Raising Stony Mayhall (22 page)

“That’s a great idea, sir,” Stony said. Compared to Calhoun Island and the Spaceship of the Living Dead, it was completely practical. Stony didn’t know if any LD besides the Commander would wear a full-metal bodysuit all day, every day, but he knew plenty who could use it. Some LDs, like Roger, fell apart faster than others. They lost teeth, hair, toes. An Integrity Suit could add decades to their existence.

“We’re planning a variety of colors and styles,” the Commander said. “Something for everyone. Except you, of course.”

“Pardon?”

“You don’t need a suit, Johnny, because you can
grow
. You can
heal
.”

“Actually, sir, whenever I got hurt my mom and my sisters would—”

“Nonsense! If you can grow, you’re adding mass. That’s healing, son. That’s a whole other world of LD existence. And we need to know how the hell you do it. We need to bottle what it is that God gave you.”

Stony didn’t know what to say.
Bottle it?
He looked at Delia, but her face—her half-fleshed face—was unreadable.

“Stony, I want you to come with me back to Florida. We’ve got a state-of-the-art lab there and the best people money can buy. Wait here! I’ll show you the brochure.” The Commander whipped around and headed for the back bedroom.

Stony turned to Delia and dropped his voice. “What have you done?”

Behind them, someone knocked at the front door of the bus.

“I’m sorry,” Delia said. She walked toward the door and he followed her. “I didn’t know about the lab.”

“If he thinks I’m going down to his homemade Cape Canaveral to play Ham the Astrochimp, he’s insane. God
damn
insane.”

Delia stepped down and opened the door. One of Mr. Blunt’s guards looked up at them. “We’ve got a problem outside,” the man said.

“
Outside
outside?” Delia asked.

“Mr. Blunt would like you to hurry.”

* * *

Stony insisted on going with her. No way was he going to stay on the bus with Commander Crazy. He followed Delia across the warehouse floor, aiming for the loading docks where they’d all entered. Delia cautioned him to not look panicked in front of the delegates. Everyone was still on edge because of Calhoun’s swerve into sci-fi and Billy Zip’s removal from the stage.

The security guard told them that a breather had somehow gotten through the front gates and driven up to the docks. “One of Blunt’s breathers, the black guy with the beard—”

“His name’s Aaron,” Delia said.

“Well, Blunt sent him out to talk to the other breather, and told me to get you.”

“How the hell did he get through the gates? Calhoun’s company was supposed to lock down the whole compound.”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Of course you don’t.” At the end of the warehouse, they went up a short flight of stairs, then outside. The sunlight came as a shock. It was afternoon, the oblique autumn light throwing long shadows before the fleet of vehicles parked out front on a gravel lot. There were nine or ten semis, including the freezer truck that Stony had traveled in, a multitude of vans and moving trucks, and several cars. The warehouse squatted on a vast, grassy plain, featureless in every direction he could see except for a long paved road that led away from the parking lot. The land was flat as Iowa, the sky a pearly gray he knew from midwestern winters. Stony experienced the kind of scale shift he hadn’t felt since playing the Little Big game when he was a kid. The warehouse, so huge when he was inside it, suddenly seemed as small as a toy box, and he was a plastic soldier surrounded by Matchbox trucks and Hot Wheels cars.

Perhaps a hundred yards away, a pickup truck was parked on the paved road, engine running, driver still behind the wheel. Aaron stood beside the truck, his hands on the driver’s-side door. The driver was obscured by the glare of the windshield—Stony caught an impression of a fat man with a high forehead—and even though Stony couldn’t hear the words of the men, he could tell they were arguing. A few of the other breather drivers were huddling around the truck, blocking the driver from going forward, and more important, obscuring his view of Mr. Blunt and the other LDs, who were standing well back.

Mr. Blunt saw Delia and Stony emerge and walked over to them holding the brim of his hat, which served both to keep it from blowing off in the cold wind (cold for breathers, that is, twenty-four hours in the freezer having obliterated Stony’s thermostat) and to shield his face from the breather in the pickup.

“He’s the warehouse manager,” Blunt said. “And he very much wants to know what we’re doing with his building.”

“It’s none of his fucking business,” Delia said. “All the employees were told to take the week off.”

“Nevertheless, he says that he’s going to call the police if we don’t let him inside.”

“But he hasn’t called them yet. Is he armed?”

“This is North Dakota. He has a gun rack in the truck.”

Delia and Mr. Blunt looked at each other. Stony had seen them do this before, silently exchanging information at a baud rate he could only imagine. If the driver called the police, the congress was too large for everyone to escape undetected. There would be roadblocks. Highway chases.

After perhaps ten seconds of silence, Delia said, “Fuck. Grab him. Let him see breathers only. But if he goes for the rifle—”

“Understood,” Mr. Blunt said. He gestured to one of the security guards and said, “Get the word to Aaron.”

The LD security guard spoke to one of the breather drivers, and that driver walked up to Aaron. Aaron stepped away from the car, listening to the man, then stared at him for a long moment.

Stony wondered what he was thinking. Aaron risked his freedom for LDs every day—all these drivers did. They were the most hard-core of volunteers, the breathers who drove the vehicles, hosted the safe houses, kept the secrets of the undead. Without them, the LDs could not survive. And yet they were always being asked to do more, even betray their fellow humans. And for what? The LDA didn’t even allow them inside the congress.

Aaron nodded, then turned again toward the pickup. Stony thought, If I was Aaron, I would tell the man to run. The place is full of monsters.

Aaron said something to the pickup driver, then suddenly lunged through the driver’s-side window—reaching for the truck keys, Stony realized. The driver shouted something, and the truck lurched backward. Aaron was still halfway through the window, his toes kicking up gravel.

The truck accelerated, still in reverse, and bounced onto the paved drive. Aaron half fell out of the window, and the road kicked his legs out from under him. His arm was still thrust through the window, bent backward at the elbow. Aaron screamed in pain.

Mr. Blunt was in motion, running toward the pickup. Suddenly the truck slammed on the brakes, spun. Aaron went flying, tumbling off the pavement and onto the grass. The driver twisted the truck around, aimed it away from the warehouse.

Mr. Blunt was only thirty yards from the vehicle’s
tailgate—but then the driver hit the gas and the truck peeled away from him. Blunt would never catch it.

Stony yelled at one of the security guards. “Which way did the truck come in?”

The guard looked at him, then started to look away, and Stony screamed, “Which way?” He pointed left, at a diagonal from the paved driveway. The entrance had to meet another road at the front gates. “East?” Then he pointed toward the right. “Or west?”

The guard thought for a moment, then said, “East.”

The only way to beat the truck was to cut through the square. A squared plus B squared equals the shortest distance to the road. And if there was one thing Stony knew how to do it was run.

The ground was frozen, the knee-high grass brittle with frost. He ran. Then he ran faster. He glanced to his right, and saw the pickup disappearing up the drive. The warehouse manager was on pavement, and the truck could go sixty, seventy miles an hour, maybe faster once it swung onto the main road. The unknown variables in play were the lengths of the sides of the triangle, and Stony’s top speed—and he had no idea what that might be. This was more than just a question of endurance, like the Halloween he ran from Officer Tines, the night he realized that dead muscles didn’t require oxygen. This was an engineering problem. Muscles could tear, foot bones could break, shins could fracture—but none of those injuries had to impede him if he did not let them. The day he’d chased down Thomas he hadn’t pushed himself in the slightest.

So: Go faster.

A chain-link fence surrounded the compound. He’d been aiming for a corner of the fence, or rather a spot just to the right of it, and that point was coming at him at an amazing
rate. He wished Kwang were here to see this. The Unstoppable, suddenly in possession of a new superpower, running like the Flash (well, Quicksilver, maybe) to stop the bad guy.

The fence seemed to be about ten feet high, and on the other side was a two-lane highway. He looked right but didn’t see the pickup. He’d beaten the manager by a huge distance—unless the man had driven in the other direction. Who would catch him if he’d gone west?

Suddenly Stony was only a dozen yards from the fence. How high could he jump, and how far at this speed? But no, maybe he should stop and climb—

His pace stuttered, and then his feet tangled, and Stony pitched forward into the metal fence. The chain link collapsed as he struck it, popping free like a shower curtain yanked from the rod. He had a moment to think, Jesus, how fast was I moving? And then he was tumbling across the surface of the highway, over the gravel shoulder. He had no control of his limbs; he ragdolled to a stop in the high grass on the far side of the road.

He lay there for a moment, stunned. Then he remembered the pickup and pushed himself up. Both legs were still working, both arms. He hadn’t broken his neck, as far as he could tell. Across the road from him, the section of fence he’d struck was empty, the chain link matting the grass. In the fields beyond, a line of LDs ran toward him across the field, following his path, though none of them seemed to have his speed.

He stepped to the center of the road, straddling the dotted line. The pickup appeared, perhaps an eighth of a mile away, rushing toward him. Stony suddenly remembered that he didn’t have a plan. He was the dog who had caught the car. He had no gun, no rock to throw at the windshield. His only weapon, his only tool, was his body.

Stony squared his shoulders to the road and raised one hand as if he were a traffic cop.

A pickup weighed, what, three, maybe four tons? All of it moving at seventy-five miles per hour. That much momentum would pulverize him, or else catapult his body hundreds of feet down the road. He wasn’t sure which outcome was more likely.

Except—except—if the driver escaped, then everyone at the congress could be destroyed, and every breather who helped them could be arrested, just like his mom. Aaron, if he was alive, would spend the rest of his life in jail.

Stony’s arm had lowered as of its own accord. He raised it again, and now the truck was almost upon him, approximately a football field away. He knew that it was too close, moving too fast, to stop in time.

He hoped Aaron was alive. The insult to the man’s arm, the rude throw from the car, all of it seemed, now that he thought back on it, painful but survivable. Unless Aaron had hit his head, or suffered some internal injury. The deer Stony had found Halloween night looked as if it could have hopped to its feet and run off. What had killed it—as what had kept it alive all its life until then—was invisible, as invisible as whatever animated Stony and the other LDs, the odic force or clockwork virus or space radiation that kept this dead stick moving in the wind. How much damage, he wondered, could his body take before that spark, too, was extinguished?

The pickup screamed: a shriek of grinding brakes and squealing tires. The hood nosed down, and the truck began to slide, the bed of the truck drifting out from behind the cab. The vehicle was close now, less than a hundred feet. The driver was a round-faced, middle-aged man, perhaps sixty years old, bald
on top but with a fringe of dark hair. He looked distraught, mouth open, both hands clutching the wheel.

The bed began to slide the other way, swinging like a wide baseball bat. Even if Stony tried to move—and he
wanted
to, he wanted to very much—he wouldn’t know which way to jump.

The truck was spinning now, and the mass of it was suddenly beside him, the cab less than two feet from his right arm—and then it was past him. An instant later and fifty feet farther down the road, the back wheels hit the gravel shoulder and the vehicle lurched, right rear and front tires tilting into the air, and for a terrible moment he thought it was going to flip. But the forward motion had been arrested and the wheels slammed down and the truck body bounced against its suspension.

I’m alive, Stony thought. And the driver is alive. Even the truck—the Goddamn truck!—is undented.

He walked quickly to the vehicle. When he was still ten feet away, the driver pushed open his door. He was a large man, with a huge gut under a crisp denim shirt. He put one leg out onto the pickup’s step, then pressed a hand to each side of the door frame, as if afraid the cab would squeeze shut on him before he could get out. He saw Stony and froze.

“Are you—what were you—?”

The man seemed to be in shock. Did he see what Stony was? Did he know now what he’d stumbled into?

He realized now that his idea—if it wasn’t ludicrous to call something so impulsive an idea—had depended on the driver being too humane to run down a man in the middle of the road. Which made the breather the good guy. Stony was the supervillain playing on the hero’s weakness for innocent bystanders. He’d had it all backward from the start.

“I’m so sorry,” Stony said. “But I couldn’t let you go.”

But the man wasn’t looking at Stony now, but behind him. Stony turned. Four of Blunt’s security guards and three other LDs had made it to the fence. They charged through the gap and headed toward the truck.

“It’s okay,” Stony called to them. “He’s not going anywhere.”