Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

Alice didn’t look up. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll be over it soon.”

  “I should have acted happier.”

  She grunted, kept typing.

  He dropped his voice. “I just don’t get it. A suit? She might as well buy me dance lessons.”

  Alice kept working. It was like this every time she visited, even at Christmas: relentless cramming. He wondered if she ever wished she could be like Stony and go without sleep. He would have had a huge advantage in college.

  “So do they study me in medical school?” he asked. “The walking dead?”

  “They talk about what you did,” she said. “Not what you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked up from the typewriter, then took a breath and leaned back in her chair, allowing him to interrupt her for a while longer. Alice and Crystal both took after the Mehldaus, Mom’s side of the family: black hair, deep brown eyes, Cherokee-quality cheekbones, strong noses. At a casual glance you could take them for twins. But in Crystal those features added up to a kind of dark beauty, a mystery that drew you in. In Alice what you noticed first were the angles of her face, the severity in every expression, the certainty in her gaze. One sharp look and you’d rethink your next step.

  “They teach us about the outbreak. How many died, how many were bitten, how many were transformed. The world should have ended that night, John. We don’t know how the hell they transmit the disease, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. The math is scary, John. One living dead person, biting and transforming one other person per hour—that’s all you need. In three days all the humans are dead or turned into walking dead.”

  “What?”

  “Those are raw numbers. Let’s say you manage to quarantine people as they’re bitten—say ten or twenty percent. That cuts down on the spread rate. But the world still ends in five days. Six billion people, dead or undead.”

  “But the world didn’t end. They stopped it once.”

  “The only way the model works out for human survival is if you kill off almost every single undead in the first two days. A ninety-nine-point-four-percent kill rate. Not ninety-eight, not ninety-nine-point-three—ninety-nine-point-four. And that’s what happened on the East Coast. Everyone who could carry a gun organized into gangs, and they went door to door shooting anything that moved. If that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be here today.” She shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t.”

  “Shit,” Stony said.

  “You’re a walking threat to national security, John. You’re smallpox. You’re an ICBM.”

  “They have to find a cure,” Stony said. “Somebody’s got to be working on a cure, right? A vaccine or something.”

  “Sure they are. But there’s a problem. The living dead break all known rules of biology and common sense. There’s no virus that works like this, we can’t find a pathogen, and it’s certainly not caused by space radiation or whatever the government tried to tell us it was. All the corpses that were examined after the outbreak, the ones they rekilled? They were just that—corpses. No one’s found anything to tell us what the disease was, or how we can prevent it. So the medical people threw up their hands. There was no way to study it with the normal tools of science, so they booted the whole subject down the road to the theoreticians. All a young doctor can do is pray that it never comes back.”

  “But it hasn’t gone away,” Stony said. “I was reading a newspaper article about a sighting in Indiana in 1971—”

  “Stragglers, kid. Some of the infected were smarter than the others and tried to hide once the cleanup gangs came out. And some were hidden by their crazy relatives.”

  “That is crazy.”

  “In the early seventies there was a lot of hysteria, a lot of paranoid books being written. You had Dennis Wenger on television talking about the ‘hidden dead,’ and antiwar activists claiming solidarity with them. People were seeing the living dead everywhere, turning in sick people, the elderly. New hunter gangs formed, though that was mostly rednecks looking for a reason to walk around with guns. I thought Mom was going to start drinking.”

  He didn’t remember any of that. All he remembered was playing with Kwang and his sisters.

  “So if they’re stragglers, why aren’t they biting people? The disease should be spreading. You said all it takes is one victim.”

  “Not all the victims were homicidal a hundred percent of the time. We don’t know why. Some of them could talk. Well, at least form words. Residual brain function.”

  “That wasn’t in anything I read. None of the magazines or books.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve looked at all the newspaper stories, and even went back to the original incident reports. I wrote a couple of papers on it, before my advisor told me to drop it.” She leaned forward. “People are studying the outbreak, John, just not the people at my level. And sooner or later, somebody is going to have to study you.”

  “Great.”

  “You grew up, John. How you did that is a complete and utter mystery. There’s not a whiff of this in the literature—at least the stuff I’ve been able to get access to. I don’t know how it’s even possible. Somebody needs to figure out how you did it.”

  “Somebody like you,” he said. “You want to be one of those theoretical people.”

  “I’ve got to get through med school first,” she said. “Then pay off my loans. But yes, I’d like to be that person. Does that scare you?”

  “Scare me? Are you kidding?” He laughed. “Alice, there’s nobody else I’d want doing this.”

  She seemed taken aback. “John, you don’t have to—”

  “Nobody else. And I want to work with you.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean really work with you. I want you to train me. Teach me. I want to take college courses. By correspondence, I guess—I haven’t thought through this yet. But I don’t want to be just a test subject, I want to be one of the investigators.”

  “John—”

  “Just tell me what to read, I’ll read it. Tell me what to study, and I’ll pass the test.”

  She regarded him for a long moment. “All right, Brother John. I guess you have graduated from high school.” She tapped the virology textbook. “Read the first two chapters, then write me a two-page essay on bacteriophages—what they are, their different types, et cetera.”

  “Do you want it typed?”

  “I’m using the typewriter, thank you. Now get to work.”

  He worked for an hour and got halfway through chapter two. He learned pretty quickly that a bacteriophage was a virus that ate bacteria. But there were just so many new terms and concepts to track down. What was a lysis gene? What was RNA replicase? He wanted to know it all, now. Alice refused to answer questions. “Work through it,” she said.

  He realized he’d have to find an introductory textbook, something at the level of Alice’s undergraduate courses. There was no such book on the shelves downstairs; he’d have to ask Mom to get one from Des Moines. Just like he had to ask her for everything. He was trapped here, in this farmhouse, his own personal Deadtown. Kwang was leaving for college at the end of the summer, Junie would be gone in a year, and Alice and Crystal weren’t ever coming back—at least not to stay. It would be just him and Mom. He was the retarded kid who could never live on his own, the crazy lady in the attic—the vicious dog you could never let off the chain.

  Alice typed away, concentrating so hard she looked angry. Eventually she noticed he was staring at her. “Yes?”

  Take me with you, he thought. Get me out of here.

  “Still confused?” she said.

  “Kind of. But it’s cool.”

  “Good. Struggle is part of the process.”

  Mom came out of the bedroom sometime after nine. She still wore her green dress—her only party dress. “Doing homework, John? I thought you could take at least one day off.”

  “I’ve enrolled in the University of Alice,” he said.

  “I see.” She placed a hand
on his shoulder. “How about we go for a drive?”

  Stony looked up from his page of notes. “What?” One of the cardinal rules was to never leave their farm or the Chos’. And as far as they knew, he’d never broken that rule. He hadn’t been caught the night of the deer, and he’d never told anyone in his family about it.

  “It’s not far.” Her eyes were tired, but her mouth was set, exactly like a woman who’d been crying for a long time and then had decidedly stopped crying. He’d seen that look a lot over the years.

  “We’ll hide you in the back,” Mom said.

  “Okay …” He got up to put on his gym shoes, then realized something. “Would you like me to wear the suit?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.” Then, “I also bought you dress shoes. And socks. I put them in your room.”

  He got dressed, choosing the white shirt and the most colorful of the two ties. He had no idea how to tie it, though. Jack Gore always wore a tie, but of course he never explained how he knotted it. Stony carried it out to the kitchen and his mother told him not to worry about it for now, but that he’d have to get Mr. Cho to teach him. She buttoned the middle button of the jacket. “You look handsome,” she said.

  He knew it was a lie. He looked like a corpse in a funeral suit. But he also knew his mother would never say so.

  He lay down in the very back of the station wagon, on a fresh blanket to keep his clothes clean. She spread another blanket over him. “If we get pulled over,” she said, “act like cargo.”

  He turned on his side and watched the lights of the town scroll past the windows. Then they were leaving town, and his mother began to speak. “It was so cold the night we found you,” she said. “You should have been stiff as a board. But your mother had you wrapped up in her rabbit fur coat, with her arms around you. She was trying so hard to keep you warm that she spent all the heat in her body.”

  He could barely hear her over the sound of the engine and the wind coming through the windows, but it didn’t matter: He’d heard this story countless times. He used to beg her to tell him about that night, and she used almost the same words every time. He used to lie in his bed at night thinking of his mother—his first mother—burning down like a candle to protect him.

  Mom told him about trying to resuscitate him, and how she had bathed him in warm water at the kitchen sink, a “low-rent baptism.” She laughed. “The girls were so excited. Junie thought you were her pet.”

  The car slowed, turned, and came to a stop. It had been twenty minutes since he’d seen any houselights. “We’re here,” she said.

  She opened up the back of the wagon for him and he climbed out. They were in a cemetery. The gravestones stretched out into the dark.

  His mother turned on a flashlight and led him back into the rows. She seemed to know where she was going. After a minute she stopped and aimed the beam at a patch of grass.

  “Hello, Jane,” Mom said. “I brought your boy this time.”

  The stone was about ten inches high. She raised the light so he could read the inscription: Jane Doe. Died 1968. Then in smaller print, a line at the bottom: At Home Now.

  “I’m sorry about the marker,” she said. “I couldn’t afford a big one, or many words. I wanted to mention you somehow, but I was afraid to even hint. I hope you aren’t—”

  “Mom, it’s fine. It’s more than fine.” He had no idea she had been coming out here.

  “She would have been so proud of you,” his mother said. “How hard you work, how much you study.”

  He crouched down, plucked a weed. He didn’t know what to feel. He knew he should be having some moment of communication with the woman who gave birth to him—one dead person to another—but what saddened him was the thought of his mother coming out here over and over, beating herself up for raising the woman’s son without her, and not getting a big enough gravestone.

  “They never found out her name I guess,” he said.

  “There’s a detective I call every few years. Detective Kehl. He says he’s still looking, but no one’s ever reported a missing girl that matches her description. He thinks … well. He’s still looking.”

  Stony looked up. “He thinks what?”

  Even in the dark he could see his mother take a breath. “Oh Stony, he believes she was murdered.”

  “You told me she died of exposure.” He got to his feet. “She was hitchhiking.”

  “That probably is what happened. But he’s pretty sure she was also robbed, because she didn’t have a purse or ID. Plus, the autopsy made it clear that she’d been pregnant and had given birth recently.”

  “So they’re looking for a baby? For me?”

  “No, no. Detective Kehl thinks it was a miscarriage, or a … well, an abortion that went badly. He thinks maybe she was weak from internal bleeding.”

  “But nothing about the walking dead.”

  “Don’t you worry, you’re still safe. No one’s looking for you.”

  Together they stared at the grave. For years he’d imagined meeting her. He daydreamed about walking along the winter highway, and coming upon her walking the other way, a young woman with long brown hair, wearing a rabbit fur coat and yellow rain boots. Her skin would be as cold and gray as his own. She’d reach down to touch his cheek, and she’d say, There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.

  He put his arm around his mother’s shoulders. They were almost the same height.

  “I should have brought some flowers,” Stony said.

  “You’re here,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1982

  Easterly, Iowa

  rystal didn’t show up the night of graduation, or the next day, or the next week. She finally called from somewhere out west and said that her travel plans had gotten “complicated.” Then one night in mid-August she called Mom at work, saying that she’d be home for supper next Saturday. “She says she has a surprise for you,” Mom said to Stony.

  “The only surprise would be if she showed up,” Junie said.

  On the appointed night, Junie, Stony, and Mom sat around the kitchen table, staring at empty plates, enveloped in the smell of the lasagna warming in the oven. Crystal always loved lasagna, though maybe not enough to make her show up on time. Mom was trying hard to stay positive, but her kids weren’t making it easy. Junie kept staring at the clock and sighing, because she had a party to go to. Stony was supposed to spend the night at the Chos’, because Kwang was leaving in three days for Iowa State and it was probably the last sleep-over they’d ever have.

  Mom told them to sit.

  At 6:30, when Crystal was already an hour late, Mom let them eat the garlic bread. At seven she let them have their salads. At 7:30 she said, “To hell with it.” She pulled the lasagna out of the oven, and told them to serve themselves if they were in such a rush.

  Stony waited until she was out of the room before melodramatically whacking his forehead against the table. Junie cracked up. “You know what the great thing about Crystal is?” she said. “She takes all Mom’s attention off us.”

  “She’s like Jupiter,” Stony said. “Sweeping all the killer asteroids out of the solar system with her massive gravitational pull.”

  “Right. Jupiter.” Junie took one bite from a square of lasagna, then called her boyfriend to pick her up at the end of the lane. Stony wondered if any of his sisters’ boyfriends ever wondered why they weren’t allowed to approach the house. Probably they were happy about it.

  Kwang was outside, watching the fields for Stony’s approach. He jumped when Stony appeared behind him. “Jesus, what did you do, teleport?”

  “I’m working on my ninja skills. Here, Mom made lasagna. I figure you were starving over here.” The Chos were visiting Mrs. Cho’s sister in Philadelphia. Kwang took the full plate inside.

  “It’ll be good to have something in our stomachs,” Kwang said. He paused. “Until it isn’t.”

  Kwang had decided several weeks ago that before he went off to college,
he needed to teach Stony how to drink. “You’re going to miss the most important thing about college,” Kwang had told him. “And I can give that to you.”

  Stony wouldn’t admit this to Kwang, but he was touched. Things had gotten so distant between them that he was pleased that Kwang wanted to share this with him. With Mr. and Mrs. Cho gone, Kwang and Stony would have the run of the house for the next two days—plenty of time for Stony to recover.

  The bar was set up on the dining room table. Ten different bottles, most of them less than half full. “I borrowed from people,” Kwang said. “I wanted you to get a good sampling. Like this one, Southern Comfort. That’ll kick your dead gray butt, my friend.”

  “This one smells good,” Stony said.

  “That’s peppermint schnapps. It’s a girl’s drink, but that just means it’ll kick your butt without you knowing what’s happening.”

  Stony said, “You haven’t tried any of this, have you?”

  “Of course I have. I had a shot of Wild Turkey just last weekend.”

  “Right. This is about you wondering if you can hold your liquor with the frat boys.”

  “Hey, do you want me hurling on my first night out? Look, I bought mixers. I’m thinking we start with rum and Dr Pepper.”

  Kwang declared this an awful, awful combination. Vodka and orange juice was tolerable, practically sophisticated in comparison, but bourbon was terrible no matter what they mixed it with. “It tastes like ass,” Kwang said.

  “There’s certainly an assy quality,” Stony said. As with food, he followed Kwang’s lead. “With notes of burnt rubber.”

  After a couple of hours of sampling, Kwang thought everything tasted like aluminum siding. The night quickly became a contest to concoct the worst-tasting combination possible.

  “I call this the Gay Nazi,” Stony said, and handed him a mixture of schnapps, gin, and Mello Yello. “It’s the perfect drink right before you commit suicide in a bunker.”

  “Gah! It’s like a Christmas tree threw up in my mouth. Try this. Tequila, Jack, and a dash, a dash, a dash …” He reached for the rum, and Stony saved a row of bottles from tumbling off the table.