Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

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.

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.

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.