Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

Edward told her all Rae had said. It didn’t take long, and by the end Gates was shaking her head.

“Figures. One of the biggest, most destructive time periods in history and those redneck outlanders can’t even be bothered to learn the most basic facts about it.”

“Um, outlanders?” Edward asked.

“All the people who live in those little boonie towns like this one. When humans managed to turn the tide against the zombies, it was the major cities on the coasts that were reclaimed first. It took longer for the military to secure all the more remote places. So civilization returned to some places a full twenty or thirty years before the most overrun places in the middle of the country. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning. Chicago.”

Edward listened to the entire tale so intently that he barely even noticed when the jet started up, taxied down the runway, and flew off. When Gates was finished, he’d regret not taking that last moment to say goodbye to Wisconsin.

He had no way of knowing that he would be back this way, and that when he returned he would have most of the country searching for him.

“As near as anyone was ever able to pinpoint,” Gates began, “everything started in a suburb just outside Chicago. I say near as we can tell because, as your gun-happy friend pointed out, records from that time are spotty. Massive efforts have been made to recover any and all physical records. Some information was even waiting on the internet, when the tech people were able to gain back some ground on communications technology. Too many servers were destroyed in various accidents, especially since no one figured for a while that such things would ever be needed again.

“The virus spread quickly, as I’m sure you can guess, but the human race lucked out a little bit. The speed with which it started acting is the same thing that kept it from spreading even faster. You see, the virus only took a couple minutes to turn someone from a healthy, living and breathing person into a zombie, so the people that were infected couldn’t move very far before it got them. What started outside Chicago on that July Fourth morning reached your region by the afternoon. I’m sure that much you’re already familiar with.

“After that, most places and people got smart. There were still holdouts, people who didn’t take proper precautions because they believed it was just the media causing a needless panic, or people with ridiculous conspiracy theories, or other such nonsense. But they were the exceptions. Flights, trains, and buses got shut down, quarantine areas were created. The system worked, and one week after the first outbreak of the Animator Virus, everything was under control.”

“But that doesn’t seem to line up with everything else I’ve seen and heard so far,” Edward said.

“That’s right. It doesn’t. Things did indeed get worse, but no one really understood why for years after. It wasn’t until the Center for Reanimation Studies came into existence that the world discovered why everything continued to go to hell. That was nearly fifteen years after the initial Uprising. During that time the Animator Virus continued to spread, and continued to do things we didn’t think it should be able to.

“You see, the reason the initial quarantine failed and the rest of the world ended up infected was we kept running into new kinds of zombies. No one understood at first, especially with the widespread panic and the shoot-now-question-later philosophy everyone was taking, which admittedly is probably the only thing that kept everyone alive for a while. But no one tried to study the changes or catalogue the differences observed in different zombies. In fact, there were anti-science groups that cropped up and actively killed anyone who tried to study these things. In their minds, the scientists were probably the ones who had created the Animator Virus in the first place. Even today, these groups still exist. Mostly in Texas, thanks to the purges. Trust me, don’t try to say you’re a scientist in Texas.

“So, jump forward to around thirty years ago. The Center for Reanimation Studies existed, but it wasn’t at Land’s End yet. Well, I guess Land’s End didn’t even exist yet, but you know what I mean. CRS had grown from a division of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. They had finally caught a large number of zombies to experiment on and test. And that was when they made the first real breakthrough. They discovered that there was not just one kind of zombie, but four. Four distinct kinds each with their own traits. The first kind, designated as Z1s, were what you initially saw and what turned you.

“The second kind, Z2s, did not appear to be any different at first glance. All reports seemed the same. They moved at the same speed as the originals, did the exact same shambles and moans. But the early CRS had noticed discrepancies in the reports about how long the Animator Virus took before it turned its victims. After the first month, people reported taking up to a day to turn people. The CRS didn’t have any samples of the earliest virus by that time, so the difference would have been purely theoretical except for the obvious change that occurred nearly a year later. The government by then had thought they had everything under control and were ready to start clearing out the middle of the country. That’s when we started seeing the Z3s. With them, the virus didn’t need to be directly passed through blood or saliva anymore. Any fluid from a zombie could pass it, and the virus remained active for several days in the fluid. The virus had been mutating all this time, you see, and it made the Animator Virus nearly impossible to stop.

“Years went by. For a long time, hygiene practices changed. Even today, you’ll still find some older people who are obsessive about it. Eventually things once again got under control on the coasts. By the time the CRS in Atlanta discovered the variations in zombies, the Z4s had started showing up. Now here’s where things start to get interesting, I think. The Z4s were slightly faster than the Z3s, which should have made them more formidable. But they didn’t spread the virus as fast, and Atlanta was having more ease keeping them under control. That’s when they started the tests on zombie specimens. They learned some new things about how the zombies worked, but most importantly they discovered that the Z4s weren’t infected with the more aggressive version of the virus after all. They were infected with an earlier version, nearly identical to what had been seen in the Z2s. Do you understand what I’m getting at here? The Animator Virus wasn’t mutated in these specimens. Instead, it was the zombies themselves who had changed long after they’d been infected.

“Everyone who is alive today probably owes their lives to the researchers there in Atlanta. Their work on the different types of zombies eventually led to more effective ways to hold them back. Since then we’ve eliminated all zombies in more urban areas, and they can only be found in occasional small hordes wandering around the countryside. Most people know not to go out that far anymore.”

“But that’s only four kinds,” Edward said. “Mendez mentioned earlier something about one called a Z7.”

Gates glared at Mendez. “Well, Mendez should know better than to let something like that just slip his lips unless he wants to be reassigned to some remote CRS facility in Cornhole, Idaho. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Yes, you’re correct. There are more known varieties. Two, in fact. Z5s and Z6s. And they are the reason the CRS has its main headquarters now at Land’s End instead of Atlanta. When the people in the Atlanta CRS started studying some of the captured Z4s, they accidently triggered something in a few of the zombies’ genetics. That’s what it boils down to, you see. The original person’s genes. Some react to the virus in one way, staying Z1s or Z2s, while others after some time turn into Z4s. Something has to be done to them to trigger the change into a Z5 or Z6. The Z5s were fast. And I mean very fast. They could sometimes chase down a dog running at full speed. And the Z6s had limited intelligence. Not a lot at all, but just enough. They could hide on purpose. Some could use tools. Between those two new strains, the CRS could no longer really hold them. They escaped. They infected everyone around them at a rate that exceeded the heyday of the Z3 strain. The government had no choice, really. They had to take care of it before the Z5s and Z6s could escape. They firebombed the city. Every man, woman and child who lived there was killed. To this day Atlanta still isn’t fit for humans.