The Reanimation of Edward Schuett Read Online Free PDF Page B

whatever she could to try straightening this out, but she didn’t know where to start. Who the hell was she supposed to call in the event of a talking, apparently sentient zombie? The person to talk to would probably be one of those zombie researchers, but there weren’t any in Fond du Lac anymore. There wasn’t a need. Except out in the boonies, the outer ruins of the old city, zombies were rarely heard or seen. No one worried about them anymore except when it came to entertainment, so there hadn’t been a reason to keep an expert around for a long time.
    But she didn’t doubt that she had to do something, and quickly. Ringo sometimes had a good head on his shoulders, but from what little she had seen of Charlie she wouldn’t be surprised if he just shot the zombie—Edward, although it was still hard to think of a zombie as having a name—purely so he wouldn’t have to deal with this.
    Rae went into the guard shack and grabbed her cell phone from where she had left it on the window sill. Her boyfriend had given it to her a couple weeks ago as a present to celebrate her new job as a gate guard. The phone made her the envy of all her friends, since so few of them could afford one yet, but she was never quite sure what to do with it. She’d heard from a few old timers that there had once been a time when everyone owned one, and most people had used them all the time. Her generation, however, hadn’t quite gotten used to having them again. Cellular towers and wireless communication had been restored to some parts of the country about fifteen years ago, but here in Wisconsin the technology renaissance had come later. She supposed people in the more populated areas of America would think that meant Rae and all the people here were backwater hicks, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought. It was her people that had been the ones to take back most of the country from the zeds, doing it all by themselves without the military help that the coasts had, so she figured those stuck up coast bastards could just suck it.
    She fiddled with the phone, trying to figure out who she should call to alert about what she had just seen, but nothing came to her. Maybe she was just being a bleeding heart in thinking she needed to call anybody in the first place. Talking or not, Edward was a zed. His kind, if a virus-infected corpse could really be said to have a “kind,” had wiped out three-quarters of the Earth’s population before she had been born. Her parents had always told her stories about the early days of the Uprising, mostly as a way to scare her into not getting out of bed at night when she was supposed to be sleeping. Even though no zombies had gotten past the circular Empty Zone around Fond du Lac since she had been eight, her parents had still taught her how to use rifles and handguns just in case the zombies ever made a resurgence. If either of them had been alive today they would have been horrified at the idea of helping a zombie.
    It was easier, however, to not care about a zombie when they were old and rotted and only had a passing resemblance to anything human. Edward looked like a living human, and if his weird regeneration continued at the rate Ringo and Charlie had hinted at, then he wouldn’t even be recognizable as a zed soon. That might not get him treated any different if those two still sold him to the Jamboree, though.
    Finally Rae just dialed the first and only number that popped into her head, and her boyfriend Johnny picked up immediately.
    “Rae, I know how much you want use your new phone,” Johnny said, “but I don’t think Merton Security is going to smile on the idea of you using it while you’re supposed to be on the job.”
    “Hi to you too, sweetie. Gee, that greeting really makes me feel loved.”
    “Sorry, but I just know how much you love your job and I wouldn’t want you to do anything to jeopardize it.”
    Rae resisted the urge to sigh into her phone. She didn’t love