How we survived: The death of Howard McKinney (Pt. 4)

Dealing with death

(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 4 of 5 in the story of Howard McKinney. Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

By Juliette Mendelssohn

It was in the middle of the 2010 outbreak, and the survivors stuck inside Chicago Heights Retirement Home had a significant problem. Jim Bartlett, a resident of the facility, had just died of a heart attack, and the survivors had no idea whether he was about to turn into a zombie. Among the survivors, seven of them were confined to wheelchairs or otherwise physically infirm.

And the eighth, Howard McKinney, was struggling.

“The poor boy just had too much on his shoulders,” recalled Bonnie Nowak, the last survivor of the group. “Anna (Zabuzhko) kept having episodes, and he had to get food and medicine for all of us, and he had that wound on his arm.”

McKinney, a relatively new Chicago Heights employee, had barricaded the wing he was working in when the outbreak started, leaving him as the sole able-bodied denizen. Only a few months removed from three years of wrongful imprisonment, McKinney found himself a new kind of locked in against his will and, according to 2010 Chicago Heights director Jeanine Hobart, had been overwhelmed by even the day-to-day procedures when he started the job.

“He had an excellent work ethic,” Hobart said. “I really couldn’t ask for anything more in that regard. On the other hand, three years in jail, and just out of high school when he went in, he just didn’t have the life experience of many of our employees. But still, the boy worked so hard.”

McKinney partly blamed himself for Bartlett’s death, Nowak said, because he didn’t respond to his cries for help with good speed. Once Bartlett’s body was discovered, McKinney, according to then-resident Robert Cornwell, sank to the floor.

“He was straight shocked,” Cornwell said in a 2011 interview. “We tried to get him up, tried to get him to do somethin’ with the body, but he couldn’t move.”

The world learned after Z-Day that natural-causes deaths won’t result in zombies, but in the days immediately following the outbreak, this knowledge wasn’t available, so the Chicago Heights residents were scared of what would come of Bartlett’s corpse.

Cornwell said he tried to encourage, goad McKinney to rise for a few minutes. When that failed, Cornwell and fellow resident Trenton Harris took it upon themselves to bind Bartlett’s arms to the bed with belts, lest his body reawaken.

“It was a job, gettin’ belts out, tyin’ ‘em around Jimmy’s body, considering our wheelchairs an’ all,” Cornwell said. “But we got it done, and we turned back to ol’ Howard.”

McKinney, Cornwell said, watched as they worked, but never moved. Once Bartlett was lashed down, the group settled into a calm, their attention split between the equally unmoving Bartlett and McKinney.

“It must have been ten minutes,” Nowak said. “Finally, we all sort of silently decided that enough time had passed, and Jim was well and truly dead. That snapped Howard out of it, I suppose. Maybe he was more worried about having left Jim to become a zombie than to die, I don’t know, but he seemed much more okay after the wait.”

McKinney’s first move, Nowak said, was to clear the residents out of Bartlett’s room, lest they were wrong about the fate of his corpse, and decide how to handle the body. The initial consensus, she said, was to merely barricade Bartlett’s body inside the room.

“But Howard said no,” she said. “We didn’t need to keep the fresh memory of his body right there, all the time, he said.”

Nixing the “hide the body” approach left McKinney with only one option, Nowak said — the exterior window. Weeks earlier, when their food and medicine supplies ran low, McKinney had made a sojourn outside to replenish. With the doors barricaded, his only method for outside access was a window that sat above a dumpster in a back alley, higher than zombies could reach. It was this window, then, that McKinney decided to use for Bartlett’s body.

He used a pair of extension cords he had found in a storage room to further bind the body by the neck and ankles, Nowak said, before dragging the whole setup — mattress and body — into the hallway and to the rear window.

“Compared to the work he had done barricading the place, I don’t suppose Jim’s body was too difficult,” Nowak said. “On the other hand, he was dragging a man, and a man he knew. And I could tell Howard was too scared to touch Jim any more than he had to. So the whole process was rather awkward.”

McKinney encountered his next problem when he reached the window, which had barely been large enough for his body on his earlier run, let alone Bartlett’s body strapped into a bed mattress. At the same time, untying the body meant risking reanimation. McKinney, Nowak said, tried a middle ground.

“He made us all go away. No one was allowed to see what he was doing,” she said. “But I knew. Even before I went over there later, I knew he was chopping poor Jim’s body up, and throwing it out the window, piece by piece.”

McKinney wouldn’t allow any of the residents to see what he was doing, and tried to instruct them to not even approach that bit of hallway, but Nowak said she and others would go over there when McKinney was otherwise occupied, just to confirm their suspicions.

All that was left, she said, starting to cry at the memory, were a blood-stained mattress leaning against the wall, a couple of belts, a couple of extension cords, and a dark red stain on the floor. She never found the knife he had used.

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