“Edward, are you okay?” Rae asked.
“Yes, I suppose. It’s just…never mind. I want to finally do this.”
Rae led him up to the front door. The glass doors had been smashed long ago and covered up in plywood that was at least slightly less rotten than on other buildings. She opened the door and motioned for Edward to go in ahead of her. She followed and waited for him to take in the sight.
It was still possible to tell that the building had once been a library, but that was mostly because of the books stacked as high as her shoulders in teetering towers of yellowing pages. While some shelves still remained intact, the books had all been removed from them and set to one side so the old man could use the shelves to store the incredible number of folders he’d accumulated over the years. A couple days ago when the old man hadn’t been looking she’d pulled out one of the folders to look at the contents, but it was full of handwritten notes in a sloppy hand she couldn’t read and equations and formulas she didn’t understand. The other shelves had been dismantled and put back together as work tables, and all across the tables there were microscopes, test tubes, small refrigerators, Bunsen burners, needles, and various tools that Rae couldn’t name. And huddled among them all on a stool, fidgeting excitedly as he watched Edward come in, was the old man.
“Are you him?” the old man asked.
“I guess, unless you were expecting some other Z7,” Edward said.
The old man jumped off his stool. That was pretty impressive, considering he had to be well over eighty years old by now. “Really? There’s more?”
“Um, no. I was being sarcastic,” Edward said. “How exactly would you not know I’m the only Z7? You’re the one that made me.”
The old man looked puzzled. “I did?”
“You said you did,” Edward said. “When you called. You said you were the man who created me.”
“Oh, yes, well when you put it like that then I guess I did have something to do with creating a Z7, but that’s not what I really meant.”
“Then could you please finally explain it to me?”
“Yes, yes, I’m so sorry. This should call for a proper introduction. Edward Schuett, my name is Dr. Brendan Bloss and I am the man who created the Animator Virus.”
Chapter Thirty Nine
For several seconds the old library was exactly the way it had always been intended—completely quiet. Edward stood there with Rae beside him, but he had no clue what to say and Rae’s mouth hung open in shock. Dr. Bloss watched them both with what might have been amusement on his face, but it was hard to tell through his bushy beard. Finally one of them made a sound, but Edward didn’t realize what it was at first. A clicking noise came from Rae. When Edward looked over at her he realized she had just turned off the safety on Spanky.
“That’s a load of horseshit,” Rae said.
“It’s not,” Dr. Bloss said. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m senile enough to make random things up for no apparent reason.”
“There’s no way that could be true,” she said. “One man could never have done that.”
“One man didn’t,” Dr. Bloss said. “I was part of a team.”
“That was fifty years ago. If someone was actually responsible for it, they would be dead by now.”
“Really? ‘If someone was responsible for it?’ Did you honestly think no one was responsible? A single virus wiped out three-quarters of the human race in a completely unnatural way. Something like that doesn’t just happen at random in nature. Well, it does sometimes, actually. Maybe I’m not making my point right.”
“You did all this,” Edward said. He was surprised at just how calm and even his voice sounded. “You nearly destroyed all of humanity.”
“You make it sound like I would have done something like that on purpose. I didn’t.”
“Yet you admit to it,” Rae said. Edward noticed that her grip on Spanky had grown tighter. “Why would you tell anyone that you murdered the world?”
“Please don’t be dramatic. I told you we didn’t do it on purpose. But it’s not something I’d like to take to my grave. I’ve come to grips with the part I played in all this, and I need to make it right, if such a thing could ever be said to be right again. That’s why I’ve been seeking you out so desperately, Mr. Schuett. You are now the key.”
Edward looked to Rae. “Put the gun down.”
“It’s not up.”
“I can see it, Rae. It’s slowly going up to point at his head. Put it down. For now.”
It was the last two words that seemed to convince her. She lowered the rifle but didn’t put the safety back on. Edward was okay with that. Rage and anger at this man were only two of the roiling emotions in his head that he couldn’t possibly map at the moment. If what he said was true, then on some level he was responsible for the deaths of Julia and Dana, even Liddie. Edward knew it was ridiculous, putting the blame for the deaths of three random people on this fragile old man when the blood of millions more was ignored, but that was all it came down to for Edward right now. These next few minutes were the doctor’s chance to make amends, at least to Edward. Whether or not Rae would follow that reasoning was up to her, but for now Dr. Bloss could make his case.
“Explain,” Edward said to him. “Everything. Start at the beginning.”
“The beginning,” Dr. Bloss said. “Let’s see, where’s the beginning?” He actually turned around in place as though he were looking for it. “Oh! I suppose that would be Project: Queen.”
He paused, looking at them both as though that explained everything. Rae made a hurry-up motion with her hand. “Which is?” she prodded impatiently.
“I guess you could call it a sort of bio-weapons program. For the government. That’s how it all started out. Isn’t that how things always start out? Yes, something like that.”
“Those sons-of-bitches,” Rae said. “You can’t trust them now, so I guess you couldn’t trust them then.”
“Wait,” Edward said. “The government created a zombie virus as a biological weapon? How did they actually expect to control it?”
“They didn’t, because that is not what they were trying to do. I was part of project designed to add enhancements to certain soldiers. It was supposed to be a new way of communicating in combat, a method that could not be intercepted or hacked by enemies and could silently allow complex groups to coordinate their maneuvers. The basic idea started with how certain lower species communicate, and we were trying to find a way to get a similar effect in humans.”
“Pheromones,” Edward said. “It was never supposed to be about raising the dead, but about giving people a way to communicate through pheromones. Is that right?”
“Oh yes, very good. You’re correct, after a fashion. What we came up with was actually far more complicated than that, but the idea was similar.”
“I’m not sure I’m following that,” Rae said. “If these fair-o things were just about communicating, how did we end up with zeds?”
“The reanimated were a completely unexpected byproduct of something else we were trying to do with the project. We wanted to give soldiers these abilities, but we were having trouble doing it with any speed. We’d thought we had figured out how to manipulate DNA to the necessary glands and sensory organs, but the process was very slow and very painful. One of my colleagues thought he could speed up the process and essentially get the pain over with in one quick moment. He’s the one that made it into a virus. I assure you, the rest of us would have stopped him if we had known. I spent years trying to figure out the exact nature of it. What I concluded is that there was a flaw in the virus’s structure. It caused the new growth, but that growth was unstable and it tried to break down. Essential parts of the rest of the body would slow down almost to a stop to redirect all their energy into the new growth, which never quite finished and therefore never stopped. In attempting to heal the new growths, other parts of the body would try to heal rapidly too, at least to a point. That is why the reanimated appear dead yet don’t decay beyond a certain point.”