“Next time—” Stony said.
“I said never.”
“Well, we can’t use that outfit, now that the cops are looking for Shields and Yarnell.” Delia backed down the basement stairs, with Thomas’s head braced on her shoulder, cheek to cheek. Stony felt bad about losing the traveling mime troupe gag. They’d worn the costumes for several rounds of visits to the people of the parish, and perhaps because no one wanted to engage a mime, they’d been aggressively ignored. Then again, they’d never chased down a postal worker in broad daylight. “I’m thinking of something even better,” he said.
“Better.”
“Three words: Kiss tribute band.”
She abruptly stopped. Thomas folded between them and grunted.
She wouldn’t smile—Delia wasn’t the smiling type—but he’d managed to loosen the line of her frown. She wasn’t really mad at him; she was furious with Roger, and with herself for allowing Roger to live on his own with the breathers. She looked at him over the tops of her sunglasses, her lidless eye like a full moon.
“One more thing. Go get the car, Delia?”
“Oh, that.”
“Next time you give me an order, outside this house or in, I will kick your dead gray ass.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said.
They set the mailman on the floor in Stony’s room, and Delia left to call the chain of answering machines and voicemail systems that connected the cells. The other cell leaders had to know about a new bite, especially one to a government worker who’d be missed soon. The risks were too great. It was an article of faith among the LDA that a single victim, let loose on the world, could start a new outbreak.
Well, yes and no. The numbers and infection models he’d learned from Alice were true, but only in the purest theoretical sense, a physics problem that required a perfect vacuum. Every real LD knew that if they were seen walking the streets, much less biting someone in front of witnesses, the Diggers and every other arm of the government would sweep down and burn every LD in sight—and probably anyone without a tan. The United States had been caught unawares in ’68, but they wouldn’t allow an outbreak to happen again.
The other eight LDs living in the houses converged on Stony’s room. The space was already crowded with equipment tables, filing cabinets, and computer desks, but they cleared a spot in the middle of the room, set down an old mattress, and laid Thomas upon it. The man was growing delirious. He thrashed at his bonds, and moaned through the tape that covered his mouth.
“Can I do anything?” Roger asked. “I somehow feel responsible.”
Stony stared at him. “Just stay out of the way.” Roger would be busy enough in the next couple of hours surviving Delia. He’d broken Rule No. 1. She would have to take disciplinary action; she had no choice. Stony said, “We need sheets, at least five. We’re going to have to mummy-wrap him to stop him from hurting himself.” Two residents hurried off into the tunnel that connected the two basements. “Valerie, could you find me surgical thread and needles? Oh, and towels and water.”
Valerie, a sad, graveborn woman who was his best friend in the house, brought him the things he asked for. He also assembled what he needed from his own supplies in the room: syringes, Petri dishes, sealable vials. Then he crouched next to Thomas.
“I’m going to remove the tape, okay?”
The man’s eyes flicked back and forth, and he seemed not to hear Stony. But then his head jerked in what could have been a nod. Stony peeled the tape from his mouth.
The man gasped, then said, “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m going to help you through this, Thomas.”
“I have a wife. You have to—somebody has to—” He took a shaky breath. “I can’t think straight. There’s something wrong with me.”
His shirt was drenched in sweat; his breaths came fast and light. So many autonomic processes in the living body, Stony thought. Nerves fired, muscles twitched, adrenaline pumped; uncountable systems and subsystems churned and contested with one another. Thomas’s conscious mind was being pushed along on a flood of chemicals and electricity, not riding the wave but swept up in it, trying to make sense of what the body told it: You are under threat. The monsters surround you. The poison is already inside.
“It’s going to be all right,” Stony said. “You’ll be going through some changes in the next twenty-four hours or so. You may feel afraid, or angry. You might even scare yourself. But I want you to know that I’m going to be here with you.”
However long it takes, Stony thought. The folklore of the LDs was that the sooner a person died after a bite, the sooner he came back. Instead of waiting for the bite to shut off his heart, Stony could kill Thomas now, even make it painless. But that was folklore. Stony wasn’t about to experiment on the man. He doubted he could kill Thomas even if he knew the rumor to be true.
Thomas said, “Am I going to die? I feel like I’m going to die.”
“I promise you,” Stony said. “Soon you’re going to feel a lot better.”
“It’s not fair,” Valerie said. She stood behind Stony as he gazed into the microscope. On the floor, Thomas groaned and thrashed. He was wrapped neck to feet in several layers of bedsheets, a makeshift straitjacket. Leather belts were cinched around his ankles, waist, and upper arms. He chewed at the towel they’d wedged into his mouth to protect his teeth and jaw from his frantic gnashing.
“I know, I know,” Stony said absently. He rotated the slides again. Here was Thomas’s blood before he died, six hours after the bite: perfectly normal. And here was Thomas’s blood after he passed, at the 6:12 mark: dark, viscous, waxy. The transformation had occurred between observations, like the state change in a quantum particle. Like death itself. “I wish we could explain to him what’s happening.”
The bitten did not die as normal humans did. In a normal death, cells would begin to starve, and acidic carbon dioxide would build up, rupturing cell membranes. Digestive enzymes would spill into other cells, and the body would begin to eat itself from the inside out. As muscle cells stopped pumping calcium ions, rigor mortis would set in around the jaw and neck. Blood cells would begin to settle and congeal.
But the bitten did not break down, they did not stiffen. They entered the fever, which could last anywhere from 24 to 48 hours. Thomas was only on hour 10. If they let him loose now he’d attack any human in sight. Stony had often marveled at how specific the hunger was: The fevered dead didn’t attack animals, or invade butcher shops. They craved human meat, human and nothing but, as if taking revenge for being kicked out of their former species. The Payback Diet.
“He didn’t choose this,” Valerie said. “We should have let him decide.”
Stony looked up from the eyepiece. “What? Let him die?”
“If that’s what he wanted.”
He swiveled to face her. She must have been a handsome woman when alive. Her bearing was erect, and she wore her plain, secondhand dress as if it were an evening gown. But she was graveborn, one of the LDs who’d already been dead when the outbreak swept through the East, and so her appearance had suffered even before she’d joined the others above-ground. Unlike most of the LDs, women and men alike, she refused a wig. She was perfectly bald, and her eyes were sunk so far that they seemed to be excavated from the gray stone of her skull.
Stony said, “But we can’t just let him die die.”
She looked down at Thomas. “This one had a chance to get away. He could have been in heaven by now. And now, he’s here.”
“Being LD isn’t that bad, is it?”
“You’re young, Stony. Fresh. You were bitten what, seven years ago?”
“Uh, about that, yeah.” Valerie was his closest friend here, the one he could talk to most honestly, but he’d never told her about his birth. Delia’s orders.
“You’ve just begun. You’ll begin to realize that we’re not supposed to be here—we’re not part of the natural order. We’re in limbo, cut off from life, from God, even cut off from hell
.”
“Come on, Valerie …” He said it lightly. “Even if we are all spawns of hell, I couldn’t make him choose, not under duress. It would have been cruel.”
He felt a little guilty making this argument; if there was one way to win a point with Valerie it was to appeal to her kindness. When he first arrived, it was Valerie who saw how lonely he was, how much he missed his family, and began to pull him into the life of the community. When she discovered how much he enjoyed building things, she convinced her sister, the breather who owned the house, to purchase materials and tools, and assigned him renovation projects that would please the other residents. It was Valerie who detected his hidden competitive streak and set him up with Tanya and Teddy, two Scrabble fiends who’d alienated everyone else in the house with their cutthroat style of play. And soon he discovered something he would never have imagined: He felt comfortable around dead people. At home he’d been so self-conscious about his dead skin, his inability to sleep, his fundamental difference from his sisters and his mother. But here he was hardly the most decayed person—in fact, he was downright attractive. He felt shallow comparing looks, but he had to admit that he was in better condition than anyone else in the house.
And he was safe. Well, more safe. In Iowa he’d been almost constantly on edge, because he felt as if his security rested entirely on his shoulders. His mother might mean well, but she couldn’t really protect him. A circle of baking flour wasn’t going to keep the government troops at bay. But here, Delia and Mr. Blunt were so competent, so sure of themselves, that he could do something he could never before afford to do: relax. Hell, he could even be goofy if he wanted to.
He owed so much of this new sense of comfort to Valerie. She made everything easier for him. He knew that in some ways he was making her into a proxy for his sisters, or perhaps, more disturbingly, his mother. Lately, however, he’d become worried about Valerie, and their roles had begun to reverse. She had always had a melancholy nature, but in the past year she’d been talking more and more about the wrongness of undead existence. There was a strong self-loathing streak in the LDs—Delia said it was because they’d bought into the mainstream’s portrayal of them—but many of the graveborn had started calling themselves the Damned. All LDs were going to hell in an inescapable handbasket. The graveborn said they understood more because they’d gotten closer to the other side than anyone—they had a better idea of what was spiritually at stake. The bitten LDs argued that they’d all died, and the graveborn were putting on airs.
Thomas arched his back, then flipped himself onto his front. He raised his head and then bashed his face against the floor.
“Thomas!” Stony yelled. He jumped down from the chair and grabbed the man by the shoulders. “Thomas, stop it!”
The man suddenly went still. Stony turned him back onto his back, and the man stared into his eyes. Thomas was gone, lost in fever, but something glimmered behind his eyes.
“How did you do that?” Valerie asked.
“What?” Stony began checking the buckles on the leather straps, cinching them tighter.
“He listened to you. The fevered don’t listen to anyone.”
“It doesn’t last long.” Stony adjusted the strap keeping the gag in place, and Thomas shook his head like an angry child. “See?” he said. Valerie frowned, thinking, and Stony said, “Look, I know nobody would ask to go through this, but he was already bitten, the fever was already coming, and he wasn’t thinking straight. Even if he’d begged for death, I wouldn’t have killed him, because already he wasn’t in his right mind. He’d just been attacked by us, why would he want to become us? But in a few hours he gets a chance to really choose.”
“He won’t be the same person in a few hours.”
“Okay, maybe not,” Stony said. Many of the bitten lost their memory or emerged with altered personalities. “But at least he’ll be alive. Or moving at least. ‘The dead stick moves in the wind.’ ”
“Don’t start quoting the Lump to me,” Valerie said.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that—” He looked up at her, then back at Thomas. “Look, I haven’t told anyone in the house about this, but I had a chance once. Someone I loved was very hurt, and I—I didn’t do anything. I ran away before I even realized I could have saved her.”
Valerie looked appalled. “Are you talking about biting someone? On purpose?”
“She was dying. If I could have—”
“Not even then. Not ever. No biting. That’s our one rule, our most important rule.”
“Valerie, sometimes—”
“Think about that girl who lives next door. Would you want her to die?”
Stony grimaced in frustration. Why was she bringing up the girl next door? “Never mind,” he said. Every day he thought about the accident. Maybe Junie wouldn’t have wanted to be converted; maybe she would have thanked him. But even if she hated him for it, at least he’d be able to ask her forgiveness now.
Valerie tilted her head. “I’m worried about you, Stony.” She touched his head. He still had all his hair, smooth and brown. It never grew, but never fell out. “I would pray for you, if I thought God listened to us.” She stepped away from him, then stopped in the doorway. “We’ll talk about this more when Thomas’s fever breaks.”
“That’s right,” Stony said. “All three of us can talk about it then.”
He tried to get back to work, but now the slide show of the accident was firing behind his eyes. He saved the VisiCalc sheet where he’d been recording Thomas’s stats, then copied it to his backup floppy and ejected it. Then he crouched and touched the man’s shoulder, and Thomas twisted his head in a vain attempt to bite his hand. LDs didn’t hunger for other LDs—this was just an automatic response. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Stony said to him. “You’re almost done.” A lie. It might take another day and a half for the fever to pass.
Stony went to the bathroom, washed the last of the clown white from his face, and went upstairs. The two houses were small, falling down on the outside, but well tended inside, thanks largely to Stony’s renovation efforts. Every window was covered with heavy drapes. It was 8:30 p.m. but could have been 3 a.m., or noon. Most of the residents were in Yellow’s living room, smoking cigarettes and watching Head of the Class. Roger was laughing louder than anyone. LDs didn’t need to sleep, but most of the ones Stony had met spent all of that extra time smoking and watching TV.
He found Delia in the kitchen, at the end of a phone cord stretched across the room. He was surprised to see Mr. Blunt at the table with her. Blunt lived in Aaron’s split-level in Culver City, where they sheltered four LDs. Aaron drove him over to Delia’s house once a week, but he wasn’t due for several more days.
“You have mail?” Stony asked him.
Mr. Blunt smiled, dipped into his briefcase with clacking fingers, and produced two envelopes, one thick and one very thin. “Stony” was written on the front of each: in elegant cursive on the thick envelope, and in blocky capitals on the other. Neither had a return address, but in the upper left corner of the thin envelope was the Hangul pictogram for “friend”: . Upside Down Man and Legless Man, as Stony thought of them.
“I hear you’ve recruited someone to replace me,” Mr. Blunt said.
“I thought we should hire a professional,” Stony said. He tucked the envelopes into his back pocket and sat down. He nodded toward Delia. “How are the higher-ups taking it?”
This thing with Roger had to be an embarrassment for Delia. He knew that she was more than a cell leader; she was some kind of troubleshooter in the LDA hierarchy. Once a month, on average, she hit the road to inspect other safe houses. Other times she was constantly on the phone, and messages were left for her almost every day. The LDA used a system of voicemail dead drops. Cell leaders called a number that changed every week to leave messages for the group. Stony had offered to set up an electronic bulletin board, but Delia nixed the idea: most of the LDA didn’t know how to use a computer.
�
�The reaction has not been good, by the looks of it.” He leaned forward, creaking. “We have other problems besides Roger. We lost an entire house in Nevada.”
“What? How many people?”
Delia shushed him. Mr. Blunt lowered his voice. “Five LDs, two breathers. You ever hear about the Scanlon Sisters? Two lovely women in their seventies. They’ve been helping us since the outbreak.”
“Who turned them in?”
He shrugged. “We’re not sure. We wouldn’t know about the raid at all if one of their friends hadn’t contacted us. The Diggers sent in almost a hundred agents, sealed the entire block.”
“A hundred?” Stony said. LDs feared even a small squad of Gravediggers. But this was an army of them.
Delia carried the handset back to the wall and hung up. “They want to call a meeting,” she said. “Another fucking congress. All the cell leaders at least, and more delegates besides. I’ve tried to tell them it’s a mistake. It’s a fucking security nightmare.”
Stony looked from her to Mr. Blunt. “They’ve done this before?”
“Only once,” she said. “In ’76.”
“But isn’t it dangerous?” Stony asked. “I mean, for all of you to be together like that?”
“Desperate times,” Mr. Blunt said. “People are scared. We lost a dozen people in the past year, and now five in one blow.”
“And two of the living.”
Mr. Blunt shrugged.
Delia said, “The Big Biters are lobbying for action again.”
“That’s crazy,” Stony said.
“Even the Perpetualists are getting antsy. They’re afraid if we don’t change course soon, then the Big Bite becomes our only option.”
“How about you?” Stony asked her. “Is that what you think?” In front of the residents, Delia toed the line of the Abstainer majority, but he knew that she was privately sympathetic to the Perpetualist agenda. It was suicide to keep to a strict no-bite policy, the Perpetualists argued. If the LD race was to survive, the community needed to recruit at least as many members as they lost. Not one Big Bite, but a measured conversion campaign, slow enough to fly under the radar of the government, quick enough to keep their community viable.
Raising Stony Mayhall Page 11