Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  Stony opened the envelope from Kwang first. Like his previous letters, it was less than a page long, and composed of 15 percent weather and 85 percent farm news. What else could Kwang talk about, if not their shared past? So, Stony learned that it had been very rainy lately, and Kwang was thinking of switching seed vendors, and in the spring he was going to try an HTF ethanol hybrid—whatever that was. Stony wondered if the LD censors suspected Kwang of encoding secret messages in his agro-jargon. But alas, there were no ciphers to be found. Kwang had become an Iowa farmer, and he wrote like one. He never talked about his feelings, how difficult or rewarding it was to wring a living from land his father had never succeeded in getting to produce, or what it was like to do all the work of an able-bodied farmer while stomping around on two prosthetic legs. The letters were stunningly boring, highly repetitious, and dry as kindling. Stony loved them.

  The last line was, “Hope your doing okay. K.”

  He set the letter aside, then opened the remaining envelope. Four pages on lined paper, filled with Alice’s dense, slashing cursive, and an eight-page photocopy of an epidemiology article. More predictions of the next outbreak. He decided to read the letter first. Alice didn’t talk about her feelings, either, but she was never boring. The letter was dated three weeks ago.

  Mr. Blunt knocked on the door frame. “I’m on my way out, but I wanted to see your post human.”

  “And there he is,” Stony said. “His name is Thomas.”

  Blunt leaned over the man and shook his head. “Still in his swaddling clothes. And still in the thick of it, it seems.” He glanced at Stony. “I noticed you skipped the second act of our little performance of The Tooth of Crime.”

  “I didn’t think I needed to see any more of that.”

  “You need to see everything, Stony. You’re a scientist.”

  “I’m a dead boy in a basement with a computer.”

  “And a new patient.” If Valerie was the mom of the house, then Mr. Blunt was the bachelor uncle, always dropping by to entertain the kids. His position in the LDA was nebulous. Sometimes Stony thought he was Delia’s lieutenant, other times her superior. He was insistently vague on the nature of his responsibilities, but liked to hint darkly of his adventurous past. The joke was that Blunt had no past, at least before 1968. The fever had erased his memory, and when he dug himself from the garbage heap (if that story was true, and while Stony doubted many of Blunt’s tales, he believed that one), he remade himself into the vivid outline of a man, not so much a person as a persona. His mood was too constantly light, his voice always pitched to carry beyond the footlights, his appearance as persnickety as a period costume. There were a couple of other people in the house who also seemed too consistently themselves, and Stony wondered if this was one of the side effects of the fever’s amnesia. Forced to instantly invent a personality from scratch, they seized on an image of themselves, and became that. Or maybe that’s what everyone did. Think of his sister: What else was Crystal but Chelsea’s deliberate act of reinvention? Who did Kwang become when he joined the football team? And what the hell was Stony doing whenever he went out with Delia? In his head he was slipping on the red mask of the Unstoppable, or shrugging into that Jack Gore trench coat. So Mr. Blunt had adopted the dress and dialect of a 1960s British TV spy—at least he was fun to be around.

  Mr. Blunt stood up, brushed some nonexistent dust from his knees. “And how are your investigations proceeding?”

  “They proceed nowhere,” Stony said. “Just like every other time. Stop smiling.”

  “I like to see you throw yourself against this particular brick wall,” Mr. Blunt said. “You’re bound to knock a few chips off it eventually.”

  “It’s just that what’s happening to Thomas doesn’t make any sense. We don’t make any sense. And you’re the worst of all. You’re, what, sixty, sixty-five percent wood?”

  “I’ve never measured. Do I look like I’ve gained weight?”

  “Both hands and most of your arms are artificial. Both legs up to your hips are carved wood. Your chest—”

  “Stipulated. I am composed of a large amount of building material.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you how crazy that is? You can walk around, move your hands and your fingers—with what? When I met you I thought there were wires or electrodes or something that allowed you to move them.”

  “Ooh, that sounds complicated.”

  “Complicated does not mean unexplainable. Complicated is how the world works. It’s how nature works. But we’re—never mind.”

  “Come come, my boy! It’s okay to use the S-word.”

  “There’s no such thing as the supernatural. If we’re in the world, then we’re part of nature—super doesn’t enter into it. So there has to be an explanation for us.”

  “Nonsense,” Mr. Blunt said. “Have you learned nothing from the Lump?”

  “And if there’s an explanation—”

  “There has to be a cure. Yes, yes.” They’d had this discussion many times over the years. “I only wish that you weren’t so unhappy with yourself that you were pining for one.”

  “Don’t tell Delia,” Stony said. She was fanatical about LD Pride.

  Mr. Blunt nodded toward the envelopes on the desk. “Any word from Crystal?”

  “She’s due any day now. She may have already had the baby. Alice is going to be there for the birth.”

  “My conditional congratulations, then! And your mother?”

  “Still in ‘quarantine.’ Alice thinks she’s still in Georgia, but they might have moved her.” The Calvette Medical Prison, outside Atlanta, was her third facility since she’d been arrested two nights after the accident. She’d never been allowed to see a lawyer or been given a chance for a trial. The quarantine was a sham, of course. No disease carrier could still be alive days later, much less six years.

  “I’m sorry, my boy. We live in a police state. This is what they do—burn the dead, lock up the living. At least your sisters are free.”

  “You don’t feel very free if the government’s got a gun to your head.” Alice and Crystal hadn’t been arrested after Stony escaped, but they’d been told not to talk to the press or they’d be prosecuted for terrorism. “Alice still can’t get hired at a real research facility. Every time she applies to a lab or a university she gets turned down, no explanation. They’ve blacklisted her.”

  “Yet she is still—”

  “If you’re going to tell me that I could have destroyed their lives even more thoroughly than I have, I get it, Mr. Blunt.”

  “Ah. Well.” He clapped his hands against his thighs—clack!—and then tucked his arms behind his back. “I wanted to tell you that I’ll be taking Roger with me when I go, so you and Delia don’t have to worry about watching him. You did a fine job today, a fine job. I wish I could have seen your performance. A mime is a terrible thing to—”

  “Stop! Please don’t,” Stony said.

  “Say no more.” He started down the hallway, then stopped again. “And if I’m not here when Thomas awakes, may I be the first to say, mazel tov.”

  There was a small room at the top of Blue house, just under the eaves. It was less than ten feet long and was empty except for a few storage boxes, and a metal folding chair set up in front of the single narrow window. The window was covered by a blanket. No one from the houses went up there much because of the low roof and the lack of electrical outlets. A room without TV, after all, was no room at all.

  Stony sat down on the chair, and after a moment, pushed the edge of the blanket a few inches to the side. They lived in a neighborhood of tiny boxes built in the 1940s for returning GIs, now populated by their white widows and the mostly nonwhite people who moved in when the widows died: legal and illegal immigrants, claiming or denying citizenship from every country in the Americas and a few Asian nations as well.

  Next door, the front porch light was on, but all the windows of the house were dark, of course. It was 3:30 in the morning. In two hours S
herry would be getting up, to take the 6:40 bus to the restaurant where she worked. He didn’t know the name of the restaurant. He didn’t know anything about her, really. She’d moved in with her family almost two years ago. She was in her early twenties, and had a preschool-age son that she left with her mother while she worked. She spent too much money at convenience stores rather than going to a real grocery store, and she never seemed to have vegetables in her plastic bags. She liked orange soda. When she’d had a particularly tough week she’d go to the store and bring back expensive ice cream. Sometimes she went out with girlfriends, but as far as he could tell, she did not date. In the summers she filled up a wading pool for her son, and she’d sit in it with him. He’d never heard her voice.

  “You know that’s creepy, right?” Delia. He closed the shutters, and the room was fully dark.

  “What?”

  “Your girlfriend.” The floorboards complained as she crossed the floor to him. “It’s not healthy to lust over a breather, Stony.”

  “I’m not lusting, I’m just—”

  Delia laughed. “I’m kidding, farm boy. I’ve never known a stiff who could get a stiffy.” She paused, and he was glad he couldn’t see her face in the dark. “You don’t, do you?”

  He thought of Kwang, trying to teach him to masturbate. “You sound like my sisters,” he said. “They were always trying to figure out my sex life. They wanted to get me laid.”

  “Someone should have told them that necrophilia’s illegal.” She leaned over him and lifted the blanket up over the curtain rod. Pale light washed her face. This was her good side, almost unmarked.

  “I watch them, too,” she said. “Sometimes.” She scanned the street, alert, as always, for police and Diggers. “That black girl next door—she’s pretty.”

  “I guess.”

  She chuckled. “I guess.” She took a pack of menthol lights from her jacket pocket, offered one to Stony. He shook his head, and she said, “Come on, I know you sneak smokes up here.”

  “Do I have no secrets?”

  “I can’t figure out why you’re hiding them. We all smoke, Stony. We’re already dead, we’d be crazy not to.”

  “My mom would kill me if she found out,” he said, and took the cigarette from her. She lit it for him with her plastic lighter, then squatted with her back to the window.

  A while later she said, “You still love them, don’t you, Stony?”

  “Who?”

  “All of them. The breathers. You want to be one of them again.”

  “I was never one of them,” he said.

  “You may know that now,” she said. “But I bet it didn’t feel that way when you were growing up with them.” He didn’t say anything. She said, “We were worried about you that first year in the house. You were pretty depressed. Blunt put your odds at fifty-fifty.”

  “Fifty-fifty of what? Killing myself?”

  “You’ve been here long enough now to see it. Some people can’t take the constant hiding. They don’t see any end in sight, so pretty soon they start making one. They start checking out. Doing crazy things.”

  “Roger’s not your fault,” he said.

  “Yeah? Whose fault is it?”

  He’d known her for six years now. He’d watched her hold the house together, and knew that other houses were depending on her. But even though he talked with her almost every day, even though they’d shared thousands of hours in the same house, he still didn’t know if she considered him a friend. She held something in reserve, as if preparing to burn down the house at a moment’s notice—or burn herself to save them.

  “They’re going to hold the congress,” she said. “Sixty, seventy delegates, from all over the country.”

  “Wow.”

  “And I need you to go with me.”

  “Really?”

  “Settle down. We could all die if we don’t do this right.”

  “Right. But I thought it was just cell leaders.”

  “And delegates,” she said. “You’re now a delegate.”

  “Wait, when is this happening?”

  “You have somewhere to be?”

  “We’ve talked about this. You know Crystal is pregnant—she may have already had the baby.”

  “We can’t get you to southern Utah, Stony. It’s impossible.”

  “I need to be there. I haven’t seen any of them since I left.”

  “You want to risk one of the volunteer’s lives to drive you there?”

  “No, but—”

  “We all want to be somewhere else, Stony. But I’m sorry. The congress is risky enough. We just can’t afford casual trips for weddings and bar mitzvahs.”

  “This is not casual, this is important.”

  “Important to you, Stony. But the community’s needs come first. Plus, the Lump suggested you go.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Consider it part of your education. There are people you need to meet—people who can affect your future.”

  “You’re talking about the benefactor!”

  She took a suspiciously long drag on her cigarette before answering. “There’s no such thing,” she said, and exhaled a stream of smoke. “That’s just house gossip.”

  Gossip and cigarettes were the only currencies available in the LD world, and trading was heavy. Rumors of a millionaire backer for the underground circulated constantly. The candidates fell into three broad categories, the most popular of which was the Celebrity with a Heart of Gold, the talk show host/sitcom star/supermodel whose undead sibling cried out for justice from the Hollywood basement. Less popular, but more doctrinally pure, was the benefactor as Hometown Boy, the billionaire LD who’d died but somehow managed to hold on to his money, unliving proof that LDs didn’t need breathers to bail them out, no siree—the corpses were doing it for themselves.

  And then there were the rumors of the Evil Masterminds. No one would really help the living dead, the thinking went; the money had to be coming from some political group or foreign power or multinational corporation bent on using the dead for its own ends. It could even be the U.S. government itself, its cash flowing into the community like CIA-purchased heroin, lulling them into dependency so that they could be rounded up in one fell swoop.

  Stony thought someone had to be bankrolling them. He wasn’t seeing any of the money here in the house, but there had to be a reason the LDA had lasted twenty years in the wild.

  Delia stood up, then toed her cigarette into the floorboards. “And if there was a benefactor? He wouldn’t be there. Way too risky.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Stony led Thomas up the stairs, guiding him with an arm around his shoulders. Stony had cleaned him as best he could, replacing his sweat-drenched shirt and soiled pants with a UCSD sweatshirt and a pair of nylon track pants.

  Stony called out, “Everyone? Could you come out here?”

  Delia and Elizabeth came out of the kitchen. Valerie and the other residents drifted in from their rooms.

  Thomas stared at each of them as they appeared, his mouth open. He was shaky and weak, and had no memory of how he’d come to be here, no memory of his own name. Perhaps some of that would come back in time.

  “Everyone, I want you to welcome Thomas.”

  Teddy, an LD with a golden, hard-shell toupee that might have been stolen from a Sears mannequin, stepped forward. “Happy birthday,” he said, and hugged the man. Thomas accepted this awkwardly. The other residents embraced him in turn. Even Valerie welcomed him, though she seemed sorry to have to do so.

  Elizabeth, the only living person in the room, wiped tears from her cheeks. “I have to go,” she said. She touched Thomas on the arm, then quickly left the house. The man looked frightened.

  Delia stepped up and took his hand. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine.” She pulled him close. “Welcome to our family, Thomas.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  1988

  Los Angeles, California

  hey watched from the trees as Aaron th
e Beard walked to the back of the semitrailer, fiddled with the lock, and finally pulled open one of the doors. A cloud of cool mist puffed into the dry air and evaporated.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Stony said.

  “Is there a problem?” Delia asked.

  “Yes. It’s a freezer truck. Inside it’s going to be, what’s the word? Cold.”

  “That’s right, just a word,” she said. “A little cold won’t hurt you.”

  “Then why did we bring blankets?”

  “So we don’t stick to the floors.”

  Delia and Stony walked briskly across the parking lot, carrying their small travel bags and blanket rolls. Aaron was turned away from them, scanning the empty parking lot as they scrambled up into the back of the trailer. The interior was stacked to the ceiling with white cardboard boxes, all stamped with the familiar line drawing of Commander Calhoun’s face. Evidently they were traveling with fish sticks—strike that, fishstix. Delia edged into a narrow gap between two walls of boxes and inched sideways toward the front of the trailer.

  Aaron came up to close the door, and Stony said, “When did you learn to drive a truck?”

  “Just try to keep it down in there,” he said, and slammed the door. The compartment went dark, but not completely; after a moment he realized that a light from the other side of the boxes was playing off the aluminum ceiling. Voices he didn’t recognize greeted Delia happily. Stony squeezed into the gap Delia had taken, and soon emerged into a cleared space at the front of the trailer, just under the rumbling air conditioner. Two white men reclined on furniture made from arrangements of white boxes and luggage. A big flashlight was propped up and aimed at the ceiling.