Raising Stony Mayhall (14 page)

“The mailman saw you?” Stony asked. “He recognized what you were?”

“I saw it on his face. He was going to run. So I had to … well, grab him.”

“Jesus,” Delia said. “Did the neighbors see anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Show us where he is,” Delia said. Roger stumped down the hallway—one leg was a few inches shorter than the other. She asked, “Did you hurt him?”

Roger hesitated. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”
Delia said.

“We were rolling around a lot. He was fighting, yelling. In all the ruckus, I may have, uh, bit him.”

Delia grabbed Roger by the shoulder and spun him around. “Did you kill him?”

“No! It was just a bite, a little, tiny bite. I didn’t even mean to!”

If you bit him, Stony thought, you’ve already killed him.

They reached the back bedroom door. There was no sound. Stony said, “Did you knock him out or something? Gag him?”

“I tied his hands with my belt! Then I just, well, sat on him. When I heard you come in, I told him not to move, or
else
, and I locked him in here.”

Stony tried the door, but the knob didn’t turn. He looked at Delia.

Delia said, “Roger, you do know that bedrooms don’t lock from the outside?”

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

Stony stepped back and kicked. The door banged open. There was no one in the room. The blue-green belt from Roger’s robe lay on the bed, next to a red blot the size of a half-dollar. There were two windows in the room, one filled with an air conditioner, the other wide open.

“Where is he?” Roger yelled.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Delia said. “It’s a fucking mystery.”

Stony went to the open window. They were in a single-story bungalow, and the brown September grass was only five feet below. He leaned out and saw a blue-shirted figure dart between the houses and disappear.

“We’ve got a runner,” Stony said. “Delia, go back to the van, see if you can find his mail truck on the next block—he’s probably heading for that. I’ll try to grab him before he gets there.” She didn’t answer. “Delia?”

“Fine,” Delia said. “Roger, you’re coming with me. You’ve burned down another fucking safe house.”

Stony dove through the open window, landed hard on one shoulder, and rolled to a standing position. Undead Advantage No. 12: throwing yourself around like a rag doll, without worrying about concussions or torn muscles. Number 13? The trick he’d learned years ago: relentless, tireless running.

Stony sprinted in the direction the man had taken. He came out between two houses, and he’d closed the distance to within fifty yards. The mailman was running flat out, with a canvas bag flapping at his side. You had to admire him for hanging on to the mail.

Stony shouted, “Wait!” The man glanced behind him, then looked a second time, and stumbled.

Stony thought, That’s right, you thought we were shamblers, didn’t you?

Thanks to Romero’s endlessly replayed documentary of the outbreak, everyone thought the living dead shuffled around like geriatric patients. But those were the fevered dead, brain-damaged and confused, at the mercy of recalcitrant limbs jerking to their own rhythm. After the fever passed, a sane LD only had to tell the muscles to move, and they moved.
Jump, and they jumped. Free will, or its compelling illusion, was restored.

The man stopped running, turned to face him. His chest heaved, but he looked merely scared and confused, not terrified. Then Stony thought, Oh, right. I’m dressed like a mime.

He slowed to a stop about ten feet from the man. “I just want to help you,” Stony said.

The mailman looked Hispanic, perhaps forty years old. His shirt was untucked, and there was blood on his neck and his arm. Roger really had bitten him, maybe more than once. The mailman pointed back toward the bungalow. “Something—” He breathed deep. “Zombie. Bit me.”

“You don’t have to use the Z-word,” Stony said.

The man stared at him.

“Why don’t you come with me,” Stony said. “We can get you some help.”

He nodded slowly. Stony stepped forward, and the man suddenly slung his bag behind him and bolted for the nearest house. It was a two-story modernist cube with large square windows, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Stony swore and started after him. The mailman reached the fence, planted two hands, and vaulted over without breaking stride. The move looked so practiced that Stony wondered if he’d learned it in postal school. Advanced Canine Escape Techniques. Stony’s hurdle was less graceful; he was moving so quickly that he was able to clear the fence, but he landed awkwardly and covered the last twenty feet in a stumbling, headlong rush. He barreled into the man, mashing him against the door with much more force than he’d intended.

The mailman squawked and began to slide to his knees.

“Sorry!” Stony said. He stooped, then lifted the man into a fireman’s carry, and the mailman yelped in pain. “Sorry, sorry.” Stony carried him to the fence, nudged open the gate
with his hip, and walked into the street. Behind him, the door opened and a voice yelled in Spanish.

The blue van swung around the corner. Delia was driving, and Roger, thank God, was out of sight in the back. Stony struck a pose: hip cocked, head tilted, thumb raised. The van stopped with its bumper only a few inches from his left knee.

Stony pivoted to face the house. A dark-haired woman in an aquamarine pantsuit pointed at him and yelled, “Police! Police!”

Stony swept his free arm back and bowed to her. The purity of the gesture was marred only by the thrashing captive on his shoulder.

“We’re never doing that again,” Delia said.

They hauled him out of the van like a roll of carpet; Stony held his feet and Delia gripped under his arms. During the trip from Mount Washington to Venice they’d secured his wrists with plastic zip ties, mostly to stop him from trying something stupid, and duct-taped his mouth.

Stony said, “Do what, kidnapping?” But he knew she wasn’t talking about that.

“And then you take a fucking bow? Are you insane?”

“That was great,” Roger said from behind them.

Delia’s safe house was actually two houses, Yellow and Blue, a back-to-back pair of run-down bungalows several miles from the beach, fenced off and partially shielded from the neighbors by overgrown trees. They’d parked the van on the cement patio between the houses, and so only had to carry the mailman in the open for a few seconds before they reached the back door of Yellow. Still, Stony could not help
but glance up at the house next door, at the single window that overlooked their backyard.

Delia caught him. “Quit looking for an audience, farm boy.” She stepped backward through the kitchen door, and then they were inside. “You
like
dressing up, don’t you?”

“I thought maybe she’d think it was performance art and wouldn’t call the cops.” Stony shrugged. “I mean, it
is
Venice. Watch your head, Thomas.” They maneuvered around a corner and entered the living room. Thomas Sandoval was the name on the mailman’s driver’s license. He was still sweating and scared, but part of that was due to the fever coming on.

“I’m not letting you talk to Mr. Blunt anymore,” Delia said. “He’s a bad influence.”

It was true, the disguises had been partly Mr. Blunt’s idea. If you can’t hide it, he’d said, paint it red. He’d suggested Mardi Gras masks, but Stony decided that makeup was the better choice, especially if they needed to drive themselves. He was pretty sure it was illegal to drive with a mask on, and it certainly couldn’t help with your peripheral vision.

“Next time—” Stony said.

“I said never.”

“Well, we can’t use
that
outfit, now that the cops are looking for Shields and Yarnell.” Delia backed down the basement stairs, with Thomas’s head braced on her shoulder, cheek to cheek. Stony felt bad about losing the traveling mime troupe gag. They’d worn the costumes for several rounds of visits to the people of the parish, and perhaps because no one wanted to engage a mime, they’d been aggressively ignored. Then again, they’d never chased down a postal worker in broad daylight. “I’m thinking of something even better,” he said.

“Better.”

“Three words: Kiss tribute band.”

She abruptly stopped. Thomas folded between them and grunted.

She wouldn’t smile—Delia wasn’t the smiling type—but he’d managed to loosen the line of her frown. She wasn’t really mad at him; she was furious with Roger, and with herself for allowing Roger to live on his own with the breathers. She looked at him over the tops of her sunglasses, her lidless eye like a full moon.

“One more thing.
Go get the car, Delia?
”

“Oh, that.”

“Next time you give me an order, outside this house or in, I will kick your dead gray ass.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

They set the mailman on the floor in Stony’s room, and Delia left to call the chain of answering machines and voicemail systems that connected the cells. The other cell leaders had to know about a new bite, especially one to a government worker who’d be missed soon. The risks were too great. It was an article of faith among the LDA that a single victim, let loose on the world, could start a new outbreak.

Well, yes and no. The numbers and infection models he’d learned from Alice were true, but only in the purest theoretical sense, a physics problem that required a perfect vacuum. Every real LD knew that if they were seen walking the streets, much less biting someone in front of witnesses, the Diggers and every other arm of the government would sweep down and burn every LD in sight—and probably anyone without a tan. The United States had been caught unawares in ’68, but they wouldn’t allow an outbreak to happen again.

The other eight LDs living in the houses converged on Stony’s room. The space was already crowded with equipment tables, filing cabinets, and computer desks, but they cleared a spot in the middle of the room, set down an old mattress, and
laid Thomas upon it. The man was growing delirious. He thrashed at his bonds, and moaned through the tape that covered his mouth.

“Can I do anything?” Roger asked. “I somehow feel responsible.”

Stony stared at him. “Just stay out of the way.” Roger would be busy enough in the next couple of hours surviving Delia. He’d broken Rule No. 1. She would have to take disciplinary action; she had no choice. Stony said, “We need sheets, at least five. We’re going to have to mummy-wrap him to stop him from hurting himself.” Two residents hurried off into the tunnel that connected the two basements. “Valerie, could you find me surgical thread and needles? Oh, and towels and water.”

Valerie, a sad, graveborn woman who was his best friend in the house, brought him the things he asked for. He also assembled what he needed from his own supplies in the room: syringes, Petri dishes, sealable vials. Then he crouched next to Thomas.

“I’m going to remove the tape, okay?”

The man’s eyes flicked back and forth, and he seemed not to hear Stony. But then his head jerked in what could have been a nod. Stony peeled the tape from his mouth.

The man gasped, then said, “Please don’t kill me.”

“I’m going to help you through this, Thomas.”

“I have a wife. You have to—somebody has to—” He took a shaky breath. “I can’t think straight. There’s something wrong with me.”

His shirt was drenched in sweat; his breaths came fast and light. So many autonomic processes in the living body, Stony thought. Nerves fired, muscles twitched, adrenaline pumped; uncountable systems and subsystems churned and contested with one another. Thomas’s conscious mind was being pushed
along on a flood of chemicals and electricity, not riding the wave but swept up in it, trying to make sense of what the body told it: You are under threat. The monsters surround you. The poison is already inside.

“It’s going to be all right,” Stony said. “You’ll be going through some changes in the next twenty-four hours or so. You may feel afraid, or angry. You might even scare yourself. But I want you to know that I’m going to be here with you.”

However long it takes, Stony thought. The folklore of the LDs was that the sooner a person died after a bite, the sooner he came back. Instead of waiting for the bite to shut off his heart, Stony could kill Thomas now, even make it painless. But that was folklore. Stony wasn’t about to experiment on the man. He doubted he could kill Thomas even if he knew the rumor to be true.

Thomas said, “Am I going to die? I feel like I’m going to die.”

“I promise you,” Stony said. “Soon you’re going to feel a lot better.”

“It’s not fair,” Valerie said. She stood behind Stony as he gazed into the microscope. On the floor, Thomas groaned and thrashed. He was wrapped neck to feet in several layers of bedsheets, a makeshift straitjacket. Leather belts were cinched around his ankles, waist, and upper arms. He chewed at the towel they’d wedged into his mouth to protect his teeth and jaw from his frantic gnashing.

“I know, I know,” Stony said absently. He rotated the slides again. Here was Thomas’s blood before he died, six hours after the bite: perfectly normal. And here was Thomas’s blood after he passed, at the 6:12 mark: dark, viscous, waxy. The transformation had occurred between observations, like
the state change in a quantum particle. Like death itself. “I wish we could explain to him what’s happening.”

The bitten did not die as normal humans did. In a normal death, cells would begin to starve, and acidic carbon dioxide would build up, rupturing cell membranes. Digestive enzymes would spill into other cells, and the body would begin to eat itself from the inside out. As muscle cells stopped pumping calcium ions, rigor mortis would set in around the jaw and neck. Blood cells would begin to settle and congeal.

But the bitten did not break down, they did not stiffen. They entered the fever, which could last anywhere from 24 to 48 hours. Thomas was only on hour 10. If they let him loose now he’d attack any human in sight. Stony had often marveled at how specific the hunger was: The fevered dead didn’t attack animals, or invade butcher shops. They craved human meat, human and nothing but, as if taking revenge for being kicked out of their former species. The Payback Diet.