He tried to keep himself distracted by watching through one of the windows as the land passed by below them, but the view, as breathtaking as it was in the sunset, still acted as a reminder that he was in the wrong time and a wrong world. Even though he had never flown before, he knew more or less what he was supposed to see as the jet flew over the Midwest. Julia had described to him once how all the roads and farmland turned the ground into a huge checkerboard pattern for as far as the eye could see, with the occasion town or city breaking it up. Those colossal squares seemed to be a thing of the past, though. He could sometimes see the outlines of where they had once been, but the roads that had divided them were fewer. He didn’t think that most of the land was crops anymore, either. Huge portions of the land had gone back to their natural states after fifty years of being left to themselves. Sometimes he thought he saw small patches that might have been farmland, but these were only near small, worn-looking settlements. If what Rae said was right, even that much development was rather new. It had taken such a short period of time for America to devolve back to an earlier state, it seemed.
Staring out at the empty land, it finally hit him just how much time had really passed. Everything he had known was gone, and there would be no such thing as familiar in this new world. Even Rae and Gates’ brief history lessons had done little to educate him. He had no idea who the president was, or what had happened to the president he remembered. He wasn’t even sure that America still had a president. For all he knew it had turned into a monarchy or something. NASCAR? Did that still exist? It had to in some form, right? Or had that been another aspect of his culture that had been neglected and forgotten when corpses had started shambling around and eating people? Baseball? Football? Mexican food? Did anything he had loved still exist?
Was Dana still out there somewhere?
He hadn’t realized he was crying until Gates handed him a Kleenex. Or maybe he should just call it a tissue. Maybe the Kleenex brand didn’t exist anymore.
“Thank you,” Edward said.
“You’re welcome,” Gates said. “What were you thinking about?”
“Nothing. Everything. Hey, I don’t suppose you could tell me who’s currently the king of the United States, could you?”
Gates gave him a funny look. “There is no king. There’s a president.”
“Good. That’s good to know.”
The jet landed long enough to refuel at some remote airport. Edward was allowed to get out and stretch a little, but he made sure not to wander very far. He remembered the sniper in Fond du Lac, and figured Gates would have likely called ahead to make sure there was similar security here. Again somebody went to get food—actual meals for Gates, Mendez, and the pilots, raw meat for him. He did his best to ignore his urge to gobble it down with only the bare minimum chewing. At least his hunger was no longer at the same level it had been before. And the people around him no longer smelled like food. That was a very good thing.
As near as Edward could tell, their refueling stop was somewhere just east of the Rocky Mountains. By that time it had grown completely dark, and he could no longer see anything they passed over. Only occasionally did he think he saw any lights to mark towns or settlements, but they were nothing but tiny far away dots.
He didn’t know how long he stared out the window, but when he stood to go to the bathroom again he realized that Mendez was asleep closer to the front of the cabin. Gates had his gun now, and while she didn’t keep it pointed at him she still kept it within easy reach. She had bags under her eyes by now, and her notebook was again in hand as she scribbled a few notes.
“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing down?” Edward asked.
“For starters, I writing that it appears you need less sleep than a human.”
“Could you please stop referring to me as though I’m not a human?”
All that got for a response was a few more jotted down notes.
“What do you mean I need less sleep? I slept before you found me.”
“But for how long?” Gates asked. “From what I’ve been told, you were only out of anybody’s sight for a few hours.”
“Yeah, I guess. Maybe an hour or two?”
“And here it is, quite late by your time zone, yet you don’t appear to be tired.”
Edward hadn’t thought of that. Ever since the tingling of regenerating wounds had dissipated and he’d gotten something to eat in his system, he hadn’t felt anything at all like fatigue. “Do zombies sleep?” he asked.
“Not any of the variations I’ve ever observed,” Gates said. “But I guess a Z7 must need to at least a little. Tell me, when you slept earlier, did you dream at all?”
Edward remembered the vague red-tinged memories he’d had while he’d napped in the shed. He still couldn’t recall any clear details, but he remembered enough to know they’d been somewhat violent and disturbing. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”
Gates eventually slept, too. Maybe she forgot for the moment that he was supposedly dangerous, because she didn’t bother waking up Mendez first to watch over him. Initially he thought about trying to take the gun from her before she woke up, but that was just the part of him that resented the way he’d been treated so far. Taking the gun wouldn’t actually do anything useful in the long run. It wasn’t like there was anything he could do with it to get away while in the air. Also, although he had no delusions that he was anything other than a prisoner right now, he didn’t think he would try getting away even if he could. He had already learned more from Gates about what may or may not be happening to him than he had by himself or with Rae. Cooperating would hopefully get him even more answers.
Or it could get him dissected in the end, for all he knew. But going along with it seemed the only intelligent move for now.
He stopped staring at the gun and went back to staring out the window. He did, however, see out of the corner of his eye as Gates, apparently not sleeping at all, checked that the gun was still next to her before quickly writing something more in her notebook.
When he first started seeing lights on the ground, Edward at first thought he had to be hallucinating them. They started out sparse, but as the plane continued the lights became more concentrated.
“Excuse me,” Edward asked. “But where are we right now?”
Gates leaned over and looked out the window. “That’ll be us starting to come in over California.”
“Looks like the population is much denser down there.”
“It is. When the Uprising happened, those who weren’t complete rednecks realized there really would be safety in numbers and headed to the coasts. That way the government was better able to protect them. Those who decided they wanted to be the lone wolves ended up having to fend for themselves for years. It increased the population here but drastically depleted the population out in the wilds.”
That didn’t sound at all like what Rae had said, but Edward didn’t comment. He suspected that neither of those sides of history really told the whole story.
Although he wouldn’t have known exactly what cities should have looked like in the air back in his own time, he still suspected they wouldn’t have looked exactly like this. There didn’t appear to be much in the way of suburbs. The cities were bunched together into tighter masses with very little in between. It wasn’t until the plane started its decent, however, that Edward could really see how different things were.
“Is that Los Angeles?” Edward asked.
“Huh? Um, no. Los Angeles is much further south. That’s Stanford.”
“That’s Stanford?” He tried to remember anything he’d ever heard about Stanford, but there wasn’t much. He’d never had any reason to care one way or the other about the place. He’d heard of the university, of course, but didn’t know anything about the town around it. He was pretty sure it had been rather small. That was why it was a bit of shock to see it now as a bustling metropolis full of skyscrapers. “I don’t understand. How did it go from…um, whatever it
was before, to this?”
“Once Atlanta was gone, the main branch of the CRS had to go somewhere. Stanford University was the second best source of research on the Animator Virus, so this is where it ended up. The government channeled a lot of money into here, and private companies, once they realized business wasn’t just going to cease because of the zombies, realized there was a lot of money to be made in everything from research equipment to CRS housing. It wasn’t like it was terribly easy at that time to ship things across the country or even have people live in suburbs. The result was the fastest growth for a city ever seen in the country’s history. And all of it is centered around Land’s End University and the CRS.”
Edward squinted, trying to get a better look at the details of the city, but they were still too high up and it was still too dark, even with the amazing amount of light the city seemed to give off. After fifty years he would have expected a city—especially one so new and modern—to be some barely recognizable future dome or some other such science fiction nonsense. Maybe there should have even been flying cars. But he couldn’t see anything like that. He supposed humanity had been too busy dealing with other things to bother with the future dreams of the past.
“Am I going to get to see any of it?” Edward asked.
Gates looked thoroughly amused. “This isn’t a vacation, Mr. Schuett.”
“So what then? Are you going to be sticking me in some cage as soon as we land?”
“This isn’t a prison either.”
“Just what the hell are we going to be calling it then?”
“Call it…a hospital stay. An extended one.”
“And is this hospital stay ever going to actually end?”
Gates didn’t answer. She just put her hand back on her gun. He supposed that was answer enough.
Chapter Eighteen
Unlike the other two airfields where they had landed, the airport in Stanford was a full-fledged commercial one, or at least as far as Edward could tell. He only got a brief glimpse of it as the plane taxied down the runway. It took a couple of minutes before he was allowed to go for the door and stairs, as the plane didn’t actually go up to a terminal, but instead stopped near a makeshift military-looking station where someone erected a curtain around the door. Edward could still see things from out of the windows, so he could only assume the curtain was there to keep anyone from seeing him.
There was a plain-looking van waiting to pick him up within the curtained-off area. It was hard not to notice the very distinct difference in style between this thing and the vehicles he had seen in Fond du Lac. Most of the cars and trucks there had been older and run down, sure, but even the nicer car Gates had picked him up in looked more like the cars he remembered from his own time than this thing did. Somehow it managed to look blocky and sleek at the same time. Also, the tires didn’t appear to be made out of rubber, but some kind of plastic. If the van was typical of the difference between Wisconsin and California, then he couldn’t even begin to guess what other styles and materials and technologies had changed.
Three people waited outside the van as they came down the stairs. One was obviously a guard, evident by both the studied way he stood next to the open back door of the van with his hands clasped behind his back and the rather large handgun he had in a shoulder holster. The second person, an Indian woman in her late forties, was dressed in a neat suit that would have made Edward mistake her for a business executive if it weren’t for the satchel in her hand and the stethoscope around her throat.
The third person made Edward do a double take. If the girl standing there had been twenty years older, an inch or two taller, and had maybe a few more pounds on her, then she would have looked exactly like Danielle Gates. She even wore a nearly identical suit.
Neither the guard nor the doctor paid Edward much mind as he approached with Gates ahead of him and Mendez behind. Gates’ lookalike, however, stared right at him, her eyes roaming up and down like she was trying desperately to see every part of him at once. She appeared surprised by whatever she saw.
“This must be him,” the doctor said, but she still didn’t acknowledge Edward, instead directing the comment to Gates.
“Correct,” Gates said. “You’ll want to do your own tests, I’m certain. The PVA that inbred yokel doctor used on Mr. Schuett here back in Wisconsin looked ancient and about as reliable as Shannon Casanova at a tennis convention, but it did appear to confirm our suspicions. This here is our not-so-mythical Z7.”
The doctor gave Gates a grudging look. “We’ll just see,” she said.
Edward wasn’t sure what confused him more: that something was obviously going on between Gates and the doctor that they probably weren’t going to tell him, or all the words and expressions Gates had just used that were completely beyond his comprehension.
“There is no way,” the younger version of Gates said. Unlike the doctor, she spoke directly to Edward. “There has to be some mistake. You don’t look like a reanimated at all.”
“Liddie, why are you even here?” Gates asked the younger version of herself. “You’re supposed to be supervising the Althocain trials.”
“Mom, really, what the hell is there even to supervise? You inject the Althocain into a human, it does nothing. Inject it into a reanimated, it jerks around for a couple hours. Just like all the other test runs. Pardon me if I thought this was more important. And interesting.”
“You’re not going to move up in the CRS if you keep shirking your duties like this,” Gates said.
“Then stop giving me duties a monkey can do.”
The doctor gave both women a poorly hidden sneer as she set down her case and opened it to pull out another device like the one the doctor had used in Wisconsin. This one looked more compact, but otherwise Edward couldn’t see much of a difference. Assuming these things were the PVAs Gates had mentioned, he couldn’t see why this one would be any superior to the other.
A fold out table had been set up near the van, and the doctor set the PVA on it and proceeded to pull out a needle to draw blood. Edward didn’t wait for her to ask and rolled up his sleeve. The doctor’s eyes went wide and Liddie gasped. Even the guard fidgeted a little.
“Holy Christ on a cracker,” Liddie said.
Edward frowned and looked at Gates. “Did I do something wrong?”
“That’s…that’s not possible,” the doctor said.
“What?” Edward asked. “Could someone please fill me in here?”
“You rolled up your sleeve,” Gates said.
“So?”
“The reanimated don’t see that someone is about to draw their blood and then roll up a sleeve to help. They try to eat the person instead. Also, I’d guess Dr. Chella is a little surprised that you’re speaking.”
Dr. Chella started to repack her case. “This is ridiculously childish, even for you, Gates. You come back here with your supposed Z7 and it’s a fake. Not only is it a fake, but not even a very good one. Well this is it. I’m reporting your little prank directly to the president, do you hear me? You’re finally done.”
Edward looked at Gates, who did nothing but stare at Dr. Chella with a smirk. The doctor finished packing up again and turned to the guard. “Well, are we going to get out of here?”
Now it was the guard’s turn to look confused. “Ma’am, um, Director Gates hasn’t given us permission to leave.”
“Chella, are you done throwing your hissy fit now?” Gates asked. “Because the Z7 still has his sleeve rolled up for you.”
“I am so sick and tired of all your…” Dr. Chella began, but Gates cut her off.
“Whether you like to admit it or not, I am your boss. And as your boss I am ordering you to take Mr. Schuett’s blood and test it.”
Chella glared at Gates and Edward, even throwing an evil eye at Liddie despite the young woman having done nothing except suppress a giggling fit during the whole exchange, then unpacked her equipment once more. The tests were pretty much the same as the ones conducted o
n Edward in Wisconsin, except for the fact that Dr. Chella was decidedly less careful where she stuck the needle in his arm. She had to jab him three times in all before she finally found the vein, probably because she didn’t even bother to look at his arm for the first two tries. When she finally tested his blood both she and Liddie leaned over to intently watch as the little screen showed the results.
“That’s impossible,” Dr. Chella said.
“Yeah, I’ve been hearing that a lot lately,” Edward said.
“You really are a reanimated,” Liddie said.
“You know, I’m starting to think I really don’t like being called that any more than I like being called a zombie,” Edward said.
“This is…this is insane,” Dr. Chella said. “There cannot be an honest-to-God Z7.”
“I think it’s time you and I finally had a long overdue talk,” Gates said to her. She turned to Liddie. “You really want something new to do? I’ll have you be the one to escort Mr. Schuett to Land’s End. It will give the doctor and I some time to go over what this all means.”
Liddie gave her mother a mock salute, then held the back door open for Edward to get in. “After you, good sir. If I can call you sir, that is.”
Edward sighed. “I suppose it’s a step better than ‘reanimated.’“
Liddie took the seat next to him while the guard went around and got in the driver’s seat. Once Liddie slid the door closed he could no longer hear any of the conversation between Gates and Chella, but he could still hear them talking very heatedly.
“It’s comforting, really,” Edward said.
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 11