The Reanimation of Edward Schuett (27 page)

“Okay, so now what?” Edward asked.

Liddie stared at the blank monitor on the dashboard where the map had been. “Well, we sure are not going to be getting to Illinois any time soon.”

“And Laramie?” he asked. “Any chance we’ll find a way to continue on from there?”

“I don’t really know,” Liddie said. “It depends if someone has a vehicle we can buy with what little money we have, which I don’t think is likely. And that would only be if the residents are friendly to outsiders.”

“Do you have any reason to believe they wouldn’t be?”

“This is mid-country. No one is friendly to outsiders. But I can’t recall hearing about anything worse than normal from around here. I guess we really won’t know one way or the other until we actually make it there.”

“Do you think they would recognize me there?” Edward asked.

“No more or less reason than anywhere else,” Liddie said. “I don’t know. Is there anything you can do to make yourself look less like you?”

“Nothing more than what I’m already doing,” he said as he rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved since the escape from Stanford, but he only barely had any stubble. That was one of the bizarre little details of being a Z7, apparently. Before, he’d been the kind of person who could get five o’clock shadow half an hour after shaving. Now it took days before there was enough hair on his face to bother going over it with a razor.

“Guess it will have to be enough,” Liddie said. “Come on, let’s get going.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Edward said, gesturing at the sky behind them. The sun was already low over the mountains.

“Maybe not,” she said. “For all we know, if we come in after dark they’ll mistake us for reanimated and aim for our heads. But what are we even going to do until then?”

“We’ve got a little bit of food left,” he said, “but maybe we should leave that until the morning. You know, make sure we’re as full as we can be before the walk. Thirty miles on foot is not exactly going to be easy.”

Liddie nodded. “So what then?”

“We should probably use the van again as shelter tonight, but for now it should be okay if we build a fire, shouldn’t it?”

“Won’t that attract reanimated?”

“I’ll be able to tell if any are coming, and maybe even get them to go away. Come on, what do you say? We can use it to keep warm for a while, maybe even find a stick we can sharpen and roast stale hamburger patties over an open flame.”

Liddie smiled. “Like they used to do back in your time when people went camping?”

“Yeah, just like that. Well, no, except for the hamburger patty thing. Not exactly traditional camping food.”

“Do you even know how to start a fire?”

“I know how to pretend I know how to start a fire. Does that count?”

Liddie laughed, and they both got out of the van to search the terrain for burnable wood. It wasn’t easy, but after some searching Liddie found the very old remains of a wooden fence that might have once marked the borders of someone’s property. They brought it back to the road and set it up on the shoulder, being sure to keep it far enough away from the grass to prevent a brushfire. Actually lighting it was a hassle. Edward remembered seeing people start fires in various outdoorsy ways on television and in movies, and he even had a vague recollection of some of the tips he’d been taught back when he was a boy in Cub Scouts, but none of it was easy. It took them both a long time of messing around with the wood and cussing it out before they finally got a moderate fire going. Liddie actually went as far to skewer one of the burgers, bun and all, on a stick they had found. She thought the idea was hilarious.

To Edward’s surprise, he couldn’t help but smile along with her. He had to admit it. This was actually kind of fun. For the moment they could forget why they were out here in the first place and all the bad things that had happened up until this moment. The CRS seemed like a long time ago, and all the obstacles that were still in their path felt far off. As they sat side by side in front of the fire, watching the sun vanish behind the Rocky Mountains while eating their ridiculous burgers-on-a-stick, Edward actually felt a little bit at peace.

“You want the rest of this?” Liddie asked as she pulled the final hamburger from her stick and fished the meat out from the well-done bun.

“Sure.” He took it and ate it slowly, staring all the while at Liddie as she licked ketchup from her fingers. She smiled at him and watched him right back as she ate the bun. They were both sitting cross-legged, and Edward suddenly became aware that she was close enough for their knees to touch. It gave him a little thrill to have her so close. She saw where he was looking and put a hand on his knee.

“Is this really what camping was like back then?” she asked.

“Kind of. I didn’t get to do it a lot. I’d always hoped to get out and do it more once Dana got a little older. Do people not do this at all anymore?”

“Far too dangerous,” Liddie said. “I wouldn’t dare sit out here in the open, in the dark, if you weren’t around to do that thing. Have you had to use it at all, yet?”

“A zombie moved by somewhere to the north of us a while ago,” he said. “But I think the wind was wrong for it to get a whiff of us.”

“It’s refreshing,” she said, “being away from all the people. Being alone.” Something about the soft way she said the words made him look into her eyes. She stared back, and Edward felt a flutter in his chest. He hadn’t felt anything like this since he’d first started dating Julia, that moment of anticipation when he thought a relationship was about to take a new, unexpected, yet welcome turn. She leaned closer, just enough to give him a hint at what she wanted, and he matched the movement. Closer together, so close, but Edward couldn’t quite make himself move across those vital last inches. He wanted to, he really did. The thought of Julia was still there, though. His wife, the one he’d never been able to even give a funeral.

Something about him must have given away his thoughts, because Liddie leaned away and the moment was broken. “You’re still not ready, are you?”

“For a moment there I thought I was. But I guess maybe I’m not.”

Liddie nodded and scooted a few inches away from him. Edward felt a small emptiness the instant she moved away. “Can I ask you something?” she asked.

“Go ahead.”

“What happens after we get to Winnebago?”

“I don’t know. Unless we can find some sort of ride in Laramie, that might just be a long time off yet.”

“Suppose its not. Suppose we luck out and get a vehicle and make it all the way to Winnebago by tomorrow night. What happens then?”

Edward shrugged. “We find this man and hope it’s not all some sort of weird trap, and hopefully he can give me some answers.”

“All right, assume that. We’re there, he has all the answers. And after that?”

He frowned. “Liddie, I’m not sure I get what kind of answer you’re looking for from me here.”

“We’ve travelled halfway across the country already. This is so far from anything else that I’ve ever done that I don’t have even the tiniest inkling what comes after that.”

“I guess I don’t either. This isn’t exactly common for either of us here. I don’t know. Maybe…find a place where I can resume something that looks like the way my life was before?”

“You can’t have your life from before. It’s gone. Just like mine. It’s not coming back.”

“Liddie, is that what this is about? Are you having regrets that you did this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. No. No, not regrets. I’m just scared.”

“I’m scared, too, if that means anything.”

Liddie nodded. She was silent for a long time, then she abruptly stood up. “Guess maybe it’s time to get some sleep. The earlier we wake up, the earlier we can start off for Laramie.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” he said. “I’ll put out the fire.”

She just nodded and went back to the van. Edward couldn’t help but think he had missed something vital in that conversation, but he didn’t know what.

A dim part of his mind, one that was fading quickly, could still recognize the smell coming in from the open window. Brats, burning on a grill. But those words no longer had much meaning to him, and the smell was nothing more than a distraction. Other scents on the air concerned him more. Through the window he clearly caught something new, something completely unfamiliar yet so enticing at the same time, a shifting and swirling odor of honey. It was everywhere. He should have been able to detect it before, but “before” no longer had any meaning. No before and no later, just now.

The window wasn’t the only place where the scent came from. He looked around and saw something else in the room with him, something familiar in shape and thick with the sweet scent. His mind had no name for it anymore. It was just a form that moved and acted like he did. He felt an attachment to it, an urge not to leave it. He didn’t know why, nor did he care. He just knew that was the way things were.

He milled around the room, occasionally bumping into things that he no longer had names for, and the other form did the same. The sweetness from outside urged them both to join it, but they couldn’t figure out how so they just continued shambling here and there.

He soon became aware of one more odor, but this was oh so much different. This one was foreign and meaty, and it filled him with an urge to rip and shred. The other form had to notice it as well, but neither of them could find it. The smell seemed to come from behind a door, but neither of them knew how to use a door handle. So they continued that way for a long time, shambling and walking into the door and then shambling some more.

The light outside had changed by the time the door finally opened. He stood on the far side of the room from it, not even looking, but as soon as the door opened just a crack the smell grew stronger. He turned to it, and a small thing darted out and toward another door. He wasn’t fast enough to catch it, and the other form missed it as well. It went through the door, shutting the door behind it, and he could hear it babbling, saying things he couldn’t understand. Eventually the noise stopped, and there was no more scent. He shambled about some more, not concerned with the fact that he hadn’t done anything other than that all day.

Time passed. He didn’t understand that, nor was he capable of wanting to. Sometimes that small thing would come back, and he would try to catch it again, but it was always too fast. It felt familiar somehow, much in the same way the other form shambling around the room did, but this thing didn’t have the honey scent and therefore it was not something he couldn’t try eating. He was aware sometimes of hunger, and when it got truly bad he couldn’t move quite as much. Many times it got so bad he fell to the floor, unable to pull himself back up. The first time this happened, he was there for a very long time before the meat appeared in front of him. The meat was putrid and rotting, and he didn’t know how it had come to be right where he needed it, but it was enough to restore some of this strength.

The food continued coming, but only when he was at his weakest. Eventually he saw the small scampering thing place it there in front of him, then scamper away to some hiding place. He didn’t know why it did this, nor did he care. He just accepted it.

The small scampering thing didn’t stay small. He was unaware of years passing, but the thing was always there, always growing. Sometimes it would stay in the room long enough to talk to him, speaking words that meant nothing, leaving only when he tried to kill it. It began to look more and more like the other form in the room, despite its ragged clothing and skinny body. Or maybe it was because of the ragged clothing and skinny body, since the form had wasted away to little more. Somewhere in his head there was a part of him that still felt more for this thing than just the lust to rip it apart and eat its flesh, but even on the rare occasions where that part of him surfaced it didn’t stay long.

He wasn’t aware enough to realize the moment when everything was different. The time came when he was too weak to move, and the thing came in and left meat for him and the other, but it didn’t leave. As he ate and regained his strength, he heard that the sounds it made this time were so much different than normal. Crying, the old him would have known it as, but now he couldn’t recognize it. It left the door it normally used open wide and sat down on the floor between him and the other, and it had something in each hand. He didn’t know what to call them anymore, but Edward’s mind, now coming up from its dreaming memory, recognized them both. His daughter, now a young woman after having stayed with them for so long, had a bottle of whiskey in one hand in one hand and a razor blade in the other.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said, or at least that was what he thought she said through the tears. “I’ve tried. I really did. All these years I thought you might come back. Shows just how fucking stupid I am.”

She took one last swig from the whiskey bottle, waited for her long-dead parents to come for her, and then, right as their stiff fingers were about to touch her flesh, she put the razor to her carotid artery and pulled it across her skin.

For the first time since the dreams had started, Edward woke screaming. But the memory didn’t fade away with sleep. The memory continued coming back to him even in full wakefulness. He felt Dana’s blood splash his skin and watched her pleading eyes as the light faded from them. She had to be in her late teens by this time, for she had developed an ample bosom just like her mother’s, and that chest stopped rising and falling as she collapsed to the ground. She’d been with them that whole time, never leaving their side, always hoping in her childish way that her parents would come back to her. She’d never left, never tried to rejoin other people. Maybe it had driven her mad. Maybe she had gone nearly feral, no longer even capable of living around anyone that wasn’t part of the walking dead. Or maybe she had just loved them too much to let them finally leave without making sure they had one more meal to keep their strength up.