How we survived: The death of Howard McKinney (Pt. 3)

Further complications

(Editor’s note: As the 10-year anniversary of Z-Day approaches, this series looks back on the events and little-told stories of 2010. This is part 3 of 5 in the story of Howard McKinney. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.)

By Juliette Mendelssohn

Anna Zabuzhko, suffering from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had fallen to the floor in a desperate attempt to flee the confines of the Chicago Heights Retirement Home during the 2010 zombie outbreak. She “flat refused” help in getting back to her wheelchair, according to a then-resident, and remained on the floor for several hours.

Eventually, Howard McKinney, a 21-year-old who had worked at Chicago Heights for only a few weeks, had an idea, said Bonnie Nowak, the last survivor of the facility’s lockdown.

“He said he remembered Anna’s children visiting, and they played music,” Nowak said. “The old gal loved her music. Howard didn’t have the same songs her foreign family had, but he gave it a shot. He pulled out his own music player and forced the headphones onto Anna.

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Nowak said, “she calmed right down. She remembered it was 2010, and she started to ask, in that accent of hers, ‘Why am I on the floor?’ It was like she had never panicked in the first place.”

McKinney helped Zabuzhko back into her chair and fed the residents, said then-resident Robert Cornwell in a 2011 interview. But all the while, Cornwell added, he got paler, the effects of a cut to his arm suffered during his sojourn into the outside world to get supplies.

“We was worried about him, no doubt,” Cornwell said. “The cut looked bad, to say nothin’ of the limp he had. We didn’t even know what that was from, but the way he walked, it was like his ankle was bad sprained.”

Jeanine Hobart, 2010 director of Chicago Heights and the person who hired McKinney, said that, if the man had any weakness, it was his pride.

“He wouldn’t have asked for help even if the rest of the able-bodied staff was in there with him,” Hobart said. “With only the residents there, I’m not the least bit surprised he tried to downplay his injuries.”

After a round of food and a round of medications, everyone settled into their general routines, Nowak said. McKinney disappeared into a vacant room for a while, and emerged later with fresh bandages on his wound, bandages that had been poorly applied.

“Poor boy just didn’t have the serious-wound experience he needed,” she said. “The next time he was off caring for one of the other residents, I went into that room and checked his old bandages. They were soaked. He had bled through his first layer of bandages, and bled through them a lot. We couldn’t tell, because he wore his sleeves long and kept changing the bandages whenever he found a second, but that wound wasn’t getting better.”

Cornwell said Zabuzhko continued having difficulties with her reality over the following weeks, and would occasionally suffer further flashbacks to her time in Chernobyl, but McKinney managed to calm her with his iPod each time.

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“Power’d gone off after a coupla days,” Cornwell said, “so he never used that thing unless he had to. Kept it off the rest of the time.

“But that,” he added, “wasn’t near the worst thing, just then. Right about her fourth or fifth panic was when Jimmy’s heart went.”

“Jimmy” was Jim Bartlett, a tenant of the facility since 2005, according to Hobart.

“Mr. Bartlett had a heart condition,” Hobart said. “He had suffered two heart attacks prior to the outbreak.”

Bartlett, described as a standoffish man who rarely left his room, was by himself when he had his heart attack, Nowak said. He cried for help, but McKinney was busy with Zabuzhko at the time and was slow to respond.

“By the time he got there,” she said, “Jim was gone. I expect there’s nothing Howard could have done even if he’d gotten there straight away, but that didn’t matter — he took it so hard.”

Bartlett’s death presented a pair of issues for McKinney, Nowak said. First, she said, was the fact that McKinney was suffering overwhelming guilt. But the second issue, and the more pressing to all in the facility, was the fact that there was now a dead body inside their blockade.

Those who survived the outbreak learned that bodies that died of natural or otherwise non-zombie causes couldn’t turn, but in the immediate aftermath of the start, people didn’t know what to expect from new corpses, and McKinney and the Chicago Heights residents were no different.

“We was panicked,” Cornwell said. “And Howard went near-on catatonic.”

(The story of Howard McKinney will be continued in a later edition.)