The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (35 page)

“Um, no. I was being sarcastic,” Edward said. “How exactly would you not know I’m the only Z7? You’re the one that made me.”

The old man looked puzzled. “I did?”

“You said you did,” Edward said. “When you called. You said you were the man who created me.”

“Oh, yes, well when you put it like that then I guess I did have something to do with creating a Z7, but that’s not what I really meant.”

“Then could you please finally explain it to me?”

“Yes, yes, I’m so sorry. This should call for a proper introduction. Edward Schuett, my name is Dr. Brendan Bloss and I am the man who created the Animator Virus.”

For several seconds the old library was exactly the way it had always been intended—completely quiet. Edward stood there with Rae beside him, but he had no clue what to say and Rae’s mouth hung open in shock. Dr. Bloss watched them both with what might have been amusement on his face, but it was hard to tell through his bushy beard. Finally one of them made a sound, but Edward didn’t realize what it was at first. A clicking noise came from Rae. When Edward looked over at her he realized she had just turned off the safety on Spanky.

“That’s a load of horseshit,” Rae said.

“It’s not,” Dr. Bloss said. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m senile enough to make random things up for no apparent reason.”

“There’s no way that could be true,” she said. “One man could never have done that.”

“One man didn’t,” Dr. Bloss said. “I was part of a team.”

“That was fifty years ago. If someone was actually responsible for it, they would be dead by now.”

“Really? ‘If someone was responsible for it?’ Did you honestly think no one was responsible? A single virus wiped out three-quarters of the human race in a completely unnatural way. Something like that doesn’t just happen at random in nature. Well, it does sometimes, actually. Maybe I’m not making my point right.”

“You did all this,” Edward said. He was surprised at just how calm and even his voice sounded. “You nearly destroyed all of humanity.”

“You make it sound like I would have done something like that on purpose. I didn’t.”

“Yet you admit to it,” Rae said. Edward noticed that her grip on Spanky had grown tighter. “Why would you tell anyone that you murdered the world?”

“Please don’t be dramatic. I told you we didn’t do it on purpose. But it’s not something I’d like to take to my grave. I’ve come to grips with the part I played in all this, and I need to make it right, if such a thing could ever be said to be right again. That’s why I’ve been seeking you out so desperately, Mr. Schuett. You are now the key.”

Edward looked to Rae. “Put the gun down.”

“It’s not up.”

“I can see it, Rae. It’s slowly going up to point at his head. Put it down. For now.”

It was the last two words that seemed to convince her. She lowered the rifle but didn’t put the safety back on. Edward was okay with that. Rage and anger at this man were only two of the roiling emotions in his head that he couldn’t possibly map at the moment. If what he said was true, then on some level he was responsible for the deaths of Julia and Dana, even Liddie. Edward knew it was ridiculous, putting the blame for the deaths of three random people on this fragile old man when the blood of millions more was ignored, but that was all it came down to for Edward right now. These next few minutes were the doctor’s chance to make amends, at least to Edward. Whether or not Rae would follow that reasoning was up to her, but for now Dr. Bloss could make his case.

“Explain,” Edward said to him. “Everything. Start at the beginning.”

“The beginning,” Dr. Bloss said. “Let’s see, where’s the beginning?” He actually turned around in place as though he were looking for it. “Oh! I suppose that would be Project: Queen.”

He paused, looking at them both as though that explained everything. Rae made a hurry-up motion with her hand. “Which is?” she prodded impatiently.

“I guess you could call it a sort of bio-weapons program. For the government. That’s how it all started out. Isn’t that how things always start out? Yes, something like that.”

“Those sons-of-bitches,” Rae said. “You can’t trust them now, so I guess you couldn’t trust them then.”

“Wait,” Edward said. “The government created a zombie virus as a biological weapon? How did they actually expect to control it?”

“They didn’t, because that is not what they were trying to do. I was part of project designed to add enhancements to certain soldiers. It was supposed to be a new way of communicating in combat, a method that could not be intercepted or hacked by enemies and could silently allow complex groups to coordinate their maneuvers. The basic idea started with how certain lower species communicate, and we were trying to find a way to get a similar effect in humans.”

“Pheromones,” Edward said. “It was never supposed to be about raising the dead, but about giving people a way to communicate through pheromones. Is that right?”

“Oh yes, very good. You’re correct, after a fashion. What we came up with was actually far more complicated than that, but the idea was similar.”

“I’m not sure I’m following that,” Rae said. “If these fair-o things were just about communicating, how did we end up with zeds?”

“The reanimated were a completely unexpected byproduct of something else we were trying to do with the project. We wanted to give soldiers these abilities, but we were having trouble doing it with any speed. We’d thought we had figured out how to manipulate DNA to the necessary glands and sensory organs, but the process was very slow and very painful. One of my colleagues thought he could speed up the process and essentially get the pain over with in one quick moment. He’s the one that made it into a virus. I assure you, the rest of us would have stopped him if we had known. I spent years trying to figure out the exact nature of it. What I concluded is that there was a flaw in the virus’s structure. It caused the new growth, but that growth was unstable and it tried to break down. Essential parts of the rest of the body would slow down almost to a stop to redirect all their energy into the new growth, which never quite finished and therefore never stopped. In attempting to heal the new growths, other parts of the body would try to heal rapidly too, at least to a point. That is why the reanimated appear dead yet don’t decay beyond a certain point.”

“If you worked for the government,” Edward said, “why did the CRS apparently not know any of this?”

“It was so secret that there was no official record of our science team,” Dr. Bloss replied. “We were stationed not far from here in Rockford. When the outbreak—or the Uprising, as people ended up calling it—began, the rest of my team was the first to be affected. I was lucky, I suppose. I chose the wrong, or maybe the right, moment to go get a late lunch from outside the facility. So I wasn’t in the main lab when it started. I still don’t know to this day who got infected first or how, but I was able to live and find shelter when things suddenly became much worse.”

“But someone in the government still had to know you were there, right?” Rae said. “You said you still have contacts everywhere.”

“You’re correct. There are still certain people who know I exist. Unfortunately, there are not as many as there used to be. If there were, I might have been able to get you sent directly to me, Mr. Schuett, and not to those brainless twits in the CRS.”

“Why not work with the CRS?” Edward asked. “If you’d been helping, you could have shared your research and knowledge with them and stopped things from getting as bad as they did.”

“Oh, there were times when I wanted to. Many times. Then I would find out from my contacts about how this person wanted to control the reanimated as a weapon, or how that person was experimenting on live human subjects. It’s something the government didn’t want the public to know, even if they did declare it in the public’s best interest. The final straw was Atlanta. My contacts were able to tell me things about what was happening in Atlanta before it was burned from the face of the planet. The Z5s and Z6s were no accident, no matter what official line the CRS may have given you, Mr. Schuett. It was people not taking the correct safety precautions, people jumping to conclusions without accurately putting them to the test first. In short, they were doing exactly what my team in Rockford had done, and I wasn’t going to be a part of that again.”

“Then here’s the question,” Edward said. “What does all this have to do with me? How did you make the first Z7? Why release me again out into the wild? Why did you pick me in the first place?”

Dr. Bloss blinked at him. “Mr. Schuett, what are you talking about?”

“What do you mean, what am I talking about? Look at me! I’m that theoretical Z7 the CRS was looking for all those years. If you were the one researching fixing the problem, why just let your answer out to wander in the world?”

Dr. Bloss looked away from them both. “I’m sorry. You seem to be operating under a false assumption. I didn’t do anything to make a Z7. You are purely an accident.”

“Wait, what? How can I be an accident?”

“You’re exactly what the CRS thought you were. Somewhere in your genetic makeup there was just something different. A tiny difference, maybe some junk DNA that wouldn’t even have affected you had you lived out your life naturally. But the virus, constantly trying to evolve, constantly trying to fix your DNA, finally got to a point where it could change. The mistake that was written into the virus in the first place was no longer a mistake when combined with the right random mix. I’m sorry, but you’re completely unplanned, and not part of some great plan to fix everything. You’re just a freak happening.”

Edward held one of the tables for balance.
Completely unplanned
. Everything that had happened to him had not been for a reason at all. Liddie’s death hadn’t been some sacrifice for a greater purpose, and worse yet there had never been a way to save her. There wouldn’t be a way to save anyone else, either.

“There’s no way to create a Z7 again,” Edward whispered. “I’m the only one.”

“I never said that,” Dr. Bloss said.

Edward looked back at him. “But you just said…”

“That you’re the only one, yes. That you happened purely without any intent, correct. But Z7s? That’s why I wanted you here all along. It happened once, it can happen again. I can be the one to do it.”

“You…you can bring others back? You can make people human again?”

“Only as far as you’ve come back. I don’t think I can ever reverse the change fully. But I do think that, with enough studying of you, I can make other reanimated into Z7s. Maybe not all of them. It’s all in a person’s DNA. But I can do it to some. With enough work, maybe one day I can even do it to most.”

“Zeds as humans again,” Rae whispered. “On a large scale.”

“We can do it, Mr. Schuett,” Dr. Bloss said. “You and I together.”

This was huge. It felt like something Edward should have needed to think about. If Dr. Bloss could really do this, it would change the world. Everything Edward had seen since waking up could be, if not exactly reversed, then at least repaired to some degree. But the colossal possible effects of this were not the first thing that came to mind. Instead he thought of Dana, of Julia, of Liddie. Lives that could have been saved if this moment had come sooner.

There was really nothing to think about.

“Where do we start?” Edward asked.

Dr. Bloss smiled. “We start by celebrating, I think.”

“Rae?” Edward asked. “Can we count on you to help us on this?”

“On the fixing of things or the celebrating?”

“Both, I suppose.”

“I don’t know what I can help fix, but I suppose there might be people who have a problem with helping zeds. I can be your security for that. As for celebrating, if there’s alcohol involved I’m sure me and the others can help.”

Edward smiled. “Do you think you can find something like that?”

“I’m sure we can figure something out.” She pulled out her walkie-talkie. “Hey, Cory. Guess what? I’ve got a special mission for someone.”

They all listened for an answer, but nothing came.

“Cory, you there?”

There was a pause. “Rae? We’ve got a serious problem. Some old acquaintances of both us and your friend Edward are here.”

“Who?”

“Merton and the CRS.”

Despite Dr. Bloss’s assurances that he would be fine at the library while they went to find out what was going on, Edward and Rae insisted he come with them. Edward wasn’t sure what Rae’s thoughts were on the matter, but he had a suspicion they wouldn’t be able to come back for him later. Unless this was just a small group sent here to scout the area and find if Edward or Rae was really here, the CRS and Merton wouldn’t be people they could fight off and expect to never come back. Their only option, as Edward saw it, was to run.

They all got into the car, and Rae sped down the roads without any of the care she had shown on the way here. Edward stared out the back window as the library disappeared behind them. All of Dr. Bloss’s research was in there, fifty years worth of studying zombies in a way the CRS had never even thought to try, right along with all of his equipment. If the doctor really could eventually find a way to turn all zombies into Z7s, he would have to start now from scratch. For a man as old as Bloss, there was no guarantee he could remember key details or even that he would live long enough to recreate it. But as long as they kept the old man with them and alive, they still kept hope.