“Actually I don’t think I ever met him.”
“Yes you did. You just knew him better as Dr. Emmanuel.”
Edward didn’t say anything. Liddie looked over at him and realized he was biting the inside of his cheek and desperately trying not to laugh.
“You promised.”
“I know.”
“Because, well, you know how it is. After a few drinks even the biggest dirtbag can begin to look good. Stop laughing!”
“I’m not laughing! See how much I’m not laughing. Words cannot express how much I’m not…STOP!”
She didn’t even realize what he was saying at first. Her eyes had been on him for the last minute, so she hadn’t seen what was ahead. He couldn’t have been paying any attention either, because there was no way he would have missed the reanimated in the middle of the road. Her brain immediately did calculations of the situation and she hit the brakes, but perhaps she didn’t hit them as hard as she could. They’d been going pretty fast yet the road had been in as much disrepair as all the others they’d been on. Slowing down too quickly would end in an accident, she knew. And the group of reanimated, about five in all, seemed so far away when she hit the brake. She didn’t expect the distance to close so quickly. She swerved a little, but not enough. Somewhere in her mind, she still didn’t consider it that important if she just ran down a few reanimated.
Three of them were out of the way in time. Two were not. She hit one of them head on, and the van still had enough speed that the thing’s rotting body splattered apart on impact. Its head slammed into the windshield and cracked it just as blackish-red blood smeared all over it. There was a second thump, but Liddie only barely heard it over her and Edward’s screams.
The van skidded to a halt at an angle, and for one second it tilted at an odd angle on the left two wheels. Then the van thumped back down to all four, and everything went silent except for their ragged gasps of breath.
Edward spoke first. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Liddie said. “You?”
“Yeah.”
They sat there for a few more seconds in silence before Edward undid his seat belt and opened his door.
“Wait, where are you going?” Liddie asked.
“To check on the damage,” Edward said. He got out, and after a few more moments to catch her breath Liddie followed.
Liddie wrinkled her nose as she looked back at the highway behind them. Skid marks went back for longer than she could estimate, but that wasn’t the most prominent new feature on the asphalt. A streak of gore trailed behind the van for at least forty feet. Most of it was completely unrecognizable, but here and there Liddie thought she could see parts that might have once been ribs or internal organs. Off the side of the road a complete arm lay in the dirt.
“Oh dear God,” Liddie said. “It’s like they came out of nowhere.” She said it to Edward, but he wasn’t listening. He walked a bit off the road and gestured to the three remaining reanimated. They’d shambled in three different directions, but now that the initial moment of shock was over they all walked toward each other again, and once they were all within ten feet of each other they started shambling back to the road, directly toward the van.
“Oh hell,” she said. “Get back in the van, quick.”
“We don’t have anything to worry about from them,” Edward said. His voice was so soft she could barely hear it over the wind.
“But they’re coming right for us.”
“They smell prey,” he said, “but that’s not their biggest emotion right now. They’re scared. We scared them.”
“Edward, they don’t have emotions.”
“No, I guess not really. Not completely. But they do have something.”
He stared intently at the three, and they all stopped. Liddie remembered the way the reanimated had frozen during Dr. Chella’s experiment, but they stopped for longer this time. They actually stared at Edward, then turned away.
“Edward? Did you just do that?” Liddie asked.
“Yes. They still smell you, but they no longer think of you as prey. Or at least I think that’s what I told them. I’m still not really sure.”
It didn’t matter. Whatever they thought, if they could be said to think at all, it still kept them walking in the other direction. They made no sign of turning back.
“That is really eerie,” Liddie said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“It’s rather new for me, too,” Edward said. “And I’m still not even sure I’m doing it right.”
“Come on,” Liddie said. “We’ll need to clean off the van before we—”
“Not yet,” Edward said. “There’s something else.”
He walked back down the road, but Liddie couldn’t tell why at first. Even Edward looked a little lost. He kept glancing at the side of the road, bending down to take a closer look at the bits of gore left behind by the exploding reanimated, and even occasionally sniffing the air. He finally went completely off the road at right about the place where the van had hit the reanimated, going twenty feet out into the desert to stoop next to some scrub bushes. Liddie followed, not sure what he was looking at until she was almost next to him.
“Is it dead?” Liddie asked.
“Oh yes,” Edward whispered. The last reanimated, the one she’d hit but hadn’t seen, lay in the dust. Its entire body was twisted at a terrible angle, and now that she was closer she could see that she’d asked a stupid question. Its head and chest were completely caved in so that Liddie couldn’t even tell if it had once been a man or a woman. Its clothes looked like little more than rags, although its denim jeans seemed to have held up remarkably well over the years.
“So we don’t need to worry about it,” Liddie said. She turned to go back to the van, but Edward stopped her.
“Liddie, wait. I need your help.”
“With what?”
“With burying him.”
“What? Why?”
Edward stood up and glared at her. “What do you mean, why?”
“It’s just a reanimated.”
Edward reached down and felt around at the reanimated’s waist. He apparently found what he was looking for in one of the pockets and pulled it out, showing it to Liddie. It was a nylon wallet, badly worn with age but still intact. “If he was just a zombie, then why would he need this?”
“He probably just had it on him when he died. Most zombies probably did.”
“Liddie, do you seriously mean to tell me that you still don’t get this?” He opened the wallet and started pulling things out to hand to her. “Look at these. Look at all of these.”
She looked at each one in turn. There were a couple of pay cards of the early design, the kinds they’d stopped making when she was just a kid. There were places on their backs for signatures, but the ink had long since been smeared away. There was a condom, its silver wrapper broken through in a few places to show the crumpled and brittle latex inside. There were some pieces of paper that Liddie didn’t recognize at first, but after closer inspection realized had to be battered old-style currency. A penny with a hole in it that had been tucked deep into one of the wallet’s pockets. A scrap of yellowed paper with the hastily scrawled words “For the birthday, Sat.,” followed by a telephone number. A folded photograph so faded that Liddie had to hold right up to her face to see what might be a young woman with long hair holding a dog. And the last thing Edward pulled out, a laminated card which he kept a hold of and read it out to her.
“Timothy North,” he said. “Apparently from Seattle, Washington. This driver’s license expired, what, twenty-eight years ago? A long way from home, isn’t he? How do you think he got all the way into the Nevada desert?”