The Reanimation of Edward Schuett

Chapter Thirteen

Edward was surprised when he wasn’t put in handcuffs before being escorted to the car. The two men led him to a back seat before closing the door for him, then both got in the front. Neither of them talked, although the one on the passenger side kept glancing back at him like he expected Edward to try something stupid. Edward, however, didn’t think he would have the energy to try escaping right now even if he wanted to or thought he could actually make it past all the other security personnel crawling over the area. He was tired again, his body ached, and he still hadn’t had any chance to eat.

For a moment Edward thought the hunger in his gut was causing an olfactory hallucination, but when he took a deep breath he realized the car smelled like food. And not just the scent of the two men in front (he was too mentally worn out right now to be alarmed that he had just equated them with food) but something else, a scent from long ago, greasy and meaty. He looked up at the dashboard and saw a brown and blue bag sitting there. From the scent and the shape of the contents bulging at the bag’s side, Edward guessed it held a burger of some sort and fries. He’d never seen the logo on the bag before, curlicued letters spelling out the name Zappy’s, but that didn’t matter. It was food.

The man in the passenger seat saw where Edward’s gaze went, and he grabbed the bag to hand back to Edward. “Danielle got this for you. She said that if you really were a Z7 then you would need the protein.”

That made absolutely no sense to Edward, but he snatched the bag from the man’s hand and opened it, tearing the bag a little in the process. The french fries were on top, and he grabbed a handful and stuffed them into his mouth. They were great, despite being cold like they had sat in the car a little too long, but his stomach still lurched a little bit at the taste. He forced himself to chew and swallow, thinking it had been so long since he had eaten that his stomach just wasn’t used to having food in it again, but the more he ate the queasier he felt. As much as he was sure he needed the food, he didn’t want to eat any more. If he threw up, it might very well be the same black maggoty mess he’d had in him back in the Walmart, and he didn’t want to see any of that again.

The other door opened and the black woman who had talked him out of the truck—Danielle, he assumed from the man in front’s comment—got in beside him. She looked at the torn bag in his hands and smiled. “Does it help any?” she asked.

“No,” Edward said. “In fact I think I might throw up.”

Danielle nodded. “I thought that might be a possibility. Why don’t you try the hamburger? Don’t eat the bun or anything, though. Just take off the meat and try that.”

Edward stared at her for several seconds, then did what she said. He pulled the burger, a large and greasy third-pounder, out of its carton and took the meat from the bun. His stomach stopped rolling as the smell of beef hit his nostrils. He nibbled at it at first, allowing the juicy taste to spread over his tongue. It tasted amazing. In his memory it had only been perhaps a week since he had eaten a hamburger, but he had to remind himself that, in truth, it had been over fifty years. After fifty years any burger, even the cheapest fast food there was, would taste like the most delicious thing ever. It also stopped most of the rolling in his stomach. But not all. Edward took another, bigger bite and sighed as he chewed.

“Good?” Danielle asked.

“Yes,” Edward said. “But…”

“But what?”

Edward thought about it. It tasted good and familiar, but it still didn’t feel quite right. Something was missing. Nutrients, maybe, parts that had been cooked off. But that didn’t feel like a natural urge, and he didn’t want to admit it.

“Is it that it’s not raw?” Danielle asked.

Edward paused, then nodded. Danielle nodded back, then reached into her expensive looking jacket and pulled out a pen and a small notebook. She flipped it open and jotted a few words down.

“What are you doing?” Edward asked. “Taking notes on my eating habits?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Edward chewed the rest of the meat in silence. He was still hungry, perhaps even hungrier than he had been before, but he didn’t think he could finish the fries or the bun. The driver started the car and drove off, leaving the crowd of onlookers behind. Edward had thought for a moment that he had seen Rae somewhere among them, but he supposed she didn’t matter anymore. Her part in his story was probably over.

“Can you tell me who you are?” he asked.

“Danielle Gates, Chief of Special Projects for the Center for Reanimation Studies.”

“Is that what I am, then? A special project? Some experiment that escaped?”

She chuckled. “I think maybe you might have read too many books in your life, Mr. Schuett.”

“Hate books. They bore the hell out of me. So if I’m not an experiment, then what am I?”

“You are something we have expected could exist for a long time but have never actually seen.”

“I’m sorry, but that kind of tells me jack crap.”

“My apologies, Mr. Schuett. I promise we will give you a more detailed idea of what we know when we get where we’re going. Until then, I’m more concerned about your safety and comfort.”

Edward snorted. “I’m not really sure what kind of comfort you think you can give me right now.”

“We’re going to do everything we can for you. You just need to trust us.”

Edward didn’t say anything back. After everything that had happened so far, his trust was something few people would be able to earn easily.

Chapter Fourteen

The car drove through the city and back out through a gate into the Empty Zone. While they went, Gates explained that she and several others in the CRS had flown in on the Center’s private jet as soon as they had heard that some random security guard had been asking questions about zombies that didn’t act like zombies. They had asked local contractors and people within Merton to bring him in to safety, although Gates had a scowl as she said they had obviously ignored the part about “safety.” Edward paid attention to all this but didn’t speak. He listened for anything she might say that would give him any more information, but she was keeping tight-lipped for now. The only information he’d learned had been before she got back in the car, when the man in the passenger seat had called him a Z7, but he had no clue what that was supposed to mean.

The airport was several miles outside of the new boundaries of Fond du Lac, built on the same location as the municipal airport Edward remembered from his own time. It was mostly the same, although there were significantly fewer personal aircraft and much tighter security surrounding it. Edward guessed the security was purely for the purpose of keeping out the few stray zombies, since he couldn’t imagine the place, small enough originally, to ever host commercial flights. That one airstrip had been enough for the jet, though.

The men at the gate let the car through, and the driver pulled right up near where the jet was parked. The stairs were already set up and ready, and a youngish man, maybe around Rae’s age, stood at the base. Edward waited for a moment as everyone else got out of the car, expecting someone to open his door for him and grab him to be detained somewhere. After several seconds of waiting, though, Gates looked back through her own still-open door at him.

“Well, are you coming?”

“I thought I didn’t have a choice.”

“Are you saying you want to stay now? Not get your answers?”

“No. I guess not.”

Edward got out, and while Gates went over to the driver and talked to him in a whisper for several seconds the man who had been at the base of the stairs walked over. He had a leather bag in his hand, and as he approached he opened it.

“Are you him, then?” the man asked.

“Um, I guess.”

“Mr. Schuett, this is Dr. Concordia,” Gates said. She walked over to join them as the driver got back in the car and drove off. “If you wouldn’t mind, he’d like to do a few tests before you get on the plane.”

“Okay, first, what kind of tests?” Edward asked. “And second, where exactly are we going?”

“We’re going someplace where we can hopefully answer a few questions—the main campus for the Center for Reanimation Studies located at Land’s End University in California. In your time I believe it was called Stanford.”

“California,” Edward said. Strangely, given the circumstances, he felt a growing excitement. He’d barely even left the state for most of his life. The only thing resembling a vacation he’d ever been on had been when he’d gone with Julia to visit his in-laws in the Upper Peninsula, but that had been far too nerve-racking to be enjoyable. Not that he thought this trip would actually be fun, but that small excitement remained.

Of course, that still left a problem. He wasn’t stupid. There was a good chance this was a one-way trip. Whether they decided to keep him somewhere for further study or at some point they decided he was too much of a problem and disposed of him, it wasn’t likely he would be returning to Wisconsin any time soon, if ever. That part wasn’t so hard to accept. After all, this place wasn’t his home anymore, not really. But there still might be things here he wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.

“Wait, my family,” Edward said. “That woman Rae, she said she was going to look for any records of what happened to them.”

Gates paused and gave him a concerned look. “I do hope you realize how jumbled the records are from that time. There is very little likelihood that any such information exists.”

“Rae already filled me in on that. But please, if you want me to cooperate, can’t you please have someone look?”

Gates frowned but still took out her pad and pen to jot down a few notes. “It’s not impossible. But you do realize that if you want anything we find, we will need your full and unconditional cooperation on everything. Understood?”

“Understood completely,” Edward said. He hoped she didn’t hear the hesitation in his voice. He had the sneaking suspicion that he might learn to regret that agreement later.

“Okay then,” Gates said. “Dr. Concordia, whenever you’re ready.”

The doctor gestured over to the stairs. “Perhaps you would like to sit down, Mister…”

“Schuett,” Edward said. “Why would I need to sit down?”

“I’ve been asked to check all your vital signs and do a few tests,” Dr. Concordia said. “Although it might be helpful if you told me any symptoms you’ve been feeling?”

“Symptoms?” Edward asked. “Um…”

“Edward, Dr. Concordia was brought here on last minute notice,” Gates said. “He has been sworn to secrecy as to anything he finds with you, but I thought it might be…call it telling, if he came into this blind with no expectations about what he will find with you.”

“You mean,” Edward said, “you really can’t tell just by looking at me?”

“You’re pale and seem to have some sort of bad skin condition, but other than that I cannot gather anything just by looking at you,” the doctor said.

Edward looked at Gates. “But, I just looked in a mirror maybe half an hour ago…”

“Let the doctor do his job,” Gates said. “We’ll discuss the details later.”

Edward took a seat on one of the lower stairs, and Dr. Concordia opened his case. Mostly it contained standard doctor’s tools, although there were a few devices Edward didn’t recognize. The doctor took out an object slightly larger than his hand, a squat black cylinder on a square base. There were buttons and a digital readout on the base, but the cylinder was completely smooth except for a small black opening over the readout. The doctor kneeled next to Edward, put the device on the ground, and then pulled a syringe and rubber cord from the case.

“Hold out your arm, please,” the doctor requested. Edward did. It was a good thing Edward wore short sleeves, since otherwise Dr. Concordia would have needed to roll up the filthy and ragged cloth. The doctor wrinkled his nose in disgust as he wrapped the cord around Edward’s forearm and swabbed the crook of his elbow with alcohol, and Edward was reminded how terrible he probably smelled.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I could get some new clothes anytime soon?” Edward asked Gates.

“That’s one of the things I asked the driver to get while we’re waiting here,” Gates said. “I’m sure those old things smell just as bad to you as they do to us.”

Actually, Edward thought there was something vaguely pleasant and reassuring about the way they smelled, but he was sure that wasn’t how he was supposed to answer. Instead he just stayed quiet.

The doctor used the syringe to fill a vial with Edward’s blood, then stuck it in the opening of the black device. Immediately it began to whir. “What is that thing, anyway?” Edward asked. The doctor gave him a confused look.

“Uh, what does it look like?”

“Don’t have a clue,” Edward said.

“How could you not know…” the doctor started, but Gates cut him off.

“Remember what I said, Doctor. No unnecessary conversations with Mr. Schuett.” Gates looked at Edward. “It’s similar to the blood centrifuges doctors used in your time, but portable and capable of greater analysis in a shorter timeframe.” The doctor frowned when she said “in your time,” but he didn’t speak any more.

The rest of the tests were pretty standard. The doctor checked his blood pressure and his heartbeat, as well as some basic tests for eye movement or pupil dilation or whatever the hell it was. Edward didn’t really know what most of the tests were actually supposed to discover.

The black device was still whirring as the doctor put all his instruments away. “On the outside, he seems mostly fine,” he said to Gates. “A few irregularities, although nothing I would consider alarming if not for his pale coloring or the scabs on his skin.” The doctor looked back at Edward, and he paused for a moment, blinking several times. “Although I must not be paying nearly enough attention as I should have. When he first got out of the car his skin condition seemed worse to me.”

After a few more seconds the device stopped whirring and instead made a ding like an egg timer. The doctor stooped down to look at the readout. “Now let’s take a look at this. Most levels look fine. Hmmm, some very strange blood sugar levels. What about…” He pressed a few buttons. “Looks like he tests negative on all major diseases. Wait…” He stopped pressing buttons and stared down at the device. He didn’t move for many seconds, but when he did he stood up and slowly backed away from Edward.

“What is it, Doctor?” Gates asked.

“I think you already know,” the doctor said. “Or else I wouldn’t be here.”

Edward noticed that Dr. Concordia suddenly wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“The Animator Virus?” Gates asked.

“In unprecedented levels. Miss Gates, what the hell is that thing?”

From a person to a thing in just a few minutes. Edward would have felt hurt if he hadn’t already been half-expecting that response.

Something about his feelings must have shown on his face, because Gates looked at him, gave him a pitying look, and the gestured at Dr. Concordia. “Doctor, let’s go talk over here,” she said. “Bring the blood tester so we can take a closer look at the results.”

The two of them moved out of earshot, but he continued to watch them. Gates looked calm through the whole conversation, but the doctor’s demeanor kept changing. For several minutes he grew more and more agitated until Gates put a hand on his shoulder and appeared to say soothing things. He calmed down as he showed her various things on the blood tester. Whatever else it said, it couldn’t have been simple because they talked for an awfully long time.

After a couple of minutes Edward stood up and paced around at the base of the stairs. He didn’t dare go too far from them for fear that Gates might think he was trying to get away. He wondered if he even could. The three of them appeared to be alone out here, but that couldn’t possibly be the case. After all the commotion they’d gone through just to get him here, there had to be some sort of guard. Edward sniffed instinctively. It was strange, but he almost believed he could smell Gates and Dr. Concordia. They smelled like meat. He tried not to think about that.

Or maybe that wasn’t his imagination. Maybe that had something to do with being a zombie. He sniffed again, and this time he thought he caught more than just the two of them. There was a slight breeze, not enough that it blew away the scents of Gates and Concordia, but enough that he didn’t think he would smell anyone downwind from him. Upwind, however, there was definitely something.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. There was a single something some distance away, something with the smell of rot and mildew and yet…was that…honey? No, not quite, but to him it smelled similar. Edward recognized that scent. He’d smelled it earlier in the day (had it only been a day so far? It felt to him like years had already passed) inside the Walmart. He’d sniffed that odor just before the first of the other zombies had shown up.

He opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the scent. There was a fence in that direction and then nothing but an open field, although it was covered in tall grass. From this point of view Edward couldn’t see anyone or anything out there, but he knew one of the undead was wandering around. He couldn’t tell if it was coming this direction or not, but since it was upwind he doubted it could smell any of the live people at the airport.

Neither Gates nor Concordia seemed to notice. He was the only one that could smell it.

A sharp crack echoed through the air, and both Edward and Concordia jumped. Gates, however, barely appeared to notice. It sounded like a gunshot, although at first Edward couldn’t tell who had been shooting or at what. Then the scent from the field began to fade. Edward glanced around and finally saw someone at a window in the control tower. It was far enough away that he couldn’t be sure, but the person might have had a rifle.

Apparently he hadn’t been the only one to notice the zombie. Maybe they always kept someone with a gun up there to make sure the occasional random zombie didn’t get too close, but Edward didn’t think that was the case.

He was suddenly completely certain what would happen if he wandered too far from the plane.

Chapter Fifteen

The plane was not scheduled to leave for another hour yet. He continued to wait outside it for ten minutes before Gates was finished with Concordia. By the end of their conversation Concordia seemed agitated again, but Edward didn’t think that was because of him this time. Something about Gates’ demeanor had changed. She no longer looked so calm, and there was now something vaguely threatening about the way she put her hand on his shoulder. Edward thought of the sniper in the tower again, and he guessed Gates was informing him that maybe Concordia might meet a sniper of his very own if he discussed anything he’d seen here.

Gates dismissed Dr. Concordia as the car came back. The driver stayed in the car and drove the doctor home, wherever that might have been, while the other man got out and approached Edward and Gates. In one hand he had another bag from Zappy’s. In the other he had a plain button-down shirt, a pair of jeans, a belt, and slippers.

“I had to guess at the sizes,” the man said to Gates. “I know you’re in a hurry, so I stopped at a thrift store I found on the outer edge of the town rather than going all the way to a department store. Sorry about the slippers, but they didn’t have much else.”

“That’s fine,” Gates said. “All we need is something to make him comfortable until we reach Land’s End. And the rest?”

The man held up the bag. “You should have seen the look on their faces when I asked for three raw hamburgers.”

Gates took the bag and clothes and handed them to Edward. “There’s a small bathroom on the plane where you can change. We’ll have the pilot get ready to go in the mean time. Once we’re in the air, I can give you what few answers I know. Any other answers will have to wait for more tests at CRS headquarters.”

She led the way up the stairs and pointed him in the direction of the bathroom once they were inside. The jet was small, obviously intended for private flights rather than commercial ones. Nothing about it would have made Edward think he was on technology that should have been fifty years from what he remembered, but he wasn’t terribly surprised by that. He left the bag of hamburgers on one of the seats and went into the cramped bathroom. Changing in it wasn’t easy, but it felt very good to get the nasty old rags off his body in favor of something that had actually been made within the last decade. He still could have really used a shower, though, especially after he stripped off his underwear and discovered the truly awful surprises waiting for him. Based on the maggot-ridden filth he had vomited up earlier he guessed that, as a zombie, his digestive system hadn’t worked properly, but some of what he ate still went through his system and out the other side.

Wiping himself down took nearly twenty minutes, and even then he only stopped because he ran out of toilet paper.

When he came out, Gates was seated near the bathroom door. The other man sat on the far end of the plane, but he continued to look back at them. Edward guessed he probably had a gun ready to come out of some shoulder holster if Edward showed any signs of something wrong. Gates, however, appeared relaxed.

“I was getting ready to send in a search party,” Gates said. “Be honest, was there anything wrong I should know about?”

Edward wanted to say that anything wrong with him in the bathroom was none of her business, but he still wasn’t completely sure where he stood with this woman. Anger or sarcasm wouldn’t likely make anything better for him. Besides, he figured this was probably the part where he would finally understand a few things. That did wonders for his temper.

“I…um…it appears that I had an accident at some point. Many of them. Over the course of several decades.”

Gates’ eyes went wide, but she nodded. “The reanimated don’t have any bowel or bladder control. Urine comes out by itself sporadically, while feces…well, anything they eat slowly builds up in their system until it just, um, kind of pushes itself out continually.”

That was far more information than Edward had wanted to know, but that didn’t mean the information wasn’t something he might need. “Is that…that something that’s going to continue for me now?”

“Honestly, we don’t know. Many of your body functions seem to be normal again, so we hope not. It’s not like we have any diapers for you if it does continue. Most of this stuff that you’re learning about yourself just now, I’m learning it right along with you.”

Gates instructed the other man, whom she referred to as Mendez, to take Edward’s old clothes and store them. Mendez did not look happy about that at all, but Edward was more interested in the fact that Gates didn’t just have him throw them away. For all he knew, they were going to study his tattered, shit-stained clothing the same way they were going to study him.

Edward sat down in the seat next to Gates. “So, you really don’t know what’s so different about me.”

“We do and we don’t,” Gates said. “I suppose that, to make you truly understand, I should start with a brief history of the last fifty-odd years. That bizarre woman you were with in the truck, did she tell you much about the Uprising?”

Edward told her all Rae had said. It didn’t take long, and by the end Gates was shaking her head.

“Figures. One of the biggest, most destructive time periods in history and those redneck outlanders can’t even be bothered to learn the most basic facts about it.”

“Um, outlanders?” Edward asked.

“All the people who live in those little boonie towns like this one. When humans managed to turn the tide against the zombies, it was the major cities on the coasts that were reclaimed first. It took longer for the military to secure all the more remote places. So civilization returned to some places a full twenty or thirty years before the most overrun places in the middle of the country. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning. Chicago.”

Edward listened to the entire tale so intently that he barely even noticed when the jet started up, taxied down the runway, and flew off. When Gates was finished, he’d regret not taking that last moment to say goodbye to Wisconsin.

He had no way of knowing that he would be back this way, and that when he returned he would have most of the country searching for him.

Chapter Sixteen

“As near as anyone was ever able to pinpoint,” Gates began, “everything started in a suburb just outside Chicago. I say near as we can tell because, as your gun-happy friend pointed out, records from that time are spotty. Massive efforts have been made to recover any and all physical records. Some information was even waiting on the internet, when the tech people were able to gain back some ground on communications technology. Too many servers were destroyed in various accidents, especially since no one figured for a while that such things would ever be needed again.

“The virus spread quickly, as I’m sure you can guess, but the human race lucked out a little bit. The speed with which it started acting is the same thing that kept it from spreading even faster. You see, the virus only took a couple minutes to turn someone from a healthy, living and breathing person into a zombie, so the people that were infected couldn’t move very far before it got them. What started outside Chicago on that July Fourth morning reached your region by the afternoon. I’m sure that much you’re already familiar with.

“After that, most places and people got smart. There were still holdouts, people who didn’t take proper precautions because they believed it was just the media causing a needless panic, or people with ridiculous conspiracy theories, or other such nonsense. But they were the exceptions. Flights, trains, and buses got shut down, quarantine areas were created. The system worked, and one week after the first outbreak of the Animator Virus, everything was under control.”

“But that doesn’t seem to line up with everything else I’ve seen and heard so far,” Edward said.

“That’s right. It doesn’t. Things did indeed get worse, but no one really understood why for years after. It wasn’t until the Center for Reanimation Studies came into existence that the world discovered why everything continued to go to hell. That was nearly fifteen years after the initial Uprising. During that time the Animator Virus continued to spread, and continued to do things we didn’t think it should be able to.

“You see, the reason the initial quarantine failed and the rest of the world ended up infected was we kept running into new kinds of zombies. No one understood at first, especially with the widespread panic and the shoot-now-question-later philosophy everyone was taking, which admittedly is probably the only thing that kept everyone alive for a while. But no one tried to study the changes or catalogue the differences observed in different zombies. In fact, there were anti-science groups that cropped up and actively killed anyone who tried to study these things. In their minds, the scientists were probably the ones who had created the Animator Virus in the first place. Even today, these groups still exist. Mostly in Texas, thanks to the purges. Trust me, don’t try to say you’re a scientist in Texas.

“So, jump forward to around thirty years ago. The Center for Reanimation Studies existed, but it wasn’t at Land’s End yet. Well, I guess Land’s End didn’t even exist yet, but you know what I mean. CRS had grown from a division of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. They had finally caught a large number of zombies to experiment on and test. And that was when they made the first real breakthrough. They discovered that there was not just one kind of zombie, but four. Four distinct kinds each with their own traits. The first kind, designated as Z1s, were what you initially saw and what turned you.

“The second kind, Z2s, did not appear to be any different at first glance. All reports seemed the same. They moved at the same speed as the originals, did the exact same shambles and moans. But the early CRS had noticed discrepancies in the reports about how long the Animator Virus took before it turned its victims. After the first month, people reported taking up to a day to turn people. The CRS didn’t have any samples of the earliest virus by that time, so the difference would have been purely theoretical except for the obvious change that occurred nearly a year later. The government by then had thought they had everything under control and were ready to start clearing out the middle of the country. That’s when we started seeing the Z3s. With them, the virus didn’t need to be directly passed through blood or saliva anymore. Any fluid from a zombie could pass it, and the virus remained active for several days in the fluid. The virus had been mutating all this time, you see, and it made the Animator Virus nearly impossible to stop.

“Years went by. For a long time, hygiene practices changed. Even today, you’ll still find some older people who are obsessive about it. Eventually things once again got under control on the coasts. By the time the CRS in Atlanta discovered the variations in zombies, the Z4s had started showing up. Now here’s where things start to get interesting, I think. The Z4s were slightly faster than the Z3s, which should have made them more formidable. But they didn’t spread the virus as fast, and Atlanta was having more ease keeping them under control. That’s when they started the tests on zombie specimens. They learned some new things about how the zombies worked, but most importantly they discovered that the Z4s weren’t infected with the more aggressive version of the virus after all. They were infected with an earlier version, nearly identical to what had been seen in the Z2s. Do you understand what I’m getting at here? The Animator Virus wasn’t mutated in these specimens. Instead, it was the zombies themselves who had changed long after they’d been infected.

“Everyone who is alive today probably owes their lives to the researchers there in Atlanta. Their work on the different types of zombies eventually led to more effective ways to hold them back. Since then we’ve eliminated all zombies in more urban areas, and they can only be found in occasional small hordes wandering around the countryside. Most people know not to go out that far anymore.”

“But that’s only four kinds,” Edward said. “Mendez mentioned earlier something about one called a Z7.”

Gates glared at Mendez. “Well, Mendez should know better than to let something like that just slip his lips unless he wants to be reassigned to some remote CRS facility in Cornhole, Idaho. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Yes, you’re correct. There are more known varieties. Two, in fact. Z5s and Z6s. And they are the reason the CRS has its main headquarters now at Land’s End instead of Atlanta. When the people in the Atlanta CRS started studying some of the captured Z4s, they accidently triggered something in a few of the zombies’ genetics. That’s what it boils down to, you see. The original person’s genes. Some react to the virus in one way, staying Z1s or Z2s, while others after some time turn into Z4s. Something has to be done to them to trigger the change into a Z5 or Z6. The Z5s were fast. And I mean very fast. They could sometimes chase down a dog running at full speed. And the Z6s had limited intelligence. Not a lot at all, but just enough. They could hide on purpose. Some could use tools. Between those two new strains, the CRS could no longer really hold them. They escaped. They infected everyone around them at a rate that exceeded the heyday of the Z3 strain. The government had no choice, really. They had to take care of it before the Z5s and Z6s could escape. They firebombed the city. Every man, woman and child who lived there was killed. To this day Atlanta still isn’t fit for humans.

“And then there’s you, Mr. Schuett. A zombie unlike any we’ve ever seen before, but there has long been speculation that something like you could exist, a zombie possessing full human memory and intelligence, complete human capabilities, and even looking human, but you still have a heavy concentration of a Z1 strain in your system. Version Z7.

“And it doesn’t seem likely to me that such a thing could exist by accident. I believe someone changed something in you on purpose, even though such experimentation has been forbidden for years. Someone went out of their way to create you—the world’s first super-zombie.”

Chapter Seventeen

Edward didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the flight, and Gates didn’t volunteer anything else. That was perfectly fine to Edward. What she had already said was more than he thought he could handle right now, anyway. He wasn’t comfortable with the way she continued to call him a zombie, since he failed to see what, if anything, really made him different from an ordinary human by this point (with the exception of the continued trips he had to make to the bathroom since his bowels continued to act more like a zombie than a regular person, but the less said about that the better). But Gates kept her distance from him, and Mendez continued to keep his gun out and pointed in Edward’s general direction.

He tried to keep himself distracted by watching through one of the windows as the land passed by below them, but the view, as breathtaking as it was in the sunset, still acted as a reminder that he was in the wrong time and a wrong world. Even though he had never flown before, he knew more or less what he was supposed to see as the jet flew over the Midwest. Julia had described to him once how all the roads and farmland turned the ground into a huge checkerboard pattern for as far as the eye could see, with the occasion town or city breaking it up. Those colossal squares seemed to be a thing of the past, though. He could sometimes see the outlines of where they had once been, but the roads that had divided them were fewer. He didn’t think that most of the land was crops anymore, either. Huge portions of the land had gone back to their natural states after fifty years of being left to themselves. Sometimes he thought he saw small patches that might have been farmland, but these were only near small, worn-looking settlements. If what Rae said was right, even that much development was rather new. It had taken such a short period of time for America to devolve back to an earlier state, it seemed.

Staring out at the empty land, it finally hit him just how much time had really passed. Everything he had known was gone, and there would be no such thing as familiar in this new world. Even Rae and Gates’ brief history lessons had done little to educate him. He had no idea who the president was, or what had happened to the president he remembered. He wasn’t even sure that America still had a president. For all he knew it had turned into a monarchy or something. NASCAR? Did that still exist? It had to in some form, right? Or had that been another aspect of his culture that had been neglected and forgotten when corpses had started shambling around and eating people? Baseball? Football? Mexican food? Did anything he had loved still exist?

Was Dana still out there somewhere?

He hadn’t realized he was crying until Gates handed him a Kleenex. Or maybe he should just call it a tissue. Maybe the Kleenex brand didn’t exist anymore.

“Thank you,” Edward said.

“You’re welcome,” Gates said. “What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing. Everything. Hey, I don’t suppose you could tell me who’s currently the king of the United States, could you?”

Gates gave him a funny look. “There is no king. There’s a president.”

“Good. That’s good to know.”

The jet landed long enough to refuel at some remote airport. Edward was allowed to get out and stretch a little, but he made sure not to wander very far. He remembered the sniper in Fond du Lac, and figured Gates would have likely called ahead to make sure there was similar security here. Again somebody went to get food—actual meals for Gates, Mendez, and the pilots, raw meat for him. He did his best to ignore his urge to gobble it down with only the bare minimum chewing. At least his hunger was no longer at the same level it had been before. And the people around him no longer smelled like food. That was a very good thing.

As near as Edward could tell, their refueling stop was somewhere just east of the Rocky Mountains. By that time it had grown completely dark, and he could no longer see anything they passed over. Only occasionally did he think he saw any lights to mark towns or settlements, but they were nothing but tiny far away dots.

He didn’t know how long he stared out the window, but when he stood to go to the bathroom again he realized that Mendez was asleep closer to the front of the cabin. Gates had his gun now, and while she didn’t keep it pointed at him she still kept it within easy reach. She had bags under her eyes by now, and her notebook was again in hand as she scribbled a few notes.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing down?” Edward asked.

“For starters, I writing that it appears you need less sleep than a human.”

“Could you please stop referring to me as though I’m not a human?”

All that got for a response was a few more jotted down notes.

“What do you mean I need less sleep? I slept before you found me.”

“But for how long?” Gates asked. “From what I’ve been told, you were only out of anybody’s sight for a few hours.”

“Yeah, I guess. Maybe an hour or two?”

“And here it is, quite late by your time zone, yet you don’t appear to be tired.”

Edward hadn’t thought of that. Ever since the tingling of regenerating wounds had dissipated and he’d gotten something to eat in his system, he hadn’t felt anything at all like fatigue. “Do zombies sleep?” he asked.

“Not any of the variations I’ve ever observed,” Gates said. “But I guess a Z7 must need to at least a little. Tell me, when you slept earlier, did you dream at all?”

Edward remembered the vague red-tinged memories he’d had while he’d napped in the shed. He still couldn’t recall any clear details, but he remembered enough to know they’d been somewhat violent and disturbing. “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

Gates eventually slept, too. Maybe she forgot for the moment that he was supposedly dangerous, because she didn’t bother waking up Mendez first to watch over him. Initially he thought about trying to take the gun from her before she woke up, but that was just the part of him that resented the way he’d been treated so far. Taking the gun wouldn’t actually do anything useful in the long run. It wasn’t like there was anything he could do with it to get away while in the air. Also, although he had no delusions that he was anything other than a prisoner right now, he didn’t think he would try getting away even if he could. He had already learned more from Gates about what may or may not be happening to him than he had by himself or with Rae. Cooperating would hopefully get him even more answers.

Or it could get him dissected in the end, for all he knew. But going along with it seemed the only intelligent move for now.

He stopped staring at the gun and went back to staring out the window. He did, however, see out of the corner of his eye as Gates, apparently not sleeping at all, checked that the gun was still next to her before quickly writing something more in her notebook.

When he first started seeing lights on the ground, Edward at first thought he had to be hallucinating them. They started out sparse, but as the plane continued the lights became more concentrated.

“Excuse me,” Edward asked. “But where are we right now?”

Gates leaned over and looked out the window. “That’ll be us starting to come in over California.”

“Looks like the population is much denser down there.”

“It is. When the Uprising happened, those who weren’t complete rednecks realized there really would be safety in numbers and headed to the coasts. That way the government was better able to protect them. Those who decided they wanted to be the lone wolves ended up having to fend for themselves for years. It increased the population here but drastically depleted the population out in the wilds.”

That didn’t sound at all like what Rae had said, but Edward didn’t comment. He suspected that neither of those sides of history really told the whole story.

Although he wouldn’t have known exactly what cities should have looked like in the air back in his own time, he still suspected they wouldn’t have looked exactly like this. There didn’t appear to be much in the way of suburbs. The cities were bunched together into tighter masses with very little in between. It wasn’t until the plane started its decent, however, that Edward could really see how different things were.

“Is that Los Angeles?” Edward asked.

“Huh? Um, no. Los Angeles is much further south. That’s Stanford.”

“That’s Stanford?” He tried to remember anything he’d ever heard about Stanford, but there wasn’t much. He’d never had any reason to care one way or the other about the place. He’d heard of the university, of course, but didn’t know anything about the town around it. He was pretty sure it had been rather small. That was why it was a bit of shock to see it now as a bustling metropolis full of skyscrapers. “I don’t understand. How did it go from…um, whatever it was before, to this?”

“Once Atlanta was gone, the main branch of the CRS had to go somewhere. Stanford University was the second best source of research on the Animator Virus, so this is where it ended up. The government channeled a lot of money into here, and private companies, once they realized business wasn’t just going to cease because of the zombies, realized there was a lot of money to be made in everything from research equipment to CRS housing. It wasn’t like it was terribly easy at that time to ship things across the country or even have people live in suburbs. The result was the fastest growth for a city ever seen in the country’s history. And all of it is centered around Land’s End University and the CRS.”

Edward squinted, trying to get a better look at the details of the city, but they were still too high up and it was still too dark, even with the amazing amount of light the city seemed to give off. After fifty years he would have expected a city—especially one so new and modern—to be some barely recognizable future dome or some other such science fiction nonsense. Maybe there should have even been flying cars. But he couldn’t see anything like that. He supposed humanity had been too busy dealing with other things to bother with the future dreams of the past.

“Am I going to get to see any of it?” Edward asked.

Gates looked thoroughly amused. “This isn’t a vacation, Mr. Schuett.”

“So what then? Are you going to be sticking me in some cage as soon as we land?”

“This isn’t a prison either.”

“Just what the hell are we going to be calling it then?”

“Call it… a hospital stay. An extended one.”

“And is this hospital stay ever going to actually end?”

Gates didn’t answer. She just put her hand back on her gun. He supposed that was answer enough.

Chapter Eighteen

Unlike the other two airfields where they had landed, the airport in Stanford was a full-fledged commercial one, or at least as far as Edward could tell. He only got a brief glimpse of it as the plane taxied down the runway. It took a couple of minutes before he was allowed to go for the door and stairs, as the plane didn’t actually go up to a terminal, but instead stopped near a makeshift military-looking station where someone erected a curtain around the door. Edward could still see things from out of the windows, so he could only assume the curtain was there to keep anyone from seeing him.

There was a plain-looking van waiting to pick him up within the curtained-off area. It was hard not to notice the very distinct difference in style between this thing and the vehicles he had seen in Fond du Lac. Most of the cars and trucks there had been older and run down, sure, but even the nicer car Gates had picked him up in looked more like the cars he remembered from his own time than this thing did. Somehow it managed to look blocky and sleek at the same time. Also, the tires didn’t appear to be made out of rubber, but some kind of plastic. If the van was typical of the difference between Wisconsin and California, then he couldn’t even begin to guess what other styles and materials and technologies had changed.

Three people waited outside the van as they came down the stairs. One was obviously a guard, evident by both the studied way he stood next to the open back door of the van with his hands clasped behind his back and the rather large handgun he had in a shoulder holster. The second person, an Indian woman in her late forties, was dressed in a neat suit that would have made Edward mistake her for a business executive if it weren’t for the satchel in her hand and the stethoscope around her throat.

The third person made Edward do a double take. If the girl standing there had been twenty years older, an inch or two taller, and had maybe a few more pounds on her, then she would have looked exactly like Danielle Gates. She even wore a nearly identical suit.

Neither the guard nor the doctor paid Edward much mind as he approached with Gates ahead of him and Mendez behind. Gates’ lookalike, however, stared right at him, her eyes roaming up and down like she was trying desperately to see every part of him at once. She appeared surprised by whatever she saw.

“This must be him,” the doctor said, but she still didn’t acknowledge Edward, instead directing the comment to Gates.

“Correct,” Gates said. “You’ll want to do your own tests, I’m certain. The PVA that inbred yokel doctor used on Mr. Schuett here back in Wisconsin looked ancient and about as reliable as Shannon Casanova at a tennis convention, but it did appear to confirm our suspicions. This here is our not-so-mythical Z7.”

The doctor gave Gates a grudging look. “We’ll just see,” she said.

Edward wasn’t sure what confused him more: that something was obviously going on between Gates and the doctor that they probably weren’t going to tell him, or all the words and expressions Gates had just used that were completely beyond his comprehension.

“There is no way,” the younger version of Gates said. Unlike the doctor, she spoke directly to Edward. “There has to be some mistake. You don’t look like a reanimated at all.”

“Liddie, why are you even here?” Gates asked the younger version of herself. “You’re supposed to be supervising the Althocain trials.”

“Mom, really, what the hell is there even to supervise? You inject the Althocain into a human, it does nothing. Inject it into a reanimated, it jerks around for a couple hours. Just like all the other test runs. Pardon me if I thought this was more important. And interesting.”

“You’re not going to move up in the CRS if you keep shirking your duties like this,” Gates said.

“Then stop giving me duties a monkey can do.”

The doctor gave both women a poorly hidden sneer as she set down her case and opened it to pull out another device like the one the doctor had used in Wisconsin. This one looked more compact, but otherwise Edward couldn’t see much of a difference. Assuming these things were the PVAs Gates had mentioned, he couldn’t see why this one would be any superior to the other.

A fold out table had been set up near the van, and the doctor set the PVA on it and proceeded to pull out a needle to draw blood. Edward didn’t wait for her to ask and rolled up his sleeve. The doctor’s eyes went wide and Liddie gasped. Even the guard fidgeted a little.

“Holy Christ on a cracker,” Liddie said.

Edward frowned and looked at Gates. “Did I do something wrong?”

“That’s…that’s not possible,” the doctor said.

“What?” Edward asked. “Could someone please fill me in here?”

“You rolled up your sleeve,” Gates said.

“So?”

“The reanimated don’t see that someone is about to draw their blood and then roll up a sleeve to help. They try to eat the person instead. Also, I’d guess Dr. Chella is a little surprised that you’re speaking.”

Dr. Chella started to repack her case. “This is ridiculously childish, even for you, Gates. You come back here with your supposed Z7 and it’s a fake. Not only is it a fake, but not even a very good one. Well this is it. I’m reporting your little prank directly to the president, do you hear me? You’re finally done.”

Edward looked at Gates, who did nothing but stare at Dr. Chella with a smirk. The doctor finished packing up again and turned to the guard. “Well, are we going to get out of here?”

Now it was the guard’s turn to look confused. “Ma’am, um, Director Gates hasn’t given us permission to leave.”

“Chella, are you done throwing your hissy fit now?” Gates asked. “Because the Z7 still has his sleeve rolled up for you.”

“I am so sick and tired of all your…” Dr. Chella began, but Gates cut her off.

“Whether you like to admit it or not, I am your boss. And as your boss I am ordering you to take Mr. Schuett’s blood and test it.”

Chella glared at Gates and Edward, even throwing an evil eye at Liddie despite the young woman having done nothing except suppress a giggling fit during the whole exchange, then unpacked her equipment once more. The tests were pretty much the same as the ones conducted on Edward in Wisconsin, except for the fact that Dr. Chella was decidedly less careful where she stuck the needle in his arm. She had to jab him three times in all before she finally found the vein, probably because she didn’t even bother to look at his arm for the first two tries. When she finally tested his blood both she and Liddie leaned over to intently watch as the little screen showed the results.

“That’s impossible,” Dr. Chella said.

“Yeah, I’ve been hearing that a lot lately,” Edward said.

“You really are a reanimated,” Liddie said.

“You know, I’m starting to think I really don’t like being called that any more than I like being called a zombie,” Edward said.

“This is…this is insane,” Dr. Chella said. “There cannot be an honest-to-God Z7.”

“I think it’s time you and I finally had a long overdue talk,” Gates said to her. She turned to Liddie. “You really want something new to do? I’ll have you be the one to escort Mr. Schuett to Land’s End. It will give the doctor and I some time to go over what this all means.”

Liddie gave her mother a mock salute, then held the back door open for Edward to get in. “After you, good sir. If I can call you sir, that is.”

Edward sighed. “I suppose it’s a step better than ‘reanimated.’“

Liddie took the seat next to him while the guard went around and got in the driver’s seat. Once Liddie slid the door closed he could no longer hear any of the conversation between Gates and Chella, but he could still hear them talking very heatedly.

“It’s comforting, really,” Edward said.

“What is?” Liddie asked.

“After fifty years, at least one thing is still the same. The government officials still act like spoiled brats.”

Liddie’s laugh felt like the first normal thing he’d heard since he’d woken up in the Walmart.

Chapter Nineteen

When Dana was seven, Edward and Julia had made plans to go to Chicago for a weekend with her. That had been about the time Dana had begun an obsession with dolphins, and Julia had thought it would be a good idea to take her to the Shedd Aquarium for her birthday. But it hadn’t been the dolphins and aquarium that Edward himself had been excited about. It had been the buildings of downtown. He’d spent all of his life in Wisconsin, and most of it just in Fond du Lac. Skyscrapers weren’t something he’d ever had a real chance to see. He’d briefly seen some of the towers in Milwaukee on the rare occasion he got to go see a Brewers game, but he knew Chicago would make Milwaukee look like a bunch of shacks. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d been so excited to see them. There had just been something about the idea that tiny people could really build things so huge. He never got to see them, however. He’d busted his foot pretty bad at work the week before Dana’s birthday. They’d had to skip Chicago that year, even though they all promised themselves they’d do it the next year. They never did.

That memory came back to Edward as the van drove through the new (or at least new to him) version of Stanford. There were several skyscrapers, all with designs and architecture he would have never been able to imagine. One even looked like a hundred-story pyramid. It was breathtaking. Unlike on the plane, it suddenly became a lot easier to forget his current situation.

It helped that Liddie Gates didn’t have the same severe and serious aspect as her mother. The young woman smiled at him the whole time they drove. She also didn’t take the precautions her mother had. There was no gun pointed at him during this journey, no notebook, and certainly no talk about preserving his soiled underwear.

“So, um, hi,” Edward said.

“Oh, hi! I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t really do a formal introduction. I’m Claudia Gates, but I prefer…”

“Liddie. That much I got,” Edward said. “I’m Edward Schuett.”

“Edward? Not Ed or Eddy?”

“No, Edward. My dad was never big on nicknames. A career military man. Everything always had to be exact with no shortcuts.”

“Well it’s good to meet you, Edward.” She held out her hand for him to shake. Edward didn’t take it. He just stared at it.

“Is there something wrong?” Liddie asked.

“It’s just…not a lot people have offered to shake my hand over the last twenty-four hours. Most of them have either tried to cage me or shoot me.”

“You don’t have to shake it if you don’t want to,” Liddie said, but she didn’t pull her hand back. The smile never left her face.

Edward hesitated, then took her hand. He couldn’t help but smile back.

“Can I ask you something?” Edward asked.

“Probably, but I reserve the right to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about if it’s something I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Are there a lot of things you’re not supposed to tell?”

“In the CRS? Of course. What else would you expect?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve ever heard of the CRS before today.”

“What, have you been living under a rock?”

“No, apparently I’ve been a zombie.”

“Oh. Uh, right. So what did you want to ask?”

“That thing back there. What was that? Between your mom and the doctor?”

Liddie’s smile finally disappeared as she rolled her eyes. “That horrible witch of a woman keeps making power plays and failing.”

“Uh, I’m assuming you’re calling the doctor the witch, and not your mother?”

“Oh, don’t make the mistake. My mom can be a horrendous bitch too when she wants to be, and that’s usually quite often. But the difference between them is that Mom is good at it.”

“I’m still afraid I don’t completely understand.”

“Dr. Chella wants Mom’s job, and has used every excuse she can possibly think of to get it. For the longest time, I was her pet reason.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can run circles around Chella when it comes to almost anything regarding the CRS. I grew up there. I’ve never even really been anywhere else. I know all the science about the reanimated and I know every theory, every computer. Hell, I could give you a reasonable prediction of what each scientist at the center will bring in for lunch. But I don’t actually have a degree in anything, so Chella’s tried to prove I have no right to all the responsibilities Mom sticks me with. But she eventually got shot down on that one by the president himself. She knew her reputation was on the line, so the next thing she decided to latch on to was Mom’s pet theories about reanimated evolution. Chella said there was no hard proof. Except now Mom has it, I think.”

“You think? If I understand all this Z7 stuff, and admittedly I’m not really sure that I do completely, then I’m all the proof she needs, ain’t I?”

“Well, yeah, if you’re actually a reanimated. You still just look like any other human to me.”

“The last thing I remember before twenty-four hours ago was being attacked by my apparently dead wife nearly fifty years ago. So you’ll pardon me if even I’m wondering just how human I could possibly be at this point.”

“Oh,” Liddie said. She didn’t seem to have anything to add to that.

Edward’s attention went back out the window. He stared for several minutes, trying to find more ways to associate this new world with the one he had known. There wasn’t a lot to see in the middle of the night, but everywhere he looked he saw more evidence that the world had moved on without him. The cars here were different, the architecture was different, even the design of the street signs was different. At least in Fond du Lac the city had maintained some semblance of the place it had once been. This city, however, had not really even been here fifty years ago. The van may have been much more comfortable, but Edward actually found himself feeling nostalgic for the sights from Ringo’s cage.

They passed a squat building with a bright sign out front. The name of the place read “Zappy’s” in shockingly bright blue letters surrounded by what might have been a bull’s eye.

“What is up with these Zappy’s places, anyways?” Edward asked. “Are they sort of like McDonald’s?”

“What the hell is McDonald’s?” Liddie asked back.

“Wow, never thought I’d see that day,” Edward said.

“So you really don’t remember anything of the last fifty years?”

Edward almost said that he didn’t, but he remembered the brief flashes he’d had in his dreams. He couldn’t be certain that they were memories, but that was what they felt like. It just didn’t seem possible that he could have been shambling around for nearly half a century and not have registered any of it.

He looked at Liddie and the expression of genuine curiosity on her face. She hadn’t asked the question so she could further study him like her mother had. She wanted to know because she honestly thought of him as more than just a scientific specimen.

“I kind of had flashes when I was dreaming,” Edward said. “Like the last fifty years really were just a dream or something like that. I don’t really remember anything other than that.”

“I’m sure that with all our know-how we can help you remember,” Liddie said.

Edward thought of the red tinge to his dreams. Bright red fading to maroon, like blood. He wasn’t sure he wanted to remember anything from that time. Maybe it was better to ignore it and pretend he’d just been in a really long sleep. A zombie Rip Van Winkle, maybe. But then there was that last memory of Julia biting him, and Dana. That memory, at least, he needed to find. He needed to know what had happened to them.

“Maybe,” Edward said. “Is that really what you intend to do? Help me?”

“Of course it is. What else are you expecting us to do?”

“Dissect me?”

“What do you think we are, monsters?”

“How would I know?”

“Trust me, we’re not the monsters,” Liddie said. “We’re the ones who are making sure the monsters never come back.”

Edward was tempted to tell her that back where he’d come from the monsters had never really left, but it was already obvious to him that Stanford would be a completely different world than the one he’d already seen. She probably honestly believed what she said.

Edward, on the other hand, still had no idea what to believe.

Chapter Twenty

The world was red again, all other color sucked out of it. He felt like he’d just come from somewhere, someplace foreign and unfamiliar and full of confusion and pain. There was none of that here. He could sniff the air and catch something that maybe once upon a time he would have thought to be putrid, but now smelled like honey. The scent was all around him. It was intoxicating. It was comforting.

There were other forms around him, forms that he would recognize as being like him if he had anything like self-awareness. All of them shuffled down a street. Sometimes forms would break away from the group for some inexplicable reason, sometimes others would join them. There was no real pattern to the movements that he was capable of noticing, but he didn’t care. What he did care about was the new scent that had come to his nose from some light breeze. There was something else nearby, something like the forms around him and yet not like them at the same time. A scent that felt fresher. A scent that made his long-forgotten stomach try rumbling, even though it hadn’t quite been able to do that for a long time.

There were subtle shifts in the honey odor, and all the forms around him moved at once toward the new scent. Several of the forms at the edge of the group broke off and went in two separate directions while all the others drifted to either side of the street. With fewer forms so close to him he felt more sluggish. He would have said he felt a growing confusion, if he had even been capable of understanding what that word meant. Nonetheless there was still that honey scent in the air, ebbing and flowing and generally assuring him that this was what the horde needed for right now.

He had no way of comprehending time or how much of it passed as he stood there on the side of the street. All he knew was that the fresher odor suddenly became stronger. The honey scent changed ever so slightly again, and he began to move.

Something ran down the street. He didn’t know what this thing was supposed to be, although on some level he recognized that it was similar in shape and size to the other forms. It was like them and yet not at the same time. It had no honey scent, and therefore it was something he needed to attack.

It didn’t look where it was going. Instead it looked back over its shoulder as several forms came after it. They weren’t moving very fast, and there was no way they could catch it. They didn’t need to. The rest of the horde came out into the street. It didn’t know what was happening until it was already being ripped apart.

Edward ripped right along with all the others. He could feel the flesh coming apart under his hands as others tried to tear the pieces away from him, but he didn’t care. He had enough of the meat in hand to raise to his mouth and take a great big bite. His rotting teeth were still able to tear through the skin, although one chipped on a bone. He barely felt it. He didn’t even taste anything as the bits of the horde’s prey slid over his tongue and down his throat. It took only a brief time for the horde to reduce the thing to little more than a skeleton. Then Edward went back to shuffling down the street, reveling as always in that honey scent, and was not even aware that anything had happened.

It wasn’t like the movies. Edward didn’t wake up right away, sitting up straight in bed and screaming at the horrible nightmare he’d just had. He came out of it gradually, and his subconscious tried desperately to keep wakefulness from coming. Part of him might have been aware that he should be sleeping for much longer, that the mere two hours of sleep should not have been anywhere near enough for him to feel so rested. Another part of him, however, didn’t want to let the dream go. It had been comforting. It had been like home, completely unlike where he was when he came fully awake.

The room was uncomfortably small, and even with only the small bed that had been brought in it still felt cramped. There were no toilet or shower facilities. After all, if the few cryptic things Liddie had said when they brought him in late at night were any indication, this room wasn’t intended for a breathing human to live in anyway. It was simply the best the CRS had been able to set up for him on such short notice. The room smelled of disinfectant, but underneath that Edward thought he could still smell something comforting and sweet. Something like honey. Up until recently, another zombie had been in here.

He knew the fact that he could tell that should have bothered him, but he had other issues right now. Even if he looked like a normal human, had a heartbeat like a normal human, and had to eat (more or less) like a normal human, his bowels were still apparently closer to that of a zombie. He had soiled himself in his sleep.

He got up from the bed and grimaced as he stood. He’d stripped down to just his pants while he’d slept. Normally he would have slept in just his underwear, but he was pretty certain that somewhere in this room there were cameras watching him. He hadn’t wanted to give anyone a free show. That choice had kept the mess from getting on his bed, but instead it was all over the back of his pants. He could feel it sticking to his skin. He went over to the door, trying to ignore the unpleasant feeling all up and down the back of his legs, and knocked.

Liddie had told him to just let anyone outside the door know if he needed anything, that they would provide him with any food or take him to a bathroom or shower, that they would even provide him with entertainment once they had a more permanent room set up for him. Edward understood that the implication of all that, even if Liddie herself didn’t understand or at least acknowledge it, was that he was not able to leave the room on his own accord. Just to test that theory, he tried to open the door by himself now. It was locked.

There was an observational window in the door, but the view was blocked by a sliding panel from the other side. He could hear footsteps from the other side, and he took a deep breath as he tried to think how he would say what he needed. This wasn’t exactly a situation he had a lot of practice in, and he didn’t want to talk about it any more than he had to. Zombie virus or not, this was not something a grown man should have to worry about. He even considered maybe not saying anything and just pretending nothing had happened. He might save some face that way, although he realized that would only be for a little while. There wouldn’t be much time before the stink made his embarrassing situation quite obvious.

The panel slid aside, and Liddie smiled through at him. There were bags under her eyes, but nothing else about her made her look tired.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

“Um, no. I think I’m done for now.”

Liddie frowned. “You only slept for two hours.”

“Well, I don’t feel tired.”

“So was there something you needed?”

Edward opened his mouth but didn’t say anything yet. Just what the hell was he supposed to tell her? “Is…is there someone I could speak to about something?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“No, I mean, uh, about something I need.”

“Right here. I volunteered to be the first one to look after you. Just consider me your liaison for any and all needs.”

Edward bit his lip. He couldn’t tell her. If he were talking to a man on the other side, then maybe he could say something, albeit in a very quiet manner with as many euphemisms as possible. Her mother would have been even better. That woman had, after all, already probed him for all the intimate details about this sort of thing. Liddie, on the other hand, just didn’t seem like someone he could talk to about this.

“Really, I need to talk to someone else,” he said.

“Whatever it is, I can help.”

“No, not with this.”

“What, you don’t think I can do it? Whatever it is, I’m just as capable of taking care of the problem as anyone else around here. Or do you not trust me?”

“I’m not sure if I trust anyone around here yet.”

“Not even me?”

“I don’t really know you, Liddie. But you do seem more trustworthy than some.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

“Damn it, Liddie. It’s…it’s a personal problem.”

“Oh.” Liddie’s frown disappeared and her face softened. Even though Edward didn’t think there was anyone else in the hallway to hear, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Is it that one thing you had a problem with before?”

“Um, I’m not sure. Which one thing would that be?”

“The thing in your file. You know…the pants thing.”

Edward backed away from the door with a horrified expression. “I already have a file? And that’s already in it?”

“Look, it’s not a big deal. If that’s the problem, then—”

“No. I’m fine. Really. There’s nothing wrong.”

“Edward. It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“This isn’t right. I shouldn’t have to deal with this. None of this is right.”

“Edward, listen to me. It’s okay. We can take care of it. I can even make sure this doesn’t go in your file, at least not this time.”

Edward didn’t look at her for nearly a minute. She stayed on the other side, not moving, waiting patiently for him to talk again.

“This is all bullshit,” Edward said finally. He wasn’t quite sure what he was referring to at the moment. It could be his accident, or his situation, or just everything in general. Liddie didn’t ask for him to elaborate.

“I know it is. Let me help you fix it, okay?”

There was a click as she unlocked the door. Edward quickly threw on a shirt and exited the room, walking carefully so none of the mess in his pants dislodged and fell on the floor. This was already horrifying enough as it was without leaving a trail of shit all the way to the bathroom.

Edward had gotten a quick look at some of the CRS facilities when they had brought him in, but once the van had pulled up at the back door of some moderately tall skyscraper the people who were waiting for him hadn’t allowed him to stop long enough to look. He knew from the drive in that the building was somewhere in the center of the city—the very center, according to Liddie’s idle chatter—and he’d been able to piece together from various other clues that the lower floors of the building housed Land’s End University. The upper floors belonged solely to the Center for Reanimation Studies. He’d been ushered right through a series of non-descript hallways to an elevator that his handlers had to operate with a key. Although he didn’t know exactly which floor he was on, it had to be somewhere near the top. The elevator ride had been very long.

After that he’d been quickly brought to his room, so now was his first chance to see the facilities that were, for lack of a better term, his new home. He’d expected a sterile, drab series of hallways with no real decoration, and other than a few random generic landscape paintings on the walls he was right.

“You guys aren’t much for decorating, are you?”

“Not on the lab levels, no. Some of the other floors are a little more homey. If you want, we can probably find a painting to give your room a little more color.”

“Thanks, but no. Although, if you find me a Dale Jr. poster, then maybe we can talk.”

“Who’s that?”

“Seriously? You mean no one here remembers all the NASCAR legends?”

“What’s NASCAR?”

“Ugh. Never mind.”

She led him to a unisex bathroom down the hall, but not before taking him past several more doors like the one he’d been behind. Most of them were empty, but four of them had zombies behind them. No, scratch that, five. There was another further down the hall. He knew that was another thing he shouldn’t have been able to tell, but by now it didn’t surprise him. He could tell by that honey scent in the air.

“Tell me, can you smell that?” he asked Liddie.

“Um, yeah. Sorry. It’s getting pretty strong now, but I know where I can get you some extra pants really quickly.”

Edward blushed. “No, I mean…whatever.”

She left him alone to go into one of the bathroom stalls and came back several minutes later with a pair of scrub pants. He’d cleaned himself up by that time, although he still needed a damned shower. He shoved the soiled pants underneath the stall door and winced when she hissed at the smell.

“So are you going to keep those, too?” he asked.

“Are you joking me? Why the hell would I do that?”

“Your mother did it.”

“And yet again I need to remind you that I am not my mother.”

Edward finished pulling up his new pants and then opened the door. Liddie was gingerly shoving the old pants into a garbage can and then tying off the bag.

“Hey, Liddie?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For, you know, treating me like a human being.”

She gave him a bemused look. “Someone has to. And look, to be completely honest, I’m not sure how much of that you’re going to be getting from anyone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve already overhead some of the plans my mother has for you. Don’t worry, no one’s going to do anything to hurt you. But she sure does plan on getting every bit of scientific data she can out of you.”

“So what, they really are going to dissect me at some point?”

“Hey, I just promised you that wouldn’t happen, didn’t I? But if I were you I’d cooperate with everything. Some people like Dr. Chella are just looking for excuses to make trouble, and you could be the perfect excuse.”

Somehow, Edward didn’t find any of that the least bit reassuring.

Chapter Twenty One

Once she got some sleep of her own, Liddie was able to convince her mom to let her sit in on the directors’ meeting the next morning. It wasn’t terribly hard. Liddie knew everything about this place, and there was rarely a time where she didn’t have some useful tidbit to contribute to any planning meeting. This one was different however. Liddie didn’t even register until after she sat down at the table with her mother, Dr. Chella, and Chella’s assistant Dr. Emmanuel that the television monitor on the far wall was actually on. There was another monitor in the room for when they needed to have meetings with other people in distant locations, but that one was much smaller. This one was only supposed to be used for one person and one person alone.

“Mom, uh, Director Gates?” Liddie asked. “Is he actually going to be talking to us?”

“He talks to us all the time, Claudia,” Dr. Chella said. “We just don’t usually see any reason for you to be here when he does.”

“Well this time there is a reason, Chella, so just let it go for now,” Liddie’s mother said.

“I thought we were just going to be discussing Edward,” Liddie said. Her mother raised an eyebrow, but Liddie wasn’t sure why.

“We are. Don’t you think Mr. Schuett is someone he’s going to be interested in?”

“I suppose,” Liddie said. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it that much.”

Dr. Emmanuel rolled his eyes. He was another one that thought Liddie had no right to all the access she had, but Liddie didn’t care. She was reasonably certain the only reason he had this job was because someone had blackmailed Chella into giving it to him, but she had never found the hard proof of it.

The monitor blinked a couple times as it established a connection with Washington, D.C., and the President of the United States appeared before them.

“Director Gates, Dr. Chella, I hope you’re both well,” he said. Liddie was too starstruck to care that he didn’t acknowledge her, although she had to stifle a smile at the way Dr. Emmanuel bristled at his exclusion.

“Sir, we couldn’t be better,” Liddie’s mother said. “I’m sure you’ve already been fully updated on what we’ve discovered.”

“I have. I have to say how shocked I am. And that I owe you an apology. You’ve predicted this event for a long time, but I must admit I was starting to doubt you. Certain people were very vocal that your obsession with this was getting in the way of your work. I’m sure you feel vindicated.”

Chella fidgeted in her chair.

“Thank you, sir, but now is not the time for that. There are certain things we need to discuss. Specifically, what is to be done with the Z7.”

“I understand your devotion to studying the specimen, but it would probably be in the best interest of the American people to destroy it immediately.”

“Wait, what?” Liddie asked.

The President blinked and looked at her for the first time. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe we’ve been introduced?”

Liddie’s mother cleared her throat. “Sir, this is my daughter Claudia. She’s second in charge of special projects. I thought she should be here today because I think she might be able to play an important part in any operations regarding the Z7.”

“And I don’t think any such operations would be prudent,” the President said.

“But why?” Liddie asked. “He’s not a danger to anyone.”

“A reanimated capable of reasoning? My apologies, but I think such a thing is very much a danger. Everyone knows what just a few Z5s and 6s did to Atlanta. A Z7 in my book would classify as a weapon of mass destruction that no human should try to control.”

“Edward is about as far from a weapon of mass destruction as someone could possibly get,” Liddie said.

“I’m sorry. Edward?” he asked.

“Yes sir, that is something that might not have been in any of the early reports you’ve received,” Liddie’s mother said. “You see, there’s more to the Z7 than was originally hypothesized. It doesn’t just possess greater intelligence. It looks and acts completely human. If it weren’t for the high concentration of the Animator Virus in his system and a few physical abnormalities we are still attempting to chronicle, he would seem to be no different than you or me. His name is Edward Schuett.”

The president took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “This…is not something I was prepared for, Director Gates. You’re telling me this man is not really a reanimated at all?”

“He is, sir,” Dr. Chella said. “The tests I’ve run have proven it.” Liddie turned to her with a confused look. Last night the woman had refused to acknowledge that Edward was anything more than a practical joke, yet now she was the first to jump in and say what he was. Liddie would have had to wonder what her game was if the woman didn’t reveal it right away. “From what I’ve seen, I believe you were right the first time. This thing is dangerous. We cannot let it continue to exist here. The director is putting everyone in danger.”

“He’s not a ‘thing’,” Liddie said. “Not only does he have a name, but he was talking about having a family once. A life. And he’s an American citizen, sir. You can’t just kill him for no reason.”

“You say he had a family?” the president asked. “How long ago was this?”

“About fifty years ago,” Liddie said.

“And he was a reanimated that whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Miss Gates, what do you think this thing has been doing that whole time? Knitting? Playing solitaire?”

“Sir, I’m not sure that I understand what you’re—”

“It was killing. That’s what the reanimated do. It killed people. It isn’t even alive by any legal definition, even if it can talk and act like a human. It gave up any sort of American citizenship it had a very long time ago. So if I order it destroyed, it will be destroyed, do you understand?”

Liddie didn’t say anything.

“With that said, if this thing is capable of reason then it might just be capable of cooperating,” the president said. “Director Gates, you want to study it. What exactly do you have planned?”

She outlined a few tests she wanted to do. It was really very basic stuff. Cognitive tests, reflex tests, tests of Edward’s tissue samples. “But most importantly,” she said, “I want to see if we can get it to remember anything of the past fifty years. We’ve learned so much about the reanimated, but there are still things we don’t understand. How they group together, how they sense when humans are near, how and why they migrate the way they do. The Z7 may just be the key to unlocking some mysteries we’ve been trying to understand ever since the first days of the Uprising.”

The president looked at Dr. Chella. “And I assume you have a well thought-out argument against this plan?”

Dr. Chella hemmed and hawed, but there was nothing about what she said that could be considered “well thought-out.” Even with all his prim and proper posturing, Liddie thought for just a moment that she might have seen the president roll his eyes.

“Director Gates, you’ve already talked to this thing. Has it given you any reason whatsoever to believe it might not be willing to let you experiment?”

She hesitated. “Maybe. It did show a willingness to fight when we picked it up in Wisconsin. But it wants to know all the details about what it is just as much as we do. We can use that. Even more so, it wants information regarding its family.”

“It has a family?”

“It did when it was alive fifty years ago. It seems to be under the impression that some of that family might still be out there somewhere.”

“And have you found any information about this family?”

“You know how the records are from that time, sir. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fake it. I’ve already commissioned a team to forge some fake documents. It won’t know any different.”

Liddie looked at her. This was the first she had heard about any of that. She knew there was nearly no hope of finding out what had ever happened to Edward’s daughter, but the idea of lying to him about it horrified her.

The president nodded. “Okay then. I believe I will let this continue, but from now on I want daily reports. I want to know everything, no details left out. And if this thing so much as sneezes in a threatening manner, I will order it destroyed. Is that understood?”

Liddie’s mother nodded. “Absolutely, sir.”

“And I’m sure you’ve already taken precautions, but I still need to stress this as well. This is top secret. You may pick a few of your top people for the research, Director Gates, but beyond that the only people who are to know of this thing’s existence are the people in this room.”

“I’ve already done everything I can about those precautions as well. The number of people that even know he’s here on campus is minimal, and most of them are being told he’s an outside consultant.”

“Good. Tread carefully with this, Gates. After all, I’m sure that I will hear if there’s even the smallest slip up.”

Dr. Chella actually smiled at that. Liddie would have reached over and smacked the woman if she didn’t think even her mother would fire her for that.

“Thank you, sir,” Liddie’s mother said. The president nodded, and the monitor went blank.

Liddie sat quietly next to her mother while Dr. Chella and Dr. Emmanuel stood up and mumbled to each other. Her mother opened up a file folder she’d had in front of her and began thumbing through the documents inside, but Liddie could tell she wasn’t really looking at any of them. She knew that look on her mother’s face. She’d seen it ever since she was a little kid. This was the look when she expected Liddie to throw a tantrum and was preparing to give her daughter a severe talking-down.

Well, Liddie wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction this time. She was an adult now, after all. She was fully capable of having a calm adult conversation about things that upset her. There would be no yelling involved. Really.

Once Chella and Emmanuel were gone, Liddie spoke in a quiet, measured voice. “You never said anything to me about the fake documents.”

“That’s because I was hoping you would come to that conclusion yourself,” her mother said. “Actually trying to find records of his daughter would be a wild goose chase and a waste of resources. But we need him to be cooperative.”

“So your answer is lying to him?” Liddie noticed she was beginning to raise her voice and made a conscious effort to bring it back down. “And something else. What was all that while you were talking with the president where you kept referring to Edward as ‘it?’ You were talking like he was another reanimated, and he’s not.”

“He is, Liddie, at least in the eyes of most people. Especially to the president, who hasn’t had a chance to meet him yet. I was merely talking in a way that the president would comprehend. If I had referred to Edward as a ‘he,’ that would have made the president think I was getting attached.”

“Referring to a person as a person isn’t getting attached. That’s just giving him basic human dignity.”

“Dignity like you tried to give him when you helped him with his soiled pants last night?”

Liddie was surprised for a moment, but she supposed she shouldn’t be. There were cameras all over the place in here. They would have seen her go into the bathroom with a fresh set of pants and come out with the garbage bag. Her mother had probably even retrieved it from where she had thrown it away simply so the pants could be studied.

“So what now?” Liddie asked. “You don’t want me to let the big bad reanimated monster feel like a human anymore?”

“Actually, just the opposite. I want you to continue doing exactly what you were doing last night. I want you to be his friend.”

This time Liddie was surprised enough that she couldn’t speak.

“Of course, I want you to maintain some professional distance,” her mother said. “You must be very careful not to get too attached. We don’t know enough about him yet, either as a Z7 or a person. I mean, really, for all we know he was convicted child molester or serial killer back before he died. It isn’t like we can check his records or anything. Or he might one day not be able to control his reanimated impulses and try to eat someone. But until that happens, we need him happy, or at least happy enough that he goes along with whatever we need.”

“Mother, I’m not going to pretend to be something just because you ask me to.”

“I’m not asking you to pretend anything. I’m asking you to show the same sort of compassion I would like you to show anyone else. Because let’s face it, I can’t be the one to do that. I have far too many things to take care of. All I’m asking is that you talk to him. Let him confide in you if he needs it. If you’re so convinced he really is completely human despite his condition, then don’t let him forget that. Remind him what being a human means.”

Liddie stared at her. “Mom, I do hope you understand this is a weird request. It’s like telling a kid to go to someone’s sleepover because they don’t have any friends.”

Her mother smiled. “You thought that was weird? You never said anything about it.”

“That’s because Jamie was… well, I felt sorry for her. I thought maybe you were right.”

“Of course I was. I’m your mother.”

She kissed Liddie on the forehead and left the room, leaving Liddie to contemplate Edward and that long ago friend Jamie. The problem with Jamie was they had become friends after all, best friends, but only up until high school. That was when Jamie had slept with Liddie’s boyfriend.

That wasn’t exactly the sort of friendship Liddie wanted to have again.

Chapter Twenty Two

It was tough for Edward to tell how much time passed. He never got a chance to go outside and none of the rooms he went between had windows. He would have tried to judge the number of days by the number of times he slept, but he never slept for more than two hours at a time and even then it seemed like he got sleepy at completely random intervals. He didn’t want to ask anyone, though. Keeping track of time was the sort of thing any old person should have been able to do, and he refused to admit he couldn’t.

Other things, at least, seemed to get easier. He still couldn’t hold down anything other than meat, but as time went on and his body no longer made any obvious changes he no longer felt the urge to eat it raw. Even better, his bowel problems started to get under control. For what seemed like several days after he arrived at Land’s End he had to wear adult diapers. He would have simply called them Depends, but Liddie didn’t know what that meant; they were apparently just another brand name that had disappeared a long time ago. His accidents became fewer and fewer, however, and soon he was able to go without them.

His room, too, changed for the better. He didn’t have to stay in that cramped little cell for very long. Liddie came to him several times asking him unusual questions ranging from his favorite color to his rest index ratio, which he had no idea what that was, but he eventually figured out that was something to do with advanced beds that hadn’t been invented yet in his time. He didn’t know what it meant until she came and led him to his new room, although it was really more of an apartment. It had been built in the facility just for him, and he could still smell the fresh paint and brand new carpet. She’d put a rush order on the place, apparently, and refused to let any of the tests on him start until he had a comfortable place of his own. That gesture alone would have meant a lot to him, but the cap on it all was the yellowed yet framed poster of Dale Earnhardt Jr. she’d put on his wall. She hadn’t know who Dale Jr. was, but she’d found out and searched high and low for it just for him.

He’d been nervous about all these cryptic tests Liddie kept mentioning, but once they actually started they proved to be little more than annoyances. They started out by taking only a few blood samples, but once it was discovered that he regenerated blood just as quickly as he could regenerate any other wound they began taking far more than a normal human would have been able to survive. All it did was make him feel slightly weak once in a while. There were also treadmills and various strength tests, the results of which surprised everyone including Edward. He’d always had a decent amount of strength, but he’d never been what he would call a bruiser or anything, and he certainly had never done very well running. But on the treadmill he could now keep up a good jogging speed for nearly an hour without getting winded, and he could generally lift more than he’d ever been able to in his previous life. The only side effect was that every time he pushed himself to that level he craved raw meat again.

This was all just the beginning, he was assured. Not only would there be more complicated and involved tests in his future, but they were going to see what they could do to help him recall events during his missing fifty years. On the outside he acted like this was something he was okay with, even excited about. After all, it was possible there might be something in there that could give him information about Dana or even Julia. But inside he was scared out of his wits at the idea of remembering. The red-tinged dreams had continued, except he knew damned well they were more than just dreams.

He was brooding on his brand new couch about that exact issue when Liddie knocked at his door. The door still remained locked whenever he was in here, but at least he didn’t have to ask for permission to go the bathroom anymore thanks to the toilet and shower of his own right in the apartment.

“Are you decent?” Liddie called from outside.

“About as decent as I ever am,” he called back with a smile. He’d only been in the new apartment a short time, but that had already become their familiar call and response every time she came to see him. She visited at least twice a day, once to collect him for the day’s battery of tests and once to just talk. They didn’t usually have a lot to talk about, but it was nice to have her around. It wasn’t like he ever had anyone else to talk to that didn’t want to stick another needle in his arm.

Liddie opened the door, but she didn’t come in right away like normal. Instead he heard some grunts and mumbles from the hallway.

“Liddie, is everything okay?” he asked as he started to get up from the couch, but Liddie’s voice stopped him.

“Don’t come out here,” she said. “Just stay on the couch and close your eyes.”

“Are you sure? It sounds like you need some help out—”

“No, don’t come out. You’ll ruin the surprise!”

Edward shrugged, sat back down, and closed his eyes. “Okay, they’re closed.”

“Good. No peeking, no matter what you hear,” she said. What he heard was more grunts, and he realized that she wasn’t alone. For a moment he almost panicked and opened his eyes. Maybe someone was coming for him. Maybe Liddie was just trying to distract him while some goons came to take him out. Maybe the CRS had for some reason decided that their precious Z7 was too dangerous after all.

Then he relaxed. He barely knew Liddie, but he believed she was trustworthy enough that she would never spring something like that on him. She would warn him and try to save him, or at least he hoped she would.

There were some bumping noises and someone cursed. It sounded like there were at least two other people with Liddie, and they were coming through the door slowly.

“Careful,” Liddie said. “It took a lot of convincing to get my mother to approve this thing, and I don’t think I can get her to approve another one if this one ends up broken.”

Edward raised an eyebrow without actually opening his eyes.

“Put it right over there. We can have someone move it later if he’d prefer it somewhere else.”

“Liddie? Can I open my eyes now?”

“Just a second. Okay guys, that’s good. You can go now.”

The two extra people left, leaving Edward alone with Liddie and whatever they had brought in.

“Okay,” she said. “Go ahead.”

Edward opened his eyes and gasped at one of the largest televisions he had ever seen in his life.

“What’s all this about?” he asked.

“Happy birthday, I guess.”

“It’s not my birthday. Or at least I don’t think it is.”

“I thought about asking you, but I thought that might give away that I was planning something. Really, I thought it might be something to help you pass the time, since you can’t exactly do much socializing or get outside.”

Edward got up to take a closer look at it. It was longer than he was tall and held up by a stand connected to the back, but for all its size it didn’t look heavy. He took a look at it from the side and was shocked to see it was nearly paper-thin. There was a small bulge on the side that he couldn’t identify, but there was a slot in it for something.

“I’ve got some other things for you, too.” Edward finally looked at her and realized she had a folder in her hands. “Now, I hope you realize how tough it was for me to get this first thing. I had to do a lot of research on your time, and I had to find some archive somewhere that actually had these recordings.” She opened up the folder just enough to pull out a small disk about the size of a golf ball with a hole in the center, then slid it into the slot on the television. The screen turned itself on, and despite its apparent lack of speakers the television suddenly blared the sound of cars speeding around a raceway. Edward backed away and gaped at the image.

“Oh my God. Is this what I think it is?”

“This is the last NASCAR race ever recorded,” Liddie said. “It would have been the day after you were bitten, if my research is right. Despite the spreading infection, some people tried to pretend that life was going on as normal. You can see in the stands that there are fewer people, but the race wasn’t interrupted at all. It was a long time before the Uprising was under enough control that organized sports events started up again, but by then there was a fuel shortage problem. NASCAR never made a comeback. But there is at least this. I even know who won, but I’ll let you find that out for yourself. I’ve got recordings of other races, too, although those you might have seen.”

Edward smiled as he saw the familiar number 88 race around the track. “It’s great. Thank you. Makes it feel a little more like home.”

“Well, that’s not really the most important thing. There’s something else. Something important.”

“What is it?”

“You really need to sit down for this.”

Edward shrugged and went for the couch. Liddie lightly touched the edge of the TV screen. He thought maybe she was going to turn it off so they could talk in quiet, but it sounded like the TV got louder instead. It wasn’t a lot, and maybe she hadn’t even done it on purpose, but it was strange enough that he took note of it.

Liddie took a place next to him on the couch, sitting closer to him than she usually did, and he had a sudden uncomfortable feeling. Ever since the Walmart, people had done their best to stay as far away from him as possible. Liddie hadn’t gone to the extremes that some others had, but she still hadn’t let herself get this close before.

She took a deep breath before she opened the folder. “Dana Schuett. Born June 10, 2004. Died April 29, 2055.”

Edward’s heart missed a beat.

Liddie’s voice wavered as she spoke. “It took some time to find all this. Take a look in the folder and you’ll see everything we discovered.” She handed him the folder. He took it with shaking hands and looked at the first item. It was a printout of an obituary. The photo wasn’t very clear, and at first he didn’t understand he was supposed to be looking at his daughter. But it had to be her. She had his prominent chin, although her mother’s high cheekbones were no longer so noticeable. She was also in her fifties.

“You can see from the obituary that she changed her name. That’s because she got married when she was in her twenties, although the ways to make it federally recognized didn’t exist again until she was thirty one.” She paused. “And you can see at the bottom of the page that you were listed as having passed before she did.”

Edward wasn’t interested in that so much at the moment. He had just found out that his daughter had lived through the worst of the Uprising, had even gotten married and maybe even had children of her own. Did that mean he had grandchildren out there somewhere? But even as these questions went through his mind, his eyes still went to the bottom of the page like she had said.

For the second time in less than a minute it felt like his heart stopped. This time, however, it was not out of joy. Someone—he had to assume it was Liddie—had written something there in a clear feminine hand but with tiny letters. They were so small he could barely read them, but they were there:

Everything in this file is fake.

Before he had time to say anything she reached over and flipped to another sheet of paper. “You can see here that we found hospital records indicating she gave birth at least once, but elsewhere in the file you’ll see where we think we have evidence she had at least one other child before they started keeping records again.” She pointed at a place on the paper near the bottom, just above another tiny note:

They’re watching. Pretend you believe everything I say.

Edward knew he should speak, but he didn’t know what would sound convincing. He wasn’t even entirely sure yet what was going on. Either the things she was saying or the things she had written down were a lie, but he was too shocked to come to any other logical conclusions.

“So, um, what did she die of?” he asked. He hoped he sounded sufficiently choked up. It wasn’t exactly an act.

Liddie’s voice was quiet and unsteady. Edward realized now why she had turned up the volume on the television. She wanted to cover up any flaw in her performance for the security cameras.

“Here. We were able to obtain a copy of the death certificate.” She turned to another page. This time she didn’t need to direct him where to look for the next message.

They’re doing this to get your cooperation. They have no intention of looking for any real evidence. You have to pretend this all satisfies you for now.

He forced himself to look at the fake death certificate. “Accidently killed by friendly fire when her husband was defending their home against an undead attack?” he asked. He felt sick. They had wanted to make it look real, he understood that, but if they were going to give him the false fate of his daughter couldn’t they have at least made it a less bloody and painful death?

“Yes. I’m sorry,” Liddie said. Edward looked up at her. She really did sound sorry. In fact, her eyes looked a little watery. That could have just been part of the act for the cameras, but he found himself meeting her gaze. Her eyes didn’t waver. He thought she honestly was sorry, sorry for being a part of tricking him, maybe sorry for playing with his feelings.

Or maybe he was reading the wrong things into it. For all he knew this was all some complex mind game, another experiment to determine how inhuman he was.

“We know that at least her youngest child is still alive,” Liddie said, gesturing for him to turn to the next page. “So you’re a grandpa.” This sheet was intended to look like an article from a Wisconsin news site. The article was text heavy, but a small portion had been highlighted for his benefit. His granddaughter, the one that didn’t exist, had apparently been named to her school’s honor roll. Underneath, it said:

Rip off these messages as soon as you can and destroy them. Be careful you’re not seen.

Edward nodded. “This…this is a lot to think about. I think I need some time to sort this all out in my head, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” she said. She started to get up, but he touched her arm before she could.

“Liddie, I suppose I should thank whoever did this.”

“I’ll make sure they know,” Liddie said. She hesitated, then leaned in and gave him a hug. She kept her mouth close to his head, presumably where none of the cameras could see her speak, and whispered into his ear. “I swear to God I will help you find out what really happened to her.”

Edward hugged her tightly back, then let her leave.

Chapter Twenty Three

It took Edward every part of his soul to keep from screaming any time he saw somebody from the CRS other than Liddie. He wanted to beat them, hurt them, and yes, there was even a small urge to try eating them. All of that would be too good for them. They had blatantly played with his emotions in trying to feed him the fake file, and he wasn’t sure that he would be a strong enough person to fight off those animal urges if the circumstances were any different. Liddie was the only one that kept him grounded. Despite some of his earlier reservations, he now believed she was the only person he could trust.

Not that there weren’t still some nagging doubts in his mind. The senior Gates had obviously been a part or at least aware of the plan to trick him, and Liddie had certainly seemed up until this point to be loyal to her mother. He couldn’t comprehend what her game might be, though, if the CRS knew she had told him the file wasn’t real. No. At some point he had to trust somebody, and she was so far the only one who had earned it.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have any chance to talk about it. She visited him regularly, even more now than she had before the file, but they were both acutely aware they were being watched the whole time. They could talk and learn more about each other, but there was still that secret between them that could never get mentioned. Edward felt a constant paranoia that someone watching would see some subtle gesture or clue when they were together and figure out what had happened, but if that happened he never saw any evidence of it.

Enough time passed that he almost forgot about the whole thing. As angry as it made him, he still had almost begun to think of this place as his home. If things had continued on uninterrupted, he might have eventually been able to forgive them.

Then Dr. Chella did something he never would have expected, and that was the beginning of the end of his stay at the CRS. She had an idea. A good one. Too good.

Dr. Emmanuel and Liddie came to take him for the day’s tests like normal, but Edward knew right away that something was different today. Normally they took him in one direction down the hall, but Dr. Emmanuel gestured the other way.

“Where are we going?” Edward asked Liddie. He’d learned a while back not to even bother asking Emmanuel. He never even acknowledged that Edward could talk.

“Not a clue,” Liddie said. “Manny, where are we going?”

“I told you not to call me that,” Emmanuel said, but that was all he gave as a response. Liddie just shrugged and motioned for Edward to follow him. If she wasn’t concerned, then that was good enough for Edward.

He led them to an area close to where they’d kept him on the first day he’d arrived. Edward could smell that familiar honey flavor on the air again, but by now he’d grown used to it. He could smell it on the scientists sometimes when they came to him after observing some of the other specimens. It made him uncomfortable yet calm at the same time, but it had become little more than a background odor. It was stronger today, though. He couldn’t begin to guess why.

Dr. Emmanuel opened a door and pointed for Edward to go in. The door was reinforced just like any of the other doors in this hall, but there was another door right next to it that looked decidedly less secure. With a quick look at Liddie to make sure she still didn’t look worried, he went in and allowed Dr. Emmanuel to close the door behind him. He could hear it lock.

The room was stark white with a high ceiling, completely featureless and without furniture except for the large mirror that took up most of a wall. He’d seen enough cop shows to know it had to be two-way. That could only be where the other door had led. He could hear some vague murmuring from the other side before an intercom came to life and Liddie spoke to him.

“Um, Dr. Chella is here and she wants me to speak to you about a few things.”

“Can’t she talk to me herself?” Edward asked.

More murmuring, then Dr. Chella’s voice replaced Liddie’s. “I suppose I should call you Mr. Schuett. Do you mind if I do that?”

“I guess not. What’s going on? This a new test?”

“More like an elaboration on an old test.”

“Well? Do I get to know what this is going to be about or are you just going to make it a fun surprise?”

“First, I need to ask you a question. Have you felt any swelling in your nasal cavities?”

“I’m assuming that means my nose. No.”

“Close enough. How about anywhere on your skin?”

“No.”

“Your armpits?”

“What? No! What the hell is this about?”

“We noticed something on the scans we did on you two days ago. There was some inflammation of your sweat glands, especially under your armpits. It reminded me of something else I’d seen. Scans of most reanimated show tumors at certain parts of their bodies. It has been something that has baffled the CRS for a long time. The reanimated are supposed to rot, of course. Their functions slow down so much that all non-vital organs and extremities start to deteriorate, but at a certain point the deterioration stops. They seem to remain in that same state indefinitely, but one part still grows. The tumors. Except they don’t act like tumors in humans. And even more importantly, the sites of these tumors correspond with the inflammations on your own body.”

“Okay then, so what does that mean?”

There was a pause. “I have a theory.”

“Which is?”

She didn’t respond. However, he heard the door unlock, and immediately after two armored guards appeared at the door. There was someone between them, and at first Edward thought it was another guard of some sort. The figure had a mask over its face and thick clothing over its whole body. Then Edward noticed that it had cuffs on its wrists and ankles. There were thick protective mittens on its hands. Edward still wouldn’t have know what it was if the honey scent hadn’t suddenly hit his nostrils. This thing was one of the zombies.

The guards pushed it into the room and then hurried out. It stumbled and fell to the floor, not even trying to break its fall. Edward thought he heard something crack, like a breaking bone, and he winced. The zombie didn’t make any sound like the fall had hurt, though. After lying on the floor for several moments it began to moan and struggle to get up, but it couldn’t manage with the cuffs on.

Although Edward’s first impulse was to back away from it, he resisted the urge. This was the first time he’d been in the presence of a zombie (unless he counted himself) since that first day he’d woken up, but he remembered the way they had practically ignored him. He didn’t think this one was going to be any different, but even if it did attack him he didn’t have anything to fear. He was faster and stronger, and he didn’t even have to worry about getting infected like a normal human would. The virus was already thick inside his system.

Someone on the other side of the mirror, however, wasn’t quite as calm about it. As soon as the zombie had been pushed into the room there’d been a series of noises from the other side, and now that his attention was back on his hidden audience he realized it was some kind of scuffle. The intercom clicked several times like someone was trying to turn it on but couldn’t figure out how, then he heard Liddie’s voice.

“…bitch! You’re going to…Edward! Run for the…”

“Liddie?” he called. “It’s okay.”

There was some more scuffling before Dr. Chella’s voice came back on. “One moment, Mr. Schuett.” The intercom went silent, but he could hear what sounded like a heated discussion from the other side. Liddie had probably forgotten that he wasn’t in any danger, or else she had heard something about this test that he didn’t know yet and she wasn’t happy about it. Either way, anyone on the other side of that mirror was most likely not giving him full attention right now, leaving him alone with the zombie.

It still struggled to get up off the floor. Edward couldn’t help but feel sorry for it. To everyone else in this building, the pathetic creature in front of him was a monster, or at the very least a biohazard. If he took off its mask he would see a haggard face, rotted skin, maybe even eyes that had gone white with cataracts. That was what he had looked like, he realized. He remembered the putrid state of his own skin as he had first glimpsed it in the twilight of the department store, a memory that made him look at his arm again. Perfectly clean and smooth flesh, healthy looking. Even his tattoo was gone, its last remnants having faded away as his body had healed even the scars it had gathered before he’d been bitten. But no one had yet been able to figure out what made him different than this thing in front of him. No, that was wrong to think in those terms. He couldn’t call it a thing. If he was so much like it, and he wanted to call himself a person, then he had to call it a person as well.

All noise from the other side of the mirror had stopped, but he didn’t receive any further information from either Liddie or Chella. This was obviously some sort of new test, but he had no clue what it was supposed to accomplish. He called out, asking what he was supposed to do, but there was no response. The zombie, on the other hand, groaned. In its efforts to get back up it had twisted its body into an awkward position with its arms pinned underneath it at a bad angle. The position looked painful, but Edward wasn’t sure if a zombie could feel pain. He thought back through all the red hazed memories that had come back to him through his dreams. Had he ever felt pain during those missing fifty years? He wasn’t sure. Nothing like that had come back to him. Maybe he hadn’t, but he could feel it now. He was more human than zombie now, even if no one other than Liddie wanted to act like it. And if he could come back, who was to say that none of these others might one day? They’d been human once, they might be human again, so why not treat them as though they were human now?

Edward squatted down next to the zombie and put a hand on its shoulder. It stopped moving. Was it waiting for something? Was it even capable of intentionally waiting for something? He remembered the way the zombies in his memory had moved together as one, how they had stopped and waited to trap their prey. So yeah, the zombies could wait, but what would possess them to do that? He hadn’t remembered thinking anything through, making any plans, and it hadn’t looked like any of the others had either. Yet they had coordinated their movements anyway.

He took a deep breath, not even realizing he was doing it, and the honey smell hit him harder than before. He immediately felt compelled to do…something, but he didn’t know what. He stopped moving, trying to ward off the sudden compelling feeling that he shouldn’t be in control of his own body. The awareness hit him that there was something nearby, many somethings, things that he could consume and become stronger, more stable, more capable of following along with the horde.

He backed away from the zombie, and the bizarre feelings subsided. As strong as they had been, he knew on some level that those compulsions should have been stronger. Had it all come from the zombie?

The zombie started struggling again. The urges came back, although they were still well within his control. Was it the fact that this zombie was in distress? He got closer again, this time putting a hand near the mask like he intended to remove it. The scent subsided, and all inhuman urges disappeared again.

He stepped away again. Edward was sure that to the people on the other side of the glass it looked like he was doing the Hokey-Pokey or something, but the scent grew strong again and supported his suspicions. The odor was some kind of distress call, or at least a way of communicating. It was like the zombie was calling him for help. If he didn’t know any better, he would say the zombie was actually scared.

He wasn’t sure if this was what Dr. Chella wanted and expected him to do or not, but if his hunch was true he couldn’t let this continue. At the very least, he had to get the zombie out of that uncomfortable position.

He went for the mask again, this time doing his best to ignore the changes in the air’s smell. The mask was like a modified baseball catcher’s mask, likely designed to keep the zombie from biting anything. It would be important for the zombie to have it on around humans, but by now he was pretty certain the zombie posed zero threat to him. With the mask off, Edward helped the zombie into a sitting position and took a closer look at it.

Edward had no way of knowing how old the zombie really was. Its skin decay might have given a clue as to how long it had been dead, but if what Dr. Chella had said earlier was true then there came a certain point where a zombie didn’t noticeably rot anymore. So this one could have been anywhere from several weeks to several decades dead, for all he knew. But there was enough flesh that Edward might still tell about how old it had been when it had turned. At the very oldest, the boy in front of him couldn’t have been over fourteen.

Edward looked at the mirror out of reflex, trying to see Dr. Chella’s reaction to the revelation, but of course he couldn’t see anything. And really, how did he expect her to react? It wasn’t like this would be the first time she had seen the boy. He had probably been property of the CRS for a while now. She had observed him, done tests on him, poked and prodded him, and to her none of that would have been wrong. In fact, to most of the world that would have been perfectly acceptable or even commendable. Even Liddie, despite treating Edward with dignity, probably thought of this boy as nothing more than another test subject. This wasn’t a boy to them at all. It was a thing.

Maybe Edward wasn’t thinking rationally about this. Whatever it looked like, the zombie was completely different than whoever it had been while alive. It didn’t have a personality, morals, hopes, or dreams. And when left to its own devices it would gladly kill a human being. Something like that surely couldn’t be allowed the same rights or status as a person.

Yet there was still that one nagging fact. Edward had been like this once too, and now he wasn’t. Somewhere inside this zombie’s brain it still had all it needed to go back to being the boy he once was. All that was needed was to figure out what could push a person back.

The zombie kid stared blankly at him. That spark of humanity might have still been in there, but there was absolutely no outward sign of it.

The door opened again, and the two guards came back in. The odor in the air grew again, but it had different feel, like it was sweeter. This wasn’t like earlier, when Edward could interpret the sickly sweetness to something like fear. This felt more like…what exactly? Excitement? Joy? Anticipation? He couldn’t say for sure, but it had more of a positive connotation to it. Edward thought he understood. Two real humans were entering the room, but the zombie couldn’t classify them as humans. If his memories were accurate, it couldn’t even classify itself as a human. It had only the most rudimentary self-awareness. To it, the humans were just as much things as he was to them.

Both guards were armed with the same kind of shock prods Edward had seen in Wisconsin, although these looked to be newer models. They both ignored Edward and went for the zombie, prodding it right at the base of its head. The zombie went into convulsions and went to the floor. Edward backed away and both guards surrounded it, one holding his prod ready to shock it again while the other, for some reason, stooped down to unlock the zombie’s cuffs and removed the mittens. They had left the door open, and a few seconds later Liddie came in. Her hair was somewhat mussed up, but otherwise there was no clue what had been going on behind the mirror.

“Edward?” she said as she stepped in. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Edward asked.

“I thought it was going to hurt you.”

Edward shook his head. “I don’t have anything to fear from him.” He made a conscious effort to refer to the zombie as “him” rather than “it.” Even if he’d been thinking that way to himself, he didn’t want to continue it.

The guard finished unlocking the zombie and went out the door. The other one gave the zombie another shock, although there didn’t appear to be any good reason to do so. The zombie was still too out of it to react much, but Edward winced. Even Liddie fidgeted uncomfortably.

“Come on,” Liddie said. “I don’t have the slightest clue what Chella thought this would accomplish, but whatever it was it obviously failed. Let’s…”

The door shut and clicked as the two guards locked it from the outside.

“What the hell?” Liddie asked. She ran over to the door and knocked on it. “Hey, we’re still in here. Let us out!”

There was no sound from the other side.

Edward looked back and forth between the mirror and the zombie on the floor. Not only had the guards taken the hand and ankle cuffs, but also the mittens and mask. There was only one reason they would do that with an unarmed human in the room. They intended for the zombie to attack her.

“Hey!” he screamed as he ran up to the window to pound on it. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Even as he said the question, though, he thought he already had the answer. He stepped away from the window, knowing full well that nothing he said would change Dr. Chella’s mind. It was one thing to poke and prod him and treat him like a thing, but she was willingly putting Liddie in danger here. The woman wasn’t just on a power trip anymore. She had crossed the line into full-blown psychopath.

Liddie joined him at the window, being sure to give the zombie a wide berth, and did her own yelling. “Chella, you bitch! What is going on?”

“Liddie,” Edward said, “are you in on this?”

“Huh?”

“Just please, tell me you’re not in on this. This isn’t just a prank you’re in on?”

“I’m not in on anything. I don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on.”

“I think I do,” Edward said. “It’s a test.”

“A test of what?”

The zombie started to moan and twitch. Liddie moved as far away from it as she could. Edward stayed right by her side.

“A test of my humanity,” Edward said. “A test to prove I’m more human than zombie. If I don’t kill it, it will kill you.”

“What? No, Edward, that’s insane. That can’t be what…” She stopped in mid sentence and looked back at the mirror. “Chella, that’s insane. Don’t do this!”

Honey in the air. Edward sensed it before he even looked back over at the zombie. It was getting up, and it knew there was something else in the room, something foreign to it and hostile, but maybe also edible. Something that would help it, be useful to it. When it stood straight, Edward felt a subtle change in the scent. The change was like…an invitation? No, more like halfway between an invitation and a command. Join it. Become part of the horde. Make the horde stronger. Make the horde more capable. Help the horde feed.

Edward was vaguely aware that Liddie was somewhere nearby frantically trying to find something to use for defense. Did she realize at this point that he might be just as much of a threat as the zombie? It didn’t matter, because Edward didn’t succumb to the scent’s invite. He could feel all the subtle changes in the scent and the way it tried to work its way into his system, but it wasn’t built to compel something or someone with conscious control. And as Edward became aware of all those subtleties, he also felt the tiny ways in which he contributed to them.

The zombie took several shambling steps toward Liddie. Without looking at her, Edward heard her fumbling around in her clothes. Of course, he realized, anybody who worked in close proximity to zombies would always keep something on them as protection. Edward didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t look to find out. He was too preoccupied with that heady, unseen mixture that filled the air. The zombie added to it, and Edward added to it. The zombie was what gave the scent its invitational feeling, so what was Edward giving it? The feel of something that wanted that invite? Maybe that meant Edward could take that away, change it. He could concentrate, make it do something…

Liddie was never aware of the minute change in the scent. She wasn’t even aware that some primitive form of conversation was going on directly in front of her. But Edward was aware of it, and more importantly the zombie was aware. If this was a conversation, then Edward guessed that what he had just done was equivalent to making random barnyard animal noises in the middle of a serious discussion. His end of the conversation made no sense, and it thoroughly confused the zombie.

It stopped. That was all it did. It didn’t even stop for very long, a second or two at most. The instant it did, however, Edward heard a commotion from behind the mirror. The door unlocked and the two guards rushed into the room, but they didn’t both go for the zombie this time. One smashed it across the face with the shock prod, but the other came straight for Edward. He didn’t move, wanting it to be completely evident that he had no intention of doing anything to resist, but the guard either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He brought the prod down on Edward’s head, and Edward fell to the floor.

He had a sneaking suspicion that he had somehow failed the test.

Chapter Twenty Four

Liddie had heard her mother raise her voice on a few occasions, but that had always been the limit to her anger. She’d done well throughout her entire life in keeping any temper she had completely hidden from the public, only allowing Liddie to see it when she had no other choice. Even with that, however, Liddie had expected her mother to at least scream in all her righteous indignation.

What she hadn’t expected was for her mother to punch Dr. Chella in the face right in front of the President of the United States.

“Bitch!” her mother screamed. “Fucking bitch! I’ll rip your lying murderous fucking head off!”

The conference room was in complete turmoil, which was an interesting trick considering there were once again only four people and a television image in it. Dr. Emmanuel simultaneously tried to hold off Danielle Gates and help Dr. Chella back to her feet from where she had fallen on the floor after the punch. Liddie’s mother tried to get past him for another shot while Liddie did her best to hold her back, but that was a challenge. It was like trying to hold an angry rabid ferret. Even the president himself shouted, screaming for everyone in the conference room to calm down and act professional. The only person who was calm at all was Dr. Chella. She’d had a stern and dour expression only seconds before Danielle’s fist had hit her face, but now, even with blood running over her lips from her nose, she smiled. That horrible creature actually smiled. Even as she tried to make sense of everything that had been happening, Liddie realized that somehow Dr. Chella had just won her years-long power struggle.

“If everyone in that room doesn’t be quiet and sit down this instant,” the president yelled, “I am going to fire every last one of you and give your jobs to the janitors!”

Her mother stopped trying to fight Liddie off and let Liddie guide her to the nearest chair. It frightened Liddie to see her mother in this state, but she was actually a little disappointed her mother hadn’t gone further. Or better yet, her mother could hold Chella down while Liddie stomped right through the woman’s ovaries. After all, if there was anybody here who had a real reason to be angry it was Liddie.

“Sir,” Dr. Chella said as Emmanuel helped her up. “If I could have permission to go clean up my face before we continue the conference…”

“No you may not,” the president said. “I may not have caught everything that was said before Director Gates came in and greeted you, but I heard enough to know you have some serious explaining to do. Did you honestly lock the young Miss Gates in a room alone with two reanimated and leave her to die?”

“I did no such thing,” Chella said. “Junior over there was never in any danger. I would never put another human being in harm’s way.”

“My ass,” Liddie muttered under her breath. That got a warning look from the president, but he said nothing to chastise her.

“Then just what exactly could you possibly have expected to accomplish with this little stunt?” the president asked.

“Sir, I’ve only just shown to the world how the reanimated nearly destroyed the human race, and maybe even given us exactly the clue we need to destroy all that remain.”

The president only looked surprised for a second before he regained his composure. “Continue.”

“It’s pheromones, sir. So obvious an answer that someone should have figured it out by now, but nobody did.” She neglected to add Nobody but me, but Liddie knew the sentiment was intended all the same.

“Pheromones,” the president repeated. “You’ll excuse me if I ask you to tell me what that means. The term sounds familiar.”

“They’re a chemical factor released by certain species to trigger specific responses. They are a common phenomena among insects.”

“Insects? And just how are things that started out as humans making these chemicals that only insects are supposed to have.”

“I suspect it’s not exactly like insects. You must remember, sir, I’ve only just now made this discovery. The actual difference between these new pheromones and the ones science is already familiar may be very great. Or small. We simply can’t be sure yet. But I do know where they come from: the so-called tumors.”

The president rifled through a series of papers spread out on his desk. “Those would be, let’s see…the anomalies you discussed in one of your reports.”

“Correct. They were never tumors at all. They’re glands of some sort that we’ve never seen before. I believe now that they are what created the pheromones. And the anomalies in the reanimated nasal cavities are the pheromone receptors.”

“And what exactly is so important about these pheromones? What do they actually do?”

“Don’t you see, sir? That’s how the reanimated communicate. That’s how they find these groups they become part of, that’s how they seem to know when other reanimated are in the vicinity, and most importantly that is how they sometimes appear to coordinate their attacks. When alone they only have their individual empty brains to work with. But once they’re together, the pheromones make them into a sort of hive mind. Like one creature in many bodies.”

“But these pheromones can’t be something that you’re just discovering now. The glands you talk about must have been in the earliest reanimated specimens. So why is this the first I’m hearing of them?”

Again, Dr. Chella didn’t even try to hide her malicious smile. “I’ve had my suspicions for a while, but I couldn’t study them. Director Gates had been so obsessed with the idea of a Z7 that she took funding away from all other research.”

Director Gates stood from her chair. “That is a blatant lie! I was only taking funds from programs that…”

The president put his hand to his head like he had a headache. “I will not tolerate any more outbursts, Gates. Dr. Chella will finish having her say.” Liddie looked at her mother, who looked back. She wondered if her mother had just noticed the same thing she had. This was the first time in either this conversation or the last that the president hadn’t referred to her as “director.”

“Dr. Chella,” the president said, “I’m still failing to see how this has anything to do with locking a member of the CRS senior staff in with two reanimated, one of which we still don’t understand in the slightest.”

“And that was exactly the problem. We don’t understand that thing. We don’t know what it’s truly capable of. Or at least we didn’t. We do now. I had a theory, and unfortunately it required the younger Gates to believe she might be in danger, but my theory turned out to be true.”

“And are you going to tell us this theory, or are you going to continue acting like a drama queen and making me ask you questions every few seconds so you can make yourself feel smarter?”

Dr. Chella paused at that. Her moment of discomfort secretly delighted Liddie, but she had a feeling that delighted moment wouldn’t mean a whole lot for much longer.

“Sir, I’m only trying to say this: the Z7 is capable of rational thought, but it was obviously affected by the pheromones. I could see the way it looked when the reanimated was going for Miss Gates. It looked euphoric. That alone wouldn’t be so bad except for the other issue. For just a few seconds, it was able to control the other reanimated. And if it can control one, it can control others. It can do this, yet it is obviously not on our side.”

“That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard!” Liddie said. “Edward is just like any of us! You can’t just say—”

“Miss Gates?” the president said. His voice was unexpectedly quiet, and Liddie stopped. “I do think a terrible mistake has been made here. You’ve allowed yourself to get too close to the subject to see the truth. This is not a man. He may look like a man and talk like a man, but he is not one. He is a reanimated. A zombie. A zed, if you want to use the slang of those yokels in mid-country. And if Dr. Chella’s claim about what he can do is even slightly correct, then that actually makes him something worse. It makes him the only thing in known history with the ability to control the worst bioweapon ever unleashed on the planet Earth. And that is simply not acceptable.”

The president contemplated his hands for a moment. “Between this and the broadcast that went out on TV an hour ago, I do believe I have no choice. This particular project is terminated. The Z7 is to be destroyed. Dr. Chella, since you obviously have no misguided personal feelings in the matter like certain others do, I’m putting you in charge of making sure this thing is shot in the head and burned immediately. After that, I will review the particulars in this matter and determine if any further disciplinary action is warranted.”

Liddie leaned forward. “Mr. President, you’re acting illogically here. Just let us do some more experiments to prove he’s not a threat.”

“My word is final, Miss Gates,” the president said. The screen then went blank.

Dr. Chella and Dr. Emmanuel stood up. “I’m sorry it had to happen this way,” Chella said. “Really I am.”

“You lying fucking bitch,” Liddie said. “Don’t even fucking say that. You’re not sorry in the slightest.”

Dr. Chella looked at the screen as though making sure that the president couldn’t still listen in on the conversation. “You’re absolutely right. This may just be the happiest moment in my entire life.”

“I won’t let you do this,” Liddie said. “You’re not going to just kill an innocent man.”

“The president himself ordered it,” Dr. Emmanuel said. “You can’t go against that. It would be treason.”

“And you know as well as any of us do that this thing isn’t innocent,” Dr. Chella added. “No matter what it can do or say now, it once couldn’t do anything other than hunt down and kill people. And it absolutely disgusts me that you treat it as though it were as good as us.”

Liddie looked at her mother. The woman still had that look of righteous indignation on her face, but that was probably more from having her daughter threatened and her authority challenged. She probably didn’t care what happened to Edward as anything other than an experiment and theory she’d been trying to prove. But maybe that was enough. As long as she cared about Edward on some level, she wouldn’t want to destroy him.

Liddie made an almost imperceptible nod in Chella’s direction, but her mother caught it. Liddie hoped her mother realized what she was planning and wouldn’t try to stop it at the last second, but then her mother knew her better than anyone else. She had probably already realized that when or if this day came, Liddie wouldn’t let anything happen.

Liddie stood up, followed by her mother. “You don’t understand what you’re doing,” she said. “If you go through with this, you will…” She interrupted herself by punching Dr. Emmanuel in the balls.

He screeched and hunched over, putting him in the perfect position for Liddie to knee him in the chest. Liddie then grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him against the wall, although that was less to hurt him than to get both him and her out of the way of her mother and Dr. Chella. Dr. Chella stood there, too shocked to consider now might be a good time to defend herself, as Liddie’s mother ran up to her and punched her once more in the face. There was an audible crunching noise this time, and her mother screamed and pulled back her hand, but Chella didn’t say anything. Her eyes simply rolled back as her nose went from merely bleeding to completely smashed, and then she fell to the floor. She didn’t move, although she was at least still breathing. That was good. Liddie hated the woman with a fiery passion, but it would have made things so much worse if they had accidently killed her. As it was, Liddie suddenly realized, both she and her mother had just completely obliterated their careers and possibly gotten themselves a jail sentence for assault and battery.

Liddie wasn’t sure how her mother felt about it, but to Liddie it was worth it.

Chapter Twenty Five

Edward had just been entering another of the disturbing red dreams when all the lights in his apartment came on at once and woke him up. His first reaction was relief, but that didn’t last long. No one ever interrupted him at this time of day. Something was up.

He heard the front door open, but he didn’t move from his bed until he heard Liddie speak. “Edward.”

He threw on some clothes quickly and went into the living room. Liddie stood in the open door. She looked disheveled like she had just been running or exerting herself in some way. She also had what looked like a laptop bag over her shoulder and a pile of clothes in her hand.

“Liddie, what’s going on?” Edward asked.

“You need to change into these clothes immediately,” she said. “It’s time for us to leave.”

“Leave? To where? Am I being moved?”

“No, leave as in leave permanently and never come back. Dr. Chella has been ordered by the president himself to terminate you.”

Edward blanched, but went to take the clothes. “Is she coming for me right now?”

“Um, no. I actually, uh, locked her and Dr. Emmanuel in a supply closet.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that, and despite the worried expression on her face only moments earlier Liddie smiled, too. He took the clothes and looked at them. They were janitor’s coveralls and a beat-up pair of shoes. They weren’t anywhere near the right size for him, but he supposed that was a minor problem at the moment.

“But how am I supposed to get out?” Edward asked. “They’re probably even watching this on the security cameras right now and calling in the guards.”

“My mother is working on that right this instant.”

“Your mother?”

“And it’s not going to be just you getting out. We both have to come with you. Considering all the laws we’ve already broken in the last fifteen minutes, I don’t think we can expect to get out of this with only slaps on our wrists.”

Edward put the coveralls on over his clothes. His heart was racing, yet he didn’t actually feel scared. He’d wanted to do this for as long as they’d been keeping him here, but he’d never really thought it would be possible. Any plans for escaping had been pure fantasy, although in the more recent ones he hadn’t been leaving alone. The fact that Liddie would really be coming along actually gave him butterflies in his stomach.

“Was it about what happened in that room?” Edward asked.

“Mostly,” Liddie said. “I’ll explain everything Chella said if we manage to get out of here. But there’s something else, too.” She gestured at the computer bag. “I didn’t even know about it until just now, but apparently it was all over the news tonight.”

“What was?”

“You, actually.”

Edward was too shocked to say anything to that, so he just finished putting on his shoes and went out into the hallway. He thought for a moment about going back in and grabbing his NASCAR video, since it was likely a rather rare find in the modern world, but he kind of doubted he would be able to watch it at any conceivable point in the future. It felt a little strange leaving the apartment knowing it would be the last time, but it wasn’t like it had ever been his home. He wasn’t sure that he would ever have a real home ever again.

Just as he was leaving the apartment, Danielle Gates jogged down the hall and met them. She looked even more out of sorts than Liddie, thanks mostly to her horribly swollen hand. He nodded at her and she nodded back, but he didn’t really have anything to say to her. In none of his escape fantasies had she ever been along for the ride. From the very beginning she had struck him as someone who put duty first, possibly even before her own daughter. But he had to be wrong about that. Liddie had to be the only reason she was helping. He certainly didn’t think she really cared one lick about him.

“I distracted the guard in this floor’s security station, then hit him and tied him up. No one should realize anything is wrong for at least an hour. I swear, I’ve physically attacked more people today than I previously have in my entire life.”

“So how are we actually going to do this?” Liddie asked.

“You can both go down in the elevator together without anyone getting suspicious,” Danielle said. “Or at least I hope so. But from there you’ll have to temporarily split up. It would look strange for one of the senior staff members of the CRS to be palling around with a janitor. Direct Edward toward one of the back exits. Probably by the canteen area. He shouldn’t look too strange there, just another low level employee trying to get lunch. You can then go to the motor pool and get one of the vans, but you have to remember what I showed you that one time about disabling the tracking device. Go around to the exit and pick Edward up, then get the hell out of Stanford. If you’re lucky you’ll get about an hour before anyone realizes something is wrong, and even longer before they realize he’s not anywhere in the building.”

Liddie stared at her for several seconds without speaking, then replied softly. “You’re not coming with us.”

“I can run interference for you here. Even if I can only get you a few extra minutes, that still may be enough for you to get Edward out.”

“But you’ll get arrested for this,” Liddie protested.

“Maybe,” Danielle said. “But maybe from here I can show people that Dr. Chella is a dangerous quack.”

“Why are you really helping me?” Edward asked.

“You are the proof of my life’s work,” Danielle said. “Others may think you’re dangerous. Even I’m not entirely sure you’re not, especially if there’s any truth to Dr. Chella’s theories. But I will not have everything I’ve worked for destroyed just because a clueless politician got paranoid.”

Edward nodded. He had suspected it could be something like that, but something about the way she spoke made him wonder if she wasn’t being entirely truthful. “That’s it?”

Danielle glared at him, then looked to Liddie. “I suppose there’s something else I should say, since I have no idea how long it might be before I can see you again. About the file I gave you to give to him.” She turned to Edward again. “It was a fake. I’m sorry, but I did what I needed to do to get you to cooperate, and I would do it again.”

“I already told him, Mom,” Liddie said.

“I know. I knew the very next time I talked to you after you took it to him.”

Liddie blinked. “But you never said anything.”

“That’s because I already saw the way you were looking at him. I didn’t think much of it. I figured it would pass. It didn’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Edward asked.

Danielle actually smiled at him. “You may be an anomalous super zombie, but at your core you’re still a just another clueless man. Just why the hell did you think she was spending all that time with you? It sure as hell wasn’t because she thought you were a fascinating test subject.”

Edward understood her meaning, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. When he looked over at Liddie, however, she wouldn’t meet his gaze.

“I’m taking a very big leap here, Mr. Schuett,” Danielle said. “In letting her take care of you, I’m assuming that you aren’t dangerous, either as a zombie or a person. I hope that’s not a wrong assumption.”

“No,” Edward said. “It’s not.”

“That’s good, but just in case, I feel compelled to tell you that I made sure my daughter grew up knowing jujitsu.”

“I’ll, um, be sure to keep that in mind.”

“We’ve got to go,” Liddie said. “You never know when we might run out of time.” Liddie kissed her mother on the cheek, and they both took a moment for one last hug. Then Liddie led Edward to the nearest elevator. It wouldn’t open without a key code. He noticed her hesitate before punching the numbers in.

“Last chance to turn back,” Edward said. “By doing this you’re probably giving up everything you’ve ever worked for.”

“None of this was ever anything I’ve actually worked for,” Liddie said. “It’s what Mom worked for. I just came along for the ride. It’s probably about time I took my own path.”

She punched in the numbers, but it took an agonizing amount of time for the elevator to reach their floor. Neither of them said anything, and the ding of the elevator stopping at their floor startled Edward. They got in and faced the door as it closed. It took him several seconds to realize they stood closer together than was strictly necessary. Their hands were close enough to brush against each other. After a few more moments of hesitation Liddie took his hand. Neither of them looked at each other, but they didn’t need to. That simple touch said things they may have started thinking but hadn’t brought themselves to actually say.

Then an image flashed in his mind of Julia, sitting next to him on the couch and cuddling as they watched a movie, their hands roaming over each other and touching in ways that were completely innocent yet thoroughly intimate. She’d been gone for fifty years. She wasn’t even like Dana, where he could try convincing himself that she still might be out there alive. She had become a zombie before he did, and even if she was still wandering around out there, which seemed highly unlikely, there did not appear to be any way that she could be like him. Yet none of this had fully hit him yet. By his own internal clock it felt like he’d only seen her a few weeks ago. To him, she might as well have still been alive.

Edward let go of Liddie’s hand and side-stepped away. He hoped it wasn’t too obvious, but he couldn’t do that just yet. He wasn’t ready, and honestly didn’t think he would be ready from quite some time yet.

Liddie still didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at her to see if his action had hurt her at all. All he could do was hope she understood.

The awkward moment faded away the instant the doors opened. This wasn’t the same elevator he’d been brought up in, and the area outside was unfamiliar. She stepped out quickly, but he hesitated and looked around to see if there was anyone watching. Based on something Liddie and Danielle had said earlier about the evening news, Edward suspected it was probably pretty late in the day and there wouldn’t be too many people around. But the majority of the building was a college, and he had no idea what kind of activities a school in this day and age might have going on. The elevator at least didn’t open onto anything that looked like a major hallway, since it was pretty featureless except for a few utilitarian-looking doors. He thought he saw someone walk by near the end of the hall, but otherwise there was no one here.

Liddie pointed down the hall in the opposite direction. “Go that way,” she said in whisper. “Take a left when you see a sign for the canteen, but go past the canteen entrance and take the next right. I’m not down here a lot, but I’m pretty sure there’s an emergency exit at the end of that hall. I’ll head to the motor pool. Wait by that exit until you hear me knocking from the other side.”

“What am I supposed to do if somebody comes by and asks me about something?”

“Just, I don’t know, pretend you really are a janitor. Do whatever you can to not look suspicious.”

“I don’t even know what suspicious is supposed to look like these days.”

“Do your best,” Liddie said. She leaned toward him for a second like she intended to do something more, but then backed away. “Try not to panic or anything, okay?” She went off in the opposite direction she had told him to go. He was on his own for the moment.

He went down the hall, but even going the fifty or sixty feet to his first turn felt like an impossible trial. There were cameras mounted near the ceiling, and he did his best not to stare at them. A janitor wasn’t supposed to even notice those things most of the time. He had to keep reminding himself that he was supposed to be top secret, that no one other than the security personnel on his one floor was supposed to know that he even existed, but he kept thinking about all the ways he might be making himself conspicuous to whoever might be watching those cameras. All it took was one over-eager security guard to send someone to check on him, and this would all be over practically before it had begun.

He saw no one else in the halls, however. When he passed the canteen he saw one bored young man in a hairnet behind the counter and a very tired looking student with his nose nearly pressed against some kind of tiny personal computer, but that was all. These people had probably been in and out of here over and over during the last several weeks, yet they’d been completely unaware that something like Edward was right over their heads. No one anywhere even knew he existed except a rare few. If he got caught now and was terminated like had been ordered, no one would care. For all intents and purposes he really didn’t exist.

So what, then, was he supposed to do with his life now? Any minute now Liddie would knock on that door and they would be on the run, with people from the government giving chase soon after. Where were they supposed to go? He supposed he could try going back to Fond du Lac in an effort to discover what had really happened to Dana, but he had to admit that even that one hope he’d clung to now seemed like something he couldn’t find out. After all, the CRS had known that was something he wanted so they would look for him there first. He could escape, but he had no purpose.

Liddie took longer to get to the door than Edward had expected, and he had started to pace by the time she finally knocked. All this worry and paranoia were becoming a bad habit for him. If he kept this up he might become the first zombie in history with neuroses. The thought nearly made him laugh, but he stifled it right away. Didn’t want to draw attention to himself, after all.

The sound of knocking made him jump, and he looked up at the nearest security camera in the corner as though checking to see if it was watching him. He knew that made no sense, but it felt like the thing to do anyway. It wasn’t like he really knew what security devices around here were capable of, anyway. For all he knew the stupid camera could shoot a net to hold him until the guards came to collect him.

Liddie knocked again, more urgently this time, and Edward finally opened the door and went out.

“You had me worried for a second,” Liddie said. “I thought maybe someone had found you.”

“Just letting my imagination get the best of me,” Edward said. “To be completely honest, I’m scared out of my mind right now.”

Liddie gave him a nervous smile. “Good to know I’m not alone. Come on, the van’s right over here.”

They were in an alley that looked similar to where they’d originally dropped him off, with a van parked and running right nearby. Edward looked around and noticed there were cameras here on the outside of the building, too. If they had avoided looking conspicuous before, they were probably failing miserably now. But that hopefully wouldn’t matter. All they needed was a few more minutes.

Liddie ran around to the driver’s side. “Get in. The quicker we get moving, the more likely we can get out of the city before anyone gets sent after us.”

“Are there cameras around the city they can use to find us?” Edward asked.

“Yeah, but that won’t be any problem once we get beyond the city walls. They don’t really have a reason anymore to keep watching the wastelands, and I’ve already disabled the van’s tracker.”

Edward got in, and Liddie was already pulling away before he could close the door. She sped out of the alley and almost hit another car as she turned onto the street.

“Don’t speed,” Edward said. “That will just attract the attention of some cop.”

“Can’t afford not to. We have no idea how much time we have left before someone notices you’re gone. Or else maybe discovers Dr. Chella locked in a closet.”

“But if we get pulled over that will just take even longer. Assuming there are still cops and they do still pull people over.”

Liddie sighed and eased her foot off the accelerator. “Sorry. First time I’ve ever been on the run. My mom may have taught me a lot of things, but this was never one of them.”

“You said there’s a wall around the city?”

“Of course. There’s a wall around every city.”

“Are we going to have any trouble getting out?”

“We shouldn’t. The only time anyone ever really scrutinizes anyone is when they’re coming back in. You know, to make sure there’s no illegal reanimated with them or that they’re not infected or anything.”

“So how long before we get there?”

“At this time of night? Not long. Ten minutes at the most.” Liddie hesitated, then pointed at the computer bag she’d left in the footwell of his seat. “Just enough time for you to take a look at that.”

“What is it, anyway?”

“Proof that not the whole world is against you.”

He opened up the bag and pulled out an extremely thin computer. “How do I turn it on?”

“Just touch the screen. I already loaded it with the recording of tonight’s news.”

“One of you mentioned that before,” Edward said. “What was on the news that I would need to know about?”

“For starters, it’s one of the reasons the president gave to have you terminated. He mentioned it during the conference, but I hadn’t seen it yet by that point. I got a quick look at it though when Mom gave it to me. We both thought it would be important for you to see.”

Edward touched the screen. “Do I need…” He was going to ask if he needed to do anything else, but the news report immediately started by itself. A woman who looked to be in her mid-forties sat behind a news desk. Although her hair was in a completely unrecognizable style, nothing else about the scene looked much different than a news cast from his own time. “Welcome back,” the woman said. “Our top story this evening is something that cannot possibly be believed, but several witnesses from the Wisconsin borderlands claim it to be absolutely true. The reanimated have been with us for far longer than anyone wants to remember, but we have always thought we knew what they were capable of. Since Atlanta, no further variations of them have been reported, but some have always claimed that there could be one more, known as a Z7. Up until now, these claims have been treated as nothing more than wild conspiracy theories. But now there may just be evidence. Is there really a Z7? One Wisconsin woman insists there is. Please welcome on tonight’s program Miss Rae Neuman.”

Edward gasped as Rae came on the screen. She’d cleaned herself up and wore a suit, but she was still recognizable as the gun-toting woman who had first treated him like a person when no one else would.

“Thanks for having me,” Rae said.

“Is this a national newscast?” Edward asked.

“Yes. The entire country saw this early this evening.”

The newscaster began asking her questions about what had happened in Fond du Lac, occasionally interrupting the interview to show some of the evidence that the network itself had gathered about the existence of a Z7. There were a few blurry pictures of the standoff in the back of Ringo’s truck, and a few other witnesses were mentioned. Most of them looked like yokels, or at least were portrayed as yokels by the newscast. As the interview continued it became evident to Edward that the newscaster didn’t really take Rae seriously.

“This woman is treating Rae like a joke. Why the hell would the president consider this something threatening enough to have me killed over?”

“Don’t you see?” Liddie said. “Even if most people don’t take this seriously, some people will. That’s enough. I didn’t get a chance to watch the whole thing, but my mother told me this Rae woman was arguing that you should have rights and that the government was keeping you against your will.”

“Which is all completely true,” Edward said.

“Yes, and that’s a problem. Maybe you saw a little of this when you first woke up and maybe you didn’t, but there’s a lot of political tension between the middle of the country and the coasts. Some places, like that town where you were found, have rejoined civilization pretty easily but a lot still resist. They still after all these years resent what they think of as the government leaving the center of the country to die. Any issue relating to the reanimated is liable to stir them up. Some people might think the government is holding a legitimate person against his will, and they’ll want to fight the government over it. Other people will see you as a terrible bioweapon that shouldn’t be allowed in the hands of anyone, especially not the government, and want to fight them over that. So you see, your existence, any way you look at it, is dangerous. And that’s not even including Chella’s theories.”

“You still need to tell me what exactly she…” Edward began, but a sound like a cell phone went off in Liddie’s computer bag and interrupted him.

Liddie looked at him with a hint of panic in her eyes. “That’s my cell.”

“Is there any reason anyone would be calling you right now?” Edward asked.

“No. Only people from the CRS should have that number.”

Edward pulled the cell out of the bag and looked at it. It listed a number on the display screen, but it contained far more digits than phone numbers had possessed in his own time. He recited the number, but Liddie shook her head.

“I’ve never heard of that number before. In fact, that doesn’t even sound like a Stanford number.”

The phone stopped ringing, but started up again only seconds later.

“Think you should answer it?” Edward asked.

“What if it’s someone trying to track us? We can’t have that. In fact, we need to get rid of it altogether or else the CRS can use it to find us.”

The phone stopped and started up again. “Whoever it is, they’re not stopping,” Edward said. “What if it’s your mother trying to warn us about something?”

Liddie gave him another look, then took the phone. She looked around at the few other vehicles on the road, probably to check if anyone was following or watching them, then pulled over onto a side street and answered the phone.

“Who is this?” she asked. There was a pause as she listened to the other person. “Well pardon me if I think it is important. Tell me who you are.” Pause. “That’s for me to decide. How did you even get this number?” Longer pause, which included Liddie giving Edward a confused glance. “Maybe he is.” Pause. “We’re already doing that, but I still don’t see any reason to trust you with any information beyond that.” Pause. “Yes, he’s right here.” Pause. “Yes, but I’m not…” Pause, and then finally she handed the phone to Edward. “Uh, this guy wants to speak to you. He even asked for you by name.”

Edward took the phone. “Hello? Who is this?”

An old man with a raspy voice answered. “I already told the young Miss Gates that I’m a friend. At this point I’d expect you to distrust a claim like that, but for now you have no choice but to accept it. Judging from how quickly she was able to get the phone to you, I’m going to assume that you’re both together and on the run?”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Because my contacts already alerted me about the president’s order to have you destroyed. These same contacts gave me the inkling that Miss Gates might have an interest in your well-being, so I hoped that by contacting her I could convince her to help you escape. I’m glad to find out that this at least is a step I can skip.”

“What exactly is it you want?”

“I want to help you. I’ve been trying to help you since you woke up in that old Walmart.”

Edward looked at Liddie with surprise. How many people had even been aware that that’s where he had first come to? The answer was even fewer people than had known of his existence in the first place.

“And just how have you been trying to help me?” Edward asked.

“As soon as I heard rumors through my contacts in Merton that you were awake, I tried to find you. I was there when the CRS came to pick you up in Fond du Lac, but I got there too late and had to watch them carry you off. I thought maybe you might be in capable hands with the CRS, but I was wrong I see.”

“So that’s why you’re calling now? You want to help me?”

“Maybe. But I need to see you. I can give you some answers no one else has. You need to come find me.”

“And where do I do that? Are you in California?”

“Unfortunately it won’t be that easy for you. I’m going to give you an address and you have to remember it, especially since I think it is a very bad idea for you two to be carrying around a phone they can track you with. You have to get to Illinois. Specifically, Winnebago, Illinois. Go to 210 North Elida Street. I might have to do a few tests to make sure you’re who I think you are, but after that I can give you answers not even the CRS or the government know.”

“And how would you even have these answers?” Edward asked.

“Because, Mr. Schuett, I am the man who created you.”

And then the old man hung up.