Raising Stony Mayhall (45 page)

After all the buildup, all the frantic reports on the radio, the crazy television reports, it was kind of a letdown. Willie had set up generators and big lights aimed down the road, and the thing shuffled toward them, lit up and haloed as if on a beauty pageant runway. It moved kind of sideways, as if its hip had been broken.

The city employees looked to Willie to make the first move. He put down his shotgun and asked for a deer rifle. The thing was, he’d never fired a gun in the line of duty. He’d certainly never shot at something human-looking. He sighted down the barrel, steadied himself—then lowered the gun. The
municipal men looked at one another. One of them started to say something, and then Officer Tines raised the rifle and fired. Then again.

It took three shots to finally make it stop moving. The men hooted and slapped high-fives.

Willie handed back the rifle to its owner. “Get the extra barrels in place,” he said. The men went to the half-dozen barrels lining the side of the road and began to wheel and walk them into place.

Willie walked perhaps twenty feet away, got out his cellphone, and called his wife. “It’s happening,” he said. “Are you at the school yet?” Willie and his fellow officers had designated the elementary school as the emergency shelter. The building was brick, large enough to hold a few hundred people, small enough to defend, with access to the roof so they could shoot from high ground. They didn’t know how many people would stay in Easterly—five hundred? a thousand?—but the three policemen agreed it was better to be together when the attack came.

His wife told him they were leaving the house now, she and the two younger boys. Their daughter and eldest son were away at college. He’d talked to them both a few hours ago, but he could barely stand the thought of them being away from home right now.

“Okay, good,” Willie said. He glanced at his watch. The house was on the north end of town, well past the subdivisions, but still only fifteen minutes from downtown. “Grab us a couple of the good cots.”

Behind him, the crack of another rifle shot. He turned. Another zombie—no, three of the dead things were staggering toward the roadblock. “I’ve got to go,” he said into the phone. “I love you, hon. Please hurry.”

The men were firing repeatedly now, using too much
ammo. Willie went to the barricade and picked up his shotgun. Not that it would do much good. What they needed was a machine gun, a flamethrower—hell, an Apache gunship. But everyone understood that there’d be no help coming from the state police or the National Guard—from anyone in the government. They were on their own.

The three zombies went down, but the men didn’t celebrate this time. They held on to their guns and waited for the silhouettes to appear at the edge of the light a hundred yards away.

They felt it first. The barest tremor in the pavement beneath their feet, as if a train were passing—but the tremor persisted, grew more insistent. The sounds came next. From far away in the dark rumbled a low murmur, an engine-like noise of a thousand throats, wordless and random.

The sound grew, and still they could see nothing beyond the rim of light. The men glanced at one another, and looked away.

One of the men on the barricade said, “We’re no better than them. We’re already dead.”

“Cut it out,” Tines said. Something made him check his phone again. The phone icon was blinking. He’d missed a call from his wife’s cell. He knew then that he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. He slowly turned in place, like a compass needle, until he faced north. The threat wasn’t behind him, it was ahead.

Someone said, “Shit.”

A shape had appeared at the edge of the light. It was a wall of black, a mass distinguishable as bodies only because of the swaying and bobbing at the edge of the silhouette.

The men began to fire, round after round. They could see no effect. The mass shuffled forward, and the moans of the
dead increased. The percussive scrape of their feet against the pavement rattled up through the men’s bodies.

Tines yelled for the men to stop firing, and they obeyed. “We’ll never hold this,” he said. “You all go back to the schoolhouse. Back to your families.”

“What about you?” one of them asked.

“I’ll do the dump.”

“Fuck that,” one of the men said. “I’ve got no family. You guys go.”

Willie said, “Ron, you don’t have to do this.”

“Go. Git.”

The men got into the pickups, and Willie climbed into his black and white SUV. The six extra barrels were filled with kerosene. Ron had to wait until the zombies were close—ten, twenty yards—before he dumped the contents onto the road, or else the fuel would run off the pitched surface like rainwater. Even then, it was a low-probability tactic. At best it would only kill the monsters who were walking on the road. But at least it was something.

Willie drove north down 59, going fast. The flames erupted in his rearview mirror.

Stony sat on the floor in the center of the living room, a map of Easterly spread out on his lap, his hands at his sides. He was surrounded by a circle of powdery white seed, which was connected to the larger circle outside by a straight line that ran through the open door of the house. The two white candles burned inside the circle with him, so he could see the map.

His hands, one gray, one Barbie-colored plastic, rested in the powder. The circle, he told himself, was an extension of
his body. His flesh, laid out in a line. He encircled the house, and he was the house. He could feel the brittle bones of the barn like the bones of his missing hand. Mine, he thought. He flexed his fingers, and felt timbers snap.

Better watch that, he thought. He relaxed his hands and went still.

Now, how far could he go? Surrounding the house and barn were the spring fields, eager with life. He felt them in his arms, his legs, his chest. He masked the new grass with his own dead nature.

He looked down at the map. He’d drawn a big O around the town’s borders, and inside that a smaller O where the farmhouse was located—and within
that
, a dot to represent the circle he now occupied.

He closed his eyes. Be fractal, he thought. Larger than the town and inside it at the same time, all scales at once. Little Big.

Take it all in, Stony.

He needed the entire town. Houses and fields and fast-food restaurants, roads and cars and the thousand souls who’d refused to evacuate—all of it. He could feel the undead out beyond the borders of the town, pressing to get in, desperately hungry. But the dead would not eat the dead. The grave had nothing to offer them.

All he had to do was turn the house, the farm, and the entire town into a corpse.

But the task, the geography, was too big for him. He couldn’t forget himself, this body he was in. He could feel his arms, his legs, the small of his back. He knew it was all just dead flesh—some of it was even plastic. But he’d lived in it for a very long time. He’d grown too comfortable.

Someone was outside. No, two people. He could feel them like breath on the skin of his arm.

He opened his eyes.

Standing in the front yard, twenty feet from him, were two boys. Brown-haired, clearly brothers. The oldest of them—he was twelve or thirteen—held a cellphone in one hand and his brother’s hand in the other. There was blood on their clothes and arms. Something terrible had happened. They hadn’t been bitten. For some reason he was sure of that.

The boys peered into the dark of the house. Stony wondered how much they could see past the flickering light. Did they recognize what he was?

Suddenly the older boy turned away, pulling his brother with him. Stony stood up, and as he stepped out of the circle it was like a circuit breaker had been thrown. Suddenly he was cut off from the house, the farm, the network of roads. He blinked in surprise. Maybe he’d gotten further than he thought.

He reached the doorway in time to see the boys run into the barn. He stared after them, trying to decide what to do, and finally went back into the house, to the back bedroom, and dropped through the trapdoor.

Ruby sat on the cement floor outside the fortress room, holding her flashlight and a book. She was dressed in a hoodie and jeans, and her knees were drawn up tight. It was pretty cool down here at night. The book she was reading was his mother’s pink and green diary. He’d given it to her. He’d never been able to open it himself.

“You’re supposed to be in the safe room,” Stony said.

“It’s a little cramped in there. The Chos are scared, which is making me scared. You’re doing something. I can feel it. I can feel you.”

He nodded at the book. “How is it?” He couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“Bethany Cooper was a very sweet, innocent girl.”

“Really?”

“According to this, she wasn’t even sure how she got pregnant. But you’re changing the subject.”

“I need you to do something for me. There are two young boys out there, hiding in the barn.”

“What? Where’d they come from?”

“I have no idea. Could you check on them, find out where their parents are? Maybe convince them to go in the tunnels with you?”

Ruby put down the book. “Are they hurt?”

“I don’t think so. They look like they’re in shock. I can’t go check on them without scaring the shit out of them. So please?”

“No problem. As soon as you tell me what you’re doing up there.”

“Just one little thing,” Stony said. “One impossible thing.”

He pulled himself back up through the trap and went to his mother’s old bedroom, which faced the barn. The window was blocked by plywood but he reached under the wood and popped it free. Ruby had already emerged from the cellar door and was walking toward the barn.

Huh, Stony thought. The cellar door was practically under his mom’s window. How many nights had she watched him haul dirt out that door? He thought he was being so sneaky.

Ruby stepped through the barn door, leaving it ajar. He watched for several minutes, waiting for her to step back out, when the night was lit up by blue and red flashing lights. Stony hurried to the front of the house, keeping out of the open doorway.

The driver was moving fast, so much faster than when
Mr. Cho had taken the road in his Buick, jouncing over the potholes. A police car, a big SUV, braked to a halt in front of the house.

A man stepped out of the SUV, his features hidden by the glare of the headlights. Stony watched him through the gap in the door. He had the impression of a tall, bulky man. He carried a rifle or shotgun in his hands. He seemed to be studying the front door.

“Marc! Peter!”

Ah. He had to be looking for the boys.

Stony waited for them to answer, but nobody replied. The cop moved out of Stony’s line of sight. Stony stepped back to get a view into the yard—and suddenly he was staring into the cop’s face. They were two feet from each other, and for a second both of them were too shocked to move.

The cop recovered first. He recognized Stony for what he was. Then he jammed the barrel of his shotgun into Stony’s gut and fired.

The blast knocked him off his feet. He crashed onto his back, into the circle. White powder puffed around him.

Pain flared across his abdomen. No, no time for that. He needed to put the sensation away. It was the first thing he’d learned after Kwang fired that arrow into his heart. How many times had he been shot since then? You’d think he’d be used to it by now.

He tried to sit up, but there was a lot of him missing in the middle now, major structural damage. Stony succeeded in executing a kind of aggressive twitch.

The cop raised the weapon again, aimed carefully, and fired from the shoulder. Stony felt his throat and face tear, and again he was knocked flat.

The cop leaned over Stony. His face was distorted by the
flickering candlelight, but he seemed somehow familiar. Stony tried to say, “Officer Tines?” But the sound came out as a cough.

Tines ratcheted the shotgun, reloading it, and pressed the double barrels against Stony’s face.

The world reduced itself to a single noise.

He’d told Ruby it wasn’t in his nature to fall in love. But that wasn’t true, was it? He’d been in love from the moment his mother picked him out of the snow. For the first eighteen years of his life he’d been surrounded by women he loved, and by women who loved him: Mom and Alice and Crystal and Junie. And later, he’d met a sad woman named Valerie.

And what had he done with that love? He’d failed them all, betrayed every one of them. He’d killed Junie with incompetence, and Valerie with lack of imagination. He could never think of a way to save her. His mother had been arrested because of him, and locked away for decades like a terrorist. And Alice and Crystal—they might very well be dead by now, hunted down by the undead he’d helped set loose.

All he’d ever done, his entire life, was run. He was so good at it. Unstoppable.

Time to stop.

He did not move when Willie Tines searched the house. Or when the boys came out of the basement cellar, calling their father’s name. Or when Willie went back to his vehicle to get the gasoline.

Ruby tried to stop him, bless her heart. Stony wished he could have told her that it was all right. He was guilty as charged. He was tired. For years he’d been holding this body together with twine and duct tape. It certainly wasn’t worth
saving. He could only imagine what his skull looked like. Caved-in papier-mâché, perhaps. A busted piñata.

So, he waited as the pungent gasoline splashed around his body. He’d known since he was a boy that this was the way he was destined to die. Hunted, shot, and finally burned. It was a relief to have the moment finally arrive. His only regret was that the house would burn with him, and all those lovely books.