The zombie apocalypse began on a frigid February morning in Chicago when Mildred Cavanagh, age 82, slipped and fell while attempting to step around bum’s puke that crystallized on the sidewalk. When Cavanagh came to a few moments later, she raised herself from the ground, gathered the groceries that had fallen out of her cart, and faintly murmured the word “brains”. Cavanagh was shot six hours later by Officer Mike Kowalski as she attempted to suck her son-in-law’s brain through a straw she’d bored in his skull. The apocalypse took decades longer than it does in the movies: three weeks after Cavanagh’s fall, only 23% of Chicago’s population had joined the undead. The zombies continued with their day-to-day tasks, harvesting brains under the cover of night. Undead teachers went to school, CTA employees continued to drive their buses, and city workers drank coffee on the side of blocked streets during rush hour. In the early days, it was difficult to tell who was or was not a zombie: there were polite zombies, asshole zombies, plumber zombies and day-trading zombies, Jew zombies and goy zombies, gruff meatpacking zombies on the South Side and college-student zombies who brained their roommates with bongs.

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UPDATE 4/30/10: This story is also now up on Is Greater Than. Read it here.