The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (28 page)

“No no no no oh God no!” he screamed inside the van. Liddie was next to him, shaking him by the shoulder and telling him to wake up, it was only a dream, but he was already awake and the memory continued.

His fingers went right for the wound at her throat, where they found enough purchase under the skin to rip her throat clear off. Julia didn’t bother trying to pull off pieces but instead dropped to the floor next to their daughter’s body and bit into the face, her teeth popping Dana’s eye before pulling it from the socket and chewing. Dana still had enough life in her to try screaming at that, but all that came from the ruins of her throat was a wet gurgle. They continued eating, gorging themselves until their stomachs distended. And when it was all finally over, they both stood up and walked out the door in the direction of that sickly sweetness that had enticed them for so long. If there had been any part of them that had been aware of what they were doing to their own flesh and blood, it had been unable to surface through their bloodlust.

“No no no no,” Edward continued saying, but it was no longer a scream. He’d been so loud moments earlier that his throat already felt raw, but still he continued to mutter as the tears streamed down his cheek. The memory was so horrible, so overwhelming, that he thought he could still feel Dana’s hot blood covering him. As he came back to himself, however, he realized it was nothing so horrible. Liddie had joined him on his seat, and she clutched him tightly as he rocked and shivered.

“Shh, it’s okay,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

“No, no it’s not,” Edward said. “I killed her.”

She stopped rocking with him for a moment, then caught herself and joined him again in the gentle movements. “Who? Who did you kill?”

“Dana. I killed my Dana.” He knew that wasn’t technically true, since Dana had really been the one to take her own life, assuring that there was no way she would come back like her parents had, but it was true enough. And saying that he had killed her didn’t even feel as horrible as the truth. Simply killing his only daughter would have been the better option.

“Edward, it was just a dream.”

“No. No it wasn’t. She’s dead. She’s been dead all this time and I ate…” He couldn’t allow himself to finish. It was too much. Everything everyone had been saying about him all this time was true. He was not human. He was a monster, a disgusting thing that had no right to continue existing on this Earth. “Kill me,” he said. “Please, for the love of all that’s holy, you have to kill me now.”

“Edward, no. I won’t.”

“Kill me! I’m nothing! I’m a thing! I can’t…I don’t want to…”

“No,” she said softly. The word was so calm that it brought him back to himself a little, at least enough that he was able to look her in the eye.

“I don’t deserve to live,” he said.

“I won’t kill you, and I won’t let you hurt yourself either,” she said. “Not now, not ever.”

“But I’m a monster.”

“I never believed that, and I never will. That wasn’t you. You had no control over it. But you have control now, and I believe you’re strong enough to face it. You can go on. And I can help you, if you want me to.”

He saw that soft look in her eyes again, the same one he’d seen by the fire. She meant every word of it. She really believed. He didn’t think he’d be able to believe any of that without her.

There was no flutter in his chest this time, no anxious moment of anticipation. He moved his head toward hers, and the angle of his body against hers made the whole act clumsy, but their lips still met. Liddie was too shocked to do anything at first, but as soon as she recovered she pushed back, returning his kiss and gripping him tight to her. With her hands holding him he no longer shivered, and he moved around trying to get into a less awkward position without breaking contact. His hands brushed against her breasts, and although his first instinct was to recoil from the touch and apologize profusely he instead let them hover there, lightly touching them and enjoying the way they rose and fell against his palm. Then his hand went lower, sliding over the swell of her chest and down her stomach. Her own hands began to move lower, but they stopped just above his waist. She pulled away slightly, breaking the kiss, and spoke quietly through gasping breaths.

“Edward, are you sure you’re ready?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want you doing this if you’re going to regret it later.”

“Later I might regret not doing it.” She nodded. He wondered idly if this was love for her. It might be. He knew it wasn’t for him, not yet, but he thought it quite easy for the day to come when it was. She wasn’t Julia, and she never would be. But she was someone just as wonderful, just as beautiful, just as strong. He didn’t deserve her. A monster like him deserved nothing. And yet somehow she disagreed. She saw the man he had once been and could be again. He pressed his hand harder against her stomach and continued down as they kissed again, and she reached for the zipper of his coveralls.

The moment was awkward as they both removed each other’s clothes. The van had seemed spacious enough earlier, but now the roof seemed lower as they bumped it taking off their shirts, and the seat felt too small to accommodate both their bodies lying down, even one on top of the other. Yet at the same time the location seemed strangely right. They’d met in one of these vans, and now they were moving to the next level in one. But that was nothing compared to how correct it felt to Edward to touch her smooth bare skin. She was warm, full of life, so much different than anything he had felt for nearly fifty years. Touching her brought home the reality she had been trying to instill in him moments earlier. She was right in that he was different. He wasn’t a lifeless monster. He had blood pumping through his veins just like her.

As they made love the time seemed to have no meaning, just like when he’d walked the planet without any real life in his body, but unlike then he could still attach meaning to the moment. It was not a perfect moment, but he knew it was what they both needed. It was what they both had to have in order to feel truly alive.

They finished with her on top, and with a deep, satisfied breath she gently let herself down to lie over him on the seat. He held her back firmly, enjoying every time her chest pressed against his from her breath. She chuckled softly for no apparent reason.

“Something funny?” he asked.

“No, not something you’d find funny at least.”

“How do you know without trying it on me?”

“Heh. Well, the thought just occurred to me that you’re pretty okay at that for someone who hasn’t practiced in fifty years.”

He chuckled too. “Better yet, think of it this way. You just made love to someone old enough to be your grandfather.”

“Ew, we’re not even going to talk about that. For all intents and purposes in my mind you’re only a few years older. Which is funny, since I’m the one who’s completely exhausted. You look like you could go again.”

He said nothing to that, instead caressing her back and enjoying the way it felt under his hand. She felt a little cold, though. Next time they would need to find themselves a blanket or something.

“Edward?” she asked. “Are you going to be okay? I mean, both about us and about, you know, what you remembered?”

“We’ll deal with any problems as they come up. Right now, are
you
okay?”

“I…I just feel cold, is all.”

“We should get you dressed again. We can snuggle again after that.”

“No, not yet. Don’t let…let…don’t let go…”

She started shivering against him.

“Liddie? Is something wrong?”

“Edward? Don’t let…Edward?”

“Jesus, Liddie. You’re practically shaking. Are you sure…” He looked into her eyes, knowing instantly that look. She was scared. Terrified, in fact. Somewhere among all the memories that he had recovered since waking up, something about this moment seemed familiar, but his brain wouldn’t let him face it yet.

Her chest heaved several times against him in quick succession, and then stopped.

“Liddie? Liddie, what’s going…” That mental block in his head finally moved, and he realized exactly what was happening. “No, oh God no. Liddie! Wake up! Don’t do this!”

There was nothing really for her to wake up from. Her eyes were still open, staring directly down into his, but they were unfocused, without any inner light. She moved, squirming slightly on top of him, but there was no rhythm or purpose to any of it. Her chest didn’t move, and there was no rhythmic thumping of her heart from behind her breast. But worst of all was the way she smelled, starting off small and barely noticeable but growing quickly.

Edward continued to hold her tight, calling her name softly as the van filled with the scent of honey.

Edward spent the rest of the longest night of his life outside under the stars. He hadn’t been able to stay in the van. The pheromones had been so strong that he couldn’t block them out, and they mixed with the scent of lovemaking. He couldn’t stand that right now. He didn’t even bother to put his clothes back on. He simply closed the door of the van behind him, leaving her trapped until he could figure out what had to happen next.

For several hours he tried not to think of anything at all, but eventually he didn’t feel he had any choice but to go back to that horrible moment and try figuring out what had happened.

Edward went to stand next to the van and put a hand against the window. There was still some fog inside the windows from their lovemaking, but enough of it had cleared away that he could see her shape inside the dark van. Every moment he stood there he hoped something would prove that he had been mistaken, that she really wasn’t infected.
Infected
. That was the only word he could use to describe her right now. He didn’t dare use the Z or the R words.

She barely acknowledged him. She sat on the seat, the very same seat where they had just been loving and caressing each other, but she couldn’t quite get the posture down, like her legs didn’t want to bend and let her rest. She kept trying to rise, bumping her head on the ceiling and forcing her to plop back down. He knocked softly on the window once, hoping to get some sort of reaction to make himself believe she was still in there. She turned her head at the noise, but nothing else.

This was his fault. There was no way to deny that, but he hadn’t quite figured out how yet. Had he maybe bitten her in the heat of the moment? Possibly, although he didn’t remember that. It hadn’t even occurred to him, nor probably her, that something as simple as a love bite could be dangerous from him. He’d heard from numerous doctors that he still carried the Animator Virus, but he’d all but forgotten that his bite would then have the same effect as that of any other zombie.

He thought back to the moments before and during sex, and he shook his head. No, that couldn’t be it. He went over every moment, every movement of both their bodies, but there hadn’t been a bite. He was sure of it. Perhaps…could it have been the kissing? Out of all those times that they had almost kissed only to have him decide against it at the last moment, had he been unknowingly saving her life from him? He thought back to what he remembered about becoming a zombie, about how long it had taken for Julia to turn after she’d been bitten or after she had bitten him. He supposed that with a simple kiss the virus might have taken longer to enter her system, but that didn’t seem correct either. He thought about the AIDS virus and how it supposedly could not be passed through kissing. That must have meant something about the mouth prevented it from spreading or something like that, right? So what else could it have been…

He gasped and slid down to a sitting position against the side of the van as the answer finally came to him. Given the amount of time it had taken for the virus to take hold of her, he could work backward and figure out right about the moment she had been infected. What had she been exposed to just a minute or two beforehand that she hadn’t been exposed to before? His semen. The virus had passed to her when he had come inside her.

He was the first person in human history to pass on the Animator Virus as an STD.

He had a fresh bout of crying for several minutes before he wiped away the tears, stood up, and looked back inside the van. There was no noticeable change. She still didn’t even look dead. Except for the vacant look in her eyes and the loose way she held her limbs, she could have passed for being alive. She wouldn’t look like that in a few days, or maybe even a few hours. Her skin would sag and take on a sick hue. Soon her flesh would begin to rot, her eyes might gloss over with cataracts, her blood would darken to near-black. Anyone who saw her would forget that she had once been anything other than infected. They would forget because none of them understood the way he did: this wasn’t the end.

The revelation came to him and made his breath catch in his throat. Or course it wasn’t the end. He had told her as much when they’d buried Timothy North in the Nevada desert. Her mind was gone and everything that made her who she was had retreated to the deepest depths of her brain, but she could continue on like this for a very long time. She could be hurt or damaged in so many ways, yet as long as there was no damage to her head she could survive anything else. And she could come back. Somewhere in her Liddie still existed, a whole person hidden and waiting to return exactly like Edward had. Edward remembered the brief moments in his memories where he had nearly felt his old awareness return, just long enough to feel some sort of kinship with the woman he had loved. Did Liddie feel that same thing now? When he was next to her, did she still feel a connection she was incapable of understanding? Edward bet she did. And he could bring all of that back.