Falling to Pieces
by Norm Cowie
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
The window was open, tall and streaky with bird poop and water spots. But when he tried to open it further, it wouldn’t budge. It was made to open sufficiently for air but, for safety, it wouldn’t open enough for anyone to get through it, accidentally or otherwise.
“Brains!” the zombies cried, trying to snag his legs.
“Aaagh!’ he cried. He turned back to the window, his legs river-dancing through the zombies’ wildly grabbing arms. The opening was about six inches, too small for a normal-sized high-school kid. Fortunately, he wasn’t a normal-sized high-school kid.
He remembered seeing a video once where a huge octopus had been captured by a fishing trawler’s nets. It had dropped out of the nets and slithered along the deck until it came across a tiny little slotted opening on the side of the boat’s gunwale. With the fishermen watching and cheering it on, the octopus somehow squeezed its big head and all of its tentacles through the little crevice, to plop into the safety of the sea on the other side.
Mimicking the octopus, Brian let out his breath, and squeezed his leg and shoulder into the opening. It was too small.
Something grabbed his other arm, and Brian looked into the mushy face of a zombie. “Aaagh!”
Adrenaline accomplished what his normal strength could not, and he squirted through the opening, scraping his ears painfully on the way.
Now he was on the narrow ledge on the outside of the window, looking in at the horde of zombies biting and grabbing at the glass. The sounds of their scrabbling vented from the opening and a few stuck arms through, trying futilely to snag him.
“Hah!” he gloated. He smacked the glass at their frenzied faces, which only enraged them more.
An arm snaked through the opening and grabbed him by the butt.
“Hey,” he cried, and then he lost his balance. As he fell, his life flashed before his eyes. Then his death as a zombie flashed before his eyes. Neither was all that remarkable or that long in duration. A moment later he hit the roof of the pool after a drop of only about six feet.
“Oouff!”
His breath blasted out of him and he lay on his back, marveling that his lungs worked again. Well, they weren’t working at present, but they had been until they were stunned by his collision with the roof. Still though, he was gasping, air moving again, something he hadn’t been capable of for the last few years.
He looked up at the sky. The sun was peeking from around a cloud around the roof of the school. The zombies were still at the windows, but now they seemed to be calming down. Was it because he was out of their reach?
“Brian?” one of the zombies called out. It was Nick Winston.
Brian tried to answer, but all he could do was make a choking sound.
“Stay there,” Nick said. “We’ll come get you.”
Oh, no, they’re after me! Thus urged, Brian painfully rolled to his side and took a shaky breath. His lungs seemed to be back on the job again. He looked up at the cafeteria window. The zombies were gone. It was time for him to do the same.
He made his way on shaky legs towards the edge of the school and looked down. The zombies were massed there and, to his horror, he could see one of the janitors bringing over a large extension ladder.
“Oh, no!” He quickly backtracked out of sight and looked around for another way off the massive roof. Because all of the zombies were below him, he thought of climbing back into the cafeteria. But he didn’t know if anyone was still there, and he would still have to get through the hallways.
It would be better if he could stay outside and get down from here. And then what? Go home? To a zombie mother and father and sister, all of whom might try to eat his brains? What had happened? Was he human again? If so, how had that happened? And then he felt something itching and as he scratched lightly at it he wondered, was that what had done it? The mosquito bite?
He looked down at the small raised red lump on his otherwise now smooth arm. It just looked like a normal bite. But it had bitten him when he was a zombie, and now he obviously wasn’t.
The sharp clang of the aluminum ladder startled him out of his reverie, then came banging as multiple feet pounded up the ladder.
“Crap!” Frantically, he looked down the length of the roof, looking for anything that might suggest a way off. The roof was shaped like a big cross, two of its arms single-story, lined with classrooms. Opposite him was the third arm, a massive gymnasium-auditorium complex, and the other arm he was on held the second-floor cafeteria and pool. The pool itself was on the first floor, but its roof was a story and a half, so it was like a small step-stool.
But there was no way down. He guessed for safety reasons the school didn’t want the students to have easy access to the roof, which didn’t help him.
Then he noticed the window in the pool roof. It was open, probably to let the warm humid air from the pool escape.
Before he could do anything, figures erupted from the top of the ladder and zombies ran yelling at him.
“Crap!” He scuttled over to the open window and looked down. He was twenty feet above the surface of the middle of the deep end. In the shallow end, a group of miserable zombie teens were huddled together with water up to their bellies.
“There he is!” someone shouted behind him.
Brian risked a glance. They were almost on him! It was either the pool or getting chomped on by zombies. He turned back to the window but, when he put an arm down to brace himself, his fingers instead found air. And then he was falling.
This time the falling lasted longer than six feet, and he found he had time to look down to see what he was going to hit. The water had a greenish cast to it, probably all of the chemicals they had to dump in to offset unwashed zombies. He also had time to remember belly-flopping once, the pain and surprise when his body slammed into water. And that was just from a diving board. What was it going to feel like when he hit the water from thirty feet up? Windmilling his arms, he tried to reorient himself feet down.
Voices from above meant they’d caught up with him. He felt pretty sure no zombie was going to voluntarily follow him into water.
Somehow he managed to get his feet under him and closed his eyes, braced for the water.
Next thing he knew, his leg scraped past something hard and unyielding, and his butt slammed into something else: the diving board.
With a mass times velocity force that some physics kid could probably do the math on, the wide board graciously accepted his weight and momentum and then, using another form of physics that could likewise be measured by someone smarter than Brian, sling-shot him back into the air.
“Aagh!” As he arched beautifully into the air, his arms and legs flailing, a zombie passed him going the opposite direction, undoubtedly barfed from the same opening he had come through. They had followed him!
“Brian,” the zombie said as they passed in midair.
“You mean brain?” Brian snapped back, ticked that he seemed to have the only edible brain left in the world.
The water rushed at him, and he had time to notice other zombies splashing into the water below. Meanwhile, the zombies that had been standing in the shallow end had somehow become aware that his brain was now something to be desired, and they were surging deeper in the water, though not progressing beyond chest level. He only had time to notice that the zombies that had fallen from the roof were now treading water in a circle around where he was about to land. They could swim?
Then he hit the water. While he didn’t slice into the water with the grace of a springboard diver, neither did he slap horizontally in a massive belly flop. It was something in between, but such that he hit with enough force to stun him, so he floated underwater for a moment trying to get his bearings. A perverse nature of water is that buoyancy acts to push us the opposite direction gravity would like us to go. But sometimes there’s a period of time while your body remains in a temporary stasis between the tug of war of these two forces of nature.
He opened his eyes and was treated to the sight of zombie legs kicking to remain afloat all around him. He was surrounded! And quickly running out of what air he’d managed to gulp just before splashdown. There wasn’t enough to last for him to swim out of the encircling group of zombies.
He remembered watching a show once about the Arctic when the oceans were iced over and hungry polar bears waited by one of the few openings in the ice where Beluga whales would rush to snatch a breath of air while trying to avoid the heavy claws of the bears. With this pleasant thought in mind, he kicked towards the surface with the goal of sucking in enough oxygen to go back under and swoop under the zombies.
As his mouth cleared the surface, someone grabbed him.
“Auck!” he cried.
“Brian,” a voice said.
“You mean brain, don’t you?” Brian sputtered, ineffectively batting at hands trying to grab him.
“No, I mean Brian,” the voice said.
Brian cleared the water from his face. “Nick? You can talk normally again?”
Nick grinned. “Yep.”
“And you don’t want to eat my brain?”
“Well, tempting though it might be, I’d rather have a hamburger.”
“We’re all okay now,” another kid said. Brian recognized him as a former Mathelete. He couldn’t remember his name, though.
“Yeah, while chasing after you, we all started changing,” Winston released Brian’s collar so he could paddle to keep above water.
“Back into human,” the Mathelete gasped, having a harder time keeping afloat in jeans and tennis shoes.
“The closer we got to you, the quicker the change seemed to happen,” Nick said.
Brian looked toward the shallow end. “Okay, so we can get out of here now, right?”
Nick shook his head. “No, not yet we can’t. We’ll have to wait a bit until the zombies in the shallow end convert back to humans again. Don’t wanna get eaten by being too hasty.”
“Yeah, there were some close calls when we were chasing you,” the Mathelete said. “Some people turned human before others, and then the zombies would start chasing them until the zombies finally turned.”
Nick nodded. “It was a little touch and go, but if you were quick enough, you were safe.”
“Yeah, the change was pretty quick,” the Mathelete put in.
“What do you suppose happened?” Brian asked.
Nick shrugged. “I dunno. You showed up at school, all human-like and smelling, well, delicious. But it was like you had some kind of virus or something, and we all got sick with a human-flu, or something.”
“A fast-acting one,” the Mathelete added.
Kicking to stay afloat, Brian gave it some thought, his eyes on the zombies in the shallow end who were no longer pushing to get deeper in the water and were acting a bit more human like, some splashing and swimming around, big smiles on their faces.
Nick was watching them, too. “I think it’s safe to get out now.”
* * *
“Wake up, hon.”
Brian blearily opened his eyes. “Noooo, I don’t want to go to school.”
“You never want to go to school,” his mother said. “Come on, sleepyhead. It’s a whole new world now,”
Brian’s eyes snapped open. That’s right. Had it been a dream? Or was he...
Vaulting out of bed like never before, he rushed past his mother, who stepped back with a smile. Then he stopped: “Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“You’re... you’re, like, all pretty again,” he stammered, feeling his face get red.
She colored as well. “I feel much better, as if a fog has lifted from my mind.”
“Me, too,” he said. He tore his eyes from his mother and went into the bathroom. Then he took a deep breath and sneaked a peek at the mirror. He looked... normal... Not like zombie normal but the normal that was pre-zombie normal. His eyes were clear, his hair looked thicker, healthier. His skin was smooth and had lost its greenish tint.
His mom had followed him. “I don’t know what happened, but after you left yesterday, I began feeling different. Better,” she mused. She shook her head: “We don’t have much to eat. Most of what’s in the refrigerator is, well, gross. I threw it away.”
“Yeah, we ate trash, didn’t we?” Brian said.
His mother got a grim look on her face: “Never again.” She shook her head, “Anyway, we have some canned food left. If the can isn’t swollen, it probably won’t poison us. And it will last until we can get some normal food.”
* * *
Later that morning in class, Mr. Phelps was fielding frightened questions from his students. “Yes. Food is going to be a problem, but we have so fewer mouths to feed nowadays, I think we’ll be okay. Many of our fields reseeded themselves even when we neglected them. People didn’t throw away frozen foodstuffs which may be freezer-burned, but still edible. Eating won’t be exciting, but we will have enough that people won’t starve.”
“What do you think happened?” a Plastic asked.
Brian noticed the Plastics weren’t acting all high and mighty. Maybe they, like everyone else, were reveling in how their gray world had suddenly burst forward in colors again.
Mr. Phelps frowned in thought. “Well, I don’t know what sparked the zombie turning. It will take years, if ever, to puzzle that out. But based on what Brian, here, reported about the mosquito biting him and how it affected everyone who came in contact with him, I’d say the evidence seems to support that a mosquito carried some fast-acting virus that reversed the zombie virus. Cancelled it? Killed it? I don’t know. It must be some fast mutating virus to have been transmitted by the mosquito biting and then becoming airborne.”
“So you’re saying it’s possible mosquitoes saved the human race?” Nick blurted.
Mr. Phelps scratched his head and then nodded reluctantly. “I’d have to say it’s a distinct possibility.”
“Well, who’d a’ thunk?” Nick said, grinning.
* * *
A year later
Nature has a specific trick where some animals are able to cheat death when food is scarce. The African lungfish, for example, can bury itself in mud during extreme drought, coating itself with a secretion that will allow it to live without water for years. Other animals such as the bear, marmot and bumblebee simply shut down their systems and sleep when there is nothing to eat. Hibernating animals include several bats, such as the little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus.
When the world of humans was lost in a zombie wasteland, another, vastly older species, took refuge in hibernation. But now, as blood began to move again in the veins of man, this creature somehow sensed its prey return and began slowly to shake off its long sleep. In eastern Europe, in a casket in an ancient crypt, a vampire slowly opened its eyes.
Copyright © 2026 by Norm Cowie
