He thought back to the moments before and during sex, and he shook his head. No, that couldn’t be it. He went over every moment, every movement of both their bodies, but there hadn’t been a bite. He was sure of it. Perhaps…could it have been the kissing? Out of all those times that they had almost kissed only to have him decide against it at the last moment, had he been unknowingly saving her life from him? He thought back to what he remembered about becoming a zombie, about how long it had taken for Julia to turn after she’d been bitten or after she had bitten him. He supposed that with a simple kiss the virus might have taken longer to enter her system, but that didn’t seem correct either. He thought about the AIDS virus and how it supposedly could not be passed through kissing. That must have meant something about the mouth prevented it from spreading or something like that, right? So what else could it have been…
He gasped and slid down to a sitting position against the side of the van as the answer finally came to him. Given the amount of time it had taken for the virus to take hold of her, he could work backward and figure out right about the moment she had been infected. What had she been exposed to just a minute or two beforehand that she hadn’t been exposed to before? His semen. The virus had passed to her when he had come inside her.
He was the first person in human history to pass on the Animator Virus as an STD.
He had a fresh bout of crying for several minutes before he wiped away the tears, stood up, and looked back inside the van. There was no noticeable change. She still didn’t even look dead. Except for the vacant look in her eyes and the loose way she held her limbs, she could have passed for being alive. She wouldn’t look like that in a few days, or maybe even a few hours. Her skin would sag and take on a sick hue. Soon her flesh would begin to rot, her eyes might gloss over with cataracts, her blood would darken to near-black. Anyone who saw her would forget that she had once been anything other than infected. They would forget because none of them understood the way he did: this wasn’t the end.
The revelation came to him and made his breath catch in his throat. Or course it wasn’t the end. He had told her as much when they’d buried Timothy North in the Nevada desert. Her mind was gone and everything that made her who she was had retreated to the deepest depths of her brain, but she could continue on like this for a very long time. She could be hurt or damaged in so many ways, yet as long as there was no damage to her head she could survive anything else. And she could come back. Somewhere in her Liddie still existed, a whole person hidden and waiting to return exactly like Edward had. Edward remembered the brief moments in his memories where he had nearly felt his old awareness return, just long enough to feel some sort of kinship with the woman he had loved. Did Liddie feel that same thing now? When he was next to her, did she still feel a connection she was incapable of understanding? Edward bet she did. And he could bring all of that back.
All he had to do was figure out how to make a Z7.
It sounded like an impossible task, but he himself had already proven that it could be done. The answer was in Winnebago, Illinois, or at least he hoped so. That had to be the only thing the old man could have meant when he said he had created Edward. He thought back to everything Liddie’s mother had told him about the different variations of zombies. The CRS may have never gotten down to what exactly had caused him to become a Z7, but the Z5s and Z6s had to be created by tinkering with their genetics. It was entirely possible that this old man, whoever he was, had done something to his DNA and forced the change. So if this person could do it to him, why not Liddie as well?
The idea excited him, but his smile disappeared quickly when he realized how hard the rest of the trip would be. The van was broken down, so if he didn’t go on foot the rest of the way to Illinois then he would need to find another ride. But he didn’t have the slightest clue how to get one in this strange future world. He didn’t know any of the customs, he didn’t know exactly how to use Liddie’s pay cards (which may have looked similar to credit cards but seemed to have a more complex money system attached to them), and he didn’t even know exactly where he had to go from here without the van’s map. Liddie had been his guide through all this, but she couldn’t help now.
It wasn’t like he could go into any towns or settlements anyway anymore, not with an infected woman tagging along trying to eat the townsfolk.
All of these questions worried him, but he refused to let them get him down just now. He had a reasonable hope that he could make things right, and that had to be enough.
He opened up the door and went back inside. Liddie’s scent was still strong, but now it no longer seemed so horrible. He sat down on the seat next to her, still hoping she would show some little sign that she recognized him. She didn’t even look at him, but she stopped trying to stand up and instead sat quietly by his side. He supposed that would have to be enough for now.
Chapter Thirty Two
The sunrise brought with it a whole host of problems, most of which he had considered last night but for which he still hadn’t found answers. Strangely, though, the biggest problem for now was simply getting dressed.
Edward himself had no problem getting dressed. It was Liddie who caused the biggest issue. When Edward had left the van earlier to take a leak, he’d smelled several other zombies nearby. When he came back in some of the pheromones must have wafted in behind him, because Liddie kept moaning and trying to claw her way out the door. He would have worried about her opening it by accident and getting away before he could stop her, but she wasn’t even groping at the handle. She groped for the glass, as though she couldn’t understand why her fingers couldn’t go through to the other side. Her restlessness made it nearly impossible to get her clothes back on. Part of the problem was also that he didn’t feel comfortable touching her naked body now. It felt wrong, like a violation of her personal space, to touch her without her permission. It didn’t matter to him that he’d had plenty of permission last night. That was completely different, and now even so much as accidently brushing her hip as he tried to pull her pants back on felt like a perverted thing to do. He kept apologizing to her every time a finger grazed her skin. Once or twice she moaned at that, and Edward liked to pretend that was her way of saying he was forgiven, but he knew that wasn’t true. He supposed he could try using his limited control of the pheromones to keep her from twitching around so much, but that would have felt like just as much of a violation as touching her.
All that time struggling to get her decent again, however, gave him plenty of time to think. He thought he had a plan, or at least the partial beginning of one. So far the van had done a pretty decent job of keeping her from wandering off, and he didn’t have any reason to think it couldn’t continue on like that. If he could keep her here in the van, then he could go alone into Laramie, try to find some vehicle for cheap that would at least take them some distance, and maybe even find a map. Then he could come back and get her, and they would be back on their way to Winnebago.
He didn’t feel comfortable just leaving the van so close to the side of the road where someone could see it, though, so he took an hour trying to get it off the road. He hadn’t seen anyone else out here since the van had broken down yesterday evening, but he didn’t want to take any chance of someone finding it. If someone did happen along, the best case scenario would be them going on along with their business and then reporting wherever they ended up that they seen a strange sight back along the highway that might need investigating. Worst case scenario involved rednecks with itchy trigger fingers looking for a zombie to use as target practice.
In the end, he couldn’t do a lot to hide it. Even when switching it into neutral, which was complicated even further by him having to figure out how to put the unfamiliar controls in neutral to begin with, he had a hard time pushing it. There was a ditch along the side of the road that the van wouldn’t be able to go over, and no real cover for miles around to hide it behind anyway. In the end he found a particularly steep section of the ditch and, with Liddie safe
ly outside while he did it, pushed the van in. The van was too big to be completely hidden, but once he threw some dirt and dust over it the van at least looked like it had been there for while. Hopefully that would discourage anyone who came by and just glanced at it.
Liddie had already started wandering off down the road by the time he was finished, and it took him some effort to round her back to the van. Again he realized the task would have been easier if he just gave her an extra nudge with the pheromones, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It felt a little silly, but he couldn’t help but think that sort of thing was akin to mind control, and he refused to force Liddie to do anything with that sort of power. He opened up the van door, preparing to have to give her a little push in, but was surprised when she got in all by herself and sat down on the now-at-an-angle seat. He shrugged and was about to close the door, but she gave a long moan. He stopped and stared, but she simply looked ahead like he wasn’t even there. Edward tried to close the door again, and once more she moaned. The noise almost sounded sad.
He paused. There was still no indication that she knew or cared he was there, but he had to wonder.
“Liddie?” he asked. “Are you there?”
No answer.
“Listen. I’ve got a plan. I think I can help you, or at least I think I’ve figured out someone who can. But I’ve got to go do some stuff before that can happen. Just stay here, okay? I promise to God that I will come back for you.”
No answer.
He debated for a second whether or not to say anything more before deciding on just giving her a peck on the check. Her skin had lost all its heat and was even starting to feel a little rough to the touch. That wasn’t really the way he wanted to remember her, and he wasn’t sure if he could do that again any time soon. When he closed the door this time, however, she remained silent. He hoped that meant she got the message.
The sun was the only way he had to keep track of time as he walked to Laramie. He left when it was only slightly over the horizon and finally got his first glimpse of the city when the sun was directly overhead. From this distance it looked just like any other town he’d seen, with a ring of broken down structures surrounding what looked like a wall, although it was much higher than any of the ones he’d seen in mid-country, and what could have been a thriving community inside.
He spent the rest of the way trying to figure out what he would say. His coveralls might make for some interesting questions, but he thought he could work that into a convincing lie. It would probably even work better if he mixed in just a slight amount of the truth. But once he got inside, he had no clue what he was going to do. If he could he would need to get some food, since he was starving and starting to feel quite sluggish, but he didn’t want to spend any more money than he had to.
He was so busy imagining what it would taste like right now to bite into a savory plate of raw steak or ground beef that he didn’t hear the commotion from one of the guard towers as he got closer. The towers were tall, even taller than anything Stanford had stationed around their perimeter, and had he been paying attention he would have already been able to see several people staring down at him as he passed the first ruined buildings just outside the city. He did finally notice them, however, when they shot at him.
“Holy shit!” he screamed, jumping back as a bullet ricocheted off the broken pavement in front of him.
“Wait, stop!” someone said from up in one of the towers. “It’s a human!”
Edward waited for another shot. When it didn’t come, he tentatively began walking again. There was something different about the setup here, but he couldn’t place his finger on it until he got closer to the walls. Unlike with most of the other towns and cities he had seen, there was no cleared-away ring immediately surrounding the wall. The wall, too, looked different. Others looked like they had been planned and built up with fresh material. This one seemed to be made out of random bricks, cinder blocks, and large stones thrown together with a cheap concrete badly poured over them. He tried to remember if Liddie had told him anything about Laramie, but he didn’t think even she knew much about it other than it was a sizable place on their map. From what he could see, it didn’t look like the kind of place that had done a lot to distinguish itself.
“Hey, you!” someone said from the nearest tower. “If you’re really a human then say something!”
Edward had been rehearsing this moment in his head. “Please, you’ve got to help me. I need to get back to Denver.”
“And just who the fuck are you?”
“I’m a maintenance worker with the CRS,” he said. He had figured that was an easy enough way to explain why he wore coveralls instead of normal clothes. Liddie had mentioned at one point during the long miles between Reno and Salt Lake that there was CRS facility in Denver, but they mostly studied the effects of the high altitude on the zombies and weren’t considered a major part of the organization.
“CRS?” the tower guard asked. “What the fuck is that?”
Edward blinked. That wasn’t good. As far as he had seen so far, almost everybody knew who the CRS was. If he was in a place where they weren’t known at all, then he truly was far from civilization. Suddenly he wasn’t sure that he wanted to go in here at all, but he had no other option at the moment that he could see.
Someone else in the tower spoke up. “They’re those scientists shitheads that were poking around out here last year, remember? Hey, you out there. What’s your name?”
“Edward.”
“Well, Eddy, what’re you guys doing back up here, and why the flying fuck would any brainiac like yourself actually be out here alone?”
“I…I was part of a team. We were doing some routine repairs on some field equipment when a group of reanimated came out of nowhere. I’m the…um, the only one who got away. Please, I haven’t eaten in almost a day, and I need water. And I have to find a way to get back to Denver.”
He heard the two voices talking to each other in low tones. One of them sounded like he was trying to hide laughter. Finally the first one spoke again. “Well all right then, Eddy. I’m sure we can find some food for you, but I don’t know about anything else.”
Unlike other towns, this one had a huge double set of doors instead of just a gate. They looked cobbled together from pieces of scrap metal, and both of them were rusted so badly they hurt Edward’s ears as some armed men pushed them open from the other side. Edward thanked them as he went in, but they both just scowled in response.
Just on the other side of the doors a steep set of stairs led up to the towers, and one of the men came down at a cautious pace. The stairs looked about ready to break apart under his weight. He was tall and skinny, with long knotty hair and clothes that were full of tears and moth holes. Edward’s dusty coveralls looked like a tuxedo next to him.
“Well then, I guess we should welcome you to Laramie,” the man said. Edward looked over the town around him and tried not to gape at the site. When he had first woken up, the ruins outside Fond du Lac had definitely given him the illusion of a post-apocalyptic world. The town itself had cracked that illusion, and Stanford had completely shattered it. Laramie, however, put that illusion back together good as new. Many of the buildings closest to the wall were still somewhat recognizable for the quaint little family homes they had once been, but they all looked like they’d been built before the Uprising and had barely been maintained since. Further away and closer to the center of town there appeared to be newer buildings rising up over the others, but just because they were newer didn’t mean they looked safer to be in. One building, rising up at least six stories, looked to be built with the same mismatched style as the outer wall and appeared to be lopsided. The streets were bustling with people and makeshift tents and booths had been set up on what had once been lawns but were now little more than muddy pits. The rare pieces of clothing that looked newer than fifteen years old appeared to be homemade.
Yes, this was most definitely not Stanford anymore.
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The man from the tower smacked Edward on the shoulder. “Hey, don’t you go doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ve seen that look before when some asswipe wanders up here from Denver or somewhere. That’s the look of you thinking the place you come from is so much better. Well it’s not, so fuck off.”
“I didn’t say anything like that,” Edward said.
“You didn’t need to. Just remember, you better mind your fucking manners around here. We don’t like fucking rude people, got it?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Good for you. Now look here. I got to go run and have someone report to my super that you came wandering in here, but for now you can go get yourself something to eat and the boss will be by to talk to you in a while, got it? Just head on down Arena Street here until you actually get to the arena. Right across the street you’ll see a building with a sign that says it belongs to Stupid Jerry. You go in there and tell them Bert sent you in and you need the Dumbass Wanderer special. You got all that?”
Edward nodded that he did, not because he actually understood any of it but simply because the guy was starting to give him the creeps. He supposed that would have been rather funny, a zombie being creeped out by someone, if he didn’t think that mentioning the joke out loud would get him killed.
He followed the directions Bert had given him. Stupid Jerry’s turned out to be what passed for a diner in this town, and the Dumbass Wanderer special was something the establishment had worked out with the Laramie security forces. They would feed the occasional human that ended up this far out (almost never on purpose) and the security people would foot the bill. That didn’t mean the waitress at Stupid Jerry’s was happy to serve him, nor did it mean the food they served him much resembled food. The special consisted of some soft substance (possibly mashed potatoes) mixed with meat (rabbit was Edward’s best guess) and some kind of sauce (which was pretty much unidentifiable) all served on a ceramic plate which, through some miracle of previously unknown chemistry, was somehow rusty.
The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Page 22