The Zombie Feast

The Zombie Feast

Zombies originated with a West African tribe many of whom emigrated from their homeland to Haiti where they were welcomed due to compatibility with the local Haitian beliefs.

Somewhere along the way a flesh and bone-eating virus spread through the island nation causing much agonizing death. Normally, death is death except in the case of vampires and zombies. While vampires tend to be intelligent and able to shapeshift, zombies are usually dumber than a box of red bricks. They need to eat constantly to replace the flesh that is constantly falling off their weakened frames.

Zombie feasts happen whenever a zombie finds something he or she can eat. These are rather ugly events, full of blood splatter, raw bones with dangling bits of flesh hanging off the bones of whatever creature the zombie was able to catch and eat along with other face-stuffing zombies.

While most zombies have the intelligent level of a ten-year old, bald rubber tire, the occasional one is able to put a sentence together and even to entertain the odd thought as in, “Why don’t we go and break into the brain institute and raid the refrigerators where they keep the brains of famous people? Maybe if we eat their brains, we can get to be as intelligent as they were.”

Of course, trying to get the other members of the zombie tribe to understand this was a stretch. It was like asking a tone deaf chimpanzee to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with one hand. So, instead, the zombie with the thoughts, whose name was Ralph, which was quite appropriate because that is what you wanted to do as soon as you saw him or his flesh-shedding crew of zombidiots, just gathered them all together.

Don’t get me wrong. Just because they could be mistaken for walking jellyfish, one does have to be careful not to get close enough to any of them. If you did get close enough, the chances are that they would grab hold of any part of you they could reach, rip it off, and stuff it in whatever was left of their face. This would immediately cause a zombie version of mad cow disease and other havoc - quite similar to a political convention.

Ralph managed to get his message understood, at least enough to get the Zombiherd pointed in the right direction. “Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains! Brains!” they all sang as they shuffled along the deserted streets, stopping only to retrieve any body parts that fell off along the way.

As they approached the front of the Institute, they noticed that security was tight. The whole building was surrounded by police, rent-a-cops, and part-time soldiers. Seeing the zombies running towards the building, the ring of security began to look more like a ring round the toilet bowl as a number of the personnel had fecal accidents. The zombies could smell it as they closed in on the building.

“Hot food!” called out one of them. “Food! Food! Food! Food! Food!” they chanted in attempted but unachieved unison which did not matter to the officers on duty. All they saw, heard and smelled, was a wave of flesh-eating puke closing in on all sides, like the sixty-foot tide at St. Andrew’s By the Sea.

There was nowhere the officers could go. They stood there and kept shooting holes in the zombies even as these creatures smiled and tore off arms, legs, heads and any other parts they could grasp in their hands or teeth.

Before long, there was not much left but a ring of blood and indigestible bits of ex-humans. The zombies belched, crossed this red stream and started up the steps to the front doors of the Brain Institute.

The doors were locked and barricaded but this caused only a temporary delay as paving stones and slabs were ripped up and heaved at the door until the sheer number of them forced the glass to give way and the Zombiherd climbed through the gap. Inside, they were faced with another contingent of heavily-armed security guards.

Bullets did not stop the zombies for much longer that it took Grandpa to climb the stairs to the toilet after taking a 30-second turbo-laxative. They munched and crunched their way through the security patrol, in a putrid wave of reeking raw meat, chucking bones over their shoulders as they went.

Soon they were down in the basement where containers filled with liquid nitrogen stood in silent rows. Each one was labelled with the name of the individual to whom the brain inside had once belonged. The Zombies were ready to tear apart the containers, plunge their hands into the freezing gas and feast.

“Wait!” yelled Ralph. I think we should each taste a bit of all the brains and then we can vote on which ones are the best.”

Everyone nodded without knowing what Ralph was talking about. They just wanted to feast before their bottoms literally fell out of their pants.

All of the brains were taken out of the containers and put in a row with the names in front of them. Some of the brains included Socrates, Aristotle, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Henry I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Madame Curie, Einstein, Genghis Khan, Charles Darwin, Confucius, Robin Hood, Marilyn Monroe, and many, many more.

Each zombie was invited to taste a tiny bit from all the brain matter and to vote on which one tasted the best. The zombies agreed that Albert Einstein’s brain was twice as munchy and crunchy as all the others.

“Oh!” exclaimed Ralph, you mean E=MC2!

©March 2021 Robert W. F. Taylor