Zombie School

By Aaron Jenkins

Zellner isn’t much different from you typical angsty teenager – he just happens to be a little deader.

The world is in chaos and the dead have reawakened. Which is pretty cool if you happen to be a zombie like Zellner. He lives in Revenant, a zombie-inhabited town that educates the undead with human intelligence.

Living the dead life is great, though it does have its disadvantages, such as the insatiable desire to eat human brains, and the inability to remain intelligent without consuming them daily. That’s definitely a problem when the zombie apocalypse has reduced the human race to near extinction.

Zellner’s undead life is pretty mundane until he and his best friend go human tracking one night, and Zellner comes face to face with a living, breathing human girl. He captures her and brings her into town. When she escapes, Zellner’s attempt to retrieve her accidently causes the death of one of their own, and Zellner is banished from Revenant.

Damned to a life as a mindless zombie, Zellner makes a deal with the human girl and the two flee town in hopes that together they can survive long enough to find the girl’s camp, where humans die daily of disease, and which will supply Zellner with enough brain food to continue to survive. As the human leads them, Zellner must fight off hordes of ravenous zombies while fighting his own relentless craving to devour the girl’s brain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aaron Jenkins
• Release date: Oct 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310138003

Book preview

1. I AM A TEENAGE ZOMBIE

Math is hard. Even more so if you’re a zombie—which I am. No matter how much I try to focus on the formulas and memorize them, all I can seem to think about is brains. Four times nine equals ... brains! Four squared is ... brains! Brains plus brains equals ... yum! I’m telling you. If you think math is hard, try being a zombie. School is way harder when you’re a zombie.

2. THE PERKS OF BEING A ZOMBIE

I sat at my desk, doodling a picture of a plump, knobby brain over the lined paper of my notebook. It looked so good I wanted to eat it off the page. But I restrained myself. Nothing was more embarrassing in zombie school than devouring your notebook because you couldn’t control your brain cravings.

My name is Zellner Olander.

Pause.

Now I know what you’re going to say. Zellner the Zombie? I know. But I think it’s sort of poetic justice, like I was meant to be a zombie. I only know my name was Zellner because of the student ID I had in my wallet when I was zombified. Zellner had actually been my last name. But my first name was too boring. It was so boring I won’t even tell you what it was. Zellner sounded so much cooler, so that’s who I am. Zellner. It oozes epicness, don’t you think?

I go to school at Oakrest High School in Revenant. Revenant is the name of our zombie town, a collection of communities we have developed after humans had been driven out of the area. Only adolescent zombies go to school at Oakrest. The older zombies who are being educated go to the learning center. We didn’t name the high school, by the way. It was given that name by the humans who used to live in this area, and there wasn’t much sense in changing it. Oakrest used to be a town inhabited by humans in the Northeast of America, before zombies took over the world. All of the buildings we occupied were former human structures. We really don’t have the resources to start constructing our own buildings yet. We’re mostly focused on surviving, thankyouverymuch.

Oakrest High School is pretty big. It has two floors, though the south end is burned out. There’s a huge hole in the wall where the gym had been, and the interior stretching back to the cafeteria had been scorched and destroyed. We usually do gym outside, though, so it works out. As zombies we can’t really get into better shape, but it helps keep our bodies limber and flexible. If a zombie sits or stands still for too long, his muscles start to get stiff.

My friend Trevor thinks being a zombie is the best thing ever. And while education can be a real drag at times, especially when that midday brain craving hits, I can’t really disagree with him. There’s a lot of perks of being a zombie – we are tough, and strong, and immortal, unless our brains are destroyed. Yeah, being a zombie is pretty awesome.

I don’t remember what it was like to be human, though I was one for sixteen years. Zombies don’t retain memories after they reanimate, only residual skills they may have developed in their human lives. We think it has something to do with muscle memory, but it’s hard to say. Zombie science has come a long way, but there’s still a lot to learn.

I know what you’re thinking right now, Joe (for the sake of convenience, and because I don’t know anything about you, I’m going to assume your name is Joe. Feel free to insert your real name in its place). Zombie science? Zombie school? I thought zombies were mindless. I thought all zombies wanted to do was kill and eat people. I didn’t know zombies could talk, or write, or even think.

Well, Joe, let me tell you, it surprises most people. But that’s where zombie school comes in. Let me break it down for you.

The things you know about zombies are generally true, depending on what you might have heard. Zombies only have one instinct – to eat living human brains. That’s it. That’s what they live for. Outside of that, the life of zombie is pretty meaningless. Most zombies spend their entire deaths mindlessly searching for fresh human brains to devour, and when they aren’t doing that, they busy themselves with all the fun and excitement that being a capricious, mindless Neanderthal yields.

The zombie awakening happened decades ago. I don’t even know if I had been born yet at the time. We don’t have a lot of information on the details. With the human race ravaged by the voracious undead, written histories sort of fell by the wayside. What we do know is that a virus began to spread. It wasn’t a deadly virus, and it came quietly and undetected. A human would never even know he was infected in his lifetime. Only his loved ones would realize it, some hours after he drifted peacefully into a natural death, when his corpse reanimated and tried to devour them.

The virus is passed through bodily fluids. It wasn’t such a bad virus, in of itself. Those infected got to lead perfectly normal, healthy lives. The problem came afterward, when the dead reawakened. The virus would easily be transmitted to any humans the newly born zombie attacked, and in the event that the zombie didn’t succeed in devouring its prey’s brain, a new zombie was born out of the human’s eventual death. Thus began the zombie inception.

It wasn’t long before zombies made up a majority of the world’s population. That was helped by the fact that zombies only died when their brains stopped functioning. And as long as a zombie gets a fresh brain every few months, its brain will stay active. Zombies take a long time to die out. It’s no wonder we took over the world as quickly as we did.

I realize that none of this sounds very auspicious on the surface. I have to admit, the idea of being a mindless ravenous reanimated corpse doesn’t exactly sound all that gratifying. And it’s not. An afterlife like that is almost as good as being dead. Almost.

Thankfully for me, I’m not in that boat. Because not all zombies are mindless and ravenous. Not anymore. Something happened, a long time ago. Somehow, zombies got smart.

I chewed on the end of my pencil, gnawing at the eraser. It was so pink and soft I could have sworn it was a juicy piece of brain. I shook my head and forced myself to stare forward at the blackboard, making myself jot down the formula that was written in chalk on it. Honestly, when in the world was a zombie ever going to have to do algebra? It’s not like we had to calculate the circumference of some dude’s head before we cracked it open and scarfed down his brain.

We don’t know exactly how some zombies gained intelligence. That’s a pretty big mystery, kind of like trying to understand how exactly humans got smarter than all the other animals in the world. We just did. And we didn’t just get smart. We gained awareness. We learned how to do things that most humans are capable of doing – thinking, speaking, writing, and control. Autonomy. Pretty cool, right? Well, if you’re a zombie, it’s the best thing that’s happened since sliced brains. It kind of sucks for humans. And Joe, if you’re a human, I’m sorry about that. But that’s life.

From then on, zombies started to learn. That’s when zombie education began.

3. ZOMBIE EDUCATION

Have you ever heard the expression if you give an infinite number of monkeys a typewriter and give them an infinite amount of time, they will write Shakespeare? That’s sort of how zombie education starts.

If you put a zombie in a room with enough time, and enough motivation, eventually, it will learn.

It’s sort of like those lab rat experiments, where you put rats in a maze, and if they go the right way, they get a piece of cheese. You give a zombie a test. If it gets the answer right, it gets a piece of brain. Eventually, after a while, to get the brain, the zombie has to learn. And it does. Because zombies will do anything for human brains. True story.

And that’s how the zombie race split off.

Not all zombies get educated. In a world overrun by zombies that’s just impossible. Especially considering our fledgling community of smart zombies is still in its relative infancy. And thankfully, most zombies seem incapable of learning without some sort of formal education to guide them. Thankfully because if all zombies in the world were smart, there wouldn’t be enough human brains to go around to keep us all unliving.

We have to draw the line somewhere. And while we acknowledge that the uneducated zombies of the world are our brothers in some ways, they are also our ancestors. And in the same way that we can’t be sympathetic for humans, which we all used to be once, we hold no sympathy for the uneducated undead. They are mindless. They are the past. We are the future.

We call zombies who haven’t been educated Stiffs. They’re still dead, mentally speaking. They have no awareness and no self-control. They can be pretty dangerous, if you aren’t careful. They will attack anything that moves, living or undead, and devour it. As long as we keep our distance, though, they aren’t much of a threat. But despite their lack of intelligence, they are faster and stronger than humans and most animals. Humans are a zombie’s natural prey.

We, on the other hand, who have been or are being educated, are Wakes. We know what’s up.

And then there’s humans.

4. THE HUMAN DILEMMA

We don’t hate humans. We have nothing against them. In fact, most of our education and learning is a result of them. The books they wrote, the schools and communities they built, and the languages and ideas they created are all an important part of zombie education. And we all used to be human at one point.

We literally couldn’t exist without them.

Here’s the problem.

We need humans. Not in a sentimental way. Sentimentality is for humans.

We need their brains.

There’s a reason Stiffs crave living human brains. It keeps zombies going. Our organs have stopped, we don’t grow, our hearts don’t beat. But there’s one thing about us that is still working.

Our brains.

And why do they keep working?

We feed them.

We feed them living human brains.

Our brains would literally shut down if we stopped eating human brains. We’d die. Not human die. Zombie die. And once a zombie dies, it can’t come back. Forget about anything you’ve heard about zombies raising from the grave. You only become a zombie if you’re infected with the zombie virus at death. It keeps the cerebral cortex of your brain alive when the rest of you dies. Once your brain dies, forget it. You’re dead. Not human dead. Dead dead. It’s absolute death.

The problem is that zombies’ brains don’t just keep working. They wear out. And eventually they die. Unless they’re fed. And there’s only one thing that keeps a zombie’s brain alive and working.

You guessed it, Joe.

Living, human brains. Specifically, the cerebral cortex has the greatest effect.

We’ve tried other animals. Their brains do zilch. Even monkey brains don’t have any effect, even though they’re close to humans evolutionarily speaking. I bet that Darwin had a nice big juicy brain come to think of it. Sorry. I’m still learning to curb my cravings. I’m getting better. Anyway. We’ve tried dead brains, or zombie brains. Nada. Only living, human brains recharge us and keep us going. I mean like fresh out of the skull brains. We’ve figured out ways to preserve them with chemicals, but that’s only if you do it right away and if the brain isn’t infected with the zombie virus. The longer an infected brain is inactive, the more the virus spreads through it. And the more the brain is infected, the less effect it has on revitalizing us.

The longer you’re a zombie, the more your brain wears out. Once you’ve been zombified for a couple years, you need at least one morsel of brain every few months to keep yourself going. Zombies gradually lose brain function over time when they haven’t fed on human brains. Eventually we fall into a comatose state. The longer you go without brains, the harder it is to come out of it and become awake again. After a few months or so, brain activity just fades away, and then there’s nothing, and there’s no coming out. The brain dies.

There’s another problem for Wakes. The longer we go without eating a piece of living, human brain, the dumber we become. Our brains stop working, and we revert back to our former Stiff selves. We call that skidding. Yeah, it sucks. But that’s just the way things are. Wakes can’t go more than a few days without having a piece of human brain, or else they skid and start to become like Stiffs again.

And then there’s the human dilemma. There aren’t a lot left. Most of the Stiffs have devoured them. The ones they haven’t are in hiding, and they’re tough to find and capture, because they’ve gotten good at defending themselves against zombies. We’re sort of going through a human famine. It isn’t pretty. But thankfully we have enough brain preserves to last us a while. The government makes sure to give us weekly updates to assure us that there are enough brain preserves to keep Revenant and its inhabitants functioning for some time, delivered by the town’s spokeszombie, the ever-beaming Mayor Hillard. Even so, brain preserves won’t last forever, and we have to work feverishly to replenish the allotment we use daily.

And that’s why human tracking is so important.

My mentor is Bill Barton. He’s the lead human tracker for our community. I live in square 1 in zone A. It’s really close to the border of Revenant so it’s the best place for human tracking in our zone.

All zombies that are still being educated are given a mentor to help them navigate through their undead experience. It’s all a bit of a shock at first, honestly. One minute you know nothing, and then all of a sudden you can start to think and reason and speak. It’s bizarre. It’s probably what it’s like if you could remember being a baby and growing up. All Wakes begin their afterlife in preliminary school, where they’re taught the basics – speaking, reasoning, and understanding. That usually takes about a year. Even though we can’t remember our past lives, the information is still there, buried in our brains, so it’s really just relearning what we already knew at one point. Our brains have already formed and the information is there. It’s just a matter of reeducating ourselves. We may have forgotten what it’s like to be human, but our brains didn’t.

After pre-school, we’re placed into formal education at Oakrest if we died when we were young, or the learning center if you were an adult. We all have jobs that are given to us based on the skills we showed during pre-school, and that determines who our mentor is. I must have shown some proficiency for human tracking in pre-school, because I had been assigned one of the best human trackers in town as my mentor.

Human trackers search for and capture humans, preferably alive so that they can be evaluated. The young adult humans are usually kept and corralled for breeding. Younger kids and older adults are usually used as fodder – that’s a nice way of saying that we eat them. Some we evaluate and determine they would be more useful if they were zombified and educated as Wakes, but only if they seem to have some skill that would translate into something useful for the zombie community, like human tracking, which we are in desperate need of. Zombies don’t retain their memories after they revive, but most skills that they had as humans can be more easily replicated as zombies in pre-school.

Lately, though, we haven’t had many new zombies brought in for education. That has a lot to do with the human dilemma. There aren’t enough rations to go around, so that makes it hard to keep educating Stiffs. This year only three zombies were brought in past preliminary school. Two went to the adult center, and one was a kid they brought into my school. He was being taught to be a speaker of state affairs. Zombie kids that were brought in to take a government role were rare. I guess he showed a lot of potential during pre-school.

It’s been really tough lately to find humans. They have gotten really good at hiding, and they only come out at night when they need supplies. Stiffs have a tendency to rest at night, and seem to be awakened by the sunlight, so it’s safer to scavenge at night. Most stay in the human safe zone, which we haven’t been able to find. No humans we’ve captured have ever given any information about its location, though we’ve gotten a few details about what it’s like.

That’s why human trackers are so important. Decades ago, when zombie education had just started, it was easier, because there weren’t as many Stiffs. The more years that passed, the more Stiffs and the fewer humans there were. Along the way they learned strategies to defend themselves against Stiffs, like keeping quiet or moving slowly. They’ve become a lot more conservative in recent years. They never come out in daylight now. Only at night. When they do, they’re really careful and hard to spot. And they’re good at defending themselves. They usually have some sort of weapon, usually a gun. Most tools like knives and heavy objects are pretty ineffective against zombies. Our skin is tough and difficult to pierce, and humans, for the most part, aren’t strong enough to break it. It requires the superhuman strength of a zombie to take out another zombie. Guns, on the other hand, are the most effective weapon to use against zombies. The velocity of a bullet is enough to rip through a zombie’s head and pierce its brain. An armed human can be a real concern for any zombie, Stiff or Wake. Human trackers try not to engage armed humans, and when they do, they always wear protective gear and helmets. An unprepared Wake can meet its ultimate demise at the hands of a frightened human if he isn’t careful.

Human tracking can be a pretty dangerous occupation. That’s why human trackers always travel in groups. It’s not safe otherwise.

Let me tell you, Joe, if you thought life as a zombie was easy, that it’s all fun and games, I’m here to tell you that it’s not. Zombie life is just as tough as any life. But you have to make the best of it. Sometimes you just have to be grateful to be living dead.

5. ZOMBIE SHENANIGANS

I dropped my pencil and let it roll on my desktop, the pink eraser gnarled into an unrecognizable shape. I couldn’t concentrate. Math was my last class of the day. That’s when my cravings got the worst. I have gotten a lot better at controlling them. That’s part of zombie education too. You’re no good to the zombie community if you can’t curb your brain cravings. But the longer you go without brains, the harder it is. The Wakes who have been around for a while are a lot better at it. I’m still learning. I’ve only been in zombie school for a year and a half, and the year before I spent in pre-school, having my mind slowly re-taught the basics of thinking and speaking.

I didn’t know how the twenty or so other zombie kids in class could stand it, but when I looked around I could see they were getting as restless as I was. Zombie feet tapped up and down anxiously on the linoleum floor, zombie bodies squirmed in their hard, uncomfortable seats, and zombie hands clenched at the fabric of their stiff jeans. We wore typical human teenager attire, whatever had been dug out of the closets of the humans that had lived in town before we controlled it, or any human brought in by breeders that fit, were comfortable, and we deemed cool enough. Zombies shared many traits with humans, and pride was one of them. Zombies did not like being naked, especially since it tended to show off our zombie scars – abrasions, wounds, loose, wrinkled skin, and the like. We may be dead, but we don’t have to look it, at least not so much on the surface.

I folded my arms over my desk and buried my head in them, trying to quiet the pounding in my head. My mind was starting to play tricks on me. Visions of cerebellums were dancing in my head. I just needed class to end, but Mr. Melbourne wouldn’t shut his brain hole. I didn’t know how he could talk about something as boring as math for so long. If I had to focus my whole life on studying and reciting math formulas and calculations, I’d probably die again of boredom.

Hey! a voice behind me chirped.

Kids were stifling their giggles. Something sailed over my head and landed on a desk two rows away from me. I shook my head. Didn’t they ever get tired of this?

Keep away from Peg-ear! someone whispered harshly.

Peggy, sitting directly behind me, was fuming. I felt bad. It’s not her fault her mentor couldn’t afford to take her to a tailor. Things were really tight, and most Wakes couldn’t afford anything but the bare necessities.

Give it back, she hissed behind me.

What? the kid two rows away, Anthony, called in a whisper. I couldn’t quite make that out. Wait. Let me try this. Then he held Peggy’s ear up to the side of his head and set his face straight, feigning attention.

Very funny, she shot back. Come on!

This was a semi-daily event. Either in class, or the