Raising Stony Mayhall (41 page)

Stony said, “Stop!” The dead woman paused, then swiveled slightly so that her eyes were on them.

“Go back!”

The woman turned and pushed against the door. Ruby said, “How the fuck are you doing that?”

“You don’t need to swear so much,” Stony said.

“Oh, I think I do. Shit.” The zombie woman suddenly fell to the ground, knocked down by someone coming out the stairwell door. Another dead person, a large man wearing no shirt. More bodies clamored behind him. The shirtless man saw Stony and Ruby and started toward them in a stumbling half run.

Stony yelled, “Stop! Sit down!”

The man hesitated, but now other zombies were charging past him: six, seven of them. Ruby shouted something—undoubtedly another curse word—and stepped behind Stony. An LD reached Stony and tried to shove him out of the way. Stony pushed him backward, into the people behind him, and they shuffled aside and let him fall to the ground.

Stony said, “Maybe we should—”

The group surged forward and Stony went down, smothered in bodies. They weren’t attacking him; they were trying to get through him, to Ruby. The woman with the broken neck emerged from the pile and threw herself forward. She grabbed Ruby’s right arm and yanked her toward her. The flashlight went flying, the beam bouncing crazily. Ruby screamed in pain; the dead woman’s fingers ground into her.

With her other hand Ruby raised the H&K, squeezed the trigger—but the trigger wouldn’t budge. The safety. The zombie woman bit at Ruby’s gun hand; Ruby jerked her arm back, thumbed the safety, then shoved the barrel of the gun into the woman’s jaw. She fired, and the woman’s face—

But you know what happened to the woman’s face.

Ruby backed away in the pitch-black hallway, shouting Stony’s name. She was blind, afraid to fire for hitting Stony, and afraid not to fire. Then something grabbed her shoulder and she jerked away from the touch, brought the gun around.

“Back the other way,” Stony said out of the dark. “We’ll circle around—”

“No!” Ruby said. “My apartment. There’s another way out.”

Ruby turned and ran for her doorway. She couldn’t see anything, but she trailed a hand against the wall, counting door frames. She almost fell into her apartment when she reached it; the door was wide open. For a wild moment she thought, They’re inside. Then Stony pushed her inside and slammed the door.

“Open—” she said, fighting for breath. “My door was open.”

“What?”

“They’re inside.”

“No,” Stony said. “That was me. I left it open when I came looking for you.”

“Would you just check the fucking living room?” she cried.

“I’m holding the door shut.” As if in reply, something banged against the metal. The zombies were trying to get in.

Ruby reached past him, fumbling, then found the deadbolt and the chain lock. “
Now
check it.”

“Fine. Watch the door. But please, don’t use the gun unless you absolutely have to.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“You’ll disfigure these people, or kill some of them permanently.”

“Fuck you,” Ruby said. “They’re trying to fucking kill me.”

“For now,” he said. “It’s temporary insanity. And I know you’re stressed, but you don’t have to keep saying the F-word.” He slipped past her then, and Ruby stood next to the door, her hand on the surface so she would know when it started to open. The metal shuddered with each bang. The undead wailed as if frustrated.

Suddenly Stony was back. “We’re clear. Now where’s this other way out?”

“Just a sec.” Hoping the door would hold, Ruby went to the hall closet and retrieved her loaded backpack. It was heavy with ammo, an extra flashlight, batteries, food. Thank you, Paranoid Aunt Alice.

Ruby slung it onto her shoulder and went through the dark to the back window. Wedged between the sill and the top of the window frame was a block of four-by-four that held the air conditioner in place. She felt for the block, then whacked it with the side of her fist. Then she whacked it again and it popped free. “Grab the air conditioner,” she told Stony, and then pushed up against the sill. The wood shrieked. “And don’t let it drop.”

“You’re kind of bossy,” Stony said. He pulled the air conditioner from the frame and set it on the futon. In the hallway, bodies slammed against the door.

The window overlooked an airshaft. Below was a black pit. Above, the bellies of clouds flickered from fires across the city.

Ruby reached down to the floor beneath the window and found the stack of cloth and plastic that had been sitting there, unused, since she had installed it a year ago.

“What is that?” Stony asked.

“Alice said never live anyplace without an emergency exit.” She tossed the rope ladder out the window. The base of the ladder was bolted to the floor.

“I—I am so proud of you,” Stony said. He leaned out the window. “No LDs below. At least that I can see.”

“Me first then,” Ruby said.

A year after the epidemic, it still wasn’t clear how many agents Calhoun had planted in how many cities. The sheet of names
and airport codes that Mr. Blunt had discovered in Calhoun’s Atlanta offices included over eighty locations, but many more might have been off the book.

In most of the cities, Calhoun’s agents struck at retirement homes and hospitals. They worked in pairs. Two LDs would enter a facility and begin shooting, using automatic weapons and small arms. As each roomful of people were executed, the LDs would deliver a quick bite. Killing by hand was inefficient. It was certainly much too slow to bite a living person and then wait for them to die.

The old and sick were perfect subjects for conversion. They couldn’t run away, they died quickly, and their age made no difference in their effectiveness when they were reborn. In some instances, the LD agents were shot down by police within an hour of the start of the attack. But in a few cities, the agents moved on to second- and even third-tier institutions.

In any case, within a few hours the police had far too many living dead to handle.

The first reported attack was on the Grand Oaks Retirement Village in Columbus, Ohio. Two gunmen entered the main building of the village at 8:10 p.m. eastern. They killed and bit over eighty residents by the time police were able to corner the men in a third-floor wing of the building. The gunmen leaped from the window. The police did not figure out that the men were undead until the first of the elderly patients began to move again, and reports from around the world began to pour in.

The attacks were so widespread that local governments could not coordinate a response. By morning, when Ruby and most of the eastern United States learned of the outbreak, the Big Bite had taken on the mathematical shape of the equations Stony had worked out years ago. The infection rate
soared into a hockey stick graph. The outcome for the planet was certain; only the specifics remained to be worked out.

Chicago, for example. By dawn after the first nighttime attacks, the city was teeming with fevered LDs. By the time Stony reached Ruby’s apartment at 3 a.m. of the second day, the infection had reached a saturation point. According to the models (and later, it seemed that the models fit reality reasonably well), 90 percent of the residents were dead or bitten, and of the bitten, most had already turned. The streets were crowded with fevered undead.

Stony led Ruby into the street. They were both forced to do terrible things on their way out of the city. Zombies—that is to say, people—were killed and maimed. You could tell this story yourself. You know the ingredients: