How we survived: The death of Howard McKinney (Pt. 5)

The end

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

By Juliette Mendelssohn

Howard McKinney, the only remaining employee of Chicago Heights Retirement Home, had been forced to dispose of the body of Jim Bartlett, a resident of the facility, after Bartlett died of a heart attack during the 2010 zombie outbreak. This left McKinney in the barricaded wing of the facility with the other seven surviving residents.

One of the residents, Anna Zabuzhko, suffered from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and all seven of the residents were infirm or in a wheelchair. And McKinney himself, during a sojourn outside the facility to get food and medicinal supplies, had suffered a pair of injuries — an unspecified leg injury that left him with a limp, and a long cut along his arm that, according to then-residents, was improperly cared for and bleeding too much.

“I was awfully worried about Howard,” said Bonnie Nowak, the last surviving resident of the facility. “He kept sneaking off, trying to care for his wound himself. But I knew he wasn’t taking any kind of painkiller, and we’d catch peeks of blood-stained clothing and bandages every now and then.”

According to Jeanine Hobart, 2010 Chicago Heights director, McKinney’s relative inexperience with medicinal issues cost him in this instance.

“After the fact,” she said, “when we talked to the survivors, they said that Howard was using the bare minimum in bandages, and essentially no painkillers, on himself. But the one thing he had gotten more than enough of when he ventured outside was pain medication. There was easily enough there for him to have some on occasion. But, if their accounts were accurate, he never touched it.”

The one positive, said Nowak, after disposing of Bartlett’s body, was that everything settled down. The other residents were basically healthy, all things considered, save for Zabuzhko’s occasional flashbacks to her trauma in Chernobyl, which, she said, McKinney had begun treating as routine.

Robert Cornwell, in a 2011 interview, said that a couple of the residents had decks of cards, and so poker and bridge were common during their extensive down time.

“Lotta card-playin’,” said Cornwell, who died in 2014. “I musta taken a few hundred bucks off of Trenton (Harris). Howard played, too, and the boy held his own in our games.”

For a few weeks, things were largely calm in Chicago Heights. Eventually, though, as was the way in many 2010 hideouts, food stores began to diminish again.

“Howard had been rationing the food carefully,” Nowak said. “But there was only so much he could do. He had been basically starving himself to keep us fed. I think he was down to food maybe once a day, and he didn’t eat enough then. Some of us would set some of our food aside and offer it to him, but he wouldn’t go for it. Made us finish our plates.”

Eventually, it became clear that McKinney would again reach another crucial choice — venture outside for food, or venture outside and leave his compatriots. According to Cornwell, the group again tried to insist that he leave them, try to find somewhere for only him.

“But we knew it wouldn’t do no good,” Cornwell said. “Felt like we had to tell him to go, to save himself, but we knew even as we said it he wouldn’t’a done that. He was committed to savin’ us, even though we was hardly worth saving.”

McKinney finally decided once and for all to make another sojourn for food in the early morning hours of October 22, 2010, which was also his 22nd birthday. He left the remaining food in the residents’ care, made his way to the external window and, after another round of goodbyes to the gathered seniors, climbed out.

“The first thing we heard,” Nowak said, fighting through tears to tell the story, “were his screams.”

Exactly what happened to Howard McKinney after climbing outside the window was not difficult to determine. The severed limbs of Jim Bartlett, scattered around the alley below the window, had attracted the attention of a handful of zombies weeks earlier, and his picked-apart bones were still on the ground.

Those zombies, having eaten their fill and with nothing drawing them from the alley, had settled into a stasis, staying in the alley for the intervening weeks. When McKinney landed atop the dumpster, though, the noise and scent brought the zombies around, and they were atop him within seconds. The angle of the window was such that Howard couldn’t have seen much beyond the dumpster, even if he had been judicious about avoiding any zombies that might have been in the alley.

Of course, Oct. 22 was also Z-Day. Less than an hour after the zombies tore McKinney apart, the creatures were gone. Not long after, emergency crews came and began the process of removing the barricade to the survivors.

“We asked them to check on Howard,” Nowak said, “but we knew even then that there was no point.”

McKinney’s body was identified by his iPod, still in the pocket of his torn clothing. Little of his flesh remained when authorities reached the alleyway.

“Nothing about Howard’s life was fair,” said Hobart. “He lost his best years when they put him in jail, and he was innocent. And then he’s only out long enough to get trapped in somewhere else.”

“He had plenty of chances to go out on his own,” said Cornwell. “He surely coulda managed to protect himself. But he never woulda heard of it. I don’t think he coulda lived with himself any other way. Of course, he never got the chance to live with himself his way, either.”

“I’m still alive today because of Howard McKinney,” said Nowak. “That’s probably not fair. I’m 81 years old, and even in 2010 I had had more than my fair share of life. He never got close to his. But I will still be forever thankful. It is only because of him that I sit here today, and if I can do nothing else about it, I hope that people know his story.”

Matt Nolan, the other Chicago Heights employee, the one who fled the facility at the onset of the outbreak, was found. His mobilized corpse was among those that devoured Howard McKinney in the back alley as he went for supplies on Z-Day.

People trapped inside Chicago Heights Retirement Home, 2010:
Jim Bartlett (d. 2010)
Robert Cornwell (d. 2014)
Lorraine Gladwell (d. 2016)
Trenton Harris (d. 2012)
Irene Jones (d. 2018)
Howard McKinney (d. 2010)
Bonnie Nowak
Myra Reyes (d. 2017)
Anna Zabuzhko (d. 2011)