She’d worked out a cover story with Edward on the way here, and although it had some risky parts, she was still reasonably certain it would hold up. She’d ripped off the patch on his coveralls that said “janitor,” but she’d kept her ID that identified her as a higher official with the CRS. Assuming that they’d made it here in time before CRS security could alert the gate guards, she would be able to just tell them that she was on a research excursion for the CRS to collect data on wild reanimated migratory patterns. It was a legitimate study that CRS scientists had been working on for some time, and hopefully it wouldn’t draw that much attention. She could just say Edward was a maintenance assistant going with her to fix some equipment, although there was a possibility someone would question why they were going out so late. The reanimated population was low enough these days that going outside the city limits in the daylight was relatively safe, but night was another story. Hopefully she could convince the guard that some field equipment needed immediate service or else it would compromise some experiment. She just had to hope the guard wasn’t smart enough to ask why they weren’t bringing armed guards with them.
They stopped at the gate booth and waited for a guard to come to the window and ask what they were doing, but even though there was a light on inside nobody came to them. Liddie peeked her head out the van’s window into the booth only to find the guard fast asleep on a chair.
“That’s just ridiculous,” Liddie whispered to Edward. “A reanimated could just walk right up the gate to find a way in and this guy would never even know.”
“Or a reanimated could walk up and find a way out,” Edward said.
“Maybe,” she said. She opened the door and, leaving the engine running, approached the open window of the gate booth. She supposed she was lucky the night was warm enough that the guard hadn’t closed the window. This meant she could probably just reach in and hit the switch to open the gate, then jump back in the van and hope to get out before the guard could wake up and realize what was going on. It would be risky, though. If the guard heard the noise and woke up before the gate was all the way open, he could still shut it again before the van had a chance to get through. She had to wonder what her mother might do in this situation.
My mother wouldn’t take any shit from someone like this, Liddie thought, then smiled.
“Hey!” Liddie yelled through the window. The guard startled awake and almost fell out of his chair. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The guard tried to blink the sleep from his eyes. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just…can I help you?”
“You can help by giving me the name of your supervisor.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m on an urgent errand to fix a reanimated tracking monitor so that thousands of people in this city can sleep at night knowing they’re safe from the undead, and just what the hell do I find? Our first line of defense sleeping at his post.”
“Excuse me, but just who the fuck…” Liddie flashed her CRS ID before he could finish that thought, although she did it quickly enough that he couldn’t see the name. “Oh. Oh shit. Please, it was just a really quick nap.”
“A really quick nap? Well it would have been a really long nap if a reanimated had gotten past that gate and bitten you. I’m going to see you fired for this.”
“No, please, I swear it won’t happen again!”
A sudden flash of inspiration came to Liddie. “Your superiors, if they want to communicate with you they use a walkie-talkie?”
The guard showed her the thumb-sized device hanging from his belt. “Right here, ma’am.”
“Give it to me. I want to speak with them myself.”
“Uh, I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I’m not supposed to let anyone else use it.”
“Do you want me to also report that you were trying to prevent me from letting your superiors know about your mistake? Because I’m sure that will make you look so much better in their eyes.”
The guard cringed, then handed her the walkie-talkie. Liddie took it and turned back to the van.
“Hey!” the guard said. “You can’t leave here with that.”
“I’ll be reporting you from out in the field. I’m already running dangerously far behind because I had to wake your lazy ass up. I’ll return shortly and you’ll be getting it back. In the meantime, if I were you I would start trying to come up with an excuse that won’t get you fired.”
The gate was already opening as she got back into the van. Edward stared at her wide-eyed, but with a smile. “Okay, I didn’t catch all of that from here, but what I did catch was pretty impressive.”
“My mother’s training strikes again,” Liddie said.
“What is that you took from him?”
“His walkie-talkie.” She handed it to him, then drove through the open gate.
“This is a walkie-talkie? That’s even more impressive.”
“What, didn’t they have walkie-talkies in your time?”
“Yeah, but they weren’t anything like… wait, what do we need a walkie-talkie for, anyway? Can they maybe track us with this like they could the phone?”
Liddie shook her head. They’d tossed the phone out the window soon after the mysterious call. As much as they would have liked to try getting a hold of the strange old man again, she knew it would be too risky. “These models are cheap throwaway types. Not even worth putting trackers in them. And I took it because I think we can use it to fake out our pursuers for a while. When the CRS security realizes we’re gone, they’ll likely contact all the gate stations to be on the look out for us. You can just pretend to be the guard and say you haven’t seen anything. By the time we’re out of range they will still be thinking we’re somewhere in the city.”
“Good idea,” Edward said. Liddie nodded, trying to keep a confident outward attitude. On the inside, even now that they appeared to be home free, she was petrified. The obvious problem now seemed out of the way, but that meant she now had to face exactly what she had done tonight. She had thrown away everything she’d ever known in her life. Her career, her family. Admittedly, she hadn’t had much beyond that. Her friends were more like acquaintances that she occasionally met for drinks without sharing anything more than inane conversation. Her apartment had been sparsely furnished and contained few possessions. Yet it hadn’t felt like her life had been empty. Her career with the CRS had felt meaningful, like she was making an important contribution to the continued existence of the human race.
She looked over at Edward, who was still staring at the walkie-talkie with wonder. At what point had she made the decision that his life was worth more than all that? From a purely logical perspective, it seemed crazy. He was only one person, and if she had stayed at the CRS she could have gone on contributing to research that could have helped so many more. Now that her mother was very likely fired and going to jail, that meant that Dr. Chella would be in charge, and Liddie was pretty certain she didn’t care a lick about helping anybody but her own reputation.
But that was really a narcissistic way of thinking about things, wasn’t it? Had Liddie’s contribution really been more than anyone else’s? More than once she had felt like she hadn’t really belonged there. She wasn’t a scientist. She’d simply been a bureaucrat making sure all the chemicals and testing equipment had been in the right place. She hadn’t been helping anybody. Now was her chance to do some real good for a real person.
Briefly she thought to herself that Edward was more than just any old person, that he was someone special, but she pushed that thought away for now. That awkward moment in the elevator had been enough to tell her he didn’t quite want anything to do with that. At least, not yet.
“Okay, so, we need to make a plan,” Liddie said.
“Well, the first part of any plan we come up with has to be get as far away from Stanford as possible,” Edward said.
“Yes, but what after that? Do we go find this guy that just called us?”
“I certai
nly don’t know what else we would do at this point.”
“But can we trust him? How do we know it’s not some sort of trap? The CRS could have found a way to make that call and have us think it came from somewhere else.”
“But why would they send us all the way to Illinois then? If it was the CRS they could spring a trap on us much closer, I would think.”
“A trap from someone else?” Liddie asked. “Is there anyone else you could think of that would want to get their hands on you.”
“Sure, maybe, if anyone else knew I existed. It’s not like any of those conspiracy theorists you were talking about would know your private number.”
“So we’re going to say this guy is the real thing. But saying he created you? That can’t be true, can it?”
“How would I know? For all I know I was made a Z7 by a secret conspiracy of Democrat lawn gnomes.”
“What’s a lawn gnome?” Liddie asked.
“Never mind. I’m just putting my vote in for Illinois. Do you have a vote for anywhere else?”
“No. It’s not like I’ve actually left Stanford enough to know anything about anywhere else, so Illinois might as well be as good a place as any. The only problem then is how are we going to get there?”
“Are there still roads that will take us there, or were they left alone to break up for all these years?”
“A little of both,” Liddie said. She gestured at the terrain around them. Immediately beyond Stanford there was an empty zone, just like Edward had probably seen in Fond du Lac, but beyond that the landscape was much different. Any buildings that had once existed out here had all been bulldozed and the natural landscape had been allowed to grow back. The only thing that didn’t grow out here were large trees. Every so often the area cities would send teams out to trim the trees back, making it far harder for the reanimated to hide so near the city. Further beyond they could both see the lights of other nearby cities. Unlike the cities in mid-country, the cities on the coasts tended to be much closer together, and the roads between them were meticulously maintained.
“Anything that didn’t lead anywhere important has been left to nature over all these years,” Liddie said, “but major interstate highways are still sort of kept up. Or at least they’re supposed to be. Most people with half a brain avoid travelling over land, so sometimes the local government doesn’t bother to keep up with them as they should.”
“So we should be able to drive the whole way?”
“More or less.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, there’s still the problem of gas. Also food. Shelter we shouldn’t have to worry about too much. That’s why I grabbed a van instead of one of the cars. I figure it’s easier to live out of a van.”
Edward looked like he was thinking about that. “About how long of a drive would this be?”
“I don’t really know off the top of my head. How far is it? Maybe two thousand miles? I suppose we could probably make it in two days or so, if we don’t run into any trouble on the way.”
“Okay, so how’s this thing’s gas mileage?”
“Terrible. It only gets 94 miles per gallon.”
Edward made a choking sound.
“Are you okay?” Liddie asked.
“Yeah, I’m, uh, fine. It’s just…94 miles per gallon. Holy shit.”
“Sorry about that. We’d probably get better gas mileage on a riding lawnmower.”
“Um, right. So how many gallons per tank?”
“Only ten on this thing. Nearly a full tank now, so if we really want to use this thing the whole way then we’d need to find fuel at least twice somewhere along our route.”
“Do you think we can do that?”
“We’ll have to actually go into some of the cities, but I suggest we do that as little as possible. Those photos they showed of you on the news were pretty grainy, but all it takes is one mid-country hillbilly to realize who you are and start taking potshots at us.”
“And I suppose we’ll have the same issue with food.”
“Probably, but we may just have to go without that as much as possible. See, our biggest problem now that I think about it might be money.”
“Do you not have enough?”
“I’ve got some pay cards, but most of them are official cards in my name that can be traced. The few generic pay cards I have might be enough, but some of these mid-country hick towns don’t even use the same currency as the coasts.”
Edward nodded. He was quiet for a long time before speaking again. “Do we actually have a chance to pull this off?”
Liddie tried not to hesitate in her response. “We’ll be fine. It will be nothing but a smooth ride from here.”
“Are you lying?”
“Maybe.” She looked at him, being sure to make eye contact in the hopes that he knew she meant this. “But I will do everything in my power to help you.”
He smiled and put his hand between them where she could easily reach. After only a moment she took it. This time he didn’t let go right away.
Chapter Twenty Seven
They drove for three hours before they finally had to stop. According to the van’s built in map device—something that concerned Edward at first, since he thought a GPS satellite could possibly be used to track them, but Liddie assured him that modern systems didn’t work like that; Edward simply had to take her word for it—they pulled over somewhere in the Tahoe Forest. By this point they were pretty certain they weren’t being followed. The expected call had come in on the walkie-talkie about half an hour out of Stanford, which was good since Liddie said they were almost out of range. Edward had pretended to be the guard just like they had planned, and they hadn’t had any reason to believe the CRS even thought they were out of the city yet. It appeared they had gotten out free and clear, at least for now.
They had to sleep, though. Liddie looked pretty ragged by this time, and she wasn’t exactly making straight lines down the road. Edward wasn’t so concerned with her crossing over into the next lane, since they had yet to see another vehicle anywhere past Sacramento, but she hadn’t been kidding about how bad some of the roads had gotten. All it would take was for her to sleepily hit a deep pothole while going seventy-five for them to go spinning end over end into the wilderness. Edward would have taken over, except not only did the van have several controls he was unfamiliar with, but he also hit one of his sporadic tired periods at around the same time. They pulled just far enough off the road where no one travelling by would see them, locked all the doors in case there were any reanimated in the area, and both fell asleep in separate seats.
It didn’t take long before the world was red again. There were other forms around him, but not as many as he sometimes remembered. He couldn’t count to be sure, but he knew this was a very weak horde. Beyond that he didn’t know much of anything.
Several of the forms around him were familiar, inasmuch as anything could really be familiar to him, although one was more so than all the others. He didn’t know why, but he felt compelled to keep close to this one. It just felt right. Sure, it felt right to stay near any form, but this one was…special? He didn’t actually know that word, but he knew the feeling. The honey scent this one gave off felt unique to him. No other form seemed to notice it. If he had been capable of feelings, he would have been proud that he could feel it when no other could.
They were in a field, although he could see a squat building in the distance. He no longer had the capability of trying to figure out what that building was, nor did he much care. The horde had gotten the scent of something meaty, something without the correct scent, and they were making their way toward it. There was a very faint whiff of sweetness on the wind, others like him that had caught that same prey-scent and moved toward it. With a few subtle changes in that distant odor, he started moving in a different direction, still going toward the prey yet now in a zigzag pattern. He had no idea why he should do this, but he wasn’t the only one who followed along. All
the other forms in his small horde, including that one he wouldn’t stray from, followed suit. No questioning, no thought, no attempts at understanding it.
The first shot echoed through the air, and the head of one of the forms nearby exploded in a shower of skull fragments and brain matter.
The form collapsed, and the odor it gave off was no longer so sweet or enticing. It was offensive, putrid. It made his head hurt. He tried to move away from it, as did every other form around him, but as soon as he was far enough away from it the distant sweet smell took over again. Back to zigzagging. No stopping. Must follow the horde. So he did. All others around him did. Back and forth, getting closer to the target.
Another head exploded. Again, all the forms attempted to scatter, and again the scent demanded otherwise. Almost time. He didn’t know what it was almost time for, but he knew it was true and he obeyed. He looked at that familiar form, almost as though he was reassuring himself it was still there. It looked at him at the same time.
The next shot was not the clean headshot that had taken out the others. One moment he was looking at a familiar face, something he still felt some phantom attachment to, and then the next its entire lower jaw was gone. He heard the sound of the gunshot only as teeth and destroyed flesh pelted his face. Darkened blood splattered over him, but he noticed none of that. All he noticed were the form’s eyes. He saw something change in them at that moment, but he lacked the ability to understand what that meant. They went wide, staring at him, and then the form dropped. The awful stench it gave off was somehow so much worse than what had come from the others. It offended him in a way the others hadn’t. He felt something from inside, something long forgotten and hidden, wrestle to come to the surface as phantom emotions of grief and horror. All of it wanted to come out in a scream of rage, but all he managed was a low moan.
Somewhere nearby there was a scream, followed by the sound of flesh ripping and tearing. The other part of the horde, the one that had been directing his group on what had basically been a suicide distraction run, had found the shooter. But he didn’t care. He was missing his chance for nourishment, and the sickly sweet odor on the breeze invited him to join, but he couldn’t just yet. He felt compelled to stay here, next to the one that for some reason he didn’t understand he had needed. He knew something was gone, something he could never get back, but his mind simply couldn’t comprehend what was missing.
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 18
