Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

“Excuse me,” Edward asked. “But where are we right now?”

Gates leaned over and looked out the window. “That’ll be us starting to come in over California.”

“Looks like the population is much denser down there.”

“It is. When the Uprising happened, those who weren’t complete rednecks realized there really would be safety in numbers and headed to the coasts. That way the government was better able to protect them. Those who decided they wanted to be the lone wolves ended up having to fend for themselves for years. It increased the population here but drastically depleted the population out in the wilds.”

That didn’t sound at all like what Rae had said, but Edward didn’t comment. He suspected that neither of those sides of history really told the whole story.

Although he wouldn’t have known exactly what cities should have looked like in the air back in his own time, he still suspected they wouldn’t have looked exactly like this. There didn’t appear to be much in the way of suburbs. The cities were bunched together into tighter masses with very little in between. It wasn’t until the plane started its decent, however, that Edward could really see how different things were.

“Is that Los Angeles?” Edward asked.

“Huh? Um, no. Los Angeles is much further south. That’s Stanford.”

“ That’s Stanford?” He tried to remember anything he’d ever heard about Stanford, but there wasn’t much. He’d never had any reason to care one way or the other about the place. He’d heard of the university, of course, but didn’t know anything about the town around it. He was pretty sure it had been rather small. That was why it was a bit of shock to see it now as a bustling metropolis full of skyscrapers. “I don’t understand. How did it go from…um, whatever it was before, to this?”

“Once Atlanta was gone, the main branch of the CRS had to go somewhere. Stanford University was the second best source of research on the Animator Virus, so this is where it ended up. The government channeled a lot of money into here, and private companies, once they realized business wasn’t just going to cease because of the zombies, realized there was a lot of money to be made in everything from research equipment to CRS housing. It wasn’t like it was terribly easy at that time to ship things across the country or even have people live in suburbs. The result was the fastest growth for a city ever seen in the country’s history. And all of it is centered around Land’s End University and the CRS.”

Edward squinted, trying to get a better look at the details of the city, but they were still too high up and it was still too dark, even with the amazing amount of light the city seemed to give off. After fifty years he would have expected a city—especially one so new and modern—to be some barely recognizable future dome or some other such science fiction nonsense. Maybe there should have even been flying cars. But he couldn’t see anything like that. He supposed humanity had been too busy dealing with other things to bother with the future dreams of the past.

“Am I going to get to see any of it?” Edward asked.

Gates looked thoroughly amused. “This isn’t a vacation, Mr. Schuett.”

“So what then? Are you going to be sticking me in some cage as soon as we land?”

“This isn’t a prison either.”

“Just what the hell are we going to be calling it then?”

“Call it… a hospital stay. An extended one.”

“And is this hospital stay ever going to actually end?”

Gates didn’t answer. She just put her hand back on her gun. He supposed that was answer enough.

Unlike the other two airfields where they had landed, the airport in Stanford was a full-fledged commercial one, or at least as far as Edward could tell. He only got a brief glimpse of it as the plane taxied down the runway. It took a couple of minutes before he was allowed to go for the door and stairs, as the plane didn’t actually go up to a terminal, but instead stopped near a makeshift military-looking station where someone erected a curtain around the door. Edward could still see things from out of the windows, so he could only assume the curtain was there to keep anyone from seeing him.

There was a plain-looking van waiting to pick him up within the curtained-off area. It was hard not to notice the very distinct difference in style between this thing and the vehicles he had seen in Fond du Lac. Most of the cars and trucks there had been older and run down, sure, but even the nicer car Gates had picked him up in looked more like the cars he remembered from his own time than this thing did. Somehow it managed to look blocky and sleek at the same time. Also, the tires didn’t appear to be made out of rubber, but some kind of plastic. If the van was typical of the difference between Wisconsin and California, then he couldn’t even begin to guess what other styles and materials and technologies had changed.

Three people waited outside the van as they came down the stairs. One was obviously a guard, evident by both the studied way he stood next to the open back door of the van with his hands clasped behind his back and the rather large handgun he had in a shoulder holster. The second person, an Indian woman in her late forties, was dressed in a neat suit that would have made Edward mistake her for a business executive if it weren’t for the satchel in her hand and the stethoscope around her throat.

The third person made Edward do a double take. If the girl standing there had been twenty years older, an inch or two taller, and had maybe a few more pounds on her, then she would have looked exactly like Danielle Gates. She even wore a nearly identical suit.

Neither the guard nor the doctor paid Edward much mind as he approached with Gates ahead of him and Mendez behind. Gates’ lookalike, however, stared right at him, her eyes roaming up and down like she was trying desperately to see every part of him at once. She appeared surprised by whatever she saw.

“This must be him,” the doctor said, but she still didn’t acknowledge Edward, instead directing the comment to Gates.

“Correct,” Gates said. “You’ll want to do your own tests, I’m certain. The PVA that inbred yokel doctor used on Mr. Schuett here back in Wisconsin looked ancient and about as reliable as Shannon Casanova at a tennis convention, but it did appear to confirm our suspicions. This here is our not-so-mythical Z7.”

The doctor gave Gates a grudging look. “We’ll just see,” she said.

Edward wasn’t sure what confused him more: that something was obviously going on between Gates and the doctor that they probably weren’t going to tell him, or all the words and expressions Gates had just used that were completely beyond his comprehension.

“There is no way,” the younger version of Gates said. Unlike the doctor, she spoke directly to Edward. “There has to be some mistake. You don’t look like a reanimated at all.”

“Liddie, why are you even here?” Gates asked the younger version of herself. “You’re supposed to be supervising the Althocain trials.”

“Mom, really, what the hell is there even to supervise? You inject the Althocain into a human, it does nothing. Inject it into a reanimated, it jerks around for a couple hours. Just like all the other test runs. Pardon me if I thought this was more important. And interesting.”

“You’re not going to move up in the CRS if you keep shirking your duties like this,” Gates said.

“Then stop giving me duties a monkey can do.”

The doctor gave both women a poorly hidden sneer as she set down her case and opened it to pull out another device like the one the doctor had used in Wisconsin. This one looked more compact, but otherwise Edward couldn’t see much of a difference. Assuming these things were the PVAs Gates had mentioned, he couldn’t see why this one would be any superior to the other.