Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

Edward took a deep breath and stared at his hands folded in his lap. If what Rae said was true, then there likely no way for him to ever find out what had happened to Dana. Except maybe from the personal recollections of survivors, he supposed. If he could do a little more digging there…

“Who were your parents?” Edward asked. “How old were they when the…um, Uprising happened?”

Rae smiled, and Edward couldn’t help but notice that she let the business end of her rifle slip away from him again.

“John Neuman and Annie Heine. They were…oh, I don’t know. Maybe twelve or thirteen when they first met. Just a few days after the zeds really hit Fond du Lac. They found out that a large group of survivors had taken one of the junior high schools as a hideout. Dad came in with his own mother and father. Mom was part of a group of children. A woman had been going around trying to find lost and wandering kids that had been orphaned, and she took Mom and some others to the school. That group eventually grew, and after many years they were able to clear all the zeds out of a central part of Fond du Lac. They created the Empty Zone around it and built the wall, and the city was able to continue on for years before the government finally got around to reclaiming the state, but in the meantime the city was on its own.”

Edward didn’t hear most of what she said. The instant Rae had mentioned the group of children Edward had felt his heart beat faster with added hope. That would have to have been what had happened to Dana. If that woman had found Dana and taken her to safety, then maybe Rae’s mother had actually met Edward’s daughter.

“Your mother,” Edward said. “Is she still alive?”

Rae frowned and sighed. “Mom died a few years after Dad did. Took me a long time to admit it to myself, but she more or less drank herself to death. Couldn’t handle not having him around anymore.”

Edward’s heart sank, but tried not to let his own setback overshadow the pain he figured Rae probably felt at the memory. “Oh. I’m sorry. How did your father die?”

Rae’s mouth tightened into a thin line, and whether she realized it or not she aimed Spanky at him again. “Bit by a zed while guarding the Empty Zone. Mom shot him in the head immediately after. Never had the time to turn.”

And with that, Edward decided it was time to be quiet.

Rae felt relief when Edward stopped asking questions, yet at the same time she wished he would continue. It felt good to talk about her parents again. Most people, even Johnny, didn’t care to listen. They’d been brave people who had lived through a bizarre time, and neither of them had deserved to go out the way they did. If Edward had wanted her to continue she would have gladly done so, although it felt strange that the only person willing to let her go on about her life was a zed.

Rae was having an increasingly hard time thinking of him as a zombie, though. As she watched she thought she could see the way the open sores in his face knitted back together, very small but noticeable the harder she looked. And he sounded and acted living. He got angry and annoyed and saddened and hopeful when she said things, the emotions evident on his face. A zombie shouldn’t feel any of those things. A zombie was just a thing , not really even a monster if Rae really thought about it. Zombies were just a part of the environment, a force of nature, and a force of nature didn’t care about anything.

So, by Rae’s definition, Edward couldn’t be considered a zombie. He couldn’t really be considered a living human being yet, either, not when he could heal that fast (and even the cuts on his fingers were gone now, replaced only by scars that seemed to be fading already) or live when there had been so much damage to his body. If he was neither zombie nor human, then Rae had no other way to classify him.

The truck pulled over and came to a stop, and Rae slowly poked her head out of the truck bed to see. They were just down the block from her apartment building. Rae hunched back down and raised a hand to put through the bars of the cage so she could rap on the back window. “Hey! Psst! Ringo, you need to pull up closer. We need to get him in as quick as possible. It’s bad enough I have to take him up three floors before we get to my apartment.”

“Can’t. There’s too many cars parked in the way.”

“Really?” That was strange. Although Rae’s new job paid well, she hadn’t been at it long enough to move any place nice, and this entire neighborhood was full of people that couldn’t afford the luxury of a gas-using vehicle. Everyone used the bus or bikes or walked. Never in the entire time that Rae had lived here had she ever seen more than two cars parked on the entire length of the street.

But as she poked her head up again, she saw that there were at least five other cars parked now, all of them newer models. Seeing new cars anywhere in the city was uncommon, but these all looked especially nice. The only people in Fond du Lac that she knew could afford these things were a few of the higher-ups at Merton Security.

“Aw shit,” Rae said as she slouched down again. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out.”

“What?” Edward asked. “What is it?”

“It’s got to be people from Merton. And there aren’t many reasons why the higher ups would be in this neighborhood.”

“Back up. What the hell is Merton?”

“Well, I guess that all goes back to the Uprising, too. After the first several months of having to randomly fight off zombies, Lyle Merton got it in his head that people would pay to have others doing the zombie killing for them. I guess it was a mess at first, since it was basically a war zone and it was kind of hard to determine what a dollar was worth when no one was even sure if there was still a government. So Merton came in and people gave him all this money they thought was worthless, and boom, when the government shows up and says it still exists, Merton was suddenly the richest man in the whole region and in charge of security for everything. There’s companies like Merton Security all across the country, but Merton doesn’t have the same power it once did ever since Lyle Merton himself died.”

“You know,” Edward said, “for someone who says she doesn’t know that much about history you sure are able to talk a lot about it.”

“Well all the stuff about Merton I have to know. It was part of my orientation. Who do you think owns the gate I was stationed at?”

“So why are they here then?”

“Why do you think?” Rae asked. “It would be great for public relations for them if they suddenly caught the world’s only talking and thinking zombie.”

“Oh,” Edward said. “Oh shit. So what, are you going to turn me in?”

“I don’t know. Let me think,” Rae said. She nervously tapped Spanky’s stock and tried to concentrate. Ringo had said that he hadn’t told anyone about Edward yet, and although Charlie had probably blabbed his mouth around by now he wouldn’t know that she had anything to do with it. So the only person that would have been able to tell Merton anything to lead them here would have been Johnny. She couldn’t remember if she had told him not to talk about it, but even if she had he probably would have said something anyway. He was too much of a company man to keep something like this from them. Rae now had to make a choice. She could either try to take Edward somewhere else, or she could let them have him. She had no idea what they would do to Edward if they got him, although they probably wouldn’t kill him outright. They would probably study him first, but she didn’t think Merton’s idea of “study” would be very scientific.