Falling to Pieces
by Norm Cowie
|
Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Brian’s lungs were heaving. He risked a glance behind him and saw his pursuers were gaining. A dozen zombies were spread in a ragged line, shambling at top zombie speed, filmy eyes riveted on Brian.
“Brains,” a creature moaned.
“Brian, not brain,” Brian huffed, his breath catching as he tried to eke a morsel of additional speed out of his numb legs and feet. He felt like he was running against a swift current in shallow water in big balloony shorts.
“Brains!” another zombie cried.
“Aagh!” Brian responded, straining for more acceleration. If he could just make it a few more yards.
“Brains!” another groaned.
Brian stumbled, and their calls grew more frantic. “Brains!”
With a last burst, Brian stumbled across a white line. His palsied legs finally gave out, and he crumpled to the fake grass of the football field, which further galvanized the horde behind him.
“Brains!” Rough hands reached for Brian.
* * *
“You okay?” a voice asked.
Brian looked up. Mr. Phelps. “Yeah, I, I... guess,” Brian gasped.
Mr. Phelps raised his arm over Brian. “And the winner of the thirty-yard run is... Brian!”
There was no cheering, mostly because zombies, as a general rule, don’t exude cheer.
“Nice run, young man,” Mr. Phelps said, helping Brian to his feet. “That’s twice you’ve won a long-distance run.” The teacher’s eyes went distant, and Brian knew he was going to hear another “before we were zombies” story.
“Before we were zombies, and our lungs went bad and our hearts stopped beating, thirty yards was nothing. A long run would be three miles, six, in fact, marathons were—”
“I gotta hurry, Mr. Phelps,” Brian interrupted. “I can’t be late for my next class. And Brian bolted, or more precisely, shuffled off to the locker room.
* * *
Brian nudged up a step in line, his eyes roving the offerings. Same cafeteria garbage as ever. Yum.
He held his plate out, and greenish brown gunk was slopped onto his plate by Ms. Evelyn, the disinterested, heavyset cafeteria lady whose hair was brazenly bereft of hair net.
“Thanks, Ms. Evelyn,” Brian mumbled. He had been taught to be polite. Being a zombie didn’t change that rule.
As he shuffled to his normal seat with the “uncool” kids at the table closest to the monitors, he looked down at his plate: a small puddle of what was probably cat brains garlanded with a greenish pile of fetid slop trucked in from the local dump and laced with carcinogens and other toxic substances nutritionally good for young zombies. One of Ms. Evelyn’s straggly hairs was draped across the morsel of brain like a sunbathing worm.
“Brains,” Brian mumble-moaned under his breath.
“No fair, you got a hair,” a voice said next to his shoulder.
A hand reached down to pluck the hair from the plate, but Brian lightly nudged it away. “That’s mine, dude.”
The hand pulled away back towards its owner, Nick Winston, Brian’s best friend and resident nerd.
“She must like you or something.” Nick was short and thin with glasses that didn’t help a general nerdiness exacerbated by a pink shirt emblazoned with green letters reading, “Poke me... carefully.” The glasses did him no good, as all zombies have very poor eyesight. But he had worn them before turning, and the habit hadn’t been shaken by death or reanimation from death.
Brian shook his head, careful not to dislodge any body parts that might come loose from fragile, disintegrating zombie bodies. “She doesn’t like anyone.”
“Comes from working with brains all day,” Nick said sagely. Which meant nothing since he said a lot of things sagely that weren’t all that sage.
Brian grunted but didn’t answer. In this case, Nick was probably right.
They shuffled together to the table, passing by the Plastics in time to hear one shriek. “Oh, no, I lost a finger.”
Another Plastic looked up from a handheld compact mirror where she was spackling something thick onto her greenish skin. “You mean a fingernail?”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s the whole finger,” the first one said. Her voice was tinged with panic.
A third Plastic pulled a thin packet from her designer purse. “Oh, here’s some Super Glue. And my emergency sewing kit.” Cautiously, so it wouldn’t fall off, she waggled a finger. “Never leave home without your emergency pouch.”
“Oh, thanks,” the first said, daintily plucking the disconnected digit from where it had splunked into her half-eaten lunch. She frowned with concentration as she tried to fit the finger back in its allotted slot.
“Thank God for Super Glue,” another Plastic sighed.
After looking around to make sure no one was looking and blithely risking later retribution, Nick couldn’t resist a shot as they walked by. “Fingers work better if they’re connected.”
The three Plastics sneered, crooked teeth glistening with shreds of food.
Brian’s heart nearly beat. Wow, they were cute. Too bad they were such harpies.
“What babes, huh?” Nick grinned as they dropped into their seats like boneless sacks of teenager.
Shaking his head, Brian said, “You shouldn’t have said anything to them.”
It wasn’t always smart to antagonize the Plastics, who ruled the school like princesses. The three who had been at that table would no doubt be elected Homecoming Queen and Court, and they had a small army of sycophant jocks at their beck and call. Well, not exactly jocks. But guys who would have been jocks, if there were still jocks.
Finally the garishness of Nick’s shirt impinged on Brian’s consciousness. “Nice shirt. Girl’s Outlet mall?”
Nick looked down. “What?”
“Seriously, pink?”
“I like pink,” Nick said. “Who says I can’t like pink? It’s a combination of red, which is a manly color, and white, which is just cool.”
“You watch dance shows.”
“So, I like them.”
“You like to cook.”
“What are you saying?”
Brian grinned. “Nothing.”
“Hey, I’m secure in my zombieness. We don’t all have to wear dour, boring clothes like those rags you’re wearing.”
Brian was, in fact, wearing rags. Ever since the humans had been turned or eaten, the clothing industry had suffered, because, for some reason, zombies didn’t like to work with textiles. They saved their sewing skills for keeping their rotting bodies held together. That’s why rags sort of suited their image.
Brian turned his attention back to his food. Another change. Humans had historically eaten meat and vegetables. This didn’t suit zombie palates, which gravitated more to brains and junk food. And, by “junk,” this meant actual junk. The more rotted, slimy and stale, the better.
The dumps were rapidly being diminished by the appetite of the Earth’s new ruling species. There was already talk of widespread hunger if they couldn’t find a way to slow down the rate at which trash was being eaten up by ravenous zombies.
And junk food was junk food. It didn’t really sate the hungers that drove every zombie. What they really wanted was brains. Brains were a delicacy. The crème de la crème, nirvana in a self-serve bowl.
“Seriously, if you aren’t going to eat that hair,” Nick said, reaching towards Brian’s plate again.
Brian was too tired to fight him. “Fine, I’ll split it with you.”
Nick grabbed the end of the oily hair and reverently slid it from its resting place on the cat brain. “I don’t know what it is with hair. Maybe because it grows in close proximity to the brain.”
“When it grows at all,” Brian said.
“Right. So it’s rare. Ever since our hair stopped growing.”
“Since everything stopped growing,” Brian interjected.
“Yeah, since we turned.” Nick looked down on his scrawny self. “Gonna be stuck like this forever.”
“Assuming you don’t fall apart first,” Brian said.
“True. I’ve lost nearly two pounds in body parts to date.”
Brian’s heart wanted to pound. He had lost five pounds, four percent of his body weight at the time of his change. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, regretting having mentioned anything.
“I heard Carl Lunk’s down by eight pounds,” Nick said, ignoring him.
Brian said nothing.
“Most of it from when he got his head knocked off,” Nick finished.
That was true, and it had caused the school to discontinue contact athletics. Even worse, because there weren’t any true zombie doctors, the guy who’d sewn Carl’s head back on hadn’t exactly gotten it straight. It had been mounted on cocked, so now Carl always looked like a puzzled dog.
They both thought about it for a moment. Life had become quite a bit more hazardous since they died. Or were they disabled? With dead nerves, no heartbeat and no healing blood, their bodies were disintegrating. Cooking with dead nerves took nerves they didn’t have. The body relied on pain to keep it from injury, and open flame and flammable zombies made for a combustible mixture. The only thing that could hold off decay was brains, lots of brains. Preferably human brains, which not only stopped the rot, but healed.
But humans no longer existed. Well, not healthy humans. They were all disabled now. Those not eaten had been converted to zombies in the first year of the plague. When the humans were gone, the zombies went after the monkeys. Then the pigs, dogs and the cats, in that order, finally proving which species was more intelligent. Whales and dolphins were safe in their oceans because zombies abhorred water.
Brian sighed. “I heard a rumor that the government is growing a small colony of humans in a secret site in Arizona.”
Nick nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that. Area 51, or something like that.”
“I guess if we both know about it, it can’t be very secret,” Brian said, trying to ignore an itchy spot on his elbow. Scratching wasn’t good on their fragile skin which, deprived of nourishment, tended to dry and itch. The only good thing was mosquitoes were no longer a menace to humans who no longer had fresh blood rushing through their veins.
“I heard they are saving the last human brains for high elective officials and the wealthy,” Nick said.
“I’d believe that in a second,” Brian said. He looked down at his plate. There was a small bit of brain left. He sighed, sporked it up and swallowed the gelatinous substance.
Nick was chewing thoughtfully. “I think this was maybe a Siamese.”
Brian snorted: “You can’t tell one kind of brain from another.”
Nick waggled a finger with care, not wanting to duplicate the Plastic’s action. “I knew when they switched from dogs, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but —”
The bell went off.
“What’s your next class?” Nick asked, as they gathered up their trays.
Brian looked down at his schedule. “Um, History. How about you?”
“Sewing,” Nick answered, putting his tray on the conveyer belt. “The syllabus says today’s class is ‘threading the needle: treat it like a sport.’” He rolled his eyes: “Duh, how stupid is that?”
“Oh, yeah, here’s what mine says,” Brian said, reading his handout. “Was Jesus the first zombie?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Nick said, peering at Brian’s paper. “That’s sort of sacrilegious, isn’t it? We’re, like, in school. Separation of church and state and all that?”
“I dunno. It just looks stupid. I remember an essay last semester in Philosophy called, “Zombie, better to be turned... or eaten?”
“That’s an easy one,” Nick said. “I’d rather be alive than dead any time.”
“You are dead.”
“You know what I mean. Ambulatory, conscious, brain functioning.”
“Mostly functioning,” Brian interrupted.
“Yeah, fine, but still, something’s better than nothing. Besides, it got rid of my allergies.”
Brian snorted, “Our English teacher had us write a report on our bite.”
“Our bite? What does dentistry have to do with anything?” Nick asked, as they headed for the hallway.
“No, not that. We had to write an essay on the bite that turned us. Like, ‘Write how you felt when the zombie bit and converted you.’”
Nick frowned, “That’s sort of inhumane.”
“You mean in-zombie-ane, don’t you?” Brian pointed out the obvious: “We aren’t humans anymore.”
“Yeah, we’re zombies. Feels weird to say that. Still, that essay assignment just sounds wrong.”
They walked in silence for a moment.
“Well, maybe,” Brian said. “We’d better get off to class.”
“Oh, hey, congratulations on the race this morning,” Nick said over his shoulder, as he headed for his class. Brian trekked the opposite direction to History.
* * *
Mr. Bitten watched with fuliginous eyes as the horde of teen zombies shambled into his classroom. Wryly, he thought their plodding walk was little different from the one they had affected before being turned.
Just before the door closed, Brian slipped past. “Excuse me, sir.”
Brian moved quickly towards the front of the classroom. As the nearly tardy student finally slumped into his seat, Mr. Bitten closed the door. “Ah, Brian, we appreciate you gracing us with your presence today.”
The class tittered and Brian’s face would have flamed if he’d had blood under the skin.
“Okay, class, turn in your papers from yesterday,” Mr. Bitten said, ignoring the panicked looks of some kids who had obviously forgotten the assignment.
When the papers swam in a current to the front of class, he moved over to the chalkboard. “Today’s lesson is Year Two of the Plague.” He turned around. “Can anyone tell us the prime event of the second year?”
A turgidly pompous girl shot a hand into the air, causing a bit of fingernail to launch towards the ceiling.
“Yes, Christy.” Mr. Bitten smiled. While most kids hated butt-kissing students, teachers generally approved of any classroom enthusiasm.
Primly, Christy said, “That was when the mobs of free-ranging zombies began to reform rudimentary governmental organizations.”
“Excellent. And what problems did they run into?”
A panicked look crossed Christy’s face. Her first answer was supposed to cement her place as teacher’s pet without delving deeper. Maybe Mr. Bitten didn’t enjoy lips on his buttocks after all. “Um, mostly hunger, I guess,” she said hesitantly.
“Correct.”
Christy looked relieved.
“What else?” he asked.
The panicked look flashed back to Christy’s face.
“Um, well...”
As much as he liked seeing Christy squirm, Brian raised his hand.
“Yes, Brian,” Mr. Bitten said.
“Well, um, yes, there was hunger, but the overriding issue was that of intelligence. Second year zombies weren’t as smart.”
“Exactly. Then what?”
“Well,” Brian said, mentally shuffling his feet, “third year zombies were even less intelligent.”
“And why is that?” Mr. Bitten asked.
Another kid raised his hand. “Because of the quality of brains had gone down so much.”
“Brains!” the entire class chorused.
Mr. Bitten would have admonished them, but he had joined them. “Right,” he said, wiping a bit of drool from his mouth. “And what conclusion can we make from this?”
“We’re getting stupider,” a kid blurted.
The class laughed.
Mr. Bitten nodded. “Yes, and will this stupidity help us survive?”
“It helped Kyle all those years,” another boy quipped. More laughter.
“And politicians,” another kid said.
More laughter.
“Hey,” Kyle said from the back row, once he’d had time enough to interpret the insult.
“I think the human race is doomed,” Mr. Bitten said, once he’d had their attention. Suddenly, the light mood was sucked down by the gravity.
“We aren’t humans anymore,” James pointed out.
Mr. Bitten fell heavily into his seat. “Good point. More the worse.”
He sighed and finally waved a languid hand: “Dismissed.”
As the kids shuffled out, faster than they had entered, he mumbled, “And to think I was once a highly regarded scientist. Now I teach high school.” He looked up at the clock. He’d let them out half an hour early. Big deal. It wouldn’t matter. Their education was a farce anyway. With their bodies falling apart, procreation impossible, the zombie race was as doomed as the human race it had replaced.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Norm Cowie
