reputation for being a class clown. I tried not to take things too seriously. If I did, I might just want to die again thinking about the insanity the life of a zombie encompassed.
You might think being a zombie would be exciting, but not so much in Revenant, Joe. Only graduate zombies got to do anything cool, while apprentice zombies were relegated to test taking and observation. Though my main concentration in school was human tracking, I hadn’t once been in the field. I wouldn’t start field training until next year, which seemed like an afterlifetime away, and even then I wouldn’t be allowed to engage humans. As exciting as human tracking sounded, it would be a long time before I would have the chance to really capture one.
I knew a bit about humans. We studied their culture and their history from the books and accounts they had written. Humans were dangerous. They weren’t physically intimidating. It was their mentality you had to look out for. Humans would play you for sympathy and promise you anything to stay alive. Then they would stab you in the back. You couldn’t trust them. We were taught from day one that humans weren’t equals – they were a resource, the most important resource a zombie needed – and that’s how they had to be seen. I was so eager to capture one for myself. I knew all their tricks. I knew exactly how to handle them. But I wouldn’t get the chance anytime soon. Sometimes being a teenage zombie was a real drag.
I shoved my books in my backpack and slipped it onto my shoulder.
“Zell! What’s up?” Trevor paced down the hallway toward me. He held his arm out and we connected wrists, a traditional zombie greeting for students. Trevor was a tall, lanky kid with curly hair and pale blue skin. His most notable feature was his nose, which was a little too big for his face, mainly because it wasn’t his originally. It had been patched on during his preliminary waking, since his nose had been torn off when he was zombified.
“Man, I am so glad the weekend is here,” I said. “My brain is mush. I am dying for some skull candy!”
“Me too,” Trevor said. “I needed a break from school in the worst way. What do you want to do tonight?”
“If Mel-bore sends a message to my mentor, I might be stuck at home all night,” I sighed.
“Oh man, again? Your mentor is going to give you the business! I always thought having a human tracker for a mentor would be fun.”
“Not really,” I mumbled. My mentor was really serious about human tracking. He said it took really strong discipline, patience, and craft. He was really strict. I don’t think he’s ever done anything fun in his whole death, honestly.
“Well, see if you can get out. After curfew if you have to. I can’t stay cooped in all night,” Trevor said.
“Okay. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. They have some old hum movies playing at the Plex,” Trevor offered. We called everything human-related “hum” for short. Everything lame was usually a hum thing. The only thing cool about watching old hum flicks was laughing at how lame they were. Especially the romances. When you take away the desire for sex and love, romance is the dumbest thing you ever heard of. I think that might be the best thing about zombie evolution. Zombies don’t do love. We don’t have families or any desire to get married. We can’t have children, and sex isn’t possible even if we had a sex drive, which seems to have died with our bodies. To zombies, love is just a word humans invented to explain the insatiable desire to hook up with someone of the opposite sex. I think that’s why we won the evolutionary battle, quite frankly. That, and we ate most of the humans. But mostly the love thing.
“I’m tired of hum movies,” I said. “It’s all the same junk over and over again.”
“Some of the guys are sneaking into the Hub tonight,” Trevor said. “Wanna tag along?”
The Hub was the place zombies went to unwind and have fun. You were only allowed in if you had a Wake license, but that was only issued after you graduated. Zombies can’t get drunk from alcohol, because their blood steam is too weak. Blood still flows, often slowly, but blood cells are no longer made, so the only blood we have in us is what we had when we died. Breathing, which we don’t need to do and no longer do unconsciously, helps keep that blood circulating so it doesn’t harden, but for the most part, what blood we have left isn’t enough to inebriate us. We have a sort of equivalent to getting plastered, though. Instead of drinking, we jolt. We use electroshock sticks and we zap our brains. It changes the direction of the electric impulses in our brains or something, and makes us more like Stiffs again, although not totally, and the effects only last for a half hour, tops. Some Wakes argue that it’s dangerous and could result in brain damage, but that doesn’t stop most Wakes. Sometimes you just need an escape, I guess.
“I’m not in the mood for getting fried,” I answered.
“Well, there’s not much else to do in this deadbeat town,” Trevor said. “There’s nothing to do around A anyway.”
Trevor had me there. Zone A was a cesspool of boredom. There was literally nothing to do in A. Most of it was country and open fields. There was only one zone in the entire town that had electricity – zone C – and even that was limited. It was run off of gas generators, and in order to keep the electricity going we had to refuel them. We sent a group of Wake gatherers outside Revenant every month to get new supplies, but we tried to limit our trips outside of town as much as possible. And to just get to the Plex and the Hub, you had to take a bus to zone C and that killed almost half your night. Revenant was still in its early development. We didn’t have much in terms of recreation. It was all about survival and just getting by.
“All right,” I relented. “Let’s hit up the Hub.”
“Thriller,” Trevor grinned. “Meet me at my house after your mentor leaves.” Human tracking was always done at night, so my mentor worked late hours. It made it pretty easy to sneak out.
“Sure,” I said unenthusiastically. It would be a decent break from the monotony of school and studying, but doing the same thing every weekend was starting to bore me. I was beginning to wish that Wakes were allowed outside of town. But that was too dangerous. There were Stiffs galore, and if you weren’t careful, you’d become Stiff bait fast. We were sort of a gaited community, and Stiffs were too dumb to figure out how to climb in. Still, the prospect of fighting a gluttonous Stiff horde was starting to become more appealing to me than hanging out in zone C every weekend. I bet you never thought being a zombie could be so boring, huh, Joe?
7. THE ZOMBIE’S APPRENTICE
I skateboarded home. I usually got to and from school that way. It was better than taking the bus, since there was only one school bus for the whole zone and it took forever to get there after making all the stops for the other kids. Gasoline was another thing we didn’t have the luxury of wasting. We could only use public transportations to get around; otherwise, we had to walk. We had to conserve as many resources as possible, because we didn’t have access to a lot of them in Revenant, and it still wasn’t safe to wander outside the town’s borders. The zombie awakening had made zombies the dominant race of the world, but Stiffs made up a vast majority of it still.
I came to the driveway that led home. I slowed to a stop and kicked the tail of my board and caught it by the wheels. I began jogging across the gravel.
Home was a little rundown blue house. When my mentor claimed it, half the windows were broken in, the other half barricaded. The doors were broken down, the interior torn apart, and the basement was filled with human remains, scattered across the floor and splattered over the walls, like abstract art. It had been a last bastion against a horde of Stiffs, before they finally overcame it and ravaged whoever was holed up inside. I guess you could say it had been a real fixer-upper.
I went through the front door, opening it carefully and closing it quietly behind me. I snuck through the main hallway like a burglar. I wanted to make it upstairs to my room without seeing my mentor. I didn’t want to know if Mr. Melbourne had sent a courier to deliver his message to him. Hopefully, he had forgotten all about
it.
I dashed past the living room and hurried toward the stairway.
“Zellner.” My mentor’s voice boomed from the living room without him even raising it. It was steady and calm. Somehow that was even scarier than yelling.
I paced slowly back to the living room and peeked inside. My mentor sat on the couch, a pair of glasses on his face, reading the Zombie Times, the weekly newspaper produced in zone D. He dropped the newspaper from his face and gazed at me with his eye. My mentor only had one eye. The other had been gouged out when he was zombified, and he had never gotten it replaced. Besides, eyes were too difficult to reconnect and never restored vision, so it only would have been cosmetic. He wore his empty socket like a badge.
“Yes, sir?” I asked, as innocently as possible.
“Come here,” my mentor said. “Sit down.”
“I have a lot of homework to do,” I said, pointing with my thumb toward the stairs.
My mentor continued to gaze fixedly at me. I swallowed. His stare was like a tractor beam that drew you in. There was no way to escape it once you were caught. I stepped forward slowly. I sat down on the couch across from him.
“I got a message from your teacher, Mr. Melbourne,” my mentor said. “He said you were acting up in school again.