From A to Zombie

By Professor Awesome

Being a student teacher is tough enough, but Jeff's first day on the job is made even more complicated when a zombie apocalypse breaks out. With his special ability to see the ghosts of the newly-dead, now it's up to Jeff to save his kindergarten students, while also learning to cope with his new dead-adjacent lifestyle.

From the disturbed mind that brought you World Lit II: A Syllabus and I Deserve to be Called Doctor: A Dissertation comes Professor Awesome, PhD's latest work, From A to Zombie.  A darkly funny, yet whimsical tale, it will have you laughing out loud, revealing to your coworkers you were reading a book on the toilet again instead of working.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laser Blast Books
• Release date: Jul 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393706632

Book preview

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Kindergarten Apocalypse

Heroically Cowering in Fear

Casper, the Incredibly Disappointing Ghost

Sprinting through the Apocalypse

Two Nerds Fail to Save the World

We Get Our Day in Court

Monologuing Villain

I Get by with a Little Hell from My Friends

This Little Phantom Goes to Market

Literal Underground Railroad

Back in the Battle Again

Stop Hitting Yourself, Stop Hitting Yourself

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go out to many:

To the Mastermind Collective, whose musings provided the original idea.

To Michael and Nina, for cultivating this from manuscript to book.

To my wife Jamie, for tolerating me banging away at the keyboard while she was trying to sleep on many mornings.

To the many friends who read early drafts and offered advice. I would list them here, but I am very forgetful, and expressio unius est exlusio alterius.

Kindergarten Apocalypse

I've seen terrible, awful things, but rarely something quite so brutal as the scene before me. The air was filled with piercing shrieks, the kind that enter through your ears and exit by rattling your spine until your teeth ache and you have to close your eyes for relief. I cast my eyes about for some semblance of order in this writhing mass of humanity, but everywhere was chaos. I thought that just somewhere, anywhere, I might see two of them working in unison, but nowhere was organization or order to be seen. You would think that just by the sheer numbers of them, at least a couple would accidently be working toward the same goal, but if there was any intelligence behind their madness, any sign of sentience at all, I couldn't see it. Their clumsy bodies fell all over one another, tripped each other up, and then reacted with rage. At best, they would shriek at one another, but occasionally there would be shoving, or scratching at one another with dirty, unkempt nails, or even biting.

This was my first time supervising playground for the kindergarten, and it was horrifying. I looked over at my teaching mentor, Mrs. Sterne. This was only my first day of being a student teacher in her class, but as far as I could tell, she was anything but stern. Middle-aged and matronly, she always maintained a gentle but firm tone in the classroom. She was just plump enough to give her cheeks a roundness that made her look like a little black Mrs. Santa Claus.

He views the dismal situation, waste and wild, a dungeon horrible, on all sides round, only to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all; but torture without end.

Mrs. Sterne gave me a raised eyebrow of mock disapproval. Shakespeare?

No, Milton. Well, sort of. I left out some stuff.

"Hmph. I'd have gone with Lord of the Flies" she said wryly. When I was first assigned to her classroom, I had been super nervous that she might be hard to work with, but almost right away I discovered that she appreciated my sense of humor. Not everyone does, but she had a way of putting me at ease.

Is it always such a nightmare? I asked. Surely this was as bad as it got.

No. Sometimes it rains, and we have everything you see here going on in the gym. Then it's worse, concentrated, with lots of knees skinned on the wood floor and kickballs bouncing off of walls into students' faces. So, you know, you've got that situation to look forward to.

A little girl with two twisted pigtails in a cute pink dress shambled over to us. I couldn't remember her name, but she was in our class. Was it Melissa? Makayla? Yes, Makayla, that's it.

Mrs. Sterne took a small step back so I was front and center. Apparently, she expected me to handle this one. The girl turned to me. Mr. Cobb?

Mr. Codd, I corrected her. With two Ds.

Two of what?

Two Ds.

Two of these? She looked confused.

No, two Ds. Like the letter D.

Oh. I know my ABCs for the song, but I can't read yet. she said.

D'oh. I should have realized that. I was already dying in front of Mrs. Sterne on my first solo mission. I put on my best kindergarten teacher voice and a gentle smile, and said, So, what's wrong, Makayla?

I don't feel good.

Where? I asked. In your tummy?

She responded by throwing up all over my shoes. And just to make sure she answered my question clearly, it wasn't normal vomit. Apparently she had a lot of some kind of red juice to drink—my best guess is cherry, though it might have been a particularly dark strawberry juice. An experienced kindergarten teacher can identify the flavor and brand of juice vomit from a single drop on construction paper from a dozen paces away, but alas, I was new and just had to guess at it. Not only was it a deep red that would surely stain my new khaki pants forever, but it was an epic amount. Frankly, physicists should study Makayla's stomach, because that volume of throw up should not have been possible in that tiny body. My strong suspicion was that her tummy is a gateway to another dimension, one that has vast seas of red juice. And, just to make sure it was extra disgusting, there were chunks of something that smelled like dairy. It looked like I had waded through puddles of blood and viscera.

Mrs. Sterne laughed silently behind her hand, so the little girl wouldn't see her. Well, Mr. Codd, it seems like you have been officially baptized into the fellowship of kindergarten teachers.

***

Makayla and I went in to the school nurse's office. Unfortunately, it was behind the main cluster of administrative offices, way at the back, so on my first day of school I got to walk past every single person I hoped to impress while covered in jus de Makayla. The receptionist actually looked a little familiar to me, but I couldn't place her. The assistant principle, though, Mr. Kenson, I did recognize in his sweater vest and weirdly anachronistic crew cut, and he looked at me like he had found me on the bottom of his shoe. I had met him two weeks before, and he definitely did not appreciate my sense of humor. I had to fill out some forms for my background check, and he made a point of telling me about a student teacher some years earlier who they had discovered had been convicted of a felony, and he asked blandly, "Will we find anything like that in your background check?"

No, I had answered. I didn't realize that was required to work here, but if you give me a few hours I'm sure I can fnd some felony to commit.

He hadn't laughed. In fact, he didn't seem to realize it was a joke, and demanded I explain myself. By the time I had explained the joke to him for the umpteenth time, he seemed pretty sure that I was some serial child killer or sleeper cell terrorist, and had eyed me suspiciously every time he had seen me since. Now, coming into the office with a child covered in gross red goo, he seemed to think his suspicions about me were correct.

Fortunately, I could rush past him to the school nurse's office. She was very tall, gaunt, and angular-looking, like someone decided to build a marathon runner out of wooden rods. She had a very long and unpronounceable ethnic last name, so the students just called her Nurse Becky, the only adult at the elementary school who went by some variant of her first name. She looked at the mess and asked, Well, what happened here?

I got sick on Mr. Cobb, Makayla said.

Codd, I corrected her automatically.

Nurse Becky looked up at me from her squatting position. She ate cod? For breakfast?

No, my name is Mr. Codd I explained, but now that Nurse Becky was looking at me, she saw the nastiness on my pants.

You'd better clean those off, she said, pointing down at my cuffs and shoes. Use the faculty bathroom at the back of the office, that way you don't have to worry about a student walking in on you when you're scrubbing your pants in the sink.

Five minutes later, I was standing there pantless in front of the sink, an auspicious beginning to my career in education. I had just thrown my socks in the trash, and figured I would just go without socks for the rest of the day. My shoes were actually pretty easy to clean off—the nice thing about the cheap material of the shoes I could afford on a student teacher's budget is that they were pretty sturdy. My khaki pants, though, seemed ruined for good. The splatter on the bottom inch or two of the cuffs came off, but the red stain wasn't fading much.

That morning, before I started my first day on the job, I had given a lot of thought to what I would wear, clothing that would make a good first impression on both the adults and the children, so I went with my now-deceased pants, a blue button-down, and a paisley tie. What I hadn't given much thought to was what kind of underwear I would be wearing, because, after all, who would see them? So, I had just pulled out some old tighty-whities—or rather, formerly tighty-whities, since too much use and too many washings had left them saggy, a little stained, and there was a little tear where the material was starting to separate from the waistband.

So it was definitely not a good look for me when the receptionist suddenly opened the door and slid in, then locked it behind her. Now, for some men, this was the beginning of a porn scenario: First day on the job and the sexy, sexy secretary cannot keep her eyes off the hunky new student teacher. She corners him in the restroom, sees his already half-naked body, and then says something sexually aggressive in a husky voice, like, Oh, Mr. Codd, I saw you and just had to have your body. You're a teacher, right? Then I would tear off my shirt, revealing abs so chiseled that you could cut diamond on them, and I would say, I'll teach you the ways of love. Then we would make wild, passionate love while the grumpy old Mr. Kenson shuffled papers just outside the door, none the wiser.

The problem with this scenario is that the only thing husky in real life is my pants size, and that my actual response to her arrival was to let out a little shriek in a decidedly unmasculine fashion, while trying to cover myself with my pants, the legs of which were still dripping with restroom hand soap and water. Nor did she say anything remotely seductive. Instead, she said something I had not expected, and definitely did not want to hear.

You're Jeff the seer, right?

***

Gentle reader, I have a little secret that I need to reveal now. To be fair, I wasn't exactly keeping it from you; it just never had any reason to come up. Honestly, if Mr. Kenson knew my little secret, he'd probably be even more suspicious of me than he was. Heck, I know my secret, and even I think it's a little creepy. Well, very creepy.

Like that kid in that Bruce Willis movie, I see dead people. To be more accurate, I see ghosts—I guess everyone sees dead people whenever there's a dead body around. In my case, though, I also see the ghosts of the recently deceased. Now, if this were a Hollywood movie, this power, such as it is, would be either extremely useful or extremely spooky. In fact, it isn't really either.

I know what you're thinking; I've seen the very same movies and TV shows you have, and I've read the same books. Since I naturally have a greater interest in these things than the normal non-ghost-seeing people, I've probably seen way more of them than most people. And if were a character like those guys, I'd probably have a detective agency, maybe with a wise-cracking ghost sidekick. We'd probably solve a lot of murders with the cooperation of the victim, or maybe we'd face off against some supernatural existential threat against humanity. At the end of every season, I would save the world, but I wouldn't get any credit for it because no one would believe that I could see ghosts.

Or, I could be a character in the other kind of movie. Because I can see and interact with ghosts, something EVIL (always spoken of in tones that sound like the whole word is capitalized) would be awakened. It would try to break through from the OTHER SIDE, and would probably possess some child who whispers creepily, or some weird porcelain doll of the kind that kids haven't really played with since the 19th century, or mind-control me into some bizarre psycho-sexual situation that ended up breeding the Anti-Christ or something. Then, I would be trapped in a haunted house out in the woods, where there's no phone coverage or electricity, and everything is lit by candles and whale-oil lamps. Then, in the end, it would appear that I had defeated the evil spirits on this Indian burial ground / site of mass murder / former Satanic cult compound, only to have a moment in the after-credit sequence when the camera would show my eyes gleaming demonic red, suggesting that I had been possessed.

But ghosts don't really work that way. The world isn't filled with ghosts all the time, so I probably only see a ghost in my daily life as often as I see a rainbow. And, just like seeing a rainbow is a common enough experience that it doesn't change your whole day, it's still remarkable enough that every time you see one, you probably say out loud, Look, a rainbow! Most ghosts only hang around on Earth for a few seconds or so, and have about zero interest in the material world. Yes, there are some ghosts who stay around because they have unfinished business, but even those ghosts usually only stick around for a few hours or days. I think the