The Reanimation of Edward Schuett by Derek J. Goodman Read Free Book Online

didn’t tell him much, just visions of walking long distances through ruined neighborhoods and streets with occasional blood-spattered violence that his mind wasn’t quite ready to show him in total. When he woke up these dreams stayed at the corner of his thoughts, just waiting for a time when his mind might be willing to deal with what they needed to show him.
    He stretched his arms after he came to and stood up to stretch his legs, but that caused its own share of pain and a few cramps. He’d slowly been getting used to it all now, and rode out the agony as well as another bout of nausea. It was only when he was certain that he could keep the contents of his stomach down that he realized there wasn’t anything in there to begin with. The hunger in his stomach was minor pain compared to everything else, which struck him as odd. He didn’t know when the last time was that he had eaten, especially since he wasn’t sure how long it had been since he first woke up in the store, but it had to have been hours. He would have thought he would be hungrier than this. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure when he had last needed to use a bathroom. He hadn’t felt the need to urinate at all, although from the scratchy and uncomfortable feeling of his underwear in back he suspected he might have had an accident at some point in the past. He didn’t want to think too hard about that for now, though.
    There were a lot of other things he needed to think about, however, with his thought process finally working at full capacity. All of this was a lot to take in and he vaguely wondered if he was going through some sort of shock. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? His mind shouldn’t have been able to accept everything that had happened to him so far. At the moment, though, he thought he could deal with it. It might catch up with him later psychologically, but for now he felt calm.
    Fifty years. He couldn’t bring himself to accept such a big number yet. That was longer than he had been alive (or at least believed himself alive, since apparently his true age would be somewhere around eighty-three). Whatever had happened, everything he remembered was now the distant past to many people. He didn’t think that any of the people he had met so far in this freakish nightmare version of his world were even old enough to remember the time Edward came from.
    So the question was, how did he get from then to now? For some reason, the first thing that popped into his head were all those stupid science fiction movies Julia had loved so much, stories where someone got trapped in the wrong time. That idea was absolutely ridiculous, and it had the added side effect of bringing Julia to the forefront of his mind. He didn’t want to think about her, not yet. He didn’t want to consider the idea that she might be fifty years older and frail, or maybe even dead…
    No, best not to think about her. Not yet. Not until he was more ready to deal with this. He had to keep his mind back on figuring out what had happened in the first place.
    Time travel, then, was too idiotic to consider, but he supposed it was no less insane than the idea of dead people walking. He had seen that with his own eyes, and not just today. That had begun on that Fourth of July fifty years ago now. And if he had any hope of understanding how he had made it to this point, then he needed to better reconstruct that day in his memory.
    There had been no sign that anything was out of the ordinary for most of the day, and the first time he had begun to wonder if something was wrong was when he had heard a car crash somewhere a few blocks away from his house. No, wait, maybe that wasn’t the first he had heard. He vaguely remembered something he’d heard when he’d gone for supplies at Walmart, something the cashier had said. The girl, a bored-looking twenty-something, had mentioned some sort of scare she’d been hearing about down in the direction of Chicago, some virus or