Zombies in Springtime -- Chapter 4 -- Fingered

Zombies in Springtime

Chapter 4 – Fingered

Most of his students and friends called Emmit Green, “Doc.” He wasn’t an especially accomplished scientist, nor was he interested in becoming one. In fact, he wasn’t even a PhD. His nickname, “Doc” was gifted to him by his college basketball teammates. He had the highest GPA on the team, and everyone knew he planned on getting a Master’s degree in Biology so he could teach at a community college. The nickname stuck and when he started teaching, a lot of students and faculty started to assume he actually was a PhD. In many circles, he actually became known as “Dr. Emmit Green.” Doc also liked to goof around when the opportunity presented itself.

“Hey Doc.” Lanny greeted.

“Lanny, Lanny, my man. Great to see you. Have a seat. I’ll be right back. I just left something in my bag, I mean lab—down the hall—keys… keys… yes my keys are just down the hall in the lab.” Doc touched Lanny’s right arm, led him down into the chair next to his desk, and exited immediately.

Lanny sat down with a smile and was struck with a sudden sense of confusion. He knew he had brought the finger in with him. He brought it in a Ziploc bag and carried the bag in his left hand. Now it was gone. The finger was gone! He looked around frantically. He must have laid it on Doc’s desk right before he sat down. He scanned the desk, but couldn’t see through the disarray. His pulse raced and he grew hopeless.

Doc re-entered the room. He had a small white box in his hand.

“Lanny it’s been too long. We have so much to catch up on.”

“Yeah, I know, hang on—we have a problem—”

“Nonsense, nonsense. But hold the thought Lanny. First, I simply must show you the amazing discovery I’ve made.” Doc lifted the small white box to chest level. “Here, go ahead. Look inside.” His eyes radiated with excitement. His eyelids were nowhere to be seen.

Lanny lifted the white lid. His heart nearly punched through his ribcage as he watched a rotting gray index finger jab and roll frantically around in the white box. “Jesus!”

Doc crouched and pulled his arms in tight to his belly. His diaphragm convulsed as the laughter ripped through him. “Woohoo! Oh, I got you. You was screaming like a little bitch.” He lifted the white box again and revealed the underside. Doc had cut a hole in the bottom of the box and jammed a popsicle stick up the broken side of Lanny’s zombie finger. When Lanny lifted the lid, he jerked the stick around to control the finger. “Here, here. Oh ho! Woo! Have your funny looking stinky finger back. Oh that was priceless.”

“Very funny.” Lanny did not smile. “Do you know what this is?”

“Yeah, it’s one stank ass finger. Where you had that thing, in your bootie hole?”

“No, not in my bootie—c’mon don’t you find it a little odd that I am carrying a rotten finger around in a Ziploc bag?”

“Hey man, to each his own. I ain’t never judged nobody.”

“Have you ever noticed those funny looking gray kids around campus?”

“Oh. Oh yeah. Is that where this came from? You been hanging around with those weirdoes. You guys starting you a finger collection. Well that’s cool, I’m real happy for you, but I don’t want no part of it. I knew a guy collected toenails one time. That was one weird dude. I think you taking it to a whole new level though, Lanny—”

“Doc, listen to me. We got to run some tests on this thing—”

“Oh you done put it somewhere it don’t belong and you wanna make sure you ain’t got nothing? Well I may not approve of the lifestyle, my man, but I ain’t gonna hang a brother out in the cold like that. We’ll have a look at it.”

“No. Listen to me! I saw it fall off of one of the gray kids. Well, break off. It just broke clean off with hardly any pressure. A rough handshake probably would have taken off his whole hand. There’s something wrong with those kids Emmit. Something is wrong with their bodies. I don’t know what it is, I don’t’ know if it’s a virus—or... ”

“Or what? I’ll tell you what it is. Something we don’t need to be messing with.”

“Emmit, we need to know what these kids are. We need to know if they are a danger to the community.”

“Yeah, I get ya. I done looked at it though. Way ahead of ya.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I checked it out when I was making my finger stick. It’s just a dusty old finger man. There ain’t hardly no blood in it. Looks like it’s been decomposing for a while.”

“How about using the microscope you old phony.”

“I took some samples. I was gonna get to that.”

“We need to run tests. Maybe send some samples to a real lab if you don’t think you’re qualified to assess it for known diseases or unusual characterstics.”

“I got news for you Lanny. If that thing fell slap off that kids hand, we ain’t looking for no known diseases.”

Zombies in Springtime -- Chapter 3 -- Motor Skills

Zombies in Springtime

Chapter 3 – Motor Skills

Lanny sat in his silver Nissan 350Z waiting to turn on to the short road that led from the faculty parking lot to the secluded rear campus exit. He waited because as he approached the stop sign for the turn, he noticed a dusty old brown Studebaker approaching from the right. When he first sighted the car, it was at the perfect distance to make the decision to go or wait difficult. Lanny decided to wait. He busied himself by grabbing his iPhone and perusing his calendar for the upcoming days. He had a meeting with Dr. Emmit Green, a good friend and colleague, scheduled for tomorrow. Dr. Green was a Biologist. Not exactly a great one, but he fit well with Spoon County Community College.

Lanny put his phone down and put his foot on the gas without looking. He expected a clear path because far more time had elapsed than the Studebaker would have needed to pass and the road had been completely clear after that. To his surprise, he had to jam the brakes hard and fast because the car was only just passing. Lanny judged the car couldn’t be doing more than ten miles per hour. His heart sunk to think he would have to follow the car on the one lane road to the campus exit. The road after the exit, Lady Bird Road was also a one lane road and he had to ride it for six miles on his way home. It was sparsely driven though, so he would be able to pass after they got off campus.

He followed patiently behind the car. He checked the speedometer—nine miles per hour. The rear window was so dusty he could not even get a hint of who the driver might be. When the cars finally reached the stop sign, he saw the driver’s face in the side mirror as the driver looked left. It was one of the gray kids. The car was turning in the same direction as Lanny was headed, but in the split second that Lanny saw the driver, he had resolved to follow the car regardless of its direction.

As Lanny followed the gray kid in the brown Studebaker, he noticed the kid’s right tire frequently carried off the right side of the road and then gradually crept back on. It was so slow and steady it almost seemed deliberate. The oscillation was constant. He could occasionally make out features of the face in the left mirror. The gray kid’s eyes looked vacant. Like a vegetable sat behind them. His jaw slacked open as though it would take too much focus to close it. Lanny always called the kids “gray.” He spoke loosely, but the description wasn’t far off. The kid’s complexion didn’t have very much of the typical apricot hue of a regular white kid. It had a little, but it also had an extremely faint shade of blue. The net result was that the kid looked like a dead guy. Like a zombie.

The kid slowed down and prepared to turn down a heavily shaded driveway about five miles from the school. Lanny thought it was a good thing these guys lived close by because it took them over a half an hour to get this far. The gray hand reached out of the car’s left window to give the signal for a right turn. One of the fingers struck the edge of the window as it reached into the air and Lanny saw something fall to the ground. As Lanny passed the driveway he stopped the car and backed up a little. He wanted to see what had fallen.

Lanny got out of the car carefully, suspicious that someone may be watching him. He stepped over to where he had seen the thing fall. His eyes scanned the road in rows as though following an invisible grid. He didn’t really know what to expect to find. Could have been anything—could have been nothing.

He was about to give up when he saw a strange shape on the very edge of the grass. He tried his best to apply categories to the thing as he walked over to it. Animal, vegetable, mineral? He leaned down, and the shape seemed very familiar. His nervous system began to lash out in alarm. It was the kid’s finger! His finger had been knocked clean off his hand when he made the turn signal and the kid had not even noticed. Lanny knew he had to do the unthinkable, but his corpuscles compelled him not to anyway.

He reached down and picked the thing up by the end, his thumb pressing against the dead finger’s nail. Lanny twisted his wrist studying the thing. The flesh tone was grayish, much like the kid’s face. The top layer of skin was dry and it was begging to die and shed. The base of the finger where it had been severed was much dryer than Lanny expected. There was very little blood; the blood that was there was dark red and tacky. As disgusted as he was, he brought the thing back to his car. Dr. Green would have something to say about this.

Zombies in Springtime -- Chapter 2 -- Thinking

Zombies in Springtime

Chapter 2 – Thinking

Lanny was a philosophy professor. He taught the same three courses every semester: Introduction to Philosophy, Contemporary Ethical Issues, and Reasoning and Critical Thinking. Sometimes Lanny anguished the fact that he didn’t get to teach any of the other more specialized philosophy courses he had taken in college,. On the other hand, as he was approaching the end of his studies, he had wrestled with the pointlessness of the entire discipline. Sometimes he wondered if all the hard work he had poured into developing a refined expertise was worth the paper his degrees were written on. Nobody but philosphers really cared about the more specialized topics. Even those who did knew deep down that the questions belonged to somebody else—physics or psychology or sociology or anyone who used the scientific method instead of sitting back on his lazy ass pondering Gedankenexperiments. But those first three courses—they were just shallow enough to spark everyone’s interest.

His favorite course to teach was PHI 1010: Introduction to Philosophy. The course started with the Ancient Greeks, spent several weeks on the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century Moderns, and ended with what he thought of as professor’s choice. He filled this period with different topics of his own choosing each semester. According to the department guidelines, he was supposed to cover phenomenology and existentialism, but he had a few reasons for not doing that. One, many professors never got through the Greeks and the Moderns. Two, he didn’t like existentialism or phenomenology. Three, he was the only person in the department.

Lanny opened the classroom door and walked in as the lights automatically flicked to life. As with most of the topics in this course, Lanny was going to approach Descartes with some lecture and a lot of open floor discussion. Spring rain pounded the roof, and at SCCC, that meant there wouldn’t be many students in class. Eleven kids dragged into class and Lanny took his place at the front.

His lecture started with a question, to try to get the kids thinking creatively. “Have any of you ever wondered if you might be the only person in the world? Maybe it’s just you and God, and all of the people in your life, all of your loved ones and even the ones you hate are just there because God is testing you or playing with you like a toy.”

Lanny thought he noticed an agreeable look from the students who had come to class. He was pretty sure everyone had that thought as a kid pondering in isolation.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Lanny held an interactive class and Fred was usually the first student to pipe up and engage him in dialog. “How do you know that what your seeing is really there you know? It’s kind of all in your head. Like when we see colors it’s really just how our brains interpret different wavelengths of light.”

“That’s the idea. Today we’re going to talk about Rene Descartes. In 1641, he published a book that addressed this question. He wanted to develop a fundamental proof that even though we are finite beings and there are limitations to what we can know, we can rest assured that our experience of reality is absolutely real.

“He started by presenting the opposing argument. He called into question all of our knowledge about the world and suggested our entire mental experience, since it takes place inside of us anyway, could just as well be an illusion. He called this approach ‘methodological solipsism.’ Obviously, nobody really thinks this, right? And Descartes was a perfectly rational guy. He didn’t really think there was any risk that reality might not be what it seems. He was all about figuring out what we can really know as people, and how we can say we know it in a way that defies all doubt. His point was not that I might really be the only consciousness in existence, but how can I prove that I am not? Because we all know we’re not, right? But how?”

“Well I don’t know we’re not.” Sophie piped up. The other kids in the class laughed—some mockingly.

Sophie was the pasty girl with the dark hair and dark dresses. She was always melancholy and quiet as the dead. Although the other students were laughing, they held that silent dread that hits when one fears he may be in the presence of a prophet or a seer.

“What do you mean Sophie?”

“Well, look at it from the flip side. How can I prove that you have any experience of reality? You know, how can I prove that you are experiencing the same reality as me? You might be a robot–or an empty shell.”

“Well, that is an astute question, but it’s a question for a later class. There is a vast train of topics we’ll get to later where that thought is much more relevant.”

“I bet Albert would think it’s relevant. If he thinks at all.” The other students gave an uncomfortable nod. Sophie’s words rang true.

“Who is Albert?”

“Albert Campbell. He’s one of the zombies. There’s a bunch of them here.”

Fred interjected, “You mean you haven’t noticed?”

“Sorry kids, I don’t believe in monsters.” Lanny gave a look as if to say, Good one. What kind of idiot do you take me for?

Perry laughed. “Nah dog—for real, their parts fall off and shit, yo. Like, I saw Albert’s jaw fall off one time in study hall.”

Rob had a real shit-eating-grin on his face. He looked like he was up to something. His hand creeped slowly into his book bag.

Lanny usually would welcome a side discussion, but this one seemed childish. He tried to veer the discussion back towards Descartes. “So Descartes developed a thought experiment in which he imagined that an evil demon might be deceiving him…”

“Look! Its Albert’s wiener!” Rob poked Sophie’s ear with the giant Slim Jim he had pulled out of his book bag. “It must have fallen off and now it’s going after Sophie!”

The class erupted in laughter.

“Give me that zombie wiener. I’m hungry.” Perry yanked the Slim Jim right out of Rob’s hand, stripped the plastic off in one smooth motion and took a big bite right off the top.

“Hey! He’s eating my wiener!” Rob sounded truly upset.

Lanny’s thoughts started to wander. He thought about the gray kids again. The one he saw in the bathroom, and the one who had mowed his lawn. Certainly, Albert must be one of these gray kids, he thought. Perry danced around the room, swinging his hips back and forth while he held the Slim Jim in front of his zipper and swung it in a circular motion. He started walking with the same slow awkward gait of the gray kid who had mowed Lanny’s lawn. He dropped the Slim Jim on the floor in front of him feigning as though it was accidental.

“Awe, my wiener fell off.” He exclaimed in a low slurred voice as if he was impersonating the gray kid.

Lanny started to consider the possibility that the students really weren’t messing with him. Maybe there were zombie students at Spoon County Community College!

Albert’s wiener flew across the room and struck Lanny across the face.

Zombies in Springtime -- Chapter 1 -- Fresh Cut

Zombies in Springtime

Chapter 1 - Fresh Cut

Dusk settled in like a wet blanket in Spoon County, Mississippi. The rocking chair rythmically creaked against Lanny Kane's porch as he enjoyed a few puffs of Rum tobacco from his wicker pipe. He surveyed his expansive lawn. The freshly cut blades filled his nostrils and won over a smile. Some porches in Spoons were plagued by mosquitos at this hour, but not Lanny 's.

These moments were hard to come by so he knew he should enjoy it while it lasted. Even so, it was significant work to hold off the nagging feeling of needing to get back to something. Even in rest, Lanny found it impossible to completely relax.

Among the many threads of thought that tried to steal his consciousness away from the pleasurable moment, there was the oddness of the young man Lanny had paid to mow the lawn. The gait in his walk was so lethargic. His complexion was almost gray. He looked like death, but yet he plodded up and down the 3 acre lawn with the determination of a mule. He never fettered--not once. Lanny imagined that he could have held a stopwatch on the kid and that his right foot would have landed in a straight line with the mailbox at exactly the same tick on every pass.

He completed his work without a single break, and as far as Lanny could tell--and as unlikely as it seemed--without a single bead of sweat. Lanny had counted three pauses to stop and fill the mower with gas. Each of these took almost exactly the same amount of time. The young man had stopped the mower, walked in a straight line to his dusty red Ford pickup truck, grabbed the gas can, and walked the same straight line back to the mower. He returned the gas can to the pickup truck along the same path. All in all, it took nearly five hours for him to mow the lawn from start to finish. Originally, Lanny and the young man had agreed on fifty dollars, but after watching the young man consume most of his day, Lanny felt compelled to wrinkle in an extra thirty. He thought the kid was most likely a retard--one of those funny retards that don't really seem retarded until you see them doing something that makes them look really awkward and out of place. Taking five hours to mow a lawn for fifty dollars was definitely retarded, Lanny thought.

As awkward and friggin retarded as he seemed, the young man reminded Lanny of some students he had occasionally seen walking the halls at Spoon County Community College. Lanny had been teaching there since moving to Spoon County six months ago. SCCC was a pretty run of the mill Community College. About 70% of the population were young kids--barely motivated--most of whom would probably never have jobs remotely related to their "studies." The other 30% were old people who had once been in that 70% and lived a worthless life and eventually decided to go back to school and make a little something of themselves.

Lanny remembered seeing one of these gray kids in the bathroom. He was postured in front of the urinal taking a whiz which is what Lanny was on his way to do. Lanny squared off in front of the porcelain and unzipped his pants. Lanny was about to start whizzing when he caught a whiff of the gray kid. His throat tightened, his stomach recoiled and he ended up barfing a mouthful of stinging chunks into his nose and onto his shirt and tie. The gray kid smelled like dead decaying animals, but like a pile of thirty furry ones with flies swarming all over them, and like you were getting your face shoved hard and fast into the fur and rubbed around.

"What the fuck? What the-- Jesus Christ! What is that smell?"

Lanny had no idea what the hellish odor was, or that it was even possible that a human could produce it.

"Sorry," he heard the gray kid say.

"What, did you bring something dead in here? What the fuck is it?"

"I just had lunch." The gray kid started to chuckle a malevolent sounding chuckle that seemed to grow louder and louder as Lanny hurriedly zipped his pants and made a quick dart for the door without having relieved his bladder.

Lanny was so disturbed, six hours went by before he remembered he had to piss.