Raising Stony Mayhall (27 page)

Because he’d gone deaf he was unsure of the exact moment the firing ended. He only knew the attack was over when armored men leaned into the dome of his vision, men
in bulky vests and gleaming helmets like beetles. Still, over so quickly? It lacked the drama he’d been expecting, the slow-motion, Bonnie-and-Clyde deaths of Billy Zip and his terrorists. Where was the music?

The Diggers quickly determined that Stony was still functioning, and stepped over him to look at the two women.

“Fresh ones,” one of the soldiers said. The women twisted and lurched. One of them, the young blonde, clawed feebly at the air. The soldier turned to another helmeted man and said, “What would you like to do?”

The second man took off his helmet and said, “What a mess.” He was perhaps fifty years old, with a round, kindly face, and dark hair flecked with gray. He wore rimless glasses with silver stems.

The first soldier said, “Doctor, you shouldn’t—”

“It’s fine, Sergeant,” the doctor said. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The newspeople will be here soon,” he said, almost to himself.

“Put them down, then?” the soldier asked.

“No!” Stony shouted. The doctor seemed to look at him for the first time. “Don’t shoot them,” Stony said. “Please.”

“You’re Stony Mayhall, aren’t you?”

Stony tried to sit up, but his body failed to obey him. “There’s another team. By the loading dock.”

“What? How many? Where, exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

There was much shouting into radios. A few of the soldiers scrambled out of the truck, but the man with the glasses stayed.

“Don’t kill the women,” Stony said. “In a few hours they’ll be fine. The fever passes. You don’t have to kill them—”

“They’ll hardly be fine,” the doctor said. He squatted to
study Stony’s face. “You
are
him. Your mother’s told me so much about you.”

“You know my mother?”

“You’ve been hurt,” the man said. “Don’t worry, we’ll clean that up. You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you.”

I think I do, Stony thought.

The doctor said, “Sergeant, this one’s coming with us.”

“Yes, Dr. Weiss. And the other gunmen?”

The doctor regarded the bodies piled up around him. “Looks like you’ve already taken care of them. Just make sure of it.”

“And the women?”

He took off his glasses and stared at the lenses as if deciding whether to clean them. “No room,” he said finally. “Put them down, and may God have mercy on their souls.”

ell, perhaps not 1998. It could be a year earlier, or later. In Stony’s memory, the chronology of events during this period is a little shifty. In prison, at least the type of maximum security prison he found himself in, there was very little to anchor him to the living calendar. The seasons passed unseen beyond the windowless cement walls. His body, in refusing to age or decompose, was no use as a clock. One thing happened, and another thing happened. Sometimes these events were years apart.

Some moments, however, remained vivid in his memory, even if he could not place them on a calendar. Shame could paint an entire day. For example, the day he woke his first sleeper. The day he stopped his best friend from escaping.

He’d been in Deadtown for ten years, more or less. Sometime after the last chimp had died, after he’d been fitted for his first prosthetic hand, but before he’d gotten his second. A guard unlocked the steel door of his cell and said, “We’ve got another sleeper.”

Stony looked up from the book he was holding. For a
moment, he wondered if they were talking about him, because although he looked as if he were reading, in truth he’d been staring at the same page for a long time. Possibly hours. He could say that he’d been lost in thought, if he could recall any thoughts. In his recent memory, there was nothing but a brilliant white void, a hole in a strip of film where the lamp had blasted through. This had been happening more and more often to him, but for how long he couldn’t say.

Two guards stood in the doorway. The speaker’s name was Harry Vincent, a handsome young man with watery blue eyes, a strong Roman nose, and full lips that reminded him of Ruby. There were guards who were decent men, who treated the LDs, if not kindly, then at least as if they might still be part of the human family. Harry was not one of those guards.

Stony put down the book. “Who is it?”

“One of the old-timers. The doc’s away, but he said you should examine her.” Because of Stony’s relationship with Dr. Weiss, and his standing with the other prisoners, he had become over the years an unofficial trustee. He helped the newly captured adjust to life in Deadtown. He talked down the most violent prisoners, before the guards felt forced to kill them. He helped the prison run smoothly. He would have done these things, he told himself, even if the doctor did not reward him with certain privileges, such as access to the doctor’s library.

Harry tossed him a mask. It was metal mesh and leather, a cross between a fencer’s mask and a catcher’s. Stony fit it over his face, then turned his back. Harry stepped forward to buckle it tight. Then they handcuffed his arms behind his back and led him out to the elevated walkway, Harry in front, the other guard trailing. As they passed the cells, prisoners stepped to the rectangular slots to whisper hellos to Stony, or to simply catch his eye. Stony nodded, saying nothing.

The cells were set on columns inside a larger cement box, surrounded by air on all sides. No one would be tunneling out of
this
Deadtown. There’d been four facilities that inherited the name. The first had been in Indianapolis, an army barracks that had been quickly converted to an emergency holding area during the 1968 outbreak. The next Dead town was a prison farm in upstate New York, then an asylum in Florida, and finally this place, a hundred acres in the Nevada desert that had once been, and was still publicly known as, a federal toxic waste disposal facility. Wherever the dead were held, there was Deadtown.

The guards took Stony down the central stairs to the main floor, where two other guards worked the gate that allowed access to the next cell block. There were acres of cement buildings that stored several thousand tons of toxins and biological agents awaiting disposal, and among them were three oblong buildings that held the prisoners. There was no exercise yard, no cafeteria, no weight room. Most of the prisoners never left their block for the entirety of their stay. The length of their sentence largely depended on how long they could remain sane. Prisoners who acted out were destroyed. Those who tried to escape were destroyed. But those who tried to destroy themselves, or tried to escape by more subtle means, were prevented at all costs from doing so.

Stony’s entourage entered the B block. As in the other building, the prisoners here were quiet, because the guards liked them quiet. But as Stony was led past the cells, LDs again came to the doors and tried to get his attention. These prisoners saw Stony less often, and they were more insistent.

“Stony, hey. Ask them about our radios. They took away the radios—” And “You have any books with you, Stony?” And “Hi, Stony. It’s me, Thomas.”

This last voice caused Stony to slow. If he stopped completely,
the guards would become angry, so as he passed he made a minimalist wave with one bound hand, and Thomas nodded in return. The postman had almost no memories of his life before being bitten, and he’d had little time to make new ones. He’d been captured by the Diggers only a few weeks after his conversion—the day before Zip had tried to launch his Big Bite. Delia had never made it to the safe house, and she’d evidently eluded the authorities. At least Dr. Weiss had never caught her. But every LD at her safe house had been shot or captured. They’d also arrested Elizabeth, the living owner of the house.

The farther the guards took Stony down the walkway, the more his dread grew. Soon they reached the next-to-last cell, and the guards stopped to open the door. It was Valerie’s cell.

The interior was identical to his own: an iron frame cot, a toilet with a waterless bowl, and a small desk and chair. On the desk was a paper tablet and a pencil. Months ago Stony had suggested to the doctor that the prisoners keep journals, and these documents could be analyzed for psychological insights peculiar to the undead. The doctor had ignored the suggestion until enough time had passed that he could think it was his own idea. Now the tablets were collected every Sunday like homework and replaced with fresh blank paper. No one knew what they were supposed to write about, only that they had to write something. Express yourself, the doctor told them.

The prisoner lay on the bunk, eyes closed, arms at her sides.

“Valerie?” Stony said.

The figure inside the blue prison jumpsuit was almost a skeleton: completely bald, with parched white skin stretched over her bones. A thin blanket covered her legs and feet.

He asked the guards, “How long has she been like this?”

“Two days. About.”

“You should have moved her to the infirmary,” he said, trying to hide his anger. “That’s where the doctor wants them.”

“The doctor wasn’t here.”

“All right. Could you at least take off the handcuffs, then? I need to examine her.”

“Work around it,” Harry said.

Stony said, “I thought the doctor didn’t want to lose another one.”

Harry swore, then grabbed Stony by the back of the neck and pressed his masked face to the wall. The other guard worked the key of the handcuffs.

“Thank you,” Stony said when they released him.

“Leave the mask on,” Harry said. Then the two guards stepped out of the cell and pulled the bars closed.

Stony went to the bunk and squatted down beside her. He took her hand in his. Of course it was cold, but the fingers were lifeless. She had not started to decompose—at least, no further than she’d been the day she climbed from the grave. She did not smell like a corpse.

“Hey, sweetheart.” He touched her face. “Time to wake up.”

The first sleeper had been discovered about a year ago. He was an LD from Maryland named Lawrence who’d been in Deadtown for over twenty-five years. One night he lay down on his bunk—and never got up. The guards eventually realized he’d stopped moving. They pulled him from the bed, yelled at him, beat him. They tried sharp tools and electricity. He never made a sound, and his eyes never flickered.

The doctor examined Lawrence’s body, and allowed Stony to see him as well. It was a riddle. The working definition for “walking dead” was a dead person that walked. If the corpse
stopped moving, was it only a corpse? Or an LD playing possum? They watched Lawrence for weeks. He never moved. Eventually the doctor ordered Lawrence to be destroyed. Stony argued furiously with the doctor. How could he kill a man, because we don’t know he’s gone yet! But the doctor was fed up. The destruction was carried out in the usual way: one .38 round through his forehead, then off to the prison incinerator. But Lawrence had started some kind of trend. Over the next year, seven more prisoners entered the sleep.

“I know you don’t want to be here,” Stony said to Valerie.
Here
being not just this cell, or Deadtown, but the world. “You’ve served your time. You’ve earned the right to leave, if that’s what you want to do. But you know I can’t let you go without a fight.” This last he said lightly. It was a joke between them that he could argue for days about the smallest thing.

She didn’t respond. Outside the bars, Harry and the other guard were already bored. Stony tried to think of what he could say to her that hadn’t been said in all the hours they’d spent together. The doctor allowed him to visit the prisoners, and he’d used that privilege sometimes selfishly. He went to Valerie’s cell at least once a month, where they continued their conversation (argument, debate, competing monologues) wherever they’d left off. Sometimes they talked about trivial things. When the guards weren’t watching, he would sit beside her, their hands and arms entwined. Of course they didn’t have sex—that was impossible for them—but these moments seemed to be the kind of intimacy that (he imagined, after reading countless novels and watching so many films) breathers drifted into after sex, the languorous morning in bed between lovers, or settled into
long
after the last act of intercourse: the deep comfort taken by couples in their eighties. Sometime since arriving in Deadtown, Valerie had stopped being his substitute mother, his older sister, and had become
something else that he’d never heard an LD describe. And now she was trying to leave him.