Derek Goodman - The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

“You are, though,” she responded. Edward responded only by staring silently out the window as the car carefully crept over the potholed streets.

“Anyway,” Rae continued, “I’d already lost my job and tossed out my boyfriend by that point, so they sent some people to beat the shit of me.”

“Bastards,” Edward said.

“Oh, don’t worry. They didn’t get a chance to lay a hand on me. The sons of bitches sent Johnny, my ex, with a couple of other thugs, but he froze at just the right moment. He just couldn’t do it. I, on the other hand, had no problem with kicking his ass. Especially since the first thing they tried to do was take Spanky away from me. Nobody ever fucking touches my gun.

“By then I’d been thinking about trying to do some sort of private security gig myself, and I’d already convinced Larissa and Cory to join up with me. Cory got his boyfriend Luke to come along, and Luke convinced Jojo. But we wouldn’t have actually been able to start up if it hadn’t been for the old man.”

“Tell me about him,” Edward said. “So far the only thing I know about him is he’s old.”

“Then you know almost as much as the rest of us,” Rae said. “I don’t even know his name. The first time I saw him was right after the CRS took you. He asked what was going on and I told him, even though that CRS bitch had just told me not to. I didn’t think anything more of that until I started trying to find a picture to prove that you’d been in Fond du Lac. He came to me, said he’d heard I was looking into you. I asked him how, and he said Merton was keeping tabs on me about it, and he was keeping tabs on Merton. He’s been keeping tabs on a lot of people, apparently. Whoever the hell this guy is, he seems to have friends in an insane number of high places.”

“And why does he want to see me?” Edward asked.

“My first guess would be because everyone wants to see you, but he claims he knows things even the CRS doesn’t. He hasn’t been able to prove that to me yet, but he knew to come up to Fond du Lac to find you all the way from here, and he’s got access to equipment that no ordinary hermit can just find on the street. You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”

“So Winnebago is his home?”

“I guess. Not much of a home. This is one of those towns that didn’t have enough strategic value for anyone to try defending during the first days of the Uprising, and it was too close to the first reported cases. So it got left on its own. It’s not exactly the kind of place where you would expect to find a guy like this.”

The car finally turned onto Elida Street, which was one of the few streets around here still marked by a rusting and bent street sign. Most of the buildings around here were too broken up to be lived in, some of them even collapsing in on themselves, but one still looked like it was maintained with some regularity. The sign out front indicated that at one time this had been the Winnebago Public Library.

“This is it,” Rae said. “Final stop.”

She didn’t even bother to pull the car over. Some of the potholes along the curb were deep enough that she might not be able to get the car out of them again, and it wasn’t like anyone else would be coming along to use the street anyway. Edward got out slowly, staring at the building as though it were something to truly behold.

“Edward, are you okay?” Rae asked.

“Yes, I suppose. It’s just…never mind. I want to finally do this.”

Rae led him up to the front door. The glass doors had been smashed long ago and covered up in plywood that was at least slightly less rotten than on other buildings. She opened the door and motioned for Edward to go in ahead of her. She followed and waited for him to take in the sight.

It was still possible to tell that the building had once been a library, but that was mostly because of the books stacked as high as her shoulders in teetering towers of yellowing pages. While some shelves still remained intact, the books had all been removed from them and set to one side so the old man could use the shelves to store the incredible number of folders he’d accumulated over the years. A couple days ago when the old man hadn’t been looking she’d pulled out one of the folders to look at the contents, but it was full of handwritten notes in a sloppy hand she couldn’t read and equations and formulas she didn’t understand. The other shelves had been dismantled and put back together as work tables, and all across the tables there were microscopes, test tubes, small refrigerators, Bunsen burners, needles, and various tools that Rae couldn’t name. And huddled among them all on a stool, fidgeting excitedly as he watched Edward come in, was the old man.

“Are you him?” the old man asked.

“I guess, unless you were expecting some other Z7,” Edward said.

The old man jumped off his stool. That was pretty impressive, considering he had to be well over eighty years old by now. “Really? There’s more?”

“Um, no. I was being sarcastic,” Edward said. “How exactly would you not know I’m the only Z7? You’re the one that made me.”

The old man looked puzzled. “I did?”

“You said you did,” Edward said. “When you called. You said you were the man who created me.”

“Oh, yes, well when you put it like that then I guess I did have something to do with creating a Z7, but that’s not what I really meant.”

“Then could you please finally explain it to me?”

“Yes, yes, I’m so sorry. This should call for a proper introduction. Edward Schuett, my name is Dr. Brendan Bloss and I am the man who created the Animator Virus.”

For several seconds the old library was exactly the way it had always been intended—completely quiet. Edward stood there with Rae beside him, but he had no clue what to say and Rae’s mouth hung open in shock. Dr. Bloss watched them both with what might have been amusement on his face, but it was hard to tell through his bushy beard. Finally one of them made a sound, but Edward didn’t realize what it was at first. A clicking noise came from Rae. When Edward looked over at her he realized she had just turned off the safety on Spanky.

“That’s a load of horseshit,” Rae said.

“It’s not,” Dr. Bloss said. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m senile enough to make random things up for no apparent reason.”

“There’s no way that could be true,” she said. “One man could never have done that.”

“One man didn’t,” Dr. Bloss said. “I was part of a team.”

“That was fifty years ago. If someone was actually responsible for it, they would be dead by now.”

“Really? ‘If someone was responsible for it?’ Did you honestly think no one was responsible? A single virus wiped out three-quarters of the human race in a completely unnatural way. Something like that doesn’t just happen at random in nature. Well, it does sometimes, actually. Maybe I’m not making my point right.”

“You did all this,” Edward said. He was surprised at just how calm and even his voice sounded. “You nearly destroyed all of humanity.”

“You make it sound like I would have done something like that on purpose. I didn’t.”

“Yet you admit to it,” Rae said. Edward noticed that her grip on Spanky had grown tighter. “Why would you tell anyone that you murdered the world?”

“Please don’t be dramatic. I told you we didn’t do it on purpose. But it’s not something I’d like to take to my grave. I’ve come to grips with the part I played in all this, and I need to make it right, if such a thing could ever be said to be right again. That’s why I’ve been seeking you out so desperately, Mr. Schuett. You are now the key.”