Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

It still struggled to get up off the floor. Edward couldn’t help but feel sorry for it. To everyone else in this building, the pathetic creature in front of him was a monster, or at the very least a biohazard. If he took off its mask he would see a haggard face, rotted skin, maybe even eyes that had gone white with cataracts. That was what he had looked like, he realized. He remembered the putrid state of his own skin as he had first glimpsed it in the twilight of the department store, a memory that made him look at his arm again. Perfectly clean and smooth flesh, healthy looking. Even his tattoo was gone, its last remnants having faded away as his body had healed even the scars it had gathered before he’d been bitten. But no one had yet been able to figure out what made him different than this thing in front of him. No, that was wrong to think in those terms. He couldn’t call it a thing. If he was so much like it, and he wanted to call himself a person, then he had to call it a person as well.

All noise from the other side of the mirror had stopped, but he didn’t receive any further information from either Liddie or Chella. This was obviously some sort of new test, but he had no clue what it was supposed to accomplish. He called out, asking what he was supposed to do, but there was no response. The zombie, on the other hand, groaned. In its efforts to get back up it had twisted its body into an awkward position with its arms pinned underneath it at a bad angle. The position looked painful, but Edward wasn’t sure if a zombie could feel pain. He thought back through all the red hazed memories that had come back to him through his dreams. Had he ever felt pain during those missing fifty years? He wasn’t sure. Nothing like that had come back to him. Maybe he hadn’t, but he could feel it now. He was more human than zombie now, even if no one other than Liddie wanted to act like it. And if he could come back, who was to say that none of these others might one day? They’d been human once, they might be human again, so why not treat them as though they were human now?

Edward squatted down next to the zombie and put a hand on its shoulder. It stopped moving. Was it waiting for something? Was it even capable of intentionally waiting for something? He remembered the way the zombies in his memory had moved together as one, how they had stopped and waited to trap their prey. So yeah, the zombies could wait, but what would possess them to do that? He hadn’t remembered thinking anything through, making any plans, and it hadn’t looked like any of the others had either. Yet they had coordinated their movements anyway.

He took a deep breath, not even realizing he was doing it, and the honey smell hit him harder than before. He immediately felt compelled to do…something, but he didn’t know what. He stopped moving, trying to ward off the sudden compelling feeling that he shouldn’t be in control of his own body. The awareness hit him that there was something nearby, many somethings, things that he could consume and become stronger, more stable, more capable of following along with the horde.

He backed away from the zombie, and the bizarre feelings subsided. As strong as they had been, he knew on some level that those compulsions should have been stronger. Had it all come from the zombie?

The zombie started struggling again. The urges came back, although they were still well within his control. Was it the fact that this zombie was in distress? He got closer again, this time putting a hand near the mask like he intended to remove it. The scent subsided, and all inhuman urges disappeared again.

He stepped away again. Edward was sure that to the people on the other side of the glass it looked like he was doing the Hokey-Pokey or something, but the scent grew strong again and supported his suspicions. The odor was some kind of distress call, or at least a way of communicating. It was like the zombie was calling him for help. If he didn’t know any better, he would say the zombie was actually scared.

He wasn’t sure if this was what Dr. Chella wanted and expected him to do or not, but if his hunch was true he couldn’t let this continue. At the very least, he had to get the zombie out of that uncomfortable position.

He went for the mask again, this time doing his best to ignore the changes in the air’s smell. The mask was like a modified baseball catcher’s mask, likely designed to keep the zombie from biting anything. It would be important for the zombie to have it on around humans, but by now he was pretty certain the zombie posed zero threat to him. With the mask off, Edward helped the zombie into a sitting position and took a closer look at it.

Edward had no way of knowing how old the zombie really was. Its skin decay might have given a clue as to how long it had been dead, but if what Dr. Chella had said earlier was true then there came a certain point where a zombie didn’t noticeably rot anymore. So this one could have been anywhere from several weeks to several decades dead, for all he knew. But there was enough flesh that Edward might still tell about how old it had been when it had turned. At the very oldest, the boy in front of him couldn’t have been over fourteen.

Edward looked at the mirror out of reflex, trying to see Dr. Chella’s reaction to the revelation, but of course he couldn’t see anything. And really, how did he expect her to react? It wasn’t like this would be the first time she had seen the boy. He had probably been property of the CRS for a while now. She had observed him, done tests on him, poked and prodded him, and to her none of that would have been wrong. In fact, to most of the world that would have been perfectly acceptable or even commendable. Even Liddie, despite treating Edward with dignity, probably thought of this boy as nothing more than another test subject. This wasn’t a boy to them at all. It was a thing.

Maybe Edward wasn’t thinking rationally about this. Whatever it looked like, the zombie was completely different than whoever it had been while alive. It didn’t have a personality, morals, hopes, or dreams. And when left to its own devices it would gladly kill a human being. Something like that surely couldn’t be allowed the same rights or status as a person.

Yet there was still that one nagging fact. Edward had been like this once too, and now he wasn’t. Somewhere inside this zombie’s brain it still had all it needed to go back to being the boy he once was. All that was needed was to figure out what could push a person back.

The zombie kid stared blankly at him. That spark of humanity might have still been in there, but there was absolutely no outward sign of it.

The door opened again, and the two guards came back in. The odor in the air grew again, but it had different feel, like it was sweeter. This wasn’t like earlier, when Edward could interpret the sickly sweetness to something like fear. This felt more like…what exactly? Excitement? Joy? Anticipation? He couldn’t say for sure, but it had more of a positive connotation to it. Edward thought he understood. Two real humans were entering the room, but the zombie couldn’t classify them as humans. If his memories were accurate, it couldn’t even classify itself as a human. It had only the most rudimentary self-awareness. To it, the humans were just as much things as he was to them.

Both guards were armed with the same kind of shock prods Edward had seen in Wisconsin, although these looked to be newer models. They both ignored Edward and went for the zombie, prodding it right at the base of its head. The zombie went into convulsions and went to the floor. Edward backed away and both guards surrounded it, one holding his prod ready to shock it again while the other, for some reason, stooped down to unlock the zombie’s cuffs and removed the mittens. They had left the door open, and a few seconds later Liddie came in. Her hair was somewhat mussed up, but otherwise there was no clue what had been going on behind the mirror.