Free Zombie, Illinois by Scott Kenemore

very next day-a corporate event for a diagnostics company up in the northern suburbs. This schedule is typical for us. Most nights, my drums never leave my car.
    â€œWatch out for zombies,” Sarah shouts with a laugh as she pulls away in her Nissan Cube.
    â€œTotes!” I call back from the loading dock.
    The other girls follow Sarah’s Cube out of the parking garage, and I am all alone. The ugly, utilitarian surroundings remind me that this is not a place for hotel guests or residents of the expensive condos upstairs. This is a place for serfs and servants, where comfort is not a priority. I’m surrounded by ugly concrete floors below and cheap lights above (the kind that will make anybody look haggard).
    I get into my SUV and carefully back it up to the ledge by the freight elevator where my drums rest. I get out, open the back, and put on my weight-belt. I begin lifting the heavy cases one by one into my car. (This shit is good for your upper body. I’ve got some sexy-ass arm muscles, and they’re not just from the drumming.)
    Behind me, someone calls the freight elevator. Its wooden doors close automatically, and it hums softly as it’s carried away to the upper levels of the hotel. I set my kick drum case on the concrete beside me, and it makes a loud “crack.” I listen to it echo through the vast subterranean levels of the garage. It starts out loud and then fades away into nothingness. After that is only silence.
    I feel very alone, and it’s not an awesome feeling. I’m a social person who doesn’t like to be by herself. This is a little eerie.
    I try to think about something other than being alone down here.
    Something else.
    Not zombies.
    Stewart Copeland.
    Yes.

    So I’m there loading out, straining and sweating under the weight of my hardware cases and remembering watching Stewart play Wrigley Field with the Police back in 2007. (Sting’s son was in the opening band, and that made me think about wanting to make a bunch of little Stewart Copelands. At the end of the show, Stewart threw his sticks into the audience. I was sitting too far away to have a shot at catching them. The next day one of them was on eBay, but some jagoff beat me to it. Fucking goddamn “Buy It Now.”)
    I finally begin to hear other people-noises coming from distant parts of the garage. Someone moving something heavy. Footsteps. Workers. It relaxes me a bit. (I’m sure there are plenty of security cameras in the upper parking garage—the one for guests of the hotel. [They probably even have security guards watching them.] But I don’t see any security cameras down here.)
    I get the last of my cases into the back of my Jeep, and shut one of the doors. Then I turn around and almost scream.
    Standing by the front of my vehicle is a large man who looks . . . well, he looks a lot like a Strawberry Brite Vagina Dentata fan. He’s imposing—at least six feet tall—with a red beard, a face full of piercings, and tattoos that creep out from beneath a ripped Slayer t-shirt. He’s on the younger side, but his skin is mottled in a way that makes his age hard to determine. His skin is also an alarming shade of light-blue. His face looks immobile, like he’s wearing a mask. I’d say it was a mask, except all of his exposed flesh looks that way. He is wet. Dripping. His hair and beard are ribboned with green algae.
    I realize that he looks like just what he is—a corpse that has been underwater in the Chicago River for a few weeks.
    Did this guy drive his car into Lake Michigan? Get drunk at a Slayer show at the House of Blues and fall off the State Street Bridge? Whatever the case, he’s been sleeping with the fishes for a while now. He’s got that strange city-fishy smell you get after it rains: 25 percent blacktop, 25 percent dead fish, 25 percent sewer, and 25 percent unknown.
    And then he takes an awkward, sopping step toward me, and I know