Raising Stony Mayhall (20 page)

“Or bacteria, yes. The infection, passed through the bite, attacks the victim’s system—”

“But it doesn’t.”

Chuck blinked at him. “Just because we have not yet identified the virus, does not mean that we cannot infer its existence.”

“But what does it live on?”

“Pardon?”

“We’re dead. Our cells are dead. There’s no material for viruses to feed on. They have nowhere to replicate.” He looked to the other members of the circle, but they didn’t seem inclined to support a new guy. “Bacteria doesn’t even grow on our skin—I’ve tried it. We don’t even decay.”

Chuck said, “All the more reason to believe that this is an
experimental
bioweapon, manufactured by the government, operating through alternate mechanisms that we haven’t yet—”

“What alternate mechanism would that be?” Stony asked. He wasn’t being sarcastic—okay, he was being a little sarcastic—but he was also curious. He’d been reading some things about artificial life, so maybe they were thinking of a Von Neumann–style copier and constructor. He could imagine an inorganic virus that operated through mechanisms similar to crystal growth.

One of the women in the group spoke up. “As a matter of fact, Reichenbach’s odic force will explain—”

Chuck made a guttural noise of disgust, and Stony thought, Wow, I’ve just witnessed my first
harrumph
. “Vitalism?” Chuck said. “Again, Wilma? Why don’t you just save us time and call it magic?”

The others groaned; this was an old argument, evidently. Stony grinned. “Maybe it’s not so magical,” Stony said. “Have you guys ever heard of cellular automata?”

There was no night at the congress; the lights of the warehouse stayed as undimmed as a Las Vegas casino, and Stony lost track of the time. He occasionally looked around and caught glimpses of the festival bubbling around them, with delegates throwing themselves into rugby matches (ugly on cement), painting impromptu murals, singing LD folk songs, compensating for their dulled sense of touch with rough sports and high input for the remaining senses. He assumed that somewhere in the main tent the high-ranking members were debating the destiny of the community. As for Stony and the OSWoGs, they’d worked out a thorough and completely unconvincing mechanism by which a clockwork virus could replicate in dead bodies, dead bodies could move, and the dead could think via solid-state information transfer. It was the most fun Stony had had in years. Though he felt a bit
guilty not telling them about his own background. What would it do to their theories and hypotheses if they knew an LD could grow from a baby?

The talk turned to politics. Stony knew before he left L.A. that the LDA was at a crisis point—that was the whole reason for the congress—but he hadn’t grasped the severity until one of the OSWoGs casually mentioned the census number: 1,700 “give or take.”

Stony must have looked shocked, because F.M. said, “What’s the matter?”

Stony said, “I knew there was something up with the numbers, but … Delia told me there were eight to ten thousand LDs in hiding across the country.”

“Oh, Stony, no, I’m sorry. Maybe five, ten years ago, but every day there are less of us.”

Stony said, “I didn’t know the Diggers had gotten so many.”

“They’re not
that
good,” Chuck said. “We’re doing it to ourselves. Our people are suiciding. They’re burning themselves, or deliberately turning themselves in. They’re giving up, and the ones who are left are getting desperate. The Big Biters, they want to end the world now—”

“Fucking terrorists,” F.M. said.

“—and the Perpetualists think they can save the world for LDs one bite at a time and somehow not kill us all, and the Abstainers want to wither away—”

“And the Lumpists? What do they want?”

Chuck looked at Wilma. Stony then noticed that she was wearing a necklace like Rose’s, a nobbly hunk of metal. Lumpist, Lump. “The Lumpists are just trying to keep hope alive,” she said.

Chuck said, “I thought you were just waiting for the Zombie Jesus to save us.”

Wilma frowned disapprovingly at his use of the Z-word. “We’re waiting for a leader, a
bridge
. Someone to bring the living dead and the deadly living to some kind of … rapprochement.”

It was the first time he’d heard anyone use that word out loud. He had no idea it sounded so French; in his head it had always rhymed with
encroachment
.

“Oppressed people are always pining for a savior,” Chuck said. “How long can you keep them waiting?”

“Two thousand years,” F.M. said. “And counting.”

“That’s the purpose of a messiah,” Stony said. The words of the Lump had stuck with him. “You have to keep our people waiting, because what’s the alternative—Armageddon? The Big Bite?”

An air horn sounded, and the OSWoGs stood up. A late-arriving vehicle pulled into the warehouse, lights flashing and horn honking. The gleaming red-white-and-blue coach bus descended the ramp to the floor of congress, where they lost sight of it. Stony and the group walked a short distance, where they saw the bus roll to a stop at the center of the warehouse floor, scattering the Ultimate Frisbee teams.

The OSWoGs looked at the bus and one another, and Stony was sure they had no idea who it was, either. Then Stony saw Delia running toward the bus from the main tent, Mr. Blunt following briskly behind her. Even from this distance he could tell that Delia was furious.

Stony said, “I’ll be back in a minute, guys.” He jogged off toward the bus. Delia reached it well before him and began knocking at the vehicle’s door. A crowd began to gather. Stony moved up to her and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Not now, Stony,” she said, and banged on the door again. Stony couldn’t see through the tinted glass to the driver or the cabin. Porthole windows, also tinted, punctuated the side. The
paint job was metallic flake, the hubcaps so shiny they seemed to be constantly spinning. A flashy ride, but not full-on rock star. More Kenny Rogers on an up year.

Mr. Blunt pushed his way to the front. Several tough-looking LDs—a couple of whom Stony recognized as guards who’d checked him on the way into the congress—came with him, forming a picket. “Please!” Mr. Blunt said to the crowd. Half the congress was converging on the vehicle. “Everyone back.” He placed himself beside Delia and said in a low voice, “I thought you spoke to him.”

“I
told
him not to do this,” she said. “He’s risking everything.”

The door swung open. A figure in a gold-trimmed navy uniform and white skipper’s hat stood on the bottom step, and Stony’s first thought was that it was Commander Calhoun, straight from the front of one of the Commander Calhoun FishStix boxes he’d stared at for twenty-four hours on the way up here.

Stony’s second thought was, My God, it really
is
Commander Calhoun.

His tanned face was wrinkle-free and disturbingly shiny, as if he’d been sealed under plastic wrap. His teeth were brilliant white. He didn’t look like the average LD, but he definitely wasn’t a living person. The Commander was one of them. “Ahoy there!” he shouted, and the crowd roared back.

He held up a hand, and when the applause and talk had died down he said, “I can’t wait to meet each and every one of you. With the secretary’s permission, I would like to immediately address the congress and announce—” He looked down. Delia had grabbed his forearm, and for the briefest moment his smile dimmed. Delia said something to him, and Calhoun addressed the crowd again. “In one hour!” he said. “The main
tent in one hour, and I promise you, you do
not
want to miss this news.”

Calhoun turned and stepped up into the bus, and Delia hopped up after him. The door closed, to more applause. The members of the congress didn’t disperse. It was as if they were waiting for him to pop out for another performance, like an automaton in a cuckoo clock.

“Nothing to see here, people,” Mr. Blunt said.

Stony leaned in to the man. “Let me get this straight—the secret benefactor of the LDA is Commander Calhoun?”

“Ronald McDonald was unavailable.”

an a man without a brain have his mind blown? Stony’s skull was nothing but a can of dead meat, yet he felt as if his head were about to burst: Commander Calhoun, LD bluegrass, Zombie Jesus … Too much, too much.

He decided not to return to the OSWoG circle, or go to the main tent to get a good seat, as so many were doing. He thought about ducking into the film tent, where a handful of people were watching a tape of Bela Lugosi in
White Zombie
, but even those few people seemed like a crowd. He needed time by himself. He’d loved talking with F.M. and his gang, and the sheer number of strange LDs had given him a jolt, but the congress was overwhelming him. He’d grown up with half a dozen people, and lived six years in the safe house with another small group. He was not built for constant interaction. He wished he could dig. A few hours of manual labor would clear his head. Instead he walked toward the cluster of trailers and RVs, figuring he’d eventually remember which one he and Delia had put their bags in.

His mind kept circling back to the census number.
Seventeen hundred. Still large enough to scare a breather—any one of those hundreds could start an outbreak—but my God it felt tiny to him. Two thousand was a midsize high school. The Diggers could wipe them out like a Vietnamese village. Was it any wonder they wanted to hold the congress immediately? This was last call before extinction.

He walked between two silver trailers, neither of which looked quite right, and turned left in the face of a big Winnebago grille. Now he was in among a pod of RVs, boxy things like shipping containers on wheels, nothing like the sleek coach Commander Calhoun had ridden in on. Stony turned a corner and saw a group of six or seven people up ahead, engaged in some kind of argument. He recognized Billy Zip by his hat, and the man he was talking to by his missing arm; it was the secretary of the congress.

Why was the secretary giving the king of the Big Biters the time of day? The biters, as F.M. pointed out, were fucking terrorists.

Stony ducked between the next pair of RVs, then went left again. In a hundred yards he was almost behind the group, with only one vehicle separating them. He could hear Zip talking, words bouncing off the cement, but couldn’t make out his words. Stony could keep edging around to the back of the RV, or he could crawl under the thing. It would be like spying on his sisters.

Suddenly hands grabbed him from behind, and a harsh voice said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Stony looked over his shoulder. The man was huge, with green-tinged skin, as if some fungus had gotten to him in the grave. Tracks of staples held the quadrants of his face together. Behind him, a group of six or seven people were walking toward them.

Stony said, “I don’t know what you’re—”

The big man yanked Stony backward, spun him, then slammed him face-first against the side of the other RV. “Are you messing with our vehicle?”

“What? No!”

The group came around the end of the RV, Billy Zip smiling, the secretary of the congress looking nervous. “If you’re trying to spy on us,” Zip said, “you’re doing a lousy job.”

“Who is he?” the secretary asked.

“Delia and Blunt’s boy, a convert from Iowa,” Zip said.

The big man said, “He’s with Blunt?”

“Exactly,” Zip said. “Check under the RV for bombs. Look for anything with a wire on it.” One of the group, a relatively fresh-looking corpse with a wig of black hair that made him look like Moe from the Stooges, dropped to the cement and crawled under the vehicle.

“You can’t be serious,” Stony said. The big man lifted him a few inches and banged him against the metal. “Hey!”

Zip said, “What are you doing here, Stony?”

Stony looked past him to the secretary. “What are
you
doing here? Are you actually talking to these guys?”

The secretary blinked. “I talk to all the delegates.”

“Then could you tell Bluto here to put me down?”

The secretary said to Zip, “We can take this up later. We’ve already discussed—”

“No, we’ll talk now, Stanley. Tevvy, put the boy down.”

The big man, Tevvy, released him and backed up a step. Stony edged sideways so he could see around him. “I knew the Big Biters were crazy, but—”

“Watch it, kid,” Zip said. “I’ll forgive that because you’re new.”

But Stony was pissed now. “Your plan is insane. Tell me what happens after the Big Bite, after all the living are dead or
transformed. Because that’s it. That’s the end of the human race.”

The secretary put up his hands. “I’m leaving.”

“Wait, Stanley. This is exactly the kind of person we need to educate.” Zip turned to Stony. “
We
are the human race, kid. You’ve got to stop feeling like a second-class citizen. The Bite isn’t something to be afraid of. Hell, they’ll thank us. Famine in Africa? Over. Disease, old age? Done. We never die.”

“No, we wear out. We can last decades, maybe a hundred years, and what then? In a century the planet is a graveyard.”