Mandy was a deli clerk at an inner city supermarket I managed up until five years ago, which has since fallen into uncaring hands. One will find, in Baltimore, and in this story—related to me by Mandy’s mother, as she cried and chain-smoked in her car across the street from my apartment last night—that not caring is a key element in the zombie apocalypse. I’m still sick from the cigarette smoke, but just had to get the story, and she needed to smoke to discuss it.

The first stage is not caring about strangers, an attitude that I have adopted willfully, not even regarding most people as human beings, but slabs of animated meat obstructing my uncaring passage through an unworthy world. Unfortunately, most white men in Baltimore and surrounding municipalities also do not care about their own, particularly their women. For instance, I know one woman who leaves for work from a section of Baltimore City that is overrun with crime at 3 a.m. Both her husband and her adult son, decline to make sure she gets to her car safely. This is the disease of civilization, in which men give over their women and children into the all-protective arms of The State, washing their hands of their primal responsibility to be a protector. When mom walks out the door she’s a violent crime statistic that has not happened yet for no reason other than some unarmed black youth has not yet happened upon her as she is leaving the house.

It was Mandy’s night off. She is a tall, pretty girl with an outgoing personality and long light brown hair. She normally fends for herself going back and forth to work, and on those occasions carried a box cutter. Which, the opinion is, she was lucky not to be carrying. Her mother asked me about this, and I said, “Of the 44 incidents of razor use I have studied, the only time a razor has been decisive is when a person strong enough to deal with the assailant with their empty hands uses it.”

Mandy’s mother has raised her and her two sisters and brother on her own, because the father is, “a louse,” and “a piece of shit.” His name is Roger.

Mandy and her unemployed boyfriend, Ethan, wanted to move into together, and since he had no income, they rented a place at Belair Road and Erdman Avenue. Mandy was aware of the reason why virtually every member of her extended family had left Baltimore City. But this was the only place she could afford to rent an apartment, and white guys her age [late teens, early 20s] are rarely employed. So if you want a boyfriend who is not black, you’re going to have to support him.

The Belair Edison neighborhood is one of the worst in Baltimore. When I ran into Mandy at the pizzeria, and found out she was living there, I told her to make sure her boyfriend, Ethan, accompanied her when she was out and about.

This past July 8th, a Wednesday Night, at about midnight, on a day when six “bodies were dropped” in our wonderful city, Mandy and Ethan got into an argument. He put her out of the apartment that she rents, in an area where I have been attacked in broad daylight, where I sat on a bus while two Negroes shot another in front of 30 people.

Mandy does carry far too rosy a picture of her fellow humans in her mind’s eye. But she was aware of the danger she was in. She had once, when I was still working at the store, been attacked by blacks on an MTA bus, and verbally assaulted by the black bus driver for protesting, and made to walk miles. Her mother’s neighbors in the county [two adults with their handicapped son] were attacked last year by eight youths, summoned by a black female bus driver by phone, because they declined to stand with the violent criminals in the back of the bus but remained up front in the handicapped area.

Mandy knew she was in deep trouble, and made a three mile walk to Roger’s rental, where he reclines in squalor, supported by his eldest daughter and his Uncle Sam. Roger told his daughter that she should not have been arguing with her boyfriend, that if she hadn’t run her mouth, she wouldn’t be out on the street.

Mandy’s mother was already at work, as she is on the night shift booking arrests at a Central Maryland corrections facility. Mandy, unwelcome at her father’s apartment, began walking toward her mother’s house, ten miles away in the County. This brought her back through her own neighborhood, about a half mile from where she paid Ethan’s rent, through Herring Run Park, where I have had to defend myself with weapons in broad daylight. This is the park I used as the model for Stoner Park in Buzz Bunny, and the Penned in Wild Place in Three-Rivers’ Thunder-boy novel. It is not the place for a lone white woman to be, ever, particularly not at night. My Cousin Suzy was once mugged by two black teens here.

Getting tired, Mandy sat down at the bus stop at Belair Road and Parkside Drive, thinking she might take a late bus out to Overlea Station and then walk the five miles from there. Overlea Station is bad, and she was keying on that as a safe zone, which shows how skewed people’s awareness becomes when they live in an African American Ethical Zone. If you live among criminals, and are not hyper-vigilant—in other words, are not behaving as if you are a war vet suffering from PTSD—then you will begin to adjust your perception in relative terms that will not upset you. This is why most people who are attacked in these areas [most of them being black] are so easy to pick off, because they have sought a happy place in their mind when their environment demands the opposite.

A young black man then attacked Mandy. I will not go into any details. She was grabbed, beaten, clawed, raped at knife point, and told she was going to be killed if she did not stop screaming. Mind you, this is literally happening on a primary street under a municipal traffic light.

After an undetermined length of time, a tall, muscular young man yelled from somewhere on the street and chased off the attacker. He took off his hooded sweat shirt, covered Mandy up with it, asked her where she lived, and then carried her home. The man that carried Mandy home introduced himself as Marcus, and insisted on not leaving her front door until her boyfriend answered. He then told Ethan what a piece-of-shit he was, and that he had effectively thrown his girl to the dogs, and was as guilty of her attack as if he had done it himself. Ethan would later complain to Mandy that Marcus had hurt his feelings, and that he felt as if he had been unfairly “punked out.”

A police officer did respond. He informed Mandy that her boyfriend was someone that she could well do without, and also that she was lucky, because six people had just been killed that day, and she could have easily been number seven.

No arrest has been made based on the sketch of the dude that looks like half the guys in that area.

Marcus literally disappeared. Mandy’s mother, a devout catholic, would like to think that Marcus really did disappear, that he was a guardian angel. In my opinion, Marcus, who I have promised to look for so that Mandy’s mother can thank him in person, probably had a warrant out on him. He was on foot in the same neighborhood where the other guy was on foot, and that dude, armed with knife, ran like rabbit when Marcus showed up. The subtle implications are that Marcus is what my friend Sandman used to call, “Black ոiggerbane,” which is a subject I’ll save for another day.

Mandy’s mother called her employer and told her what happened, that Mandy would be out for a week. The employer expressed sympathy and stated that Mandy was their favorite employee, and that the customers “loved her.” When Mandy returned to work the black women on staff all came to her and apologized and asked her if there were anything they could do, recommending that she get rid of her boyfriend.

The white women gossiped about her.

One of the black men began following her around making suggestive comments, so she quit, feeling violated by her employer telling her coworkers what had happened, and threatened by the large, black, male coworker stalking her for sex.

Mandy’s mother asked me if any of the rentals in my area would be safe for her daughter, and I said, “No! I moved my family out of here and moved back as a bachelor. It’s workable for me. We have section eights. This guy here, Binky, is a crack dealer. Down on the end live eleven ex-cons in a halfway house. No white woman should live in Baltimore City unless she has a reliable vehicle and lives with someone who will protect her.”

Mandy is living with her mother, out in low crime area of Baltimore County, trying to decide how she’s going to start over.