Raising Stony Mayhall (17 page)

They talked for two more hours. Measured in words, it was a short conversation, but Stony began to feel as if the slow-motion unfolding of the sentences was an essential part of the content. This halting speech, telegraphed through the droning Rajit, should have been the opposite of eloquence. Instead, perhaps because he was listening so carefully, the words struck home like poetry, or commandments. The Lump described the demographics of the community, how LDs aligned themselves based on geography and religion and especially origin: graveborn separating themselves from the bitten, Oldies from the newly bitten, and those who believed they’d died from those who believed they still lived and were only infected. Then of course were the political divisions based on the bite: the Abstainers and Perpetualists and Big Biters. People in all these groups, the Lump said (without any evident pride in Rajit’s voice), looked to him for guidance.

“Everyone is waiting for a messiah. Someone to bridge the gap between the living dead and the merely living.”

Stony didn’t know what that meant, “bridge the gap.”
Someone who’d make the LDs into something not quite dead? If this were a normal conversation—whatever passed for normal in the undead world—Stony might have started asking questions. Instead he waited as Rajit continued to spell out words. The Lump described how people longed for the Big Bite, but they were waiting for a sign from the Lump that the messiah had arrived.

“It seems to me,” Stony said slowly—he wanted to choose his words as carefully as the Lump did—“that a messiah is the last thing you want. Once he—or she?—arrives, then all bets are off. The moderate LDs will finally believe a Big Bite is possible, and the apocalypse begins.”

The Lump rocked, creaking—the cackle of a jawless man. His hand moved. “That is generally the problem with advents.”

“Why did you invite me in here?” Stony asked. “What do you want from me?”

Stony watched the shriveled finger trace a pattern across the board.

“We would like you to pass on a message,” the Lump said. “If you see the messiah, tell him to hide.”

Stony couldn’t watch the rest of Roger’s extraction: One tooth was enough. He knew the risks to the community if Roger continued to act out, but he didn’t have the stomach for enforcement. Despite his adventuring in greasepaint, his larking about in a mime suit, he knew he wasn’t Delia or Mr. Blunt. He knew he wasn’t a true LDA
soldier
. Very few of his people were. They weren’t freedom fighters: They were TV watchers and Scrabble players.

He went down to the basement and back to his room. Thomas, still chained, had thrown himself off his pallet. Stony
helped him back into place and then took his stats. Pulse: zero. Breaths per minute: zero. Temperature: room.

“Almost done,” he told Thomas. To distract himself from the sounds coming from upstairs, he took out the two letters Blunt had given him. Letters and packages were passed from hand to hand through the network of volunteers, activists, and cell leaders, sometimes taking weeks to reach their destination. Stony was one of the lucky ones; most of the LDs didn’t have anyone who knew they were still in the world, but he received a letter or two almost every week. Each of these envelopes had been opened and taped shut; no one was trying to disguise the fact that correspondence was being scanned for information that could hurt the community if it fell into the wrong hands. He assumed that his outgoing mail was also being read and possibly censored. In fact it was doubly censored. The first time he’d written a letter to Alice, Mr. Blunt told him to not mention his life in Iowa, or his miraculous childhood—and somehow Blunt had gotten that instruction to the people who wrote Stony.

Stony opened the envelope from Kwang first. Like his previous letters, it was less than a page long, and composed of 15 percent weather and 85 percent farm news. What else could Kwang talk about, if not their shared past? So, Stony learned that it had been very rainy lately, and Kwang was thinking of switching seed vendors, and in the spring he was going to try an HTF ethanol hybrid—whatever that was. Stony wondered if the LD censors suspected Kwang of encoding secret messages in his agro-jargon. But alas, there were no ciphers to be found. Kwang had become an Iowa farmer, and he wrote like one. He never talked about his feelings, how difficult or rewarding it was to wring a living from land his father had never succeeded in getting to produce, or what it was like to do all the work of an able-bodied farmer
while stomping around on two prosthetic legs. The letters were stunningly boring, highly repetitious, and dry as kindling. Stony loved them.

The last line was, “Hope your doing okay. K.”

He set the letter aside, then opened the remaining envelope. Four pages on lined paper, filled with Alice’s dense, slashing cursive, and an eight-page photocopy of an epidemiology article. More predictions of the next outbreak. He decided to read the letter first. Alice didn’t talk about her feelings, either, but she was never boring. The letter was dated three weeks ago.

Mr. Blunt knocked on the door frame. “I’m on my way out, but I wanted to see your post human.”

“And there he is,” Stony said. “His name is Thomas.”

Blunt leaned over the man and shook his head. “Still in his swaddling clothes. And still in the thick of it, it seems.” He glanced at Stony. “I noticed you skipped the second act of our little performance of
The Tooth of Crime.
”

“I didn’t think I needed to see any more of that.”

“You need to see everything, Stony. You’re a scientist.”

“I’m a dead boy in a basement with a computer.”

“And a new patient.” If Valerie was the mom of the house, then Mr. Blunt was the bachelor uncle, always dropping by to entertain the kids. His position in the LDA was nebulous. Sometimes Stony thought he was Delia’s lieutenant, other times her superior. He was insistently vague on the nature of his responsibilities, but liked to hint darkly of his adventurous past. The joke was that Blunt had no past, at least before 1968. The fever had erased his memory, and when he dug himself from the garbage heap (if that story was true, and while Stony doubted many of Blunt’s tales, he believed that one), he remade himself into the vivid outline of a man, not so much a person as a persona. His mood was too constantly light, his voice always
pitched to carry beyond the footlights, his appearance as persnickety as a period costume. There were a couple of other people in the house who also seemed too consistently themselves, and Stony wondered if this was one of the side effects of the fever’s amnesia. Forced to instantly invent a personality from scratch, they seized on an image of themselves, and became that. Or maybe that’s what everyone did. Think of his sister: What else was
Crystal
but Chelsea’s deliberate act of reinvention? Who did Kwang become when he joined the football team? And what the hell was Stony doing whenever he went out with Delia? In his head he was slipping on the red mask of the Unstoppable, or shrugging into that Jack Gore trench coat. So Mr. Blunt had adopted the dress and dialect of a 1960s British TV spy—at least he was fun to be around.

Mr. Blunt stood up, brushed some nonexistent dust from his knees. “And how are your investigations proceeding?”

“They proceed nowhere,” Stony said. “Just like every other time. Stop smiling.”

“I like to see you throw yourself against this particular brick wall,” Mr. Blunt said. “You’re bound to knock a few chips off it eventually.”

“It’s just that what’s happening to Thomas doesn’t make any sense.
We
don’t make any sense. And you’re the worst of all. You’re, what, sixty, sixty-five percent wood?”

“I’ve never measured. Do I look like I’ve gained weight?”

“Both hands and most of your arms are artificial. Both legs up to your hips are carved wood. Your chest—”

“Stipulated. I am composed of a large amount of building material.”

“Doesn’t it bother you how crazy that is? You can walk around, move your hands and your fingers—with what? When I met you I thought there were wires or electrodes or something that allowed you to move them.”

“Ooh, that sounds complicated.”

“Complicated does not mean unexplainable. Complicated is how the world works. It’s how nature works. But we’re—never mind.”

“Come come, my boy! It’s okay to use the S-word.”

“There’s no such thing as the supernatural. If we’re in the world, then we’re part of nature—super doesn’t enter into it. So there
has
to be an explanation for us.”

“Nonsense,” Mr. Blunt said. “Have you learned nothing from the Lump?”

“And if there’s an explanation—”

“There has to be a cure. Yes, yes.” They’d had this discussion many times over the years. “I only wish that you weren’t so unhappy with yourself that you were pining for one.”

“Don’t tell Delia,” Stony said. She was fanatical about LD Pride.

Mr. Blunt nodded toward the envelopes on the desk. “Any word from Crystal?”

“She’s due any day now. She may have already had the baby. Alice is going to be there for the birth.”

“My conditional congratulations, then! And your mother?”

“Still in ‘quarantine.’ Alice thinks she’s still in Georgia, but they might have moved her.” The Calvette Medical Prison, outside Atlanta, was her third facility since she’d been arrested two nights after the accident. She’d never been allowed to see a lawyer or been given a chance for a trial. The quarantine was a sham, of course. No disease carrier could still be alive days later, much less six years.

“I’m sorry, my boy. We live in a police state. This is what they do—burn the dead, lock up the living. At least your sisters are free.”

“You don’t feel very free if the government’s got a gun to your head.” Alice and Crystal hadn’t been arrested after Stony
escaped, but they’d been told not to talk to the press or they’d be prosecuted for terrorism. “Alice still can’t get hired at a real research facility. Every time she applies to a lab or a university she gets turned down, no explanation. They’ve blacklisted her.”

“Yet she is still—”

“If you’re going to tell me that I could have destroyed their lives even more thoroughly than I have, I get it, Mr. Blunt.”

“Ah. Well.” He clapped his hands against his thighs—clack!—and then tucked his arms behind his back. “I wanted to tell you that I’ll be taking Roger with me when I go, so you and Delia don’t have to worry about watching him. You did a fine job today, a fine job. I wish I could have seen your performance. A mime is a terrible thing to—”

“Stop! Please don’t,” Stony said.

“Say no more.” He started down the hallway, then stopped again. “And if I’m not here when Thomas awakes, may I be the first to say, mazel tov.”

There was a small room at the top of Blue house, just under the eaves. It was less than ten feet long and was empty except for a few storage boxes, and a metal folding chair set up in front of the single narrow window. The window was covered by a blanket. No one from the houses went up there much because of the low roof and the lack of electrical outlets. A room without TV, after all, was no room at all.

Stony sat down on the chair, and after a moment, pushed the edge of the blanket a few inches to the side. They lived in a neighborhood of tiny boxes built in the 1940s for returning GIs, now populated by their white widows and the mostly nonwhite people who moved in when the widows died: legal
and illegal immigrants, claiming or denying citizenship from every country in the Americas and a few Asian nations as well.

Next door, the front porch light was on, but all the windows of the house were dark, of course. It was 3:30 in the morning. In two hours Sherry would be getting up, to take the 6:40 bus to the restaurant where she worked. He didn’t know the name of the restaurant. He didn’t know anything about her, really. She’d moved in with her family almost two years ago. She was in her early twenties, and had a preschool-age son that she left with her mother while she worked. She spent too much money at convenience stores rather than going to a real grocery store, and she never seemed to have vegetables in her plastic bags. She liked orange soda. When she’d had a particularly tough week she’d go to the store and bring back expensive ice cream. Sometimes she went out with girlfriends, but as far as he could tell, she did not date. In the summers she filled up a wading pool for her son, and she’d sit in it with him. He’d never heard her voice.

“You know that’s creepy, right?” Delia. He closed the shutters, and the room was fully dark.

“What?”

“Your girlfriend.” The floorboards complained as she crossed the floor to him. “It’s not healthy to lust over a breather, Stony.”

“I’m not lusting, I’m just—”

Delia laughed. “I’m kidding, farm boy. I’ve never known a stiff who could get a stiffy.” She paused, and he was glad he couldn’t see her face in the dark. “You don’t, do you?”

He thought of Kwang, trying to teach him to masturbate. “You sound like my sisters,” he said. “They were always trying to figure out my sex life. They wanted to get me laid.”

“Someone should have told them that necrophilia’s illegal.” She leaned over him and lifted the blanket up over the
curtain rod. Pale light washed her face. This was her good side, almost unmarked.

“I watch them, too,” she said. “Sometimes.” She scanned the street, alert, as always, for police and Diggers. “That black girl next door—she’s pretty.”

“I guess.”

She chuckled.
“I guess.”
She took a pack of menthol lights from her jacket pocket, offered one to Stony. He shook his head, and she said, “Come on, I know you sneak smokes up here.”

“Do I have no secrets?”

“I can’t figure out why you’re hiding them. We all smoke, Stony. We’re already dead, we’d be crazy not to.”

“My mom would kill me if she found out,” he said, and took the cigarette from her. She lit it for him with her plastic lighter, then squatted with her back to the window.

A while later she said, “You still love them, don’t you, Stony?”

“Who?”

“All of them. The breathers. You want to be one of them again.”

“I was never one of them,” he said.