Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

“Please tell me Cory finally got those old grills working,” Larissa said.

“Yeah, he did,” Rae said, “But that doesn’t mean he can cook worth a shit. And the dumbass didn’t bother to clean them off before he turned them on for the first time. So beware, the entire kitchen area smells like burning dust.”

“Hell, I don’t care,” Larissa said. “I’ve been patrolling the town all morning. I’m starved.”

“All morning? You’ve only been out for an hour.”

“And I didn’t wake up until almost eleven, so it was all of my morning.”

She let Larissa go back into the kitchen while Rae proceeded to the dining room and the makeshift command center Cory had set up. He’d pushed together any old tables that could still stand by themselves and covered them with the yellowing city maps the old man had found for them. Broken salt and pepper shakers marked the places where they had sentries around the town, while chopped up pieces of straw represented the zombies that had been found so far and pushed out of the town limits. Larissa, Jojo, and Luke had wanted to kill the zombies they’d found, but Rae made it perfectly clear that if any of them killed a zed then she would put a hole in that person’s head to match. Her parents were probably spinning in their graves over such an order, but Edward had put a significant amount of doubt in her mind when it came to the reanimated. So she kept the zeds out of town, far away from the old man, but did nothing else to them.

“Did I just see Larissa come in?” Cory asked.

“She went in back to see if she could burn lunch less than you could.”

“Damn it, she knows that the first thing she’s supposed to do when she comes in between patrols is report to me.”

“You and I both know her reports are less than reliable anyways. What did Jojo and Luke have to say when they came in?”

Cory indicated the maps. “Look for yourself. I sent them both off to see if they could confirm this, but do you see anything weird here?”

Rae sat down on the least-rickety looking chair she could find and stared at the maps. Shakers indicated Luke and Jojo’s approximate locations, both on the west side of town. A normal patrol would have taken them all around the town with Larissa and occasionally Rae acting as extra sets of eyes looking west, but Rae could see right away that there was a major discrepancy that hadn’t been on the maps yesterday.

They’d been tracking at least eighteen zombies in the area immediately surrounding Winnebago. Jojo had found some paint that hadn’t gone completely bad in the ruins of an old hardware store, and they’d been using the brightest they could find to tag the zombies with marks on their chests and backs so they could be seen from a distance. If a zombie showed up without a tag, they knew it had to have just recently wandered in. They’d had a few of those new additions in their first two days here, but not in the days after that. The straw pieces on the map were colored with the same paint as their respective zombies, giving them an idea where each one was. Everyone on patrol kept track of which ones they saw where, and reported it in to Cory.

The strange thing now, however, was most of the straw pieces had been removed from the map.

“Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” Rae asked. “So the question is where did they go?”

“I don’t think you’re actually seeing what I’m talking about,” Cory said. “Take a look at the pattern.”

Rae pulled out her canister of chewing tobacco, put a pinch in her mouth, and chewed as she tried to see what Cory saw. Out of the eighteen zombies that called the area around Winnebago their home, only six were left. The answer came to her quickly. She’d been preoccupied with the disappeared zombies, not with the position of the ones that remained. All six were to the east and slightly south of the town.

“Did someone kill them?” Rae asked.

“They’re already dead. I keep trying to tell you that, but it’s like you aren’t paying attention.”

“I’m paying plenty of attention. I just don’t have the same limited idea of what death means anymore. Answer the question.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Cory said. “If they were dead, we would have found bodies.”

“So twelve zeds just vanish, no bodies, and it doesn’t affect the ones in a specific area. Whatever’s going on, why doesn’t it seem to be happening on the east side of town?”

“I wondered that, too, but then both Luke and Jojo told me that had to use the shock prods more than usual today. Those six remaining zeds? They were trying to get into town.”

“You think all the others are hiding somewhere in town?”

“No, I don’t. Look.” He threw the rest of straws on the map, placing them randomly around the town. “These six were trying to get into town. They were all going the same direction. Do you see now?” He pushed the six toward town but stopped them at the first groups of wrecked buildings. Then he pushed all the others in the same direction. There was no town or security detail to stop them, so they all kept going.

Rae pulled out the old mayonnaise jar she’d been keeping under the table as a spittoon and spit a wad of dark saliva into it, then stared at the map. They were all heading west.

“And when did this start?” she asked.

“All the zeds were accounted for as of the midnight patrol.”

She nodded. “Something’s going on west of here. Any ideas?”

“Not a clue. If we really want to know, we’ll have to send someone out there to scout it.”

“The old man hasn’t said anything?” Rae asked.

“He hasn’t left the library. Jojo went in to check on him, make sure nothing had happened, and the old man just shooed her out again. Although, yeah, now that I think about it Jojo said he looked kind of excited when she said most of the zeds were gone. You think he has something to do with it?”

“You know him just about as well I do. What do you think?”

“I think that if that crazy old fucker isn’t behind the disappearances, he at least knows what’s caused them.”

“Then I say we go ask him,” Rae said.

She was about to go into the kitchen to tell Larissa to keep an eye on the place while they were gone, but Luke came in through the door before she could do anything.

“Holy shit guys. You need to come see this.”

“What is it?” Rae asked.

“Me and Jojo found the zeds. Rae, look, I know you’re got this whole pacifist thing going with them, but I think maybe you should rethink that for today.”

“Come on, quit teasing us, honey,” Cory said. “Are you going to tell us or not?”

“No, Cory, this is something you’ve got to see to believe. If Larissa’s here she should probably come, too. And everyone should bring their guns.”

Larissa and Luke took their ATVs while Rae and Cory took his car. They didn’t have to go far. There was the remains of a major highway just north of the Culvers, and they all found Jojo huddled behind her own ATV with a pair of binoculars in hand and her rifle at the ready nearby. Rae went to her side with Spanky in her hands, and the others soon joined them.

“You moved,” Luke said. “Weren’t you further down?”

“I had to get back closer to base,” Jojo said. Her deep voice quavered a little. That was odd and a little disturbing. Jojo had always been the stupidly brave sort. “They’re moving faster than they should.”

“Can you still see them?” Luke asked.

“Yeah, but you won’t need to binoculars for that very soon.”

“Give them to me,” Rae said. Jojo handed her the binoculars without argument, and Rae pointed them where she had been looking. It was immediately apparent what had rattled the two of them. Down the road she could see all the painted zeds that had disappeared, and far more besides. She couldn’t be sure of the exact number, but she thought fifty would be a conservative estimate. It was a true horde, the kind her parents had told her about in hushed tones, the sort of thing a human had to get away from as fast as possible if they wanted to survive. But although her first instinct was to run, her heart started to calm the more she stared. Jojo was right. They were coming fast, and the longer she looked the easier it was to tell why.