cleaning the girl’s wound and tending to the scratches on her arms, she sewed it up and gave her some human feed with antibiotics mixed in to prevent an infection. We had lots of human drugs from the former town’s local hospital, and since they were useless to zombies, we could conserve them for occasionally treating ill humans. Mrs. Kushner opted to keep me at the farm for the rest of the night and then send a message to my mentor in the morning when he returned from tracking regarding the events which had transpired.
I was awake with the sun. I hadn’t slept much the rest of the night. I was too anxious. I kept trying to figure out how my mentor would react. In one imagining, he was thrilled at what a sound human tracker I had proved to be, and how impressed he was with me bringing back a human to our community on my own. In another, he was furious at me for having disobeyed him, and determined to report my crimes and have me expelled. Neither idea seemed to fit reality, but I couldn’t wrap my head around anything but the possibility of the two extremes. By the time the morning light flooded into Trevor’s bedroom window, I was ready to be thankful if only my mentor would elect not to report the incident and allow me to stay in school. Quietly I was still hoping he would forgive my mistakes from last week and realize that I had a contribution to make to Revenant. Very quietly.
Mrs. Kushner called me downstairs a bit after dawn. My mentor was waiting in the living room for me. I paused on the steps and gazed forward at him expectantly. He gazed back at me with the same expectant expression. His pale face was damp, his hair scraggly, and his eyelids were puffy. He looked deader than usual.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“It was a long night,” he replied solemnly, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt. He replaced them on his nose and looked up at me. “Let’s take a walk, Zellner,” he finally said.
I moved clumsily down the stairs and followed him out of the farmhouse. He led me through the open grass field of the Kushner farm. Early morning gnats hovered around us, suffocating us as we passed. The morning was cool, the sun staring at us from across the sky and making everything dense and airy at the same time. Our feet kicked up slick blades of grass as we walked. My mentor’s hands were shoved in his pants pockets and he looked ahead as I walked by his side, my head down, waiting for his judgment.
“Zellner, what you did was a very stupid thing,” he said finally.
“I just wanted to make up for what happened last week,” I offered meagerly.
“By doing the same thing.”
“By bringing in a human,” I corrected him.
“Are you under the impression that the only thing that matters is results?” my mentor asked. “That as long as we get what we need, the ends justify the means.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“We have rules when it comes to human tracking. We have them in place for a reason. What’s the most important rule?”
I tilted my head to the side. He had bored it into my head so many times that it was impossible for me to forget. “A human must be brought in under any circumstances unless to do so would endanger the life or livelihood of a Wake.”
“Do you understand what that means?”
“It means you should always do whatever you can to bring in a human when you find one. I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t have let her get away in the first place, but I tried!”
He put his opened hand up to my face. “No, Zellner. You don’t understand. After all this time you still don’t understand. That’s what troubles me the most.”
I sighed with frustration. “What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t mean that you should always bring in a human when one is found. It means that you should only bring in a human when it is safe to do so. Such as when you are trained to do so, or when you have a group of other trackers to help you. We never bring in humans alone. Under any circumstances. Especially without field training. I thought I made this clear last week. And then you went and did the same thing.”
“I didn’t know what else to do. If I told you the truth, that the human had survived, you would have to report it to the council. Then I knew I would be expelled. It was the only way I could think of to get the human back here without ending up as a Stiff. And I thought it might show you that I had a contribution to make. That I was capable of being a human tracker.”
“Zellner, I never thought you weren’t capable of being a human tracker. I just didn’t know if you had the right mentality. And if that’s what you were trying to prove last night, then you certainly did.”
I beamed up at him hopefully. “Really?”
“Yes. You proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you don’t.”
My face dropped. “What?”
“Tracking isn’t about bravery, or strength, or the best laid plans of mice and zombies. It’s about responsibility. Do you understand? It’s about being responsible for yourself, for your group, for your community, and for the town. And you didn’t do any of those things last night.”
“But I brought in the human!” I objected.
“And you got her infected. An infected human is nearly as useless as a Stiff. And you could have gotten yourself killed in the process.”
“I could handle it.”
“That isn’t the point, Zellner. Your recklessness can’t be overlooked. It put yourself in danger. It put Trevor in danger. It risked the viability of the human. And above all, it put the town at risk.”
“How did it –“
“The Stockade is dangerous. The most dangerous place inside Revenant. There’s a reason only authorized Wakes are given access to it. You can’t let Stiffs have too much interaction with intelligent beings. That’s when they become dangerous.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Zellner, a Stiff escaped from the Stockade last night. It ran amuck across the town.”
“What?” The word was barely audible, already a whisper in my throat before I ever uttered it. “That’s impossible!”
“The Stiff from Mrs. Kushner’s farm,” my mentor continued. “The one you inadvertently infected. It climbed the gate and it escaped.”
“No way!” I shot back. “Stiffs can’t climb gates! They don’t know how. They’re too stupid!” He was making it up. He was lying. To try to have something else to pin on me. To make me feel guilty for what I had done. But I wasn’t going to buy it.
“It learned, Zellner. It learned.”
“Stiffs can’t learn,” I retorted.
My mentor looked at me as if what I had said was the dumbest thing he had ever heard. And it probably was. “We’re undying proof that isn’t true.”
“But how could it –“
“You’ve taken Zombiology, haven’t you? Maybe you should have concentrated more in class.”
I didn’t reply. I had barely passed with a C. It wasn’t my strong suit.
“Stiffs tend to retain vestigial traces of humanity in their brains,” my mentor explained. “That’s what makes zombie education possible in the first place. And the more recently a Stiff has been reanimated, the more they are capable of learning. That one was only a week in. You taught her how to climb the gate. You reminded her how. And she learned.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Did you get it?”
“It rambled all the way to Zone C. Everyone was called in to try to capture it. It killed one of the town’s zombies. A Wake from Zone D.”
My face was stone. I couldn’t move it even to express surprise.
“He was one of the first Wakes to encounter it, and he tried to stop it, but he wasn’t trained for it. It had bitten into his jugular, then severed his head. We managed to dispose of it before it could damage his brain, but it was too late. There’s no patch job for decapitation. We did the only humane thing.”
Stick and twist.
“It was a gruesome night,” my mentor said. “A tragedy all around. No one could figure out how the Stiff had escaped,
until I got the message from Mrs. Kushner about what had happened with you. Zellner, this is unforgivable.”
“But I didn’t mean to hurt anyone! I only wanted to set things right!”
“By putting the entire town at risk. Whatever good you thought you were doing by breaking in there and bringing back the human, it was completely mitigated by the severe risk involved.”
I threw my head to the heavens. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think –“
“I know. That’s the problem, Zellner. You’re a Wake. The thing that divides us from the Stiffs is the fact that we think. And that’s what I expect of you. It’s what I expected.”
“What do you want me to say?” I asked with an edge to my voice. I was tired of being chewed out. Whatever silent hopes I had of being rewarded for my courage and being canny in bringing in the human had been gnawed away like a corpse’s flesh in a field of Stiffs.
My mentor stopped walking and turned to face me. “There is nothing more you need to say, Zellner. I just wanted to explain to you my reasoning.”
“Your reasoning?” I looked up to him, his figure shadowed against the light of the morning sun. His shadow falling across me made me feel dwarfed and cold.
“For reporting you,” he replied. “Zellner, you’ve left me no choice. Before you were responsible for the loss of human stock. That’s a terrible crime in of itself, but one that isn’t unforgivable. But now your reckless actions have cost the life of a Wake. You put the entire town at risk. I have to report this to the Mayor Hillard and the council.”
I had no