Brains for the Zombie Soul (a parody) Read Online Free Page A

for twenty
years, and one of their most prized employees, but they still had
the audacity to fire me after I became infected. There was still no
such thing as state of living discrimination, so I had nothing to
sue them for.
    I tried to apply for unemployment benefits, but
being both dead and fired, I didn’t qualify.
    First, I pursued job openings for accountants. I
got plenty of interviews, but employers many wouldn’t even meet
with me once I got there. They gave me excuses like, “I’m sorry, he
had a conflicting appointment,” or “He had to leave for a family
emergency. We’ll call you to reschedule.” Of course, they never
called back.
    Then there were the excuses. Most of them boiled
down to, “You don’t have the qualifications we’re looking for,”
even though I had a master’s degree and several advanced
certificates. What they were really saying was, “Zombies aren’t
smart enough for this job.”
    As time went on, I lowered my standards more and
more. After I was rejected for bookkeeping jobs, I applied for tax
preparer jobs, then bank teller positions, then customer service
associates, then general retail jobs, and finally even fast food
openings.
    Eventually, I had applied to nearly anything. I
was living in a homeless shelter, relying on the food bank for
meals. Many times, even the soup kitchen wouldn’t serve me, asking
zombies to let living people who could die without food go
first.
    When an opening in the paper was posted for a
general laborer to work in a rather dangerous position at the saw
mill, I applied to it like I would for any other job. I was
surprised when I was called in for an interview.
    It was the most unusual interview I ever had. It
seemed like for the first time, they ignored the politeness of
pretending I was living, and instead focused on the fact that I was
a zombie. I went with it, and talked up the benefits to being
undead.
    They also seemed sympathetic to my plight and
offered housing and meals as standard benefits. They hired me on
the spot, and I started the next morning.
    When I arrived at 7 am, first a nice young lady
showed me to my bunk. It was in a cabin similar to one I stayed in
at camp when I was in grade school. It wasn’t anything special, but
at least I had a roof over my head. She also gave me a locker to
put my few meager belongings in.
    Then she gave me a tour of the grounds. She
showed me where to clock in for the day and where the cafeteria
was. I got a cup of coffee. Afterwards, she handed me off to the
supervisor.
    He was a gruff man with a blunt way of speaking,
but I thought that wasn’t unusual for this sort of work. He put me
to work running boards through a table saw.
    The first thing I noticed were the condition of
the safety features. Most of the guards and precautions were
missing. The ones that were there were broken or working
improperly. They had told me it would be a dangerous job, and it’s
not like I could die.
    At around noon, I noticed no one had left. I
asked the employee working on the machine to my right when the
lunch hour was.
    “Lunch hour?” he said. He laughed dismally. “We
don’t get lunch.”
    My stomach rumbled, but I was used to that and
kept working. I worked straight through until five o clock. Then I
shut down my machine and went to the door.
    “What are you doing?” demanded the
supervisor.
    “Isn’t it quitting time?” I asked.
    “No, get back to work,” he yelled.
    I went back to machine and kept ripping boards.
No one else left their machine. I was just as hungry and tired as I
was on the street.
    After it had gotten dark outside, a zombie on
the other side of me fell asleep at his machine. He awoke with a
start when one of his fingers got caught in a belt and got ripped
off.
    “It’s about time,” my neighbor said.
    At the same time, the supervisor yelled,
“Quitting time!”
    I wasn’t sure if I needed sleep or food more, so
I mindlessly followed the crowd and found myself in the