Zombie School

by Aaron Jenkins

was just thinking that.”

  “I wish there was something to do to get out of it. Life as a zombie can be the pits. The real pits!”

  “Pitiful!”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “It’s just the same thing over and over. Like we’re just spinning our wheels. Sometimes I wonder --”

  “Oh my God!”

  My eyes darted back and forth uncertainly at Marissa’s interjection.

  “Lisa, come on! I have to hit the dance floor! This is my jam!”

  She grabbed her friend by the wrist and pulled her away into a crowd of Wakes as the lyrics to an old hum song broke over the speakers. I turned dejectedly back to the bar. It was hopeless.

  A few minutes later I slunk out of the Hub and waited for Trevor outside on the street. I leaned against the wall of the Hub away from the crowd with my hands shoved in the pockets of my jacket hoodie. He met me about an hour later. He was still dazed, but mostly recovered. He stumbled up to me and put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Hey, man, why’d you leave like that?” he asked.

  “Dude, you’re so fried,” I said.

  “Naaaah,” he said and didn’t speak for a few moments. “I’m fine. Man, it was great! You should have jolted with me. It was a blast!”

  “I’m sick of that stuff.”

  “Ahhhh ... You’re just an old corpse in the ground. Undie a little, man!”

  “It’s just the same stuff, Trev. I’m tired of this town.”

  “You up for something really crazy?” Trevor asked, putting his hand on my shoulder and leaning in close, like he was delivering a secret.

  “Like what?” I asked suspiciously.

  “I heard some of the Advanced kids talking back there in the Hub. Big Jake and them. They’re going human tracking later tonight.”

  “Alone?” I asked. That was seriously dangerous.

  Trevor nodded his head gravely, then he stopped and closed his eyes, as if the motion had made him dizzy. “You want to crash in? They’re meeting in F4.”

  “I don’t know,” I shook my head. Zombie students don’t start field training until they became Advanced students. Trevor and I were still at the Intermediary level. We didn’t have any experience.

  “Come on. Your mentor’s the lead human tracker. You must have learned something from him. You know some stuff. And we’ll be with the Advanced kids. They’ve done fieldwork.”

  “They won’t even let us go with them,” I said doubtfully.

  “Sure they will. They won’t care. You know Big Jake. Whatever makes things more interesting. Besides, I thought you wanted something fun to do.”

  He was right about that. I was bored. Going human tracking would be something different, something exciting, and it would get me out of Revenant for the first time in my life.

  I wasn’t that big on human tracking, though. I knew it was a necessity for zombies to survive, and I had nothing against it personally, no more than I probably had against hunters who had killed animals for me to eat when I was human. Unless I’d been a vegetarian as a human. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

  For me, though, it wasn’t that appealing. I must have killed my share of humans as a Stiff. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been around long enough to be converted to a Wake. But I don’t remember any of it. Since gaining zombie consciousness I haven’t killed any humans. I’ve only eaten the brains supplied to me. And honestly, apart from my cravings, I haven’t really felt the desire to. Although, when I become an Advanced student and start fieldwork, I will have to start tracking humans, and learn how to defend myself from them, and kill them if I have to. It’s essential zombie training.

  It was kind of weird that I had been assigned as the apprentice to the community’s lead human tracker. It had something to do with the tests they gave us during preliminary education to make us Wakes. Maybe it was easier for me to answer certain questions that were related to tracking humans. I guess that’s it. I was supposed to begin human tracking as my permanent profession after I graduated. I couldn’t tell anyone, especially my mentor, that I’d rather do something else. It raised a huge red flag about your viability as a contributing member to zombie society if it turned out that what you were educated for wasn’t a skill you were adept at. It was rare that Wakes were allowed to change professions to something else. And I wasn’t even sure what that something else would be. All I knew was that it wasn’t human tracking. But I didn’t know any way to get out of it, either. I was expected to follow in my mentor’s footsteps. That’s the way zombie life worked. It kind of sucked, but I guess you can’t fight the zombie man. Every Wake had a place and a job, and if he couldn’t adequately serve that position, then he was just a waste of brain preserves. It was harsh, but that was the current reality. The town could only afford to keep Wakes who could provide a service of need around.

  Those rules had been initiated after the civil war. Things had become a lot stricter then, my mentor said, but it was a necessary evil. Survival was the most important thing, and any Wake who couldn’t contribute to that was dead weight. Posters were plastered everywhere with Mayor Hillard’s long, skeleton face, and his wide, tooth filled smile, with his signature catchphrase: “Living death has a price. What is your contribution?”

  If I wanted to continue my zombie afterlife, I would have to become a human tracker, and a damned good one. What better way to practice than to go human tracking?

  And I didn’t have any other retort for Trevor’s argument. There was nothing else to do in Revenant, and I was tired of doing the same thing. Prowling the mall, watching old hum movies, or getting fried at the Hub was no longer a droll distraction from the humdrum of everyday zombie life. Humans were so hard to find, anyway. We probably wouldn’t even run into any. It takes skilled human trackers like my mentor to find them and capture them, and nowadays even he was routinely coming up empty.

  “Okay, I’ll tag along,” I relented.

  “Thriller!” Trevor cheered, hitting his wrist to mine again. “They said they were gonna meet in a couple hours. You wanna hit the mall while we wait? Or scope out a Stiff match?”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go back to your house and get our safety gear and some preserves. To be safe.”

  “Aw, come on, don’t be such a scaredy hum!”

  “I’ve never been outside the borders of Revenant before, Trev. I’ve heard enough horror stories from my mentor to know how dangerous it can be, especially in zone F.”

  “All right, man, all right. Let’s go.”

  We started down the street back toward the bus stop.

  I’m not gonna lie, Joe. I was more than a little nervous. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this. But I was just a dumb zombie kid. Dumb zombie kids do dumb zombie things.

  Right?

  11. DUMB ZOMBIE THINGS

  We rode the bus back to Mrs. Kushner’s farm. The return trip sobered Trevor back up completely, so he was pretty clear headed, but famished, by the time we got back. He had a preserve to snack on to ease his jolt hangover, and we went to work figuring out what to bring with us. Neither of us owned any tracking gear. My mentor said he would get it for me when I began advanced classes and not a moment before. He was really strict like that.

  Instead, we packed the safety gear Mrs. Kushner had gotten us for feeding and caring for the humans. It wasn’t as good as tracking gear, and it was a lot less mobile, but it was better than nothing. We threw our gear into our backpacks, and Trevor packed a small container of chemical mix, with some brain preserves inside. If you’re planning to be out for a while, it’s always good to bring some extra brains. The second worst thing that can happen to a Wake, outside of having your brain damaged, is to be away from home without access to any human brains for an extended time. A lot of Wakes have been lost that way, as they eventually skid back to their former Stiff selves and just aimlessly wander off. Becoming a Stiff again is almost as bad as re-dying.

  We got everything together and listened for the sound of Mrs. Kushne
r’s dense snoring pulsing through the walls to be sure she was still sleeping soundly before we took off.

  We returned to A3 and awaited the bus. We were running behind since we returned to zone A, and Trevor was complaining that Big Jake and them were probably already in zone F by now. I ignored him. It wasn’t safe to go tracking without any protective gear, and there was no way I was leaving Revenant without preserves. I’d never left the town boundaries before, and my mentor always brought reserves when he went tracking. It was one of the most important rules of being a human tracker. It wasn’t until later that I realized that Trevor was worried about going tracking without the Advanced kids. The trip back had sobered him up completely, and with the loss of his mental haze, his courage had gone with it. He nervously tapped his foot against the street and suggested a few times that we go back to the Hub and forget about tracking.

  I pushed aside his worries. Maybe I wasn’t much of a human tracker, but I wasn’t going back to the Hub or zone C either. I didn’t really care about tracking humans. What really mattered to me was getting outside of town and seeing the world outside Revenant. Since the ride back from zone C I had gotten excited about that possibility, and now, even against Trevor’s own reluctance, I wasn’t ready to throw that away. The more I thought about it, the more ready I was to break out of Revenant, at least for a night.

  The bus finally rolled up to the bus stop and we climbed