from the hallway some ten minutes after he sat at his desk adjacent to the morgue. He glanced up from his paperwork, a chill crawling down his spine and saw, through the window which, fortunately for him, was reinforced with a mesh of wire, Basadi, or Basadi’s body, or, as he put it, “a horrifying abomination which resembled Basadi, but whose face was twisted with evil.” Melesi, whose colorful descriptions of the encounter made for good reading in the days that followed, even as terror gripped the world, uttered one phrase as he scrambled from his chair and shrunk against the wall behind it: “Unatombwa na farsi!” which, roughly translated, means “Fuck a horse!”, an exclamation common amongst the Botswanan lower class. Melesi wasn’t often given to cursing, having been “brought up better than that” according to his mother (who was sufficiently scandalized by this revelation that she gave her son a sharp slap across the cheek before taking him into her arms and sobbing once they were reunited.) That he was shaken and disturbed enough  by Basadi’s appearance to issue such an utterance gives testimony to how hideous she must have looked. Her body was relatively intact, as she hadn’t been dead very long, and aside from her pale complexion and her left arm which hung limply at her side, on the surface, Basadi would have seemed more or less normal, save for the fact that when Melesi had left her the previous night, she had been, you know, dead. Plus, figure that Melesi was a coroner, a man who had seen some serious shit. He’d spent time in Angola, in Sudan, in Somalia. He was not unused to the dead. But when Basadi’s head turned, and he saw her face, well, that was enough to make a cultured, well-raised man swear.
There was no long, tense stand off between Basadi and Melesi, though to the coroner, it initially felt as if the two stared at each other for a matter of minutes before anything happened. In reality (he later admitted) less than a second passed between Basadi seeing him and her springing into action. Basadi leapt at the window, bouncing back from it, seemingly unharmed. As Melesi watched, horrified and shocked, he still felt some measure of clinical detachment which caused him to wonder about the woman’s dislocated shoulder which she now put into attempting to break the window. Again and again she smashed at it, and Melesi winced each time, thinking about how incredibly painful that must be, though Basadi did not seem to notice and no trace of pain crossed the woman’s face.
“Yeye anaonekana kama yeye alikuwa na njaa,” Meresi said. “She looked as if she were hungry.” When interviewed by James Thrace and William Kipnis for their book Path of a Virus: Mapping the Great Zombie Outbreak, this was the only description he could give of her countenance, other than that it seemed that the devil himself had taken possession of her soul, a statement that further shocked Melesi’s Badimo-practicing mother.
You can imagine, can’t you, what it might do to a people who had gone their whole lives, as those who practice Badimo do, that your ancestors are actually walking amongst you, to see someone, recently very very dead to be actually walking amongst them, and, that, at least in this instance, this was decidedly not a good thing. It would be a complete and total mindfuck, to say the very least. If it had been Melesi’s great-grandmother, one of his own relatives, out there in the hallway, it might well have been worse. According to Thrace and Kipnis, who had done extensive research on Melesi’s family and the Badimo religion in order to paint a fuller picture of the impact this event might have had, this was a woman who had told him endless stories of the old days. She had impressed upon him the fact that in those times it was not unusual for a young man to toil in the fields alongside the spirits of his ancestors. These stories had terrified the young Melesi, though he would never admit it, had kept him up at night, sweating in his bed, imagining hordes of undead roaming the Earth. Even if they were not malevolent creatures — as the one he currently saw certainly was, banging and thrashing against his office window — the idea was not a comfort to him. The very thought of confronting something so old, so ancient was a source of nightmares to the young boy. Even these sessions with his great-grandmother, who at 53 years old was by far the oldest woman in the small village in which Melesi was raised, made him uneasy. Her wrinkled face, her raspy voice, her weakened and brittle frame; Melesi wasn’t completely certain that the woman wasn’t dead already, leading him to ask his mother, quite often, “Unaweza kuona bibi pia, sahihi?” (“You see Great-grandmother too, right?”) which would often lead to a slap as well.