{"id":814,"date":"2011-11-05T18:03:05","date_gmt":"2011-11-05T23:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/?p=814"},"modified":"2011-11-14T15:16:20","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T21:16:20","slug":"botswana-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/?p=814","title":{"rendered":"Botswana, continued"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ooooh. Scary Zombie (wearing NU hat)! Word count: 9023. Also: Northwestern 28 - Nebraska 25!<\/p><\/div>\n

Good writing again today. Nice to get out of my narrator’s head, more or less, as he relates some of the story of the initial outbreak. Doesn’t make much sense as this is his personal memoir, so why would he basically be reciting, word for word, from some book that was well researched and well read? Well, don’t ask. Shut up….<\/div>\n
Botswana was a (mostly) random choice of country for case number two, but it turns out to be a pretty good one as the traditional religion is Badimo which means, wait for it, “Walking dead.” Three cheers for serendipity!<\/div>\n
2000+ words written while watching NU beat Nebraska 28-25. Wakka wakka!<\/div>\n
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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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t provide its victims with the wherewithal to contend with doors, nor a working knowledge of elevators. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until 7 the next morning when the coroner, a middle-aged man named Baruti Melesi, arrived for work that anybody knew something was amiss.
\nMelesi later told news reporters that he first had an inkling that something was wrong, not when he saw that Basadi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s body, or, as he put it, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a horrifying abomination which resembled Basadi, but whose face was twisted with evil.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Unatombwa na farsi!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which, roughly translated, means \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fuck a horse!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, an exclamation common amongst the Botswanan lower class. Melesi wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t often given to cursing, having been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153brought up better than that\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00c2\u00a0by Basadi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s appearance to issue such an utterance gives testimony to how hideous she must have looked. Her body was relatively intact, as she hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d spent time in Angola, in Sudan, in Somalia. He was not unused to the dead. But when Basadi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s head turned, and he saw her face, well, that was enough to make a cultured, well-raised man swear.
\nThere 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yeye anaonekana kama yeye alikuwa na njaa,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Meresi said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153She looked as if she were hungry.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d When interviewed by James Thrace and William Kipnis for their book Path of a Virus: Mapping the Great Zombie Outbreak<\/em>, 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Badimo-practicing mother.
\nYou can imagine, can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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<\/em>, and, that, at least in this instance, this was decidedly not a good thing<\/em>. It would be a complete and total mindfuck, to say the very least. If it had been Melesi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t completely certain that the woman wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dead already, leading him to ask his mother, quite often, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Unaweza kuona bibi pia, sahihi?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You see Great-grandmother too, right?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) which would often lead to a slap as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good writing again today. Nice to get out of my narrator’s head, more or less, as he relates some of the story of the initial outbreak. Doesn’t make much sense as this is his personal memoir, so why would he basically be reciting, word for word, from some book that was well researched and well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[16],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanowrimo","tag-excerpt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.illinoir.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}