Raising Stony Mayhall (42 page)

But you crave sensory detail. A vivid description of how it looks and sounds and feels to run over a human body. A simile that conveys the pattern of blood and viscera spattering the windshield. Maybe some sound effects?
Ka-thump. Bang. Cra-ack
.

Or maybe you’d like to have described to you the peculiar beauty of the sun coming up on an interstate littered with bodies, the rays glinting off chrome and broken glass.

“Battlefield sunrise,” Stony said.

Ruby was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes closed but not asleep. They were on I-88 now, heading west. Stony drove fast, slipping past stopped vehicles, slowing only when the way was blocked and he was forced to nudge and scrape past the abandoned cars. The interstate was most congested near the toll plazas. The police had tried to turn them into roadblocks, but that hadn’t worked for long.

Only once did they have to leave the interstate and weave through city streets. Stony told Ruby to keep her head down, but she thought this was primarily because he did not want her to see the bodies as they stumbled in front of his van. People would not get out of the way, and Stony could
not slow down for them. It was a relief to get back onto the interstate.

Ruby said, “Did Alice tell you where to find me?”

“She gave me directions,” he said. “But I already knew your address.”

“Yeah, I got your birthday cards.”

She opened her eyes. The sunlight, even filtered through the blood-smeared windshield, was too bright. She closed them again. The air smelled of gasoline, from all the extra plastic cans Stony kept in the back of the van. She said, “How much longer?”

“Four hours if nothing gets in our way.”

“No one lives there, you know. It’s all boarded up.”

“Even better,” Stony said. “You’ll be safe there.”

She opened her eyes to slits. He was driving with both hands on the wheel—one hand dead flesh, one plastic—and staring straight ahead. The driver’s-side window had blown out during the escape, and the wind whipped at the dirty bandanna he kept tied around his forehead. She’d never seen a dead man close up. His skin was the texture and color of concrete. There was a gash on his neck, but it did not bleed; the dry flesh lay open, revealing not blood or tissue, but a deeper shade of gray. When he wasn’t talking to her, or when he thought she wasn’t looking at him, his face set into an expression that looked like grief, or anger.

“What’s wrong?” Ruby asked.

He forced a smile, then let it slip away. After a time he said, “I need to tell you, Ruby. I’m responsible for this.”

Ruby said, “What do you mean?”

“All of it.” He glanced at her, then back to the road. His eyes were milky white, blind man’s eyes. “The man who started the bite—I made sure everyone trusted him. Trusted
me
. Then I let him get away with it. I could have stopped it at any time, but I thought I was the smartest guy in the room.”

“I don’t understand. If you didn’t know what he was doing, you can’t take responsibility. You didn’t start the outbreak.”

“Oh, Ruby,” he said. “They couldn’t have done it without me.”

he road cleared, and they crossed the Illinois border without incident. He kept the speedometer pegged to 90, and even then cars zoomed past him.

He talked as he drove. He told her everything.

He started with Commander Calhoun, the island, the theory and practice of the Big Bite. She asked questions, and he told her more, going back years: The Living Dead Army, the safe houses, the congress, Billy Zip and the ZCMI attack, Deadtown. She needed to know how the undead had waited underground like a bomb, like a poisonous gas. A thousand pockets of inevitability. She needed to know the crimes he’d committed. “I wrote it all down,” he said. “I’ve got a printout in my bag. It’s about twelve hundred pages. Plus there’s a diary my mom kept—my biological mom. And there’s this novel—”

“You wrote a
novel
?” Ruby asked.

“It’s a draft,” he said.

They were making good time. The infection would be rolling west from Chicago, north from Madison, south from
Des Moines. If they could beat that wave to Easterly, Ruby might live through the day.

Then they reached the rolling hills outside Iowa City.

He stopped the van at the top of a hill. Ruby stirred, and Stony said, “I don’t want you to panic.”

She sat upright. At the bottom of the hill, the four lanes of interstate had become a parking lot: semis, school buses, dozens of cars. Foraging among the vehicles were hundreds and hundreds of LDs, like the graduating class of the University of Iowa on an undead field trip. Some of the LDs had noticed Stony’s van and were heading up the hill.

“Turn around,” Ruby said.

“I told you not to panic,” he said. “You just need to go lie down in the back of the van. I’ll help you get—”

“You’re not going to drive through them? There are too many, Stony. They’ll swarm us.”

“I should have tried this earlier. I know how to get through them.”

“
You’ll
get through them. They’re not trying to eat you,” she said. “Just turn the van around and we’ll find some other way.”

Jesus, she was stubborn. Absolutely no doubt she was a Mayhall woman. “Please, Ruby, just trust me, okay?”

“If I get bitten, I’m going to come back and kick your ass.”

“That’s a given. Now please, before they get here.” He got out of his seat and went to the back of the van. He pried up a section of the aluminum floor to the left of the drive shaft and showed her the coffin-like space below. It was a metal box with a bit of foam padding to dampen the noise when going over bumps.

She frowned. “You’re putting me in a coffin.”

“Coffins are smaller, trust me.”

She got in the compartment, lay back, and crossed her arms over her chest, one hand holding the pistol. He placed the flooring over the compartment, thought for a moment, and lifted it again.

“What?” she asked.

“I just remembered that this may be airtight. Just a sec.”

“What the fuck! Get me out of here!”

“Shhh,” he said, and set the lid at a slight angle so the corners were open, then threw a tarp over the area. She should be fine; there were handles on the inside of the lid so she could push her way out if she needed to.

He climbed back in the driver’s seat. A ragged column of fevered LDs shuffled up the hill, the nearest of them less than twenty yards away. Stony put the van in drive, covered the brake—and closed his eyes. He felt his hands gripping the steering wheel. Relax, he told himself. Feel your hands …

He heard a thump and glanced up. A huge white man in a Blackhawks shirt smacked the fender of the van and reached for the passenger door.

Stony shut his eyes again. He rubbed his palms against the plastic wheel. It was a part of his hands, an extension of him. He felt the steering column, the engine, then each axle like a set of limbs …

I am the car. The car is me. I belong to you and you belong to me
.

The passenger door shook and the LD howled in hunger, but Stony kept his eyes closed. He slowly eased up on the brake, and the van began to roll forward. He rode the brake against the gravity of the hill, never letting the van get over walking speed. The road was warm and rough beneath his wheels. His skin was dented sheet metal. His eyes were shattered glass. He could see everything.

The LDs stepped aside as the car approached, and then
they began to walk away from him. The vehicle had become another dead thing. Not food, not even a container of food.

He slipped down the hill, one undead among many. As he approached the helter skelter of stopped vehicles at the bottom of the hill he was forced to pull into the grassy median, but even that did not alarm his people. He rolled past cars with sprung doors, shattered glass. He forced himself to look into the cabins of the cars, through the open door of the yellow school bus. He memorized what had been laid out on the road.

He’d done this. He’d brought this moment to them.

He did not tell Ruby it was safe to leave the compartment until they were miles past and the road was clear again. She’d seen enough, hadn’t she? Awful enough to witness horrors in the dark. But in bright sunlight, on a beautiful spring day, with the wind blowing across the Iowa fields? Too much. Too much for anyone.

An hour later and fifty miles from Easterly, Ruby told him to pull over. “I have to pee like a racehorse,” she said.

He scanned the scrub brush by the side of the road and decided it was unlikely an LD would be lurking here. She grabbed her backpack and stepped off the road. “Be quick,” he said, and turned his back to her.

But she wasn’t quick. After five minutes she still hadn’t returned, and without turning around he called out for her.

“Bite me,” she called back. In another minute she came out of the brush. She’d tried to wash the blood from her face, and had only partially succeeded. Still, she was beautiful. He saw Crystal in her, of course, and therefore Alice: those high cheekbones, that narrow, stern architecture of shoulder and hip and knee. But there was something in the way she walked,
the way she swung her arms climbing up to the roadway, so unself-conscious, that reminded him of Junie.

“Your turn to drive,” he told her. “And my turn for the box.”

“Are you sleepy?”

“We’re ahead of the wave now,” he said. “The next people we’ll see are likely to be breathers. They might be police, or just armed gangs. Who knows how crazy it’ll be. I’ll be back there if you need me, but it’ll be up to you to get us the rest of the way. I know you can—why are you smiling?”

“You’re using the Patton voice.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mom does that to me all the time. And Aunt Alice, too. You sound just like them.”

“I do?”

“You Mayhalls all sound like you’re about to march into battle. Now, are you going to tell me how you got through those undead in Iowa City?”