VIU: Zombie Invasion Part IV The Conclusion

Nabil writes Part III

And here is the conclusion!

“Coffee! We need coffee!” I cried. Sustenance would be required if we were to hold off the zombies. That and I was beginning to feel the effects of three late night essay-writing sessions. “Curse those essays for limiting our zombie-fighting powers!”

Becka and Jacqui each grabbed a coffee carafe from the Jumpin’ Java, and we headed into the main library.

“Cups! Paper cups!” Nabil ran back into the coffee shop and grabbed the cups. “Okay, we’re good.”

“Lets move people!” I scouted out the library, my familiar stomping ground. Those without weapons headed to the reference section, to collect some ammunition. We wheeled several carts from behind the desk and loaded them up with the most back-breaking of tomes and took them up the elevator to the forth floor.

The zombies pushing at the glass of the front doors. As we were headed up the elevator with a second trip of carts, Gareth ran up to us. “Well, they’re coming through.” He looked at the carts. “You’re going to chuck books at them?”

“Yup.”

“Okay.” Gareth reached into his knapsack and pulled out his copy of Spirits in the Wires, he slapped it onto one of the carts. “Lets go.”

On the forth floor we lined up the shelving carts at the top of the stairs. At the top of the fifth floor stairs, Jacqui and Becka set up the coffee station.

Everyone gathered at the base of the forth floor stairs for an informal speech-gathering scene. The kind that’s all moving and rallies the troops to great enthusiasm even though they’re headed to their death. Nabil held up The Rhetorical Tradition. “This book and I have been through a lot together,” he sighed. “I say it needs to take out a few more zombies.”

“Yes!” We all cried, shaking our respective weapons in the air.

“Just remember,” I said, tapping the closest book trolley poised at the top of the stairs. “Books do save lives. And this is the best use some of these are going to see!” The crowd chuckled. “Also, if we survive, you’re all helping me put these back on the shelves.” The chuckles stopped mid-chuckle.

“Wait’a be a mood killer,” said Nabil.

I shrugged. Glass shattered downstairs. “Lets kill some zombies!”

“Huzzah!” the troops cried, and we positioned ourselves behind the carts, waiting for the zombies to find us.

It didn’t take long and as they staggered up the stairs we responded, sending carts over the edge; they piled up on the landing, creating a barrier. It seemed all too soon that we ran out of carts. “To the forth floor,” yelled Jacqui over the clatter of the last cart. The zombies were beginning to climb over the books, leaving bloody trails on the pages from their earlier snacks.

“Hey!” I yelled at one particularly blood-fouled zombie. “That’s really crossing a line. You can’t treat books like that! You’re leaving a bloody footprint!” Becka and Riley dragged me away and up the stairs to the forth floor. “Sorry,” I apologized when I came to my senses, “but there are some things you just can’t do to library books.” Everyone nodded sympathetically.

We had a minute, maybe two, before the zombies made it over the book barrier. I grabbed a coffee. Strong stuff. Perfect.

The zombies began to climb the stairs toward us, moaning, staring through us with their dead eyes. Desiree looked at the cup of coffee in her hand. “I guess this is the end,” she said, and chucked the remains of her coffee into the face of the lead zombie.

The zombie recoiled. It’s skin began to bubble and burst and flow with bloody puss.

“The coffee! Throw more coffee on them!” Jacqui and Brianna grabbed one of the carafes and moved toward the stair edge. Becka pulled off the top. And together they flung a third of the contents on the pack of zombies. We wasted no time and set upon them with our weapons. We continued, down to the third floor, fighting our way toward the elevator, invigorated by the power of coffee. Down the elevator we went. There were zombies everywhere but it didn’t matter, even after the carafes were empty. We were stronger, invincible. No plan needed to be made, the goal was clear. We just had to get to the coffee shop and hold up there.

I thought back to my research paper. Coffee would save the day, again.

***

And that it did. We held off the zombies, and soon the onslaught abated.

Once the students returned to school the Jumpin’ Java saw a massive surge in popularity when they began printing their cups with the slogan “It Kills Zombies.” They did not recruit one of the heroic creative writing students to come up with the slogan.

As for us, life went back to normal. We did what we always did before the zombie invasion: we sat around on our crappy lounge furniture and came up with scenarios for what we would do if the zombie invasion came, and we drank a lot of coffee.

And yes, I did make them help me re-shelve the surviving books. To this day, I have not been forgiven.

The End

Happy Zombie Hunting
Kaitlyn Till

VIU: Zombie Invasion Part I

11:29am

A group of us stand outside after class, loitering, discussing the readings, diligent students that we are. The smokers are smoking, and the non-smokers are not smoking. A bush rustles and out hops a bunny. “Awww,” we chorus. As many bunnies as there are on campus, each is individually adorable. This one, pure white, hops around chewing on dewy sprigs of grass. Its ears perk. “Awwwww.” It bounds to the side, and promptly becomes an explosion of fur and bloody effluvia.

“Zombie attack!” I cry. Burning cigarettes drop to ground as we all rush back into the building as a dozen zombies lumber out of the bushes. A lumber may not sound like much, but when the lumbering is done by a brain-hungry monster it’s suddenly a pretty threatening form of movement. Their blood-encrusted mouths gape, moaning, and their arms stretch, grasping at us. Toward our throats.

“To the lounge!” yells Riley. We have heard of these creatures, but infestation on campus is news to us. Zombies are something that we hear about on the news, but don’t actually show up in real life. And yet here they are. At the English building. Which has not been zombie-proofed. There is no point in barring the outer doors as zombies will beat their way through the glass. Instead, we head for the student lounge. No windows, one door. We can make our stand, bottleneck the living dead. Hold them off until—what? Rescue? No. That won’t be coming. We are on our own.

We push a tacky red couch into the doorway and stack a bookshelf on top creating a pathetic barrier. The doors open outwards and have no inner handles to bar (does no one keep zombies in mind when designing buildings?). Desiree and Gareth drag a box out from under a table, they shove a pile of Navigator back issues off of it and open the top to reveal our stockpile of weaponry. We are not completely unprepared. They pass around a couple of baseball bats, golf clubs, and tennis rackets. Blunt instruments appropriate for hit-and-run zombie bashing!

We hear scuffling and clamoring outside. Something’s coming. They’re coming. We grip our weapons tight, and wait.

***

Are you DYING to find out if we survive the VIU zombie invasion? Sate your thirst right now! Look for installment #2 from my fellow blogger, Nabil Boschman!

The Quest for Knowledge

I love science fiction. I love reading it, and I love writing it, but science fiction has a tendency to make me feel stupid. Perhaps stupid isn’t the right word. Under-educated? Ignorant? In any case, science fiction leaves me feeling that the world is a damn big place, and I don’t know much about it.

Like how am I supposed to sit here, at my desk, and invent a plausible explanation for artificial gravity? That’s asking a hell of a lot! I barely passed high school physics!

But this frustration with a lack of knowledge goes for most writing, even the more down-to-earth stuff (perhaps especially the down-to-earth stuff). How can I write a story with a character who is an investment banker if I don’t know anything about investment banking? How can I write a story about a corporation that takes over the world without knowing the first thing about how a corporation works? How can I write about an avid bird watcher without some credible knowledge of ornithology?

There are any number of ways to go about learning. Read a lot of books, peruse the internet, and ask lots of questions. Go places, see things, meet people. Every time I get around to course selection, I’m always drawn by the obscure electives—the really fascinating stuff that seems to have little practical application (for me anyway) except to further knowledge on a subject. I’m always interested in astronomy, anthropology, art, and linguistics, sciences too. I like the idea of sampling from all walks of life. Even if I don't usually get around to those particular course samplings.

As a child, knowledge was gathered piece-by-piece, by looking through a cheap plastic magnifying glass at a patch of dirt while getting my shoes muddy, or reading a stack of books, whether it be about how to be a detective, castles and knights, or Pluto (I was saddened to learn of Pluto’s demotion—like taking away a part of my childhood learning, not to mention rendering “The Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space” out of date). There was never any goal to learning, it was all about satisfying curiosity. But along the way from there to here, learning became focused on letter grades, and credits, and began to cost a whole lot more than the price of a dollar store magnifying glass.

The shoes still occasionally see mud—such as the time my first year English class went on a nature hike. Mud was not in short supply.

I do love that evolution. We’re lucky to live in an age of internet and easy travel, where if we want to learn something, we can go and do it, on our own. Or we can learn in a classroom. Knowledge flows freer than ever before. Simply the fact that in our time, as a woman I can gain an education that not so long ago wouldn’t have been possible (or at least very difficult) is pretty darn cool.

So sometimes I feel frustrated about a subject. I don’t know enough, and don’t know where to start finding out, but I just remember, ignorance is the first stage of the journey. Without that initial ignorance, there wouldn't be anything to learn. It’s exciting, to think of all the things I don’t know—yet. There are all the things that I have the potential to learn, and the gravity of that isn’t so artificial.

Happy questing!
Kait