Would You Like Brains With That?

On wonderful days such as these, deep in Upstate of the Carolinas, during the beauty and heat of the majestic summer, the wonderful hot sun's rays burning down on my skin, sitting on my back porch enjoying a sweet thick hot sugary tea poured over ice, like my grandma used to make, my thoughts naturally turn to memories of the taste of brains, and the great zombie hordes of 09.

 

One just doesn't plan for a zombie infestation, and that was our undoing. We stupidly thought the grave strong and fast. We were caught with our brains hanging out, fully unaware, mindlessly stroking our member nations, and posing for the photo opportunities, watching our fox news "break-aways," and listening to our government issue sound bytes, when the cerebrum eating began in the backwaters and small river towns. It was a time for innocence, and a time for fools.

The screaming from the depths; the blackened souls; the earth regurgitated its dead. Hell itself evicted the unthinking, and uncontrollable rotting masses, sans soul . . . and they were hungry.

So there we were, lost and frightened amongst the orgy; the feast; un-quelled. The dead walking, being consumed by the walking dead. Who are we really? This base need to survive laid open bare, who indeed . . . Tossed rag dolls, used up, into early empty graves? Well, apparently the graves were wombs or cocoons of a sort and it was a day to be "born again."

The only strategy was to grab the nearest weaker brother, free up some brains and eat. Zombie just aren't that bright, and when they see you noshing, ravenously, academy award performance or not, they assume you are just more of the walking dead, and move on to the panicked wailing, and running innocent bags of more fresh food. It was survival of the hungriest.  For although zombies technically can eat soiled and dead meat, it does not satiate like a good fresh gray brain porridge and thick blood-red fillet, nor will dead meat keep a zombie motile (most people don't know that).

Stand tall my friends. Keep vigilance, eyes wide open. We are the great trudging rotting reality, composing symphonies of undead remnant groans, the echoes of a once great civilization. I remember! I do! the majestic folklore and stories, America, America, God shed his grace on . . . no time now though, as we wake the beast within, with a mandatory taste for the living. That's when it almost happened, a deeply meaningful momentary consideration, pondered and ready functioning philosophical meandering, close to giving birth to the most wonderful life giving concept ever graced in wisdom by human beings.

Genius really, the epiphany that would have led to world peace and prosperity for the entire world, and to the second, almost realised, but dropped and splashed into the pooling blood, during a "head rubbing moment" of politicians, scratching the itch, the rumbling craving, while each warm blood-soaked life giving morsel cooled the burning need, and calmed the tortured soulless dark empty hearts with wonderful pulsing drippy juicy meat. All thoughts of humanity quickly forgotten in the lust. How quickly we reverted.  No iTunes, iPod Tablet high speed connectivity in the global wonderland that is the small world we live in.  Sometimes, there's just nothing better, than a good hunk of thick steak and a rub on the head.

After it was all finished, in the end, we became painfully aware that there had only been one slightly zombified corpse, and that starter of the rampage, had been accidentally reanimated, artificially dead in the first place, by a well meaning nurses aid and an eleventh hour needle full of Adrenalin. The rest of us, sadly, all pannic-ee and hopped up on 800 milligrams of steamed milk laden Starbucks, were again, in the end, really just trying to not be eaten.

So we killed and ate our fill, to hide from the horde and survive! History will say that our neighbors and friends were killed by "friendly teethe."  Yes the great zombie infestation did not truly involve zombies, per se, but a good amount of paranoid hysterical panicking, ending in an afterglow fat-cat-laying-around-the-den kind of full feeling, like the semi-circle of lazy boy chairs of the menfolk at Thanksgiving dinner, while the women did the dishes; a huge number of chagrined and embarrassed yet well fed citizens, and the need, the next day, to clean the landscape of the remnants of the nights riotous festival; the "empties" of all that went to the dirt nap a little light headed.

This day, warm summer day, I wonder, what did we really learn, as we buried our dead, and licked our wounds?

What changed?

I just don't really know, as I watch the television news and suddenly my stomach rumbles, and I realize . . . actually . . . I could eat.

 

© 2011 Rob Krabbe / NoonAtNight Publications