The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (6 page)

Edward was too preoccupied with making sure the brats were perfect, that sweet spot where they were cooked all the way through but not darker than a deep brown on any side, to notice that Julia went around to the side of the house to the front. He did hear, however, when she screamed.

The first thing he did when he heard the scream, even before he had checked for Julia, was to look for Dana. She was still on the swing set, sitting at the top of the slide, but her little six-year old eyes were wide as she looked in the direction of the side of the house. Edward turned to look at the same place and completely forgot about the brats.

Julia was running toward him holding her left wrist. He could see the blood dripping from it and splashing on the grass as she ran, but he didn’t yet fully register that she was hurt. As he abandoned the grill and went to stop her in her panicked flight he became aware that hers wasn’t the only scream in the air. Somewhere else in the neighborhood there were other screams, men and women both, as well as other noises he couldn’t quite identify yet. The noises were loud and yet deep, like the wind blowing through empty canyons, sounds that had no right being heard in a quiet neighborhood in Heartland America.

“Get Dana inside! Get her inside!” Julia screamed, and even though Edward had no idea what was happening his instincts told him to do exactly what she said. He ran to the swing set and grabbed his daughter as Julia ran in the house through the back door, and as he was pulling the startled and now crying girl off the slide he looked in the direction Julia had come from. He saw the first of the monsters coming around the side of the house, a creature that looked human except for its uneven walk and the unidentifiable guts hanging from the wide gash in its stomach. His hand went up to cover Dana’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t help but continue staring even as the thing shambled closer, and only when he saw a second one coming up behind the first did he realize he should be running for the safety of the house.

As soon as he was through the door Julia slammed it behind him, although she wasn’t able to manage much force. She looked pale, and the blood was still flowing from her arm at an alarming rate. He set Dana down in the living room and ran to get something to bandage Julia’s arm, although all he’d been able to find on such short notice had been a couple of t-shirts. They at least slowed down the blood, and while Julia slouched exhausted in Edward’s arms he had stared out the living room window to see all the insane carnage going on outside. He had no idea what those things were or what they wanted, but they were ravenous, attacking anything that moved and ripping it apart with their teeth.

Edward didn’t know how long he sat there watching, but when he came to his senses again he realized Dana was no longer in the room with them. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. When he tried to move Julia out of the way so he could go look for Dana, however, she didn’t budge. She was just dead weight in his arms. That scared him at first until he noticed her shivering. He put a hand to her head, ready to test for a fever or something, and that was when she bit him.

He remembered yelling and pulling away from her as she first fell to the floor and then began crawling after him. He moved away, suddenly very frightened of the vacant and unfocused look in her eyes, but all memories after that faded to a hazy intense blur in his mind. All he could remember was the smell of burning brats coming in through the window, and with that he had begun to feel very, very hungry.

The shed he was in now didn’t have any windows, but it was poorly constructed enough that light shone through several wide gaps in the roof slats, and Edward used the feeble light to look at his hand where Julia had once bit him. His arm still looked rotted and festered, although decidedly less so than it had when he had first woken up. His body really did appear to be healing itself. There was a faint outline near his thumb and forefinger that might have once been the impression of teeth, but they wouldn’t have been recognizable if he hadn’t known what he was looking for. It might even have just been his imagination. He continued staring for a long time until he was finally able to forcibly accept the truth.

Everyone he had met so far was right. Edward was a zombie. Or at least he had been one yesterday. He had no idea what he was now.

With her rifle Spanky slung on a strap over her shoulder, Rae biked through the streets of Fond du Lac to the North Side. According to what little history Rae knew about the city, the northern end had once been the site of Lakeside Park. Her parents had once told her that the park had included a playground and various rides, all situated on the shore of beautiful Lake Winnebago. The lake was still there, as well as the marina and historic lighthouse that had lit the way for boats to get into the harbor, but everything else had changed. The playground equipment and broken down carousel had been hauled away long ago, and all the canals that had wound their way through the park had been filled in. The barn from the old petting zoo was all that still stood, and it now served as the entrance to the Jamboree.

Rae locked her bike up at the bike rack next to about thirty others. People like Ringo could afford a little gasoline for their cars thanks to all the money they brought in with the increasingly rare zombies (and didn’t have any real choice in the matter, since it was kind of hard to pull around a cage full of zombies on a ten-speed), but most other people had to make do with simpler transportation. Rae had seen on television how people on the coasts were starting to have huge amounts of oil imported in again, but as usual everyone in the center of the country had to make do with the dregs.

The Jamboree didn’t look open for business just yet, as it was still far too early in the day for any big crowds, but there at least seemed to be some activity as the Jamboree’s employees prepared for the night’s show. Rae walked up to the front entrance in the converted barn and waited while a bored looking teenage boy came up to the ticket counter.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said with a tone that made it evident he had given this same line hundreds of times before. “We are not quite opened for business yet. Show times are every Wednesday and Friday from eight p.m. to ten p.m. Tickets will be available—”

“I’m not here for tickets,” Rae said. The Jamboree’s new days and hours were news to her, but they weren’t surprising. Her parents might have mourned the loss of a carousel from days gone by, but to her the Jamboree was the place of fond childhood memories that was slowly slipping away. Built shortly before she’d been born, a few years after the government had declared their “victory” against the zombie Uprising, it had originally been a way to get rid of more zeds while both making a profit and giving the people a way to “get back” at the creatures who had wiped out three-quarters of the human race. People still came to watch the Jamboree, but not as many anymore. Those who did come were older. The younger generation had forgotten what the zeds had done to the world and didn’t understand why they had to be exterminated like vermin.

The other more pressing problem for the show, however, was how few zombies there were left out there anymore. No one had ever developed an inoculation against the Animator Virus, but humanity had become highly adept at surviving anyway. Fewer people being bitten meant fewer new zombies, while the old ones were rounded up and brought to places like this.

The Jamboree wouldn’t be around forever, and Rae felt a deep sense of melancholy whenever she came here. People were forgetting the older ways too easily, losing their heritage.

“I’m actually here looking for one of the zed dealers,” Rae said. “Guy named Ringo. He been around yet?”

The boy shrugged, somehow managing to look even more bored now than when he had started the conversation. “Don’t know. They don’t come through the front, so I don’t really have to deal with them.”

“Right,” Rae said with a sigh. She moved to go around the ticket counter and into the Jamboree, but the kid suddenly became more animated.

“Wait, no. You can’t go back there. You can come back at one of the showtimes on Wednesday or Friday from—”

“Kid, I’ve got business to take care of.”

“Well, you can’t go back with your rifle. No outside weapons allowed in the Jamboree.”

Rae blinked. That was a new one, but she supposed it had been as inevitable as everything else about the Jamboree’s decline. In its early days people had been encouraged to bring their own weapons, partly because it wanted to insure that people were prepared if anything in the show ever got out of hand, and partly because the Jamboree hadn’t owned enough of its own weapons to pass around to all the people who wanted to take part in the festivities.

Now they must have had enough weapons but not enough people. And lawmakers had started passing gun laws, which was just ridiculous. What if the common person on the street needed to kill some zed outbreak? Rae could have sworn that the world had lost all its common sense.

“Spanky doesn’t leave my side,” Rae said. “He just doesn’t.”

“Then you can’t go in, because no outside weapons…”

“…are allowed in the Jamboree. Right, I heard you the first time.” Rae rolled her eyes as she reached into her pocket and pulled out her security badge. “Except I think I’m going to be an exception.”

The kid scrutinized her badge, and she was thankful that he finally showed a small amount of respect in his expression. Even Merton Security had lived long past its heyday, but at least the company still had some pull. Rae hadn’t been sure that she’d wanted this job to start with, but it still gave her a little prestige.

“Okay, I guess you can go in with it,” the kid said. “If the guy you’re looking for is here, he’ll probably be at either the loading dock or the cell block. On the far side of the stadium.”

Rae nodded and went past the ticket counter into the lobby. It was dark at the moment and empty except for a single woman restocking candy at the snack bar. There was a hall going off to her right that she suspected would lead to the back storage rooms and the cell block, but Rae didn’t go that way immediately. Instead, she went up the short flight of stairs and passed through a double set of doors, taking a deep breath and staring out at the stadium, the real home of the Jamboree.

The stadium was the largest structure that had been built in Fond du Lac since the zombie Uprising, and although Rae supposed it wasn’t nearly as big as similar places in other cities, it still managed to impress her even now. When she had been a little girl the place had seemed absolutely massive, though, an epic place where amazing things always happened. The seats could hold several thousand people, designed back in a time when every one of Fond du Lac’s ten thousand remaining residents had crowded into the Jamboree at least once a week. There were even more people in the city now, the result of an entire generation mating indiscriminately trying to repopulate the world, yet fewer people crowded into the stadium.

As much as she relished the memories of the place, however, Rae’s melancholy only grew at the sight of the place outside of peak hours. The sky was dreary and threatened to drop a drizzling rain on the muddy open space within the stadium, making the lonely, depressed feel of the place even worse. On the main field area several stages were set up on the sides complete with posts to tie zeds to, where they would be whipped or have their flakey flesh pealed from their bodies, or sometimes just plain shot. A couple of motorcycles were parked off to the side with chains attached to a hook at the back. Rae remembered the awe she had felt when she had first seen them in action. Four chains from four separate motorcycles would be attacked to a zed’s individual limbs, and then the motorcycles would race away from the zed, ripping the zombie into four pieces. If the motorcycles were fast enough they could sometimes pull all four limbs off at once, leaving a fifth piece behind in the form of a powerless torso. Sometimes the zed had been tougher than it looked, and the motorcycles would spin their wheels in the mud as they tried to pull it apart. The zombies in these cases would usually give a peculiar high pitched moan, much to the cheers and laughter of the audience.

Some people who came to the show would even pay extra to shoot their own zombies. Kids that did this were given special badges and ribbons as souvenirs. Rae still had all of hers stashed away in a box in her closet.

There were many other ways here to destroy zeds for the amusement of a humanity that wanted revenge for what the zombies had done, but Rae couldn’t look at them anymore for now. It was all just a reminder that people were forgetting. Her parents had taught her to never forget and never forgive these things, but others apparently hadn’t learned the same lessons. Times were changing, and probably not for the better.

Apparently more than just the times were changing, though. At least one zombie had gone through something, and it was time to stop reminiscing and find out what the hell was happening.

Rae walked past the rows of seats until she got to an exit marked with signs saying “Employees Only,” and she went through to find herself a dingy, dimly lit corridor. She could hear voices down the hall and followed them, not entirely sure she was going in the right direction until she also heard the moans of zombies. She continued following them past a couple of offices until she found herself in a wide open room full of cages. There were over a hundred cages in here, each one big enough for a single zombie, but only about fifteen were occupied. As she walked passed them a couple of the zombies charged her with their hands out to grab at her, only to hit the bars and stumble stupidly back. Rae looked at each one but none of them appeared to be the mysterious Edward Schuett. She tried to see if any of them were the other zeds she had seen in Ringo’s truck, but that was a lost cause. All zombies looked the same to her.