The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (14 page)

“Years went by. For a long time, hygiene practices changed. Even today, you’ll still find some older people who are obsessive about it. Eventually things once again got under control on the coasts. By the time the CRS in Atlanta discovered the variations in zombies, the Z4s had started showing up. Now here’s where things start to get interesting, I think. The Z4s were slightly faster than the Z3s, which should have made them more formidable. But they didn’t spread the virus as fast, and Atlanta was having more ease keeping them under control. That’s when they started the tests on zombie specimens. They learned some new things about how the zombies worked, but most importantly they discovered that the Z4s weren’t infected with the more aggressive version of the virus after all. They were infected with an earlier version, nearly identical to what had been seen in the Z2s. Do you understand what I’m getting at here? The Animator Virus wasn’t mutated in these specimens. Instead, it was the zombies themselves who had changed long after they’d been infected.

“Everyone who is alive today probably owes their lives to the researchers there in Atlanta. Their work on the different types of zombies eventually led to more effective ways to hold them back. Since then we’ve eliminated all zombies in more urban areas, and they can only be found in occasional small hordes wandering around the countryside. Most people know not to go out that far anymore.”

“But that’s only four kinds,” Edward said. “Mendez mentioned earlier something about one called a Z7.”

Gates glared at Mendez. “Well, Mendez should know better than to let something like that just slip his lips unless he wants to be reassigned to some remote CRS facility in Cornhole, Idaho. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Yes, you’re correct. There are more known varieties. Two, in fact. Z5s and Z6s. And they are the reason the CRS has its main headquarters now at Land’s End instead of Atlanta. When the people in the Atlanta CRS started studying some of the captured Z4s, they accidently triggered something in a few of the zombies’ genetics. That’s what it boils down to, you see. The original person’s genes. Some react to the virus in one way, staying Z1s or Z2s, while others after some time turn into Z4s. Something has to be done to them to trigger the change into a Z5 or Z6. The Z5s were fast. And I mean very fast. They could sometimes chase down a dog running at full speed. And the Z6s had limited intelligence. Not a lot at all, but just enough. They could hide on purpose. Some could use tools. Between those two new strains, the CRS could no longer really hold them. They escaped. They infected everyone around them at a rate that exceeded the heyday of the Z3 strain. The government had no choice, really. They had to take care of it before the Z5s and Z6s could escape. They firebombed the city. Every man, woman and child who lived there was killed. To this day Atlanta still isn’t fit for humans.

“And then there’s you, Mr. Schuett. A zombie unlike any we’ve ever seen before, but there has long been speculation that something like you could exist, a zombie possessing full human memory and intelligence, complete human capabilities, and even looking human, but you still have a heavy concentration of a Z1 strain in your system. Version Z7.

“And it doesn’t seem likely to me that such a thing could exist by accident. I believe someone changed something in you on purpose, even though such experimentation has been forbidden for years. Someone went out of their way to create you—the world’s first super-zombie.”

Edward didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the flight, and Gates didn’t volunteer anything else. That was perfectly fine to Edward. What she had already said was more than he thought he could handle right now, anyway. He wasn’t comfortable with the way she continued to call him a zombie, since he failed to see what, if anything, really made him different from an ordinary human by this point (with the exception of the continued trips he had to make to the bathroom since his bowels continued to act more like a zombie than a regular person, but the less said about that the better). But Gates kept her distance from him, and Mendez continued to keep his gun out and pointed in Edward’s general direction.

He tried to keep himself distracted by watching through one of the windows as the land passed by below them, but the view, as breathtaking as it was in the sunset, still acted as a reminder that he was in the wrong time and a wrong world. Even though he had never flown before, he knew more or less what he was supposed to see as the jet flew over the Midwest. Julia had described to him once how all the roads and farmland turned the ground into a huge checkerboard pattern for as far as the eye could see, with the occasion town or city breaking it up. Those colossal squares seemed to be a thing of the past, though. He could sometimes see the outlines of where they had once been, but the roads that had divided them were fewer. He didn’t think that most of the land was crops anymore, either. Huge portions of the land had gone back to their natural states after fifty years of being left to themselves. Sometimes he thought he saw small patches that might have been farmland, but these were only near small, worn-looking settlements. If what Rae said was right, even that much development was rather new. It had taken such a short period of time for America to devolve back to an earlier state, it seemed.

Staring out at the empty land, it finally hit him just how much time had really passed. Everything he had known was gone, and there would be no such thing as familiar in this new world. Even Rae and Gates’ brief history lessons had done little to educate him. He had no idea who the president was, or what had happened to the president he remembered. He wasn’t even sure that America still
had
a president. For all he knew it had turned into a monarchy or something. NASCAR? Did that still exist? It had to in some form, right? Or had that been another aspect of his culture that had been neglected and forgotten when corpses had started shambling around and eating people? Baseball? Football? Mexican food? Did anything he had loved still exist?

Was Dana still out there somewhere?

He hadn’t realized he was crying until Gates handed him a Kleenex. Or maybe he should just call it a tissue. Maybe the Kleenex brand didn’t exist anymore.

“Thank you,” Edward said.

“You’re welcome,” Gates said. “What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing. Everything. Hey, I don’t suppose you could tell me who’s currently the king of the United States, could you?”

Gates gave him a funny look. “There is no king. There’s a president.”

“Good. That’s good to know.”

The jet landed long enough to refuel at some remote airport. Edward was allowed to get out and stretch a little, but he made sure not to wander very far. He remembered the sniper in Fond du Lac, and figured Gates would have likely called ahead to make sure there was similar security here. Again somebody went to get food—actual meals for Gates, Mendez, and the pilots, raw meat for him. He did his best to ignore his urge to gobble it down with only the bare minimum chewing. At least his hunger was no longer at the same level it had been before. And the people around him no longer smelled like food. That was a
very
good thing.

As near as Edward could tell, their refueling stop was somewhere just east of the Rocky Mountains. By that time it had grown completely dark, and he could no longer see anything they passed over. Only occasionally did he think he saw any lights to mark towns or settlements, but they were nothing but tiny far away dots.

He didn’t know how long he stared out the window, but when he stood to go to the bathroom again he realized that Mendez was asleep closer to the front of the cabin. Gates had his gun now, and while she didn’t keep it pointed at him she still kept it within easy reach. She had bags under her eyes by now, and her notebook was again in hand as she scribbled a few notes.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing down?” Edward asked.

“For starters, I writing that it appears you need less sleep than a human.”

“Could you please stop referring to me as though I’m
not
a human?”

All that got for a response was a few more jotted down notes.

“What do you mean I need less sleep? I slept before you found me.”

“But for how long?” Gates asked. “From what I’ve been told, you were only out of anybody’s sight for a few hours.”

“Yeah, I guess. Maybe an hour or two?”

“And here it is, quite late by your time zone, yet you don’t appear to be tired.”

Edward hadn’t thought of that. Ever since the tingling of regenerating wounds had dissipated and he’d gotten something to eat in his system, he hadn’t felt anything at all like fatigue. “Do zombies sleep?” he asked.

“Not any of the variations I’ve ever observed,” Gates said. “But I guess a Z7 must need to at least a little. Tell me, when you slept earlier, did you dream at all?”

Edward remembered the vague red-tinged memories he’d had while he’d napped in the shed. He still couldn’t recall any clear details, but he remembered enough to know they’d been somewhat violent and disturbing. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

Gates eventually slept, too. Maybe she forgot for the moment that he was supposedly dangerous, because she didn’t bother waking up Mendez first to watch over him. Initially he thought about trying to take the gun from her before she woke up, but that was just the part of him that resented the way he’d been treated so far. Taking the gun wouldn’t actually do anything useful in the long run. It wasn’t like there was anything he could do with it to get away while in the air. Also, although he had no delusions that he was anything other than a prisoner right now, he didn’t think he would try getting away even if he could. He had already learned more from Gates about what may or may not be happening to him than he had by himself or with Rae. Cooperating would hopefully get him even more answers.

Or it could get him dissected in the end, for all he knew. But going along with it seemed the only intelligent move for now.

He stopped staring at the gun and went back to staring out the window. He did, however, see out of the corner of his eye as Gates, apparently not sleeping at all, checked that the gun was still next to her before quickly writing something more in her notebook.

When he first started seeing lights on the ground, Edward at first thought he had to be hallucinating them. They started out sparse, but as the plane continued the lights became more concentrated.

“Excuse me,” Edward asked. “But where are we right now?”

Gates leaned over and looked out the window. “That’ll be us starting to come in over California.”

“Looks like the population is much denser down there.”

“It is. When the Uprising happened, those who weren’t complete rednecks realized there really would be safety in numbers and headed to the coasts. That way the government was better able to protect them. Those who decided they wanted to be the lone wolves ended up having to fend for themselves for years. It increased the population here but drastically depleted the population out in the wilds.”

That didn’t sound at all like what Rae had said, but Edward didn’t comment. He suspected that neither of those sides of history really told the whole story.

Although he wouldn’t have known exactly what cities should have looked like in the air back in his own time, he still suspected they wouldn’t have looked exactly like this. There didn’t appear to be much in the way of suburbs. The cities were bunched together into tighter masses with very little in between. It wasn’t until the plane started its decent, however, that Edward could really see how different things were.

“Is that Los Angeles?” Edward asked.

“Huh? Um, no. Los Angeles is much further south. That’s Stanford.”

“
That’s
Stanford?” He tried to remember anything he’d ever heard about Stanford, but there wasn’t much. He’d never had any reason to care one way or the other about the place. He’d heard of the university, of course, but didn’t know anything about the town around it. He was pretty sure it had been rather small. That was why it was a bit of shock to see it now as a bustling metropolis full of skyscrapers. “I don’t understand. How did it go from…um, whatever it was before, to this?”

“Once Atlanta was gone, the main branch of the CRS had to go somewhere. Stanford University was the second best source of research on the Animator Virus, so this is where it ended up. The government channeled a lot of money into here, and private companies, once they realized business wasn’t just going to cease because of the zombies, realized there was a lot of money to be made in everything from research equipment to CRS housing. It wasn’t like it was terribly easy at that time to ship things across the country or even have people live in suburbs. The result was the fastest growth for a city ever seen in the country’s history. And all of it is centered around Land’s End University and the CRS.”

Edward squinted, trying to get a better look at the details of the city, but they were still too high up and it was still too dark, even with the amazing amount of light the city seemed to give off. After fifty years he would have expected a city—especially one so new and modern—to be some barely recognizable future dome or some other such science fiction nonsense. Maybe there should have even been flying cars. But he couldn’t see anything like that. He supposed humanity had been too busy dealing with other things to bother with the future dreams of the past.

“Am I going to get to see any of it?” Edward asked.