The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (26 page)

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 completely 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.

“That is really eerie,” Liddie said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“It’s rather new for me, too,” Edward said. “And I’m still not even sure I’m doing it right.”

“Come on,” Liddie said. “We’ll need to clean off the van before we—”

“Not yet,” Edward said. “There’s something else.”

He walked back down the road, but Liddie couldn’t tell why at first. Even Edward looked a little lost. He kept glancing at the side of the road, bending down to take a closer look at the bits of gore left behind by the exploding reanimated, and even occasionally sniffing the air. He finally went completely off the road at right about the place where the van had hit the reanimated, going twenty feet out into the desert to stoop next to some scrub bushes. Liddie followed, not sure what he was looking at until she was almost next to him.

“Is it dead?” Liddie asked.

“Oh yes,” Edward whispered. The last reanimated, the one she’d hit but hadn’t seen, lay in the dust. Its entire body was twisted at a terrible angle, and now that she was closer she could see that she’d asked a stupid question. Its head and chest were completely caved in so that Liddie couldn’t even tell if it had once been a man or a woman. Its clothes looked like little more than rags, although its denim jeans seemed to have held up remarkably well over the years.

“So we don’t need to worry about it,” Liddie said. She turned to go back to the van, but Edward stopped her.

“Liddie, wait. I need your help.”

“With what?”

“With burying him.”

“What? Why?”

Edward stood up and glared at her. “What do you mean, why?”

“It’s just a reanimated.”

Edward reached down and felt around at the reanimated’s waist. He apparently found what he was looking for in one of the pockets and pulled it out, showing it to Liddie. It was a nylon wallet, badly worn with age but still intact. “If he was just a zombie, then why would he need this?”

“He probably just had it on him when he died. Most zombies probably did.”

“Liddie, do you seriously mean to tell me that you still don’t get this?” He opened the wallet and started pulling things out to hand to her. “Look at these. Look at all of these.”

She looked at each one in turn. There were a couple of pay cards of the early design, the kinds they’d stopped making when she was just a kid. There were places on their backs for signatures, but the ink had long since been smeared away. There was a condom, its silver wrapper broken through in a few places to show the crumpled and brittle latex inside. There were some pieces of paper that Liddie didn’t recognize at first, but after closer inspection realized had to be battered old-style currency. A penny with a hole in it that had been tucked deep into one of the wallet’s pockets. A scrap of yellowed paper with the hastily scrawled words “For the birthday, Sat.,” followed by a telephone number. A folded photograph so faded that Liddie had to hold right up to her face to see what might be a young woman with long hair holding a dog. And the last thing Edward pulled out, a laminated card which he kept a hold of and read it out to her.

“Timothy North,” he said. “Apparently from Seattle, Washington. This driver’s license expired, what, twenty-eight years ago? A long way from home, isn’t he? How do you think he got all the way into the Nevada desert?”

“Well, reanimated migration patterns being what they are…”

“Damn it, Liddie, stop thinking like you’re still in the CRS just for one second and think about who this man was. Because that’s what he was. A man. With a family, probably. Look at all that stuff in his wallet. Don’t you see any story there? Can’t you picture this man maybe going on vacation to Las Vegas or something? Maybe he had his girlfriend with him. Maybe they were going to elope, get married in some cheesy little chapel where the guy doing the ceremony is an Elvis impersonator. Anything like that, because whether any of that is true or not, this man had a story. It’s a story that got cut short. But what if this guy in Illinois is the reason I became a Z7? What if he can do that again? That means this man’s story could have started up again, but now it won’t. And because of that, excuse me if I’m going to take a moment to mourn him, because this man could have just as easily been me.”

He took all the contents of the wallet back from her and carefully placed each one back where he had found it except for the driver’s license. Then he folded the wallet back up, put it back in the reanimated’s pocket, and got to his knees to dig a hole next to the body with his hands.

“Edward, don’t do this,” Liddie said.

Edward turned to her with a look of genuine anger. “Look, at this point I really don’t care if—”

“You’ll rip your hands up if you try to dig like that,” Liddie said, and Edward’s expression softened. “Let’s go back to the van first and see if there’s anything we can use as a shovel.”

They were able to pull apart a couple pieces of plastic from the interior of the van. They made terrible shovels and the grave ended up being only a foot deep, but it was enough to satisfy Edward. He added in what pieces he could find of the other reanimated, although neither of them could stomach doing that for long, and placed them next to the body. They then covered it up and used one of the makeshift plastic shovels as a grave marker. As a final gesture Edward leaned the driver’s license next to the marker. It wasn’t the kind of memorial that would last long enough for anyone else to ever find it, but for now at least they could both see that this was the final resting place of Timothy North, whoever he may have been.

Even though their route took them right past Salt Lake City, they didn’t try to go in. Considering the shape the van was in after the accident, they figured that stopping anywhere they didn’t have to might result in a whole lot of unwanted attention. It didn’t seem like it would be much of a problem, considering they thought they were in good shape until they at least got through Wyoming. They had enough fuel to go for a while, and they’d bought enough extra at Zappy’s that, as long as they ate sparingly, they would have enough until the morning. It was still a risk, considering the onboard map said there wouldn’t be any communities on their route after this until they reached Laramie, but Liddie told Edward it was a risk they should take. After all, Salt Lake was a mid-country city with a reputation for taking matters into their own hands, and if they recognized Edward as the Z7 they certainly wouldn’t wait for any official authorities to pick him up.

Neither of them noticed the first problems with the van until they started through the Rocky Mountains. Edward thought he heard the engine cough a little, but the noise didn’t repeat for long enough that he almost started to think it was his imagination. As the roads became steeper the noise occurred more frequently. By the time they had nothing surrounding them but large ledges of rock on one side and steep drops into pine forests on the other, they both knew they were in serious trouble.

They pulled over for a while for Edward to take a look under the hood, but that didn’t do them much good. Edward only had a very basic idea of how to fix a car, just enough that he had been able to keep his family’s car going long enough for payday to roll around so he could get someone else to fix it properly. Even that much knowledge wouldn’t help at all here, though. For starters, the van didn’t have anything in the way of emergency tools except for the spare tire and a jack. Vehicles like this had never been intended to go out this far from civilization, way beyond the motor pool and the CRS’s own mechanics. And even if they did have things to fix it with, Edward wouldn’t know where to start. This thing was fifty years beyond anything he had ever messed around with, and many of the components and gadgets under the hood were completely unrecognizable to him. Liddie couldn’t help out, either. All her expertise had been in administration, with a little bit of knowledge for scientific equipment. This kind of thing had always been done for her. At no time in her life had she even needed to change a flat tire.

Even with so little idea of car mechanics between them, it was obvious to see what had happened. From somewhere under various wires and tubes Edward pulled a putrid green finger, and it looked like there might be other pieces still in there. When they’d smashed the zombie, not all of it had ended up on the road and windshield. Some of it had gone through the front grill or under the severely dented hood. Edward took some time removing everything he could find, but several of the auto parts looked like they had been worn or broken from sharing their already cramped space with rotting body parts.

They briefly debated what to do. There was nothing else they could do but continue along and hope none of the damage was severe enough to strand them before they got to Laramie.

Through most of the Rockies, Edward thought fortune had smiled on them. It wasn’t until they started coming back down again out of the mountains that the simple engine coughs became more like burps, and soon were accompanied by groans and screeches. Liddie winced at every noise.

“How much further do we have until Laramie?” Edward asked when the first barely-noticeable tendril of smoke appeared at the edge of the hood.

“Thirty miles,” Liddie said. “Or at least I think. Whatever’s happening with the hood, I think it’s messing up the computer system, too. The map keeps shifting on the screen.”

Thirty miles. Edward nodded. They could still make that. Even if the van broke down before they made it there, it should still be close enough that they could walk there. Or at least he could walk there. Unfortunately, Liddie might be a different story. The land around them was mountainous with very little else on the landscape except grass and the highway. There weren’t many places she could go for cover if zombies were around, and with night approaching again she might not see them coming. He could try keeping them away, but he still didn’t trust his strange little pheromone ability enough to test her life with it. Even worse, they’d been eating and drinking sparingly all day. That didn’t leave them with a lot of energy to head out for another thirty miles on foot. Edward was pretty certain he could manage if he had to, since the CRS had tested his abilities to continue on for a time without food or water, but again Liddie didn’t have that advantage.

“Just keep going,” Edward said. “Maybe we can still make it.”

In response, the van made a very loud and unhappy thump from under the hood. The smoke immediately got much worse.

“Shit,” Edward said.

“Keep trying to go?” Liddie asked.

“That depends,” Edward said. “Does this model of van have any known tendency to explode?”

“Um, there might have been a recall at one point…”

“No, you know what? It’s probably much better if I don’t know. Looks like this is all she wrote. Pull over.”

Liddie pulled over to the shoulder and killed the ignition. There was a noise like something breaking under the hood. Edward seriously doubted that anything would happen if she tried turning the key again.