Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  The truck accelerated, still in reverse, and bounced onto the paved drive. Aaron half fell out of the window, and the road kicked his legs out from under him. His arm was still thrust through the window, bent backward at the elbow. Aaron screamed in pain.

  Mr. Blunt was in motion, running toward the pickup. Suddenly the truck slammed on the brakes, spun. Aaron went flying, tumbling off the pavement and onto the grass. The driver twisted the truck around, aimed it away from the warehouse.

  Mr. Blunt was only thirty yards from the vehicle’s tailgate—but then the driver hit the gas and the truck peeled away from him. Blunt would never catch it.

  Stony yelled at one of the security guards. “Which way did the truck come in?”

  The guard looked at him, then started to look away, and Stony screamed, “Which way?” He pointed left, at a diagonal from the paved driveway. The entrance had to meet another road at the front gates. “East?” Then he pointed toward the right. “Or west?”

  The guard thought for a moment, then said, “East.”

  The only way to beat the truck was to cut through the square. A squared plus B squared equals the shortest distance to the road. And if there was one thing Stony knew how to do it was run.

  The ground was frozen, the knee-high grass brittle with frost. He ran. Then he ran faster. He glanced to his right, and saw the pickup disappearing up the drive. The warehouse manager was on pavement, and the truck could go sixty, seventy miles an hour, maybe faster once it swung onto the main road. The unknown variables in play were the lengths of the sides of the triangle, and Stony’s top speed—and he had no idea what that might be. This was more than just a question of endurance, like the Halloween he ran from Officer Tines, the night he realized that dead muscles didn’t require oxygen. This was an engineering problem. Muscles could tear, foot bones could break, shins could fracture—but none of those injuries had to impede him if he did not let them. The day he’d chased down Thomas he hadn’t pushed himself in the slightest.

  So: Go faster.

  A chain-link fence surrounded the compound. He’d been aiming for a corner of the fence, or rather a spot just to the right of it, and that point was coming at him at an amazing rate. He wished Kwang were here to see this. The Unstoppable, suddenly in possession of a new superpower, running like the Flash (well, Quicksilver, maybe) to stop the bad guy.

  The fence seemed to be about ten feet high, and on the other side was a two-lane highway. He looked right but didn’t see the pickup. He’d beaten the manager by a huge distance—unless the man had driven in the other direction. Who would catch him if he’d gone west?

  Suddenly Stony was only a dozen yards from the fence. How high could he jump, and how far at this speed? But no, maybe he should stop and climb—

  His pace stuttered, and then his feet tangled, and Stony pitched forward into the metal fence. The chain link collapsed as he struck it, popping free like a shower curtain yanked from the rod. He had a moment to think, Jesus, how fast was I moving? And then he was tumbling across the surface of the highway, over the gravel shoulder. He had no control of his limbs; he ragdolled to a stop in the high grass on the far side of the road.

  He lay there for a moment, stunned. Then he remembered the pickup and pushed himself up. Both legs were still working, both arms. He hadn’t broken his neck, as far as he could tell. Across the road from him, the section of fence he’d struck was empty, the chain link matting the grass. In the fields beyond, a line of LDs ran toward him across the field, following his path, though none of them seemed to have his speed.

  He stepped to the center of the road, straddling the dotted line. The pickup appeared, perhaps an eighth of a mile away, rushing toward him. Stony suddenly remembered that he didn’t have a plan. He was the dog who had caught the car. He had no gun, no rock to throw at the windshield. His only weapon, his only tool, was his body.

  Stony squared his shoulders to the road and raised one hand as if he were a traffic cop.

  A pickup weighed, what, three, maybe four tons? All of it moving at seventy-five miles per hour. That much momentum would pulverize him, or else catapult his body hundreds of feet down the road. He wasn’t sure which outcome was more likely.

  Except—except—if the driver escaped, then everyone at the congress could be destroyed, and every breather who helped them could be arrested, just like his mom. Aaron, if he was alive, would spend the rest of his life in jail.

  Stony’s arm had lowered as of its own accord. He raised it again, and now the truck was almost upon him, approximately a football field away. He knew that it was too close, moving too fast, to stop in time.

  He hoped Aaron was alive. The insult to the man’s arm, the rude throw from the car, all of it seemed, now that he thought back on it, painful but survivable. Unless Aaron had hit his head, or suffered some internal injury. The deer Stony had found Halloween night looked as if it could have hopped to its feet and run off. What had killed it—as what had kept it alive all its life until then—was invisible, as invisible as whatever animated Stony and the other LDs, the odic force or clockwork virus or space radiation that kept this dead stick moving in the wind. How much damage, he wondered, could his body take before that spark, too, was extinguished?

  The pickup screamed: a shriek of grinding brakes and squealing tires. The hood nosed down, and the truck began to slide, the bed of the truck drifting out from behind the cab. The vehicle was close now, less than a hundred feet. The driver was a round-faced, middle-aged man, perhaps sixty years old, bald on top but with a fringe of dark hair. He looked distraught, mouth open, both hands clutching the wheel.

  The bed began to slide the other way, swinging like a wide baseball bat. Even if Stony tried to move—and he wanted to, he wanted to very much—he wouldn’t know which way to jump.

  The truck was spinning now, and the mass of it was suddenly beside him, the cab less than two feet from his right arm—and then it was past him. An instant later and fifty feet farther down the road, the back wheels hit the gravel shoulder and the vehicle lurched, right rear and front tires tilting into the air, and for a terrible moment he thought it was going to flip. But the forward motion had been arrested and the wheels slammed down and the truck body bounced against its suspension.

  I’m alive, Stony thought. And the driver is alive. Even the truck—the Goddamn truck!—is undented.

  He walked quickly to the vehicle. When he was still ten feet away, the driver pushed open his door. He was a large man, with a huge gut under a crisp denim shirt. He put one leg out onto the pickup’s step, then pressed a hand to each side of the door frame, as if afraid the cab would squeeze shut on him before he could get out. He saw Stony and froze.

  “Are you—what were you—?”

  The man seemed to be in shock. Did he see what Stony was? Did he know now what he’d stumbled into?

  He realized now that his idea—if it wasn’t ludicrous to call something so impulsive an idea—had depended on the driver being too humane to run down a man in the middle of the road. Which made the breather the good guy. Stony was the supervillain playing on the hero’s weakness for innocent bystanders. He’d had it all backward from the start.

  “I’m so sorry,” Stony said. “But I couldn’t let you go.”

  But the man wasn’t looking at Stony now, but behind him. Stony turned. Four of Blunt’s security guards and three other LDs had made it to the fence. They charged through the gap and headed toward the truck.

  “It’s okay,” Stony called to them. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  The men rushed past him. The first of them reached the truck and pulled the driver from the cab. A second man circled an arm around the driver’s neck and yanked viciously down; the driver yelped and went down, hitting the pavement on his side. His other arm flailed upward and caught the second guard across the mouth. The LD laughed.

  The undead men swarmed. They covered the driver’s arms and legs, though any one of them was strong enough to hold him down. The
driver screamed.

  Stony yanked one of the LDs away. “Stop it! What are you doing?”

  The first guard, now straddling the driver’s waist, ripped open the man’s blue shirt. His belly was huge and white. The guard looked up at Stony and said, “You want to do the honors?”

  “Please, don’t—” Stony said.

  The guard shrugged. He opened his jaws and bit down. The driver screamed again. The guard rose up, his mouth awash with blood. “Your ass is ours now!”

  The driver screamed again. A second guard rose up with blood on his face. The LDs made a sound between a growl and a cheer. They began tearing at the man. Stony put an arm around an LD and pulled him backward. The man knocked Stony away and threw himself back into the pile.

  The fat man screamed, and screamed, and kept screaming, until suddenly going silent. Someone severed an artery and bright blood sprayed into the afternoon light. Then he became a fountain.

  The congress disbanded. No, that sounds too orderly. The congress exploded. News of the killing reached the warehouse, and delegates scrambled for their bags, called for their human drivers, and fled in their vehicles. They scattered. Calhoun’s bus was the first through the gate.

  Stony was aware of none of this. Delia found him next to the highway, sitting in the grass, staring at the blood-smeared patch of pavement where the driver’s body had been. Blunt’s men, when they finished their meal, had thrown the eviscerated corpse into the back of the pickup and driven it back to the warehouse. The hole in the fence, and the stain, were all that remained to mark the site of the murder. It wouldn’t even look like a crime, necessarily. Some large animal, perhaps a three-hundred-pound buck, had charged through the gap in the fence and been struck here, and the driver had carried off the roadkill for his freezer. Probably happened all the time out here.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Delia said. “They were only supposed to bite him. To turn him.”

  “Of course,” Stony said. He felt disconnected from his body, as if he were hovering perhaps four feet above his right shoulder. “It was an accident.”

  The driver was beyond revival, Delia said. He wouldn’t be joining the ranks of the undead, but on the positive side, neither would Aaron. He’d been battered, Delia said, and his arm had been broken, probably in several places, but he would live. One of his fellow breathers would be taking him to a hospital.

  After a moment he realized Delia was waiting for a response, so he said, “Good. That’s good to hear.”

  Delia looked at him worriedly. “Let’s get going, kid.” They wouldn’t be going back by freezer truck, she told him. She had a separate vehicle that would be taking them someplace else. He didn’t bother to ask where. And later, he wouldn’t remember much about the trip. The two of them were tucked into the back of a moving van. Delia spent the first hour of the journey talking into a military-quality walkie-talkie. Perhaps he heard her say “civil war.” Perhaps he only realized later what she’d been talking about. Then they were out of range of whomever she was talking to, and she put the radio back into the Commander Calhoun backpack. For the next five or eight or twelve hours neither of them said much at all that he could recall. And then the breather driver, a man Stony had never met, opened the back doors of the van. They were in a one-car garage, the cinder-block walls scuffed with red clay. A small door led to what had to be the house.

  “Where are we?” Stony asked.

  “We contacted one of our retired volunteers,” Delia said. “She offered to put you up temporarily.”

  “Just me? Aren’t you staying?”

  The door opened. A very tall woman holding a very small child stood in the doorway.

  “Crystal!” he said. He walked to her, then stopped short, afraid to hurt the baby.

  She laughed and pulled him in tight. “Brother John.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1988

  Reveille, Utah

  er name was Ruby. He could not stop holding her, and when he was not holding her, he could not stop looking at her. That shock of jet-black hair, the blue-gray eyes, the puffy, Pia Zadora lips. Last night they’d stayed up late talking, Ruby sleeping in the crook of his elbow, and he would only surrender her to Crystal when she needed to eat. Then, just after dawn, he heard her fussing and went in to get her before she could wake Crystal. As soon as Ruby saw him she stopped crying and regarded him silently.

  “I think we have a connection,” he told Crystal later that morning. “She knows me.” They sat on the couch in the converted sunroom, Crystal at one end with a mug of green tea in her hands and her legs curled beneath her, Stony at the other end with Ruby in his arms, the baby tucked into a nest of blankets to insulate her from his cold skin. They looked out through a wall of glass at a Martian December, miles of empty red rock dotted with alien trees, pink desert light shifting across the surface. Not since Iowa had he sat in front of an open window in daylight.

  He had decided not to tell Crystal about the congress, about how he’d helped kill an innocent man. He wouldn’t bring that poison into this house. He would be Crystal’s little brother, and Ruby’s big uncle.

  “It’s like I know her,” he said. “Like I knew she was coming.”

  “Hah,” Crystal said. “A tarot reader in Moab—she’d never been wrong before—told me she’d be a boy.”

  “A tarot reader? You couldn’t just get a sonogram?”

  “Would a sonogram tell me that he’d be strong-willed, impulsive, and a lover of words?”

  “Or have a vagina?”

  She laughed. Oh, he’d made her laugh. “I didn’t see any doctors, Stony. Everything happened here, at home. The only doctor I let near this child was Alice. She came in, you know, for the birth.”

  “I meant to be here,” Stony said.

  “That’s sweet. But you would have only gotten in the way. You know how weak menfolk are around birthin’ and babies.”

  “I just think it’s so … cool. I mean, I can’t get over the idea that you made her, inside you.”

  “I had help.”

  “Yeah, but still. It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?” Somehow a bundle of overeager cells had stolen a strip of chromosomes from an incoming sperm, decided to rampantly duplicate, then organized themselves into eyes and ears and fingers. Then, at some indeterminate point, the wad of tissue became conscious, a sentient being with thoughts and feelings of its own. A person. A specific, unique person.

  Ruby.

  The entire process seemed massively improbable, a joke. If it weren’t happening every second of every day, with every type of animal on the planet, nobody would believe it.

  Crystal was dozing again. She reclined against the pillows, still balancing the mug on her stomach, eyes closed. Not only had she had to wake up for the regular feedings, but she’d stayed up late last night, letting Stony ask her questions about the baby. Delia had said little, frequently vanishing into the garage for long smoke breaks. When Crystal could no longer keep her eyes open she’d set out blankets and pillows for them and told them to make themselves at home. As if they would sleep, or wanted to. As if they were run-of-the-mill visitors who’d dropped in for a visit.

  Crystal was so good at playing pretend, he could almost pretend to be normal himself. He could almost ignore the corpse of the driver that he saw whenever he closed his eyes, or the ghost of their sister that hovered at the edge of every anecdote, every family reminiscence. Because of Ruby. She was a little battery of life, jamming the death signal.

  “You’re humming,” Crystal said, her eyes still closed.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was doing that.”

  “No, it’s all right. It’s nice. Ruby likes it.” She sat up, took a sip of tea. “When I was carrying her, she’d start kicking whenever I sang. I think she’s going to be musical, like her father.”

  “He’s a musician? You never talked about him in your letters.”

  “He’s not a professional musician. He’s not a professional a
nything, really. He works as a river guide in Moab, and he likes to mountain climb.”

  “Does he know about the baby?”

  “Oh, he knows. This just isn’t the kind of adventure he’s interested in. Not the type to stick around the house and mix formula. Sometimes he stops by. And he sends me money for the electric bill when he remembers.”

  “A marauder from the land of Moab,” Stony said.

  “What?”

  “Zombie Bible story. Your guy, he sounds like an asshole.”

  “No, he’s just …” She put down her mug. “Well, he can be an asshole. I’m just not sure if he is an asshole. He’s himself. I knew what he was when I picked him up, as the Indians say. And God, he’s beautiful. He looks like Jesus with his shirt off, all skinny and beardy.”

  He heard the door to the garage open, and Delia’s familiar footsteps. For the past hour she’d been in the garage, whether smoking or doing something else was unclear. She appeared in the doorway behind him, scanning the landscape outside the window. “You shouldn’t be sitting out here,” she said. “Somebody could have binoculars.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Crystal said. “Sit down and enjoy the sunlight.”

  Stony said, “Ruby and Crystal and I are—hey, I just realized that. Ruby and Crystal.”

  “And Stony,” Delia said.

  “What?” he said. Then: “Crystal, did you—?”

  Crystal burst out laughing. “I can’t believe you just figured this out.”

  He was stunned. “I thought it was just your hippie name.”

  “Well, that, too. But I was trying to show solidarity with you. I thought about calling myself Igneous, but my boyfriend didn’t like it.”

  “I’m an idiot,” he said.

  “Noted,” Delia said. She stepped down into the sunroom and squatted on the floor against one wall, out of sight of the outdoors. “Let’s talk about plans.”

  Crystal said, “I’d forgotten what it was like to work with you, Delia. Good morning to you, too.”