Then the moment was gone. He didn’t remember why he was standing here, looking down at just another corpse. The world was full of them now, so why would this one be special? He wandered off to join the others, always following the lead of the slight hint of honey in the air.
Edward woke with tears streaming down his cheeks. It took him several seconds before his brain caught up with what his heart already knew, and he realized that he had just remembered the death, or at least the second death, of his wife.
He was draped over the second row of seats in the van, while Liddie snored softly on the back row. He wasn’t sure if he’d been making any noise as he’d cried in his sleep, but at least it hadn’t disturbed her. However, it didn’t feel right to be here next to her at this moment. It felt disloyal to Julia’s memory, almost like he was…well, like he was cheating on her.
There weren’t a whole lot of other places he could go, though. It was either in here or out there, where other zombies wandered around looking either for more zombies to group up with or prey to feed that hunger they didn’t quite understand. But Edward didn’t actually have anything to fear from them, did he? To them, and indeed to most of the world, he was no different. They accepted him among them where no one else would.
He was very careful not to make any noise as he got up from the seat and slid open the back door. He closed it again softly but firmly. Edward wondered for a moment if he should open it again and lock it from the inside, ensuring that nothing would be able to get in and get Liddie, but he didn’t think zombies would be able to open the door. Or, at least, one or two zombies wouldn’t be able to open the door. From what he could remember, a large number of zombies might have been coordinated enough to figure it out. But a quick sniff seemed to confirm there weren’t that many in the vicinity. There was…one. Somewhere out in the forest. Somewhere near. After one last check to make sure Liddie was asleep and content, he walked off in the direction of the pheromones he sensed out among the trees.
The terrain was rough. There wasn’t any path out here, not even any game trails that he could find. Thick bushes obscured the ground, and several times he nearly tripped on exposed roots or animal burrows. At one point he even stubbed his toe hard enough that he thought he broke it, but the throbbing pain disappeared far quicker than it should have. Pain. That was something he never remembered in any of the dreams. As a zombie, a full-blown one complete with menacing groan and shambling walk, he hadn’t felt the holes in his flesh or the slow rotting of his limbs. And he certainly hadn’t felt any emotional pain. That one moment when he had seen Julia die was a rare exception.
He wiped the tears from his cheeks, but more replaced them. This was what he got for being more human again. Pain. Loss. Fear of being caught and killed. Was this really so great? He might have been better off if he had never come back. He would still be in the Fond du Lac area somewhere, wandering aimlessly looking for nothing except the occasional prey. It would be a pure and simple life nothing like this. He wouldn’t feel regret at the idea that he had killed people over and over for decades. He wouldn’t feel sorrow that his wife—and yes, he had to face reality now, probably his daughter as well—was long dead. He wouldn’t be on the run. Yes, there would always be the possibility of someone wandering out in the middle of nowhere with a gun coming up and shooting him in the head. He might end up at the Jamboree Rae had talked about. And he wouldn’t have destroyed Liddie’s life and career.
He stopped as the ground in front of him dropped off into a gully. There were too many trees to allow much moonlight to filter through here, but there was still enough light that he could see the gully’s lone occupant. It was a woman, perhaps a little fresher looking than most zombies he had seen, but most definitely not alive. Her clothes looked like they had started out as a business suit, although they were too coated with grime and dead leaves for Edward to be sure. One whole side of her face had been skinned, probably from the fall into the gully, and there were even places where the bone showed through. She wandered back and forth at the bottom of the gully, occasionally trying to walk up the side and falling back in. Edward had no idea how long she had been here or how she got here. Who had she been?, Edward wondered. Had she had a family? Children? No family at all except for a house full of cats? Did someone out there miss her? Or did no one care?
She tried to go up the gully wall again and failed. She just couldn’t grasp the idea that she couldn’t walk straight up it or that she might need to hold onto some of the bushes with her hands. Edward snorted. This was what he had been nostalgic for just a few minutes earlier. A life stripped of all meaning. He’d been the incredibly lucky one. He’d been given his life back. It wasn’t the same one he’d known, and it never would be again. But he could build a new one.
He started to turn back in the direction of van, but the woman moaned and he looked back. She stared up at him, and the pheromone scent on the air changed. Join, it said without words. Become. Hunt. Follow. He didn’t feel that same moment of compulsion he had back with the boy in the CRS, but he could still feel all the subtle variations. On some level he could still understand them all, too. He hadn’t been able to use that understanding in any effective way at the time, but he hadn’t really given it any thought, either. It had just been a knee-jerk reaction. Now that he was alone, though, and didn’t have to worry about this zombie potentially doing something to Liddie, maybe he could control the scents a little better. Maybe he could actually use them to communicate, if anyone could really be said to communicate with the undead.
He concentrated on the pheromones. Now that Liddie had told him Chella’s theories, he found it easier to picture them in his head. A chemical floating on the air currents, coming from him, wafting to the zombie, being picked up with whatever those special receptors were in her nasal cavities. He concentrated on all that, and he pushed. The effect was immediate, just like it had been back in that room, and the zombie woman reacted in the same way. She froze, completely confused by the garbled message she received. Well, at least he knew how to do that. He could stop a zombie dead in its tracks. But could he do more? It had never seemed in any of his dreams like there was one zombie in charge, more like a consensus of all zombies. Some might want to do one thing, some might want to do another, but the strongest pheromones, the ones released by the most zombies, were the ones that all others obeyed as though they had wanted to do that same thing all along.
Strength, he realized, was the issue. The zombie down there in the gully wanted him to come down and join her. All he had to do was figure out how to tell her to do something else, and make it stronger.
He closed his eyes and let the memories come back to him. There was one freshest in his mind, one he’d rather not think about, but there was still something useful there. He’d received an order and he had followed it, despite the order putting him in danger. He thought he could remember the shape of it in his mind, the slight scent, the way it had touched him. He could recreate that. Just remember everything about it. Remember everything…and then push out.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the zombie. She was trying to get up the gully wall again, and although she still couldn’t quite make it she at least made it a little farther up before she fell down. Mostly that was because instead of trying to climb it straight up, she was moving at it at an angle, a zigzag.
He experimented with it a little more before he turned back. He tried various things, assorted messages to this woman about what she should do, although most of them resulted in nothing more than that confused deer-in-the-headlights look. With a few differences in the scent, though, he at least managed the command away, sending her further down the gully. Maybe she would find a way out somewhere down there. She could come across a spot flat enough that she could walk out and go on about what passed for her life now. He had no idea what might become of her. It was entirely possible she might find some sort of salvation, something like he had. Or she could join a horde and hunt somebody down. Or
perhaps she wouldn’t find a way out at all. He didn’t feel like he had any right to judge her, no matter what her path might be.
Liddie was awake and looking nervous inside the van when he came back. She looked relieved as he came back to the door and opened it, although she also looked like she was trying her damnedest not to show it.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“I guess I just had some things to work out in my head.”
“And did you?”
He sat down on the seat next to her and held her hand. Nothing else yet. This was all he thought he was ready for. The memory of Julia’s death, while technically very old, was still fresh in his mind. He had no idea how long it would take him to accept that and move on, but at least he had a general idea what, or rather who, he wanted to move on to.
“Yeah, I guess I sort of did.”
She fell asleep again next to him, and while he couldn’t sleep he at least stayed next to her through the whole night, never letting go of her hand.
Chapter Twenty Eight
The strangest thing of all for Liddie was how easy it became to forget that she was on the run from the government with a talking and thinking reanimated sitting in her passenger seat. She didn’t even realize until now how long it had been since she’d thought of him in those terms. The last time Edward had been nothing more than a “reanimated” to her had been before he’d gotten off that plane with her mother. As soon as she’d seen a normal human-looking face greeting her with a mix of expectance and apprehension, he’d simply been a man. Now he was a man she was going to be with for a long time, most likely, and it was her turn to be apprehensive and expectant.
There was a lot of driving to do, and a lot of silence for them both to fill along the way. She’d already learned quite a bit about him and his previous life while he’d been in custody with the CRS, but at the time she’d still been going for a pretense of professionalism and had left her own life out of the conversation. Now he asked all these questions about her, and she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t have a whole lot to tell. Her whole life had been with the CRS, and she hadn’t had much outside of it.
“What about friends?” Edward asked as they drove through the Nevada desert. They’d gone past Reno about an hour ago, going into the city only long enough to find a Zappy’s for lunch and put some more fuel in the van. They didn’t stay any longer than they had to. A couple just passing through by van was a strange enough sight to cause a few people to ask all the wrong questions, and they hadn’t even wanted to dine in at the Zappy’s for fear of someone taking note of Edward’s meat-only diet.
“Of course I had friends,” Liddie said.
“You never mentioned them while we were at the CRS.”
“That’s because…okay, so I guess my friends weren’t really much of friends. I think the last really good friend I had was in high school.”
“And her name was?”
“Jamie.”
“Is there any particular reason you stopped being friends with her.”
“Is this really something you want to know?” Liddie asked.
“Just trying to get to know you better. Because honestly, you strike me as the kind of person who should have lots of friends.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you’re just…I don’t know, friendly. And compassionate and caring, I guess.”
Liddie sighed. “Jamie slept with my boyfriend, if you must know. In fact, she did it just two days after I let him take my virginity.”
“Ouch. Sorry. You don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want.”
“No, it’s ancient history. And to be honest, I’ve never really talked to anyone about it. Not even my mom. I could tell her anything, usually, but that was a particularly busy time for her at the CRS. Right after that I started helping her at the CRS more. Stanford’s population exploded, Land’s End University became huge, and I was needed for all this administration work. Went right into it. So I just let Jamie have the son of a bitch. She popped out a bunch of youngsters from him, according to what I heard, and then he went and cheated on her.”
“Is that something you wish you had?”
“What?”
“Youngsters.”
“No. Never had the urge.”
“I didn’t either, until Julia discovered she was pregnant with Dana. Changed my perspective.”
“I just never saw the point. Plenty of other people were doing it. It wasn’t like the rest of the world needed me to repopulate it.”
“So, what, that was it then?” Edward asked. “No attempts at dating after that? No urge to at least have someone else in your life?”
“Oh, I tried dating. Sort of a disaster, really. Lots of students from Land’s End, one severely misjudged coworker with the CRS. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been celibate. Probably would have been better if I had.”
“Someone from the CRS? Anyone I met?”
Liddie bit her lips shut. Edward raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked. “Who was it?”
“I’m not telling. You’d laugh.”
“No I won’t.”
“Trust me, you would.”
“I promise. Come on, the suspense is killing me here.”
“Um, okay, fine. It’s just, um, I might have once had a drunken New Year’s Eve moment in a closet with…uh, Carter.”
“Actually I don’t think I ever met him.”
“Yes you did. You just knew him better as Dr. Emmanuel.”
Edward didn’t say anything. Liddie looked over at him and realized he was biting the inside of his cheek and desperately trying not to laugh.
“You promised.”
“I know.”
“Because, well, you know how it is. After a few drinks even the biggest dirtbag can begin to look good. Stop laughing!”
“I’m not laughing! See how much I’m not laughing. Words cannot express how much I’m not…STOP!”
She didn’t even realize what he was saying at first. Her eyes had been on him for the last minute, so she hadn’t seen what was ahead. He couldn’t have been paying any attention either, because there was no way he would have missed the reanimated in the middle of the road. Her brain immediately did calculations of the situation and she hit the brakes, but perhaps she didn’t hit them as hard as she could. They’d been going pretty fast yet the road had been in as much disrepair as all the others they’d been on. Slowing down too quickly would end in an accident, she knew. And the group of reanimated, about five in all, seemed so far away when she hit the brake. She didn’t expect the distance to close so quickly. She swerved a little, but not enough. Somewhere in her mind, she still didn’t consider it that important if she just ran down a few reanimated.
Three of them were out of the way in time. Two were not. She hit one of them head on, and the van still had enough speed that the thing’s rotting body splattered apart on impact. Its head slammed into the windshield and cracked it just as blackish-red blood smeared all over it. There was a second thump, but Liddie only barely heard it over her and Edward’s screams.
The van skidded to a halt at an angle, and for one second it tilted at an odd angle on the left two wheels. Then the van thumped back down to all four, and everything went silent except for their ragged gasps of breath.
Edward spoke first. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Liddie said. “You?”
“Yeah.”
They sat there for a few more seconds in silence before Edward undid his seat belt and opened his door.
“Wait, where are you going?” Liddie asked.
“To check on the damage,” Edward said. He got out, and after a few more moments to catch her breath Liddie followed.
Liddie wrinkled her nose as she looked back at the highway behind them. Skid marks went back for longer than she could estimate, but that wasn’t the most prominent new feature on the asphalt. A streak of gore trailed behind the van for at least forty feet. Most of it was complet
ely unrecognizable, but here and there Liddie thought she could see parts that might have once been ribs or internal organs. Off the side of the road a complete arm lay in the dirt.
“Oh dear God,” Liddie said. “It’s like they came out of nowhere.” She said it to Edward, but he wasn’t listening. He walked a bit off the road and gestured to the three remaining reanimated. They’d shambled in three different directions, but now that the initial moment of shock was over they all walked toward each other again, and once they were all within ten feet of each other they started shambling back to the road, directly toward the van.
“Oh hell,” she said. “Get back in the van, quick.”
“We don’t have anything to worry about from them,” Edward said. His voice was so soft she could barely hear it over the wind.
“But they’re coming right for us.”
“They smell prey,” he said, “but that’s not their biggest emotion right now. They’re scared. We scared them.”
“Edward, they don’t have emotions.”
“No, I guess not really. Not completely. But they do have something.”
He stared intently at the three, and they all stopped. Liddie remembered the way the reanimated had frozen during Dr. Chella’s experiment, but they stopped for longer this time. They actually stared at Edward, then turned away.
“Edward? Did you just do that?” Liddie asked.
“Yes. They still smell you, but they no longer think of you as prey. Or at least I think that’s what I told them. I’m still not really sure.”
It didn’t matter. Whatever they thought, if they could be said to think at all, it still kept them walking in the other direction. They made no sign of turning back.
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 19
