Derek J. Goodman
THE REANIMATION OF EDWARD SCHUETT
Part One:
WISCONSIN
Chapter One
All of his nerve endings started working again at the same moment, and for the first time in over fifty years Edward Schuett tried to scream. He failed. There were not enough of his vocal cords back in his throat yet.
Eventually, the pain became so strong that he nearly passed out, and as he lay on the floor the agony became a sort of background noise while he slowly became aware of his surroundings. He was in someplace dark, someplace cavernous. As he thrashed about he occasionally felt his limbs smack various things strewn about him, but he didn’t yet have the presence of mind to wonder what any of these stray objects might be. The debris he sent skittering away made echoing noises, but he couldn’t yet begin to guess where he might be or what he was doing here, or even who he was. These questions occurred to him on some level, but he didn’t have the concentration yet to dwell on them.
The pain didn’t go away completely, but it receded enough that he was able to feel other sensations. He felt heat, an uncomfortable warmth just below the skin that coursed through his entire body. There was an alien thumping sensation in his chest, and his ribcage moved uncontrollably up and down to force air in and out through his mouth and nose. He couldn’t remember at first what these things were, and fear passed through his mind for a moment before he remembered them from the past, from some distant moment he couldn’t think clearly on. This was a heartbeat. This was breathing. These were things he was supposed to do, and the realization came to him that for the longest time he hadn’t done either.
Then there was another sensation, something that he was most decidedly not supposed to feel at all. It started in his stomach, a gurgling like something liquid was boiling over inside. Then it felt like a tickle moving up his throat. The muscles in his stomach involuntarily clenched, and instinctively he rolled over onto his side before the sensation fully overcame him. His stomach clenched again, and this time he felt something come up and fill his mouth. He opened it and finally made a retching noise as a thick dark stream spewed from between his lips. The instant it was out he felt a little better. Some of the pain was even gone, although it still throbbed throughout his entire body in time with his heart, and he turned over on his back. He lay there for a long time, and eventually he lost consciousness.
When he woke back up again the pain had come back some, but it wasn’t at quite the debilitating level it had been before. He was still on his back in the exact same position he had been before, but now there was a subtle difference in the light around him. The place he was in was still dark, but not so dark now that his eyes couldn’t adjust and pick up ambient light from somewhere. He didn’t know what that meant yet, didn’t even know what anything that had been happening to him really meant, but it allowed him to at least begin to get his bearings. He sniffed something nearby, a sensation that simply by itself felt strange and new, and he realized that his sense of smell wasn’t working completely right. It was working enough, though, for him to know that the puddle of vomit that had come out of him earlier was right next to his head. He turned and looked at it, and a dim part of his brain knew he should have been revolted by what he saw. Instead, however, he just stared at it, trying to understand it and failing.
In the thin light it was impossible to tell the exact color, but the vomit was something dark and thick, either red or blue or possibly black. There were chunks sticking out of the thick sludge, chunks that probably would have been unidentifiable even in full light, but parts of it were moving, too. The moving bits came up out of the dark sludge and squirmed about, and they were a much lighter color than the rest of the vomit. Maggots, he realized, and unless he had been lying here for a lot longer than he thought (which could admittedly be possible, since he only had the vaguest sense of what time was at the moment anyway) then they had to have come from inside him just like the rest of the vomit.
The movement of his head to look at the vomit had made him dizzy for a moment, but it dissipated quickly enough. He tentatively moved his arms and legs, little flexes of the muscles here and there, and although parts of his limbs felt stiff and unresponsive, even tingly like they had fallen asleep, he still felt like they were strong enough that he might try getting up. He planted his hands at his sides and tried to push himself into a sitting position. At first he didn’t seem to have the muscle control to do such a simple maneuver, and besides fumbling around trying to get his arms to move the right way he also felt a sharp pain and stiffness in his back. He gritted his teeth, but the pain now was nowhere near as bad as it had been when he’d woken up earlier. This was pain he could get through. After several false starts he was finally able to push himself into something like a sitting position, and he could finally get a better look at the place around him.
He recognized the type of place he was in right away, but it took him several confused minutes before he could think of the right word for it. He was on a linoleum floor, and on either side of him there were rows of light colored shelves. There were some boxes and packages up on the shelves and a few more littered around him. He reached out to grab one of the packages, struggling to get his fingers to move right, and the package slipped out of his hand. After a few more tries he managed to get a weak hold of it, and he was able to bring it up closer to where he could see it in the dim light. The package had a cardboard backing with some sort of plastic bubble attached to it. The plastic was dented and cloudy with age, but it had originally been clear and he could still see something inside that looked like a little man holding a gun. An action figure, he remembered it was called. They were all around him. He was in a toy aisle, and the echoing cavernous building around him had to be a department store.
His first thought was What the hell am I doing here? His second was Who the hell am I, anyway?
He sat unmoving in the middle of the toy aisle, attempting to ignore the returning queasy feeling in his stomach, and tried to think. His name came to him after not too long, but that didn’t help him much. His name was Edward Schuett, but he couldn’t place any memories to go with the name. It seemed meaningless for now without any context. He had a few brief flashes, a momentary passing memory of sitting on a couch drinking a beer and watching NASCAR on television with a woman sitting next to him, but the memory felt random and unimportant. As much as it gnawed at him that he couldn’t remember much, it seemed much more important to figure out what was going on in the here and now. And in the here and now he was sitting in a toy aisle about to throw up again.
The reflex in his throat came upon him once more, and another stream of vomit flowed out to join what was already next to him. There was not as much this time, but he didn’t yet have the sense to be grateful for this. The fluid that finished dribbling out his mouth didn’t seem to have quite as many maggots this time, and that at least felt like some small triumph. He moved to get farther away from the puddle, managing a kind of crab-like shuffle despite the continued stiffness of his arms and the general uncooperativeness of his legs. He looked down at the legs, trying to see what if anything might be keeping them from working properly, and for a moment he didn’t see anything that could give him a clue. The jeans on his legs were old and molding, though, with multiple tears and holes all up and down them. They felt strange against his skin, stiff and yet moist at the same time. There might have been stains all over them, but he couldn’t be sure in this light. He reached out to feel them, trying to understand why they might look this way, and that was finally when he saw his own skin.