Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

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.

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?”