The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

by Derek J. Goodman

  Rae locked her bike up at the bike rack next to about thirty others. People like Ringo could afford a little gasoline for their cars thanks to all the money they brought in with the increasingly rare zombies (and didn’t have any real choice in the matter, since it was kind of hard to pull around a cage full of zombies on a ten-speed), but most other people had to make do with simpler transportation. Rae had seen on television how people on the coasts were starting to have huge amounts of oil imported in again, but as usual everyone in the center of the country had to make do with the dregs.

  The Jamboree didn’t look open for business just yet, as it was still far too early in the day for any big crowds, but there at least seemed to be some activity as the Jamboree’s employees prepared for the night’s show. Rae walked up to the front entrance in the converted barn and waited while a bored looking teenage boy came up to the ticket counter.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said with a tone that made it evident he had given this same line hundreds of times before. “We are not quite opened for business yet. Show times are every Wednesday and Friday from eight p.m. to ten p.m. Tickets will be available—”

  “I’m not here for tickets,” Rae said. The Jamboree’s new days and hours were news to her, but they weren’t surprising. Her parents might have mourned the loss of a carousel from days gone by, but to her the Jamboree was the place of fond childhood memories that was slowly slipping away. Built shortly before she’d been born, a few years after the government had declared their “victory” against the zombie Uprising, it had originally been a way to get rid of more zeds while both making a profit and giving the people a way to “get back” at the creatures who had wiped out three-quarters of the human race. People still came to watch the Jamboree, but not as many anymore. Those who did come were older. The younger generation had forgotten what the zeds had done to the world and didn’t understand why they had to be exterminated like vermin.

  The other more pressing problem for the show, however, was how few zombies there were left out there anymore. No one had ever developed an inoculation against the Animator Virus, but humanity had become highly adept at surviving anyway. Fewer people being bitten meant fewer new zombies, while the old ones were rounded up and brought to places like this.

  The Jamboree wouldn’t be around forever, and Rae felt a deep sense of melancholy whenever she came here. People were forgetting the older ways too easily, losing their heritage.

  “I’m actually here looking for one of the zed dealers,” Rae said. “Guy named Ringo. He been around yet?”

  The boy shrugged, somehow managing to look even more bored now than when he had started the conversation. “Don’t know. They don’t come through the front, so I don’t really have to deal with them.”

  “Right,” Rae said with a sigh. She moved to go around the ticket counter and into the Jamboree, but the kid suddenly became more animated.

  “Wait, no. You can’t go back there. You can come back at one of the showtimes on Wednesday or Friday from—”

  “Kid, I’ve got business to take care of.”

  “Well, you can’t go back with your rifle. No outside weapons allowed in the Jamboree.”

  Rae blinked. That was a new one, but she supposed it had been as inevitable as everything else about the Jamboree’s decline. In its early days people had been encouraged to bring their own weapons, partly because it wanted to insure that people were prepared if anything in the show ever got out of hand, and partly because the Jamboree hadn’t owned enough of its own weapons to pass around to all the people who wanted to take part in the festivities.

  Now they must have had enough weapons but not enough people. And lawmakers had started passing gun laws, which was just ridiculous. What if the common person on the street needed to kill some zed outbreak? Rae could have sworn that the world had lost all its common sense.

  “Spanky doesn’t leave my side,” Rae said. “He just doesn’t.”

  “Then you can’t go in, because no outside weapons…”

  “…are allowed in the Jamboree. Right, I heard you the first time.” Rae rolled her eyes as she reached into her pocket and pulled out her security badge. “Except I think I’m going to be an exception.”

  The kid scrutinized her badge, and she was thankful that he finally showed a small amount of respect in his expression. Even Merton Security had lived long past its heyday, but at least the company still had some pull. Rae hadn’t been sure that she’d wanted this job to start with, but it still gave her a little prestige.

  “Okay, I guess you can go in with it,” the kid said. “If the guy you’re looking for is here, he’ll probably be at either the loading dock or the cell block. On the far side of the stadium.”

  Rae nodded and went past the ticket counter into the lobby. It was dark at the moment and empty except for a single woman restocking candy at the snack bar. There was a hall going off to her right that she suspected would lead to the back storage rooms and the cell block, but Rae didn’t go that way immediately. Instead, she went up the short flight of stairs and passed through a double set of doors, taking a deep breath and staring out at the stadium, the real home of the Jamboree.

  The stadium was the largest structure that had been built in Fond du Lac since the zombie Uprising, and although Rae supposed it wasn’t nearly as big as similar places in other cities, it still managed to impress her even now. When she had been a little girl the place had seemed absolutely massive, though, an epic place where amazing things always happened. The seats could hold several thousand people, designed back in a time when every one of Fond du Lac’s ten thousand remaining residents had crowded into the Jamboree at least once a week. There were even more people in the city now, the result of an entire generation mating indiscriminately trying to repopulate the world, yet fewer people crowded into the stadium.

  As much as she relished the memories of the place, however, Rae’s melancholy only grew at the sight of the place outside of peak hours. The sky was dreary and threatened to drop a drizzling rain on the muddy open space within the stadium, making the lonely, depressed feel of the place even worse. On the main field area several stages were set up on the sides complete with posts to tie zeds to, where they would be whipped or have their flakey flesh pealed from their bodies, or sometimes just plain shot. A couple of motorcycles were parked off to the side with chains attached to a hook at the back. Rae remembered the awe she had felt when she had first seen them in action. Four chains from four separate motorcycles would be attacked to a zed’s individual limbs, and then the motorcycles would race away from the zed, ripping the zombie into four pieces. If the motorcycles were fast enough they could sometimes pull all four limbs off at once, leaving a fifth piece behind in the form of a powerless torso. Sometimes the zed had been tougher than it looked, and the motorcycles would spin their wheels in the mud as they tried to pull it apart. The zombies in these cases would usually give a peculiar high pitched moan, much to the cheers and laughter of the audience.

  Some people who came to the show would even pay extra to shoot their own zombies. Kids that did this were given special badges and ribbons as souvenirs. Rae still had all of hers stashed away in a box in her closet.

  There were many other ways here to destroy zeds for the amusement of a humanity that wanted revenge for what the zombies had done, but Rae couldn’t look at them anymore for now. It was all just a reminder that people were forgetting. Her parents had taught her to never forget and never forgive these things, but others apparently hadn’t learned the same lessons. Times were changing, and probably not for the better.

  Apparently more than just the times were changing, though. At least one zombie had gone through something, and it was time to stop reminiscing and find out what the hell was happening.

  Rae walked past the rows of seats until she got to an exit marked with signs saying “Employees Only,” and she went through to find herself a dingy, dimly lit corridor. She could hear voices down the hall and followed th
em, not entirely sure she was going in the right direction until she also heard the moans of zombies. She continued following them past a couple of offices until she found herself in a wide open room full of cages. There were over a hundred cages in here, each one big enough for a single zombie, but only about fifteen were occupied. As she walked passed them a couple of the zombies charged her with their hands out to grab at her, only to hit the bars and stumble stupidly back. Rae looked at each one but none of them appeared to be the mysterious Edward Schuett. She tried to see if any of them were the other zeds she had seen in Ringo’s truck, but that was a lost cause. All zombies looked the same to her.

  Beyond all the cages there was a loading dock, and here Rae found Ringo in a quiet conversation with someone behind a nearby desk. The man behind the desk was counting out a stack of bills, and Ringo stared at the money with a bemused look on his face.

  “Are you sure that’s all you can give me?” Ringo said. “I brought in four. How many people actually bring in that many at a time anymore?”

  “Not many. You’re still one of the best, Ringo,” the man behind the desk said. “But we can’t pay more money than we have.”

  “What the hell ever happened to supply and demand? Supply is way down these days.”

  “And so is demand. I’m sorry. Really I am. We’re all struggling lately. But this is the best I can do.”

  “Yeah, well, just see how long I keep this up at prices like this,” Ringo said.

  “If you stop that will be a shame, no doubt in that, but I’m serious. I can’t do anything else for you.”

  Ringo sighed and grabbed his cash, and that was when he noticed Rae standing a few feet away. The man behind the desk noticed, too, and he stood up.

  “Sorry lady, I don’t know how you got back here but we don’t allow people to bring in their own weapons any—”

  “She’s with Merton Security,” Ringo said quietly.

  “Oh,” the man said, “well, of course. Welcome. How can I—”

  “I’m actually here to talk to him,” Rae said, pointing at Ringo. “Probably want to do it in private, right, Ringo?”

  Rae didn’t exactly like her job, but as she sat there watching Ringo fidget like a kid who had just been caught playing with his parents’ semi-automatic, she had to think there were times where it was worth it.

  She followed Ringo out of the loading dock and back to his truck, where he reached in and pulled a pouch of tobacco and some papers from his glove compartment. He offered some to Rae, and they both rolled a cigarette on the hood of his truck while they talked.

  “So I would guess you’re here to talk about the one weird zombie I picked up.”

  “Edward,” Rae said. “He said his name was Edward.”

  “Yep, that he did,” Ringo said. He put his finished cigarette in his mouth and lit it, then lit Rae’s. “Christ, a zed isn’t supposed to have a name.”

  “Not supposed to talk, either,” Rae said.

  “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m going to do with it. I thought at first maybe I could sell it somewhere special, like as part of a freak show or something. But I’m the one who’s freaking out here. These things aren’t supposed to happen.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I tried to contact one of those zombie experts, even.”

  Ringo didn’t look too happy about that. “I don’t think that’s really your place. The damned thing is mine, and anything like that is shit I should be doing myself.”

  “In the event that thing is really sentient and conscious,” Rae said, “I don’t think you have any right to be calling it yours.”

  “I’m the one who caught it, so it’s mine. Jesus, don’t go trying to act like it actually has feelings or a soul or anything.”

  Rae thought as she took a long drag on her cigarette, then spoke. “And how do you know it doesn’t have a soul?”

  “It’s a fucking zombie, that’s how. It died. Its soul is gone.”

  “I’d usually be more than happy to agree to that, but just playing Devil’s advocate here. Did you happen to notice if it was breathing again?”

  Ringo leaned against his truck and was silent for several seconds. When he spoke again his voice was quiet. “Yeah, I kind of did.”

  “And if it’s breathing, then maybe it has a heartbeat. And it certainly seems to be able to think. So yeah, it was dead. But by any definition I guess it’s alive again. And if it’s alive, then maybe it has a soul.”

  Ringo shook his head and flicked his cigarette away, noticing too late that he had only been half done with it. “I will never believe that those things could possibly have souls. They kill. They go up to people that look just like them and eat them. How can you possibly say that something that destroys something so close to its own kind could ever have a soul?”

  Rae took another long drag and blew a cloud of smoke into the air, thinking about what Ringo said. His words made a certain amount of sense, she supposed, but she wasn’t sure if his logic was infallible. She had two gut instincts warring inside her. One fell in line with the words her parents had always said, all the things about how the only good zed was one with a bullet hole through its brain. The other kept coming back to that pleading look that had been on Edward’s face.

  “Okay, so maybe most zombies don’t have souls,” Rae said. “But this other one is different. Even if it doesn’t have a soul, it’s still a living, thinking creature. And I can’t let you just keep it locked up in…um, where do you even have it right now?”

  “None of your damn business. Now look, are you here on official Merton Security business, or are you here just to satisfy your own fucking curiosity?”

  She supposed she could lie, but there was always the slight possibility that a lie could come back later and lose her the job. “As far as I know Merton doesn’t know anything about this Edward yet. The only people who know anything weird is going on are you, me, and your idiot friend.” She supposed Johnny knew, too, but she didn’t think that would make much difference. He was too interested in himself and his job to care much about some random weird zombie. Or at least she hoped. If he did get it in his head to tell someone at Merton she didn’t think anyone there would stop to consider questions of a zombie’s rights or soul. They would probably just see a smart zombie as a threat that needed to be eliminated immediately. Suddenly Rae wasn’t so sure if involving Johnny had been such a good idea, not if anybody hoped to get to the bottom of this situation without just shooting Edward in the head.

  Ringo looked at his tobacco pouch like he wanted to roll another cigarette, then apparently decided against it. “Yeah, the problem with Charlie, though, is that last I saw him we didn’t part on good terms. Meaning he was threatening to blow that zed’s head off. He could be out drinking right now and blabbing to everybody about what he saw.”

  “And if he does,” Rae said, “we’ll likely have people storming your place with torches and pitchforks looking for a piece of him. Please tell me you didn’t actually just lock Edward up somewhere at your home.”

  Ringo grimaced. “It’s in my shed out back.”

  Rae tossed her butt to the ground and smeared it out with her boot. “Which means we should probably move him.”

  “What do you mean ‘we?’“ Ringo said. “I already fucking told you. My zombie to do whatever I fucking want with it.”

  “And if you want to keep you miracle money-making zombie then you’ll let me help, got it?”

  “Why are you even here? What the hell is it you’re getting out of this?”

  That was a good question, one Rae had been wondering about for most of this conversation. She’d never wanted anything to do with zombies, and a smart, talking zombie shouldn’t have been any different. But it was different somehow.

  Rae shrugged. “Maybe I just feel sorry for him.”

  “It. You mean you feel sorry for it.”

  “That’s what I said. Now come on. Maybe if we talk with it we can even
figure out what happened that made it so special. You mind putting my bike in your truck and giving me a ride?”

  “Sure, but would you mind putting your rifle in back, too? It might be a little large to fit in—”

  “Not a chance in hell. Now let’s go.” She was so interested in getting her bike loaded and going to see the mysterious zombie that she forgot she had put her cell on silent, and she didn’t feel it vibrate.

  Chapter Eight

  Ringo hadn’t bothered to take anything out of the shed before he’d locked Edward in, and Edward considered for a while if he wanted to arm himself with any of the shed’s tools before Ringo came back. Ringo had the prod, but if he were quick enough Edward thought he might be able to knock it out of Ringo’s hands with a well-timed hit from a shovel. There was a weed whacker in here, too, although it was the electric kind and there wasn’t an outlet in the shed. Edward wondered if it would look threatening enough anyways, but that was just stupid. The weed whacker didn’t even look like it had been used in all the years since the zombie apocalypse, so it might very well just wimp apart if he grabbed it from its hook on the wall.

  After enough time, however, he decided fighting his way out of here was a terrible idea. On a practical physical level it sucked. Although he was feeling much better now than when he had first woken up, he still felt stiff in most of his joints. Even if he could fight off Ringo, Edward still didn’t think he could run as well as he used to. Of course, for all he knew that had nothing to do with his zombie-like condition. That could just be that he was technically somewhere around 83 years old now.

  And if he did run, where would he even go? If the condition of his arms matched the condition of his face, then Edward didn’t think he would be able to pass for an average human yet. For all he knew, everyone on the outside had heard about the freakish zombie that could talk, and if he were running around people might look for him.