“What is it, Doctor?” Gates asked.
“I think you already know,” the doctor said. “Or else I wouldn’t be here.”
Edward noticed that Dr. Concordia suddenly wouldn’t look him in the eye.
“The Animator Virus?” Gates asked.
“In unprecedented levels. Miss Gates, what the hell is that thing?”
From a person to a thing in just a few minutes. Edward would have felt hurt if he hadn’t already been half-expecting that response.
Something about his feelings must have shown on his face, because Gates looked at him, gave him a pitying look, and the gestured at Dr. Concordia. “Doctor, let’s go talk over here,” she said. “Bring the blood tester so we can take a closer look at the results.”
The two of them moved out of earshot, but he continued to watch them. Gates looked calm through the whole conversation, but the doctor’s demeanor kept changing. For several minutes he grew more and more agitated until Gates put a hand on his shoulder and appeared to say soothing things. He calmed down as he showed her various things on the blood tester. Whatever else it said, it couldn’t have been simple because they talked for an awfully long time.
After a couple of minutes Edward stood up and paced around at the base of the stairs. He didn’t dare go too far from them for fear that Gates might think he was trying to get away. He wondered if he even could. The three of them appeared to be alone out here, but that couldn’t possibly be the case. After all the commotion they’d gone through just to get him here, there had to be some sort of guard. Edward sniffed instinctively. It was strange, but he almost believed he could smell Gates and Dr. Concordia. They smelled like meat. He tried not to think about that.
Or maybe that wasn’t his imagination. Maybe that had something to do with being a zombie. He sniffed again, and this time he thought he caught more than just the two of them. There was a slight breeze, not enough that it blew away the scents of Gates and Concordia, but enough that he didn’t think he would smell anyone downwind from him. Upwind, however, there was definitely something.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. There was a single something some distance away, something with the smell of rot and mildew and yet…was that…honey? No, not quite, but to him it smelled similar. Edward recognized that scent. He’d smelled it earlier in the day (had it only been a day so far? It felt to him like years had already passed) inside the Walmart. He’d sniffed that odor just before the first of the other zombies had shown up.
He opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the scent. There was a fence in that direction and then nothing but an open field, although it was covered in tall grass. From this point of view Edward couldn’t see anyone or anything out there, but he knew one of the undead was wandering around. He couldn’t tell if it was coming this direction or not, but since it was upwind he doubted it could smell any of the live people at the airport.
Neither Gates nor Concordia seemed to notice. He was the only one that could smell it.
A sharp crack echoed through the air, and both Edward and Concordia jumped. Gates, however, barely appeared to notice. It sounded like a gunshot, although at first Edward couldn’t tell who had been shooting or at what. Then the scent from the field began to fade. Edward glanced around and finally saw someone at a window in the control tower. It was far enough away that he couldn’t be sure, but the person might have had a rifle.
Apparently he hadn’t been the only one to notice the zombie. Maybe they always kept someone with a gun up there to make sure the occasional random zombie didn’t get too close, but Edward didn’t think that was the case.
He was suddenly completely certain what would happen if he wandered too far from the plane.
Chapter Fifteen
The plane was not scheduled to leave for another hour yet. He continued to wait outside it for ten minutes before Gates was finished with Concordia. By the end of their conversation Concordia seemed agitated again, but Edward didn’t think that was because of him this time. Something about Gates’ demeanor had changed. She no longer looked so calm, and there was now something vaguely threatening about the way she put her hand on his shoulder. Edward thought of the sniper in the tower again, and he guessed Gates was informing him that maybe Concordia might meet a sniper of his very own if he discussed anything he’d seen here.
Gates dismissed Dr. Concordia as the car came back. The driver stayed in the car and drove the doctor home, wherever that might have been, while the other man got out and approached Edward and Gates. In one hand he had another bag from Zappy’s. In the other he had a plain button-down shirt, a pair of jeans, a belt, and slippers.
“I had to guess at the sizes,” the man said to Gates. “I know you’re in a hurry, so I stopped at a thrift store I found on the outer edge of the town rather than going all the way to a department store. Sorry about the slippers, but they didn’t have much else.”
“That’s fine,” Gates said. “All we need is something to make him comfortable until we reach Land’s End. And the rest?”
The man held up the bag. “You should have seen the look on their faces when I asked for three raw hamburgers.”
Gates took the bag and clothes and handed them to Edward. “There’s a small bathroom on the plane where you can change. We’ll have the pilot get ready to go in the mean time. Once we’re in the air, I can give you what few answers I know. Any other answers will have to wait for more tests at CRS headquarters.”
She led the way up the stairs and pointed him in the direction of the bathroom once they were inside. The jet was small, obviously intended for private flights rather than commercial ones. Nothing about it would have made Edward think he was on technology that should have been fifty years from what he remembered, but he wasn’t terribly surprised by that. He left the bag of hamburgers on one of the seats and went into the cramped bathroom. Changing in it wasn’t easy, but it felt very good to get the nasty old rags off his body in favor of something that had actually been made within the last decade. He still could have really used a shower, though, especially after he stripped off his underwear and discovered the truly awful surprises waiting for him. Based on the maggot-ridden filth he had vomited up earlier he guessed that, as a zombie, his digestive system hadn’t worked properly, but some of what he ate still went through his system and out the other side.
Wiping himself down took nearly twenty minutes, and even then he only stopped because he ran out of toilet paper.
When he came out, Gates was seated near the bathroom door. The other man sat on the far end of the plane, but he continued to look back at them. Edward guessed he probably had a gun ready to come out of some shoulder holster if Edward showed any signs of something wrong. Gates, however, appeared relaxed.
“I was getting ready to send in a search party,” Gates said. “Be honest, was there anything wrong I should know about?”
Edward wanted to say that anything wrong with him in the bathroom was none of her business, but he still wasn’t completely sure where he stood with this woman. Anger or sarcasm wouldn’t likely make anything better for him. Besides, he figured this was probably the part where he would finally understand a few things. That did wonders for his temper.
“I…um…it appears that I had an accident at some point. Many of them. Over the course of several decades.”
Gates’ eyes went wide, but she nodded. “The reanimated don’t have any bowel or bladder control. Urine comes out by itself sporadically, while feces…well, anything they eat slowly builds up in their system until it just, um, kind of pushes itself out continually.”
That was far more information than Edward had wanted to know, but that didn’t mean the information wasn’t something he might need. “Is that…that something that’s going to continue for me now?”
“Honestly, we don’t know. Many of your body functions seem to be normal again, so we hope not. It’s not like we have any diapers for you if it does continue. Most of this stuff that
you’re learning about yourself just now, I’m learning it right along with you.”
Gates instructed the other man, whom she referred to as Mendez, to take Edward’s old clothes and store them. Mendez did not look happy about that at all, but Edward was more interested in the fact that Gates didn’t just have him throw them away. For all he knew, they were going to study his tattered, shit-stained clothing the same way they were going to study him.
Edward sat down in the seat next to Gates. “So, you really don’t know what’s so different about me.”
“We do and we don’t,” Gates said. “I suppose that, to make you truly understand, I should start with a brief history of the last fifty-odd years. That bizarre woman you were with in the truck, did she tell you much about the Uprising?”
Edward told her all Rae had said. It didn’t take long, and by the end Gates was shaking her head.
“Figures. One of the biggest, most destructive time periods in history and those redneck outlanders can’t even be bothered to learn the most basic facts about it.”
“Um, outlanders?” Edward asked.
“All the people who live in those little boonie towns like this one. When humans managed to turn the tide against the zombies, it was the major cities on the coasts that were reclaimed first. It took longer for the military to secure all the more remote places. So civilization returned to some places a full twenty or thirty years before the most overrun places in the middle of the country. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning. Chicago.”
Edward listened to the entire tale so intently that he barely even noticed when the jet started up, taxied down the runway, and flew off. When Gates was finished, he’d regret not taking that last moment to say goodbye to Wisconsin.
He had no way of knowing that he would be back this way, and that when he returned he would have most of the country searching for him.
Chapter Sixteen
“As near as anyone was ever able to pinpoint,” Gates began, “everything started in a suburb just outside Chicago. I say near as we can tell because, as your gun-happy friend pointed out, records from that time are spotty. Massive efforts have been made to recover any and all physical records. Some information was even waiting on the internet, when the tech people were able to gain back some ground on communications technology. Too many servers were destroyed in various accidents, especially since no one figured for a while that such things would ever be needed again.
“The virus spread quickly, as I’m sure you can guess, but the human race lucked out a little bit. The speed with which it started acting is the same thing that kept it from spreading even faster. You see, the virus only took a couple minutes to turn someone from a healthy, living and breathing person into a zombie, so the people that were infected couldn’t move very far before it got them. What started outside Chicago on that July Fourth morning reached your region by the afternoon. I’m sure that much you’re already familiar with.
“After that, most places and people got smart. There were still holdouts, people who didn’t take proper precautions because they believed it was just the media causing a needless panic, or people with ridiculous conspiracy theories, or other such nonsense. But they were the exceptions. Flights, trains, and buses got shut down, quarantine areas were created. The system worked, and one week after the first outbreak of the Animator Virus, everything was under control.”
“But that doesn’t seem to line up with everything else I’ve seen and heard so far,” Edward said.
“That’s right. It doesn’t. Things did indeed get worse, but no one really understood why for years after. It wasn’t until the Center for Reanimation Studies came into existence that the world discovered why everything continued to go to hell. That was nearly fifteen years after the initial Uprising. During that time the Animator Virus continued to spread, and continued to do things we didn’t think it should be able to.
“You see, the reason the initial quarantine failed and the rest of the world ended up infected was we kept running into new kinds of zombies. No one understood at first, especially with the widespread panic and the shoot-now-question-later philosophy everyone was taking, which admittedly is probably the only thing that kept everyone alive for a while. But no one tried to study the changes or catalogue the differences observed in different zombies. In fact, there were anti-science groups that cropped up and actively killed anyone who tried to study these things. In their minds, the scientists were probably the ones who had created the Animator Virus in the first place. Even today, these groups still exist. Mostly in Texas, thanks to the purges. Trust me, don’t try to say you’re a scientist in Texas.
“So, jump forward to around thirty years ago. The Center for Reanimation Studies existed, but it wasn’t at Land’s End yet. Well, I guess Land’s End didn’t even exist yet, but you know what I mean. CRS had grown from a division of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. They had finally caught a large number of zombies to experiment on and test. And that was when they made the first real breakthrough. They discovered that there was not just one kind of zombie, but four. Four distinct kinds each with their own traits. The first kind, designated as Z1s, were what you initially saw and what turned you.
“The second kind, Z2s, did not appear to be any different at first glance. All reports seemed the same. They moved at the same speed as the originals, did the exact same shambles and moans. But the early CRS had noticed discrepancies in the reports about how long the Animator Virus took before it turned its victims. After the first month, people reported taking up to a day to turn people. The CRS didn’t have any samples of the earliest virus by that time, so the difference would have been purely theoretical except for the obvious change that occurred nearly a year later. The government by then had thought they had everything under control and were ready to start clearing out the middle of the country. That’s when we started seeing the Z3s. With them, the virus didn’t need to be directly passed through blood or saliva anymore. Any fluid from a zombie could pass it, and the virus remained active for several days in the fluid. The virus had been mutating all this time, you see, and it made the Animator Virus nearly impossible to stop.
“Years went by. For a long time, hygiene practices changed. Even today, you’ll still find some older people who are obsessive about it. Eventually things once again got under control on the coasts. By the time the CRS in Atlanta discovered the variations in zombies, the Z4s had started showing up. Now here’s where things start to get interesting, I think. The Z4s were slightly faster than the Z3s, which should have made them more formidable. But they didn’t spread the virus as fast, and Atlanta was having more ease keeping them under control. That’s when they started the tests on zombie specimens. They learned some new things about how the zombies worked, but most importantly they discovered that the Z4s weren’t infected with the more aggressive version of the virus after all. They were infected with an earlier version, nearly identical to what had been seen in the Z2s. Do you understand what I’m getting at here? The Animator Virus wasn’t mutated in these specimens. Instead, it was the zombies themselves who had changed long after they’d been infected.
“Everyone who is alive today probably owes their lives to the researchers there in Atlanta. Their work on the different types of zombies eventually led to more effective ways to hold them back. Since then we’ve eliminated all zombies in more urban areas, and they can only be found in occasional small hordes wandering around the countryside. Most people know not to go out that far anymore.”
“But that’s only four kinds,” Edward said. “Mendez mentioned earlier something about one called a Z7.”
Gates glared at Mendez. “Well, Mendez should know better than to let something like that just slip his lips unless he wants to be reassigned to some remote CRS facility in Cornhole, Idaho. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Yes, you’re correct. There are more known varieties. Two, in fact. Z5s and Z6s. And they are the reason the CRS has its main headquarters no
w at Land’s End instead of Atlanta. When the people in the Atlanta CRS started studying some of the captured Z4s, they accidently triggered something in a few of the zombies’ genetics. That’s what it boils down to, you see. The original person’s genes. Some react to the virus in one way, staying Z1s or Z2s, while others after some time turn into Z4s. Something has to be done to them to trigger the change into a Z5 or Z6. The Z5s were fast. And I mean very fast. They could sometimes chase down a dog running at full speed. And the Z6s had limited intelligence. Not a lot at all, but just enough. They could hide on purpose. Some could use tools. Between those two new strains, the CRS could no longer really hold them. They escaped. They infected everyone around them at a rate that exceeded the heyday of the Z3 strain. The government had no choice, really. They had to take care of it before the Z5s and Z6s could escape. They firebombed the city. Every man, woman and child who lived there was killed. To this day Atlanta still isn’t fit for humans.
“And then there’s you, Mr. Schuett. A zombie unlike any we’ve ever seen before, but there has long been speculation that something like you could exist, a zombie possessing full human memory and intelligence, complete human capabilities, and even looking human, but you still have a heavy concentration of a Z1 strain in your system. Version Z7.
“And it doesn’t seem likely to me that such a thing could exist by accident. I believe someone changed something in you on purpose, even though such experimentation has been forbidden for years. Someone went out of their way to create you—the world’s first super-zombie.”
Chapter Seventeen
Edward didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the flight, and Gates didn’t volunteer anything else. That was perfectly fine to Edward. What she had already said was more than he thought he could handle right now, anyway. He wasn’t comfortable with the way she continued to call him a zombie, since he failed to see what, if anything, really made him different from an ordinary human by this point (with the exception of the continued trips he had to make to the bathroom since his bowels continued to act more like a zombie than a regular person, but the less said about that the better). But Gates kept her distance from him, and Mendez continued to keep his gun out and pointed in Edward’s general direction.
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 10