The Great Brain (3 page)

Mick's older sister, Kim, was, like all sisters, not to be trusted on any level. She delighted in the fact that Mick was thicker than a bucket of crunchy peanut butter and enjoyed the colourful comparisons made between her and entirely thick Mick.

People couldn't believe they were related. Kim caned her exams, swooped up the academic awards and completed
her homework standing on her head – not easy for a zombie, whose body parts tend to fall off without warning. Mick failed every exam put in front of him and couldn't even spell his name correctly on the assessment paper. His brainpan was more like a dustpan.

Kim loved it.

So, when she came to Mick offering assistance with his bet, he was well dubious. Dubious? He was as suss as a donkey with corduroy ears. Why would Kim help him? She ridiculed him, mocked him, derided and disparaged him. She made a fool of him in front of her friends. She wrote rude (albeit true) things about him on the girls' toilet walls. She revelled in his dimwittedness like a hound revels in rubbish.

So, yes, Mick was suss. Under typical circumstances Kim's motives stank worse than a stuntman's undies, but these circumstances were far from typical.

See, Kim also detested Mr Noel. The despicable teacher had dared to fail her on
a test, based on the foolish assumption that any sibling of Mick must be a mindless zombie too. Then he accused her of cheating on the test. It was only when she complained to the school authorities and had her paper re-marked and her handwriting verified that she was awarded a standout A+.

But the damage was done. She loathed Mr Noel, swore eternal hatred, and any opportunity to lay revenge and retribution on him was worth embracing – even if it meant aiding her embarrassment of a brother.

Talk about sacrifice.

Kim tapped on Mick's bedroom door.

‘Enter,' intoned Mick solemnly. He'd practised saying that so it came out cool and slick like a movie star, but then he stuffed it up by adding ‘voo'. ‘Enter voo,' he said. He was going for
entre vous
, which is French for ‘get in, cretin', but dumb Mick couldn't overcome his unfathomable density and ‘enter voo' doesn't mean anything worth translating.

Kim understood what her bozo brother meant. She pushed through the door and waited for Mick to lay down the book he was ‘reading'. He was trying hard to look intelligent but gripped the book upside down, so the effect was wholly lost on his sister.

‘Mick, cut it out,' she snapped. ‘Everyone knows you can't read. Now, pay attention, because I'm going to help you with your bet.'

‘Why would you do that?' asked Mick.

‘Because I want to see Mr Noel go down,' Kim answered, ‘and I think I know how to do it.'

‘How?'

‘I just had a great idea,' replied Kim, ‘which is a totally foreign concept to you, but you'll have to bear with me. I was just down in the kitchen and …'

It
was
a great idea, and I should know because I've had thousands. Kim had been down in the kitchen scarfing her breakfast of scrambled dregs when Mr Living-Dead came panting in through the back door.
He looked flustered and stressed, and his white shirt and tie were smeared with grease.

‘Honey,' he called out to his wife, ‘can you come out and give me a jump-start. That blasted car battery is flat again. Must be the damned alternator. I've got the jumper leads here – if you could just back your car out, I'll start it off your battery. It's the last time I buy a used car from Horror Discount Motor Mart.'

‘I warned you,' said Mrs Living-Dead in her I-warned-you tone of voice. ‘You can't trust a company run by a vegetarian vampire – it's unnatural. And the stories I've heard at the salon about how he treats his wife would scare the dead back to life.'

‘Yes, yes,' snapped Mr Living-Dead impatiently. ‘I'm sure he's the biggest scoundrel in the citrus industry – he certainly sold me a lemon. But can we hurry up? I've got a 9.15 appointment with a very important client. Looks like I might finally sell that new line of hair gel into their chain of Yeti hair salons. Cha-ching!'

Kim watched through the kitchen window as her mum gave her dad's car a jump-start, and her great idea sizzled simultaneously like a lightning strike. Theoretically, the electrical impulses that governed and controlled the human brain were no different to those in the circuits of a car engine. And if a dodgy car with a flat battery could be jump-started to life, a dingbat brother with a flat brain could be jolted in the same way, from lamebrain to flamebrain.

‘So you see,' Kim slowly explained to her ignoramic brother, ‘all we'd have to do is find a supercharged battery – or in this case, a supercharged brain.'

‘But where would we find that?' asked Mick. ‘It's not the sort of thing they sell on eBay, is it? And even if we do find a place to get a brain, whose brain do we use? They would have had to be pretty smart, right?'

‘Right,' agreed Kim, nodding her head slowly. ‘So at least you and your mates are safe.'

Sisters just can't resist being sarky; it's in their genetic make-up bag.

‘Listen carefully,' said Kim. ‘Never mind the details. I've got it all worked out. I Googled “intelligence” and all the sites it pulled up led straight back to the Albert Einstein webpage. It's the mother of all brain-related sites. He was the smartest bloke in history. He was a legend. He devised the Theory of Relativity – the more annoying your relative, the longer they stay at your house. He's the one we need.'

Mick looked blankly at Kim. She'd lost him straight after ‘listen carefully'. He gawped like he'd seen their pet dog, Biter, gawp when he was busted drooling dog slobber into Mr Living-Dead's slippers. And Mick even had a suitable soundtrack to accompany the gawp: ‘Huh?'

‘God, Mick, you clueless clod, you really are thick as a wedge. I'm telling you I've identified exactly what we need for our scheme – Albert Einstein's brain!'

‘But where would we get Albert Einstein's brain?' asked Mick. ‘Isn't he
dead? And didn't they bury his brain with his body?'

I reckon they were pretty relevant questions, but his merciless sister didn't; she turned and mauled him savagely. ‘God, are you as dumb as a box of mules' butts, or what? Don't you know anything? Don't you read the papers? Don't you listen to the news?'

No, no and no.

Kim looked frustrated enough to dice Mick into meat cubes with a samurai sword, but she kept her cool – just. ‘Look. It's simple, just like you. There's a museum in Horror. It's called the Horror Museum. It's got a wing in it containing human brains. It's called the Brains Wing. There's a brain in that Brains Wing that was taken out of Albert Einstein's body after he died. It's called Albert Einstein's brain. And we're going to steal it. Capiche?'

Mick, who wanted to retain his original form long enough to grow a bad teenage moustache and get slapped across the face by pretty girls, very wisely said nothing,
pressing the mute button on his mouth's remote. But inside the empty wasteland of his brain, a single word was blowing around on the gusty breezes, among the dust, tumbleweeds and litter, and that word was …
‘huh?'

 

Huh? That was actually my response too. Albert Einstein's brain housed in Horror – like
that
would happen. Given a choice of where to keep the finest brain in the history of the
world
, given the opportunity to store it in, say, the Guggenheim Museum, the Pentagon, or a pub in Germany next to a large jar of pickles – why in the name of King Solomon's tie-dyed undies would they slop it in some vat in the Horror Museum?

Why?

There are garden variety coincidences, there are ridiculous coincidences, and coincidences so far out of the realm of possibility that they could dress up in the Devil's pink lingerie, slap on mascara and rouge and go out to the city's flashest
restaurant on a double-date with Attila the Hun and Francis the Talking Mule – and then skip out on the bill.

Albert Einstein's brain in the Horror Museum? That's a coincidence that blows them all away.

When I read the details of this absurd coincidence, I rang the publisher straight away and complained bitterly. Presented with such an outrageous sequence of events, how was I supposed to convince normal, intelligent, sensitive, socially aware readers that what I'm reporting is actually the truth?

Okay. So then how was I supposed to convince
my
readers?

The publisher had an information kit ready. They'd anticipated my complaint and were all over it like Donald Trump on a tube of wig glue. According to their research, the category of reader I'm catering for is like a whole new species of goatfish previously unknown to science, occupying a substrata so low in the slime of human ignorance that it believes
anything it reads, hears, sees on a bumper sticker, has tattooed on its rear-end, or even turns up in the scripts of
Horror & Away
.

What a relief …

So, moving right along. Time's a dragging by like my cross-dressing Uncle Carla, and since I'm paid by the centimetre, I've got to add enough height to this story to finally convince my publisher to scrawl their John Henry across a cheque and send it to my address, quick time. With any luck they'll hit their head on the door jamb, start seeing double and send me two cheques, allowing me to buy an aeroplane ticket that'll transport me twice as far from you as I am right now.

Sweet.

You'd think that the Brains Wing at a world-renowned museum would be guarded by intelligent people. You'd think. But then you'd think that the doctor on duty in Horror High's sick bay would be a qualified physician rather than a dyslexic butcher with a wooden eye and a bad case of the shakes, and you'd be wrong there too.

The sap-headed sentinel who stood guard at the Brains Wing of the Horror
Museum was not the most cluey bloke on the block. He was still trying to work out why the Horror Museum had a Brains Wing and, indeed, why it had wings at all. Were they covered in feathers? When would he get to see the museum fly? Or was it one of those large, flightless creatures like the emu, ostrich and Big Bird from
Sesame Street
?

These questions took up a fairly decent portion of the guard's already limited brain space, and what small amount was left he devoted to musing over literature. Well, he called it literature. He fancied himself as rather highbrow and intellectual – you know, worked at a museum, read constantly … but he read detective comics.

Don't get me wrong – detective comics rock. But this sissy simpleton read
Daisy Dimple: Girl Guide Detective
, and they do not rock. They
do
rotate, but not in a good way, and they're definitely not realistic – not one bit. The last one I read had Brown Owl bawling out Daisy Dimple for not
selling enough fundraising chocolate bars, and I know that's not accurate. Guides don't sell chocolate, that's for sure, because our pack sold Fairy Biscuits. I mean, get real – if you're going to write about something serious, know your facts.

Amateurs.

But this guard was not as smart as some people I could name (me) and didn't realise he was reading unrealistic rubbish. And he sure didn't realise he was about to be hoodwinked in a much more nefarious and disconcerting manner.

It was dark and there was no moon. The stars shone like a million miniature suns. That's because it was night-time. Mick and Kim crouched in a bush in front of the museum, punching a number into a mobile phone.

Fifty metres away they could see the guard at the front door, pacing back and forth, occasionally checking his watch. He was yawning deeply when his phone rang, snapping him back to attention. He took the call.

So far, so good.

‘Hello,' the guard said. ‘Brain Wing.'

‘Hello,' said Kim, ‘it's your mother.'

‘Hello Mum!' the guard replied brightly.

‘Don't you “Hello Mum” me, you rotten horrible lunk of a son. Didn't I warn you to make your bed before you left? Well, didn't I?'

There was no answer, but even from this distance the zombies could see the guard turning pale and sweat breaking out on his brow.

‘Didn't I warn you?' Kim whispered tersely into the phone. ‘And you remember what I threatened to do? Well, now I'm going to do it!'

‘No! Please, Mum!' the guard whimpered. ‘Not my Daisy Dimple comics – please don't burn them. I'm coming home. I'll make my bed. I'll never leave it unmade again.' The pansy guard bolted out of the building, moaning, holding his head in his hands. He left in such a rush that he didn't turn the lights off. Didn't even lock the front door.

Careless.

‘Right,' said Kim, stepping out from behind the bush. ‘Let's book.'

The two zombies snuck along the line of bushes in front of the museum, glanced over their decomposing shoulders to make sure the coast was clear and made a dash for the door. Kim knew the layout. She'd been there before, done a complete reccy and made straight for the main chamber where the brains were stored.

 

It was an eerie feeling pacing along the forbidden, echoing corridor, filing past a long line of brains lurking quietly in glass vats of fluid. It was spooky and felt almost as though the brains were watching them and thinking rude, unspoken thoughts to themselves.

The very air reeked of intelligence, and just breathing in the stinky smart-mist made Mick daydream he was a world famous zombie scientist who'd save Horror from the disastrous meteor threatening to wipe them off the globe.

Planet Reality to Mick, Planet Reality to Mick, come in Mick …

As his eyes became more accustomed to the half-light, Mick began to distinguish the labels on the vats. Some of the brains belonged to very famous people, some to very infamous people, and some to complete jackasses who died in such silly and embarrassing ways that the Dept of Dodgy Deaths requisitioned their grey matter to distil it and vaccinate the general population against future stupidities.

The leftovers were donated to science, and brain surgeon students mashed and diced and minced them up them for homework in brain surgeon school.

It'd be fascinating to document the various pink blobs floating in formalde-hyde fluid in the huge glass vats, but there's no time to squander on such trivialities – Mick was there for a purpose. But, being Mick, he'd completely forgotten what that purpose was, so let's trivialise a bit while he takes a few deep breaths and brings himself up to speed.

Some of the brains here had implants hooked up to them, with microphone and headphone outlets. It was mad – and seemingly pointless – but you could actually ask these brains questions. After a few moments there'd be a slight shudder of the large pink organ in the viscous fluid. A few bubbles would slowly rise up like a koi letting off in a fish tank, and a disem-bodied, computer-generated voice would answer your questions through the headphones.

If it could. Some of the brains were clearly not up to it, and some were barking mad. Hitler's brain kept ranting the single phrase ‘
Gott und Himmel!'
, which according to my dodgy translation book means ‘God eats Himmels' – a popular brand of hot-dog back in the dark days of World War II.

Hitler's brain was stored down the left bank, with all the misfits, murderers and malcontents. Right next to him was the 1920s gangster Al Capone, who'd smoked so many big, fat, gangster cigars during his extensive crime spree that his brain
now exuded nicotine like a toxic sponge, staining the vat a nutty brown.

Beside Capone's mucky brown brain was the brain of Jack the Ripper, the evil contents of his demented noodle floating in corn flakes, milk and sugar, like you'd expect for history's most notorious serial killer.

The next tub contained the fifth Wiggle – the infamous Black Wiggle, who wore a black skivvy, sold his soul to Satan and ran amok in the Horror Kindergarten, using his middle finger for the trademark finger wiggle and scaring the children before punching himself unconscious.

Down the right bank lay the brains of the good guys. Charlie Chaplin was there, saying very little, along with The Three Stooges, their three brains all banged up in one vat, slapping and pinching and poking each other. Willy Wonka's brain floated happily in a chocolaty sauce, and next to it rested Queen Victoria's, which repeated over and over, ‘We are not amused.'

Arnold Schwarzenegger's was there, though I didn't even realise he was dead. I guess the presence of his brain in the Horror Museum explains the flipped-out timbre of his shoddy movies.

Captain Cook's brain was also there, retrieved from his ocean grave in the Sandwich Islands, and now it sailed serenely on a deep blue sea of formalde-hyde fluid.

There were a bunch of generals and politicians and do-gooders and time-wasters and community-minded clowns, but they're just wasting our time. The most important pink blob for the purposes of our convoluted, too diluted, unripefruited story lay there silently, thinking deep and lofty thoughts to itself, wondering what relevance
E=mc
²
has when most people can't even remember their PIN numbers. Yes folks, right at the end of the line was the smartest and fattest and pinkest blob of the lot – Albert Einstein's.

Brainy.