The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

by Derek J. Goodman

  There were other landmarks he recognized, although most of them were not exactly the way he remembered them. The truck passed the building that had once been Edith’s Bakery, but it looked like it might be some kind of pawnshop now. In the distance looming over the rest of the city he could see one of the tallest structures in Fond du Lac, the hotel that had constantly changed hands and been renamed every so often from the Retlaw to the Clarion to the Ramada. The sign on the top of the building now declared that it was Merton Tower, but he couldn’t be sure if that meant it was still a hotel or not.

  The truck occasionally passed people going about their business on the streets, although few gave the truck and cage a second glance. Those that did often did a second take as they saw Edward in the back with the zombies, and he kept hoping that someone would realize what a horrible mistake had been made, that a human had for some improbable reason been mistaken for a zombie and was being unjustly kept where the undead could kill him at any moment, but no one said anything. They just stared at him.

  The zombies, for their part, thankfully didn’t look like they were going to be attacking him anytime soon. Often they would try to stand up in the cage only to fall all over each other when the truck hit another bump in the road. They treated Edward no differently than they treated each other, which made Edward more disquieted than comforted. He knew he wasn’t a zombie, but no one else here seemed to realize that, not even the real zombies. He wondered if he could get Ringo or Charlie to give him a mirror when they got to their destination, for no other reason than to see what everyone was seeing about him that he couldn’t.

  Even though many of the places they had passed looked like they were thriving despite the apocalyptic scenario outside of the city, the truck ended up pulling into the driveway of a run-down two story home with its paint chipping and its roof sagging. The world had managed to continue on just as it once had, apparently, right down to being divided into haves and have-nots. Both doors of the truck opened at the same time to let Edward in on the middle of an argument.

  “What’s to discuss?” Charlie said as he jumped out of the passenger side and slammed his door. Edward couldn’t help but notice he had his pistol out again.

  “Absolutely nothing. Because again you seem to forget that I’m the one who’s in charge,” Ringo said.

  “Bullshit you’re in charge. You’re the one with the truck. That don’t give you the right to be making that kind of decision.”

  “That’s right. My truck, but also my zed prod and my cage and my gas and all kinds of other shit. If you don’t like how I decide to do this then you can just find another partner. Go ahead, just try. You’re not going to be making the same amount of cash with someone else, not with how scarce zeds have become. I’m the one who finds them. You just help haul them into the cage.”

  “I’m also the one who can shoot this motherfucker’s head clear the fuck off,” Charlie said, raising his gun at Edward and pulling back the hammer.

  “Jesus Christ!” Edward yelled as he ducked down, expecting a bullet to fly right through where his head had been. When there was no shot Edward looked back up. Charlie was walking briskly down the driveway and onto the sidewalk, cussing under his breath and waving his gun the whole way.

  “What the hell was that about?” Edward asked Ringo, but Ringo didn’t answer. He was too busy rooting around behind the seats for the prod again.

  “Damn it,” Edward said. “Answer me! I have a right to know what the hell is happening here!”

  Ringo closed the door, the prod now in his hand. He looked unnerved and shook a little as he spoke. “You don’t have any rights what-the-hell-so-ever. You’re a fucking zed.” Ringo shook his head. “Jesus, I must be losing it. Arguing with a fucking zombie.”

  “I am not a zombie,” Edward said. “I know I must look…strange, and I have no idea what’s going on with me, but I’m not a zombie. I’ve seen them in action. They’re mindless and just kill and eat anything in sight. Have I done anything that would make you think that about me?”

  Ringo paused, and for the first time he looked Edward in the eye. “No. No you haven’t. That’s the weird part. And that’s why I’m not taking you with the others. You’re getting out here.”

  “You’re letting me go?”

  “Hell no. But I need to put you somewhere while I take the rest to the Jamboree. I don’t know if they’ll want to buy you when they see you or not, but I don’t want to take that chance. I don’t know how the hell you’re able to talk and think, but I don’t think most people around here would appreciate just how different that makes you. Maybe you’re not really a zombie, and if I ever find that out for certain I’ll gladly let you go. But if you are? Aw hell, I could make way more money off of you than I ever would by selling you to be shot at by a bunch of tourists at the Jamboree.”

  Edward nodded, and Ringo shocked the other zombies through the bars before he went around to the back of the cage and fumbled with the keys. Edward wasn’t sure exactly what the Jamboree was, but he had already come to the conclusion that he didn’t want to go there. Ringo sounded like he was just going to lock Edward up somewhere else, but that was probably a better fate than any of the zombies would get.

  Ringo kept the prod out and ready to use on Edward if he made any sudden moves, but Edward didn’t need the man upset. What he really wanted to do was rush the damned man and beat the hell out of him for locking Edward in a cage, but Ringo would likely only take that aggression as a sign that he really was a zombie. It would be better for now the keep calm and let everything happen.

  “Can you at least tell me how long it’s been?” Edward asked.

  “How long what’s been?” Ringo asked. He gestured for Edward to move back behind the house into the overgrown back yard, and Edward did as he was shown.

  “How long it’s been since…well, since all this. The zombies, the abandoned parts of the city, the weird bulldozed area and the wall, all that. It looks like the world ended.”

  Ringo paused before answering. “How the hell could anyone not know that?”

  Edward continued to move, but he couldn’t resist the urge to be sarcastic. He had to have some sort of way to release all his tension. “Gee, maybe because I’m a zombie and I’m not all that smart. Please, just tell me.”

  “The Uprising was over fifty years ago. Old news.”

  Edward didn’t say anything. Fifty years. It no longer seemed so likely that he could find Dana after all.

  Chapter Six

  Ringo locked Edward in a storage shed out back and then left. Edward could hear the truck rumble to a start and then drive away, leaving him alone to try to piece together everything he had learned so far. He sat back against the shed’s far wall and tried to concentrate, but everything that had happened today had completely drained him and he drifted off to sleep instead.

  There was nothing restful about his slumber. Even unconscious, he could feel the odd tingling and pain in his body as all the festering wounds continued to mend. He twitched and fidgeted as he slept, and strange red-tinted dreams came to him, dreams that were part bizarre incomprehensible images and part memories. The memories didn’t tell him much, just visions of walking long distances through ruined neighborhoods and streets with occasional blood-spattered violence that his mind wasn’t quite ready to show him in total. When he woke up these dreams stayed at the corner of his thoughts, just waiting for a time when his mind might be willing to deal with what they needed to show him.

  He stretched his arms after he came to and stood up to stretch his legs, but that caused its own share of pain and a few cramps. He’d slowly been getting used to it all now, and rode out the agony as well as another bout of nausea. It was only when he was certain that he could keep the contents of his stomach down that he realized there wasn’t anything in there to begin with. The hunger in his stomach was minor pain compared to everything else, which struck him as odd. He didn’t know when the last time was that he had eaten, especially
since he wasn’t sure how long it had been since he first woke up in the store, but it had to have been hours. He would have thought he would be hungrier than this. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure when he had last needed to use a bathroom. He hadn’t felt the need to urinate at all, although from the scratchy and uncomfortable feeling of his underwear in back he suspected he might have had an accident at some point in the past. He didn’t want to think too hard about that for now, though.

  There were a lot of other things he needed to think about, however, with his thought process finally working at full capacity. All of this was a lot to take in and he vaguely wondered if he was going through some sort of shock. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? His mind shouldn’t have been able to accept everything that had happened to him so far. At the moment, though, he thought he could deal with it. It might catch up with him later psychologically, but for now he felt calm.

  Fifty years. He couldn’t bring himself to accept such a big number yet. That was longer than he had been alive (or at least believed himself alive, since apparently his true age would be somewhere around eighty-three). Whatever had happened, everything he remembered was now the distant past to many people. He didn’t think that any of the people he had met so far in this freakish nightmare version of his world were even old enough to remember the time Edward came from.

  So the question was, how did he get from then to now? For some reason, the first thing that popped into his head were all those stupid science fiction movies Julia had loved so much, stories where someone got trapped in the wrong time. That idea was absolutely ridiculous, and it had the added side effect of bringing Julia to the forefront of his mind. He didn’t want to think about her, not yet. He didn’t want to consider the idea that she might be fifty years older and frail, or maybe even dead…

  No, best not to think about her. Not yet. Not until he was more ready to deal with this. He had to keep his mind back on figuring out what had happened in the first place.

  Time travel, then, was too idiotic to consider, but he supposed it was no less insane than the idea of dead people walking. He had seen that with his own eyes, and not just today. That had begun on that Fourth of July fifty years ago now. And if he had any hope of understanding how he had made it to this point, then he needed to better reconstruct that day in his memory.

  There had been no sign that anything was out of the ordinary for most of the day, and the first time he had begun to wonder if something was wrong was when he had heard a car crash somewhere a few blocks away from his house. No, wait, maybe that wasn’t the first he had heard. He vaguely remembered something he’d heard when he’d gone for supplies at Walmart, something the cashier had said. The girl, a bored-looking twenty-something, had mentioned some sort of scare she’d been hearing about down in the direction of Chicago, some virus or something. She’d said it was being mentioned all over the place on Twitter and she’d asked him if he wanted to by one of those surgical-type masks. A lot of people had been coming in to get them, she had said. Edward had nodded politely and left, holding his tongue against all the obscenities he’d wanted to say to her. It had just been more hysteria created by morons who would believe anything the media told them, just like all the people that had been afraid of the West Nile Virus and the Swine Flu.

  Except he supposed that hadn’t been the case. The outbreak that had begun in Chicago hadn’t been false hysteria after all.

  When he had actually been doing the cookout, though, it had been the car crash that had made him uneasy. Dana was playing on her swing set and didn’t even hear the noise over her own delighted giggles on the swing. The sound hadn’t been too terribly loud, so Edward tried to pass it off as a fender bender and go on cooking his brats. Julia came out and asked him if he had heard it, and he said he had, but she wasn’t too worried. She was more curious than anything. Edward wouldn’t really call her a gossip, but she always wanted to know the latest news about their neighbors, and he supposed she wanted to know if it had been anyone she knew.

  Edward was too preoccupied with making sure the brats were perfect, that sweet spot where they were cooked all the way through but not darker than a deep brown on any side, to notice that Julia went around to the side of the house to the front. He did hear, however, when she screamed.

  The first thing he did when he heard the scream, even before he had checked for Julia, was to look for Dana. She was still on the swing set, sitting at the top of the slide, but her little six-year old eyes were wide as she looked in the direction of the side of the house. Edward turned to look at the same place and completely forgot about the brats.

  Julia was running toward him holding her left wrist. He could see the blood dripping from it and splashing on the grass as she ran, but he didn’t yet fully register that she was hurt. As he abandoned the grill and went to stop her in her panicked flight he became aware that hers wasn’t the only scream in the air. Somewhere else in the neighborhood there were other screams, men and women both, as well as other noises he couldn’t quite identify yet. The noises were loud and yet deep, like the wind blowing through empty canyons, sounds that had no right being heard in a quiet neighborhood in Heartland America.

  “Get Dana inside! Get her inside!” Julia screamed, and even though Edward had no idea what was happening his instincts told him to do exactly what she said. He ran to the swing set and grabbed his daughter as Julia ran in the house through the back door, and as he was pulling the startled and now crying girl off the slide he looked in the direction Julia had come from. He saw the first of the monsters coming around the side of the house, a creature that looked human except for its uneven walk and the unidentifiable guts hanging from the wide gash in its stomach. His hand went up to cover Dana’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t help but continue staring even as the thing shambled closer, and only when he saw a second one coming up behind the first did he realize he should be running for the safety of the house.

  As soon as he was through the door Julia slammed it behind him, although she wasn’t able to manage much force. She looked pale, and the blood was still flowing from her arm at an alarming rate. He set Dana down in the living room and ran to get something to bandage Julia’s arm, although all he’d been able to find on such short notice had been a couple of t-shirts. They at least slowed down the blood, and while Julia slouched exhausted in Edward’s arms he had stared out the living room window to see all the insane carnage going on outside. He had no idea what those things were or what they wanted, but they were ravenous, attacking anything that moved and ripping it apart with their teeth.

  Edward didn’t know how long he sat there watching, but when he came to his senses again he realized Dana was no longer in the room with them. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. When he tried to move Julia out of the way so he could go look for Dana, however, she didn’t budge. She was just dead weight in his arms. That scared him at first until he noticed her shivering. He put a hand to her head, ready to test for a fever or something, and that was when she bit him.

  He remembered yelling and pulling away from her as she first fell to the floor and then began crawling after him. He moved away, suddenly very frightened of the vacant and unfocused look in her eyes, but all memories after that faded to a hazy intense blur in his mind. All he could remember was the smell of burning brats coming in through the window, and with that he had begun to feel very, very hungry.

  The shed he was in now didn’t have any windows, but it was poorly constructed enough that light shone through several wide gaps in the roof slats, and Edward used the feeble light to look at his hand where Julia had once bit him. His arm still looked rotted and festered, although decidedly less so than it had when he had first woken up. His body really did appear to be healing itself. There was a faint outline near his thumb and forefinger that might have once been the impression of teeth, but they wouldn’t have been recognizable if he hadn’t known what he was looking for. It might even have just been his imagination
. He continued staring for a long time until he was finally able to forcibly accept the truth.

  Everyone he had met so far was right. Edward was a zombie. Or at least he had been one yesterday. He had no idea what he was now.

  Chapter Seven

  With her rifle Spanky slung on a strap over her shoulder, Rae biked through the streets of Fond du Lac to the North Side. According to what little history Rae knew about the city, the northern end had once been the site of Lakeside Park. Her parents had once told her that the park had included a playground and various rides, all situated on the shore of beautiful Lake Winnebago. The lake was still there, as well as the marina and historic lighthouse that had lit the way for boats to get into the harbor, but everything else had changed. The playground equipment and broken down carousel had been hauled away long ago, and all the canals that had wound their way through the park had been filled in. The barn from the old petting zoo was all that still stood, and it now served as the entrance to the Jamboree.