The Great Brain

by Paul Stafford

  The bet had been a rash response to the continuous goading Mick had weathered from Mr Noel for the entire school year. The teacher was entranced at the insurmountable thickness of Mick’s head, delighted at his deadset density and amazed at how dazed this young zombie actually was. It was a constant source of mirth for Mr Noel, who was bored to tears by his rubbish teaching job at Horror High and took to bagging Mick out as a hobby.

  Our dumb chum was the unvarying butt of Mr Noel’s jokes. He would pick on Mick, getting on his wick by giving the undead hick heaps of stick for being thick as a brick.

  A sick trick.

  That’s called sadism: B-grade writers padding out their stories with cheap, second-hand riffs and crapping rapping. And what Mr Noel was doing blew too.

  Mick put up with Mr Noel’s rude jibes for nearly an entire year, copping grief every day in class for not knowing the answers to easy questions. Until one fateful day …

  Mr Noel strolled in, chest puffed out, eyes shining, ears pricked up, teeth flossed, nose polished, looking for trouble. He spotted Mick and knew he’d found it.

  ‘So, Living-Dead. Let us pose a question I knew the answer to on last night’s episode of Who Wants to Be a Horror Millionaire. What is the square root of a triangularised cylindrical oblong when it’s in outer space?’ Mr Noel tapped his foot impatiently. ‘Well?’

  Mick gaped like an ape in a cape juggling grapes. (Like I said – sadism.)

  Finally Mick shrugged his shoulders and mumbled, ‘Don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Don’t know, sir,’ echoed Mr Noel, sniggering. ‘Well, class, what a surprise – Living-Dead doesn’t know. I’m dumb-founded, which is the opposite of Living-Dead, who’s founded in dumb. My mindless, young zombie student just admitted he doesn’t know the answer to that question, but what I’d really like to accurately discern is this: what does Living-Dead know? Eh?’

  The rest of the class grinned, waiting for the response. They knew what was happening here; it was a longstanding ritual. Mr Noel would mock Mick mercilessly, harangue him about his hard-headedness and force the boy to finally ’fess up and admit he knew nil.

  But not today. Today was the day all that changed. Today was the first day of the rest of Mick’s life, or the beginning of the end – depends which way you look at these things.

  Beginning of the end, I reckon.

  Normally Mick pre-empted the humiliating daily pageant, ending the demeaning process prematurely by admitting to Mr Noel and the class that he knew nowt about owt. But today would be different. Today he’d finally be biting back.

  ‘Is there anyone in the history of the world dumber than Living-Dead?’ Mr Noel asked the class rhetorically. ‘Anyone at all?’

  ‘Yeah,’ mumbled Mick. ‘You.’

  A hush fell over the class. Suddenly the air was frozen enough to crack into prisms and sell to an Alaskan kaleido-scope company.

  ‘What?’ asked Mr Noel disbelievingly.

  Mick stared defiantly into Mr Noel’s eyes. ‘You. You’re dumber. You’re the idiot, Mr Know-All.’

  Mr Noel gagged and sputtered as he swallowed the hysterical laugh that had started from his throat. He felt certain he’d misheard, but his brain jogged his memory and assured him he’d heard it right the first time.

  ‘You what?’ asked Mr Noel, incredulously.

  ‘You heard me,’ snapped Mick.

  ‘You’re insane. Thick and insane.’

  ‘Wanna make a bet?’ said Mick. ‘Wanna make a bet I’m smarter than you?’

  ‘You are insane, Living-Dead,’ stated Mr Noel. He was still in shock, but his head was already ticking over with possibilities. ‘And yes, I want to make a bet. I’m especially keen to make a bet with you involving intelligence – one that I can’t lose. But how should we settle such a one-sided wager?’

  ‘You versus me on Who Wants to Be a Horror Millionaire,’ said Mick.

  ‘What!’ hollered Mr Noel. ‘You couldn’t answer the first question on that show, which is “Hi viewers, how are you this evening?” You can’t be serious. You can’t honestly think you’ll beat me in an intelligence competition. You’ll be hammered. Even I’d feel sorry for you … eventually.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ snapped Mick. ‘Or are you scared to put your money where your big ugly mouth is?’

  That rudeness galvanised Mr Noel and he instantly became all businesslike. ‘What’s at stake here, Dumbo?’

  ‘Everything,’ replied Mick. ‘What do you want to bet?’

  ‘Well, you mentioned money – how much do you have?’

  ‘I work part-time flipping burgers at McHorrors and earn fifty bucks a week,’ answered Mick. ‘I’ll put up a year’s wages – $25,000.’

  ‘I could easily use some extra pocket money,’ smirked Mr Noel. ‘So you want me to put up $25,000 – even though you only earn $2,500 a year, you thickshake?’

  ‘No,’ said Mick, shaking his head emphatically. ‘It’s not about money. I want you to put all of us out of our misery. If you lose, you quit your job and leave this school forever.’

  The details of the mad bet went through Horror High like a dose of recycled laxatives. Nobody could believe it. Mick Living-Dead definitely wasn’t the densest denizen in the district, but being smarter than Brent Strawman was nothing to be proud of.

  Brent was a scruffy scarecrow with a head full of straw possessed by the vile essences of twenty-three fragmented evil spirits, and – since the day he was stitched together, stuffed and had a two-metre pole jammed up his rear end – he’d never uttered a single word. Who could blame him? But being brainier than Brent was bugger all to boast, brag and big-note yourself about, bro.

  Even though they all knew Mick had zero chance of success, the students were energised about the possibilities of the bet. They dreamt of ridding the school of the much-hated Mr Noel and indulged in halcyonic visions of Horror High as a place where a kid might actually enjoy the lessons, gain useful and worthwhile knowledge in class, develop their inner selves in a positive learning environment and become happy, productive members of society.

  Someone had obviously spiked the drinking water.

  Many conspirators had plotted Mr Noel’s downfall before, but none had succeeded. Three previous attempts on Mr Noel’s life had failed miserably. The first occurred on a school excursion when an anonymous student let the bus handbrake off while Mr Noel was standing in front of it taking a photograph of some amusing roadkill. The vehicle was parked on a steep hill and the slick move would’ve flattened Mr Noel like a toad through a mangle if he hadn’t looked up from the camera to check the aperture.

  The second attempt was craftier. Someone broke into the school canteen and filled Mr Noel’s lunch roll with iron filings. The theory was that, once swallowed, the contents would gouge his intestines like sandpaper on spaghetti. It should’ve and would’ve exterminated the treacherous teacher by last period, except the illiterate canteen staff stuffed up the lunch orders and delivered the tooled-up, heavy metal roll to Principal Skullwater.

  Skullwater was a notoriously fussy eater and pecked at his food like a bird. The first prissy mouthful of the lunch roll broke his two front teeth off like they were sticks of blackboard chalk, and the jig was up. The canteen staff were tossed into the darkest dungeon in leg-irons and Mr Noel lived on, though he did miss out on his lunch.

  Again, it was too soon to carve Mr Noel’s name on a gravestone.

  Third time lucky. That’s the traditional formula in all decent stories, or so I’m told, so it’s a sure bet it won’t work here.

  The third attempt was electrocution. Everyone’s heard of the electric chair, but who ever heard of an electric toilet? The mysterious assassin figured this novel approach would succeed in killing Horror High’s resident terror, put the anonymous student on the path to a successful career as an inventor and win him bulk friends by causing Mr Noel a heaps hilarious death, all while bringing affordable entertainment to the masses.

  Ambitious.

 
Unfortunately for our innovative inventor friend, one of the school’s contingent of cleaning gnomes nipped into Mr Noel’s private bathroom and, contrary to school rule number one, used the teacher’s toilet for number twos. And, doubly unfortunately for the poor cleaner dude, electricity doesn’t discriminate.

  The gnome paid heavily; not only were his remains buried in a matchbox in the pet cemetery and glowed in the dark for the next sixteen years, but his pitiable parents were billed for the massive power surge that had sucked on the town’s electricity grid like a plague of monster leeches.

  So, you see, attempts on Mr Noel’s life were not only unsuccessful but downright dangerous, especially for gnomes. For this reason the prospect, however remote, of legally and legitimately ridding Horror High of its most detested teacher via the outrageously unfeasible Living-Dead intelligence bet was greeted with cheers and general rejoicing.

  Mick was swamped with offers from enthusiastic well-wishers. A cabal of academic kids offered Mick intensive coaching to ensure him the maximum chance of triumph. The school’s most accomplished cheaters approached him on the sly, offering to wire the zombie zilch-brain with the latest undercover gadgets, gizmos and advancements in electronic cheatery and Bluetooth defraudery. The cream of Horror High’s nerd and geek battalions pledged to assist him in any way they could and paid homage to him by building a zombie shrine in the darkest corner of the library.

  Suddenly Mick was the most popular dude in the school. It was a revelation to him. All he’d done was lose his temper and make a heaps stupid bet. Now he was treated like a hero and slapped on the back wherever he went.

  Heart-warming.

  It wouldn’t do him any good, though. He was still thicker than two truck tyres, and no amount of well-wishers and do-gooders and nerds and shrines and backslaps was going to change that.

  The tough questions remained unanswered: was Mick destined to lose his bet, his hard-earned McHorror wages, and the absolute final opportunity any kid at Horror High would ever have to rid themselves of the abhorrent Mr Noel? Was it inevitable that, in a bodgy bet based on brain power, Mick would be bent, broken and burnt up like a birch branch at a backyard barbeque? Was there no law against the relentless use of substandard alliteration by retarded, rubbishy writers?

  Was there no justice in Horror?

  Natch.

  Pick up on this. Another proverb doing the rounds in Horror was about to get a workout – the one about calamities coming in sets of three. Hot on the heels of the calamitously un-winnable Living-Dead bet was news from the Horror Space Centre that a fiery meteor was streaking through space towards Horror, bringing doom, death, disaster and a hellbroth of trumped-up insurance claims with it.

  The TV was on in the Horror canteen and a news flash chopped through the canteen ladies’ favourite midday soap, Days of Our Deaths. The preamble to the show had just started – ‘Like nails through the coffin lid, these are the Days of Our Deaths’ – when the newsflash froze the screen. It showed hazy footage of a huge rock rolling through the atmosphere, filmed by long-range space cameras, and the newsreader on Shock-Horror News looked nervous and edgy as she reported the gargantuan rock barrelling towards them.

  ‘Mad!’ exclaimed Mick from the front of the canteen line. ‘A comet! And it’s gonna hit Horror!’

  Mr Know-All was in the line-up impatiently waiting for his lunch (he didn’t trust them to deliver it anymore), and he sneered, ‘Is it possible to be any more ignorant than you, Living-Dead? A comet is a celestial body with a frozen nucleus that travels around the sun in an elliptical orbit. And, before you say it, dumbwit, it’s not an asteroid either, which moves around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. No, my exceedingly dense-witted zombie, what you see there is a meteor – a meteoroid that will eventually enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Any other stupid questions?’

  ‘I didn’t ask you,’ Mick snapped. ‘But, since you reckon you’re so smart, I do have one more question. How do you stop it wiping out Horror?’

  ‘You can’t,’ shrugged Mr Know-All. ‘It’s impossible. Nothing can stop it now.’

  Look out.

  Mick’s older sister, Kim, was, like all sisters, not to be trusted on any level. She delighted in the fact that Mick was thicker than a bucket of crunchy peanut butter and enjoyed the colourful comparisons made between her and entirely thick Mick.

  People couldn’t believe they were related. Kim caned her exams, swooped up the academic awards and completed her homework standing on her head – not easy for a zombie, whose body parts tend to fall off without warning. Mick failed every exam put in front of him and couldn’t even spell his name correctly on the assessment paper. His brainpan was more like a dustpan.

  Kim loved it.

  So, when she came to Mick offering assistance with his bet, he was well dubious. Dubious? He was as suss as a donkey with corduroy ears. Why would Kim help him? She ridiculed him, mocked him, derided and disparaged him. She made a fool of him in front of her friends. She wrote rude (albeit true) things about him on the girls’ toilet walls. She revelled in his dimwittedness like a hound revels in rubbish.

  So, yes, Mick was suss. Under typical circumstances Kim’s motives stank worse than a stuntman’s undies, but these circumstances were far from typical.

  See, Kim also detested Mr Noel. The despicable teacher had dared to fail her on a test, based on the foolish assumption that any sibling of Mick must be a mindless zombie too. Then he accused her of cheating on the test. It was only when she complained to the school authorities and had her paper re-marked and her handwriting verified that she was awarded a standout A+.

  But the damage was done. She loathed Mr Noel, swore eternal hatred, and any opportunity to lay revenge and retribution on him was worth embracing – even if it meant aiding her embarrassment of a brother.

  Talk about sacrifice.

  Kim tapped on Mick’s bedroom door.

  ‘Enter,’ intoned Mick solemnly. He’d practised saying that so it came out cool and slick like a movie star, but then he stuffed it up by adding ‘voo’. ‘Enter voo,’ he said. He was going for entre vous, which is French for ‘get in, cretin’, but dumb Mick couldn’t overcome his unfathomable density and ‘enter voo’ doesn’t mean anything worth translating.

  Kim understood what her bozo brother meant. She pushed through the door and waited for Mick to lay down the book he was ‘reading’. He was trying hard to look intelligent but gripped the book upside down, so the effect was wholly lost on his sister.

  ‘Mick, cut it out,’ she snapped. ‘Everyone knows you can’t read. Now, pay attention, because I’m going to help you with your bet.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ asked Mick.

  ‘Because I want to see Mr Noel go down,’ Kim answered, ‘and I think I know how to do it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just had a great idea,’ replied Kim, ‘which is a totally foreign concept to you, but you’ll have to bear with me. I was just down in the kitchen and …’

  It was a great idea, and I should know because I’ve had thousands. Kim had been down in the kitchen scarfing her breakfast of scrambled dregs when Mr Living-Dead came panting in through the back door. He looked flustered and stressed, and his white shirt and tie were smeared with grease.

  ‘Honey,’ he called out to his wife, ‘can you come out and give me a jump-start. That blasted car battery is flat again. Must be the damned alternator. I’ve got the jumper leads here – if you could just back your car out, I’ll start it off your battery. It’s the last time I buy a used car from Horror Discount Motor Mart.’

  ‘I warned you,’ said Mrs Living-Dead in her I-warned-you tone of voice. ‘You can’t trust a company run by a vegetarian vampire – it’s unnatural. And the stories I’ve heard at the salon about how he treats his wife would scare the dead back to life.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ snapped Mr Living-Dead impatiently. ‘I’m sure he’s the biggest scoundrel in the citrus industry – he certainly sold me a
lemon. But can we hurry up? I’ve got a 9.15 appointment with a very important client. Looks like I might finally sell that new line of hair gel into their chain of Yeti hair salons. Cha-ching!’

  Kim watched through the kitchen window as her mum gave her dad’s car a jump-start, and her great idea sizzled simultaneously like a lightning strike. Theoretically, the electrical impulses that governed and controlled the human brain were no different to those in the circuits of a car engine. And if a dodgy car with a flat battery could be jump-started to life, a dingbat brother with a flat brain could be jolted in the same way, from lamebrain to flamebrain.

  ‘So you see,’ Kim slowly explained to her ignoramic brother, ‘all we’d have to do is find a supercharged battery – or in this case, a supercharged brain.’

  ‘But where would we find that?’ asked Mick. ‘It’s not the sort of thing they sell on eBay, is it? And even if we do find a place to get a brain, whose brain do we use? They would have had to be pretty smart, right?’

  ‘Right,’ agreed Kim, nodding her head slowly. ‘So at least you and your mates are safe.’

  Sisters just can’t resist being sarky; it’s in their genetic make-up bag.

  ‘Listen carefully,’ said Kim. ‘Never mind the details. I’ve got it all worked out. I Googled “intelligence” and all the sites it pulled up led straight back to the Albert Einstein webpage. It’s the mother of all brain-related sites. He was the smartest bloke in history. He was a legend. He devised the Theory of Relativity – the more annoying your relative, the longer they stay at your house. He’s the one we need.’

  Mick looked blankly at Kim. She’d lost him straight after ‘listen carefully’. He gawped like he’d seen their pet dog, Biter, gawp when he was busted drooling dog slobber into Mr Living-Dead’s slippers. And Mick even had a suitable soundtrack to accompany the gawp: ‘Huh?’