Larissa grumbled but went inside. Rae didn’t think she had to worry about the girl leaving, at least not for a while. The girl was only barely an adult, and she hadn’t had a chance to get out and do anything with her life yet. Even if she found this boring, it was still better than her previous job desk-sitting in the Merton building.
Larissa was one of only a handful of the first wave of people Rae had recruited from Merton when she walked out on the job a couple of weeks earlier. Few people had believed her stories of a thinking, talking, human-looking zombie at first. Some, such as Larissa, had heard enough of the idle talk from onlookers on the day of Edward’s standoff that they at least gave Rae a chance to make her case. Rae had walked out of Merton that very day, not wanting any part of the cover-up. Johnny had tried to talk some sense into her, so she’d walked out on him as well. That would have been the end of it if she hadn’t dug deeper, looking for evidence to back up her claims. A few questions to the right people had turned up the term Z7, as well as a few key names in the CRS that she could use to at least make her story believable to a few more people. The real coup, however, had been finding the picture of Edward someone had taken just as the CRS was taking him out of the back of Ringo’s truck. It had been enough get the attention of a few somewhat disreputable media outlets. She had made her appearance on national television almost a week ago, and that was when things had gotten interesting. Merton Security didn’t (she hoped) have any idea where she was right now, although she couldn’t expect that to continue for long.
“Please tell me Cory finally got those old grills working,” Larissa said.
“Yeah, he did,” Rae said, “But that doesn’t mean he can cook worth a shit. And the dumbass didn’t bother to clean them off before he turned them on for the first time. So beware, the entire kitchen area smells like burning dust.”
“Hell, I don’t care,” Larissa said. “I’ve been patrolling the town all morning. I’m starved.”
“All morning? You’ve only been out for an hour.”
“And I didn’t wake up until almost eleven, so it was all of my morning.”
She let Larissa go back into the kitchen while Rae proceeded to the dining room and the makeshift command center Cory had set up. He’d pushed together any old tables that could still stand by themselves and covered them with the yellowing city maps the old man had found for them. Broken salt and pepper shakers marked the places where they had sentries around the town, while chopped up pieces of straw represented the zombies that had been found so far and pushed out of the town limits. Larissa, Jojo, and Luke had wanted to kill the zombies they’d found, but Rae made it perfectly clear that if any of them killed a zed then she would put a hole in that person’s head to match. Her parents were probably spinning in their graves over such an order, but Edward had put a significant amount of doubt in her mind when it came to the reanimated. So she kept the zeds out of town, far away from the old man, but did nothing else to them.
“Did I just see Larissa come in?” Cory asked.
“She went in back to see if she could burn lunch less than you could.”
“Damn it, she knows that the first thing she’s supposed to do when she comes in between patrols is report to me.”
“You and I both know her reports are less than reliable anyways. What did Jojo and Luke have to say when they came in?”
Cory indicated the maps. “Look for yourself. I sent them both off to see if they could confirm this, but do you see anything weird here?”
Rae sat down on the least-rickety looking chair she could find and stared at the maps. Shakers indicated Luke and Jojo’s approximate locations, both on the west side of town. A normal patrol would have taken them all around the town with Larissa and occasionally Rae acting as extra sets of eyes looking west, but Rae could see right away that there was a major discrepancy that hadn’t been on the maps yesterday.
They’d been tracking at least eighteen zombies in the area immediately surrounding Winnebago. Jojo had found some paint that hadn’t gone completely bad in the ruins of an old hardware store, and they’d been using the brightest they could find to tag the zombies with marks on their chests and backs so they could be seen from a distance. If a zombie showed up without a tag, they knew it had to have just recently wandered in. They’d had a few of those new additions in their first two days here, but not in the days after that. The straw pieces on the map were colored with the same paint as their respective zombies, giving them an idea where each one was. Everyone on patrol kept track of which ones they saw where, and reported it in to Cory.
The strange thing now, however, was most of the straw pieces had been removed from the map.
“Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” Rae asked. “So the question is where did they go?”
“I don’t think you’re actually seeing what I’m talking about,” Cory said. “Take a look at the pattern.”
Rae pulled out her canister of chewing tobacco, put a pinch in her mouth, and chewed as she tried to see what Cory saw. Out of the eighteen zombies that called the area around Winnebago their home, only six were left. The answer came to her quickly. She’d been preoccupied with the disappeared zombies, not with the position of the ones that remained. All six were to the east and slightly south of the town.
“Did someone kill them?” Rae asked.
“They’re already dead. I keep trying to tell you that, but it’s like you aren’t paying attention.”
“I’m paying plenty of attention. I just don’t have the same limited idea of what death means anymore. Answer the question.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Cory said. “If they were dead, we would have found bodies.”
“So twelve zeds just vanish, no bodies, and it doesn’t affect the ones in a specific area. Whatever’s going on, why doesn’t it seem to be happening on the east side of town?”
“I wondered that, too, but then both Luke and Jojo told me that had to use the shock prods more than usual today. Those six remaining zeds? They were trying to get into town.”
“You think all the others are hiding somewhere in town?”
“No, I don’t. Look.” He threw the rest of straws on the map, placing them randomly around the town. “These six were trying to get into town. They were all going the same direction. Do you see now?” He pushed the six toward town but stopped them at the first groups of wrecked buildings. Then he pushed all the others in the same direction. There was no town or security detail to stop them, so they all kept going.
Rae pulled out the old mayonnaise jar she’d been keeping under the table as a spittoon and spit a wad of dark saliva into it, then stared at the map. They were all heading west.
“And when did this start?” she asked.
“All the zeds were accounted for as of the midnight patrol.”
She nodded. “Something’s going on west of here. Any ideas?”
“Not a clue. If we really want to know, we’ll have to send someone out there to scout it.”
“The old man hasn’t said anything?” Rae asked.
“He hasn’t left the library. Jojo went in to check on him, make sure nothing had happened, and the old man just shooed her out again. Although, yeah, now that I think about it Jojo said he looked kind of excited when she said most of the zeds were gone. You think he has something to do with it?”
“You know him just about as well I do. What do you think?”
“I think that if that crazy old fucker isn’t behind the disappearances, he at least knows what’s caused them.”
“Then I say we go ask him,” Rae said.
She was about to go into the kitchen to tell Larissa to keep an eye on the place while they were gone, but Luke came in through the door before she could do anything.
“Holy shit guys. You need to come see this.”
“What is it?” Rae asked.
“Me and Jojo found the zeds. Rae, look, I know you’re got this whole pacifist thing going with them, but I think maybe you
should rethink that for today.”
“Come on, quit teasing us, honey,” Cory said. “Are you going to tell us or not?”
“No, Cory, this is something you’ve got to see to believe. If Larissa’s here she should probably come, too. And everyone should bring their guns.”
Larissa and Luke took their ATVs while Rae and Cory took his car. They didn’t have to go far. There was the remains of a major highway just north of the Culvers, and they all found Jojo huddled behind her own ATV with a pair of binoculars in hand and her rifle at the ready nearby. Rae went to her side with Spanky in her hands, and the others soon joined them.
“You moved,” Luke said. “Weren’t you further down?”
“I had to get back closer to base,” Jojo said. Her deep voice quavered a little. That was odd and a little disturbing. Jojo had always been the stupidly brave sort. “They’re moving faster than they should.”
“Can you still see them?” Luke asked.
“Yeah, but you won’t need to binoculars for that very soon.”
“Give them to me,” Rae said. Jojo handed her the binoculars without argument, and Rae pointed them where she had been looking. It was immediately apparent what had rattled the two of them. Down the road she could see all the painted zeds that had disappeared, and far more besides. She couldn’t be sure of the exact number, but she thought fifty would be a conservative estimate. It was a true horde, the kind her parents had told her about in hushed tones, the sort of thing a human had to get away from as fast as possible if they wanted to survive. But although her first instinct was to run, her heart started to calm the more she stared. Jojo was right. They were coming fast, and the longer she looked the easier it was to tell why.
“Stand down, everyone,” Rae said. “Put all your rifles away.”
“Okay, that is now officially crazy,” Luke said.
“No, it’s not,” Rae said. “This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”
She focused the binoculars on one particular zombie, the one at the very front. It wasn’t usual for zeds to follow one leader like that, but apparently they had made an exception here.
Edward Schuett was finally here, and he had brought with him his own zombie army.
Chapter Thirty Seven
At first, Edward made the corpse of Billy Horton follow him as a punishment. He used Horton’s truck to get a reasonable distance from Laramie, but it was an older model with gas mileage more like what Edward remembered from his own time and it ran out in what he guessed was somewhere in Nebraska. He forced Horton to spend all that time in the truck bed. For a while he was even petty enough to force Horton to lean over the side where all the various insects would splatter in his face, but that got old. In fact, the whole idea of vengeance against this man lost its appeal very quickly. The man who had killed Liddie was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Even if Edward did learn the secret to turning a regular zombie into a Z7, Horton wouldn’t get that treatment. Let the bastard wander around and eventually get shot in the head.
Once Edward had to go back to walking, however, he found having Horton around made some things easier. After some practice he figured out how to use the pheromone to make the zombie flush out small animals from their hiding places, where Edward could then pick them off with Horton’s rifle to feed himself. He used the next zombie he found for pretty much the same use at first, but that didn’t feel right. Edward didn’t give a rat’s ass about Horton, but the new one could maybe be saved by whatever process had turned Edward. It gave Edward some satisfaction that maybe he could help at least one person where he had so terribly failed Liddie. So Horton continued being Edward’s lapdog while the new one was closer to Edward’s equal. He made the next one follow him as well, and the next.
Pretty soon he wasn’t just picking up stray zombies in his path. He sought them out, sniffing for any hint on the wind that a zombie was nearby. And he sent out his own pheromones that grew stronger with every zombie added to his horde. The more he found, the further his reach.
The problem, however, was keeping them fed. He couldn’t stop them from eating entirely, since if they started starving they became slower and less responsive. He could push them to greater speeds with the pheromones, but that only went so far, and the various animals they found were generally too fast for the zombies to get them on their own. The horde grew too quickly for Edward to be able to feed them, especially since he only had a limited amount of ammunition and he had to use that for his own hunting if he ever wanted to reach Winnebago. Eventually he let a few go that were too slow to keep up.
Several times the thought occurred to him that he could feed them all if he just descended on a town somewhere. Even with the security all these places had in mid-country, they wouldn’t be expecting a horde that could coordinate their movements on this scale.
He could save all these zombies easily if he only killed living people. The irony was not lost on him, and he couldn’t bring himself to take that step. Not yet, at least.
Nearly a week after he and Liddie escaped from the CRS, Edward saw the first sign announcing that Winnebago was close. At the start of the journey he thought he would receive this moment with excitement and anticipation, but now there was no real joy at knowing the end was near. He knew that this mysterious old man had all the answers, but Edward didn’t have the slightest clue what he would do with the answers once he found them.
He could smell the group standing in the road at the edge of the town long before he saw them. The other zombies smelled them, too, and Edward had to work to keep them from going into a hungry frenzy. He had to admit that the smell of living meat ahead of them was enticing, then remembered that it wasn’t too long ago that thinking of a human as meat had repulsed him. He snorted at the memory, but without any humor.
Within a couple minutes he could see them. They were all armed, and Edward almost paused to consider what to do next. They hadn’t done anything to him yet that would justify attacking them, but at the same time they stood between him and the last thing in his life that had any meaning. He could send the horde to plow right through them, both taking care of their little roadblock and revitalizing the zombies at the same time. Or the group could be smart and try to run, but Edward didn’t have faith anymore that people could be that intelligent. All those people, the living ones, the humans, they all thought they were so much better. They had never given much thought to what would happen if they pissed off the wrong zombie, because pissing off a zombie had never been possible before. If people didn’t wise up very soon, there was an unfortunate possibility that Edward would have to teach them.
That whole line of thought became moot, however, when he saw one of the people motion for all the others to put their weapons down. Edward continued, hoping this wasn’t some kind of trap, until he got close enough to see the leader. Or, rather, until he was close enough to see her bright pink and silver rifle.
For the first time in almost a thousand miles of travel, Edward smiled.
He didn’t even need to concentrate too hard anymore to manipulate the pheromones into a stop order. The horde instantly ceased moving. He had enough experience now to know they would stand completely still for a couple minutes, and if he did nothing to reinforce the pheromones the zombies would then get fidgety. In about ten minutes they would begin to mill around, in fifteen they would probably try to attack the human in front of them. He had about that long to talk.
Leaving the horde behind at what he hoped was a non-threatening distance, Edward continued on down the road. Rae stepped away from her group but didn’t come the rest of the way to meet him. Edward stopped a couple feet away from her, and she gave him a cautious smile.
“Hey there, stranger,” she said.
“Rae, I never in a million years would have expected to see you here.”
“And I would have never expected to be here. But it’s been a strange couple weeks.”
“Yeah, I know how that one goes,” he said.
�
��I would say you probably know it a whole hell of a lot better than I do,” she said, pointing first at the horde behind him and then at the large bloodstained hole in the front of his coveralls. Edward had practically forgotten it was there. The wound had healed within a day, although he could still feel the bullet jabbing tender parts inside him if he breathed too hard. “I bet you that’s going to be quite the story.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but it might just be one I keep to myself.”
Rae nodded. “We were told you were coming and you wouldn’t be alone, but I expected at least one more person with a heartbeat. Where’s Claudia Gates?”
Edward sucked in a breath. “How the fuck did you know about her?”
“There’s a certain old man around here. I think you might have talked to him at least once. He claims to have a lot of secret contacts in high up places. Those contacts apparently told him that the CRS was planning on putting you down, and they got him in contact with her. He told me that the younger Gates was with you when he talked to you and that she would be by your side. So where is she?”
Edward said the words slowly. “Wyoming, in a grave a lot shallower than she deserves.”
Rae fidgeted. “Oh.”
“The man who killed her is back there,” Edward said, cocking his thumb back over his shoulder. “Maybe if I ever see Liddie’s mother again I’ll turn him over to her. She can dissect him, if she wants.”
Rae looked less comfortable around him by the second. “You turned him into a zed?”
“He deserved worse.”
He noticed she held Spanky a little tighter in her hands, but he didn’t care if she suddenly got the urge to shoot him. He could understand her discomfort.
“Edward, what happened to you?” she asked. “This isn’t the person I met a couple weeks ago who just wanted to find his daughter.”
He snorted. “I’m sorry. I really am. But most people wouldn’t describe me as a person anymore.”
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 25
