Chapter Thirty One
Edward spent the rest of the longest night of his life outside under the stars. He hadn’t been able to stay in the van. The pheromones had been so strong that he couldn’t block them out, and they mixed with the scent of lovemaking. He couldn’t stand that right now. He didn’t even bother to put his clothes back on. He simply closed the door of the van behind him, leaving her trapped until he could figure out what had to happen next.
For several hours he tried not to think of anything at all, but eventually he didn’t feel he had any choice but to go back to that horrible moment and try figuring out what had happened.
Edward went to stand next to the van and put a hand against the window. There was still some fog inside the windows from their lovemaking, but enough of it had cleared away that he could see her shape inside the dark van. Every moment he stood there he hoped something would prove that he had been mistaken, that she really wasn’t infected. Infected. That was the only word he could use to describe her right now. He didn’t dare use the Z or the R words.
She barely acknowledged him. She sat on the seat, the very same seat where they had just been loving and caressing each other, but she couldn’t quite get the posture down, like her legs didn’t want to bend and let her rest. She kept trying to rise, bumping her head on the ceiling and forcing her to plop back down. He knocked softly on the window once, hoping to get some sort of reaction to make himself believe she was still in there. She turned her head at the noise, but nothing else.
This was his fault. There was no way to deny that, but he hadn’t quite figured out how yet. Had he maybe bitten her in the heat of the moment? Possibly, although he didn’t remember that. It hadn’t even occurred to him, nor probably her, that something as simple as a love bite could be dangerous from him. He’d heard from numerous doctors that he still carried the Animator Virus, but he’d all but forgotten that his bite would then have the same effect as that of any other zombie.
He thought back to the moments before and during sex, and he shook his head. No, that couldn’t be it. He went over every moment, every movement of both their bodies, but there hadn’t been a bite. He was sure of it. Perhaps…could it have been the kissing? Out of all those times that they had almost kissed only to have him decide against it at the last moment, had he been unknowingly saving her life from him? He thought back to what he remembered about becoming a zombie, about how long it had taken for Julia to turn after she’d been bitten or after she had bitten him. He supposed that with a simple kiss the virus might have taken longer to enter her system, but that didn’t seem correct either. He thought about the AIDS virus and how it supposedly could not be passed through kissing. That must have meant something about the mouth prevented it from spreading or something like that, right? So what else could it have been…
He gasped and slid down to a sitting position against the side of the van as the answer finally came to him. Given the amount of time it had taken for the virus to take hold of her, he could work backward and figure out right about the moment she had been infected. What had she been exposed to just a minute or two beforehand that she hadn’t been exposed to before? His semen. The virus had passed to her when he had come inside her.
He was the first person in human history to pass on the Animator Virus as an STD.
He had a fresh bout of crying for several minutes before he wiped away the tears, stood up, and looked back inside the van. There was no noticeable change. She still didn’t even look dead. Except for the vacant look in her eyes and the loose way she held her limbs, she could have passed for being alive. She wouldn’t look like that in a few days, or maybe even a few hours. Her skin would sag and take on a sick hue. Soon her flesh would begin to rot, her eyes might gloss over with cataracts, her blood would darken to near-black. Anyone who saw her would forget that she had once been anything other than infected. They would forget because none of them understood the way he did: this wasn’t the end.
The revelation came to him and made his breath catch in his throat. Or course it wasn’t the end. He had told her as much when they’d buried Timothy North in the Nevada desert. Her mind was gone and everything that made her who she was had retreated to the deepest depths of her brain, but she could continue on like this for a very long time. She could be hurt or damaged in so many ways, yet as long as there was no damage to her head she could survive anything else. And she could come back. Somewhere in her Liddie still existed, a whole person hidden and waiting to return exactly like Edward had. Edward remembered the brief moments in his memories where he had nearly felt his old awareness return, just long enough to feel some sort of kinship with the woman he had loved. Did Liddie feel that same thing now? When he was next to her, did she still feel a connection she was incapable of understanding? Edward bet she did. And he could bring all of that back.
All he had to do was figure out how to make a Z7.
It sounded like an impossible task, but he himself had already proven that it could be done. The answer was in Winnebago, Illinois, or at least he hoped so. That had to be the only thing the old man could have meant when he said he had created Edward. He thought back to everything Liddie’s mother had told him about the different variations of zombies. The CRS may have never gotten down to what exactly had caused him to become a Z7, but the Z5s and Z6s had to be created by tinkering with their genetics. It was entirely possible that this old man, whoever he was, had done something to his DNA and forced the change. So if this person could do it to him, why not Liddie as well?
The idea excited him, but his smile disappeared quickly when he realized how hard the rest of the trip would be. The van was broken down, so if he didn’t go on foot the rest of the way to Illinois then he would need to find another ride. But he didn’t have the slightest clue how to get one in this strange future world. He didn’t know any of the customs, he didn’t know exactly how to use Liddie’s pay cards (which may have looked similar to credit cards but seemed to have a more complex money system attached to them), and he didn’t even know exactly where he had to go from here without the van’s map. Liddie had been his guide through all this, but she couldn’t help now.
It wasn’t like he could go into any towns or settlements anyway anymore, not with an infected woman tagging along trying to eat the townsfolk.
All of these questions worried him, but he refused to let them get him down just now. He had a reasonable hope that he could make things right, and that had to be enough.
He opened up the door and went back inside. Liddie’s scent was still strong, but now it no longer seemed so horrible. He sat down on the seat next to her, still hoping she would show some little sign that she recognized him. She didn’t even look at him, but she stopped trying to stand up and instead sat quietly by his side. He supposed that would have to be enough for now.
Chapter Thirty Two
The sunrise brought with it a whole host of problems, most of which he had considered last night but for which he still hadn’t found answers. Strangely, though, the biggest problem for now was simply getting dressed.
Edward himself had no problem getting dressed. It was Liddie who caused the biggest issue. When Edward had left the van earlier to take a leak, he’d smelled several other zombies nearby. When he came back in some of the pheromones must have wafted in behind him, because Liddie kept moaning and trying to claw her way out the door. He would have worried about her opening it by accident and getting away before he could stop her, but she wasn’t even groping at the handle. She groped for the glass, as though she couldn’t understand why her fingers couldn’t go through to the other side. Her restlessness made it nearly impossible to get her clothes back on. Part of the problem was also that he didn’t feel comfortable touching her naked body now. It felt wrong, like a violation of her personal space, to touch her without her permission. It didn’t matter to him that he’d had plenty of permission last night. That was completely different, and now even so much as accidently brushing her hip as he tried to pull her pants back on felt like a perverted thing to do. He kept apologizing to her every time a finger grazed her skin. Once or twice she moaned at that, and Edward liked to pretend that was her way of saying he was forgiven, but he knew that wasn’t true. He supposed he could try using his limited control of the pheromones to keep her from twitching around so much, but that would have felt like just as much of a violation as touching her.