For Harvey Pekar...

We’re at a rest stop about 50 miles south of Cleveland, and from the looks of things, the place is rife with day-walking zombies. For some reason, they’re not attacking (perhaps they’re more docile in the sunlight, or maybe they’re repulsed by the toxic blood we’ve got coursing through our veins), but something is definitely unsettling about this place. I tell Scott, and he immediately agrees.

“I thought something was amuck,” he says, hopping back into Black Betty and scanning the blank-faced, beer-gutted mounds of flesh gathered in small, near-silent groups around the parking lot, muttering the hypnotic indecipherable babble of the undead. “Just look at the confusion in their eyes.”

“I know,” I say. “We’re in the midst of a powwow of the brain-craving reanimated.”

“It’s not a powwow,” Scott says. “It’s an infestation.”

Later, when we get to town and check into our hotel on the outskirts of Cleveland, it’s in a sketchy liquor-stores-with-window-bars neighborhood. There is only one other car in the parking lot, but the place looks clean and affordable, so we get a room. Still, there’s something eerie about the place, a suspicious blood-thick hush.

At the front desk, an Indian girl so beautiful as to raise alarm bells checks us in. Where did she come from? Why is she stuck in this place when she could so easily be a Bollywood sweetheart? Is she a victim of human trafficking? I can’t see her legs—is it possible she’s chained to that desk? There’s something vaguely sinister about the whole scene. Across the lobby, I spy the black-hole dark entrance of an attached nightclub called the Evolution Ultra Lounge. I turn my gaze back to the mysterious brown-skinned beauty behind the counter. She hardly speaks, but when she does, it’s accent-thick and tone-light, and her skeleton-slender fingers gently caress the computer keys, entering our information. Every so often she raises her obsidian eyes from the monitor and shoots a hungry glance. We can’t tell if she’s innocently flirting or just licking her vampire lips at the next carload of victims unlucky enough to pull into this possibly literal tourist trap.

When she’s done, she hands us our keys with a half-cocked smile, and as soon as we turn the corner, Scott breaks the weighty silence with a measured whisper: “That woman has the eyes of a snake … and the breath of a dragon … but the figure of an angel.”

Inside our room, we lock all the bolts and chains behind us. Scott takes out the flip cam to log his thoughts, creeps over to the window and peeks around the curtain. I hear a couple car doors slam outside. "It’s confirmed,” he narrates, "an additional two carloads of victims have arrived. What are we supposed to believe? That this is a safe-haven for road-weary travelers? Or just another stop on the Hydra’s Head for that, uh, dude from The Odyssey?

“We’re not gonna die,” he says, suddenly changing directions. “At least I hope not.”

A couple hours later, at the Beachland Ballroom, the fear has dissipated. We’re back in our element—an aging music hall with no-frills rock & roll blaring from the PA at the front bar, good burgers, cool bartenders, and beer as cheap as it is cold.

We’d just interviewed punkabilly king Jim Heath—aka the Rev. Horton Heat—at This Way Out, the subterranean vintage store beneath the Beachland, and are feeling ten-feet tall in our own little Midwestern slice of Heaven, bullshitting with the bar staff and rocking to the Stones on vinyl when suddenly we get some unexpected news from Hell. My phone starts lighting up with texts from Bearfoot Hooker Ty Manning—my old compadre with whom we’d partied in Athens a week prior—and several of my other metal-head friends. You can see a ripple through the rest of the bar, too. Word has arrived of the first major rock casualty to occur during our roadtrip—metal legend Ronnie James Dio, we’ve been informed, has made his final plunge into the fires that forged him. Before long, the DJ drops some “Holy Diver” on the turntable while Scott and I and a slew of other rock fans around the bar toast the dead man of the hour with throat-scorching shots of bourbon.

L-R: Rev. Horton Heat, Jimbo Wallace & Scott Churilla live at the Beachland Ballroom. Photo by Steve LaBate.

Later that night, The Rev plays a fiery set, unleashing one tornadic flurry of guitar licks after another while his longtime bassist Jimbo Wallace—who looks like he’d be some greaser ex-con car-thief if his life hadn’t been saved by rock & roll—runs 50-yard  dashes up and down the neck of his cavernous upright, bitch-slapping those strings like some bottled-lightning jazzcat, like a rockabilly engine humming at full throttle. And, for a special treat, drummer Scott Churilla—who’d held it down on the kit with the Rev for a dozen years (from 1994-2006)—fills in all night for current drummer Paul Simmons, who couldn’t make the show. It was a happy little reunion, the trio redlining that sonofabitch all the way from starting gates to finish line, full of electric chemistry and fuel-injected Texas-size swagger.

After the show, back at our almost certainly vampire-ridden hotel, Scott pontificates on what we’ve just witnessed, slurring slightly with a bottle of Beam clutched in one meathook, waving the other in the air for emphasis—“Mr. Jim Heath is basically a rock icon in the vein of Mr. Charlie Louvin or Mr. Cowboy Jack Clement. I honestly think so. He broke down rock for us by downbeat, quarterbeat, upbeat, sidebeat, softbeat, highbeat, nobeat… and he said, basically, 'Yeah, rock & roll is here to stay,' and then he got out onstage and proved it—he proved it beyond any shadow of a doubt.”

Before long, though, far from the safety of the cozy, low-lit Beachland Ballroom, creeping paranoia was nipping at our heels again. We’d filled the trashcan with beer and ice, and were taking long slugs of whiskey between gulps of beer, trying desperately to stave off the maddening horror seeping like the jizz-sticky blood of a thousand innocent corpses under our hotel-room door. Were we just plain dumb to come back to this hotel under the shroud of nightfall? With that Godforsaken Evolution Ultra Lounge a mere 100 yards down the hallway, that red-lipsticked vampire seductress still chained to the front desk and what was sure to be a score of flesh-craving zombies prowling the grounds, ready to knaw on our bones like the hellbound jackals that haunt their undead dreams?

As our last shreds of sanity began to crumble like wreckingballed concrete, Scott unsheathed his primary means of self defense—a razor-sharp 14-inch carbon-steel hunting knife—and began running his fingers along the blade. Much to my relief, he’d left his handguns at home in Denver, but even still, that knife was no toy. And the way he was waving it around hacked at my already frayed nerves, especially with all the damned tension we’d had between us for the last couple weeks.

“Here, take the flip camera,” he said, handing me the tiny device, “I’m going to demonstrate for our viewers how to handle a vicious, unexpected zombie attack, which is something I am 100-percent prepared for.”

So I trained the camera on Scott and pressed record. He lunged suddenly toward me with the knife, thrashing at the camera. Looking through the viewfinder, it was damn near impossible to have any sense of depth perception. But when I felt the blade swoosh past my left ear, I jumped back. The camera now at my side, I realized I was backed into a corner, pinned between a knife-wielding lunatic, the wall and the bolted door. “Easy there, now” I said, forcing out a jittery laugh. “You’re a little loaded to be waving that blade around.”

“Nonsense. My mind is alert, my senses heightened, and my constitution sound. I am 100-percent prepared for the zombie apocalypse.”

At that moment I realized that I had been so worried about the evil lurking outside the room that I failed to notice the transformation going on right in front of my eyes. What had once been Scott stared through me, bloodshot and glassy-eyed, the cold carbon-steel in its hand so close I could feel the temperature drop around me like a midnight thunderstorm blowing in.

So this is how it all ends, I thought. Sliced & diced by a walking blackout of a dear friend in some shitty skid-row hotel in Cleveland.

The muscles in Scott’s neck tensed as he raised the knife up quick to his ear. In the blink of an eye, it stabbed downward, and for a second the world went dark. I heard a loud crunch echo into the room and flinched, but felt nothing. When I opened my eyes, under the strobing fluorescent light of the vanity, I saw the blade plunged straight through the top of the brown-plastic lid of the ice bucket.

“You know,” undead Scott said, pulling the knife from the bucket, looking suddenly tuckered in his collared peach button-up, “I think I’m going to lie down for a minute.”

He slowly backed away, knife still in hand, sprawled across the flowery comforter and let his steel-trap eyelids snap shut. I stood there, still frozen silent in the doorway. After about 15 seconds, I heard the faint sound of snoring, as my momentarily walking-dead pal faded clumsily into boozy slumber, chest rising and falling with each labored breath. Picking up the flip camera, which I’d dropped in the midst of all the slashing, I hit the record button and began filming again as I walked over and carefully slid the knife out of Scott’s limp hand. Then I grabbed my suitcase, buried the blade in my clothes, zipped it shut and stuffed it under my bed. With that rat bastard disarmed, I was finally able to drift off into sleep—heavy, black dreamless sleep.

Scott talks to a Wolverine impersonator outside Beachland Ballroom before being infected and transforming into a zombie. Luckily, he was able to cure himself with his usual medicine—straight whiskey. Photo by Steve LaBate.