By Bulletin Staff
Nestled beside the Colorado River and among the rolling hills of Fayette County, Texas, the bucolic city of La Grange seems very far away from the political turmoil roiling Washington, DC. But the budget battle playing out in the nation’s capital is sending shockwaves that threaten to put the lives of La Grange’s 4,400 residents at risk.
Like many rural areas around the nation, Fayette County depends on federal funding for its Zombie Emergency Response Unit (ZERU), and if Congress is unable to pass a budget by the looming November 17 deadline, the county may be forced to shut down its response team, which is based in La Grange.
“La Grange and Fayette are like a lot of areas around the country that simply can’t afford to maintain an effective zombie response group if we don’t have funding from Washington,” says Allison Zergut, mayor of La Grange. “And if that unit shuts down, we’ll be sitting ducks for a zombie horde.”
Zombies on the Range
Incorporated in 1850 and settled by waves of German and Czech immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, La Grange rose to national prominence courtesy of its famed Chicken Ranch, which inspired the movie and play “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” and the rock classic “La Grange” from Texas troubadours ZZ Top.
Today La Grange boasts a quaint downtown that draws visitors with museums, restaurants and boutique shops, as well as a number of historical sites and cultural centers that highlight the area’s rich immigrant heritage. In addition to staking a claim as the center of the Texas-German Belt, La Grange also is the county seat.
Despite Fayette County’s sparse population of about 24,000, the area has seen its share of zombie-related troubles, including the Hostyn outbreak in 1977 and the Rabbs Prairie incident of 1985. While the former was quickly contained, the latter precipitated a broader emergency when the so-called Rabbs Prairie Herd followed the twists and bends of the Colorado River upriver until it reached Austin, causing havoc and more than 250 deaths in the state capital.
In the wake of Rabbs Prairie and similar incidents in rural areas, Congress in 1993 authorized the Department of Justice to fund a network of locally based response teams that could ensure that outbreaks in sparsely peopled regions of the country could quickly be contained before they spilled over into major population centers.
30% Chance of Apocalypse
Fayette County created its own Zombie Emergency Response Unit in 1994 using a grant from the Justice Department. To this day, federal dollars 90% of the budget for the county’s response team, which includes two armored personnel carriers, a helicopter and nine full-time zombie emergency response personnel.
The Fayette ZERU responds to about 100 incidents a year throughout the 960-square-mile county, according to Lance Totlich, head of the unit. Approximately 70% of the incidents prove to be false alarms, but about 30 times every year the unit encounters undead that have to be put down.
“Business picks up during the tourist season when we get a lot of outsiders coming through,” Totlich says. “But we really need to be ready at any time to crush skulls. We all understand that the zombie we can’t eliminate today could be the one that sparks the end of civilization as we know it tomorrow.”
According to a report from the county commissioner’s office, a lengthy interruption in funding from the government would force the county, already facing a budget squeeze, to shut down its response unit, leaving Fayette without a dedicated force to fight the undead scourge.
Healthcare Funding Also at Risk
The Justice Department’s program has also expanded to provide critical funding for healthcare facilities in cities and towns like La Grange that have seen their medical infrastructure devastated over the past decade.
The group Saving Rural Hospitals, for example, estimates that more than 100 hospitals in rural areas have been forced to close in the last 10 years, and 30% of all rural hospitals are at risk of closure in the near term because payments from health insurance plans don’t cover the facilities’ costs to provide essential services.
The gutting of the rural healthcare system has meant that many regions of the country don’t have the medical personnel and facilities in place to handle the everyday medical needs of the 60 million Americans that live in rural areas, let alone a large-scale zombie outbreak.
In La Grange, Russel Cretchki, president of St. Wenceslaus Medical Center, says that if the funding spigot from Washington is shut off, his hospital will be forced to curtail critical care services and potentially even shudder its undead isolation ward completely if a federal shutdown lasts more than a few weeks.
“We operate paycheck to paycheck around here, and we rely on the funding that we get from the government to service the community,” Cretchki said. “If that funding goes away, we won’t we around to treat the bitten when the next undead horde sweeps through the county.”
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