Booo and the Zombie Dojo

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The moon hung like a cracked white plate over the old dojo. Inside, Booo stood perfectly still. His white gi was crisp. His orange belt was tied in a firm, tight knot. His ears were flat and ready. “Forty-seven,” he whispered, counting the shadows moving outside the paper walls. They were coming. They were always coming. And tonight, Booo had decided he was not going to run.

The first zombie crashed through the door like a wet sack of leaves. Booo didn't flinch. He exhaled slowly, dropped into his fighting stance, and waited for exactly the right moment. Then — kiyaa! — he leapt, spun, and kicked the zombie clean off its shuffling feet. “One,” he said, already turning for the next. The thing about zombies, Booo had learned, was that they were slow. But there were always so very many of them.

He ran along the wall, jumped off the wooden post, and flipped over three zombies at once. His feet hit the ground and he was already moving — quick hands, quick feet, think before they do. “Come on then,” he growled, bouncing on his toes. “Who's next?” The zombies groaned and lurched forward in a sluggish green wave. Booo grinned. This was the part he loved most: the moment before everything exploded into chaos.

For a while, it was almost beautiful. Every kick landed exactly right. Every jump cleared exactly the right distance. Booo felt electric — like lightning had crawled under his fur. “Block. Step. Strike,” he muttered to himself, the rhythm of his training clicking into place like a lock turning. He had practiced this a thousand times in the empty dojo. He had imagined exactly this. But imagining and doing, he was discovering, were very different things.

There was a zombie wearing a small yellow hat. Booo noticed it mid-kick and nearly tripped. He caught himself, recovered, and sent the yellow-hat zombie tumbling into two others. But the hat stayed in his mind, buzzing around like a confused moth. “Why does that one have a hat?” he asked nobody in particular. Nobody answered. The groaning continued. Booo pushed the thought away and kept fighting.

He climbed the rafter beam, balanced on one foot, and scanned the room below. He had knocked down at least twenty zombies. But twenty more were still shuffling through every gap in the walls. Booo breathed. Slow breath. Long breath. His sensei had said: when you feel small, breathe big. “I can do this,” he told himself firmly. “I trained for exactly this.” Then he saw something that made his stomach drop to his feet.

In the far corner of the dojo, there was a zombie who was not shuffling. This one stood straight. This one looked at Booo. This one wore an orange belt — exactly like his. “Oh,” said Booo. “Oh, that is not good.” He dropped from the rafter and landed in a crouch. His mind was running faster than his feet. A zombie who knew karate. He had not practiced for that.

They circled each other through the stumbling crowd. The zombie-with-the-belt was fast. Faster than the others. It mirrored Booo's footwork with horrible accuracy. “Block. Step—” Booo started. “—Strike,” the zombie finished, in a low, rumbly voice. Booo's fur stood on end. “How do you know that?” The zombie tilted its head. It almost looked amused. And then it attacked.

They crashed through a paper wall together. Booo rolled, came up fast, blocked a strike, jabbed back, blocked again. His arms ached. His legs burned. The zombie matched him move for move, like a dark reflection in a very bad mirror. “Think,” Booo gasped between blocks. “Think differently. Do something it doesn't know yet.” He needed a move he had never tried before. A move that didn't exist yet. He had about three seconds to invent one.

He dropped to his knees — which was absolutely not a real karate move — and the zombie swung over his head and hit the training post with a tremendous CLONGGGG. The bell at the top of the post rang. Loud. Clear. A single clean note. Every zombie in the dojo stopped. They all turned toward the sound. Booo stared at them. They stared at nothing. The bell was still humming. “Huh,” breathed Booo softly. “They follow the bell.”

He climbed to the training post in four quick moves. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his whiskers. He grabbed the rope. He pulled. BONNNGGG. All the zombies turned to the door. All the zombies walked toward the door. All the zombies shuffled, slowly and obediently, out into the moonlit night. The last one — the one with the yellow hat — paused in the doorway. It looked back at Booo. It waved.

Booo waved back before he could stop himself. Then he sat down on the cracked dojo floor, cross-legged, in the sudden silence, and began to laugh. It started as a small laugh. Then it got very large and extremely undignified. “A bell!” he wheezed. “I got through forty-seven zombies because of a BELL!” His ribs hurt. His face hurt. His orange belt had come slightly undone. He had never felt so wonderfully ridiculous in his entire life. And then the floor tilted.

Not a little. Not gently. The whole dojo tilted sideways like a boat in a storm. The walls went wobbly. The shadows stretched long and strange. Booo grabbed the training post, but his fingers went right through it like it was made of smoke. “Wait—” he said. The cracked floor dissolved beneath him. The moonlight went sideways. And everything went very, very warm and orange.

Booo opened his eyes. He was in his own bed. His gi was folded neatly on the chair. His orange belt hung on the door hook, exactly where he always left it. Morning light came through the window in thick yellow bars. On his pillow, right beside his nose, sat a tiny yellow hat. Booo stared at it for a long time. Then he sat up slowly and picked it up. “Huh,” he said.

He turned the hat over in his paws. It was real. Faintly dusty. Faintly cold, like stone. Outside, a bird called. The morning smelled like breakfast. Booo set the hat carefully on top of his folded gi. He went to the window, stretched his arms wide, and breathed in the ordinary, warm, un-zombie-filled morning. Then he looked back at the hat one more time. He didn't throw it away.