Zombie School

by Aaron Jenkins

I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to go back to the Hub or zone C or zone A or my regular zombie life. Not without really trying.

  Trevor shrugged absently. I motioned for him to follow me and we began down the field again. Trevor had become impatient with discreet methods of human tracking and had begun talking idly. He was walking casually through the field like he was going to a zombie picnic, and at one point he picked up a stick and started smacking at the nearby bushes as we passed. It was becoming impossible to take our mission seriously.

  “Maybe being a tracker isn’t more exciting than breeding,” Trevor complained.

  I wanted to punch him in the nose. This had been his idea. Now he was just goofing off like he always did. Sometimes the kid was so annoying. I stopped moving forward and stood erect, my back cracking as I did. I twisted my neck to stretch it, snapping my head back and forth.

  “Let’s just go back,” Trevor said. “I thought leaving Revenant would be fun. But it’s even more boring out here than it is in zone A!”

  I thought about it. A loud cracking interrupted us. It came from across the field, over the hill. We heard shouting. Trevor’s eyes bulged.

  “Come on!” he cried, and hurried forward.

  I tried to grab him to stop him. The last thing you were supposed to do when tracking humans was to run blindly into a situation. But we weren’t tracking humans anymore. We were just a couple of zombie kids looking to find something interesting again. I sprinted after him.

  We raced across the field until we came to a slope. Trevor stopped there and gazed down. I came behind him and matched his gaze.

  “It’s the kids from the Advanced class,” Trevor whispered.

  Six zombie kids were gathered around at the bottom of the slope, a few yards in front of us. “Get it!” one yelled. It looked like they were wrestling. They seemed to be pushing against each other, and arms were swinging now and then. We could hear them grunting and swearing under their breaths.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered.

  Then the students below began to break away from each other.

  “Get down,” Trevor whispered, and pulled me to a crouching position on the slope.

  Among them, bound by wires around the wrists and waist, and a snare connected to a long metal handle secured tightly to its neck, stood a Stiff. It was digging its feet into the ground, trying to move forward, but the students held it securely, its arms stretched off to the side, so that it couldn’t advance. It was thin, with a tattered black coat and belted pants and drooping, pale skin. The Stiff was slobbering over itself, its jaw hanging open as it tried to bite at the air. Stiffs always attacked with their teeth first. It made them more vulnerable, but they didn’t know any better.

  “Woowee, it’s a big one!” I heard Big Jake call. He held the handle to the snare that was cinched around the Stiff’s neck.

  “Looks kind of scrawny to me,” one of the kids returned.

  “It’s the most action we’ve gotten all night,” Big Jake shot back. “From my eyes, it’s as big as a mountain.”

  “Should we bring it in?” another kid asked.

  “Are you nuts?” Big Jake cried. “And announce to everyone, including our mentors, that we were out human tracking alone. That’s real smart, Eddie.”

  “Well, I was just thinking,” Eddie offered back.

  “I doubt that,” Big Jake huffed.

  “What do we do with it?” another kid asked.

  “Look, we’ve got enough Wakes in Revenant anyway, and not enough brains to go around as it is. They wouldn’t educate it anyway, and the Stockade’s a packed house, too,” Big Jake replied. “We do what we’ve been taught to do with dead weight. If it ain’t worth bringing back, and it ain’t worth the trouble to have it around ...” Big Jake reached into his pocket and withdrew a pocketknife. He flicked open the blade. “We dispose of it.”

  With his other hand he tugged on the handle to jerk the Stiff forward. “Bring it down,” he commanded.

  The other kids holding the wires obeyed, drawing the Stiff to the ground by force onto its stomach. It thrashed wildly with its legs and tried desperately to lift its arms over its head, all the while digging its mouth into the ground and swallowing piles of dirt mechanically.

  Big Jake moved toward the Stiff and crouched down, digging his knee into the back of its neck. Big Jake’s nickname was not a pretense. He was wide-bodied and thick, with big arms and a neck that was bigger than his head. Physically, he was a perfect human tracker. That’s probably why they decided to make him a Wake. His skin was deep purple, almost black in color. He had taken longer than normal to reawaken, and his body had gone through some of the later stages of death before he reanimated as a Stiff, one of the results being a darker skin color that was more droopy and waxy. The skin on his face looked like it was hanging off his skull, as if it had been imagined by Salvador Dalí.

  Big Jake sat on the back of the Stiff, pushing its chin into the ground so that its mouth was clinched shut. A Stiff never felt as useless as when you prevented it from being able to bite. It began kicking its legs even more wildly, trying to force itself up, but the pressure of Big Jake’s weight wasn’t letting it go anywhere. Stiffs are a lot stronger than humans, but not stronger than Wakes. We have brains and brawn, Joe – the total package.

  Big Jake let go of the handle connected to the snare fitted around the Stiff’s neck and raised his switchblade over his head. His eyes narrowed. He held the knife in both hands over the Stiff’s head. I knew what was coming next. The only way to truly kill a Stiff. Destroy the brain. Stick and twist. Big Jake drove the knife into the top of the Stiff’s skull in one motion, a dull crack sounding as it broke through the bone. Zombies’ skin was tough, but our bones had the same density as humans’. As long as you had enough force behind it, it wasn’t too hard to break through. But that’s why humans had a lot of trouble taking out zombies with hand-held weapons. They weren’t strong enough to break through the skin with one hit. Projectiles like guns or arrows were much more effective.

  Big Jake twisted the knife in the Stiff’s skull, just as he had been taught. This helped insure that the Stiff was completely dead and not just brain damaged. Even a Stiff that only knew how to bite could prove dangerous, and we didn’t like to leave any of our predecessors even partially undead. It wasn’t humane. We were all Stiffs at one time, after all.

  The Stiff went limp. Big Jake slowly raised himself off of it. It didn’t move. Its head rolled to one side and its arms and legs hung out at its sides, spread out from its body, like it was making a snow angel in the dirt. Big Jake held his pocketknife up to his eyes and viewed it, dark blood glistening on the steel against the light of the moon and stars.

  “My first kill,” he said aloud. He deftly flicked the blade back into the handle and put the knife back in his pocket. He puffed out his chest proudly. “It’s no human, but it’s something,” he said without looking back.

  “Stiffs are a dime a dozen,” another kid said.

  Big Jake shot him an angry look. “I didn’t see any others, did you?”

  No one replied at first.

  “But we see them all the time when we do field work,” another kid finally offered.

  “And we’re only allowed to observe,” Big Jake answered. “Just be glad you got some action for once. We’re ahead of the curve. The other kids won’t have their first hands-on experience until next semester.”

  “Let’s go find another one,” Eddie excitedly suggested.

  Big Jake shook his head. “Don’t you know anything, brain-dead? One death will attract a horde. And hordes don’t attract humans. Let’s get outta here.”

  “Where to?”

  “Let’s hit the Hub again,” Big Jake said. “We need to celebrate.”

  “Great! Let’s get fried!” Eddie shot back with a hyena-like laugh.

  Big Jake waved them forward and they began back toward Revenant, leaving the Stiff where it lay on the ground. After the noise of
the Advanced kids’ voices faded, Trevor and I stood. If I were still alive my heart would have been pounding. My brain was on fire, though. I had never seen a Stiff up close, let alone seen one killed. It was disturbing and thrilling. I think I liked it.

  “Come on,” Trevor shouted, and hurried down the grassy slope.

  “Trevor, hold on!” I said, but couldn’t stop him. I went after him.

  We came to the Stiff’s body. Blood was staining the dirt and grass under its head. Even though zombies don’t produce new blood cells, we retain whatever blood was in our body when we died. Most of it gets recycled and fed to the brain to keep it active. The rest of our body is filled with bile and other bodily fluids, though blood still is relatively present in our muscles, organs, and other tissues.

  The Stiff’s mouth hung open and it stared coldly upward, like it was looking directly at us. Trevor crouched down and viewed the Stiff carefully. He put his hand to the wound in the back of its head, moving his finger around and feeling everything. The blood-stained skin, the fractured skull, the punctured brain. Everything.

  “Thriller,” he mumbled in a harsh whisper.

  “Trevor, let’s go,” I said. Big Jake was right. It wasn’t safe to stay around a dead Stiff for long.

  “Look at it,” Trevor said. “It’s nothing. Gone. Dead. Really dead.” He looked up at me. “I almost forgot that death really existed. Absolute death, I mean. Not our death. Not living death. I almost