When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk Carytown

Nick Bonadies

Spectrum Editor

Hundreds of shambling undead – all of varying ages, backgrounds, and stages of decay – took to the streets of Carytown Saturday afternoon for this year’s sixth-annual Richmond Zombie Walk.

The ghoulish masses made the rounds from the west end of Cary Street to the Byrd Theatre and back several times – obeying walk/don’t walk signs and other human traffic laws, of course.  Some stopped to partake of free servings of calf brain (yes, real calf brain) being served at New York Deli.

Participants were not all necessarily of the groaning, brain-hungry variety: bands of humans in guerrilla army fatigues ambushed the hordes from street corners and storefronts with water guns, plastic knives, baseball bats and golf clubs.  Several volunteer “victims” found themselves grabbed by the sleeves and dragged down into a gruesome cannibalistic dogpile – only to emerge later, looking perhaps a little dead in the eyes and trailing an organ or two behind them.

As for the zombies themselves, undead of all ages were reported, including entire families, with mothers pushing decomposing babies in strollers.  Olive Oyl and Popeye were sighted, and several bride and groom pairs – as well as an entire reanimated cast of Scooby Doo.

Several proved the undead to be just as literate as the rest of us by carrying blood-drenched signs: one zombie, who may have been a homeless man in life, carried a piece of cardboard reading “Will eat brains for food.”  Another sign, carried by one ghoul with tea bags dangling from a three-cornered hat, read “Brains for eating, not thinking.”

A further gaggle of three undead Golden Girls, in bloodstained silk evening robes and slippers, shared a message between them: “We’re looking for Betty.”

Saturday’s turnout was a far cry from Richmond’s first zombie walk in 2005, which only involved about a hundred zombies.  The zero-warning flash mob affair took a busy Saturday Carytown shoppers’ crowd completely by surprise and shambled as far as the VCU campus.

The rest, as the say, is history – these days, a breakout zombie infestation in Carytown around late October is more or less expected.

In 2007, zombie walk organizers Anthony Menez and Josh Bishop began collecting voluntary donations from participating zombies to benefit the American Cancer Society.  Though zombie participation was and is always free of charge, Menez and Bishop claim on the Richmond Zombie Walk website that the organization has been able to collect “hundreds of dollars every year thanks to the generosity of its zombies.”

“See? Zombies can give something back to the community instead of taking delicious brain matter,” they said.  “It’s a trade-off really.” CT