Raising Stony Mayhall (40 page)

Outside, sirens blared, and gunshots cracked like slamming car doors, and car doors slammed like gunshots. Whenever she heard something particularly close—a scream, a car alarm—she went to the window, careful not to move the drapes. Most of the time she saw nothing. As the day wore on, slow-moving figures appeared in the streets. When darkness fell she did not turn on her lights, and opened her laptop only when she was covered by a blanket. She typed with one hand now. The other gripped the pistol.

She could admit to herself now that yes, she was terrified. Afraid of dying, afraid of—could she use the word?—the
zombies
. And God help her, afraid of turning into one.

She was disappointed in herself. She’d grown up knowing about LDs, thinking about them, advocating for them. When she was ten years old, Crystal had told her about her uncle, and where he was being held (secret emails from Deadtown had begun to arrive by then), and why her grandmother was also in prison. Ruby did not freak out. Quite the opposite: She was thrilled. By thirteen she’d become something of an undead ally, an activist who picked schoolyard fights whenever her classmates played Humans vs. Zombies. In eighth grade she went door to door with a petition demanding that the government give amnesty to any undead in hiding (she got five signatures). When she was seventeen she joined Amnesty International and started a blog, Dead to Rights. The amount of hate mail she received—and answered—was stunning. When people told her about the coming apocalypse, she called them bigots.

Bet they’re laughing it up now. As they get their arms bitten off. Fuckheads.

But it wasn’t just the undead she needed to worry about; the living could kill her, too. What if one of her fellow tenants tried to fight LDs with a torch—the whole building could come down. She would have to flee the building and take her chances on the street. Even if she managed to stay in the apartment undetected, eventually she’d have to leave to find food, and risk being shot by a survivor.

Alice had taught her that the outbreak, when it came, would not be over soon. The fever lasted only forty-eight hours, but that didn’t mean everything would be over in two days max. It was a rolling infection, so even as some of the first to die recovered their sanity, others were dying, or in the throes of the fever.

Near 11 p.m. she got a text from her friend Gina:
Where r u? Help
.

Ruby stared at her phone. Gina lived two blocks away, on Lincoln Avenue. Another message from Gina popped up:
Zs in my building
.

Hide
, Ruby typed.
Don’t make a noise
.

A minute passed. Two.

Gina?

She couldn’t tell if her texts were getting through. None were coming to her anymore.

She sent again:
Gina? Are you there?

Months later, long after the cell networks had gone silent, Ruby would not throw away her phone. She had a vague idea that someday the electricity and the satellites and the cell towers would all come back online. Someday, Gina would call her.

* * *

Sometime later—this must have been two or three in the morning, after her cell battery had died—she lurched awake, blinked at the dark room. Her hand still gripped the gun. She didn’t know she’d been asleep. She didn’t know what had awakened her. There’d been a huge noise—an explosion, from somewhere outside.

She pulled the blanket from her. Her laptop screen was dead. The clock above the microwave had gone out, too. A blown transformer, then?

She went to the window. The street was dark: street lamps out, not a window lit. In the distance was the faint orange glow of a large fire. Were there shapes moving on the street? She could see nothing, but imagine everything.

She thought she heard a voice, calling thinly like a drawn-out note on a violin. She leaned her head against the window, but the sound slipped away. She walked to the center of the room and stood in the dark, straining to hear. Yes, someone crying. She let the sound pull her to the apartment door and she heard it more clearly. It was Hernán Trujillo, she realized. A third grader who lived with his mom only three doors down, a boy Ruby had babysat for half a dozen times. She’d heard him cry before, but this was different. He’d been hurt, or perhaps pushed by fear into a sound that was both smaller and more primitive than a scream, the whine of a trapped animal.

Or maybe it’s not Hernán, she told herself. Maybe the sound wasn’t even coming from her floor, maybe it was winding up the stairwell. That high voice could have belonged to one of a dozen children who lived in the building, someone she didn’t know at all. It could even be a woman. There was no reason to leave the apartment.

Ruby moved closer to the door and looked through the peephole. She saw nothing.

She went back to the living room and felt around for the flashlight. She didn’t turn it on. She made sure the gun’s safety was on, tucked the pistol into the front waistband of her jeans, and went back to the door.

The crying had stopped. This only made her feel worse.

She put her hand on the deadbolt. The Trujillos’ door was only what—twenty, thirty feet away? She could yank open the door, and run to their door. Hernán might even be wandering in the hallway. She would scoop him up and bring him back to her apartment, slam the door.

Or she could wait until he started screaming as the dead things ate him.

She slowly slid back the bolt, the scrape as loud in her ears as if it had been amplified. She waited, listening. After half a minute (or perhaps only ten seconds—time slowed when you were panicked) she unlatched the chain and bent to look again through the peephole. Nothing but black. The butt of the pistol grip was hard against her belly. Ruby moved the flashlight to her other hand and dried her sweat-slicked palm against her pant leg. She reached for the last lock and twisted it.

Clack
.

In her mind, twenty undead swiveled at the sound.

She didn’t have enough hands. She wanted the baseball bat, the pistol,
and
the flashlight. She withdrew the gun from her waistband, pulled open the door a few inches, and stepped back. She aimed the gun into the gap.

The crying had started again. Or it had never stopped, but had grown too faint to penetrate the door. The child—she was sure now it was a child—was nearby.

Fuck me, she thought, and switched on the flashlight.

* * *

She stepped into the hallway, then jerked the beam of light left, then right. The corridor was empty. A smell like burnt rubber hung in the air.

The crying came from her right, toward the Trujillos’ apartment. Their door was ajar—not a good sign. She knocked on the door, causing it to glide open farther, and played the light across the tiny foyer. “Vivi? Hernán?” The crying suddenly stopped. Ruby needed to go inside and turn the corner before she could see into the rest of the apartment.

Go on, she thought. Turn the corner.

“Vivi, Hernán, it’s me, Ruby. From down the hall?” There was no answer. “I’m coming in, okay?”

She took a breath, then swung around the corner, gun and flashlight aimed in front of her. A body lay facedown on the floor. It was a small woman, in khaki pants and a dark T-shirt. No: a white T-shirt with dark stains. Her back was hunched, as if she were praying, or holding her stomach. It looked like Viviana.

She swung the light around the room. The little breakfast table had been overturned. The bookshelf was still standing, but the shelves were half empty, and many of the books and CDs and knickknacks—Vivi loved porcelain Precious Moments figurines—had been dumped to the floor.

Something moved in the bedroom doorway. Ruby shouted and jerked the light toward it.

A short, paunchy man raised one arm to shield the light from his eyes. His other arm was wrapped in a bloodstained towel.

“Stop!” Ruby yelled. “Who the hell are you?”

She couldn’t tell whether he was living or dead. The man shook his head. Ruby said, “Who the fuck
are
you?”

The man said something in Spanish. His face was wet with tears.

Ruby said, “Where’s Hernán?”

He seemed to recognize the name. He pointed toward the body on the floor and made a wheezing, high-pitched sound, a thin peal of grief.

Ruby edged toward Viviana’s body. “Vivi. Can you hear me?” She nudged Vivi’s calf with her toe. Vivi didn’t move.

Ruby moved around to the side, holding the gun on her. In a zombie movie, this is the way the stupid person gets bitten. The undead, playing dead. Vivi’s face was slack, staring. There was another body under the woman’s.

Ruby would never describe what she saw, nor will that happen here. It was clear, however, that the mother and son were dead. Maybe Viviana had killed her son, then herself. Maybe they’d been bitten and would be resurrected as LDs in a few hours. Or maybe they’d been killed by the man in the bedroom.

Ruby pointed her H&K at the man’s face. “What the fuck happened here?” She was yelling, and sounded a little crazed even to her. The man shook his head and she said, “What the fuck did you do?”

The man cried out then, and pointed behind her. His fear was so raw she didn’t doubt him; she spun toward the apartment door, gun raised.

A zombie: gray face, black mouth, a dark bandage covering its head. Ruby fired and the gun kicked up. The second shot went into the ceiling. The zombie, stumbling backward, fell against the wall.

Ruby reset her aim, bracing with both hands as Alice had taught her on the firing range. She fired again and the zombie yelled, “Jesus Christ, Ruby! Stop it!”

“Who—how do you—?”

The zombie looked down at his chest, then poked a finger at a new hole there. Ruby shone the light on his face. He
looked up, squinting. It wasn’t a bandage he wore, but a bandanna.

Ruby said, “Uncle Stony?”

He got to his feet—slowly, slowly. “The second shot always goes to the head,” Stony said. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”

“I’m new at this,” she said, and Stony laughed. But of course Mom and Alice had taught her everything they could, and everything about Stony. She’d never talked to him, and never even gotten a letter from him. Once a year, however, she received a mystery birthday card, unsigned, always from a different address.

“You can stop aiming that at me now,” he said. His skin seemed eggshell white in the glare of the flashlight. His eyes were silver dimes.

She lowered the gun and aimed the flashlight at his feet. He started to say something, then seemed to notice what was behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Oh, right: the lump of bodies on the floor behind her, and the paunchy man still standing in the bedroom door.

“Ruby, I have to tell you something, and I don’t want you to panic.”

“I’m not going to panic.”

“Right.” He thought, Please don’t shoot me again. “There are lots of LDs on the ground floor of your building, and those gunshots are going to draw them up here. We’ve got to go. The city’s burning, and there’s no one to put out the fires. Do you trust me?”

“Okay,” she said, her voice unsteady. Then: “Okay.”

Stony nodded past her. “Is your friend coming with us?”

“He’s not my friend,” Ruby said. “Yet.”

Stony walked toward him, hands out. Ruby swung the light onto the paunchy man, and he stayed planted in the doorway.

Stony indicated the towel wrapped around the man’s arm. “You were bitten?”

The man didn’t answer.

Stony said, “Your arm. Bite?
Mordedura?
”

After a moment the man said, “Yes, bite.”

Ruby was surprised he answered honestly. The man said in a thick South American accent, “My name is Oscar.” He said it with great formality, though his voice shook. He was terrified.

Stony said, “Oscar, do you know what’s going to happen to you?”

“
Soy meurto
. Dead. Yes.”

“You’re going to be all right,” Stony said. “
Comprende?
I’ve seen people go through this. Do you want me to help?”

Ruby said, “Help him how?”

The two men stared at each other. Finally Oscar nodded, lips pursed, as if he were receiving religious instruction.

“Yes,” Oscar said. He nodded toward Ruby. “Good-bye.” Then he turned, went back into the bedroom. Stony followed him.

Ruby said, “Where the hell are you going?”

“Just a second,” Stony said, and closed the door.

“You can’t just—” But there was nothing to be gained by raising her voice. She backed up to the wall and turned the flashlight on the front door to the apartment. She was careful not to look at the bodies on the floor.

There was no noise from the bedroom.

After five minutes (no, it only seemed like five to her; in reality it took less than a minute), Stony opened the door.

Ruby did not ask, Where’s Oscar? She did not ask for
explanations. The important thing to do, she thought, is to think about the next thirty seconds, and the next thirty after that. The important thing is to keep going.

“You have a car?” Ruby said.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Stony said. “We’re going to go down the stairs to the first floor. I have a van waiting. If you stay close to me, you should be fine.”

“And then what?”

“Then we drive out of the city.”

“But what about Aunt Alice? We’ve got to get her.”

“Alice wouldn’t come with me. She’s at the hospital, working the emergency room.”

“But she’ll die!”

“No one can make Alice do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Stony said.

Well, Ruby thought, he’s right about that. She let him lead her into the hallway. He went right, away from her apartment.

Ruby said, “Wait, I have stuff in my apartment—”

“You won’t need it.”

“Fuck,” Ruby said, but hurried to catch up to him. When they were a dozen feet from the stairwell, the door swung open. Ruby and Stony stopped. Ruby lifted the flashlight, but kept the gun down.

It was a woman. Her head was bent sideways, lying flat on her shoulder, like a smashed pumpkin on a front porch. Her mouth opened and made a low, sad noise.