Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

Then the moment was gone. He didn’t remember why he was standing here, looking down at just another corpse. The world was full of them now, so why would this one be special? He wandered off to join the others, always following the lead of the slight hint of honey in the air.

Edward woke with tears streaming down his cheeks. It took him several seconds before his brain caught up with what his heart already knew, and he realized that he had just remembered the death, or at least the second death, of his wife.

He was draped over the second row of seats in the van, while Liddie snored softly on the back row. He wasn’t sure if he’d been making any noise as he’d cried in his sleep, but at least it hadn’t disturbed her. However, it didn’t feel right to be here next to her at this moment. It felt disloyal to Julia’s memory, almost like he was…well, like he was cheating on her.

There weren’t a whole lot of other places he could go, though. It was either in here or out there, where other zombies wandered around looking either for more zombies to group up with or prey to feed that hunger they didn’t quite understand. But Edward didn’t actually have anything to fear from them, did he? To them, and indeed to most of the world, he was no different. They accepted him among them where no one else would.

He was very careful not to make any noise as he got up from the seat and slid open the back door. He closed it again softly but firmly. Edward wondered for a moment if he should open it again and lock it from the inside, ensuring that nothing would be able to get in and get Liddie, but he didn’t think zombies would be able to open the door. Or, at least, one or two zombies wouldn’t be able to open the door. From what he could remember, a large number of zombies might have been coordinated enough to figure it out. But a quick sniff seemed to confirm there weren’t that many in the vicinity. There was…one. Somewhere out in the forest. Somewhere near. After one last check to make sure Liddie was asleep and content, he walked off in the direction of the pheromones he sensed out among the trees.

The terrain was rough. There wasn’t any path out here, not even any game trails that he could find. Thick bushes obscured the ground, and several times he nearly tripped on exposed roots or animal burrows. At one point he even stubbed his toe hard enough that he thought he broke it, but the throbbing pain disappeared far quicker than it should have. Pain. That was something he never remembered in any of the dreams. As a zombie, a full-blown one complete with menacing groan and shambling walk, he hadn’t felt the holes in his flesh or the slow rotting of his limbs. And he certainly hadn’t felt any emotional pain. That one moment when he had seen Julia die was a rare exception.

He wiped the tears from his cheeks, but more replaced them. This was what he got for being more human again. Pain. Loss. Fear of being caught and killed. Was this really so great? He might have been better off if he had never come back. He would still be in the Fond du Lac area somewhere, wandering aimlessly looking for nothing except the occasional prey. It would be a pure and simple life nothing like this. He wouldn’t feel regret at the idea that he had killed people over and over for decades. He wouldn’t feel sorrow that his wife—and yes, he had to face reality now, probably his daughter as well—was long dead. He wouldn’t be on the run. Yes, there would always be the possibility of someone wandering out in the middle of nowhere with a gun coming up and shooting him in the head. He might end up at the Jamboree Rae had talked about. And he wouldn’t have destroyed Liddie’s life and career.

He stopped as the ground in front of him dropped off into a gully. There were too many trees to allow much moonlight to filter through here, but there was still enough light that he could see the gully’s lone occupant. It was a woman, perhaps a little fresher looking than most zombies he had seen, but most definitely not alive. Her clothes looked like they had started out as a business suit, although they were too coated with grime and dead leaves for Edward to be sure. One whole side of her face had been skinned, probably from the fall into the gully, and there were even places where the bone showed through. She wandered back and forth at the bottom of the gully, occasionally trying to walk up the side and falling back in. Edward had no idea how long she had been here or how she got here. Who had she been?, Edward wondered. Had she had a family? Children? No family at all except for a house full of cats? Did someone out there miss her? Or did no one care?

She tried to go up the gully wall again and failed. She just couldn’t grasp the idea that she couldn’t walk straight up it or that she might need to hold onto some of the bushes with her hands. Edward snorted. This was what he had been nostalgic for just a few minutes earlier. A life stripped of all meaning. He’d been the incredibly lucky one. He’d been given his life back. It wasn’t the same one he’d known, and it never would be again. But he could build a new one.

He started to turn back in the direction of van, but the woman moaned and he looked back. She stared up at him, and the pheromone scent on the air changed. Join , it said without words. Become. Hunt. Follow . He didn’t feel that same moment of compulsion he had back with the boy in the CRS, but he could still feel all the subtle variations. On some level he could still understand them all, too. He hadn’t been able to use that understanding in any effective way at the time, but he hadn’t really given it any thought, either. It had just been a knee-jerk reaction. Now that he was alone, though, and didn’t have to worry about this zombie potentially doing something to Liddie, maybe he could control the scents a little better. Maybe he could actually use them to communicate, if anyone could really be said to communicate with the undead.

He concentrated on the pheromones. Now that Liddie had told him Chella’s theories, he found it easier to picture them in his head. A chemical floating on the air currents, coming from him, wafting to the zombie, being picked up with whatever those special receptors were in her nasal cavities. He concentrated on all that, and he pushed . The effect was immediate, just like it had been back in that room, and the zombie woman reacted in the same way. She froze, completely confused by the garbled message she received. Well, at least he knew how to do that. He could stop a zombie dead in its tracks. But could he do more? It had never seemed in any of his dreams like there was one zombie in charge, more like a consensus of all zombies. Some might want to do one thing, some might want to do another, but the strongest pheromones, the ones released by the most zombies, were the ones that all others obeyed as though they had wanted to do that same thing all along.

Strength, he realized, was the issue. The zombie down there in the gully wanted him to come down and join her. All he had to do was figure out how to tell her to do something else, and make it stronger.

He closed his eyes and let the memories come back to him. There was one freshest in his mind, one he’d rather not think about, but there was still something useful there. He’d received an order and he had followed it, despite the order putting him in danger. He thought he could remember the shape of it in his mind, the slight scent, the way it had touched him. He could recreate that. Just remember everything about it. Remember everything…and then push out.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the zombie. She was trying to get up the gully wall again, and although she still couldn’t quite make it she at least made it a little farther up before she fell down. Mostly that was because instead of trying to climb it straight up, she was moving at it at an angle, a zigzag.