Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

“Excuse me, but just who the fuck…” Liddie flashed her CRS ID before he could finish that thought, although she did it quickly enough that he couldn’t see the name. “Oh. Oh shit. Please, it was just a really quick nap.”

“A really quick nap? Well it would have been a really long nap if a reanimated had gotten past that gate and bitten you. I’m going to see you fired for this.”

“No, please, I swear it won’t happen again!”

A sudden flash of inspiration came to Liddie. “Your superiors, if they want to communicate with you they use a walkie-talkie?”

The guard showed her the thumb-sized device hanging from his belt. “Right here, ma’am.”

“Give it to me. I want to speak with them myself.”

“Uh, I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I’m not supposed to let anyone else use it.”

“Do you want me to also report that you were trying to prevent me from letting your superiors know about your mistake? Because I’m sure that will make you look so much better in their eyes.”

The guard cringed, then handed her the walkie-talkie. Liddie took it and turned back to the van.

“Hey!” the guard said. “You can’t leave here with that.”

“I’ll be reporting you from out in the field. I’m already running dangerously far behind because I had to wake your lazy ass up. I’ll return shortly and you’ll be getting it back. In the meantime, if I were you I would start trying to come up with an excuse that won’t get you fired.”

The gate was already opening as she got back into the van. Edward stared at her wide-eyed, but with a smile. “Okay, I didn’t catch all of that from here, but what I did catch was pretty impressive.”

“My mother’s training strikes again,” Liddie said.

“What is that you took from him?”

“His walkie-talkie.” She handed it to him, then drove through the open gate.

“ This is a walkie-talkie? That’s even more impressive.”

“What, didn’t they have walkie-talkies in your time?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t anything like… wait, what do we need a walkie-talkie for, anyway? Can they maybe track us with this like they could the phone?”

Liddie shook her head. They’d tossed the phone out the window soon after the mysterious call. As much as they would have liked to try getting a hold of the strange old man again, she knew it would be too risky. “These models are cheap throwaway types. Not even worth putting trackers in them. And I took it because I think we can use it to fake out our pursuers for a while. When the CRS security realizes we’re gone, they’ll likely contact all the gate stations to be on the look out for us. You can just pretend to be the guard and say you haven’t seen anything. By the time we’re out of range they will still be thinking we’re somewhere in the city.”

“Good idea,” Edward said. Liddie nodded, trying to keep a confident outward attitude. On the inside, even now that they appeared to be home free, she was petrified. The obvious problem now seemed out of the way, but that meant she now had to face exactly what she had done tonight. She had thrown away everything she’d ever known in her life. Her career, her family. Admittedly, she hadn’t had much beyond that. Her friends were more like acquaintances that she occasionally met for drinks without sharing anything more than inane conversation. Her apartment had been sparsely furnished and contained few possessions. Yet it hadn’t felt like her life had been empty. Her career with the CRS had felt meaningful, like she was making an important contribution to the continued existence of the human race.

She looked over at Edward, who was still staring at the walkie-talkie with wonder. At what point had she made the decision that his life was worth more than all that? From a purely logical perspective, it seemed crazy. He was only one person, and if she had stayed at the CRS she could have gone on contributing to research that could have helped so many more. Now that her mother was very likely fired and going to jail, that meant that Dr. Chella would be in charge, and Liddie was pretty certain she didn’t care a lick about helping anybody but her own reputation.

But that was really a narcissistic way of thinking about things, wasn’t it? Had Liddie’s contribution really been more than anyone else’s? More than once she had felt like she hadn’t really belonged there. She wasn’t a scientist. She’d simply been a bureaucrat making sure all the chemicals and testing equipment had been in the right place. She hadn’t been helping anybody. Now was her chance to do some real good for a real person.

Briefly she thought to herself that Edward was more than just any old person, that he was someone special, but she pushed that thought away for now. That awkward moment in the elevator had been enough to tell her he didn’t quite want anything to do with that. At least, not yet.

“Okay, so, we need to make a plan,” Liddie said.

“Well, the first part of any plan we come up with has to be get as far away from Stanford as possible,” Edward said.

“Yes, but what after that? Do we go find this guy that just called us?”

“I certainly don’t know what else we would do at this point.”

“But can we trust him? How do we know it’s not some sort of trap? The CRS could have found a way to make that call and have us think it came from somewhere else.”

“But why would they send us all the way to Illinois then? If it was the CRS they could spring a trap on us much closer, I would think.”

“A trap from someone else?” Liddie asked. “Is there anyone else you could think of that would want to get their hands on you.”

“Sure, maybe, if anyone else knew I existed. It’s not like any of those conspiracy theorists you were talking about would know your private number.”

“So we’re going to say this guy is the real thing. But saying he created you? That can’t be true, can it?”

“How would I know? For all I know I was made a Z7 by a secret conspiracy of Democrat lawn gnomes.”

“What’s a lawn gnome?” Liddie asked.

“Never mind. I’m just putting my vote in for Illinois. Do you have a vote for anywhere else?”

“No. It’s not like I’ve actually left Stanford enough to know anything about anywhere else, so Illinois might as well be as good a place as any. The only problem then is how are we going to get there?”

“Are there still roads that will take us there, or were they left alone to break up for all these years?”

“A little of both,” Liddie said. She gestured at the terrain around them. Immediately beyond Stanford there was an empty zone, just like Edward had probably seen in Fond du Lac, but beyond that the landscape was much different. Any buildings that had once existed out here had all been bulldozed and the natural landscape had been allowed to grow back. The only thing that didn’t grow out here were large trees. Every so often the area cities would send teams out to trim the trees back, making it far harder for the reanimated to hide so near the city. Further beyond they could both see the lights of other nearby cities. Unlike the cities in mid-country, the cities on the coasts tended to be much closer together, and the roads between them were meticulously maintained.

“Anything that didn’t lead anywhere important has been left to nature over all these years,” Liddie said, “but major interstate highways are still sort of kept up. Or at least they’re supposed to be. Most people with half a brain avoid travelling over land, so sometimes the local government doesn’t bother to keep up with them as they should.”

“So we should be able to drive the whole way?”

“More or less.”

“What do you mean by that?”