Raising Stony Mayhall (43 page)

“What do you mean? I just drove slow and—”

“What? No. They ignored the van.”

He shrugged. “I’m dead, they’re dead—”

“Bullshit. They didn’t even try to get in. They were pawing through all those other vehicles for food,
hungry
, and you just sailed right through them. They walked away from you.”

“You peeked.”

“It’s like back at the apartment,” she said. “Those zombies you commanded to stop. Can other LDs do that?”

“I’ll remind you that that didn’t work so well.”

“Tell me what’s going on, Uncle Stony. What are you, King of the Zombies?”

“Don’t use that word,” he said. He was stalling for time. “It’s just that, well, some of the newly turned LDs are suggestible.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Never mind. If you’re going to blow me off, fine. Where are the keys?”

She was mad. A little bit. But at least she’d stopped interrogating him. “In the ignition. Always leave the keys in the ignition in case—”

“Patton.”

“Right.”

He sat in the back of the van, next to the open compartment, ready to slip inside at the first sign of breathers, and jump up front at the first sign of LDs. He told her to exit on Route 59. The highway that led into Easterly.

“The Shell station looks closed,” Ruby said. “The BP, too.”

“We should have enough gas in the tank to get to Easterly.”

“I’m just trying to be a good tour guide. Oops—cops ahead.” He saw the flashers reflecting in the windshield. “They’re blocking the road.” Her voice rose slightly.

“It’s fine,” Stony said. “As soon as you can, roll down the window and yell something, so they know you’re not a zombie,” he said.

“Zombies don’t drive cars,” Ruby said.

“Listen to me. Tell them you’re on your way to see Kwang Cho, he lives in Easterly. Keep your hands visible, you don’t want them to shoot you. They’re going to search the van, so for goodness sake don’t even look at the floor. Also—”

He saw her face.

“Also, that is the last instruction I’ll give to you.” He dropped into the compartment and pulled the lid down over him.

The van rolled to a stop. After perhaps a minute he heard a door open, and Ruby speaking. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.

He thought, She might want to stay with the cops. Her own people. There were other towns near here, and they’d probably armed up. She might think her chances were better with them than with her deranged undead uncle. She’d be wrong, but he could see her thinking that.

After several minutes the car door shut. The engine started and the van began to move.

Was that Ruby driving, or was a cop in the van? Maybe they were pulling it over so they could search it.

A minute later the van accelerated. Judging from the smoothness of the ride, they were still on the interstate. He waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore—perhaps two minutes—then popped the lid and slid it back a few inches. All he could see, though, was the roof of the van. He really should have put a periscope in this thing. He listened, but she wasn’t talking to anyone in the van, and he couldn’t hear anything else.

Finally he said, “What happened?”

She said, “Nothing. I told them I was alone, and desperately trying to reach my uncle’s house in Easterly. They said most of the town’s evacuating, and my uncle probably had already left, but they let me through.”

He slid the lid back farther and sat up. His head was still well below the windshield. “Without searching the van? Why would they do that?”

“Because they’re a bunch of old white guys, and I’m a cute white girl.”

“No, really.”

She tilted down the rearview mirror so she could see his face. “You don’t understand living people, do you? Breathers.”

“Of course I do. I—no. Not all the time.”

“Haven’t you ever fallen in love?”

He thought of Valerie, the long hours with their arms entwined. Was that what breathers were talking about when they talked of love? Or was what he experienced some shadow emotion, some impersonation of romance? He had no nervous system, no capillaries to flush with arousal, no glands to manufacture oxytocin to bind him to his mate. How the hell could he know?

He said, “It’s not really in my nature.”

He climbed out of the compartment and squatted behind her seat. The way ahead looked utterly unfamiliar. Where had all these houses come from? Where did all the
money
for these houses come from? Clusters of pale, tasteful two-story homes had filled in the cornfields. At the center of town were actual fast-food restaurants: a McDonald’s, a Subway, and a Wendy’s.

“Holy cow,” Stony said. “There’s a Walmart.” Perhaps a hundred cars were in the parking lot, and the people were pushing through the doors with shopping carts piled high.

“Those must be the ones who are staying,” Ruby said. “Or looting the place on their way out of town.”

“Iowans don’t loot,” Stony said.

“Oh yeah? Wait till the zombies attack.”

They passed through the little downtown area, and he directed her onto a two-lane road. Out here the fields were still open, still undeveloped. And now, he thought, they never would be.

“There,” he said, and pointed toward a distant barn roof.

And then he was home.

“We’re not staying here, are we?” Ruby asked.

The windows were boarded up with weathered plywood, and the white paint was flaking from the wood siding, but
otherwise the house looked exactly as it had the day he left it—sturdy and firm, braced for another blazing summer, another hard winter. A horde of brain-eating zombies.

“The lawn is mowed,” Stony said.

“So?”

“So nobody lives here.”

“Maybe you have really nice squatters.”

Then he thought: Kwang. He must be keeping an eye on the place. Stony looked around. The rise in the land still hid the house from the road, if not the barn, and the Cho house was obscured by the row of trees that separated their fields. The front door of this house was locked, another good sign.

“Okay,” Stony said. “You turn the van around so it’s facing nose out, and leave the keys in it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He walked around the side of the house. The crawl space door was still there but padlocked shut. He held the lock in his hand, smiling at it, until it clicked open.

The light from the doorway only partially illuminated the room, but he could see that it had been nearly emptied. His tool bench was still there against one wall, though his collection of power tools was gone. The handmade bookshelves were bare.

Oh. Of course his sisters couldn’t hold on to this stuff. He was in hiding, their mother was in prison, and Crystal was two thousand miles away. Still, he’d imagined this basement room sealed up like a tomb, his Batcave, waiting for him.

He tried the light switch, but of course the electricity was off. He walked across the room. The cement floor was water-stained, but still smooth. On the far wall, the Kiss Alive poster was gone. Where it had hung was the clear outline of the paneling that hid the door to his little secret room. He’d thought he’d been so careful, so clever.

Above he heard Ruby banging on the front door. He
walked to the spot in the room that was beneath his bedroom, and reached up. The trapdoor popped out of the way, exactly like the lid in the van. That’s right: This was his first tongue-and-groove door. He’d been reusing the design for years.

He pulled himself up into his bedroom—his bedroom closet, actually—and stepped out. There were no windows, and the only light was from the faint glow from the living room. The room was an empty box, stripped to nothing.

He went to the front door and unlocked it. The wood had swelled in the frame and he had to yank hard to open it.

“I could have been bitten by now,” she said.

“Sorry.”

The house was nearly empty. The sale had taken every article of furniture, even the carpets. Ruby kicked at a dark clump of something clinging to the floorboards. “I think animals have been here,” she said.

“I’d be offended if they hadn’t,” Stony said.

In the kitchen they found a plastic patio table he didn’t recognize and a cardboard box. Ruby peeled back the lid. “Christmas decorations,” she said. “So we’ve got that covered.”

“I’ll get us something to sit on,” Stony said. He went back to his bedroom and dropped back through the trapdoor. He was thinking he could unbolt the bookshelves, maybe improvise some benches. But unless he just smashed the boards apart, he’d need a screwdriver at least.

He went to the section of paneling that hid his room, pulled it aside, then opened the metal door. On the sheet metal floor of the tiny room were stacks of cardboard boxes, four deep and five high. He went to the nearest stack and lifted the topmost box—surprisingly heavy—and carried it out into the light slanting through the cellar door. He opened the flaps, and the rich, familiar smell of pulp filled his nose.
The top of the box was lined with faded, colorful covers and white-crackled spines.

His books. His sisters had kept all his books.

He laughed aloud and pulled out a copy of John D. MacDonald’s
The Green Ripper
. Beneath it was Frank Herbert’s
Dune
, and below that:

Head Case
, by C. V. Ferris. A man in a business suit, his back to the audience, and on his left a beautiful red-haired woman in a clinging red dress, facing out. She rested her arm on his shoulder, looking devious. The man’s face, gray and decayed, was half turned toward her, grimacing. His right arm hung at his side, holding an automatic.

C. V. Ferris wasn’t a chubby breather woman from New Jersey. He was an LD with a Royal manual typewriter. He was Jack Gore, a hard-bitten cop bitten hard.

Still, he wished Gloria Stolberg well. He hoped she survived the outbreak. He didn’t need any more Jack Gore novels, but he would love to see what she’d written about the LD community. Now, after the outbreak, her book would either be a brilliant defense or damning evidence.

No, that was the old way of thinking. Who would be alive to put them on trial? The surviving LDs would never indict their own.

He moved all the boxes out of the metal room until finally the floor was clear, with only the little pallet of old blankets on the floor (blankets intact), and the two short bookshelves screwed to the wall. He picked up a flashlight that had been left behind on one of the shelves. It wouldn’t turn on. He shook it, then unscrewed the cap and tipped out the batteries. Completely corroded, as to be expected.

He shut the room, then carried a couple of the book boxes back to the trapdoor and pushed them up and through.

Ruby heard the noise and came to the hole. “Where the hell did you go? The cellar?”

“Could you carry these back to the living room, please?”

Soon they had enough boxes to make two chairs and an end table; Stony felt like they were playing house. Ruby, sweating now in the close atmosphere, sat down to eat her last protein bar. She set the pistol on the floor between her feet. “Do we have water at least?”

“We should—it’s on a well, not city water.” He went into the kitchen and turned on the taps. The water sputtered, then ran orange-red, stinking of rust. He let it run and walked back to the living room. “It may be a few minutes until it’s drinkable.”

She bit off another inch of the energy bar, then folded the foil over it and put it back into her backpack. “We’re going to have to hit that Walmart,” she said.

“It’s almost sundown,” he said. “I’ll get you some food then.”

“From where?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“You know, I’d like to know if you have any plan at all. What are we supposed to do, wait it out and hope the outbreak misses us?”

“It won’t miss us. It won’t miss anyone.”

“You can’t know that. We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

He shook his head. “The mobs will be moving in from the cities, especially west from Chicago. We already saw Iowa City was spilling over. It’s only a matter of time till they get here.”

“Like when—tonight?”

He hesitated, then said, “Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

He watched her take in this information, consider it, and set it on some mental shelf—not forgotten, but in plain sight. He loved her for this, how she refused to panic. Crystal would have been so proud.

“You know,” Ruby said, “an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a flat plain is not exactly where I’d pick to make my last stand.”

He smiled. “I think I need to show you something.”

He supported her under her arms as she lowered herself through the trapdoor, then followed after her. “I dug out this basement when I was in high school,” he said.

Ruby played her flashlight around the space. “By yourself?”

“I had a lot of time on my hands. Let me show you the best part.” He took her to the secret panel and swung it out of the way. “I called this my fortress of solitude.”

She leaned in, and the beam of her flashlight gleamed against the metal. “Okay then,” Ruby said. Her voice echoed oddly. “Your own safe room.”

Stony said, “If the undead get into the house, I want you to come down here, okay? Close the door behind you. You can bolt it from the inside.”

“What about you?”

“They won’t hurt me. And if things get really bad, lift up the pallet. Like this.” He squatted and levered the wooden platform out of the way.

She aimed her light into the darkness. “Are those stairs?”

“Just follow them down, and then keep following the tunnel. If you go left you’ll end up behind the Chos’ house. If you go right, you’ll end up in our barn, in one of the old stalls.
And if you go down the middle passage, it’ll take you about half a mile away, near the highway.”

“Half a
mile
?”

“Alice said that I had a tendency to overdo things.”

“She got that fucking right.”

“Come on, let’s go out to the barn.” He walked down first and was pleased to find out that his wooden stairs were still sturdy. “Wait, I just remembered something.” He felt around under the last step, and there it was: the metal toolbox that used to belong to his sisters’ father. Stony had supplemented Ervin Mayhall’s tools with his own supplies. He pulled out two squat, white safety candles and a box of matches in a small plastic bag.