“Sweet Jesus, it’s right there!” Ringo pointed, and Charlie pushed him aside to get a clear shot at Edward.
“Don’t!” Edward yelled. “Don’t shoot!” He instinctively put both hands in the air, but in his crouch he couldn’t keep his balance without holding onto the tipped over machine, and he again fell backward onto his butt.
All three of them stayed exactly as they were for several moments. Edward didn’t dare move while Charlie had the gun pointed at him, but for now it didn’t appear like he was going to use it.
“Holy shit,” Charlie said. “Did that zed just speak?”
“I don’t know what a zed is,” Edward said, although he could make a good educated guess by now, “but I’m not one. Please. Something is wrong with me. I…I think I need a doctor.”
Neither of the two men moved for several more seconds. Edward took that as a good sign and slowly lowered his arms. They weren’t going to shoot him, or at least he hoped not, and maybe he could get them to stop freaking out long enough to give him some idea what was going on. There was far too much he didn’t understand, and no way for him to piece it all together on his own. He needed friends right now.
That thought didn’t last long. As he tried to stand back up, Ringo rushed forward and jabbed him in the chest with the prod. Edward would have screamed if the electricity didn’t set his jaw tight. The current running through him was still a relief compared to some of his earlier pain, but it was enough to knock him unconscious again.
Chapter Three
The Ford hadn’t been originally designed to fit a cage with five people inside in its bed, so the cage was terribly cramped. Edward didn’t think Charlie and Ringo ever cared whether their zombie passengers were comfortable. Edward woke in the cage to find one of the creatures’ arms jammed at an awkward angle in his armpit and a foot pressing uncomfortably in his crotch. As soon as he became fully conscious again he screamed, certain that at this proximity one of the zombies would finally decide it was time to make him their snack. But other than the barest acknowledgement of his screaming, none of the zombies paid him much mind. Charlie in the passenger seat was different, however. He turned around and looked at Edward through the back window, bit his lip, and then looked out again at the road in front of them. No matter how much Edward screamed and begged to be let out, neither of the two men acknowledged him again for the rest of the journey.
When Edward finally calmed down and realized he wasn’t in any immediate danger he took a deep breath and tried to think this all through. The first conclusion he had to come to was, despite his memory suggesting that the Fourth of July cookout had only been a day or two ago, the actual amount of time that had passed must have been much greater. Years, maybe even decades had gone. He could see the proof in the state of the city as the truck passed through it. The Walmart was on the northwest edge of Fond du Lac, past Forest Mall and a large number of smaller strip malls. None of these looked like they were used anymore. The truck drove past them all, going an unsafe speed over a road broken up by years of neglect. A few of the stores and fast food restaurants they passed were boarded up, but most simply looked abandoned. One or two looked like they had burned down. Edward’s initial thought was that at some point the Apocalypse had come upon the world, and the more he thought about the day the undead attacked the more he realized he wasn’t far off.
Although he tried to avoid the thought, memories of Julia and Dana came to him unbidden. He didn’t know how long it had been so he had no way of knowing how old they would be or if they were still alive, but he felt some hope. After all, here he was, stricken with some strange disease yet still very much alive. If it had happened to him, it could have happened to them. They could still be out there somewhere.
The farther the truck went into the city the smoother the ride became. They had to take an alternate route around a collapsed overpass at the freeway, but the road after that point looked like it might have been repaved in recent years, although not very well. The buildings continued to look rough and derelict for a time, but after they had travelled about five miles all structures suddenly came to a stop and gave way to a wide expanse of open ground. Edward sat up in the cage and leaned against the bars, trying to get a better idea of what he was seeing. He remembered this area. It had been a few businesses, a couple of factories, and the start of a residential area, but it looked now like it had been all been bulldozed. A half-hearted attempt had been made to clear the open space, although garbage and occasional wood and rubble littered it all. Looking out further down the road he saw that the empty zone was about half a mile wide, and on either side of the road it continued on in a slight curve. He suspected that if he were able to see the entire thing from a bird’s eye view, the no-man’s land would have formed a rough circle.
He saw why the empty zone had been created as the truck approached the other side. A cement wall had been erected around the inner part of the circle, about seven feet high but with fifteen foot towers at regular intervals. Beyond the wall Edward could clearly see more buildings, and these, finally, were as he remembered them. There were the obvious cosmetic changes on some of the more recognizable houses, and here and there were new buildings he didn’t recognize, but everything beyond the wall at least looked like it was being used. Had he seen this place first, he would have never realized anything had gone wrong with the world.
Edward’s heart beat faster. His own home was somewhere in there. He might be able to get some clues here, if only he could get away from Charlie and Ringo.
He absently scratched at his chin as the truck slowed. Whatever strange thing had happened to his skin was starting to itch, but he ignored it. Most of the pain that had plagued him earlier had receded into an occasionally annoying ache, and his thoughts and senses all felt much clearer now. He still didn’t want to look at himself, though. It wasn’t like whatever had affected him was going to clear up any time soon.
The truck came to a full stop at a wooden gate. There was a guard house next to it, and Edward watched as a woman came out and walked to the driver’s side. Her hair was cut short and done up in an unfamiliar hairstyle with pink highlights. She had a rifle in hand, and even though the whole thing was painted pink with silver zebra stripes it still made her look formidable. She looked bored as Ringo rolled down the window, not even bothering to glance at the cage.
“How many you declaring today?” the woman said. She looked like she was in her late twenties and she wore thick glasses. She was chewing something that Edward initially thought was gum until she turned her head and spit out a wad of tobacco-darkened saliva.
“Actually,” Ringo said, “we’re not sure.”
“How the hell could you be not sure? You’re the one that fricking caught them.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, “but we’re not really sure about one of them.” He turned to look through the back window, and when he saw Edward staring back at him his eyes went wide. “Holy shit. Ringo, take a look.”
Both Ringo and the woman turned to look at Edward. The woman raised an eyebrow, but Ringo’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit,” he said, and Charlie nodded at him.
“That’s a really fresh one,” the woman said, taking a step closer to the cage. The zombies took an interest in her and tried to reach through the cage, but Edward stayed back. “Hope you realize no one’s gonna pay jack shit for it.”
“Please,” Edward said to her. “I don’t know what’s going on but you got to let me out of here.”
“Jesus Mary Joseph!” the woman said as she took a leaping step back away from the cage. “That zed just talked!”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what we said,” Ringo said. “But that’s not even the freakish part anymore. It actually seems to be healing.”
Edward tried to take this all in. It had already occurred to him that they thought he was a zombie like the others, probably due to his appearance. But he hadn’t known he was healing. He finally took another look at his arms and realized that, even thou
gh they still had an unhealthy color to them, the deep wounds and rotted flesh were repairing themselves. With the mysterious healing he also became aware of how incredibly hungry he was, which he supposed made about as much sense as anything else. Of course he would be building up an appetite if his body was healing so fast. That, of course, didn’t explain why the healing was happening so quickly or why his body had needed to heal in the first place.
At least he knew there was no way he could be a zombie, although that didn’t tell him much.
“So what are you going to do with it?” the woman said to Ringo.
“Would you stop calling me ‘it?’“ Edward said. “My name is Edward Schuett. I don’t have a single fucking clue what is going on but I didn’t do anything to deserve being locked up in a fucking cage, so will one of you people just let me the fuck out?”
The woman’s eyes went wide. “Um, hi? How…how are you?”
“I’m in a cage with zombies. How would you be?”
“Okay, this is…unbelievable,” the woman said.
“Yeah, we’re right there with you,” Ringo said. “Could you please open the gate so we can get in and try figuring out what the fuck is going on?”
“Yeah, sure,” the woman said. “But shouldn’t we…you know, let him out?”
“I’m not letting out a zombie to roam free,” Ringo said. “Especially not right at the city gate. I don’t care if he can talk.”
“I’m not a Goddamned zombie!” Edward said. The shout cracked from the strain on his still-rough vocal cords. “I just want to know what the hell is going on!”
The woman looked at Ringo, who shrugged. She moved closer to the cage, being careful to stay out of the grasp of the zombies’ hands, and dropped her voice low. “You said your name was Edward Schuett?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see what I can do, okay? I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but I’ll see if I can get some people to come talk to you before these guys can do anything to you, got it?”
He didn’t get it, not really, but he supposed that was better than he would probably get from the two in the front of the truck. He nodded, and the woman went over to the gate to open it. Edward watched her stare at him as the truck passed through and into the city, hoping that someone would start making some sort of sense to this all very soon.
Chapter Four
Rae Neuman rested her custom pink rifle on her shoulder as she closed the gate and stared after the truck, attempting to understand what she had just seen. The man in the cage, Edward Schuett, had definitely been a zombie. There was no doubt about that. No living person could have that much rotted away skin and still continue to breathe. But then, a true zombie couldn’t talk. Never. In the almost fifty years since the undead Uprising, no one had ever heard a zed do anything more than moan or hiss.
She’d told the zombie, or man, or whatever he was, that she would do whatever she could to try straightening this out, but she didn’t know where to start. Who the hell was she supposed to call in the event of a talking, apparently sentient zombie? The person to talk to would probably be one of those zombie researchers, but there weren’t any in Fond du Lac anymore. There wasn’t a need. Except out in the boonies, the outer ruins of the old city, zombies were rarely heard or seen. No one worried about them anymore except when it came to entertainment, so there hadn’t been a reason to keep an expert around for a long time.
But she didn’t doubt that she had to do something, and quickly. Ringo sometimes had a good head on his shoulders, but from what little she had seen of Charlie she wouldn’t be surprised if he just shot the zombie—Edward, although it was still hard to think of a zombie as having a name—purely so he wouldn’t have to deal with this.
Rae went into the guard shack and grabbed her cell phone from where she had left it on the window sill. Her boyfriend had given it to her a couple weeks ago as a present to celebrate her new job as a gate guard. The phone made her the envy of all her friends, since so few of them could afford one yet, but she was never quite sure what to do with it. She’d heard from a few old timers that there had once been a time when everyone owned one, and most people had used them all the time. Her generation, however, hadn’t quite gotten used to having them again. Cellular towers and wireless communication had been restored to some parts of the country about fifteen years ago, but here in Wisconsin the technology renaissance had come later. She supposed people in the more populated areas of America would think that meant Rae and all the people here were backwater hicks, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought. It was her people that had been the ones to take back most of the country from the zeds, doing it all by themselves without the military help that the coasts had, so she figured those stuck up coast bastards could just suck it.
She fiddled with the phone, trying to figure out who she should call to alert about what she had just seen, but nothing came to her. Maybe she was just being a bleeding heart in thinking she needed to call anybody in the first place. Talking or not, Edward was a zed. His kind, if a virus-infected corpse could really be said to have a “kind,” had wiped out three-quarters of the Earth’s population before she had been born. Her parents had always told her stories about the early days of the Uprising, mostly as a way to scare her into not getting out of bed at night when she was supposed to be sleeping. Even though no zombies had gotten past the circular Empty Zone around Fond du Lac since she had been eight, her parents had still taught her how to use rifles and handguns just in case the zombies ever made a resurgence. If either of them had been alive today they would have been horrified at the idea of helping a zombie.
It was easier, however, to not care about a zombie when they were old and rotted and only had a passing resemblance to anything human. Edward looked like a living human, and if his weird regeneration continued at the rate Ringo and Charlie had hinted at, then he wouldn’t even be recognizable as a zed soon. That might not get him treated any different if those two still sold him to the Jamboree, though.
Finally Rae just dialed the first and only number that popped into her head, and her boyfriend Johnny picked up immediately.
“Rae, I know how much you want use your new phone,” Johnny said, “but I don’t think Merton Security is going to smile on the idea of you using it while you’re supposed to be on the job.”
“Hi to you too, sweetie. Gee, that greeting really makes me feel loved.”
“Sorry, but I just know how much you love your job and I wouldn’t want you to do anything to jeopardize it.”
Rae resisted the urge to sigh into her phone. She didn’t love her new job at all, actually, just like she didn’t really want to use her new phone. The phone just seemed decadent to her, a technology her parents had not needed during the Uprising so it couldn’t be that much more important now, despite how popular they were becoming again. And even though gate guard had once been a dangerous and noble profession, it was really pretty useless these days. Sitting in a shack with a kick-ass rifle she never got to use was just boring.
“I’ll keep it short, then,” Rae said. “I just wanted to know if you or anyone else at Merton might still have a phone number of one of those zombie experts that moved away last year.”
“Well, I don’t. I never really had to deal with any of them. But I’m sure their numbers are still on file at the office somewhere. Why?”
“Uh, nothing really, I guess. I just saw something…um, strange.”
“Strange like how?”
“Strange like…well, have you ever heard of a talking zed?”
Johnny was quiet for a few moments. “Um, no. Rae, zombies can’t talk.”
“Right, I know that, but what if one could?”
“They can’t.”
“Well I just saw one doing exactly that, so I guess they can.”
“You’re not drinking while on duty, are you?”
“No, damn it. And this is not a joke either. Two guys off into the ruins getting zeds for the Jamboree just came b
ack in, and one of their zeds was talking. Looked fresher than it should have, too.”
“Maybe it was just so fresh it could still say some random things or something like that.”
“But it was an actual coherent conversation. Almost like it could think and everything.”
“Now you’re just being dumb. That’s completely impossible.”
This time Rae did sigh. Sometimes she just wanted to kick Johnny’s ass when he said things like that. If he didn’t keep her supplied with practice ammo whenever she wanted it she probably would have left him by now.
“I saw it with my own eyes. Something was extremely strange with this zed, and I just thought someone with some sort of expertise should know.”
It was Johnny’s turn to sigh. “I’ll see if I can get a hold of one, alright?” He said his standard “I love yous” and hung up, but Rae didn’t think he was actually going to make any call.
Rae set the phone back down on the window sill and picked up her rifle, holding it close to her chest as she stared out the window and thought. A zombie named Edward Schuett. Academically she always knew that zombies had once been alive, and on rare unfortunate occasions people still contracted the Animator virus and turned into zeds, but most undead that she saw had been that way since before she was born. People like Ringo brought zombies in every so often, but Rae had never thought to wonder what they might have been like in life. She had certainly never wondered what any of them were named.
Now, however, one had a name anyway. Edward. Now that she knew that much, she felt compelled to know more. She picked up the phone again, this time dialing one of her coworkers to see if he could finish her shift in the gate house.
Chapter Five
Although Edward knew he should be concerned more about his fate at the moment, he became distracted by the scenery as the truck moved through the city and actually felt some relief at being in a familiar environment. While the world outside the bulldozed circle had looked like Armageddon, here within the new confines of the city life looked almost like it should have. They passed an elementary school, and to his shock there were children playing in the fenced off playground. That was just such a normal thing to happen, and everything he had encountered up until now had been anything but normal. A few of the children saw the truck pass and stopped their playing to watch and point, but Edward didn’t feel awkward about suddenly being the object of so much attention. The existence of children in this strange new world gave him hope, although not for very long. When he thought of them for too long his mind turned to memories of Dana, and his heart sank. Maybe she was still out there somewhere, but from what little he knew so far he didn’t think he could muster much hope. Even if she was out there his little six year old girl wouldn’t be so little anymore. For all he knew, enough time might have passed that she could be a teenager by now. She might not even remember him anymore.
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 3
