“The secretary of the congress? The one-armed guy?”
“Stanley.”
“He’s in cahoots with Billy Zip.”
“Cahoots?” Mr. Blunt asked. “Cahoots. That’s a lovely word.”
“He was meeting with him. They’re going to bring up the Big Bite for a vote.”
“In cahoots,” Mr. Blunt said, and kept whittling. “Not on cahoots. Not cahoot-ing …”
“This doesn’t bother you?” Stony asked.
“Don’t worry about Zip,” Delia said. She’d come up behind him, and she was carrying a red backpack with the Commander’s face on it. “Once the Commander gets done here, nobody’s going to listen to him.”
Mr. Blunt said, “I was hoping you’d be able to talk him out of it.”
“I talked him out of some of it,” she said. “He agreed to stop before Phase Three.”
“Well, that’s something,” Blunt said. He held up the white length of wood. “Look, it’s the Lump.” Sure enough, it was a little half man, with one arm waving.
“What the hell is Phase Three?” Stony asked.
“Look at the farm boy, swearing,” Delia said. “By the way, don’t run off afterward. He wants to meet you.”
“Who, Calhoun?”
“Trust me, not my idea.”
The audience began to applaud, and Stony turned. Stanley, the secretary of the congress, climbed onstage. The podium had been moved off to one side, and the center area was taken up by a wide projector screen.
“At this time,” the secretary said, seeming a little put out, “the congress recognizes special delegate Commander Gavin Calhoun.”
The Commander strode onstage, waving like a politician. The crowd immediately broke into loud applause. Delia said, “He thinks he’s a Goddamned John F. Kennedy.”
“He looks more alive than Kennedy,” Stony said.
Mr. Blunt said, “I think he’s had work done.”
The Commander had brought his own microphone. He walked to the edge of the stage and said, “My friends, my fellow …” He pretended to read something on his palm. “Differently Living Individuals.” That got a big laugh.
“I don’t know about you, friends, but I’m mighty tired of hiding,” the Commander said. “Mighty tired. Some of you have been on the run since day one of the outbreak—twenty years! Some of you have had to live like animals to get by. Most of us have survived only because of the generosity of a few living souls. But how long can that generosity last? How long can we expect breathers to protect us?
“We need a place of our own, my friends. A place free from the government, free from the mad dogs of Dr. Weiss and the Diggers. A place in the sun. Anita?” A projector set up on a table in the middle of the tent clicked on, and a patch of green filled the screen. “I give you Phase One of Project Homeland … Calhoun Island!”
He sounded exactly like the announcer on The Price Is Right, telling the lucky contestant they’d won a Brand! New! Car! The audience cheered. Onscreen, a camera flew over the island, and the Commander began narrating in the same jocular tone he used in his commercials. “Located in international waters just forty-five miles from St. Thomas, my friends. This former naval testing site has been forgotten by the breather world, but for us, it’s paradise. There’s everything we could desire—beaches, mountains, hardened bunkers … plus a level of residual radioactivity that will keep the living off our shores and out of our hair!”
The rounds of applause were lessening in volume somewhat. Even the dead could be leery of radiation. The Commander, perhaps sensing he was losing them, forged ahead. “I’ve already begun construction of housing,” he said. “And the airstrip is being repaved as we speak.” The movie was replaced by architectural drawings of condominiums, activity centers, bowling alleys. “As soon as the living crews finish their work, the emigration can begin.”
“When?” someone shouted.
“Now that’s a damn good question. There’s an awful lot of work to do, and as a cautious man, I shouldn’t say anything that I can’t back up.” He looked out over the audience. “My friends, you’ll be swimming in the coves of Calhoun Island by this summer, or my name’s not Commander Calhoun!”
The crowd stood up, and the shouts made the steel walls of the warehouse reverberate. Stony hoped they really were in the middle of nowhere.
When the noise had calmed down and the audience had returned to their seats, the Commander said, “This is only Phase One, my friends. Phase Two will include a clinic, where we can offer our services. The rich—and I have to tell you, I know plenty of ’em—have one thing they’ve never been able to buy, and that’s immortality. We can sell it to ’em, people! It’s our monopoly. Our little island will be the destination for the world’s rich and famous. We’ll take a bite out of their Goddamn wallets!”
“And that’s the pitch,” Delia said.
“Security and prosperity,” Mr. Blunt said. His eyes were on the crowd, scanning like every Secret Service agent in every movie with a president.
“Is he crazy?” Stony said.
“He’s not crazy,” Delia said. “He’s just …”
“How in the world are we supposed to keep all this secret?”
“That is definitely an issue,” Blunt said. “But if we can hold off—what’s he doing?”
The Commander was pointing at the screen, where it said in big blue letters: PHASE 3.
Delia said, “Oh, shit.”
Now the screen showed a painting of a tall, silver rocket. It had immense fins, like a 1950s sci-fi spaceship. “The island is only the first stepping-stone, my friends. We are capable of so much more. Our destiny is so much more. We can withstand intense g-forces. Radiation cannot kill us. We can survive indefinitely without food or water. In short, in short—”
He surveyed the crowd, his eyes glittering.
“—we can colonize alien worlds!”
No one spoke. No one moved. The crowd stared at him.
The Commander seemed confused. “Space, people! We can go to space!”
Stony looked at Delia. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe he’s a little crazy.”
Everyone in the tent began to talk at once. Mr. Blunt pointed at a figure in the crowd near the front of the stage, and Delia swore. “Stony, go turn off the damn projector.” Mr. Blunt was already gone—vanished through a new slit in the wall of the tent. Delia ran for the stage, pushing through the crowd.
By the time Stony reached the project table, Calhoun’s assistant, a marble-white girl named Anita, had already turned off the lamp and was shutting down a laptop. Stony had never seen a computer connected to a projector before. He yanked out the connecting cables anyway. “Sorry,” he told her.
A new voice boomed over the PA. “I have an alternate proposal!” Billy Zip had climbed onstage and seized the microphone. Delia was shoving her way to the front of the tent, still twenty feet from the stage and blocked by scores of people.
“We can’t live on fantasy island!” Zip shouted. “The government will never allow this thing to be built. The world will never allow it. We’re running out of time, people, and we’ve got to get—”
The sound cut off. Zip looked at the microphone, tapped it with his hand, then looked back to where the cord ran toward the stacks of equipment. Mr. Blunt stood there, holding the loose end of the cord. A long, thin blade had appeared in his other hand. Where had that come from?
Zip shouted something, and Blunt slowly shook his head. Zip hesitated, then threw down the microphone and stalked from the stage. Stony was surprised; Zip didn’t strike him as someone who’d give up so easily.
Stanley the secretary went to the podium and tapped the mike. This one was still working. “Two-hour recess,” he said.
The Commander was not happy. “Goddamn sheep!” He picked up a blueprint from the desk, started to rip it, but it was too long and he got only halfway down its length. “Goddamn—” He crumpled the paper and tossed it down the narrow corridor toward the back of
the bus. “Complete lack of vision!”
Stony stood behind Delia, wishing he were outside. The Commander had been ranting for almost fifteen minutes, and Delia had given up on stopping him.
The interior of the coach was finished like a yacht, or perhaps the theme park version of one. The outward curving walls were gleaming dark wood, inset with porthole windows. The wall decorations followed the nautical theme: fishing nets, crossed oars, stuffed swordfish and squid, a gaping shark jaw like a bear trap, a dozen old-fashioned maps in dark frames, and harpoons—lots of harpoons. Attached to the ceiling was what looked like a narwhal tusk. He reached up and touched it. It felt real, but then again, what did real tusk feel like?
The Commander was living in his own fantasy land, and Calhoun Island was more of the same. Zip was right. It was a colossally bad idea. Say that all the LDs moved there. Then what? The government could simply nuke them. One-stop shopping.
“Don’t touch that!” the Commander shouted. “Who are you? Delia, who the hell is this?”
“The young man I was telling you about,” Delia said.
The Commander’s expression changed immediately. “This is him? Goddamn!” He lunged forward and grabbed Stony’s hand. “Commander Calhoun,” he said. In extreme close-up, the Commander looked even more artificial. The skin of his face looked like molded plastic. His white hair, visible now that the skipper cap had been removed, was waxy as nylon.
Stony said, “I’m—”
“Johnny Mayhall,” the Commander said. “No need for introductions.” Stony started to tell him that his name was John, just John, but the man was going full speed now. “Goddamn, you’re handsome. If we ever do a marketing campaign, your face is going right up front. I’ve been wanting to meet you since I heard your incredible story.” He leaned close, still gripping his hand, and stared into Stony’s eyes. “A living dead baby. A Goddamn growing baby!”
“Yes sir,” Stony said. He looked at Delia. How much did the Commander know? Was there anything Stony was supposed to hide?
The man wouldn’t let go of Stony’s hand. He leaned forward until their foreheads touched, then threw his other arm around Stony’s neck. “My boy,” he said, his voice dropping, “you are the game changer. Forget what all those corpses out there think. You are the hanging curveball. You are, what’s the word …” His head turned with a squeak. “You’re …”
Don’t say it, Stony thought.
“A Goddamn miracle!”
Miracle was okay. It was the other M-word he’d been dreading.
“I want you to see something,” the Commander said, and abruptly released Stony. He began to unbutton his jacket.
“That’s okay …,” Stony said.
“Just a second.” The Commander pulled open his jacket, then began to unbutton his white shirt. “See this?” Under the shirt was a silvery material. “Touch it. Touch it!”
Stony touched it. It felt metallic, scaly.
“I call it the Integrity Suit. The I-Suit for short. Do you know why I wear it? Because of wear and tear! Every day, our dead bodies disintegrate just a bit more. Things fall apart. Now, cosmetic surgery can shore up the banks, so to speak, buttress the framework. You wouldn’t believe what the boys in the burn units can do. But our new bodies need something to hold us together—a bodysuit. I’m going to make sure that every LD in America will be wearing one of these, as soon as I can get the costs down. Maybe we go for something that’s not Kevlar. Doesn’t matter. We’re designing gloves and footies, and even a ski-mask thingy for those extreme cases.”
“That’s a great idea, sir,” Stony said. Compared to Calhoun Island and the Spaceship of the Living Dead, it was completely practical. Stony didn’t know if any LD besides the Commander would wear a full-metal bodysuit all day, every day, but he knew plenty who could use it. Some LDs, like Roger, fell apart faster than others. They lost teeth, hair, toes. An Integrity Suit could add decades to their existence.
“We’re planning a variety of colors and styles,” the Commander said. “Something for everyone. Except you, of course.”
“Pardon?”
“You don’t need a suit, Johnny, because you can grow. You can heal.”
“Actually, sir, whenever I got hurt my mom and my sisters would—”
“Nonsense! If you can grow, you’re adding mass. That’s healing, son. That’s a whole other world of LD existence. And we need to know how the hell you do it. We need to bottle what it is that God gave you.”
Stony didn’t know what to say. Bottle it? He looked at Delia, but her face—her half-fleshed face—was unreadable.
“Stony, I want you to come with me back to Florida. We’ve got a state-of-the-art lab there and the best people money can buy. Wait here! I’ll show you the brochure.” The Commander whipped around and headed for the back bedroom.
Stony turned to Delia and dropped his voice. “What have you done?”
Behind them, someone knocked at the front door of the bus.
“I’m sorry,” Delia said. She walked toward the door and he followed her. “I didn’t know about the lab.”
“If he thinks I’m going down to his homemade Cape Canaveral to play Ham the Astrochimp, he’s insane. Goddamn insane.”
Delia stepped down and opened the door. One of Mr. Blunt’s guards looked up at them. “We’ve got a problem outside,” the man said.
“Outside outside?” Delia asked.
“Mr. Blunt would like you to hurry.”
* * *
Stony insisted on going with her. No way was he going to stay on the bus with Commander Crazy. He followed Delia across the warehouse floor, aiming for the loading docks where they’d all entered. Delia cautioned him to not look panicked in front of the delegates. Everyone was still on edge because of Calhoun’s swerve into sci-fi and Billy Zip’s removal from the stage.
The security guard told them that a breather had somehow gotten through the front gates and driven up to the docks. “One of Blunt’s breathers, the black guy with the beard—”
“His name’s Aaron,” Delia said.
“Well, Blunt sent him out to talk to the other breather, and told me to get you.”
“How the hell did he get through the gates? Calhoun’s company was supposed to lock down the whole compound.”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Of course you don’t.” At the end of the warehouse, they went up a short flight of stairs, then outside. The sunlight came as a shock. It was afternoon, the oblique autumn light throwing long shadows before the fleet of vehicles parked out front on a gravel lot. There were nine or ten semis, including the freezer truck that Stony had traveled in, a multitude of vans and moving trucks, and several cars. The warehouse squatted on a vast, grassy plain, featureless in every direction he could see except for a long paved road that led away from the parking lot. The land was flat as Iowa, the sky a pearly gray he knew from midwestern winters. Stony experienced the kind of scale shift he hadn’t felt since playing the Little Big game when he was a kid. The warehouse, so huge when he was inside it, suddenly seemed as small as a toy box, and he was a plastic soldier surrounded by Matchbox trucks and Hot Wheels cars.
Perhaps a hundred yards away, a pickup truck was parked on the paved road, engine running, driver still behind the wheel. Aaron stood beside the truck, his hands on the driver’s-side door. The driver was obscured by the glare of the windshield—Stony caught an impression of a fat man with a high forehead—and even though Stony couldn’t hear the words of the men, he could tell they were arguing. A few of the other breather drivers were huddling around the truck, blocking the driver from going forward, and more important, obscuring his view of Mr. Blunt and the other LDs, who were standing well back.
Mr. Blunt saw Delia and Stony emerge and walked over to them holding the brim of his hat, which served both to keep it from blowing off in the cold wind (cold for breathers, that is, twenty-four hours in the freezer having obliterated Stony’s thermostat) and to shield his face f
rom the breather in the pickup.
“He’s the warehouse manager,” Blunt said. “And he very much wants to know what we’re doing with his building.”
“It’s none of his fucking business,” Delia said. “All the employees were told to take the week off.”
“Nevertheless, he says that he’s going to call the police if we don’t let him inside.”
“But he hasn’t called them yet. Is he armed?”
“This is North Dakota. He has a gun rack in the truck.”
Delia and Mr. Blunt looked at each other. Stony had seen them do this before, silently exchanging information at a baud rate he could only imagine. If the driver called the police, the congress was too large for everyone to escape undetected. There would be roadblocks. Highway chases.
After perhaps ten seconds of silence, Delia said, “Fuck. Grab him. Let him see breathers only. But if he goes for the rifle—”
“Understood,” Mr. Blunt said. He gestured to one of the security guards and said, “Get the word to Aaron.”
The LD security guard spoke to one of the breather drivers, and that driver walked up to Aaron. Aaron stepped away from the car, listening to the man, then stared at him for a long moment.
Stony wondered what he was thinking. Aaron risked his freedom for LDs every day—all these drivers did. They were the most hard-core of volunteers, the breathers who drove the vehicles, hosted the safe houses, kept the secrets of the undead. Without them, the LDs could not survive. And yet they were always being asked to do more, even betray their fellow humans. And for what? The LDA didn’t even allow them inside the congress.
Aaron nodded, then turned again toward the pickup. Stony thought, If I was Aaron, I would tell the man to run. The place is full of monsters.
Aaron said something to the pickup driver, then suddenly lunged through the driver’s-side window—reaching for the truck keys, Stony realized. The driver shouted something, and the truck lurched backward. Aaron was still halfway through the window, his toes kicking up gravel.
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