Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

“And then there’s you, Mr. Schuett. A zombie unlike any we’ve ever seen before, but there has long been speculation that something like you could exist, a zombie possessing full human memory and intelligence, complete human capabilities, and even looking human, but you still have a heavy concentration of a Z1 strain in your system. Version Z7.

“And it doesn’t seem likely to me that such a thing could exist by accident. I believe someone changed something in you on purpose, even though such experimentation has been forbidden for years. Someone went out of their way to create you—the world’s first super-zombie.”

Edward didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the flight, and Gates didn’t volunteer anything else. That was perfectly fine to Edward. What she had already said was more than he thought he could handle right now, anyway. He wasn’t comfortable with the way she continued to call him a zombie, since he failed to see what, if anything, really made him different from an ordinary human by this point (with the exception of the continued trips he had to make to the bathroom since his bowels continued to act more like a zombie than a regular person, but the less said about that the better). But Gates kept her distance from him, and Mendez continued to keep his gun out and pointed in Edward’s general direction.

He tried to keep himself distracted by watching through one of the windows as the land passed by below them, but the view, as breathtaking as it was in the sunset, still acted as a reminder that he was in the wrong time and a wrong world. Even though he had never flown before, he knew more or less what he was supposed to see as the jet flew over the Midwest. Julia had described to him once how all the roads and farmland turned the ground into a huge checkerboard pattern for as far as the eye could see, with the occasion town or city breaking it up. Those colossal squares seemed to be a thing of the past, though. He could sometimes see the outlines of where they had once been, but the roads that had divided them were fewer. He didn’t think that most of the land was crops anymore, either. Huge portions of the land had gone back to their natural states after fifty years of being left to themselves. Sometimes he thought he saw small patches that might have been farmland, but these were only near small, worn-looking settlements. If what Rae said was right, even that much development was rather new. It had taken such a short period of time for America to devolve back to an earlier state, it seemed.

Staring out at the empty land, it finally hit him just how much time had really passed. Everything he had known was gone, and there would be no such thing as familiar in this new world. Even Rae and Gates’ brief history lessons had done little to educate him. He had no idea who the president was, or what had happened to the president he remembered. He wasn’t even sure that America still had a president. For all he knew it had turned into a monarchy or something. NASCAR? Did that still exist? It had to in some form, right? Or had that been another aspect of his culture that had been neglected and forgotten when corpses had started shambling around and eating people? Baseball? Football? Mexican food? Did anything he had loved still exist?

Was Dana still out there somewhere?

He hadn’t realized he was crying until Gates handed him a Kleenex. Or maybe he should just call it a tissue. Maybe the Kleenex brand didn’t exist anymore.

“Thank you,” Edward said.

“You’re welcome,” Gates said. “What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing. Everything. Hey, I don’t suppose you could tell me who’s currently the king of the United States, could you?”

Gates gave him a funny look. “There is no king. There’s a president.”

“Good. That’s good to know.”

The jet landed long enough to refuel at some remote airport. Edward was allowed to get out and stretch a little, but he made sure not to wander very far. He remembered the sniper in Fond du Lac, and figured Gates would have likely called ahead to make sure there was similar security here. Again somebody went to get food—actual meals for Gates, Mendez, and the pilots, raw meat for him. He did his best to ignore his urge to gobble it down with only the bare minimum chewing. At least his hunger was no longer at the same level it had been before. And the people around him no longer smelled like food. That was a very good thing.

As near as Edward could tell, their refueling stop was somewhere just east of the Rocky Mountains. By that time it had grown completely dark, and he could no longer see anything they passed over. Only occasionally did he think he saw any lights to mark towns or settlements, but they were nothing but tiny far away dots.

He didn’t know how long he stared out the window, but when he stood to go to the bathroom again he realized that Mendez was asleep closer to the front of the cabin. Gates had his gun now, and while she didn’t keep it pointed at him she still kept it within easy reach. She had bags under her eyes by now, and her notebook was again in hand as she scribbled a few notes.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing down?” Edward asked.

“For starters, I writing that it appears you need less sleep than a human.”

“Could you please stop referring to me as though I’m not a human?”

All that got for a response was a few more jotted down notes.

“What do you mean I need less sleep? I slept before you found me.”

“But for how long?” Gates asked. “From what I’ve been told, you were only out of anybody’s sight for a few hours.”

“Yeah, I guess. Maybe an hour or two?”

“And here it is, quite late by your time zone, yet you don’t appear to be tired.”

Edward hadn’t thought of that. Ever since the tingling of regenerating wounds had dissipated and he’d gotten something to eat in his system, he hadn’t felt anything at all like fatigue. “Do zombies sleep?” he asked.

“Not any of the variations I’ve ever observed,” Gates said. “But I guess a Z7 must need to at least a little. Tell me, when you slept earlier, did you dream at all?”

Edward remembered the vague red-tinged memories he’d had while he’d napped in the shed. He still couldn’t recall any clear details, but he remembered enough to know they’d been somewhat violent and disturbing. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

Gates eventually slept, too. Maybe she forgot for the moment that he was supposedly dangerous, because she didn’t bother waking up Mendez first to watch over him. Initially he thought about trying to take the gun from her before she woke up, but that was just the part of him that resented the way he’d been treated so far. Taking the gun wouldn’t actually do anything useful in the long run. It wasn’t like there was anything he could do with it to get away while in the air. Also, although he had no delusions that he was anything other than a prisoner right now, he didn’t think he would try getting away even if he could. He had already learned more from Gates about what may or may not be happening to him than he had by himself or with Rae. Cooperating would hopefully get him even more answers.

Or it could get him dissected in the end, for all he knew. But going along with it seemed the only intelligent move for now.

He stopped staring at the gun and went back to staring out the window. He did, however, see out of the corner of his eye as Gates, apparently not sleeping at all, checked that the gun was still next to her before quickly writing something more in her notebook.

When he first started seeing lights on the ground, Edward at first thought he had to be hallucinating them. They started out sparse, but as the plane continued the lights became more concentrated.