Raising Stony Mayhall (26 page)

There was only one reason for Zip to come here, a shopping center full of security cameras: In less than an hour it would be full of people.

Stony turned off the engine. He tucked the car keys under the seat and shut the door without locking it; he didn’t know whether Crystal kept a spare set. He patted the roof and thought, Thanks little Honda. Then he hurried down the stairwell to the street. It took him ten long minutes to find a working pay phone.

“Collect call to Crystal Mayhall, from John,” he told the operator. When his sister picked up the phone he had to interrupt her before she asked too many questions. He told her where to find her car if she refused to take his advice and buy a new one. Then he said, “I need you to do me one last favor.”

* * *

Stony emerged from the stairwell a few minutes later, then found a spot behind a cement pillar where he could lean out and see the Caprice and the panel truck. The two vehicles were parked in the first row, about fifteen spots down from the store entrance. The car was empty, but there was a figure in the cab of the truck, masked by a fog of cigarette smoke. The parking garage was filling up, and people that Stony took to be staff members were being let into the store by a security guard. Two older women in bulky coats stood outside the doors, waiting for ZCMI to open, and more shoppers were probably waiting at the other entrances. It would be a busy shopping day. Christmas was only a week away. Mormons celebrated Christmas, didn’t they?

He leaned back against the pillar and checked his watch. It was 8:35, twenty-five minutes before opening. Were the men from the Caprice in the truck? Was Zip in there with them? And what about Blunt?

The big question: If Blunt
was
in there, was Stony willing to sacrifice him to stop Zip?

He leaned out again and saw the man in the truck cab looking at him. Stony jerked his head back behind the pillar—and felt something hard press against his temple.

“Holy shit. Zac was right. You’re the kid from Iowa.”

Stony turned his head slightly, trying to ignore the pressure of the metal. It was the man with the Moe Howard haircut. The pistol looked smaller in his hand than it felt against Stony’s temple.

Moe leaned past Stony to look at the store entrance. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to walk to the back of the truck. If you say a word, or try to signal that security guard, I
will
shoot you in the back of the head.”

Stony stopped himself from putting up his hands. “Is that where Zip is?” he asked. “In the truck?”

“Shut the fuck up. Move.”

Moe lowered the gun, then shoved Stony between the shoulder blades. Stony had been afraid before, but never like this. He’d grown up feeling invulnerable. Unstoppable. But now that he was a twitch of a finger from having his head blown off, he realized that he was not brave at all. He wanted to live. He wanted it desperately. So he was going to do whatever this LD man said.

They walked slowly to the truck, the man a few feet behind him. He looked toward the entrance without moving his head, but now the security guard had disappeared, and the number of waiting customers had swelled to almost twenty. None of them glanced in his direction.

Stony reached the back bumper of the truck, and Moe rapped on the panel door, three quick knocks. The door slid up and a ripe, butcher-shop smell rolled out. Inside were five LD men, in various states of decay. All carried bulky assault weapons. In front was Tevvy, the green-skinned LD who’d thrown Stony around at the congress. After a moment’s hesitation, Tevvy grabbed Stony by the front of his shirt and yanked him into the bed of the truck. Then the big man threw him to the floor and sat on top of him. Another man touched a rifle barrel to Stony’s forehead.

“Are you wearing makeup?” Tevvy asked.

The floor was wet beneath Stony’s back. The plywood wall to his right was splattered with blood. Had they already started?

“You can’t do this,” Stony said.

“Oh, we’re doing it all right,” Tevvy said. He turned to one of the other men. “Call Zip. Tell him we’ve got one of Blunt’s people here.” They had radios like Delia’s. Of course they did. Until recently they’d all been part of the same army.

Tevvy said, “Did Delia send you?”

The men loomed over him. Stony said, “Nobody sent me. I haven’t been able to reach anybody. I was afraid you’d, you’d killed them. Is Mr. Blunt still alive?”

One of the men made a series of indistinct sounds, which Stony took a moment to parse into the sentence: “Blunt came after
us
.” The man’s jaw was unhinged on one side, making every expression a leer. “He torched the house. Came in with a pistol and a—”

Stony couldn’t make out the word. “A what?”

“A machete,” Tevvy said. “It came out of his arm.”

“He cut off their heads!” the leering man said. “He’s a psychopath!”

“He took out four of our people before we shot him down,” Tevvy said. “But he’s dead now. Right, Jason?” He glanced at the one with the Moe Howard haircut.

“Five bodies, five body bags,” Jason said.

Someone rapped three times on the rear door. Tevvy rolled off Stony and nodded to have them open it. Stony lifted his head. Zip and another man climbed in. They seemed to be unarmed, but as Zip stood up his coat swung open to reveal a white T-shirt soaked with blood. He laughed. “Stony Fucking Mayhall!” Someone pulled the sliding door back down.

“Are we still on?” one of the men asked.

“Shit yes, we’re still on,” Zip said. “Bobby’s team is ready to hit the loading dock. We all go in”—he glanced at a wristwatch—fifteen minutes.”

“You can’t do this,” Stony said. “You can’t start the Big Bite.”

“Not the way I wanted to,” Zip said. “Your friends made sure of that when they betrayed us. I’ll tell you this, though—we’re sure as hell starting something. Right, boys?”

“
You
turned
her
in,” Stony said. “You told the Diggers about her houses. You told them about the answering system.”

He was guessing, but Zip nodded. “Stony, I reported every house I knew about. The Diggers will be so busy today they’ll never notice what’s happening here.”

“You betrayed everyone,” Stony said.

“I’m saving us, kid. Our people will realize that soon enough.” Zip looked up. “How are our two converts?”

The men moved aside, and Stony twisted his head to see. At the back of the truck, two dead women lay on their sides. The oldest had short gray hair, the other, young enough to be a granddaughter, was a curly blonde. Stony could not tell where they’d been bitten, but their clothes were drenched in blood. They’d been dead only an hour, maybe two.

Each bite had an incubation period. Stony had been collecting data on the process from everyone he’d met at the house, and he’d watched Thomas’s conversion in person. The longest part of the process was waiting to die. After death, there was a short period of disorientation during which the patient could barely function, and then the fever would set in. These women were already dead. They could be up and feeding within the hour.

“This will never work,” Stony said, trying to sound firm. “Once you start biting, the police will see what you’re doing on the security cameras. They’ll swarm you before the epidemic gets rolling. You may infect some people, but for what? Once the news gets out, they’ll just quarantine every victim before they bite anyone else.”

Zip squatted down and shook his head. “You’re missing the point, kid. We
want
the cameras to see us. Hell, once we get started, we’ll call the television stations ourselves if we have to.”

One of the men said, “We’ll inspire people.”

“Inspire them to do what?” Stony said. “Kill you?”

“No,
our
people,” Zip said. He looked at his watch again.
“Once they see us on the news, biting like the old days, they’ll start biting, too. The Diggers are cracking down everywhere today. Every LD in the country will realize that now’s the time. We’ve been fighting a war of attrition, getting picked off one by one. That ends today. Besides, those people out there?” He looked up to address his men and pointed toward the front of the store. “Those breathers want it as bad as us. They’re
yearning
for the end of the world. Why do you think they make so many movies about us? It’s their fucking fantasy. Every one of them wants civilization to burn, for all the rules to go up in smoke. They
want
the monsters to attack. You know why? Because then they’ll have the excuse to do what they’ve always wanted to do—shoot people in the head. No laws, no morality. They’ll
have
to do it. It’ll be fucking noble. Every one of them is picturing themselves as the last man standing, a bloodstained samurai with an AK-47.”

“You’ll get them all killed,” Stony said. “You won’t even be able to get out of here alive. There are what, twelve of you to pull this off?”

“Sixteen,” the leering man said. It sounded like
sihhhsteen
. “That’s enough.”

Zip looked at Stony curiously. “Are you pumping us for information?” He nodded toward Stony’s chest. “Lift your shirt.”

“What?”

“Lift your fucking shirt.”

Stony opened the denim jacket, then pulled up the blue Cubs T-shirt—another item borrowed from Crystal.

Zip frowned. “Drop your pants.”

“Now come on, you think I’m wearing a wire?”

“Drop ’em.”

Stony unsnapped his jeans, the same pants he’d been
wearing since the congress, and pushed them down to his thighs. At Zip’s look, he dropped his underwear, too. “See?”

“All right, fine,” Zip said. “It’d be just like Blunt to send you in here with a mike.”

“But you killed Mr. Blunt, didn’t you?”

“Shut the fuck up. Our people are hard to kill, but Blunt is something else entirely. Now, before I shoot you, I gotta ask: What the fuck were you thinking? You walk in here, you don’t have a wire on you, or even a gun—”

“I don’t believe in shooting people.”

“So what the fuck was your plan, genius?”

“I was going to try to talk you out of it,” Stony lied. “Using the force of reason.”

Zip laughed. “The force of
what
?”

“I’m an idealist,” Stony said.

“Well, we have something in common.” He looked at his watch and stood up. “Time to go shopping, boys.”

“Shoot him?” one of them asked.

Zip tilted his head. “Have you ever bitten anyone, Stony?”

“No.”

“But you’ve wanted to, haven’t you? That guy you ran down at the congress—I bet you wanted to bite the hell out of him.”

“No.”

Zip grinned. “Liar. I gotta tell you, it’s pretty damn amazing. It’s what we’re built for.” He nodded to Mel, the leering man. “Bring him along. He can die with us.” Mel slung his rifle and yanked Stony to his feet. Tevvy lifted the sliding door.

There was a loud
crack
from the parking lot. Tevvy fell backward into the truck. Another crack, and a second man fell. Stony saw gray meat splatter Mel’s face.

Zip looked at Stony. “What did you do? What did you do?”

“I made a call,” Stony said.

He’d told Crystal to call in a zombie sighting. He didn’t know if the Diggers would get here in time, or if only the local police would be close enough. He’d only gone back into the garage to make sure Zip didn’t launch the attack before
someone
arrived.

Mel smiled his lopsided smile and lifted his weapon to point at Stony’s chest.
“Muh-her fuh-her,”
he said.

Stony lifted a hand. The blast knocked him backward, into one of the dead women behind him. Pain flared through his arm and chest. He could not ignore it. He could not master it. And before he could marshal his concentration, things got much worse.

The official story, as announced by government agents later that day, was that a small group of anti-Mormon extremists had captured a single zombie, which they planned to set loose on the people in the ZCMI Store. The ten (living) men in the parking garage were all killed, and another seven, parked across the street from the loading dock, were shot before they could leave their vehicle. The identities of the extremists were kept from the public under the Emergency Powers Act of 1968, which had never lapsed since the first outbreak.

As you might imagine, conspiracy theorists had a field day with this. And as usual, what began as a terrifying secret on the fringes of culture eventually found its way into the plot of a TV movie. In 1992, ABC broadcast
Deliver Them from Evil
, starring Harry Hamlin as an ex-army colonel and Teri Garr as his wife, which proposed that experimentation on soldiers,
using a variant of the walking dead disease, had driven the men mad.

In 2011, a “final” unpublished Jack Gore novel was found.
Christmas for the Dead
is a thinly disguised version of the ZCMI attack. In it, escapees from Deadtown hole up in a Walmart in Nevada. In desperation they begin killing and infecting customers in an attempt to start a new outbreak. This is the first use in fiction of the term
Big Bite
. In the novel, Jack Gore sneaks into the store and tries to talk the “DLs” (as they started to call themselves in this book) out of attacking the “breathers” outside. Uncharacteristically, Gore fails, and he is killed along with the others when government troops storm the building. It’s a bit of a downer, and perhaps proof that the book was not written by C. V. Ferris. One serious reader argued that it was also better written than the usual Ferris novel. On this point reasonable people may disagree.

But where were we? Oh, yes: Stony dying.

Mel’s shot seemed to uncork the guns of the Diggers. A barrage of gunfire turned the interior of the truck into a hammer of sound. Stony could only stare up at the patch of air in front of his eyes, a dust storm of flesh and hair and clothing shot through with the lightning of sparking bullets. A body, or perhaps two bodies, fell over him. Stony was struck a dozen times, his body jerking with each impact—but perhaps because he was already prone, his feet pointing toward the open door, none of the shots entered his brain and ended his existence.