The Great Brain (4 page)

Back when Kim had been doing the prep for their great brain robbery, she allotted Mick one task, and one task only. Do the maths – you'll know she was courting trouble. One task was too many for her low-IQ bro.

Mick's job was to prepare a substitute brain to replace the one they were going to steal. After all, no matter how dim the museum guard, he would surely notice
an empty vat that only hours before had contained Albert Einstein's world famous, big-thinking brain.

So Kim had briefed Mick on procuring a surrogate brain, and it was no tough task, even for a twit like Mick. After all, Mrs Living-Dead cooked brains for dinner every other day. Mick could snaffle a frozen one from the deep freeze – it'd never be missed – and job done.

But that was not Mick's style. That seemed way too straightforward. He had a better idea.

Mick and idea? Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Uh oh.

Now Mick pulled his backpack off while Kim clambered up beside the glass vat. She plunged her arms into the mucky fluid and fished around until her hands closed on a slimy, pink ball the size of a large grapefruit. Quickly and efficiently, she tugged at the electronic implants, which slipped with a gluggy ‘
plop
' from the sides of the spongy blob.

Kim gingerly hoisted the gross, greasy orb out and passed it down to Mick, who slid the brain into a plastic shopping bag. He then held up a different bag containing the substitute brain he'd prepared earlier. Looking around at all those brains, Mick's mouth started to water. He nearly bit a chunk out of the brain he was holding, but luckily Kim snatched it up in time and slipped it into the vat.

Mission accomplished, they scarpered off into the night.

 

Early Monday morning they were eating breakfast when Mr Living-Dead came rushing in, running late, flapping his hands and flipping out.

‘My car battery is flat again,' he panted to his wife. ‘Damn that flaky vegetarian vampire salesman to Hell and back! Can you grab the jumper leads and give me a jump-start from your car?'

‘Yes, dear,' replied Mother L-D, giving the kids a knowing look and following the old boy out the back door.

Kim looked at Mick. ‘I think we should borrow those jumper leads after she's finished,' she whispered.

‘But you don't have a car,' Mick replied.

‘Idiot!' Kim said. ‘We'll try it on the brain.'

‘Oh,' said Mick. ‘Good idea.'

It
was
a good idea (something I'm fully aware of, having spawned millions of them myself), and it worked. The stolen brain had been hidden under Mick's bed, floating in an esky of saltwater with a few dead flies for company. They pulled it out, dried it off on an old dishrag, retrieved the greasy jumper leads from the back of the garage and rigged them up, clamping one end on Albert Einstein's juicy, information-charged brain and the other end on Mick's putrid, decaying ears.

Instantaneously Mick received a tremendous charge, a rush of facts and figures, and was suddenly imbued with all sorts of excellent data, statistics, information, train timetables, office protocols, my phone number, your granddad's vital statistics, all
things known and bulk other irrelevant tidings and gossipy hearsay.

Success!

Mick was suddenly cleverer than a wise old owl with a double PhD in fox studies; more intelligent than a super computer with a lubed-up, tricked-out motherboard and sharper than a razor blade with a scholarship to the sharpening school on Sharp Island.

But would he be smarter than Mr Know-All? They had to be certain …

Grimsweather's Annual Maths Test was a traditional, compulsory and much-hated event on the Horror High calendar. Very few students passed, nearly all failed, none got even half decent marks and just a couple died … a second time, only more painfully.

Kim saw the maths test as the perfect opportunity to test their brand new stolen brain.

The maths test was actually a thinly veiled excuse for Grimsweather to slaughter a couple of the lower, slower students to feed his relatives at the Annual Grimsweather Family Reunion Barbeque. Grimsweather hated shelling out his hard-earned wages on butcher's meat for his unlikeable, ravenous rels and had devised the maths test and its bloody carnage outcome as a viable, workable alternative.

Cheapskate.

Correction – financially shrewd, good-use-of-local-resources cheapskate.

Consequently the first Friday of every October, just before the Annual Grimsweather Family Reunion (which was held the first
Saturday
of every October), the students of Horror High filed reluctantly into their classrooms for the bogus maths test. One hour later the same group filed out again, a couple of ghouls lighter than before.

Customarily it was the two students who scored lowest on the maths exam that got
the chop, literally. So, if Mick Living-Dead was the epitome of numbskullery and nincompoopery, as previously claimed, how come he hadn't been butchered years before? Surely Mick would've scored the lowest mark every time in the past? Why hadn't Mick ended up as Grimsweather Family Reunion Barbeque steaks?

Well may you ask.

And well may you keep asking until your face falls off. How would I know? Do I look like an encyclopaedia? I get paid to scribe the facts as the publisher lays them on me. That's precisely what I write, and half the time I don't get paid anyway.

Far as I can tell, this plot has more holes in it than my granny's undies, and this is a relatively
good
one. You should see some of the shonky storylines they've forced me to write up. Honestly, one of their plots was found in the public toilets at Horror bus station, and another came out of a stale fortune cookie the publisher received after a meal at a Horror Chinese restaurant.

And some of their plot outlines
really
have whiskers on them. Whiskers? Crikey, by the time they land on my desk, they've sprouted full-blown bushranger beards. You can't see the story for hair.

Hirsute.

Listen to your school's careers adviser on this one, because for once they're not speaking with a forked tongue – writing is a shameful and disreputable occupation pursued by social misfits, walking abnormalities and frog-faced, bed-wetting oddities. I'm the only normal dude doing it, and the disgrace of working beside all these dangerous freaks means that sometimes I don't sleep at night for days on end.

But then I figure the smart thing to do is write the whole gig off as an embarrassing social irritation – like your mother playing on the National Nude Netball Team – and I zen out and chill, baby.

Peace out.

Hang about. We were talking about Grimsweather's evil annual murderous maths exam, and why Mick escaped the chop and avoided becoming a chop. I hadn't finished telling my side of the story. What sort of place is that to put a chapter break? How dare they treat my work like a piece of meat, just butchering it into bite-sized chunks and skewering a chapter break in between like it was a shish-kebab stick?

So, meat. Grimsweather had a very precise notion of the quality of steaks he was after and sometimes did a bit of personal ‘tweaking' of the test results of appetising looking candidates. If a student fell into his preferred barbeque menu criteria – plump, fleshy and heaps savoury looking – Grimsweather would doctor the exam results, rendering the student last in the line-up and first on the fryer.

And that's why Mick Living-Dead had survived all these years. He was as thin as a whippet and bonier than a flying fish, with barely a skerrick of meat on his decomposing body. So it was that maths geniuses like ‘Fat' Matt Cow-Creature and healthy, free-range students like Vincent Chicken-Experiment never exited the classroom the same way they entered it.

But Mick did. Mick may have scored dead last in the exam every year, but Grimsweather knew he couldn't feed his pet canary on Mick's corpse. So young Living-Dead came and went as he pleased, oblivious to the proximity of the meat
cleaver to his empty head. At least he proved one proverb is true: ignorance is bliss.

And there was no one in the world more blissed out than Mick Living-Dead.

So, the maths test. This year it was a doozy. See, apart from trapping himself a couple of meat-tray stiffs for his barbeque, Grimsweather also enjoyed the generally destabilising effect of setting impossible exams. The students would wince in pain, gnash their teeth, weep softly onto their calculators and writhe in agony at their own ineptitude, all of which pleased the malignant Grimsweather no end.

He dug it.

Grimsweather was another sadist, his thing was killer maths tests, and his family reunion maths test was always the worst of the year.

Mick sat at the back of the classroom wearing a big Rastafarian beanie and a thick grin. The thick grin was a clever ploy to conceal Mick's sudden lack-of-thickness and the beanie was to conceal Albert
Einstein's brain – nestled on top of Mick's head like a big, quivering, pink jelly.

Feral.

The beanie was a stroke of genius. It not only obscured the extra brain nestled atop Mick's own useless one, but it also covered the jumper leads clamped to his ears forming the electrical conduit to Einstein's brain.

Grimsweather slowly passed the exam papers out, grinning evilly. Mick took his and quickly leafed through it. Even as he was reading and turning the pages with one hand, his other hand was scrawling answers down the paper. By the time Mick's eyes had finished reading through the questions, his hand had written all the answers.

And, since Mick normally had no idea what 2 plus 2 equalled, he was in no position to judge how his surrogate brain had performed on the test. But, since time is money, there was no point in sitting around once he'd completed the paper. He stood, traipsed up the front to
Grimsweather's desk, dropped the completed exam on it and marched out of the classroom.

Grimsweather was gaping as he watched the zombie student exit. Living-Dead never even completed his exams, let alone completed them first. Then the Rollcall Master began to mark the exam paper, and the gape got gapier. Grimsweather couldn't believe it. Living-Dead had not only finished first, he also scored first, with 100 per cent correct.

Unprecedented.

 

The brain worked. This was proper cool. Now the Living-Dead siblings would strike a blow for all students of Horror High, ridding it of the despicable Mr Noel.

See what you can achieve when you cooperate? See what you can accomplish when you illegally break into museums and steal precious and irreplaceable brains? See what a tool a zombie kid looks in a Rastafarian hat?

Are we learning yet?

So. The deal was done. The stage was set. The trap was baited. Now all they had to do was spring it.

Mick fronted up to Mr Noel's office and tapped on the door.

‘
Entre vous
,' trilled the insufferable teacher.

Mick found the teacher sitting at his desk with his nose in a book. Mr Know-All glanced up and sniffed.

‘Living-Dead. What do you want?' sneered the teacher. ‘Come to back out of the bet?'

‘No,' replied Mick, grinning coolly. ‘I've come to set the time and place. I assume, since I challenged you, I can decide when and where it happens?'

Mr Know-All nodded his assent.

‘Well, it's tonight, at the school auditorium. 7.15 p.m. for a 7.30 kick-off. Capiche?'

‘Capiche,' Mr Know-All replied, and this time there was just a trace of panic in his voice. What was going on here? Why was Living-Dead suddenly so confident?