The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (10 page)

Trying to keep herself calm, Rae entered her apartment building and carried her bike up the three floors to her apartment. It would be best if she acted like nothing special was going on. The people from Merton would probably be waiting for her either outside her apartment or, if Johnny was with them and had his key, inside. They would wonder why she had left her job early, but Rae thought she could come up some story that would suitably cover her tracks. The important thing was that they not think she’d had any more contact with Edward other than the brief interaction at the gate. She was just some random peon who had seen something weird and asked a few questions about it. Nothing special, nothing worth talking about further.

The skuzzy hall outside her apartment was empty, but as she approached her door she thought she heard voices coming from inside. Taking a deep breath, she tried the handle to find that the door was already unlocked. Putting on an expression that she hoped was suitably confused and disturbed, she went in.

“Hello?” she asked. “Johnny, is that you?”

“I’m here,” Johnny said. He sat on the sofa in her front room, and stood as she came through the door. The other three people with him stood as well. Rae pretended to be surprised to see them.

“Oh,” she said. “Um, hello? Who are all you?”

“Rae, this is my immediate supervisor, Lauren Aguilar,” Johnny said, gesturing at the stout woman immediately to his left. “I told her everything you told me on the phone.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure that was nothing anyway.”

“Nothing?” Aguilar asked. “Johnny said you saw a zed that could talk.”

“Yeah, it did,” Rae said. “But I’m sure there’s got to be a logical explanation. Zeds just don’t do that.”

“You’re right, they don’t,” one of the other two men in the room said. He was well-built, balding, and stood ramrod straight in a finely cut suit. The other man wore a similar suit, although he was shorter and had a full head of dark hair. “So if you saw one that did, we need to take this very seriously. More seriously than you seem to be.”

Rae went rigid. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure she could control this situation. “I’m sorry, and who are you?”

“My name is Jean DuFresne,” the balding man said. “And my associate here is Mallicka Patal. We are both here representing the CRS.”

Rae’s breath caught in her throat. The Center for Reanimation Studies. Zombie researchers. “Oh, um, hello. I had no idea that you would be able to get here so fast. I assume you’re going to want to find this zed now and study him.”

“No ma’am,” Patal said. “We are not here to study him. We are not actually with the organization itself. They have merely hired us for security purposes.”

“I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean,” Rae said. She glanced at Johnny. He was staring at the floor, fidgeting. “Johnny, what’s going on?” He still wouldn’t look at her. “Johnny, answer me.”

Finally he looked up. “I’m sorry, Rae. But they say this is very dangerous stuff. That zed is supposed to be…” He paused as he stared at her hands. “Rae, where’s Spanky?”

Rae debated whether or not she should continue lying at this point. There was obviously more going on here than she had anticipated. Maybe Edward was dangerous. Maybe there had been something about him that he hadn’t been telling, or something he hadn’t realized was wrong. But it wouldn’t feel right to just turn on him because she didn’t know what was going on. She hadn’t really known what was going on to begin with, after all.

“I think I left him in the gatehouse,” Rae said.

“No, you would have gone back for him,” Johnny said. “You never just leave Spanky anywhere. For God’s sake, you take him to bed with us.”

Rae blushed, looking at the three other people in the room. Aquilar looked like she was trying not to laugh, but DuFresne and Patal looked alarmed.

“Did you leave your weapon in the truck, ma’am?”

Rae stopped breathing for several second. “How… uh… what truck?”

“The truck that dropped you off,” DuFresne said. “The one with the zombie in the back.”

“No, wait,” Rae said. “How did you…”

“We were watching you, ma’am,” Patal said, his voice sounding panicked. “We had people watching the truck when it pulled up. Now answer the Goddamned question! Is your weapon in the truck?”

Rae looked at everyone as her heart beat faster, then shrugged. “Yes. I left it in the back.”

“Shit!” DuFresne reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a cell. He hit two buttons then put it to his ear and shouted into it. “The Z7 is armed! Do you hear me? If it looks like it’s about to fight back, you have official permission to blow its head off!”

Edward slumped further in the truck as it pulled away from Rae’s building. The woman had done many things so far that would lead him to trust her, but there was still a fear in the back of his mind that she would turn him in. He couldn’t help it. His nerves were too frayed from everything that had happened so far. Earlier he had been able to maintain something resembling calm, but now he felt the shakes coming on. All of this was too much for one man to deal with. He wanted to curl up in the cage and go to sleep in hopes that he would wake up and none of this had happened. But he had already been to sleep once and woke to find the whole world was still a nightmare. He didn’t think it would work a second time, either.

He looked up as the truck came to the end of the block and saw Rae staring after him, and again he doubted for a moment her intentions. Maybe she was staring because she thought she wasn’t going to see him again. Maybe Ringo was taking him in to whoever was in charge and she had known all along. That didn’t make any sense at all, especially with the door unlocked and only held shut by a metal latch, but he still dwelled on it.

Then he saw her rifle on the floor of the cage near the door and smiled. Right, that made much more sense. She hadn’t been staring at him, she’d been staring at “Spanky.” He sat up a little and leaned over to pick up the gun. Before the Uprising and his reawakening he’d known as much about guns as most men in Wisconsin. He’d gone deer hunting every November and had kept a locked cabinet full of hunting rifles in his den. He would have thought he would recognize the make and model of Rae’s rifle, but he didn’t. It looked similar to the rifles he had used during his brief time in the Army, but besides the obvious customization there were other differences. It was lighter, for one thing, and didn’t appear to have any wood or metal in its composition. He wasn’t quite sure where to load the bullets, either.

Edward nodded, admiring it. He supposed all the differences made sense. This was fifty years from the time he knew, after all. From what Rae had said, the world had gone through a short dark age and then came out of it to rediscover all the ways and technology of before, but one thing that had continued to evolve through that whole time would have been weapons. Weapons manufacturers would have developed guns specifically for use against zombies. Technology had probably temporarily gone back to the Middle Ages, but mankind hadn’t been willing to go back to axes and arrows. Humanity hadn’t been able to afford that sort of leap backward.

He set the rifle back down. He really did want to sleep, but he supposed he should concentrate right now on what he should be doing next. Rae had been able to fill in some gaps in history, but he knew none of the information that was important to him. If this Merton Security company was so intent on getting a hold of him, and admittedly he wasn’t sure yet why or even
if
they really were, then that would make it difficult for him to find someone that might give him answers about why he was different than other zombies. As much as that weighed on his mind, though, the question he wanted answered most was about Dana. Rae had given him a place in time to start looking for her, but his gut filled with fear at what he might find. If she was alive still she would be fifty-six or seven by now. She likely wouldn’t even recognize him. And what if she wasn’t alive anymore? Neither of Rae’s parents were still alive, and they had both survived long after the Uprising. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, it might be easier for him in the long run if Dana’s fate remained a mystery.

There was Julia too, and although he hadn’t allowed himself to hope before, it suddenly occurred to him that she might still be out there as well. She had become a zombie before he did, he realized that, but whatever it was that made him special could have made her different, too. Even if it hadn’t, she could still be wandering around out there somewhere, and if he could come back from being undead then he could find a way for her to come back, too.

He closed his eyes and put his hands to his forehead. No, he couldn’t allow himself to think like that. He couldn’t allow himself to get his hopes up over something that was so ridiculously implausible. His wife was gone, and probably so was his daughter. They were probably both dead, or undead, or undead and then dead again if someone had killed or destroyed them after they had come back. There was no chance he could ever have them back. Everything he had ever wanted and worked for in his entire life was more than likely gone.

Tears began rolling down his cheek, but Edward didn’t have the time to cry properly before the truck’s brakes screeched and he slammed against the side of the cage from the momentum.

“Ow! Shit, Ringo, what the hell?” Edward said as he banged on the back window. But unlike when Rae had knocked, Ringo didn’t answer.

“Ringo?” Edward said, poking up his head to look through the window. Ringo was staring straight ahead, his hands tight and white on the wheel. Edward was about to ask what he was looking at, then looked through the front window.

Two cars had pulled across the street in front of them, blocking the way forward. They were newer, unidentified models, just like the ones Edward had seen in front of Rae’s apartment.

Edward turned around to see two more cars pull up behind the truck. They stopped about fifty feet behind, and for several seconds no one in any of the vehicles moved.

Edward’s first thought was that Rae had set him up after all. She had known this was going to happen, right? But that was stupid. There was the cage door, and also if she had set him up she wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave the rifle behind where he could grab it. Or maybe she just hadn’t thought a zombie would ever be smart enough to operate a rifle. Or maybe…

Or maybe nothing. Rae probably hadn’t known this was going to happen, but it didn’t matter to Edward right now. All the mattered was that all his hopes at being able to do anything about his new condition and life were wrecked before he’d had any chance at all. He was screwed, all because some agency he’d never even had a reason to hear of before today suddenly decided that he might be a threat or might be something interesting to dissect. None of these people cared that he was going through hell and he had no family anymore and no friends in the God-forsaken new world.

And he was sick of it. Without thinking of it anymore, he cleared away enough of his tears to see, then scrambled for the rifle from where it had skidded when the truck stopped.

“Stop!” someone screamed, and Edward ducked down in the truck bed as a gun went off and a bullet whistled past somewhere over his head.

“Holy shit, what the fuck is going on?” Ringo screamed from the front, but Edward ignored him. Instead he looked at the rifle in his hand. The trigger, at least, looked exactly like any other he had ever seen. He could use it if he must, although he had no idea how many bullets it had. He searched for the safety to make sure it was off, not even sure if the rifle had one, and he heard several car doors in front of and behind the truck open and many people get out.

“Confirmed,” a female voice said from somewhere behind the truck. There was another sound as a car raced down the street towards the altercation, but that seemed incidental to Edward at the moment. “We have the Z7 trapped and it is armed.”

There was a squawk from a walkie-talkie followed by a static-covered voice that Edward couldn’t make out, but he could tell that the voice on the other end was frantic.

“Driver!” a man called out from in front. “Get out of the truck now and step away from the vehicle.”

Ringo’s door opened just enough for him to call out. “On whose God-damned authority do you think you’re doing this?”

“Joint task force from the CRS and Merton. You are harboring a biological weapon.”

Biological weapon
? That was almost funny enough to make Edward snicker. Fifty years may have passed, but the government still used the same terminology. Then he realized that
he
was supposed to be the so-called biological weapon. There was no way the government would react the same way for any other zombie out there. He had to wonder just what it was that they thought was so dangerous about him.

“You people are absolutely crazy!” Ringo said, but he slowly opened the door and got out of the truck, keeping his hands up in the air as he stepped away. “You rat-shit government bastards better not harm my truck, you got that?”

“Step clear, sir,” the male voice said again, and Ringo left Edward’s limited vision from in the bed.

“You, the zombie in the truck!” the female voice said. “We know you can understand us and we know you can use that rifle. Throw it out of the truck now!”

He was surrounded, and they had already shown that they were willing to fire on him. His hands tightened on the rifle, shaking, and he stared down at them. They were mostly healed, with only a few smaller spots of missing flesh and a slightly unhealthy color to his skin. He probably looked nearly back to normal, but he didn’t think any of these people would care. He was just a monster to them. They didn’t give a shit that he could feel and think, that he was in pain and mourning his family and angry that everything had been taken away from him. These people would never care. And they wouldn’t care for a single second if he stood up right now and they all had to shoot him down. If he really was still a zombie then he might be able to survive bullets to most of his body, but a single headshot would kill him for real.