Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (12 page)

She took you back to where she lived and wrapped you up in blankets and cared for you as best she could.”

“Did this lady have a family or anybody?”

“She was all alone out there.” Gwen shook her head slowly, remembering. “All by herself.”

“Why’d she bring me—how’d she wind up bringing me to you?”

“You have to try and understand what it was like for us back then. For those of us who’d known the world the way it had been before. All you two remember is this, right? This world? The zombies?”

Anthony and Riley both said yes.

“When the zombies came, a lot of people couldn’t handle it. Mentally, I mean. This woman was all alone, out in those woods by herself. Who knows what she’d been through, what she’d seen, what she’d experienced. And there she is one day, all by herself, and some stranger walks out of nowhere, and without a word, he hands her a little newborn baby.

“Well, she took that baby and she cared for him as best she could, but she knew her best wasn’t going to be what that little boy needed, so she came to Clavius and reluctantly handed that little baby over.” A genuine smile crossed Gwen’s pale face. “Do you want to know what she was calling you?”

Anthony said
uh-huh
.

“Coon.”

“Coon?”

“She was a simple woman, this woman. She liked raccoons. She thought they were cute. She thought you were cute.”

“Coon.” Riley looked at Anthony with a winsome grin.

Anthony ignored the part about his early name. “And then what?”

“And then what
what
?” Gwen didn’t understand.

“What happened to the lady?”

“She just went back out into the woods, and we never heard from her again.”

“Did she have a name?”

“She never told it to us.”

“My mother?” asked Anthony. “She didn’t say anything about my mother?”

“No, she had no idea about your mother. It’s like I said—she was living all by herself out in the middle of nowhere, and one day this man appears out of the blue and hands her you. And here you are. Now.”

Anthony and Riley pondered the information Gwen had given them. A clock ticked on the wall.

“I have a question for you two,” Gwen said, then addressed Anthony directly, “for you really. Why’d you seek me out now? Why’d your father tell you about me
now
?”

Riley looked at Anthony.

“This story might take awhile,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere. Yet.”

Anthony told her about the two men who wandered into New Harmony from the Outlands, the autistic man who said his name was Gary and the man rotting away with plague worse than any human being should ever have had it. He told Gwen about the photograph Gary kept for his friend, and how Anthony’s own friend, Evan, had noticed the resemblance between Anthony and the man in the picture. He told her how he had gone to the hospital and how the man had seen him and thought he was this Harris.

“Here’s the picture.” Anthony handed it to Gwen. She took it gingerly and studied it for a moment before handing it back.

“Yes, that was your father. You look just like him.”

“You didn’t know the woman in the picture with him, did you?” asked Riley.

“No. That was his first wife. She wasn’t with him when I…when I knew Anthony’s father. Tell me, does he have a name, this man with the plague?”

Anthony let Riley answer. When his sister said “Mickey,” Gwen exhaled sharply. She looked shaken up.

“You okay?” Anthony asked her.

“Give me…” Gwen looked down into her lap, and held a hand up that was little more than skin and bone.. “Give me a minute.” When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.

“You know him?”

“I knew him. How is he—my god, Mickey is still alive.”

“He said a couple of things,” said Anthony. “We were hoping maybe you could help us figure out what he was talking about.”

“What’d he say?”

“Well, he kept talking about some place called Eden.”

“Eden was where we lived. Mickey and your mother and father and me and…and me. After the outbreak. In the city. Oh, I forget—you wouldn’t know. New York City. That’s all gone now.”

“Did you know Bear?”

“Bear.” Gwen thought back to a dark, still night in a dormitory and a hulking, forbidding presence. “Bear was a man with us in Eden. He—you’ve heard the stories of the zombie slayer?”

“Sure,” Anthony said, “when we were kids.”

Gwen wiped the tears from her eyes. “Right, children’s stories. So you tell me—where does the line between reality and myth meet?” Neither Anthony nor Riley answered, because it was obvious Gwen wasn’t looking for an answer. “Well, let me tell you. The ‘zombie slayer?’ He’s real. He’s a man. And his name…well, we called him Bear.”

“Bear?” Riley asked.

“But that’s all…” Anthony shook his head. “I thought those were all just stories they told us to help us stay strong. To give us courage.”

“No.” Gwen was adamant. “The zombie slayer was a real man. Bear killed millions of zombies.
Millions
.”

“So if the stories of the zombie slayer are true—”

“I’m not saying
all
the stories are true,” Gwen interrupted Anthony. “I mean, some of them are pretty crazy.”

“—but if some of them are true, then some of the other people in the myths are…”

“What? Real people? Yes.”

“The Black Angel?” asked Riley.

“The Black Angel was a real woman. Her name was Tris. But let me tell you—she was no angel.”

“An angel of death…” Riley said.

“Yeah, that definitely. But she was one pain in the ass, believe me.”

“So these were actual people?” Anthony couldn’t believe it.

“Yes.”

“Wow.”

“What happened to them?” asked Riley.

“As far as I know, they’re still out there somewhere.”

Riley and Anthony thought of what the man in the pub had told them.

Gwen looked at Anthony, and when she noticed he had noticed she spoke again. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I just…you look so much like…”

“How’d my father—my biological father—how’d Harris die?”

Gwen didn’t see any use in lying to them about that.

“Bear killed him.”

“Why?” Anthony sounded angry.

“He’d turned. He was a zombie.”

“Oh…”

“Mickey’s alive. God, what I’d do to see him one more time, before…” Gwen’s eyes looked very tired as she asked, “Tell me more about him, please?”

Someone in New Harmony with a sick sense of humor, an interest in cinema history, or some combination of the two had named the zombie George. It had stuck. George was tethered to a pole across from the hospital where Mickey convalesced. George did not sleep, and spent much of its days and nights testing the limits of the wire’s length and strength, shuffling as far as it could in one direction then another.

Though George did not know its name was George, it had come to recognize the sound people made when they called out the word—“There’s George.” “Hey, look at George.” “What’s going on with George today?”—and it had some rudimentary recognition that they were referring to itself. When people stood there talking about George, it would walk to the end of its wire, trying to reach them, wishing to eat them. When people stood there looking quietly and
did not
talk about George, it did the same thing, still wanting to eat them.

George did not recognize itself as a zombie. It had no remembrance of its past life as a human being, or the circumstances that resulted in its current undead state. Its days were marked by a complete existential ignorance. George was not bothered by the weather, by extremes of heat and cold. Neither snow nor rain nor hail bothered George. If the elevated radiation levels suffusing the globe had any impact on George and its kind, no one had been able to discern what that impact might be.

An orange, cautionary circle had been painted around the radius that George’s wire allowed it to roam. The circle was meant to keep people back and away from the zombie. George would not have been able to eat anyone even if it had been off its wire. The zombie’s hands had been removed long ago, as had all of its teeth. A speculum pulled George’s toothless mouth wide open and kept it that way. The speculum was permanently welded to George’s head via screws fused through the sides of its skull. In the past, George would wag its tongue at spectators and passers by. The sight had been deemed too disturbing, so they had removed George’s tongue.

George remembered none of this. George had no way of knowing that, even if it managed to apprehend someone or something with the nubs ending at its wrists, it would not be able to bite them without teeth, or through the stainless steel gear welded to its head.

George served a purpose in New Harmony. George was a reminder of the threat humanity had faced. Children were being born who might never—or so it was hoped—have to face Zed in the wild. George or another zombie like it was the closest a whole new generation of boys and girls had ever been to the undead.

Despite the signs warning them not to, sometimes little children would try and feed George. They would come as close as they dared, with George straining against his wire, reaching out towards them with its stumps, and the children would toss bread or candies at the zombie. The braver ones would actually try to
hand
George something to eat. Sometimes George managed not to completely fumble whatever was handed to it, and secured the morsel between the two stumps at the ends of its arms.

Of course George could not eat whatever had been handed to it. George would stare at the children, whatever adults were with them, and it wanted to eat them all. When the kids went away, George would eventually drop the bread, or whatever it had been presented with, pick it up and look it over until it dropped it again.

George had no sense of history—its own or others. Its medulla and cerebellum recognized that fire was bad. Fire was dangerous. However, it did not cognize fire with terms or labels such as bad or dangerous. George’s ability to conceptualize abstract ideas was extremely limited. It just had a natural aversion to open flame, sensing it could cause harm. George lacked an inner voice.

It spent much of its days in a state that would have bored any human being to death. One of George’s most common activities was attempting to capture the flies which landed on its body. George could not do this because it was too slow and the flies were too fast. In actuality, the flies, which had grown fat and torpid off George’s rotten flesh, were quite slow for flies. But George had no hands with which to catch them, even if it had been dexterous enough. Fortunately for the zombie, its frustration was short-lived. When there were no humans around, it was almost always engaged in attempting to catch flies.

“Mommy, my teacher said zombies used to be us.” A little girl and her mother stood together in the eventide, looking at George.

“Well, Betsey, your teacher’s right. They were us once.”

George shuffled to the end of its wire and stretched out its stumps, reaching futilely for the girl and her parent. Maybe they were heading home from somewhere. These concerns were beyond George. All it comprehended was that the food was just standing there.

“Mommy, Timmy at school said zombies don’t die.”

“That’s not true.”

“Timmy said zombies can’t die because they’re dead already.”

“Don’t listen to Timmy. He’s just being silly, honey.”

Humans like this girl and her mother often stopped by to consider George and talk about it. George had no idea that they were talking about themselves and their species when they talked about it and its state. It was not self-aware, had no conception of a theory of mind, and would not have recognized such in human beings or any other animal if it had. George tried to reach the food, but the food was always out of reach.

“Mommy, will Timmy die one day?”

“Yes.”

“Will you die one day?”

“Yes.”

“Mommy? Will I die one day?”

“Yes.”

People came by at night and liked to mess with George. Usually they were kids, and usually they just dressed George up in weird costumes. They put various outfits on it, and the zombie was pretty much powerless to stop them. And so it was that, several times a year, an employee from the Department of Public Works would get a call from some citizen of New Harmony who clung to some out-dated notion of propriety. And then that employee would have to head out to where George was tethered outside the hospital and have to change George, stripping the French Maid or cheerleader outfits off it.

Pranksters thought it was especially funny to dress George like a woman. George had no idea they were dressing it like a woman, and would not have cared if it did. When they dressed it, the only recognition George harbored was just how close the food was, and it would strain against its wire and speculum with no effective way of attaining that food.

“Mommy, do you think he gets cold at night?”

“No. It doesn’t get cold.”

Other people came and took pictures with George. Many were visitors from far off parts of New Harmony, parts where zombies like George were not kept. George did not understand what they were doing when they stood on either side of it, while a third stood in front of them all with a camera and took their picture, nor did it understand or even wonder what they did with the pictures. Photography, like nearly every other subject under the sun, was beyond George’s grasp. All it thought about while they posed with it was the proximity of the food.

“Mommy? When I die, am I going to become a zombie?”

“No. Mommy would never let that happen.”

The little girl and her mother stood there silently for awhile after that, until the little girl remarked, “I feel bad for it, mommy.”

A curly-haired man stood awkwardly for some time at the periphery of the area where George was kept. Perhaps the mother and daughter thought he was waiting for a bus or the arrival of a friend. Perhaps neither of them had noticed the man. But George had seen the man, though the man did not interest George.

The man had been standing there, picking at his knuckles, and glancing up anxiously from time to time. George could sense that the man was not food. He looked like the other food that came and went, like the girl and her mother standing there, but George knew the man was not something it would eat. It had no idea why, but this lack of understanding caused George no consternation whatsoever.