The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

Chapter One

All of his nerve endings started working again at the same moment, and for the first time in over fifty years Edward Schuett tried to scream. He failed. There were not enough of his vocal cords back in his throat yet.

Eventually, the pain became so strong that he nearly passed out, and as he lay on the floor the agony became a sort of background noise while he slowly became aware of his surroundings. He was in someplace dark, someplace cavernous. As he thrashed about he occasionally felt his limbs smack various things strewn about him, but he didn’t yet have the presence of mind to wonder what any of these stray objects might be. The debris he sent skittering away made echoing noises, but he couldn’t yet begin to guess where he might be or what he was doing here, or even who he was. These questions occurred to him on some level, but he didn’t have the concentration yet to dwell on them.

The pain didn’t go away completely, but it receded enough that he was able to feel other sensations. He felt heat, an uncomfortable warmth just below the skin that coursed through his entire body. There was an alien thumping sensation in his chest, and his ribcage moved uncontrollably up and down to force air in and out through his mouth and nose. He couldn’t remember at first what these things were, and fear passed through his mind for a moment before he remembered them from the past, from some distant moment he couldn’t think clearly on. This was a heartbeat. This was breathing. These were things he was supposed to do, and the realization came to him that for the longest time he hadn’t done either.

Then there was another sensation, something that he was most decidedly not supposed to feel at all. It started in his stomach, a gurgling like something liquid was boiling over inside. Then it felt like a tickle moving up his throat. The muscles in his stomach involuntarily clenched, and instinctively he rolled over onto his side before the sensation fully overcame him. His stomach clenched again, and this time he felt something come up and fill his mouth. He opened it and finally made a retching noise as a thick dark stream spewed from between his lips. The instant it was out he felt a little better. Some of the pain was even gone, although it still throbbed throughout his entire body in time with his heart, and he turned over on his back. He lay there for a long time, and eventually he lost consciousness.

When he woke back up again the pain had come back some, but it wasn’t at quite the debilitating level it had been before. He was still on his back in the exact same position he had been before, but now there was a subtle difference in the light around him. The place he was in was still dark, but not so dark now that his eyes couldn’t adjust and pick up ambient light from somewhere. He didn’t know what that meant yet, didn’t even know what anything that had been happening to him really meant, but it allowed him to at least begin to get his bearings. He sniffed something nearby, a sensation that simply by itself felt strange and new, and he realized that his sense of smell wasn’t working completely right. It was working enough, though, for him to know that the puddle of vomit that had come out of him earlier was right next to his head. He turned and looked at it, and a dim part of his brain knew he should have been revolted by what he saw. Instead, however, he just stared at it, trying to understand it and failing.

In the thin light it was impossible to tell the exact color, but the vomit was something dark and thick, either red or blue or possibly black. There were chunks sticking out of the thick sludge, chunks that probably would have been unidentifiable even in full light, but parts of it were moving, too. The moving bits came up out of the dark sludge and squirmed about, and they were a much lighter color than the rest of the vomit. Maggots, he realized, and unless he had been lying here for a lot longer than he thought (which could admittedly be possible, since he only had the vaguest sense of what time was at the moment anyway) then they had to have come from inside him just like the rest of the vomit.

The movement of his head to look at the vomit had made him dizzy for a moment, but it dissipated quickly enough. He tentatively moved his arms and legs, little flexes of the muscles here and there, and although parts of his limbs felt stiff and unresponsive, even tingly like they had fallen asleep, he still felt like they were strong enough that he might try getting up. He planted his hands at his sides and tried to push himself into a sitting position. At first he didn’t seem to have the muscle control to do such a simple maneuver, and besides fumbling around trying to get his arms to move the right way he also felt a sharp pain and stiffness in his back. He gritted his teeth, but the pain now was nowhere near as bad as it had been when he’d woken up earlier. This was pain he could get through. After several false starts he was finally able to push himself into something like a sitting position, and he could finally get a better look at the place around him.

He recognized the type of place he was in right away, but it took him several confused minutes before he could think of the right word for it. He was on a linoleum floor, and on either side of him there were rows of light colored shelves. There were some boxes and packages up on the shelves and a few more littered around him. He reached out to grab one of the packages, struggling to get his fingers to move right, and the package slipped out of his hand. After a few more tries he managed to get a weak hold of it, and he was able to bring it up closer to where he could see it in the dim light. The package had a cardboard backing with some sort of plastic bubble attached to it. The plastic was dented and cloudy with age, but it had originally been clear and he could still see something inside that looked like a little man holding a gun. An action figure, he remembered it was called. They were all around him. He was in a toy aisle, and the echoing cavernous building around him had to be a department store.

His first thought was What the hell am I doing here? His second was Who the hell am I, anyway?

He sat unmoving in the middle of the toy aisle, attempting to ignore the returning queasy feeling in his stomach, and tried to think. His name came to him after not too long, but that didn’t help him much. His name was Edward Schuett, but he couldn’t place any memories to go with the name. It seemed meaningless for now without any context. He had a few brief flashes, a momentary passing memory of sitting on a couch drinking a beer and watching NASCAR on television with a woman sitting next to him, but the memory felt random and unimportant. As much as it gnawed at him that he couldn’t remember much, it seemed much more important to figure out what was going on in the here and now. And in the here and now he was sitting in a toy aisle about to throw up again.

The reflex in his throat came upon him once more, and another stream of vomit flowed out to join what was already next to him. There was not as much this time, but he didn’t yet have the sense to be grateful for this. The fluid that finished dribbling out his mouth didn’t seem to have quite as many maggots this time, and that at least felt like some small triumph. He moved to get farther away from the puddle, managing a kind of crab-like shuffle despite the continued stiffness of his arms and the general uncooperativeness of his legs. He looked down at the legs, trying to see what if anything might be keeping them from working properly, and for a moment he didn’t see anything that could give him a clue. The jeans on his legs were old and molding, though, with multiple tears and holes all up and down them. They felt strange against his skin, stiff and yet moist at the same time. There might have been stains all over them, but he couldn’t be sure in this light. He reached out to feel them, trying to understand why they might look this way, and that was finally when he saw his own skin.

He stopped when his arm came into view, realizing that its motion was far jerkier than it had any right to be even after being so stiff, but that hardly seemed like the most important detail at the moment. Again he had a vague flash of memory, this time of himself barbequing outside. He saw his arm in the memory, decent sized in the bicep with forearms that might have seen a little more development than the other muscles. In the memory there was a tattoo on his inner left forearm of four playing cards, two aces and two eights fanned out. It was that tattoo that told him what he was seeing in the memory and what he was seeing now were indeed the same arm, but that was where all the similarities ended. The tattoo now was barely visible with just the faded outlines of the cards all that remained. Despite the dim light he could still tell that the color of his skin was completely wrong. In the memory his arm had a light tan to it, but now the skin was much darker, darker than anything that could be achieved just from the sun. Although it was still hard to tell in the wan light, his skin might have been a sort of grayish green.

And it had holes in it, deep decayed holes with maggots squirming inside.

Edward screamed again, and this time he had more success. His voice cracked and he didn’t achieve much volume, but at least it was recognizably a scream. He pulled the arm out of his view as the scream echoed through the cavernous store, not wanting to admit what he had seen, but he couldn’t un-see it. The damage to his arm was so horrible that he shouldn’t be able to move it, but even as he sat there he could feel more sensation returning to it. He could move his fingers now with more ease. And that led to his first truly coherent train of thought.

Whatever was wrong with him, it couldn’t just be his arm. If he checked the rest of himself he would probably see the same improbable decay. And with that kind of breakdown of the flesh, there was no way he should have been alive.

His hearing hadn’t fully returned yet and he was too busy thinking about his current horrifying state to concentrate on anything else, so he didn’t hear the moans from elsewhere in the store that responded to his scream.

Chapter Two

More time passed before Edward tried to stand up again. He knew something was very wrong with him, but his mind wouldn’t let him confront all the implications yet. Instead, he sat on the floor, rocking slightly, trying to keep his thoughts blank. But as his nerve endings worked better he came to realize, even through the still-present ache through his entire body, that parts of his legs were actually growing more numb. He tried to move them and felt the tingling sensation that let him know they had fallen asleep on him. This was enough to get his mind once again focused on self-preservation, and he attempted to stand once more to wake them up. It was easier now, especially since it occurred to him this time that he could hold onto the shelves for support.

When he was finally in a standing position he took a deep breath. It was at once an unfamiliar sensation and a great relief. He had never thought that a simple breath could taste so sweet. The breath reassured him that, no matter what was wrong with him or what strange disease he might have, he was alive. For now that would have to be enough.

He walked down the aisle in slow, deliberate steps, having to concentrate on each one or else collapse once more to the floor. Even though he tried to keep his thoughts on the task at hand, his head was clear enough now that he could wonder what exactly had happened to both him and the store around him. He still couldn’t remember many details about himself, but considering his physical state that might be a blessing.

The department store, on the other hand, felt like a safe thing to contemplate. His first thought was that the store had to have closed down at some point and he had just stumbled into it, except there were the shelves to consider. A closed down store wouldn’t have all the merchandise on the shelves, but this place was still well stocked. As he made it to the end of the toy section and turned into a wider central aisle he found there was more ambient light, and he had a better view of his surroundings. He passed out of the toys and into housewares, glancing every so often down the aisles for anything that might be a clue. Most of the items here didn’t look they had been touched. Toasters, microwaves, blenders, and other such appliances were all forgotten, although here and there boxes or display models had been knocked off the shelves. Some shelves were nearly empty, though, leaving only a few towels scattered around. In the utensils section, most things were still there but all knives were gone. Although he knew these things should have been clues he still couldn’t put it together.

At least the layout of the store was familiar. It was a Walmart, specifically the one he remembered always going to for his groceries. That, in turn, sparked a few more memories. He remembered coming here to get brats and buns for a cookout. A Fourth of July cookout, in fact. The cookout had been a last minute idea, since Julia had suddenly found out that she didn’t need to work that day and they would be able to spend the holiday together. He’d come here, bought what he needed, went home to fire up the grill, but then…

Wait. Julia. The woman he had remembered sitting on the couch with him watching the race. That had been Julia. His wife. As soon as he remembered that, another memory came unbidden into his mind. The memory of holding her hand as she screamed, a memory that at first might have seemed like something terrible. It was terrible to begin with, since the pain she had been in was so bad and he had wanted to do anything at all to take it away, yet the memory was still happy. The pain had ended with the birth of their daughter.

He was married, and he had a daughter. Dana. These memories made him stop in his tracks and take another deep breath. He didn’t know how he could have possibly forgotten these things, but now that the memory was back he no longer felt so scared.

That still didn’t answer the question of what had happened here, though. The more he wandered the store the lighter it got, so the light had to be coming through the front doors, but the light didn’t show him anything that made the answer look simpler. All the items on the shelves had a thick layer of dust on them, so thick he couldn’t even see many of the labels, and several aisles were thick with old cobwebs. Whatever had happened here occurred a long time ago, but that didn’t seem possible. As far as his newly returned memories were concerned, the Fourth of July cookout had been yesterday, but the state of the store proved otherwise. His memories were not as fresh as he had initially thought they were. He didn’t want to think just yet what that might imply about Julia and Dana’s whereabouts.

The closer he got to the grocery section of the store the more he realized that, oddly, someone at some point had used this store as their home. The shelves in the grocery aisles were, unlike the rest of the store, picked clean, and in one far corner of what had once been the deli section he could see a mountain of trash and emptied tin cans. In the open spaces near the checkout lanes Edward saw several tents. A few were still standing while most looked trampled, but every single one of them looked as if they had been abandoned many years ago.

“What the hell happened here?” Edward murmured, and was shocked at the sound of his own voice. It sounded scratchy, out of tune, but still the relatively young voice he’d once possessed. It occurred to him now that if whatever had happened here was years in the past then he should have been much older, but he didn’t sound old. He thought for a second that he wanted to find a mirror and see what he looked like, then remembered the hideous mess that was his arm. On second thought, maybe he wasn’t ready to see himself after all.

The biggest sign that something had once gone wrong here, however, was the west entrance near the grocery section. Normally there should have been two sets of glass doors, one on the outside of the building leading into an area full of carts, vending machines, and a few video games, and the second leading into the store proper. Neither set of doors remained. Just inside the second set of doors there was a beat-up Hummer, its front windshield cracked and its front passenger-side bumper imbedded in the cinderblock wall. Glass from the two sets of doors littered the ground, sparkling in what light came in from outside. Colors were easier to make out here, and there were several dark splotches on the ground and walls that could only be dried blood. Edward stared at it all, trying to concentrate long enough to put together some scenario that would explain the scene. He was inspecting the Hummer, its driver-side door still open, when he heard a noise somewhere behind him in the store.

Edward spun around, or at least did his best to spin. His balance still wasn’t one hundred percent, and he tipped over and had to catch himself on the hood of the Hummer. He blinked several times, looking into the gloom further in the store, but his eyes had already adjusted to the light and the darkness farther inside looked deeper now. The noise had been low and light, and now that he thought about it maybe he hadn’t heard anything at all. His hearing was still fuzzy, although his sense of smell was strong enough that he thought he could detect something in the air, a dank and musty odor that still somehow included the lightest whiff of honey. It was possible he was only smelling himself, considering he did had a ripe odor like decaying feces. The odor would have made him sick if it didn’t for some reason feel comfortable and welcoming.

He had almost convinced himself that there hadn’t been any sound to begin with when he saw someone moving down at the farthest end of the store. There was a wide clear aisle that went all the way from the front doors to what he assumed were the doors to the storage area in back, and he thought he saw a humanoid figure moving slowly in the shadows. Edward stared at the distant figure for several moments, not quite believing his eyes, before he called out.

“Hey!” he said, holding his hands to his mouth to help project, but he was afraid he still might not be loud enough for the person to hear. “Down here! Please, you’ve got to help me, I think something is wrong with me!”

For several seconds Edward didn’t hear anything, and he thought the person hadn’t heard him. Then, low and echoing down the aisle, Edward heard the figure moan. The noise was deep with a rattling quality to it. It didn’t sound like a noise a human should have been capable of making.

Two more moans rose up from somewhere in the store. Whatever the hell this thing was, it wasn’t alone.

Edward slowly put down his hands and took a step back. He still didn’t have enough control over his feet to do the motion properly and he had to grab hold of the Hummer’s door to steady himself. The figure moved down the aisle, but it wasn’t moving fast. In fact, given its speed and distance, Edward thought most people would have easily been able to outrun it. Edward, unfortunately, did not seem to be like most people at the moment. He didn’t think he could run.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to, either. Judging from the moan and the slow inexorable way the figure walked, he guessed it wasn’t something he wanted to meet. A part of him even felt a deep fear as the figure came closer, every step bringing it toward the light where Edward could see it. Yet he wasn’t as afraid as he thought he should have been. He couldn’t explain it, but some deep part of him felt excited.

Edward heard another moan, one from outside, and he turned on the smashed-in entrances. Whatever was coming from out there wasn’t in sight yet, probably just around the corner from the entrance, but he got the feeling that it had heard him. There was another noise outside, a distant rumble, but he couldn’t quite place it yet. That noise didn’t seem as important right now, anyway. That was something far off, and whatever or whoever was approaching him from all sides was much closer. He could even hear the slow shuffle of feet coming down the aisle. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see when he turned to look, but it sure wasn’t the putrefied walking corpse that moved toward him.

Edward screamed and stumbled backward, this time not catching himself, and falling flat on his back. He flailed helplessly for precious seconds, unable to get up off his back, before his hand found the doorframe of the Hummer and he could pull himself back up into a sitting position, then back up on his feet.

In the time he’d been on the floor the dead thing had come closer and was now only about fifty feet away. There was no denying that it had been human once, probably female, but he could only recognize that by its humanoid outline. The skin was dark, almost black, and it had no more hair on its head. It reached out in his direction, and at this distance Edward could see that its fingernails had long ago fallen off. A few scraps of cloth still clung to it over the shoulders and at the waist, but the rest of its clothing had rotted away long ago, revealing patches of flesh stretched tight over its bones and what little muscle it still had. It moaned as it came closer, and again the sound was echoed by both something somewhere in the store and another one from outside.

Another memory suddenly came to him as the adrenaline started pumping through his veins. This wasn’t the first time he had seen a creature like this. The first time had been on the day of the cookout. He’d seen one coming across the neighbor’s yard. Julia’s scream and Dana’s crying at the sudden noise had attracted more of them, and soon waves of the things had been coming at their house. He’d seen other people, people that were still living, also running and screaming down the streets. He even remembered seeing one of the creatures bite James Rohmer from across the street, and James had fallen to the ground immediately, twitching and foaming at the mouth. Edward hadn’t seen what had happened after that, because he’d grabbed Julia and Dana to pull them back into the house and lock the doors after them.

These things might not be fast, but he had seen what could happen when a lot of them grouped together for an attack. He couldn’t be sure now if the moaning noises were an accurate indication of how many of the undead things were in the area, but there had only been one moan that he could hear from outside. He stood a better chance of escaping with his life if he ran (or did the closest he could manage) for the entrance than if he stayed in here and tried to elude however many might be hiding in the shadows.

He turned and did a staggering, stumbling jog for the light. The tingling feeling had mostly left, but the pain stayed, growing more pronounced in his knees with the sudden motion of his legs. After only a few steps his lungs burned with the effort. Running, apparently, wouldn’t be an option yet. When he turned to look at the thing following him, however, he saw that even at his slow speed he still moved far faster than the creature ever could.

He made it out the door and stopped just long enough to get his bearings and try catching his breath. He wheezed, and his lungs felt like there might be fluid in them, but he thought maybe he could force himself to keep up his run if it were in very short bursts. A quick look around revealed another one of the things standing less than twenty feet to his right, but even though it shuffled around a little, it didn’t look like it was moving closer. Edward walked away from it as fast as he could anyway, and looked around at the parking lot.

There was no doubt about it. This was the same Walmart he remembered, which meant he still had to be in his home city of Fond du Lac. There were a few abandoned cars in the parking lot, and several of the lampposts had their glass smashed out. There might have been a makeshift barricade of shopping carts and various items from in the store that had once surrounded the entrance, but it had been smashed apart at some point, probably by the Hummer. All the shopping carts were rusted with age now.

The sound he had heard earlier from out here was louder now, and he was certain that it had to be a truck or car of some sort. It was a ways off but loud, and Edward looked around for the direction it came from. He thought he could see it driving down the road toward the store, a rusty-red speck. He smiled, although the expression hurt his cheeks. Whatever the hell had happened here, whatever was wrong with him, at least he was not alone.

Edward looked back over his shoulder at the entrance and saw the dead thing that had been following him shamble out into the open, with at least one more visible inside. Edward took a few deep breaths in anticipation of running again, but after a few seconds it became apparent there was no need. Instead of coming for him the creature shuffled over to the one that had been outside, and it stopped. If there had been eyes in the first thing’s head, eyes that weren’t glazed over with thick cataracts, Edward would have thought it was staring at the second one. The third one came out and approached the other two, and the three monsters stood there, not doing anything other than swaying slightly in the gentle breeze.

Edward couldn’t help but lose his earlier fear as he watched them. None of them looked terribly hostile. The more he watched them the more he realized just how different they were from the ones he’d seen the day of the cookout. Those had been freshly dead and reanimated while these had obviously been in their current states for a long time, but that wasn’t the most important difference. The ones he had originally seen had looked bloodthirsty and ravenous, going after any living thing that moved in a slow and unstoppable wave. These three… well, if he were forced to describe their behavior, he would only be able to call it “minding their own business.” It was completely unlike what he would have expected from the undead.

Edward heard something that sounded like a whoop of delight from behind him, and he turned in time to see the truck turn at a high speed into the parking lot. It was a standard pickup truck, a Ford, although it looked like it had seen better days. Even through all the trauma he had just been experiencing, Edward still felt a part of him fill with disgust—he was a Chevy man, through and through. It was a recent model, as far as he could see from here, but it still looked ancient and decrepit. The paint job was mostly gone, leaving only the color of rust, and there were multiple dents in the doors. The engine sounded sick, like it was in desperate need of some tender loving care. That wasn’t too surprising, though. What else would they expect from a Ford?

There was one thing very different about the truck, though, and it gave Edward pause. In the bed of the truck, held down with chains, was what appeared to be a large cage. It took up the entire bed and was perhaps six feet high, but it looked significantly newer than the truck. There might have been a person in the cage, but it was hard for Edward to tell. The truck was moving fast and didn’t have much in the way of shocks anymore, so whoever sat in the cage was being rattled and tossed around. For a moment Edward’s heart beat irregularly. For some primal reason he couldn’t explain, that cage made him more fearful than the three undead things just a short distance away.

Someone in the truck whooped again, and the truck turned so it was headed straight for the west entrance. Edward thought he could make out two people in the front, one of whom was leaning out the passenger side window with a pair of binoculars in hand. As the truck sped closer the passenger disappeared back through the window for a moment. When he came back out seconds later he had a handgun and fired several times at Edward.

Edward screamed and ducked, then did his best to stay low as he ran back for the cover of the entrance. As he passed the three undead they all turned their heads at the truck, and their previous calm demeanor completely disappeared. All three made snarling noises and started their slow shamble towards the intruders. Maybe, in whatever passed for minds among their kind, they hadn’t perceived Edward as a threat or as something they might want to eat. These newcomers, however, were apparently fair game.

The truck skidded to a halt on the far side of the first wave of ruined shopping carts, its driver’s side facing the entrance. Edward ducked inside behind a tipped over claw-grabber machine and peeked out to watch whatever the hell was happening. The passenger side door opened and then slammed shut, and the man who had been in the passenger seat came around the front of the truck. He was tall and lanky with a knitted cap on his head, and he wore a wide, ridiculous grin. He was probably in his late teens or early twenties, judging from the spotty facial hair on his cheeks and chin. He raised the gun and pointed it at the nearest of the three creatures coming toward him, and Edward did his best to make himself small behind the broken machine. He hoped it was dark enough this far beyond the entrance that the kid with the gun couldn’t see him, but he prepared himself to run deeper into the store, just in case.

Before the kid could squeeze off any more bullets, however, the man who’d been in the driver’s seat got out and slammed his door. “Damn it, Charlie, you can be a real fucking psycho sometimes!”

“What?” the kid, Charlie, said. “I was only shooting at the fresh one.”

“We can get still get cash for a fresh zed just like we can for a rotter.”

“Not as much. So what’s wrong with using it for target practice?”

“What’s wrong is I’m the one in fucking charge and I have the motherfucking truck. So if you want to continue getting a cut for what I bring in, then you will do what I fucking say, got it?”

The driver didn’t appear too worried about the three monsters moving right for him. As they got within twenty feet of him he merely backed away, apparently confident that he could move far faster than any of them could. The driver was a few inches shorter than Charlie and had about fifteen more years and fifty more pounds on him. Both of them were in jeans and t-shirts, although their clothes were dark with dirt. Neither of them looked very clean.

“Right, right, got it,” Charlie said. He tucked the gun into the belt of his pants and then went back around to his door. While he opened it and rooted around behind his seat, the driver walked around to the back of the truck, still moving away from the undead. The undead snarled and held their hands out to grab for the man, but they were still too far away. The driver, however, didn’t look too comfortable with how close they were getting.

“Would you hurry up already? These three are starting to give me the willies.”

“I’m fucking trying, just hold on for a minute,” Charlie said. “The prod got wedged in behind the seat again.”

“How many times do I have to tell you to be more careful with that thing? If you break it then I can’t exactly bring in any more zeds to pay for another one.”

“Would you relax? Jesus, I’m not going to break it.”

As Edward kept his eyes on the driver he finally remembered the person he’d seen in the cage. After a few more seconds a head came into view from inside it, and now that the truck was closer he could tell that it also belonged to one of the undead creatures. The cage had a padlock on it, and the driver pulled out a key but didn’t open the lock yet.

Charlie cursed one more time as he gave something in the truck one final yank, and he almost fell over when the rod in his hand came free. The rod looked like a Taser at the end of a long metal pole, and although Edward had never seen one before he figured it was probably some kind of cattle prod. “Got it, Ringo,” Charlie said.

“Good,” the driver, presumably Ringo, said. “Now knock these three fuckers out before the get over to me and chew on my fucking skull.”

Charlie ran around to the other side of the truck, and one of the three undead did a slow turn and came toward him while the other two continued their slow march on Ringo. Charlie didn’t waste any time in sticking the business end of the prod in the creature’s gut. The air crackled and hissed, and the undead thing collapsed to the broken blacktop. The thing shook uncontrollably for several seconds with thick mucus-laced foam forming at the corners of its mouth, then stopped.

The other two turned to Charlie as well, but they weren’t anywhere near quick enough to get him before he shocked them, too. Ringo took the key and stuck it in the lock as Charlie pushed the end of the prod through the cage’s bars and shocked the captured one. The first one he’d taken out was twitching by then, but it didn’t look like it would be mobile again for another minute or so. Ringo opened the cage as Charlie set the prod against the truck, and they both grabbed one of the undead’s arms to raise it up and throw it in the cage.

The two of them worked swiftly, working as a team that was obviously well-practiced in this sort of thing, but Charlie had to stop a couple times to re-shock the undead things. When all four creatures were in the cage Ringo locked it back up, but they didn’t immediately get back into the truck and leave. Instead Charlie fiddled with the prod, trying unsuccessfully to twirl it like a baton while Ringo stared into the store’s entryway. He didn’t look like he could see Edward in his hiding place, but Edward tried to make himself smaller behind the claw-grabber machine anyway.

“Hey,” Ringo said, “did that fresh zed seem odd to you?”

“All zeds are fucking odd,” Charlie said as he barely managed to catch the prod before it fell. He stared at it a moment, as if debating what to do with it, then leaned it against the truck again before moving to Ringo’s side. “Why? See something weird?”

“You didn’t think that motherfucker was moving a little fast?”

“If it was fresh then of course it would move a little faster.”

“Not that fast. And another thing. How the hell did a fresh zed get this far out from civilization? If someone had been bitten recently it would have been closer to town.”

“Maybe it was bitten and just walked out here after it died.”

“Wouldn’t have looked that fresh.”

“Then maybe someone else came out here looking for zeds to sell and got bit by one of the other three.”

“Yeah, maybe. Still seems weird, though.”

“You think too much.”

Ringo snorted. “Or maybe the rest of humanity doesn’t think enough. Come on, let’s go in after it.”

“Go into the dark cavernous building after something that likes to eat human flesh. Yeah, that really sounds like you’re thinking good.” Despite his words Charlie didn’t hesitate to go back and grab the prod.

“Here, give me the cattle prod,” Ringo said. “You get your gun out and cover me just in case.”

“Whatever happened to you not wanting me to shoot it?” Charlie asked.

“Whatever happened to you shutting the fuck up and just doing what I say?” Ringo said, then walked through the entryway.

Edward didn’t have time to think of what he should do. The time to try running to hide in the store had long since passed, so he merely stayed where he was, hoping the two men would be so anxious to get inside and find him that they would walk right past without even noticing him. But Ringo’s eyes moved to look at everything, and as soon as they turned to look at Edward, Ringo yelped and jumped back to step on Charlie’s feet.

“Sweet Jesus, it’s right there!” Ringo pointed, and Charlie pushed him aside to get a clear shot at Edward.

“Don’t!” Edward yelled. “Don’t shoot!” He instinctively put both hands in the air, but in his crouch he couldn’t keep his balance without holding onto the tipped over machine, and he again fell backward onto his butt.

All three of them stayed exactly as they were for several moments. Edward didn’t dare move while Charlie had the gun pointed at him, but for now it didn’t appear like he was going to use it.

“Holy shit,” Charlie said. “Did that zed just speak?”

“I don’t know what a zed is,” Edward said, although he could make a good educated guess by now, “but I’m not one. Please. Something is wrong with me. I…I think I need a doctor.”

Neither of the two men moved for several more seconds. Edward took that as a good sign and slowly lowered his arms. They weren’t going to shoot him, or at least he hoped not, and maybe he could get them to stop freaking out long enough to give him some idea what was going on. There was far too much he didn’t understand, and no way for him to piece it all together on his own. He needed friends right now.

That thought didn’t last long. As he tried to stand back up, Ringo rushed forward and jabbed him in the chest with the prod. Edward would have screamed if the electricity didn’t set his jaw tight. The current running through him was still a relief compared to some of his earlier pain, but it was enough to knock him unconscious again.

Chapter Three

The Ford hadn’t been originally designed to fit a cage with five people inside in its bed, so the cage was terribly cramped. Edward didn’t think Charlie and Ringo ever cared whether their zombie passengers were comfortable. Edward woke in the cage to find one of the creatures’ arms jammed at an awkward angle in his armpit and a foot pressing uncomfortably in his crotch. As soon as he became fully conscious again he screamed, certain that at this proximity one of the zombies would finally decide it was time to make him their snack. But other than the barest acknowledgement of his screaming, none of the zombies paid him much mind. Charlie in the passenger seat was different, however. He turned around and looked at Edward through the back window, bit his lip, and then looked out again at the road in front of them. No matter how much Edward screamed and begged to be let out, neither of the two men acknowledged him again for the rest of the journey.

When Edward finally calmed down and realized he wasn’t in any immediate danger he took a deep breath and tried to think this all through. The first conclusion he had to come to was, despite his memory suggesting that the Fourth of July cookout had only been a day or two ago, the actual amount of time that had passed must have been much greater. Years, maybe even decades had gone. He could see the proof in the state of the city as the truck passed through it. The Walmart was on the northwest edge of Fond du Lac, past Forest Mall and a large number of smaller strip malls. None of these looked like they were used anymore. The truck drove past them all, going an unsafe speed over a road broken up by years of neglect. A few of the stores and fast food restaurants they passed were boarded up, but most simply looked abandoned. One or two looked like they had burned down. Edward’s initial thought was that at some point the Apocalypse had come upon the world, and the more he thought about the day the undead attacked the more he realized he wasn’t far off.

Although he tried to avoid the thought, memories of Julia and Dana came to him unbidden. He didn’t know how long it had been so he had no way of knowing how old they would be or if they were still alive, but he felt some hope. After all, here he was, stricken with some strange disease yet still very much alive. If it had happened to him, it could have happened to them. They could still be out there somewhere.

The farther the truck went into the city the smoother the ride became. They had to take an alternate route around a collapsed overpass at the freeway, but the road after that point looked like it might have been repaved in recent years, although not very well. The buildings continued to look rough and derelict for a time, but after they had travelled about five miles all structures suddenly came to a stop and gave way to a wide expanse of open ground. Edward sat up in the cage and leaned against the bars, trying to get a better idea of what he was seeing. He remembered this area. It had been a few businesses, a couple of factories, and the start of a residential area, but it looked now like it had been all been bulldozed. A half-hearted attempt had been made to clear the open space, although garbage and occasional wood and rubble littered it all. Looking out further down the road he saw that the empty zone was about half a mile wide, and on either side of the road it continued on in a slight curve. He suspected that if he were able to see the entire thing from a bird’s eye view, the no-man’s land would have formed a rough circle.

He saw why the empty zone had been created as the truck approached the other side. A cement wall had been erected around the inner part of the circle, about seven feet high but with fifteen foot towers at regular intervals. Beyond the wall Edward could clearly see more buildings, and these, finally, were as he remembered them. There were the obvious cosmetic changes on some of the more recognizable houses, and here and there were new buildings he didn’t recognize, but everything beyond the wall at least looked like it was being used. Had he seen this place first, he would have never realized anything had gone wrong with the world.

Edward’s heart beat faster. His own home was somewhere in there. He might be able to get some clues here, if only he could get away from Charlie and Ringo.

He absently scratched at his chin as the truck slowed. Whatever strange thing had happened to his skin was starting to itch, but he ignored it. Most of the pain that had plagued him earlier had receded into an occasionally annoying ache, and his thoughts and senses all felt much clearer now. He still didn’t want to look at himself, though. It wasn’t like whatever had affected him was going to clear up any time soon.

The truck came to a full stop at a wooden gate. There was a guard house next to it, and Edward watched as a woman came out and walked to the driver’s side. Her hair was cut short and done up in an unfamiliar hairstyle with pink highlights. She had a rifle in hand, and even though the whole thing was painted pink with silver zebra stripes it still made her look formidable. She looked bored as Ringo rolled down the window, not even bothering to glance at the cage.

“How many you declaring today?” the woman said. She looked like she was in her late twenties and she wore thick glasses. She was chewing something that Edward initially thought was gum until she turned her head and spit out a wad of tobacco-darkened saliva.

“Actually,” Ringo said, “we’re not sure.”

“How the hell could you be not sure? You’re the one that fricking caught them.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “but we’re not really sure about one of them.” He turned to look through the back window, and when he saw Edward staring back at him his eyes went wide. “Holy shit. Ringo, take a look.”

Both Ringo and the woman turned to look at Edward. The woman raised an eyebrow, but Ringo’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit,” he said, and Charlie nodded at him.

“That’s a really fresh one,” the woman said, taking a step closer to the cage. The zombies took an interest in her and tried to reach through the cage, but Edward stayed back. “Hope you realize no one’s gonna pay jack shit for it.”

“Please,” Edward said to her. “I don’t know what’s going on but you got to let me out of here.”

“Jesus Mary Joseph!” the woman said as she took a leaping step back away from the cage. “That zed just talked!”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what we said,” Ringo said. “But that’s not even the freakish part anymore. It actually seems to be healing.”

Edward tried to take this all in. It had already occurred to him that they thought he was a zombie like the others, probably due to his appearance. But he hadn’t known he was healing. He finally took another look at his arms and realized that, even though they still had an unhealthy color to them, the deep wounds and rotted flesh were repairing themselves. With the mysterious healing he also became aware of how incredibly hungry he was, which he supposed made about as much sense as anything else. Of course he would be building up an appetite if his body was healing so fast. That, of course, didn’t explain why the healing was happening so quickly or why his body had needed to heal in the first place.

At least he knew there was no way he could be a zombie, although that didn’t tell him much.

“So what are you going to do with it?” the woman said to Ringo.

“Would you stop calling me ‘it?’“ Edward said. “My name is Edward Schuett. I don’t have a single fucking clue what is going on but I didn’t do anything to deserve being locked up in a fucking cage, so will one of you people just let me the fuck out?”

The woman’s eyes went wide. “Um, hi? How…how are you?”

“I’m in a cage with zombies. How would you be?”

“Okay, this is…unbelievable,” the woman said.

“Yeah, we’re right there with you,” Ringo said. “Could you please open the gate so we can get in and try figuring out what the fuck is going on?”

“Yeah, sure,” the woman said. “But shouldn’t we…you know, let him out?”

“I’m not letting out a zombie to roam free,” Ringo said. “Especially not right at the city gate. I don’t care if he can talk.”

“I’m not a Goddamned zombie!” Edward said. The shout cracked from the strain on his still-rough vocal cords. “I just want to know what the hell is going on!”

The woman looked at Ringo, who shrugged. She moved closer to the cage, being careful to stay out of the grasp of the zombies’ hands, and dropped her voice low. “You said your name was Edward Schuett?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see what I can do, okay? I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but I’ll see if I can get some people to come talk to you before these guys can do anything to you, got it?”

He didn’t get it, not really, but he supposed that was better than he would probably get from the two in the front of the truck. He nodded, and the woman went over to the gate to open it. Edward watched her stare at him as the truck passed through and into the city, hoping that someone would start making some sort of sense to this all very soon.

Chapter Four

Rae Neuman rested her custom pink rifle on her shoulder as she closed the gate and stared after the truck, attempting to understand what she had just seen. The man in the cage, Edward Schuett, had definitely been a zombie. There was no doubt about that. No living person could have that much rotted away skin and still continue to breathe. But then, a true zombie couldn’t talk. Never. In the almost fifty years since the undead Uprising, no one had ever heard a zed do anything more than moan or hiss.

She’d told the zombie, or man, or whatever he was, that she would do whatever she could to try straightening this out, but she didn’t know where to start. Who the hell was she supposed to call in the event of a talking, apparently sentient zombie? The person to talk to would probably be one of those zombie researchers, but there weren’t any in Fond du Lac anymore. There wasn’t a need. Except out in the boonies, the outer ruins of the old city, zombies were rarely heard or seen. No one worried about them anymore except when it came to entertainment, so there hadn’t been a reason to keep an expert around for a long time.

But she didn’t doubt that she had to do something, and quickly. Ringo sometimes had a good head on his shoulders, but from what little she had seen of Charlie she wouldn’t be surprised if he just shot the zombie—Edward, although it was still hard to think of a zombie as having a name—purely so he wouldn’t have to deal with this.

Rae went into the guard shack and grabbed her cell phone from where she had left it on the window sill. Her boyfriend had given it to her a couple weeks ago as a present to celebrate her new job as a gate guard. The phone made her the envy of all her friends, since so few of them could afford one yet, but she was never quite sure what to do with it. She’d heard from a few old timers that there had once been a time when everyone owned one, and most people had used them all the time. Her generation, however, hadn’t quite gotten used to having them again. Cellular towers and wireless communication had been restored to some parts of the country about fifteen years ago, but here in Wisconsin the technology renaissance had come later. She supposed people in the more populated areas of America would think that meant Rae and all the people here were backwater hicks, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought. It was her people that had been the ones to take back most of the country from the zeds, doing it all by themselves without the military help that the coasts had, so she figured those stuck up coast bastards could just suck it.

She fiddled with the phone, trying to figure out who she should call to alert about what she had just seen, but nothing came to her. Maybe she was just being a bleeding heart in thinking she needed to call anybody in the first place. Talking or not, Edward was a zed. His kind, if a virus-infected corpse could really be said to have a “kind,” had wiped out three-quarters of the Earth’s population before she had been born. Her parents had always told her stories about the early days of the Uprising, mostly as a way to scare her into not getting out of bed at night when she was supposed to be sleeping. Even though no zombies had gotten past the circular Empty Zone around Fond du Lac since she had been eight, her parents had still taught her how to use rifles and handguns just in case the zombies ever made a resurgence. If either of them had been alive today they would have been horrified at the idea of helping a zombie.

It was easier, however, to not care about a zombie when they were old and rotted and only had a passing resemblance to anything human. Edward looked like a living human, and if his weird regeneration continued at the rate Ringo and Charlie had hinted at, then he wouldn’t even be recognizable as a zed soon. That might not get him treated any different if those two still sold him to the Jamboree, though.

Finally Rae just dialed the first and only number that popped into her head, and her boyfriend Johnny picked up immediately.

“Rae, I know how much you want use your new phone,” Johnny said, “but I don’t think Merton Security is going to smile on the idea of you using it while you’re supposed to be on the job.”

“Hi to you too, sweetie. Gee, that greeting really makes me feel loved.”

“Sorry, but I just know how much you love your job and I wouldn’t want you to do anything to jeopardize it.”

Rae resisted the urge to sigh into her phone. She didn’t love her new job at all, actually, just like she didn’t really want to use her new phone. The phone just seemed decadent to her, a technology her parents had not needed during the Uprising so it couldn’t be that much more important now, despite how popular they were becoming again. And even though gate guard had once been a dangerous and noble profession, it was really pretty useless these days. Sitting in a shack with a kick-ass rifle she never got to use was just boring.

“I’ll keep it short, then,” Rae said. “I just wanted to know if you or anyone else at Merton might still have a phone number of one of those zombie experts that moved away last year.”

“Well, I don’t. I never really had to deal with any of them. But I’m sure their numbers are still on file at the office somewhere. Why?”

“Uh, nothing really, I guess. I just saw something…um, strange.”

“Strange like how?”

“Strange like…well, have you ever heard of a talking zed?”

Johnny was quiet for a few moments. “Um, no. Rae, zombies can’t talk.”

“Right, I know that, but what if one could?”

“They can’t.”

“Well I just saw one doing exactly that, so I guess they can.”

“You’re not drinking while on duty, are you?”

“No, damn it. And this is not a joke either. Two guys off into the ruins getting zeds for the Jamboree just came back in, and one of their zeds was talking. Looked fresher than it should have, too.”

“Maybe it was just so fresh it could still say some random things or something like that.”

“But it was an actual coherent conversation. Almost like it could think and everything.”

“Now you’re just being dumb. That’s completely impossible.”

This time Rae did sigh. Sometimes she just wanted to kick Johnny’s ass when he said things like that. If he didn’t keep her supplied with practice ammo whenever she wanted it she probably would have left him by now.

“I saw it with my own eyes. Something was extremely strange with this zed, and I just thought someone with some sort of expertise should know.”

It was Johnny’s turn to sigh. “I’ll see if I can get a hold of one, alright?” He said his standard “I love yous” and hung up, but Rae didn’t think he was actually going to make any call.

Rae set the phone back down on the window sill and picked up her rifle, holding it close to her chest as she stared out the window and thought. A zombie named Edward Schuett. Academically she always knew that zombies had once been alive, and on rare unfortunate occasions people still contracted the Animator virus and turned into zeds, but most undead that she saw had been that way since before she was born. People like Ringo brought zombies in every so often, but Rae had never thought to wonder what they might have been like in life. She had certainly never wondered what any of them were named.

Now, however, one had a name anyway. Edward. Now that she knew that much, she felt compelled to know more. She picked up the phone again, this time dialing one of her coworkers to see if he could finish her shift in the gate house.

Chapter Five

Although Edward knew he should be concerned more about his fate at the moment, he became distracted by the scenery as the truck moved through the city and actually felt some relief at being in a familiar environment. While the world outside the bulldozed circle had looked like Armageddon, here within the new confines of the city life looked almost like it should have. They passed an elementary school, and to his shock there were children playing in the fenced off playground. That was just such a normal thing to happen, and everything he had encountered up until now had been anything but normal. A few of the children saw the truck pass and stopped their playing to watch and point, but Edward didn’t feel awkward about suddenly being the object of so much attention. The existence of children in this strange new world gave him hope, although not for very long. When he thought of them for too long his mind turned to memories of Dana, and his heart sank. Maybe she was still out there somewhere, but from what little he knew so far he didn’t think he could muster much hope. Even if she was out there his little six year old girl wouldn’t be so little anymore. For all he knew, enough time might have passed that she could be a teenager by now. She might not even remember him anymore.

There were other landmarks he recognized, although most of them were not exactly the way he remembered them. The truck passed the building that had once been Edith’s Bakery, but it looked like it might be some kind of pawnshop now. In the distance looming over the rest of the city he could see one of the tallest structures in Fond du Lac, the hotel that had constantly changed hands and been renamed every so often from the Retlaw to the Clarion to the Ramada. The sign on the top of the building now declared that it was Merton Tower, but he couldn’t be sure if that meant it was still a hotel or not.

The truck occasionally passed people going about their business on the streets, although few gave the truck and cage a second glance. Those that did often did a second take as they saw Edward in the back with the zombies, and he kept hoping that someone would realize what a horrible mistake had been made, that a human had for some improbable reason been mistaken for a zombie and was being unjustly kept where the undead could kill him at any moment, but no one said anything. They just stared at him.

The zombies, for their part, thankfully didn’t look like they were going to be attacking him anytime soon. Often they would try to stand up in the cage only to fall all over each other when the truck hit another bump in the road. They treated Edward no differently than they treated each other, which made Edward more disquieted than comforted. He knew he wasn’t a zombie, but no one else here seemed to realize that, not even the real zombies. He wondered if he could get Ringo or Charlie to give him a mirror when they got to their destination, for no other reason than to see what everyone was seeing about him that he couldn’t.

Even though many of the places they had passed looked like they were thriving despite the apocalyptic scenario outside of the city, the truck ended up pulling into the driveway of a run-down two story home with its paint chipping and its roof sagging. The world had managed to continue on just as it once had, apparently, right down to being divided into haves and have-nots. Both doors of the truck opened at the same time to let Edward in on the middle of an argument.

“What’s to discuss?” Charlie said as he jumped out of the passenger side and slammed his door. Edward couldn’t help but notice he had his pistol out again.

“Absolutely nothing. Because again you seem to forget that I’m the one who’s in charge,” Ringo said.

“Bullshit you’re in charge. You’re the one with the truck. That don’t give you the right to be making that kind of decision.”

“That’s right. My truck, but also my zed prod and my cage and my gas and all kinds of other shit. If you don’t like how I decide to do this then you can just find another partner. Go ahead, just try. You’re not going to be making the same amount of cash with someone else, not with how scarce zeds have become. I’m the one who finds them. You just help haul them into the cage.”

“I’m also the one who can shoot this motherfucker’s head clear the fuck off,” Charlie said, raising his gun at Edward and pulling back the hammer.

“Jesus Christ!” Edward yelled as he ducked down, expecting a bullet to fly right through where his head had been. When there was no shot Edward looked back up. Charlie was walking briskly down the driveway and onto the sidewalk, cussing under his breath and waving his gun the whole way.

“What the hell was that about?” Edward asked Ringo, but Ringo didn’t answer. He was too busy rooting around behind the seats for the prod again.

“Damn it,” Edward said. “Answer me! I have a right to know what the hell is happening here!”

Ringo closed the door, the prod now in his hand. He looked unnerved and shook a little as he spoke. “You don’t have any rights what-the-hell-so-ever. You’re a fucking zed.” Ringo shook his head. “Jesus, I must be losing it. Arguing with a fucking zombie.”

“I am not a zombie,” Edward said. “I know I must look…strange, and I have no idea what’s going on with me, but I’m not a zombie. I’ve seen them in action. They’re mindless and just kill and eat anything in sight. Have I done anything that would make you think that about me?”

Ringo paused, and for the first time he looked Edward in the eye. “No. No you haven’t. That’s the weird part. And that’s why I’m not taking you with the others. You’re getting out here.”

“You’re letting me go?”

“Hell no. But I need to put you somewhere while I take the rest to the Jamboree. I don’t know if they’ll want to buy you when they see you or not, but I don’t want to take that chance. I don’t know how the hell you’re able to talk and think, but I don’t think most people around here would appreciate just how different that makes you. Maybe you’re not really a zombie, and if I ever find that out for certain I’ll gladly let you go. But if you are? Aw hell, I could make way more money off of you than I ever would by selling you to be shot at by a bunch of tourists at the Jamboree.”

Edward nodded, and Ringo shocked the other zombies through the bars before he went around to the back of the cage and fumbled with the keys. Edward wasn’t sure exactly what the Jamboree was, but he had already come to the conclusion that he didn’t want to go there. Ringo sounded like he was just going to lock Edward up somewhere else, but that was probably a better fate than any of the zombies would get.

Ringo kept the prod out and ready to use on Edward if he made any sudden moves, but Edward didn’t need the man upset. What he really wanted to do was rush the damned man and beat the hell out of him for locking Edward in a cage, but Ringo would likely only take that aggression as a sign that he really was a zombie. It would be better for now the keep calm and let everything happen.

“Can you at least tell me how long it’s been?” Edward asked.

“How long what’s been?” Ringo asked. He gestured for Edward to move back behind the house into the overgrown back yard, and Edward did as he was shown.

“How long it’s been since… well, since all this. The zombies, the abandoned parts of the city, the weird bulldozed area and the wall, all that. It looks like the world ended.”

Ringo paused before answering. “How the hell could anyone not know that?”

Edward continued to move, but he couldn’t resist the urge to be sarcastic. He had to have some sort of way to release all his tension. “Gee, maybe because I’m a zombie and I’m not all that smart. Please, just tell me.”

“The Uprising was over fifty years ago. Old news.”

Edward didn’t say anything. Fifty years. It no longer seemed so likely that he could find Dana after all.

Chapter Six

Ringo locked Edward in a storage shed out back and then left. Edward could hear the truck rumble to a start and then drive away, leaving him alone to try to piece together everything he had learned so far. He sat back against the shed’s far wall and tried to concentrate, but everything that had happened today had completely drained him and he drifted off to sleep instead.

There was nothing restful about his slumber. Even unconscious, he could feel the odd tingling and pain in his body as all the festering wounds continued to mend. He twitched and fidgeted as he slept, and strange red-tinted dreams came to him, dreams that were part bizarre incomprehensible images and part memories. The memories didn’t tell him much, just visions of walking long distances through ruined neighborhoods and streets with occasional blood-spattered violence that his mind wasn’t quite ready to show him in total. When he woke up these dreams stayed at the corner of his thoughts, just waiting for a time when his mind might be willing to deal with what they needed to show him.

He stretched his arms after he came to and stood up to stretch his legs, but that caused its own share of pain and a few cramps. He’d slowly been getting used to it all now, and rode out the agony as well as another bout of nausea. It was only when he was certain that he could keep the contents of his stomach down that he realized there wasn’t anything in there to begin with. The hunger in his stomach was minor pain compared to everything else, which struck him as odd. He didn’t know when the last time was that he had eaten, especially since he wasn’t sure how long it had been since he first woke up in the store, but it had to have been hours. He would have thought he would be hungrier than this. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure when he had last needed to use a bathroom. He hadn’t felt the need to urinate at all, although from the scratchy and uncomfortable feeling of his underwear in back he suspected he might have had an accident at some point in the past. He didn’t want to think too hard about that for now, though.

There were a lot of other things he needed to think about, however, with his thought process finally working at full capacity. All of this was a lot to take in and he vaguely wondered if he was going through some sort of shock. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? His mind shouldn’t have been able to accept everything that had happened to him so far. At the moment, though, he thought he could deal with it. It might catch up with him later psychologically, but for now he felt calm.

Fifty years. He couldn’t bring himself to accept such a big number yet. That was longer than he had been alive (or at least believed himself alive, since apparently his true age would be somewhere around eighty-three). Whatever had happened, everything he remembered was now the distant past to many people. He didn’t think that any of the people he had met so far in this freakish nightmare version of his world were even old enough to remember the time Edward came from.

So the question was, how did he get from then to now? For some reason, the first thing that popped into his head were all those stupid science fiction movies Julia had loved so much, stories where someone got trapped in the wrong time. That idea was absolutely ridiculous, and it had the added side effect of bringing Julia to the forefront of his mind. He didn’t want to think about her, not yet. He didn’t want to consider the idea that she might be fifty years older and frail, or maybe even dead…

No, best not to think about her. Not yet. Not until he was more ready to deal with this. He had to keep his mind back on figuring out what had happened in the first place.

Time travel, then, was too idiotic to consider, but he supposed it was no less insane than the idea of dead people walking. He had seen that with his own eyes, and not just today. That had begun on that Fourth of July fifty years ago now. And if he had any hope of understanding how he had made it to this point, then he needed to better reconstruct that day in his memory.

There had been no sign that anything was out of the ordinary for most of the day, and the first time he had begun to wonder if something was wrong was when he had heard a car crash somewhere a few blocks away from his house. No, wait, maybe that wasn’t the first he had heard. He vaguely remembered something he’d heard when he’d gone for supplies at Walmart, something the cashier had said. The girl, a bored-looking twenty-something, had mentioned some sort of scare she’d been hearing about down in the direction of Chicago, some virus or something. She’d said it was being mentioned all over the place on Twitter and she’d asked him if he wanted to by one of those surgical-type masks. A lot of people had been coming in to get them, she had said. Edward had nodded politely and left, holding his tongue against all the obscenities he’d wanted to say to her. It had just been more hysteria created by morons who would believe anything the media told them, just like all the people that had been afraid of the West Nile Virus and the Swine Flu.

Except he supposed that hadn’t been the case. The outbreak that had begun in Chicago hadn’t been false hysteria after all.

When he had actually been doing the cookout, though, it had been the car crash that had made him uneasy. Dana was playing on her swing set and didn’t even hear the noise over her own delighted giggles on the swing. The sound hadn’t been too terribly loud, so Edward tried to pass it off as a fender bender and go on cooking his brats. Julia came out and asked him if he had heard it, and he said he had, but she wasn’t too worried. She was more curious than anything. Edward wouldn’t really call her a gossip, but she always wanted to know the latest news about their neighbors, and he supposed she wanted to know if it had been anyone she knew.

Edward was too preoccupied with making sure the brats were perfect, that sweet spot where they were cooked all the way through but not darker than a deep brown on any side, to notice that Julia went around to the side of the house to the front. He did hear, however, when she screamed.

The first thing he did when he heard the scream, even before he had checked for Julia, was to look for Dana. She was still on the swing set, sitting at the top of the slide, but her little six-year old eyes were wide as she looked in the direction of the side of the house. Edward turned to look at the same place and completely forgot about the brats.

Julia was running toward him holding her left wrist. He could see the blood dripping from it and splashing on the grass as she ran, but he didn’t yet fully register that she was hurt. As he abandoned the grill and went to stop her in her panicked flight he became aware that hers wasn’t the only scream in the air. Somewhere else in the neighborhood there were other screams, men and women both, as well as other noises he couldn’t quite identify yet. The noises were loud and yet deep, like the wind blowing through empty canyons, sounds that had no right being heard in a quiet neighborhood in Heartland America.

“Get Dana inside! Get her inside!” Julia screamed, and even though Edward had no idea what was happening his instincts told him to do exactly what she said. He ran to the swing set and grabbed his daughter as Julia ran in the house through the back door, and as he was pulling the startled and now crying girl off the slide he looked in the direction Julia had come from. He saw the first of the monsters coming around the side of the house, a creature that looked human except for its uneven walk and the unidentifiable guts hanging from the wide gash in its stomach. His hand went up to cover Dana’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t help but continue staring even as the thing shambled closer, and only when he saw a second one coming up behind the first did he realize he should be running for the safety of the house.

As soon as he was through the door Julia slammed it behind him, although she wasn’t able to manage much force. She looked pale, and the blood was still flowing from her arm at an alarming rate. He set Dana down in the living room and ran to get something to bandage Julia’s arm, although all he’d been able to find on such short notice had been a couple of t-shirts. They at least slowed down the blood, and while Julia slouched exhausted in Edward’s arms he had stared out the living room window to see all the insane carnage going on outside. He had no idea what those things were or what they wanted, but they were ravenous, attacking anything that moved and ripping it apart with their teeth.

Edward didn’t know how long he sat there watching, but when he came to his senses again he realized Dana was no longer in the room with them. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. When he tried to move Julia out of the way so he could go look for Dana, however, she didn’t budge. She was just dead weight in his arms. That scared him at first until he noticed her shivering. He put a hand to her head, ready to test for a fever or something, and that was when she bit him.

He remembered yelling and pulling away from her as she first fell to the floor and then began crawling after him. He moved away, suddenly very frightened of the vacant and unfocused look in her eyes, but all memories after that faded to a hazy intense blur in his mind. All he could remember was the smell of burning brats coming in through the window, and with that he had begun to feel very, very hungry.

The shed he was in now didn’t have any windows, but it was poorly constructed enough that light shone through several wide gaps in the roof slats, and Edward used the feeble light to look at his hand where Julia had once bit him. His arm still looked rotted and festered, although decidedly less so than it had when he had first woken up. His body really did appear to be healing itself. There was a faint outline near his thumb and forefinger that might have once been the impression of teeth, but they wouldn’t have been recognizable if he hadn’t known what he was looking for. It might even have just been his imagination. He continued staring for a long time until he was finally able to forcibly accept the truth.

Everyone he had met so far was right. Edward was a zombie. Or at least he had been one yesterday. He had no idea what he was now.

Chapter Seven

With her rifle Spanky slung on a strap over her shoulder, Rae biked through the streets of Fond du Lac to the North Side. According to what little history Rae knew about the city, the northern end had once been the site of Lakeside Park. Her parents had once told her that the park had included a playground and various rides, all situated on the shore of beautiful Lake Winnebago. The lake was still there, as well as the marina and historic lighthouse that had lit the way for boats to get into the harbor, but everything else had changed. The playground equipment and broken down carousel had been hauled away long ago, and all the canals that had wound their way through the park had been filled in. The barn from the old petting zoo was all that still stood, and it now served as the entrance to the Jamboree.

Rae locked her bike up at the bike rack next to about thirty others. People like Ringo could afford a little gasoline for their cars thanks to all the money they brought in with the increasingly rare zombies (and didn’t have any real choice in the matter, since it was kind of hard to pull around a cage full of zombies on a ten-speed), but most other people had to make do with simpler transportation. Rae had seen on television how people on the coasts were starting to have huge amounts of oil imported in again, but as usual everyone in the center of the country had to make do with the dregs.

The Jamboree didn’t look open for business just yet, as it was still far too early in the day for any big crowds, but there at least seemed to be some activity as the Jamboree’s employees prepared for the night’s show. Rae walked up to the front entrance in the converted barn and waited while a bored looking teenage boy came up to the ticket counter.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said with a tone that made it evident he had given this same line hundreds of times before. “We are not quite opened for business yet. Show times are every Wednesday and Friday from eight p.m. to ten p.m. Tickets will be available—”

“I’m not here for tickets,” Rae said. The Jamboree’s new days and hours were news to her, but they weren’t surprising. Her parents might have mourned the loss of a carousel from days gone by, but to her the Jamboree was the place of fond childhood memories that was slowly slipping away. Built shortly before she’d been born, a few years after the government had declared their “victory” against the zombie Uprising, it had originally been a way to get rid of more zeds while both making a profit and giving the people a way to “get back” at the creatures who had wiped out three-quarters of the human race. People still came to watch the Jamboree, but not as many anymore. Those who did come were older. The younger generation had forgotten what the zeds had done to the world and didn’t understand why they had to be exterminated like vermin.

The other more pressing problem for the show, however, was how few zombies there were left out there anymore. No one had ever developed an inoculation against the Animator Virus, but humanity had become highly adept at surviving anyway. Fewer people being bitten meant fewer new zombies, while the old ones were rounded up and brought to places like this.

The Jamboree wouldn’t be around forever, and Rae felt a deep sense of melancholy whenever she came here. People were forgetting the older ways too easily, losing their heritage.

“I’m actually here looking for one of the zed dealers,” Rae said. “Guy named Ringo. He been around yet?”

The boy shrugged, somehow managing to look even more bored now than when he had started the conversation. “Don’t know. They don’t come through the front, so I don’t really have to deal with them.”

“Right,” Rae said with a sigh. She moved to go around the ticket counter and into the Jamboree, but the kid suddenly became more animated.

“Wait, no. You can’t go back there. You can come back at one of the showtimes on Wednesday or Friday from—”

“Kid, I’ve got business to take care of.”

“Well, you can’t go back with your rifle. No outside weapons allowed in the Jamboree.”

Rae blinked. That was a new one, but she supposed it had been as inevitable as everything else about the Jamboree’s decline. In its early days people had been encouraged to bring their own weapons, partly because it wanted to insure that people were prepared if anything in the show ever got out of hand, and partly because the Jamboree hadn’t owned enough of its own weapons to pass around to all the people who wanted to take part in the festivities.

Now they must have had enough weapons but not enough people. And lawmakers had started passing gun laws, which was just ridiculous. What if the common person on the street needed to kill some zed outbreak? Rae could have sworn that the world had lost all its common sense.

“Spanky doesn’t leave my side,” Rae said. “He just doesn’t.”

“Then you can’t go in, because no outside weapons…”

“…are allowed in the Jamboree. Right, I heard you the first time.” Rae rolled her eyes as she reached into her pocket and pulled out her security badge. “Except I think I’m going to be an exception.”

The kid scrutinized her badge, and she was thankful that he finally showed a small amount of respect in his expression. Even Merton Security had lived long past its heyday, but at least the company still had some pull. Rae hadn’t been sure that she’d wanted this job to start with, but it still gave her a little prestige.

“Okay, I guess you can go in with it,” the kid said. “If the guy you’re looking for is here, he’ll probably be at either the loading dock or the cell block. On the far side of the stadium.”

Rae nodded and went past the ticket counter into the lobby. It was dark at the moment and empty except for a single woman restocking candy at the snack bar. There was a hall going off to her right that she suspected would lead to the back storage rooms and the cell block, but Rae didn’t go that way immediately. Instead, she went up the short flight of stairs and passed through a double set of doors, taking a deep breath and staring out at the stadium, the real home of the Jamboree.

The stadium was the largest structure that had been built in Fond du Lac since the zombie Uprising, and although Rae supposed it wasn’t nearly as big as similar places in other cities, it still managed to impress her even now. When she had been a little girl the place had seemed absolutely massive, though, an epic place where amazing things always happened. The seats could hold several thousand people, designed back in a time when every one of Fond du Lac’s ten thousand remaining residents had crowded into the Jamboree at least once a week. There were even more people in the city now, the result of an entire generation mating indiscriminately trying to repopulate the world, yet fewer people crowded into the stadium.

As much as she relished the memories of the place, however, Rae’s melancholy only grew at the sight of the place outside of peak hours. The sky was dreary and threatened to drop a drizzling rain on the muddy open space within the stadium, making the lonely, depressed feel of the place even worse. On the main field area several stages were set up on the sides complete with posts to tie zeds to, where they would be whipped or have their flakey flesh pealed from their bodies, or sometimes just plain shot. A couple of motorcycles were parked off to the side with chains attached to a hook at the back. Rae remembered the awe she had felt when she had first seen them in action. Four chains from four separate motorcycles would be attacked to a zed’s individual limbs, and then the motorcycles would race away from the zed, ripping the zombie into four pieces. If the motorcycles were fast enough they could sometimes pull all four limbs off at once, leaving a fifth piece behind in the form of a powerless torso. Sometimes the zed had been tougher than it looked, and the motorcycles would spin their wheels in the mud as they tried to pull it apart. The zombies in these cases would usually give a peculiar high pitched moan, much to the cheers and laughter of the audience.

Some people who came to the show would even pay extra to shoot their own zombies. Kids that did this were given special badges and ribbons as souvenirs. Rae still had all of hers stashed away in a box in her closet.

There were many other ways here to destroy zeds for the amusement of a humanity that wanted revenge for what the zombies had done, but Rae couldn’t look at them anymore for now. It was all just a reminder that people were forgetting. Her parents had taught her to never forget and never forgive these things, but others apparently hadn’t learned the same lessons. Times were changing, and probably not for the better.

Apparently more than just the times were changing, though. At least one zombie had gone through something, and it was time to stop reminiscing and find out what the hell was happening.

Rae walked past the rows of seats until she got to an exit marked with signs saying “Employees Only,” and she went through to find herself a dingy, dimly lit corridor. She could hear voices down the hall and followed them, not entirely sure she was going in the right direction until she also heard the moans of zombies. She continued following them past a couple of offices until she found herself in a wide open room full of cages. There were over a hundred cages in here, each one big enough for a single zombie, but only about fifteen were occupied. As she walked passed them a couple of the zombies charged her with their hands out to grab at her, only to hit the bars and stumble stupidly back. Rae looked at each one but none of them appeared to be the mysterious Edward Schuett. She tried to see if any of them were the other zeds she had seen in Ringo’s truck, but that was a lost cause. All zombies looked the same to her.

Beyond all the cages there was a loading dock, and here Rae found Ringo in a quiet conversation with someone behind a nearby desk. The man behind the desk was counting out a stack of bills, and Ringo stared at the money with a bemused look on his face.

“Are you sure that’s all you can give me?” Ringo said. “I brought in four. How many people actually bring in that many at a time anymore?”

“Not many. You’re still one of the best, Ringo,” the man behind the desk said. “But we can’t pay more money than we have.”

“What the hell ever happened to supply and demand? Supply is way down these days.”

“And so is demand. I’m sorry. Really I am. We’re all struggling lately. But this is the best I can do.”

“Yeah, well, just see how long I keep this up at prices like this,” Ringo said.

“If you stop that will be a shame, no doubt in that, but I’m serious. I can’t do anything else for you.”

Ringo sighed and grabbed his cash, and that was when he noticed Rae standing a few feet away. The man behind the desk noticed, too, and he stood up.

“Sorry lady, I don’t know how you got back here but we don’t allow people to bring in their own weapons any—”

“She’s with Merton Security,” Ringo said quietly.

“Oh,” the man said, “well, of course. Welcome. How can I—”

“I’m actually here to talk to him,” Rae said, pointing at Ringo. “Probably want to do it in private, right, Ringo?”

Rae didn’t exactly like her job, but as she sat there watching Ringo fidget like a kid who had just been caught playing with his parents’ semi-automatic, she had to think there were times where it was worth it.

She followed Ringo out of the loading dock and back to his truck, where he reached in and pulled a pouch of tobacco and some papers from his glove compartment. He offered some to Rae, and they both rolled a cigarette on the hood of his truck while they talked.

“So I would guess you’re here to talk about the one weird zombie I picked up.”

“Edward,” Rae said. “He said his name was Edward.”

“Yep, that he did,” Ringo said. He put his finished cigarette in his mouth and lit it, then lit Rae’s. “Christ, a zed isn’t supposed to have a name.”

“Not supposed to talk, either,” Rae said.

“I’ve got to tell you, I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m going to do with it. I thought at first maybe I could sell it somewhere special, like as part of a freak show or something. But I’m the one who’s freaking out here. These things aren’t supposed to happen.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I tried to contact one of those zombie experts, even.”

Ringo didn’t look too happy about that. “I don’t think that’s really your place. The damned thing is mine, and anything like that is shit I should be doing myself.”

“In the event that thing is really sentient and conscious,” Rae said, “I don’t think you have any right to be calling it yours.”

“I’m the one who caught it, so it’s mine. Jesus, don’t go trying to act like it actually has feelings or a soul or anything.”

Rae thought as she took a long drag on her cigarette, then spoke. “And how do you know it doesn’t have a soul?”

“It’s a fucking zombie, that’s how. It died. Its soul is gone.”

“I’d usually be more than happy to agree to that, but just playing Devil’s advocate here. Did you happen to notice if it was breathing again?”

Ringo leaned against his truck and was silent for several seconds. When he spoke again his voice was quiet. “Yeah, I kind of did.”

“And if it’s breathing, then maybe it has a heartbeat. And it certainly seems to be able to think. So yeah, it was dead. But by any definition I guess it’s alive again. And if it’s alive, then maybe it has a soul.”

Ringo shook his head and flicked his cigarette away, noticing too late that he had only been half done with it. “I will never believe that those things could possibly have souls. They kill. They go up to people that look just like them and eat them. How can you possibly say that something that destroys something so close to its own kind could ever have a soul?”

Rae took another long drag and blew a cloud of smoke into the air, thinking about what Ringo said. His words made a certain amount of sense, she supposed, but she wasn’t sure if his logic was infallible. She had two gut instincts warring inside her. One fell in line with the words her parents had always said, all the things about how the only good zed was one with a bullet hole through its brain. The other kept coming back to that pleading look that had been on Edward’s face.

“Okay, so maybe most zombies don’t have souls,” Rae said. “But this other one is different. Even if it doesn’t have a soul, it’s still a living, thinking creature. And I can’t let you just keep it locked up in…um, where do you even have it right now?”

“None of your damn business. Now look, are you here on official Merton Security business, or are you here just to satisfy your own fucking curiosity?”

She supposed she could lie, but there was always the slight possibility that a lie could come back later and lose her the job. “As far as I know Merton doesn’t know anything about this Edward yet. The only people who know anything weird is going on are you, me, and your idiot friend.” She supposed Johnny knew, too, but she didn’t think that would make much difference. He was too interested in himself and his job to care much about some random weird zombie. Or at least she hoped. If he did get it in his head to tell someone at Merton she didn’t think anyone there would stop to consider questions of a zombie’s rights or soul. They would probably just see a smart zombie as a threat that needed to be eliminated immediately. Suddenly Rae wasn’t so sure if involving Johnny had been such a good idea, not if anybody hoped to get to the bottom of this situation without just shooting Edward in the head.

Ringo looked at his tobacco pouch like he wanted to roll another cigarette, then apparently decided against it. “Yeah, the problem with Charlie, though, is that last I saw him we didn’t part on good terms. Meaning he was threatening to blow that zed’s head off. He could be out drinking right now and blabbing to everybody about what he saw.”

“And if he does,” Rae said, “we’ll likely have people storming your place with torches and pitchforks looking for a piece of him. Please tell me you didn’t actually just lock Edward up somewhere at your home.”

Ringo grimaced. “It’s in my shed out back.”

Rae tossed her butt to the ground and smeared it out with her boot. “Which means we should probably move him.”

“What do you mean ‘we?’“ Ringo said. “I already fucking told you. My zombie to do whatever I fucking want with it.”

“And if you want to keep you miracle money-making zombie then you’ll let me help, got it?”

“Why are you even here? What the hell is it you’re getting out of this?”

That was a good question, one Rae had been wondering about for most of this conversation. She’d never wanted anything to do with zombies, and a smart, talking zombie shouldn’t have been any different. But it was different somehow.

Rae shrugged. “Maybe I just feel sorry for him.”

“It. You mean you feel sorry for it.”

“That’s what I said. Now come on. Maybe if we talk with it we can even figure out what happened that made it so special. You mind putting my bike in your truck and giving me a ride?”

“Sure, but would you mind putting your rifle in back, too? It might be a little large to fit in—”

“Not a chance in hell. Now let’s go.” She was so interested in getting her bike loaded and going to see the mysterious zombie that she forgot she had put her cell on silent, and she didn’t feel it vibrate.

Chapter Eight

Ringo hadn’t bothered to take anything out of the shed before he’d locked Edward in, and Edward considered for a while if he wanted to arm himself with any of the shed’s tools before Ringo came back. Ringo had the prod, but if he were quick enough Edward thought he might be able to knock it out of Ringo’s hands with a well-timed hit from a shovel. There was a weed whacker in here, too, although it was the electric kind and there wasn’t an outlet in the shed. Edward wondered if it would look threatening enough anyways, but that was just stupid. The weed whacker didn’t even look like it had been used in all the years since the zombie apocalypse, so it might very well just wimp apart if he grabbed it from its hook on the wall.

After enough time, however, he decided fighting his way out of here was a terrible idea. On a practical physical level it sucked. Although he was feeling much better now than when he had first woken up, he still felt stiff in most of his joints. Even if he could fight off Ringo, Edward still didn’t think he could run as well as he used to. Of course, for all he knew that had nothing to do with his zombie-like condition. That could just be that he was technically somewhere around 83 years old now.

And if he did run, where would he even go? If the condition of his arms matched the condition of his face, then Edward didn’t think he would be able to pass for an average human yet. For all he knew, everyone on the outside had heard about the freakish zombie that could talk, and if he were running around people might look for him.

Besides, he didn’t want to run. He only knew the bare bones about what had happened to the world, and he didn’t want to be out there in this new way of life while he was all alone. He wanted to know what had happened to his wife and daughter. He wanted to know what had happened to his home. And he really wanted to know how the hell he could be a zombie that was apparently in the process of being cured. Even though his fate was uncertain if he stayed, he thought he could get more answers from Ringo than out on his own. And Ringo would be more inclined to give answers if Edward didn’t simply attack him when he opened the door next.

Edward was only aware of the passage of time thanks to the subtle changes in light through the roof slats. The time had to be late in the afternoon, possibly coming up on dusk. He’d had a watch on him the day of the cookout, but at some point in the long time between it had vanished from his wrist. He’d also had a cell phone in his pocket, but the pockets of his jeans had also worn through long ago and everything that had been inside them must have fallen through. Not that the cell phone would have done him any good, anyway. He wouldn’t have been able to check the time unless he had turned it off and conserved the battery (and he wasn’t even sure if the battery would have worked after that long), and he couldn’t even be sure if the provider had survived the zombie uprising or war or whatever it had been.

It suddenly occurred to him that he was sitting here locked in a shed with some sort of zombie virus while he worried about his cell provider, and he had no choice but to laugh for several minutes. Then he had to cry for several more. By the time he was finished he actually felt a sense of relief. Whatever else was currently wrong with his body, at least he could still cry.

He didn’t know how much longer it was, but soon after he started pondering this issue he heard Ringo’s noisy truck pulling up into the driveway. He stood and waited by the door as he heard footsteps moving across the grass, and he waited anxiously as he heard a key rattling in the lock. He was determined to stand here and look completely harmless, as civilized as someone could when wearing only rags, the perfect picture of…

The door opened and Edward cried out as someone shoved the business end of a pink rifle in his face.

“Sweet Jesus, put that thing down!” he yelled. The woman holding the rifle, the same one he’d seen at the gate, looked shocked at his surprise, then sheepishly lowered the weapon. Ringo stood off to the side of the door snickering to himself.

“Sorry, I guess,” the woman said. “I just needed to be sure you weren’t going to try anything.”

“I don’t want to try jack,” Edward said. “All I want is for people to stop trying to kill me long enough so I can get some damned idea how the hell all this is happening.”

“Well, I suppose it’s about time we talked, isn’t it?” the woman said. “But not right yet. We need to move you first. Ringo’s friend—”

Ringo snorted. “I sure as hell wouldn’t call him that.”

“Ringo’s helper, Charlie,” the woman said, “he could always come back and try something. We need to move you some place safer while we figure out what to do with you. Once you’re moved, then we can talk.”

“Where are we going?” Edward asked.

“My place for now,” the woman said.

“I don’t suppose you can get me something to eat when we get there?” Edward asked. Ringo and the woman both tensed noticeably. “What?”

The woman raised her rifle slightly like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to aim it at him again or not. “And what exactly are you hungry for?”

Edward shrugged, and one of the last memories from before everything went hazy came back to him. “I don’t suppose you guys still have brats, do you? They haven’t just sort of vanished into history over the last fifty years?”

Ringo let out a single “Ha!”

The woman raised an eyebrow but grinned and lowered the rifle again. “This is Wisconsin. Of course we still have brats.”

“What,” Edward said, “you expected me to want brains?”

“I’ve never known a zombie to be too particular about what part of a person it eats,” the woman said. “But I guess I sort of thought something like that.”

Truthfully, what really started Edward’s stomach rumbling was the thought of raw brats, but he didn’t think that would go over too well with these two just yet.

Ringo and the woman led him back to the truck, and Edward was grateful that at least the woman’s guard seemed to be down. Ringo still looked edgy about being so close to an unrestrained zombie. Even though the man hadn’t been completely terrible to him yet, Edward was starting to not like the man so much.

Ringo went around to the back of the truck and fussed with his keys for the lock. “Okay. In you go.”

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to argue with armed people, but Edward was starting to get annoyed at this treatment. “Why do I have to get in the cage again? Haven’t I proven yet that I’m not going to do anything to you guys?”

“There’s not room enough for three people in the front,” Ringo said. “And besides, you may not be acting much like a zed but you still stink like one. I ain’t having you sit up there and stain the seats with your zombie muck.”

He was probably right, but that didn’t keep Edward’s anger from flaring up. This was all getting ridiculous. The woman must have seen this, because she spoke up.

“I’ll get in the cage with you, if you want.”

Ringo’s jaw dropped. “Why the flying hell would you want to do that?”

“It’ll give me and Edward the chance for that talk he wants.”

“Are you a complete fucking idiot?” Ringo asked. “I’m not going to lock you alone in a cage with a fucking zed.”

“I don’t think I have anything to worry about from him,” the woman said to Ringo. “And even if he does try something?” She patted her pink rifle. “I think Spanky can take care of me just fine.”

Ringo gave an unhappy snort and went back to opening up the cage. “Right. Fine. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

Edward stared at the shockingly pink rifle. Ringo could hope all he wanted that she knew what she was doing. Edward simply hoped that she didn’t have an itchy trigger finger.

Chapter Nine

The woman told him to keep low in the back of the truck as it started up and backed out into the street. Made sense, Edward supposed. He already looked suspicious enough as it was. It would look even stranger if someone saw that the cage held not only a regenerating zombie but also a normal human who didn’t look the least bit afraid. She stayed on the opposite side of the cage and kept “Spanky” pointed at him the entire time, but she left her finger off the trigger.

“I’m Rae Neuman,” the woman said.

Edward gave a half-hearted salute. “Edward Schuett.”

“Right. You already said that.”

“I also said I’m not a zombie, but… maybe you guys were the ones who were right on that one.”

“Yeah,” Rae said. “I figured you haven’t actually had a good look at yourself yet, so I had Ringo grab a mirror before we came out to get you.” She reached into her pocket and gingerly pulled out a piece of glass that looked like it had once been part of a car’s rear-view mirror. She held it out to Edward, and he took it, careful not to look in yet.

“I’m not sure that I actually want to see,” Edward said.

“I really think you should,” Rae said. “It might be kind of a shock, but just be grateful you’re seeing yourself now rather than earlier.”

Edward nodded and took a deep breath. He might have stopped denying that he had, at some point, been a zombie, but acknowledging that and seeing the proof of it were two different things. Everything up until now had almost felt like a dream to him, a terrible dream that just wouldn’t end, but seeing what he looked like would likely finally drive home the reality of it. A part of him wanted to hold onto the hope that it was a dream for just a while longer.

He remembered Dana again, and her myriad little cuts and bruises from random acts of childhood. He’d always told her the best way to remove a Band-Aid was to rip it off quick and get all the pain over with. If he didn’t get this over with and look then Dana would have a hypocrite for a father. Wherever she was, if she was still alive somewhere (and the memory of her disappearance before Julia had bit him gave him hope that she could still be out there in some shape or form) then he wanted to continue being a good influence for her.

He held up the shard of mirror in front of his face and forced himself to stare. The shard was small enough that he couldn’t see his entire face at once and doubtless didn’t get the full effect, but he was absolutely grotesque. He inhaled sharply and fumbled with the shard, almost dropping it, cutting the tips of his fingers when he caught it again. The blood that welled up from the cuts was probably darker than it should have been, but he didn’t pay it much mind. He was still trying to accept what he had just seen. With another deep breath he raised the mirror again, this time forcing himself not to look away.

His eyes were the first thing he saw. The irises looked like they were the right color, but the whites were more of a dark gray, almost black in places. It dawned on him that they were probably bloodshot, but the dark color of his blood kept them from looking pink like they should. From there he moved the mirror, carefully chronicling all the disturbing details of his current face. He had not been an ugly man at all when he was younger, although he supposed to anyone other than Julia he would have been considered average rather than handsome. So he hadn’t been terribly vain. But now he couldn’t believe that he was actually allowing anyone to see his face. His skin was pale grey with veins of blackish green running through. His cheeks were sunken in, and in several places the skin was pitted with deep open sores covered in dark dried pus. His hair was patchy on his head, looking like a field of dead grass that had been salted in random places to keep life from growing on it. His lips were ragged and uneven, like something had eaten them away in places, and he supposed that was very likely exactly the case. His gums were black and several teeth were missing, leaving the broken ones that were left to poke out in random directions.

For all these horrible details, however, he could clearly see that everything seemed to be healing. From his blackened gums several small, shiny bits of bone shown through that appeared to the beginnings of new teeth. A few of the pits on his cheeks looked like they were not so dry as they had once been, and where the pus flowed a little more freely the skin might have been knitting itself back together. The open patches on his skull had the slightest hint of peach fuzz to suggest a new head of hair in the future, even in the places where he had already been bald. And all of this was hours after Ringo and Charlie had first noticed that he looked to be healing. Edward couldn’t guess yet the rate that these changes were occurring, but he didn’t think he would look anything like this by this time tomorrow. Even the cuts on his fingers tingled like they were healing faster than they had any right.

“Jesus Christ in heaven,” Edward said. “This is insane.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Rae said. “So, you want to tell me everything you know about all this?”

“Lady…Rae, I don’t know jack.”

“Then why don’t you start by telling me anything you remember. Anything at all.”

Edward sighed and gave her the abbreviated version of everything he had remembered while in the shed and everything from the moment between waking up in the store and getting taken by Ringo. Rae said nothing while he talked, nodding occasionally as she rubbed the stock of her rifle. She held onto the thing like a child might a teddy bear, but Edward didn’t say anything about that. She didn’t strike him as the kind of person who would take it favorably being compared to a little kid.

“And that’s it?” she asked, peeking her head up to look over the side of the truck as it slowed to a stop. He was about to ask if they were at her place yet, but from his position he could see a stop-and-go light in front of them. It felt strangely comforting that, even with the apocalypse come and gone, things like traffic lights could still exist.

“It’s at least everything I remember,” Edward said.

“Well, none of that really tells me shit, except that whatever is causing you to regenerate apparently started some time last night or early this morning.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t give us a reason why,” Edward said. “Can I ask some questions now? Please? I think I’ve been in the dark long enough.”

“I’ll answer whatever questions I can, I guess, but I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”

“Then I guess you should start with…um, what the hell actually happened?”

“What which happened when?”

“Well, the end of the world. The zombie armageddon.”

Rae raised an eyebrow. “Zombie armageddon? That’s a new one. Why the hell would you call it that?”

“Well, that had to be what it was, right? The end of the world? Everything now is the post-apocalypse?”

“Jesus, that’s an exaggeration if I ever heard one,” Rae said. “I mean, yeah, things got bad back in those days. They say three-quarters of the world’s population was wiped out…”

“Holy fucking shit! Three-quarters? How the hell am I exaggerating, then?”

“Because, look around you.” She gestured around the truck, then remembered that he couldn’t actually sit up and look. “Or, at least think of everything you’ve seen so far. I know this is probably different than you remember, but you’re from fifty years ago. Of course things are going to be different. Different doesn’t exactly mean bad.”

“But…all the ruins outside that weird open perimeter circle thing…”

“Have been that way for as long as I can remember,” Rae said. “No change, not really. You’ve got some people living way out in the boonies trying to farm now, but otherwise there’s nothing new or different. Last I checked the world was continuing on just fine, no end in sight. And it sure as hell looks like it will continue that way for a long time.”

Edward shook his head, not understanding how anyone could miss the severity of what had happened. The world had changed drastically and into something he couldn’t recognize. An untold number of people throughout the world had died. He had no idea how someone could look at an event in history like that and not think it was the apocalypse. But he didn’t think he was going to convince this woman, and whether she was talking to him civilly or not right now he still didn’t think it would be a good idea to get into an argument with her while she was still holding a rifle in hand.

“Okay, so it wasn’t the end of the world. What do you call it, then?”

“We call it the Uprising, but I’ve never thought that was a very good term for it. Uprising implies they were downtrodden or something like that, like they were slaves that fought back. They weren’t. They were just people. They died, they got back up, they ate people. Those that they didn’t finish eating got back up, too.”

Edward felt a shiver at the matter-of-fact way she described it. “How is that even possible? Dead people getting up and walking. Was it magic or something?”

“Don’t be a moron. I don’t know, I guess there were probably some people that thought that at the time. Some people still do. Lot’s of people thought God was punishing everybody. Couple of religions sprung up because of it. It was a virus though. The Animator Virus.”

“So, it was like a plague? How did it start?”

“Don’t know. Occasionally you’ll hear new studies or news reports about it. Government keeps saying new things every so often. Most people don’t even bother with official explanations. Some nutjobs have got all kinds of conspiracy theories. But, I don’t know, I guess most people just don’t care.”

“Don’t care? Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong people in this time? How could anyone not care?”

“Easy. It was over fifty years ago. It’s history. Most people are too busy trying to pay their bills or get married and have kids or things like that. They can’t be bothered with wondering about some mysteries that are half a century old. It’s like…um, I don’t know, I’m not so good with history. It’s like people in your time would have acted about things that happened during World War I, maybe. The thing with the Nazis.”

“I think you may be thinking of World War II.”

“Maybe. But it’s something in the past that happened, it affected things, but it’s the past. Where the zeds come from is less important to daily life than the simple fact that they exist.”

Edward sighed. “Alright. So you don’t know where this Animator Virus came from, but it made the dead come back to life and try to eat people. The first I remember of this thing, it was starting somewhere around Chicago. Is that right?”

Rae squinted her eyes and looked up at the sky in thought. “Yeah, I guess that sounds familiar. Somewhere around there. Spread quickly, because people die and then rise so quickly after a bite.”

“Right, that much I was able to figure out from my memories. So what happened after that?”

“Spread across the whole country, then the world. I don’t know a whole lot about the ways different places fought against it. Most of that is military history, and while I guess I’ve always enjoyed that I never had much time for it. There are a few things everybody knows about: the Korean Nuclear Pact, the Battle of Atlanta, the Greater and Lesser Texas Purges. Mostly what I know is the things my parents told me. They lived through it, told me about all the local stuff that happened, taught me how to fight against it if it ever happened again. The zeds are still out there, as I guess you of course know, and they still bite. It could always happen again. My parents were sure it would.”

“And me? Are you expecting me to try biting you?” Edward asked.

“I’ve still got my rifle pointed at you, don’t I?” They both looked at the rifle at the same time. Her hands were relaxed on it, and it pointed off to the side. Rae readjusted it so it pointed at him again, and Edward had to fight not to smile at the way she blushed.

A thought suddenly occurred to Edward. “So your parents lived through it?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Are there records somewhere of everyone that survived? Somewhere I could look to see if people I knew came through it okay?”

Rae shook her head. “Not really. Not very good records, at least. People weren’t too concerned at keeping accurate records while they were fighting to survive. Lots of journals have survived. The history sections of bookstores have been filling up with them in recent years. Personally, I think a lot of them are fake, but the ones that have been proven real are the biggest source of info on that sort of thing. Other things that I guess were probably around in your time, social security numbers and birth certificates and death certificates and all that, those all have only come back within the last twenty years or so. If you’re looking for information on anyone in particular it will be a nightmare finding anything.”

Edward took a deep breath and stared at his hands folded in his lap. If what Rae said was true, then there likely no way for him to ever find out what had happened to Dana. Except maybe from the personal recollections of survivors, he supposed. If he could do a little more digging there…

“Who were your parents?” Edward asked. “How old were they when the…um, Uprising happened?”

Rae smiled, and Edward couldn’t help but notice that she let the business end of her rifle slip away from him again.

“John Neuman and Annie Heine. They were…oh, I don’t know. Maybe twelve or thirteen when they first met. Just a few days after the zeds really hit Fond du Lac. They found out that a large group of survivors had taken one of the junior high schools as a hideout. Dad came in with his own mother and father. Mom was part of a group of children. A woman had been going around trying to find lost and wandering kids that had been orphaned, and she took Mom and some others to the school. That group eventually grew, and after many years they were able to clear all the zeds out of a central part of Fond du Lac. They created the Empty Zone around it and built the wall, and the city was able to continue on for years before the government finally got around to reclaiming the state, but in the meantime the city was on its own.”

Edward didn’t hear most of what she said. The instant Rae had mentioned the group of children Edward had felt his heart beat faster with added hope. That would have to have been what had happened to Dana. If that woman had found Dana and taken her to safety, then maybe Rae’s mother had actually met Edward’s daughter.

“Your mother,” Edward said. “Is she still alive?”

Rae frowned and sighed. “Mom died a few years after Dad did. Took me a long time to admit it to myself, but she more or less drank herself to death. Couldn’t handle not having him around anymore.”

Edward’s heart sank, but tried not to let his own setback overshadow the pain he figured Rae probably felt at the memory. “Oh. I’m sorry. How did your father die?”

Rae’s mouth tightened into a thin line, and whether she realized it or not she aimed Spanky at him again. “Bit by a zed while guarding the Empty Zone. Mom shot him in the head immediately after. Never had the time to turn.”

And with that, Edward decided it was time to be quiet.

Chapter Ten

Rae felt relief when Edward stopped asking questions, yet at the same time she wished he would continue. It felt good to talk about her parents again. Most people, even Johnny, didn’t care to listen. They’d been brave people who had lived through a bizarre time, and neither of them had deserved to go out the way they did. If Edward had wanted her to continue she would have gladly done so, although it felt strange that the only person willing to let her go on about her life was a zed.

Rae was having an increasingly hard time thinking of him as a zombie, though. As she watched she thought she could see the way the open sores in his face knitted back together, very small but noticeable the harder she looked. And he sounded and acted living. He got angry and annoyed and saddened and hopeful when she said things, the emotions evident on his face. A zombie shouldn’t feel any of those things. A zombie was just a thing, not really even a monster if Rae really thought about it. Zombies were just a part of the environment, a force of nature, and a force of nature didn’t care about anything.

So, by Rae’s definition, Edward couldn’t be considered a zombie. He couldn’t really be considered a living human being yet, either, not when he could heal that fast (and even the cuts on his fingers were gone now, replaced only by scars that seemed to be fading already) or live when there had been so much damage to his body. If he was neither zombie nor human, then Rae had no other way to classify him.

The truck pulled over and came to a stop, and Rae slowly poked her head out of the truck bed to see. They were just down the block from her apartment building. Rae hunched back down and raised a hand to put through the bars of the cage so she could rap on the back window. “Hey! Psst! Ringo, you need to pull up closer. We need to get him in as quick as possible. It’s bad enough I have to take him up three floors before we get to my apartment.”

“Can’t. There’s too many cars parked in the way.”

“Really?” That was strange. Although Rae’s new job paid well, she hadn’t been at it long enough to move any place nice, and this entire neighborhood was full of people that couldn’t afford the luxury of a gas-using vehicle. Everyone used the bus or bikes or walked. Never in the entire time that Rae had lived here had she ever seen more than two cars parked on the entire length of the street.

But as she poked her head up again, she saw that there were at least five other cars parked now, all of them newer models. Seeing new cars anywhere in the city was uncommon, but these all looked especially nice. The only people in Fond du Lac that she knew could afford these things were a few of the higher-ups at Merton Security.

“Aw shit,” Rae said as she slouched down again. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out.”

“What?” Edward asked. “What is it?”

“It’s got to be people from Merton. And there aren’t many reasons why the higher ups would be in this neighborhood.”

“Back up. What the hell is Merton?”

“Well, I guess that all goes back to the Uprising, too. After the first several months of having to randomly fight off zombies, Lyle Merton got it in his head that people would pay to have others doing the zombie killing for them. I guess it was a mess at first, since it was basically a war zone and it was kind of hard to determine what a dollar was worth when no one was even sure if there was still a government. So Merton came in and people gave him all this money they thought was worthless, and boom, when the government shows up and says it still exists, Merton was suddenly the richest man in the whole region and in charge of security for everything. There’s companies like Merton Security all across the country, but Merton doesn’t have the same power it once did ever since Lyle Merton himself died.”

“You know,” Edward said, “for someone who says she doesn’t know that much about history you sure are able to talk a lot about it.”

“Well all the stuff about Merton I have to know. It was part of my orientation. Who do you think owns the gate I was stationed at?”

“So why are they here then?”

“Why do you think?” Rae asked. “It would be great for public relations for them if they suddenly caught the world’s only talking and thinking zombie.”

“Oh,” Edward said. “Oh shit. So what, are you going to turn me in?”

“I don’t know. Let me think,” Rae said. She nervously tapped Spanky’s stock and tried to concentrate. Ringo had said that he hadn’t told anyone about Edward yet, and although Charlie had probably blabbed his mouth around by now he wouldn’t know that she had anything to do with it. So the only person that would have been able to tell Merton anything to lead them here would have been Johnny. She couldn’t remember if she had told him not to talk about it, but even if she had he probably would have said something anyway. He was too much of a company man to keep something like this from them. Rae now had to make a choice. She could either try to take Edward somewhere else, or she could let them have him. She had no idea what they would do to Edward if they got him, although they probably wouldn’t kill him outright. They would probably study him first, but she didn’t think Merton’s idea of “study” would be very scientific.

But why should she risk her job over this man in the cage with her? She didn’t know him, and all debates aside she still couldn’t truthfully call him a man. She looked at him on the other side of the cage and the way he stared back at her. She couldn’t really tell his emotions from his expression at the moment. Maybe he was pensive, but any rational thinking person would be right now while she decided his fate. There might have been a hint of anger at the thought that she might betray him, and there might have been a hint of hope that she wouldn’t. There was no way to be certain, but she didn’t doubt that underneath that scarred flesh he was at least feeling something.

She wondered what her parents might have done in this situation, but they probably would have already shot him. To them he would have been a zombie and nothing more. They were the products of a different time. Maybe it was time for Rae to embrace being part of a new era.

“Okay, look,” Rae said. “They probably don’t even know you’re here. They’ll know that I’ve seen you because I was asking around about zombie experts, but probably not that I’ve actually been with you and talking to you. So I’ll go in alone and talk. I’ll get rid of them as quick as I can, then I’ll be back out and we’ll figure out somewhere else to put you. Are you okay with that?”

Edward snorted, and Rae could hear some of the anger and frustration coming out in his voice. “Not like I have much of a choice.”

“I wouldn’t get too snippy with me just now, Ed. At the moment I’m the only thing resembling a friend that you’ve got.”

Edward stared at her for a moment, then sighed and nodded. “Sure. You’re right. I guess.”

Rae bit her lip, then set Spanky down facing away from him and moved closer. “Look, I’ll help you figure something out, okay? If you want to figure out why you’re like this, if you want to find out whatever happened to your family, I think I can help. We can look through what little records there are and see if there’s something in there that can point towards your daughter. I promise, I’m here to help you. Got it?”

Edward stared at her again, and this time when he nodded he did it with a little more enthusiasm. “Yes. Okay.”

“Good,” Rae said, then went back to the window and knocked on it again. “Ringo, let me out.”

Making sure that no one was watching—and the street was pretty quiet right now with darkness coming—Rae got out of the back and filled Ringo in on her thoughts while she pulled out her bike. Ringo wasn’t happy about any of it.

“So, what? You just want me to sit out here on the street with a damned zed in the back of my truck while you try to get rid of people from the most powerful company in the city?”

“They’re not as powerful anymore as they want everyone to believe,” Rae said. “And fuck no, I don’t want you to sit here. That would be idiotic. When they come back out they would see you, moron. Just…I don’t know. Drive around for a little bit, and then make sure you’re parked near the corner of Merrill and Park in about half an hour. I hope that’ll be enough time. Hopefully I’ll have thought of a new plan by then.”

“Remind me again why the hell I’m doing what you’re telling me?”

“Because you know as well as I do that Edward is something really fucking special.” She pointed at Edward, who was still sitting in the cage staring out into space and ignoring their conversation. Both Rae and Ringo had forgotten to close the cage after taking out the bike, yet Edward had made no move to escape. She lowered her voice just in case Edward was listening anyway. “And the thinking and speaking part, that’s nothing. I mean, look at him. He’s still healing. He looks like he might as well be freshly dead now. Nothing is supposed to be able to do that, not human, not zombie. This is beyond anything you or me are comprehending right now. You got it? This is way bigger than either of us.”

Ringo looked skeptical, but he shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Just keep going with this for a little while longer, okay?” Rae said.

“Sure. I guess. But there better be a whole shitload of money in it for me at the end of all this, you hear me.”

“Fine. We’ll do what we can. Just drive him around, okay?” She snapped her fingers at Edward, and he looked at her. “We’ll keep the cage unlocked, if that’s fine with you. I don’t think you have anything to gain by trying to get away.”

Edward shrugged. He didn’t look so hot, but Rae supposed that was to be expected.

“Alright, Ringo, get going,” she said. Ringo got back in the front and drove off. Rae watched, not realizing until he was half a block away that she had left Spanky in the back.

“Oh shit. Ringo, wait, come back!” She dropped the bike and ran after the truck for several feet before realizing it was pointless. She wouldn’t be able to catch up with him, and it wasn’t like she wasn’t going to see her baby again. The rifle would still be there when she met up with them in half an hour.

Trying to keep herself calm, Rae entered her apartment building and carried her bike up the three floors to her apartment. It would be best if she acted like nothing special was going on. The people from Merton would probably be waiting for her either outside her apartment or, if Johnny was with them and had his key, inside. They would wonder why she had left her job early, but Rae thought she could come up some story that would suitably cover her tracks. The important thing was that they not think she’d had any more contact with Edward other than the brief interaction at the gate. She was just some random peon who had seen something weird and asked a few questions about it. Nothing special, nothing worth talking about further.

The skuzzy hall outside her apartment was empty, but as she approached her door she thought she heard voices coming from inside. Taking a deep breath, she tried the handle to find that the door was already unlocked. Putting on an expression that she hoped was suitably confused and disturbed, she went in.

“Hello?” she asked. “Johnny, is that you?”

“I’m here,” Johnny said. He sat on the sofa in her front room, and stood as she came through the door. The other three people with him stood as well. Rae pretended to be surprised to see them.

“Oh,” she said. “Um, hello? Who are all you?”

“Rae, this is my immediate supervisor, Lauren Aguilar,” Johnny said, gesturing at the stout woman immediately to his left. “I told her everything you told me on the phone.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure that was nothing anyway.”

“Nothing?” Aguilar asked. “Johnny said you saw a zed that could talk.”

“Yeah, it did,” Rae said. “But I’m sure there’s got to be a logical explanation. Zeds just don’t do that.”

“You’re right, they don’t,” one of the other two men in the room said. He was well-built, balding, and stood ramrod straight in a finely cut suit. The other man wore a similar suit, although he was shorter and had a full head of dark hair. “So if you saw one that did, we need to take this very seriously. More seriously than you seem to be.”

Rae went rigid. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure she could control this situation. “I’m sorry, and who are you?”

“My name is Jean DuFresne,” the balding man said. “And my associate here is Mallicka Patal. We are both here representing the CRS.”

Rae’s breath caught in her throat. The Center for Reanimation Studies. Zombie researchers. “Oh, um, hello. I had no idea that you would be able to get here so fast. I assume you’re going to want to find this zed now and study him.”

“No ma’am,” Patal said. “We are not here to study him. We are not actually with the organization itself. They have merely hired us for security purposes.”

“I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean,” Rae said. She glanced at Johnny. He was staring at the floor, fidgeting. “Johnny, what’s going on?” He still wouldn’t look at her. “Johnny, answer me.”

Finally he looked up. “I’m sorry, Rae. But they say this is very dangerous stuff. That zed is supposed to be…” He paused as he stared at her hands. “Rae, where’s Spanky?”

Rae debated whether or not she should continue lying at this point. There was obviously more going on here than she had anticipated. Maybe Edward was dangerous. Maybe there had been something about him that he hadn’t been telling, or something he hadn’t realized was wrong. But it wouldn’t feel right to just turn on him because she didn’t know what was going on. She hadn’t really known what was going on to begin with, after all.

“I think I left him in the gatehouse,” Rae said.

“No, you would have gone back for him,” Johnny said. “You never just leave Spanky anywhere. For God’s sake, you take him to bed with us.”

Rae blushed, looking at the three other people in the room. Aquilar looked like she was trying not to laugh, but DuFresne and Patal looked alarmed.

“Did you leave your weapon in the truck, ma’am?”

Rae stopped breathing for several second. “How… uh… what truck?”

“The truck that dropped you off,” DuFresne said. “The one with the zombie in the back.”

“No, wait,” Rae said. “How did you…”

“We were watching you, ma’am,” Patal said, his voice sounding panicked. “We had people watching the truck when it pulled up. Now answer the Goddamned question! Is your weapon in the truck?”

Rae looked at everyone as her heart beat faster, then shrugged. “Yes. I left it in the back.”

“Shit!” DuFresne reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a cell. He hit two buttons then put it to his ear and shouted into it. “The Z7 is armed! Do you hear me? If it looks like it’s about to fight back, you have official permission to blow its head off!”

Chapter Eleven

Edward slumped further in the truck as it pulled away from Rae’s building. The woman had done many things so far that would lead him to trust her, but there was still a fear in the back of his mind that she would turn him in. He couldn’t help it. His nerves were too frayed from everything that had happened so far. Earlier he had been able to maintain something resembling calm, but now he felt the shakes coming on. All of this was too much for one man to deal with. He wanted to curl up in the cage and go to sleep in hopes that he would wake up and none of this had happened. But he had already been to sleep once and woke to find the whole world was still a nightmare. He didn’t think it would work a second time, either.

He looked up as the truck came to the end of the block and saw Rae staring after him, and again he doubted for a moment her intentions. Maybe she was staring because she thought she wasn’t going to see him again. Maybe Ringo was taking him in to whoever was in charge and she had known all along. That didn’t make any sense at all, especially with the door unlocked and only held shut by a metal latch, but he still dwelled on it.

Then he saw her rifle on the floor of the cage near the door and smiled. Right, that made much more sense. She hadn’t been staring at him, she’d been staring at “Spanky.” He sat up a little and leaned over to pick up the gun. Before the Uprising and his reawakening he’d known as much about guns as most men in Wisconsin. He’d gone deer hunting every November and had kept a locked cabinet full of hunting rifles in his den. He would have thought he would recognize the make and model of Rae’s rifle, but he didn’t. It looked similar to the rifles he had used during his brief time in the Army, but besides the obvious customization there were other differences. It was lighter, for one thing, and didn’t appear to have any wood or metal in its composition. He wasn’t quite sure where to load the bullets, either.

Edward nodded, admiring it. He supposed all the differences made sense. This was fifty years from the time he knew, after all. From what Rae had said, the world had gone through a short dark age and then came out of it to rediscover all the ways and technology of before, but one thing that had continued to evolve through that whole time would have been weapons. Weapons manufacturers would have developed guns specifically for use against zombies. Technology had probably temporarily gone back to the Middle Ages, but mankind hadn’t been willing to go back to axes and arrows. Humanity hadn’t been able to afford that sort of leap backward.

He set the rifle back down. He really did want to sleep, but he supposed he should concentrate right now on what he should be doing next. Rae had been able to fill in some gaps in history, but he knew none of the information that was important to him. If this Merton Security company was so intent on getting a hold of him, and admittedly he wasn’t sure yet why or even if they really were, then that would make it difficult for him to find someone that might give him answers about why he was different than other zombies. As much as that weighed on his mind, though, the question he wanted answered most was about Dana. Rae had given him a place in time to start looking for her, but his gut filled with fear at what he might find. If she was alive still she would be fifty-six or seven by now. She likely wouldn’t even recognize him. And what if she wasn’t alive anymore? Neither of Rae’s parents were still alive, and they had both survived long after the Uprising. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, it might be easier for him in the long run if Dana’s fate remained a mystery.

There was Julia too, and although he hadn’t allowed himself to hope before, it suddenly occurred to him that she might still be out there as well. She had become a zombie before he did, he realized that, but whatever it was that made him special could have made her different, too. Even if it hadn’t, she could still be wandering around out there somewhere, and if he could come back from being undead then he could find a way for her to come back, too.

He closed his eyes and put his hands to his forehead. No, he couldn’t allow himself to think like that. He couldn’t allow himself to get his hopes up over something that was so ridiculously implausible. His wife was gone, and probably so was his daughter. They were probably both dead, or undead, or undead and then dead again if someone had killed or destroyed them after they had come back. There was no chance he could ever have them back. Everything he had ever wanted and worked for in his entire life was more than likely gone.

Tears began rolling down his cheek, but Edward didn’t have the time to cry properly before the truck’s brakes screeched and he slammed against the side of the cage from the momentum.

“Ow! Shit, Ringo, what the hell?” Edward said as he banged on the back window. But unlike when Rae had knocked, Ringo didn’t answer.

“Ringo?” Edward said, poking up his head to look through the window. Ringo was staring straight ahead, his hands tight and white on the wheel. Edward was about to ask what he was looking at, then looked through the front window.

Two cars had pulled across the street in front of them, blocking the way forward. They were newer, unidentified models, just like the ones Edward had seen in front of Rae’s apartment.

Edward turned around to see two more cars pull up behind the truck. They stopped about fifty feet behind, and for several seconds no one in any of the vehicles moved.

Edward’s first thought was that Rae had set him up after all. She had known this was going to happen, right? But that was stupid. There was the cage door, and also if she had set him up she wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave the rifle behind where he could grab it. Or maybe she just hadn’t thought a zombie would ever be smart enough to operate a rifle. Or maybe…

Or maybe nothing. Rae probably hadn’t known this was going to happen, but it didn’t matter to Edward right now. All the mattered was that all his hopes at being able to do anything about his new condition and life were wrecked before he’d had any chance at all. He was screwed, all because some agency he’d never even had a reason to hear of before today suddenly decided that he might be a threat or might be something interesting to dissect. None of these people cared that he was going through hell and he had no family anymore and no friends in the God-forsaken new world.

And he was sick of it. Without thinking of it anymore, he cleared away enough of his tears to see, then scrambled for the rifle from where it had skidded when the truck stopped.

“Stop!” someone screamed, and Edward ducked down in the truck bed as a gun went off and a bullet whistled past somewhere over his head.

“Holy shit, what the fuck is going on?” Ringo screamed from the front, but Edward ignored him. Instead he looked at the rifle in his hand. The trigger, at least, looked exactly like any other he had ever seen. He could use it if he must, although he had no idea how many bullets it had. He searched for the safety to make sure it was off, not even sure if the rifle had one, and he heard several car doors in front of and behind the truck open and many people get out.

“Confirmed,” a female voice said from somewhere behind the truck. There was another sound as a car raced down the street towards the altercation, but that seemed incidental to Edward at the moment. “We have the Z7 trapped and it is armed.”

There was a squawk from a walkie-talkie followed by a static-covered voice that Edward couldn’t make out, but he could tell that the voice on the other end was frantic.

“Driver!” a man called out from in front. “Get out of the truck now and step away from the vehicle.”

Ringo’s door opened just enough for him to call out. “On whose God-damned authority do you think you’re doing this?”

“Joint task force from the CRS and Merton. You are harboring a biological weapon.”

Biological weapon? That was almost funny enough to make Edward snicker. Fifty years may have passed, but the government still used the same terminology. Then he realized that he was supposed to be the so-called biological weapon. There was no way the government would react the same way for any other zombie out there. He had to wonder just what it was that they thought was so dangerous about him.

“You people are absolutely crazy!” Ringo said, but he slowly opened the door and got out of the truck, keeping his hands up in the air as he stepped away. “You rat-shit government bastards better not harm my truck, you got that?”

“Step clear, sir,” the male voice said again, and Ringo left Edward’s limited vision from in the bed.

“You, the zombie in the truck!” the female voice said. “We know you can understand us and we know you can use that rifle. Throw it out of the truck now!”

He was surrounded, and they had already shown that they were willing to fire on him. His hands tightened on the rifle, shaking, and he stared down at them. They were mostly healed, with only a few smaller spots of missing flesh and a slightly unhealthy color to his skin. He probably looked nearly back to normal, but he didn’t think any of these people would care. He was just a monster to them. They didn’t give a shit that he could feel and think, that he was in pain and mourning his family and angry that everything had been taken away from him. These people would never care. And they wouldn’t care for a single second if he stood up right now and they all had to shoot him down. If he really was still a zombie then he might be able to survive bullets to most of his body, but a single headshot would kill him for real.

And he couldn’t bring himself to care. He had nothing, no chance, and if they were going to kill him in cold blood then just for this moment he didn’t care as long as he took a few of them down with him.

A car screeched to a stop behind the truck, and a new female voice screamed. “Stop! Everyone stop! Stand down! Don’t shoot him!”

“He’s armed!” the first woman said. “DuFresne gave us permission to take him down!”

“DuFresne doesn’t have the slightest fucking clue what he’s doing. I order every single one of you to lower your weapons.”

Edward held his breath, trying to listen for any sounds that the people surrounding the truck were complying. He couldn’t tell for sure. He could hear other people now murmuring as footsteps came closer. A lot of people, probably not just the ones who had stopped the truck. This whole incident had likely caught the attention of everyone living in the buildings around them, and they were coming out to see what the fuss was about. Although Edward definitely didn’t want to see anyone innocent hurt, he hoped at least that the onlookers would make the people from the cars think twice before they fired.

After a few more seconds of silence from behind the truck, the new woman spoke again. “Sir? You in the truck? Can you talk?”

Edward took a deep breath and tried not to let his voice sound like he had just been crying. “Yes.”

There was a murmur from a few people. “Sir,” the woman said, “could you please sit up where we can see you?”

“No, you’ll shoot me!”

“We won’t shoot you, sir. Please, I’m sure you’re very confused right now. I can help.”

“Yeah, confused sure as hell is right. I might even say I’m a little pissed off at the way I’m getting treated so far, too.”

There was a pause in the woman’s words that Edward probably wouldn’t have heard if he hadn’t been relying solely on his ears. “Pissed off. Yes, I’m sure you are. But we’re not here to hurt you.”

“Sure as hell could have fooled me.”

“I understand. I’m sorry. There was a miscommunication. The people we asked to help us bring you in, they don’t truly understand what you are.”

“And just what the hell am I, huh? Would someone please finally answer me that?”

“Yes, sir, I will, but I need you to throw the gun out of the truck first. Can you please do that for me?”

It could be a trick. In the past he might have believed that was just a paranoid way to think, but after everything that had happened so far he figured he had a right to be paranoid now. They could just want him disarmed so he would be easier to shoot. But this new woman that had suddenly shown up talked to him unlike most people had so far. Even Rae had been unwilling to treat him like a person at first. This woman, however, kept calling him ‘sir’. Not zed, not zombie, not monster, not thing, but ‘sir”.

And she actually sounded like she knew what she was talking about when she said she knew what was going on.

“I’ll do it, but on one condition.”

“What is it, sir?”

“I’ll do it if you stop calling me sir. I worked for a living, thank you very much.”

The woman made what was perhaps the most shocking sound since he had woken up. He had almost forgotten how wonderful that sound was. She laughed.

“Absolutely. What’s your name?”

Edward threw Spanky out through the bars and heard it clatter on the road. He stood up with his hands where everyone could see them. There were a few gasps from onlookers, probably at the still-sorry state of his face, but they weren’t as bad as he would have expected earlier. He could probably pass as a regular human by now, albeit one with a serious skin condition. For some reason that brought him a great deal of satisfaction.

“Edward,” he said. “Edward Schuett.”

Chapter Twelve

By the time she reached the crowd gathered around the cars and truck, Rae’s lungs burned from the speed with which she had been pedaling her bike. The crowd was several people thick, and Rae had to stand on the pedals before she stopped in order to see anything. There didn’t appear to be much to see. Edward stood on the road behind the truck as two men, dressed much like DuFresne and Patal had been, quickly patted him down for more weapons. More men and women dressed the same way, either people from Merton Security or the CRS, were moving swiftly through the crowd and confiscating any cameras or recording devices. Many of the onlookers loudly protested this, but the security people made no effort to hide the guns strapped in holsters underneath their jackets. The crowd might be angry, but they were the descendants of survivors. They knew a time not to fight when they saw one.

Rae got off her bike, dropped it, and pushed past several people in the crowd. She could see Edward, his brow furrowed and his mouth tight from the emotion he was holding in, but he didn’t resist as the security people led him to one of the cars. An African-American woman in her forties stood by the car nearest to Rae, and she watched Edward with even more intensity than all the curious onlookers. Everyone else here looked mildly shocked at the appearance of the man who had been in the truck, but Rae didn’t think most of them knew what he really was. Edward may have looked sickly now, but not undead. His healing was continuing at an astounding rate. Only this one woman looked at him like she knew what Edward was, although she didn’t look at all fearful of him. Instead, she had a hesitant, hopeful look on her face. Rae tried to push past her so she could get to Edward, but the woman saw her and snapped her fingers at the nearest security personnel. A beefy woman nearby immediately stopped confiscating cameras and grabbed Rae by the shoulders.

“Damn it, let me go,” Rae said. “I’m with Merton.”

The African-American woman looked at Rae, then gestured to the security woman with her head, indicating that they move out of the crowd. The security woman pulled Rae over to the sidewalk, far enough away from all the commotion than none of the onlookers would be able to overhear them.

“You’re Rae Neuman, correct?” the woman said. “I’m Danielle Gates, Chief Director of Special Projects for the Center for Reanimation Studies.”

Rae blinked. She had heard that name before. “Do you mean you’re the local chief of these things, or…”

Gates smiled. She had the smile of someone who had been practicing disarming expressions for most of her life. “The whole country. I was at the field office in Chicago when I was informed that a woman at a small city’s gate had seen something interesting.”

“Look,” Rae said, “you’ve got to listen to me. I don’t know what you people think he is…”

Gates’ smile temporarily disappeared. “I’m afraid that’s classified.”

“I’m just saying, he’s not dangerous. You can’t kill him, please.”

Gates raised an eyebrow. “You’re referring to Mr. Schuett as ‘him,’ not ‘it’.”

Rae hadn’t even realized that. “Um, I guess I am. But he can actually think. He remembers things from before. You can’t hurt him.”

Gates paused. “Why would you think we were going to kill him?”

“The guy at my apartment, DuFresne. He gave the order to shoot.”

Gates’ smile disappeared again, and this time Rae wasn’t sure that it would be returning any time soon. “Mr. DuFresne will be properly reprimanded, I assure you. He reacted in a manner outside the parameters he had been given. Let me ease your mind when I say that Mr. Schuett will not be harmed in any way.”

Her tone was soothing, but Rae’s mind didn’t feel the least bit at ease. “So what are you going to do with him then?”

Gates gestured to the woman who had been holding Rae by the shoulders. “Would you mind please retrieving Miss Neuman’s B-36?” The woman nodded and left them alone for the moment. “Miss Neuman…Rae. May I call you Rae?”

Rae didn’t feel comfortable with where this might be going. “No, I don’t think so. You can go right on calling me Miss Neuman, thank you.”

Gates didn’t seem surprised by this. “Fine then. Miss Neuman, we appreciate both your help and the help of Merton Security in finding and identifying Mr. Schuett. You will be rewarded handsomely for keeping an eye on him for us. Because that is exactly what you were doing, correct? Keeping an eye on him? And not possibly trying to let someone as unusual and potentially dangerous as a thinking zombie loose?”

Rae didn’t speak. She was sure her expression said enough to this woman. She wanted to kick Gates in the shin, grab Spanky, and then take Edward somewhere far away from these people. She didn’t know why she suddenly wanted to protect him so much. She’d only just met him. But he seemed vulnerable, and while these people might have been able to give him his answers, she had no idea what else they might do with him. Gates’ assurances could be sincere, or she could work for the same government that had basically ignored the heart of the country while protecting the elite citizens of the coast during the worst point in the world’s history.

But Rae couldn’t do anything. Any attempt to help Edward now would only result in her getting arrested or possibly even shot.

Gates put a hand on Rae’s shoulder, and Rae resisted the urge to take it off while breaking a few fingers. “You will receive a bonus shortly, and I’m certain I can get you a promotion with Merton. The condition, of course, is that you don’t talk about this to anyone. You forget that you were ever a part of his story. As far as any of these people watching here know, all they saw was a sick man trying to evade custody for some reason. They don’t need to know who he really was. Ever. And if they do and we find out it was your doing, not only will you not be receiving that bonus, you will lose your job and your apartment. We’ll even take away your stupid gun.” To emphasize the words, Gates put out a hand for the returned security woman to place the rifle in. Gates handed Rae the weapon. “I trust you’ll be on board with us about this?”

“Of course,” Rae said. She wasn’t sure how convincing that sounded, so she added, “As long as my bonus and promotion are good enough.”

Gates snorted and took her hand off Rae’s shoulder. That final mercenary line seemed to do the trick, and Gates eased. “Good. It will be. Good day then, Miss Neuman.”

Gates walked away, moving swiftly between all the security people, giving them orders, and going in the general direction of the Merton employees who were talking to Ringo. From what little she knew about him, Rae was certain he wouldn’t have an issue taking a bribe to stay silent. That was the smart thing to do now.

Rae heard a wheezing noise from behind her and turned to see an elderly gentleman walking up to her. He was tall with a scraggly beard but only a few patches of hair on his head. His glasses were thick and the glass was yellow with age. He was probably older than anyone Rae had ever seen before, old enough to remember a time before the Uprising. All the commotion had probably attracted him, and all he would want was to know that everything was still safe and fell in line with the status quo.

“Miss,” the old man said. “Miss, what was it? What happened here?”

Rae looked for Gates. She had apparently finished talking with Ringo and was getting into the car that had Edward in it. The windows were tinted so Rae couldn’t see him, but she knew he was in there.

“They found a zombie,” Rae said. “A zombie that can talk and think… and heal.”

The old man gasped, but Rae didn’t look to see his expression. Instead she slung Spanky over her shoulder and went for her bike, thinking of where the nearest news outlet would be for her to tell all this to. Rae didn’t give a crap whether or not she got her money, and she had hated her job enough that she had never really wanted to be promoted anyway. Her apartment was a shithole that she could easily replace. The government could take all those things from her if they wanted.

As for them trying to take Spanky, well, Rae was pretty certain that the old-style NRA had once had a saying for that.