The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (15 page)

Gates looked thoroughly amused. “This isn’t a vacation, Mr. Schuett.”

“So what then? Are you going to be sticking me in some cage as soon as we land?”

“This isn’t a prison either.”

“Just what the hell are we going to be calling it then?”

“Call it…a hospital stay. An extended one.”

“And is this hospital stay ever going to actually end?”

Gates didn’t answer. She just put her hand back on her gun. He supposed that was answer enough.

Unlike the other two airfields where they had landed, the airport in Stanford was a full-fledged commercial one, or at least as far as Edward could tell. He only got a brief glimpse of it as the plane taxied down the runway. It took a couple of minutes before he was allowed to go for the door and stairs, as the plane didn’t actually go up to a terminal, but instead stopped near a makeshift military-looking station where someone erected a curtain around the door. Edward could still see things from out of the windows, so he could only assume the curtain was there to keep anyone from seeing him.

There was a plain-looking van waiting to pick him up within the curtained-off area. It was hard not to notice the very distinct difference in style between this thing and the vehicles he had seen in Fond du Lac. Most of the cars and trucks there had been older and run down, sure, but even the nicer car Gates had picked him up in looked more like the cars he remembered from his own time than this thing did. Somehow it managed to look blocky and sleek at the same time. Also, the tires didn’t appear to be made out of rubber, but some kind of plastic. If the van was typical of the difference between Wisconsin and California, then he couldn’t even begin to guess what other styles and materials and technologies had changed.

Three people waited outside the van as they came down the stairs. One was obviously a guard, evident by both the studied way he stood next to the open back door of the van with his hands clasped behind his back and the rather large handgun he had in a shoulder holster. The second person, an Indian woman in her late forties, was dressed in a neat suit that would have made Edward mistake her for a business executive if it weren’t for the satchel in her hand and the stethoscope around her throat.

The third person made Edward do a double take. If the girl standing there had been twenty years older, an inch or two taller, and had maybe a few more pounds on her, then she would have looked exactly like Danielle Gates. She even wore a nearly identical suit.

Neither the guard nor the doctor paid Edward much mind as he approached with Gates ahead of him and Mendez behind. Gates’ lookalike, however, stared right at him, her eyes roaming up and down like she was trying desperately to see every part of him at once. She appeared surprised by whatever she saw.

“This must be him,” the doctor said, but she still didn’t acknowledge Edward, instead directing the comment to Gates.

“Correct,” Gates said. “You’ll want to do your own tests, I’m certain. The PVA that inbred yokel doctor used on Mr. Schuett here back in Wisconsin looked ancient and about as reliable as Shannon Casanova at a tennis convention, but it did appear to confirm our suspicions. This here is our not-so-mythical Z7.”

The doctor gave Gates a grudging look. “We’ll just see,” she said.

Edward wasn’t sure what confused him more: that something was obviously going on between Gates and the doctor that they probably weren’t going to tell him, or all the words and expressions Gates had just used that were completely beyond his comprehension.

“There is no way,” the younger version of Gates said. Unlike the doctor, she spoke directly to Edward. “There has to be some mistake. You don’t look like a reanimated at all.”

“Liddie, why are you even here?” Gates asked the younger version of herself. “You’re supposed to be supervising the Althocain trials.”

“Mom, really, what the hell is there even to supervise? You inject the Althocain into a human, it does nothing. Inject it into a reanimated, it jerks around for a couple hours. Just like all the other test runs. Pardon me if I thought this was more important. And interesting.”

“You’re not going to move up in the CRS if you keep shirking your duties like this,” Gates said.

“Then stop giving me duties a monkey can do.”

The doctor gave both women a poorly hidden sneer as she set down her case and opened it to pull out another device like the one the doctor had used in Wisconsin. This one looked more compact, but otherwise Edward couldn’t see much of a difference. Assuming these things were the PVAs Gates had mentioned, he couldn’t see why this one would be any superior to the other.

A fold out table had been set up near the van, and the doctor set the PVA on it and proceeded to pull out a needle to draw blood. Edward didn’t wait for her to ask and rolled up his sleeve. The doctor’s eyes went wide and Liddie gasped. Even the guard fidgeted a little.

“Holy Christ on a cracker,” Liddie said.

Edward frowned and looked at Gates. “Did I do something wrong?”

“That’s…that’s not possible,” the doctor said.

“What?” Edward asked. “Could someone please fill me in here?”

“You rolled up your sleeve,” Gates said.

“So?”

“The reanimated don’t see that someone is about to draw their blood and then roll up a sleeve to help. They try to eat the person instead. Also, I’d guess Dr. Chella is a little surprised that you’re speaking.”

Dr. Chella started to repack her case. “This is ridiculously childish, even for you, Gates. You come back here with your supposed Z7 and it’s a fake. Not only is it a fake, but not even a very good one. Well this is it. I’m reporting your little prank directly to the president, do you hear me? You’re finally done.”

Edward looked at Gates, who did nothing but stare at Dr. Chella with a smirk. The doctor finished packing up again and turned to the guard. “Well, are we going to get out of here?”

Now it was the guard’s turn to look confused. “Ma’am, um, Director Gates hasn’t given us permission to leave.”

“Chella, are you done throwing your hissy fit now?” Gates asked. “Because the Z7 still has his sleeve rolled up for you.”

“I am so sick and tired of all your…” Dr. Chella began, but Gates cut her off.

“Whether you like to admit it or not, I am your boss. And as your boss I am ordering you to take Mr. Schuett’s blood and test it.”

Chella glared at Gates and Edward, even throwing an evil eye at Liddie despite the young woman having done nothing except suppress a giggling fit during the whole exchange, then unpacked her equipment once more. The tests were pretty much the same as the ones conducted on Edward in Wisconsin, except for the fact that Dr. Chella was decidedly less careful where she stuck the needle in his arm. She had to jab him three times in all before she finally found the vein, probably because she didn’t even bother to look at his arm for the first two tries. When she finally tested his blood both she and Liddie leaned over to intently watch as the little screen showed the results.

“That’s impossible,” Dr. Chella said.

“Yeah, I’ve been hearing that a lot lately,” Edward said.

“You really are a reanimated,” Liddie said.

“You know, I’m starting to think I really don’t like being called that any more than I like being called a zombie,” Edward said.

“This is…this is insane,” Dr. Chella said. “There cannot be an honest-to-God Z7.”

“I think it’s time you and I finally had a long overdue talk,” Gates said to her. She turned to Liddie. “You really want something new to do? I’ll have you be the one to escort Mr. Schuett to Land’s End. It will give the doctor and I some time to go over what this all means.”

Liddie gave her mother a mock salute, then held the back door open for Edward to get in. “After you, good sir. If I can call you sir, that is.”

Edward sighed. “I suppose it’s a step better than ‘reanimated.’“

Liddie took the seat next to him while the guard went around and got in the driver’s seat. Once Liddie slid the door closed he could no longer hear any of the conversation between Gates and Chella, but he could still hear them talking very heatedly.

“It’s comforting, really,” Edward said.

“What is?” Liddie asked.

“After fifty years, at least one thing is still the same. The government officials still act like spoiled brats.”

Liddie’s laugh felt like the first normal thing he’d heard since he’d woken up in the Walmart.

When Dana was seven, Edward and Julia had made plans to go to Chicago for a weekend with her. That had been about the time Dana had begun an obsession with dolphins, and Julia had thought it would be a good idea to take her to the Shedd Aquarium for her birthday. But it hadn’t been the dolphins and aquarium that Edward himself had been excited about. It had been the buildings of downtown. He’d spent all of his life in Wisconsin, and most of it just in Fond du Lac. Skyscrapers weren’t something he’d ever had a real chance to see. He’d briefly seen some of the towers in Milwaukee on the rare occasion he got to go see a Brewers game, but he knew Chicago would make Milwaukee look like a bunch of shacks. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d been so excited to see them. There had just been something about the idea that tiny people could really build things so huge. He never got to see them, however. He’d busted his foot pretty bad at work the week before Dana’s birthday. They’d had to skip Chicago that year, even though they all promised themselves they’d do it the next year. They never did.

That memory came back to Edward as the van drove through the new (or at least new to him) version of Stanford. There were several skyscrapers, all with designs and architecture he would have never been able to imagine. One even looked like a hundred-story pyramid. It was breathtaking. Unlike on the plane, it suddenly became a lot easier to forget his current situation.

It helped that Liddie Gates didn’t have the same severe and serious aspect as her mother. The young woman smiled at him the whole time they drove. She also didn’t take the precautions her mother had. There was no gun pointed at him during this journey, no notebook, and certainly no talk about preserving his soiled underwear.

“So, um, hi,” Edward said.

“Oh, hi! I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t really do a formal introduction. I’m Claudia Gates, but I prefer…”

“Liddie. That much I got,” Edward said. “I’m Edward Schuett.”

“Edward? Not Ed or Eddy?”

“No, Edward. My dad was never big on nicknames. A career military man. Everything always had to be exact with no shortcuts.”

“Well it’s good to meet you, Edward.” She held out her hand for him to shake. Edward didn’t take it. He just stared at it.

“Is there something wrong?” Liddie asked.

“It’s just…not a lot people have offered to shake my hand over the last twenty-four hours. Most of them have either tried to cage me or shoot me.”

“You don’t have to shake it if you don’t want to,” Liddie said, but she didn’t pull her hand back. The smile never left her face.

Edward hesitated, then took her hand. He couldn’t help but smile back.

“Can I ask you something?” Edward asked.

“Probably, but I reserve the right to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about if it’s something I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Are there a lot of things you’re not supposed to tell?”

“In the CRS? Of course. What else would you expect?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve ever heard of the CRS before today.”

“What, have you been living under a rock?”

“No, apparently I’ve been a zombie.”

“Oh. Uh, right. So what did you want to ask?”

“That thing back there. What was that? Between your mom and the doctor?”

Liddie’s smile finally disappeared as she rolled her eyes. “That horrible witch of a woman keeps making power plays and failing.”

“Uh, I’m assuming you’re calling the doctor the witch, and not your mother?”

“Oh, don’t make the mistake. My mom can be a horrendous bitch too when she wants to be, and that’s usually quite often. But the difference between them is that Mom is good at it.”

“I’m still afraid I don’t completely understand.”

“Dr. Chella wants Mom’s job, and has used every excuse she can possibly think of to get it. For the longest time, I was her pet reason.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can run circles around Chella when it comes to almost anything regarding the CRS. I grew up there. I’ve never even really been anywhere else. I know all the science about the reanimated and I know every theory, every computer. Hell, I could give you a reasonable prediction of what each scientist at the center will bring in for lunch. But I don’t actually have a degree in anything, so Chella’s tried to prove I have no right to all the responsibilities Mom sticks me with. But she eventually got shot down on that one by the president himself. She knew her reputation was on the line, so the next thing she decided to latch on to was Mom’s pet theories about reanimated evolution. Chella said there was no hard proof. Except now Mom has it, I think.”

“You think? If I understand all this Z7 stuff, and admittedly I’m not really sure that I do completely, then I’m all the proof she needs, ain’t I?”