Raising Stony Mayhall (13 page)

“Which is where?”

“Need-to-know basis.”

“I just want to know where we’re going.”

Mr. Blunt said, “Did you choose that name, or was it given to you?”

“Pardon?”

“It’s an appropriate nom de mort,” Mr. Blunt said.

“You mean, like ‘Delia’?” Stony said. She didn’t answer. “In the first Deadtown Detective book, Delia’s the name of the girl who tries to sell Einstein’s brain. And in book three she’s caught smuggling guns to the prisoners.”

“I never read them.”

“Stone Dead,”
Mr. Blunt said.
“Stone Cold. The Gravestone …”

Aaron pulled around to the rear of the motel and backed the van up to the building. “I’ll check it out,” he said. Mr. Blunt had put on a wide-brimmed fedora, chocolate brown with a black band. Delia grabbed a straw sun hat from a bag on the floor and handed Stony a Cleveland Browns ball cap. He couldn’t wait to get out of the cramped vehicle.

A knock on the back of the van door: all clear.

They hopped out one by one, crossed the short stretch of sidewalk, and then entered the room. In that brief moment in the open, Stony got the impression of vast emptiness surrounding them. The motel felt like the only building in a hundred miles of dark prairie, a lone ship at sea.

Delia was last in. She shut the door and Mr. Blunt said, “Another mission accomplished.”

“Jesus Christ,” Aaron said. He looked both exhausted and relieved to be out of the van. “I’ll be in the next room. Wake me at five.”

After he left, Mr. Blunt said to Stony, “He likes to sleep alone. He’s a good man for a breather, but he can’t quite bring himself to close his eyes when we’re around.”

The room was bigger than the interior of the van, but not by much. Two double beds, a green carpet, a tiny TV, pressboard dressers. Mr. Blunt turned on the TV and began flipping
through channels filled with snow. Delia sat by the window, keeping an eye on the van through a gap in the curtain.

Stony perched at the end of one of the beds. Mr. Blunt found a clear channel, then sat beside him. He crossed his legs with a squeaking sound. One pant leg had ridden up, exposing a length of gnarled wood where his leg should have been. Mr. Blunt saw him staring and laughed. He rapped on the wood and said, “Shin splints.”

“That’s a terrible joke,” Stony said.

“I’m a warped man.”

“Please, stop it.”

Onscreen was a black-and-white movie, a comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant chasing a baby cougar around a big house. Mr. Blunt kept up a running commentary on Howard Hawks and Grant’s homage to Harold Lloyd. “Grant famously ad-libbed here. It’s the first time in film anyone used the word
gay
to refer to homosexuals.”

“Uh, okay,” Stony said. He could not get over the fact that he was sitting in a room with other dead people, people like him. He’d grown up thinking he would be alone the rest of his life—whatever a life counted for in his case—hiding in basements and barns. He’d convinced himself that the world of Jack Gore was a fantasy. But here he was, on the run with the Living Dead Army.

“So what do we do now?” Stony asked. “Sit here all night?”

“The life of a fugitive is not easy, my boy,” Mr. Blunt said. “In ’68, I spent five weeks in a dump. An actual dump! I dug my own bunker deep into the garbage pile. I could have lived there forever if it weren’t for the dogs. They knew I was in there, and it drove them crazy.”

“I dug, too,” Stony said. “I dig. I do a lot of digging.”

“A common urge,” the man said. “The Lump says that we struggle between two desires, to rise”—his fingers splayed like the spines of a wooden fan—“and to return.” They clacked back together.

“What’s the Lump?”

“It’s a who,” Delia said. She tossed Stony his baseball cap. “Walk with me.”

“Outside?”

“I think we can risk an excursion.” She pulled on her big sun hat and led him into the parking lot. They walked quickly to get out of the light. At the edge of the lot she looked around, nodded toward an area of deeper dark, and said, “That way.” They marched over uneven ground. A rancid odor drifted in on the wind, slipped away, then returned, stronger. “What is that?” Stony asked. “Something die out there?”

“You can smell?”

He knew farm smells, and some summer days they’d catch a whiff of the hog plant outside Easterly. “I think it’s a slaughterhouse,” he said.

“This is a cattle state,” Delia said. “Plenty of big processing plants. Humans have a gift for large-scale murder.”

Stony thought,
Humans
? After a few moments he said, “I just realized that I haven’t said thank you yet. For rescuing me.”

“It’s what we do,” she said. “About the only thing we
can
do.”

“I’m still kinda in shock. Back at the house, when you took off your helmet?” He shook his head. “I’m just having some trouble adjusting.”

She looked at him. “You thought you were the only one, right? All those years, the only living dead boy in the world.”

“I thought they killed us all.”

“Almost all. Just shy of a hundred fucking percent. Some
of us who escaped the cleanup gangs were protected by family, though God knows why, after the things we tried to do to whoever was nearest. But mostly it was blind luck. Every one of us has an amazing story—waking up after the fever in a cellar that the humans had missed, or in the bottom of a pile of bodies that hadn’t burned all the way through, or managing to climb out of the fucking grave too late for the party. That’s because all the ones without an amazing story were shot, decapitated, burned, or sent to Deadtown.”

Stony jerked to a stop. “Wait—what?”

“I said, or sent to—”

“Deadtown is real?”

“It’s just a prison, kid. Really, a couple of prisons—they keep moving it. Some of our people nicknamed it after those books, not the other way around.”

“Okay, you’re blowing my mind. There’s a prison, and there are undead people … but are you saying we didn’t kill any humans? I mean, you and Mr. Blunt are like me, you’re not … crazy. But everything I’ve read—”

“Don’t trust the media, Stony.”

“But they couldn’t make up all those deaths. Seventy thousand people?”

“They could,” Delia said. “If they wanted to, they could.” She paused. “It just so happens that in this case, they didn’t.”

“What?”

“Yes, we killed a lot of people. But it wasn’t our fault.”

“You’re talking about the fever.”

“It lasts twenty-four to forty-eight hours. During that time, you’re exactly what you’ve read about—a mindless carnivore. But the fever passes. You wake up. You may not remember who you were, or what the hell happened, but you’re sane. You’re not homicidal anymore.”

“The government has to know this.”

“Sure they know, Stony. They’ve captured enough of us.”

“In Deadtown.”

“Right.”

Stony stepped away from her, shaking his head, then turned back. “We have to tell people.”

“Really. Tell them what?”

“Get the word out. Go on TV. We can show people that we’re not the monsters they think we are.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Why are you making fun of me?”

“You ever hear of Eli Cohen?” she asked. They resumed walking. “Antiwar activist, bit of a whack job, but his heart was in the right place. In ’69 he met some of the LDs and tried to talk about it. He’s still in prison. Then in ’71 a reporter named Hockner managed to work his way into a safe house—turned out he was working for the government, and ten of us were captured. After that, we stopped talking to reporters. We were a fucking national security threat, Stony, and still are. They’ve killed every one of us who’ve stepped out into the open, or else black-bagged us and hauled us off to their secret medical prison. They can’t afford to have even one LD out in the wild, because we’re still a danger. We
can
still bite, Stony, even if we choose not to. And because of that, we’re the scariest disease carrier they can imagine. We can wipe them out. We can end the world.”

ICBM
.

They’d walked in a wide arc, keeping the motel to their left. Delia turned to take them back the way they’d come, well outside the glow of the parking lot lights. They were silent for a long time, and then Stony said, “How many of us are there? This army of yours?”

“You’ll never know. You’ll only meet a few of us at a time.
And when you do, you can’t tell them that story about being a baby and growing up.”

“But it’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter. The only ones who know the truth are Aaron and Mr. Blunt. Everyone else, you tell them you were bitten two years ago by an LD you didn’t know, and you’ve been hiding out at your mom’s house since then, okay?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to. Just trust me.”

“Trust you? I just met you.”

She grabbed his arm and spun him around. Stony was stunned by her strength.

“Listen, bucko, I saved your fucking life. There are political situations in the LD world that you do not understand. This miracle baby crap? Some of our people are superstitious—hell, some of them are bone stupid—and there are factions that will use that magic fundamentalist shit to make them do stupid things.”

“What kinds of stupid things?”

“Shut up. You
will
be educated, and your eyes
will
be fucking opened, and on that day you will thank God that I found you first and not some asshole like Billy Zip. But until that day, you’ll keep your mouth shut. Are we clear?”

Stony stared at her. After a long moment, she released her grip on him.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Okay!”

“Okay.”

Stony watched Delia march off. He thought,
Miracle Baby
?

young brown-skinned girl, perhaps eight years old, rode down the sidewalk on her bike, a purple and pink two-wheeler with a white basket. She seemed to pay no attention to the van pulling up behind her. It wasn’t until she heard the doors of the van open that she put out a leg to stop herself, and looked back—and then gaped as two clowns hopped out of the vehicle.

Strange, colorless clowns: Their white faces were outlined in black, and they wore black shirts, black pants, and white gloves. The shorter one (who wore black sunglasses, which didn’t seem right, either) slammed shut the van’s sliding door. On it, in white letters, were the words “Goes Without Saying.”

The clown in the sunglasses hurried toward the front door of the house they were parked in front of, but the taller one turned toward the little girl. His eyes went wide, and his mouth formed a surprised O. Then he crouched and held a finger to his lips. One black-rimmed eye closed in a slow-motion wink.

The girl dropped her bike and fled. The man stood and watched her run down the sidewalk. Then he slumped his
shoulders and dropped his chin, the very picture of disappointment.

Delia called back, “Are you fucking coming or not?” Then she opened the door without knocking and went inside. Stony sighed—silently—and turned to follow.

A dead man in a black toupee met them in the hallway, looking distraught. “The mailman’s in the bedroom,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

Roger was an Oldy, one of the Original Living Dead from ’68, his face as gray and mottled as a cardboard egg carton. He wore a bathrobe over a yellow Tweety Bird T-shirt and blue sweatpants.

“I don’t know what you were doing with him at all, Roger,” Delia said. She took off her sunglasses. “You know better than this.”

Roger pulled at the neck of his robe, looking insulted. He was one of the fifty-two in her parish scattered throughout safe houses in the Los Angeles area, and this was his third placement.

Stony said, “On the hotline you said he’d surprised you?”

“He walked right in the door without knocking! I think he was delivering a package, but still, you don’t just walk in like that, do you? I was sitting right there on the couch. I’d come up to watch
The Pyramid
. I know I shouldn’t have, but the reception’s so much better up here. The curtains were pulled, and I thought the door was locked. Bob always locks the door on the way to work.” Bob was the breather who owned the house.