“Not the way I wanted to,” Zip said. “Your friends made sure of that when they betrayed us. I’ll tell you this, though—we’re sure as hell starting something. Right, boys?”
“You turned her in,” Stony said. “You told the Diggers about her houses. You told them about the answering system.”
He was guessing, but Zip nodded. “Stony, I reported every house I knew about. The Diggers will be so busy today they’ll never notice what’s happening here.”
“You betrayed everyone,” Stony said.
“I’m saving us, kid. Our people will realize that soon enough.” Zip looked up. “How are our two converts?”
The men moved aside, and Stony twisted his head to see. At the back of the truck, two dead women lay on their sides. The oldest had short gray hair, the other, young enough to be a granddaughter, was a curly blonde. Stony could not tell where they’d been bitten, but their clothes were drenched in blood. They’d been dead only an hour, maybe two.
Each bite had an incubation period. Stony had been collecting data on the process from everyone he’d met at the house, and he’d watched Thomas’s conversion in person. The longest part of the process was waiting to die. After death, there was a short period of disorientation during which the patient could barely function, and then the fever would set in. These women were already dead. They could be up and feeding within the hour.
“This will never work,” Stony said, trying to sound firm. “Once you start biting, the police will see what you’re doing on the security cameras. They’ll swarm you before the epidemic gets rolling. You may infect some people, but for what? Once the news gets out, they’ll just quarantine every victim before they bite anyone else.”
Zip squatted down and shook his head. “You’re missing the point, kid. We want the cameras to see us. Hell, once we get started, we’ll call the television stations ourselves if we have to.”
One of the men said, “We’ll inspire people.”
“Inspire them to do what?” Stony said. “Kill you?”
“No, our people,” Zip said. He looked at his watch again. “Once they see us on the news, biting like the old days, they’ll start biting, too. The Diggers are cracking down everywhere today. Every LD in the country will realize that now’s the time. We’ve been fighting a war of attrition, getting picked off one by one. That ends today. Besides, those people out there?” He looked up to address his men and pointed toward the front of the store. “Those breathers want it as bad as us. They’re yearning for the end of the world. Why do you think they make so many movies about us? It’s their fucking fantasy. Every one of them wants civilization to burn, for all the rules to go up in smoke. They want the monsters to attack. You know why? Because then they’ll have the excuse to do what they’ve always wanted to do—shoot people in the head. No laws, no morality. They’ll have to do it. It’ll be fucking noble. Every one of them is picturing themselves as the last man standing, a bloodstained samurai with an AK-47.”
“You’ll get them all killed,” Stony said. “You won’t even be able to get out of here alive. There are what, twelve of you to pull this off?”
“Sixteen,” the leering man said. It sounded like sihhhsteen. “That’s enough.”
Zip looked at Stony curiously. “Are you pumping us for information?” He nodded toward Stony’s chest. “Lift your shirt.”
“What?”
“Lift your fucking shirt.”
Stony opened the denim jacket, then pulled up the blue Cubs T-shirt—another item borrowed from Crystal.
Zip frowned. “Drop your pants.”
“Now come on, you think I’m wearing a wire?”
“Drop ’em.”
Stony unsnapped his jeans, the same pants he’d been wearing since the congress, and pushed them down to his thighs. At Zip’s look, he dropped his underwear, too. “See?”
“All right, fine,” Zip said. “It’d be just like Blunt to send you in here with a mike.”
“But you killed Mr. Blunt, didn’t you?”
“Shut the fuck up. Our people are hard to kill, but Blunt is something else entirely. Now, before I shoot you, I gotta ask: What the fuck were you thinking? You walk in here, you don’t have a wire on you, or even a gun—”
“I don’t believe in shooting people.”
“So what the fuck was your plan, genius?”
“I was going to try to talk you out of it,” Stony lied. “Using the force of reason.”
Zip laughed. “The force of what?”
“I’m an idealist,” Stony said.
“Well, we have something in common.” He looked at his watch and stood up. “Time to go shopping, boys.”
“Shoot him?” one of them asked.
Zip tilted his head. “Have you ever bitten anyone, Stony?”
“No.”
“But you’ve wanted to, haven’t you? That guy you ran down at the congress—I bet you wanted to bite the hell out of him.”
“No.”
Zip grinned. “Liar. I gotta tell you, it’s pretty damn amazing. It’s what we’re built for.” He nodded to Mel, the leering man. “Bring him along. He can die with us.” Mel slung his rifle and yanked Stony to his feet. Tevvy lifted the sliding door.
There was a loud crack from the parking lot. Tevvy fell backward into the truck. Another crack, and a second man fell. Stony saw gray meat splatter Mel’s face.
Zip looked at Stony. “What did you do? What did you do?”
“I made a call,” Stony said.
He’d told Crystal to call in a zombie sighting. He didn’t know if the Diggers would get here in time, or if only the local police would be close enough. He’d only gone back into the garage to make sure Zip didn’t launch the attack before someone arrived.
Mel smiled his lopsided smile and lifted his weapon to point at Stony’s chest. “Muh-her fuh-her,” he said.
Stony lifted a hand. The blast knocked him backward, into one of the dead women behind him. Pain flared through his arm and chest. He could not ignore it. He could not master it. And before he could marshal his concentration, things got much worse.
The official story, as announced by government agents later that day, was that a small group of anti-Mormon extremists had captured a single zombie, which they planned to set loose on the people in the ZCMI Store. The ten (living) men in the parking garage were all killed, and another seven, parked across the street from the loading dock, were shot before they could leave their vehicle. The identities of the extremists were kept from the public under the Emergency Powers Act of 1968, which had never lapsed since the first outbreak.
As you might imagine, conspiracy theorists had a field day with this. And as usual, what began as a terrifying secret on the fringes of culture eventually found its way into the plot of a TV movie. In 1992, ABC broadcast Deliver Them from Evil, starring Harry Hamlin as an ex-army colonel and Teri Garr as his wife, which proposed that experimentation on soldiers, using a variant of the walking dead disease, had driven the men mad.
In 2011, a “final” unpublished Jack Gore novel was found. Christmas for the Dead is a thinly disguised version of the ZCMI attack. In it, escapees from Deadtown hole up in a Walmart in Nevada. In desperation they begin killing and infecting customers in an attempt to start a new outbreak. This is the first use in fiction of the term Big Bite. In the novel, Jack Gore sneaks into the store and tries to talk the “DLs” (as they started to call themselves in this book) out of attacking the “breathers” outside. Uncharacteristically, Gore fails, and he is killed along with the others when government troops storm the building. It’s a bit of a downer, and perhaps proof that the book was not written by C. V. Ferris. One serious reader argued that it was also better written than the usual Ferris novel. On this point reasonable people may disagree.
But where were we? Oh, yes: Stony dying.
Mel’s shot seemed to uncork the guns of the Diggers. A barrage of gunfire turned the interior of the truck into a hammer of sound. Stony could only st
are up at the patch of air in front of his eyes, a dust storm of flesh and hair and clothing shot through with the lightning of sparking bullets. A body, or perhaps two bodies, fell over him. Stony was struck a dozen times, his body jerking with each impact—but perhaps because he was already prone, his feet pointing toward the open door, none of the shots entered his brain and ended his existence.
Because he’d gone deaf he was unsure of the exact moment the firing ended. He only knew the attack was over when armored men leaned into the dome of his vision, men in bulky vests and gleaming helmets like beetles. Still, over so quickly? It lacked the drama he’d been expecting, the slow-motion, Bonnie-and-Clyde deaths of Billy Zip and his terrorists. Where was the music?
The Diggers quickly determined that Stony was still functioning, and stepped over him to look at the two women.
“Fresh ones,” one of the soldiers said. The women twisted and lurched. One of them, the young blonde, clawed feebly at the air. The soldier turned to another helmeted man and said, “What would you like to do?”
The second man took off his helmet and said, “What a mess.” He was perhaps fifty years old, with a round, kindly face, and dark hair flecked with gray. He wore rimless glasses with silver stems.
The first soldier said, “Doctor, you shouldn’t—”
“It’s fine, Sergeant,” the doctor said. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The newspeople will be here soon,” he said, almost to himself.
“Put them down, then?” the soldier asked.
“No!” Stony shouted. The doctor seemed to look at him for the first time. “Don’t shoot them,” Stony said. “Please.”
“You’re Stony Mayhall, aren’t you?”
Stony tried to sit up, but his body failed to obey him. “There’s another team. By the loading dock.”
“What? How many? Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
There was much shouting into radios. A few of the soldiers scrambled out of the truck, but the man with the glasses stayed.
“Don’t kill the women,” Stony said. “In a few hours they’ll be fine. The fever passes. You don’t have to kill them—”
“They’ll hardly be fine,” the doctor said. He squatted to study Stony’s face. “You are him. Your mother’s told me so much about you.”
“You know my mother?”
“You’ve been hurt,” the man said. “Don’t worry, we’ll clean that up. You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you.”
I think I do, Stony thought.
The doctor said, “Sergeant, this one’s coming with us.”
“Yes, Dr. Weiss. And the other gunmen?”
The doctor regarded the bodies piled up around him. “Looks like you’ve already taken care of them. Just make sure of it.”
“And the women?”
He took off his glasses and stared at the lenses as if deciding whether to clean them. “No room,” he said finally. “Put them down, and may God have mercy on their souls.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1998
Deadtown
ell, perhaps not 1998. It could be a year earlier, or later. In Stony’s memory, the chronology of events during this period is a little shifty. In prison, at least the type of maximum security prison he found himself in, there was very little to anchor him to the living calendar. The seasons passed unseen beyond the windowless cement walls. His body, in refusing to age or decompose, was no use as a clock. One thing happened, and another thing happened. Sometimes these events were years apart.
Some moments, however, remained vivid in his memory, even if he could not place them on a calendar. Shame could paint an entire day. For example, the day he woke his first sleeper. The day he stopped his best friend from escaping.
He’d been in Deadtown for ten years, more or less. Sometime after the last chimp had died, after he’d been fitted for his first prosthetic hand, but before he’d gotten his second. A guard unlocked the steel door of his cell and said, “We’ve got another sleeper.”
Stony looked up from the book he was holding. For a moment, he wondered if they were talking about him, because although he looked as if he were reading, in truth he’d been staring at the same page for a long time. Possibly hours. He could say that he’d been lost in thought, if he could recall any thoughts. In his recent memory, there was nothing but a brilliant white void, a hole in a strip of film where the lamp had blasted through. This had been happening more and more often to him, but for how long he couldn’t say.
Two guards stood in the doorway. The speaker’s name was Harry Vincent, a handsome young man with watery blue eyes, a strong Roman nose, and full lips that reminded him of Ruby. There were guards who were decent men, who treated the LDs, if not kindly, then at least as if they might still be part of the human family. Harry was not one of those guards.
Stony put down the book. “Who is it?”
“One of the old-timers. The doc’s away, but he said you should examine her.” Because of Stony’s relationship with Dr. Weiss, and his standing with the other prisoners, he had become over the years an unofficial trustee. He helped the newly captured adjust to life in Deadtown. He talked down the most violent prisoners, before the guards felt forced to kill them. He helped the prison run smoothly. He would have done these things, he told himself, even if the doctor did not reward him with certain privileges, such as access to the doctor’s library.
Harry tossed him a mask. It was metal mesh and leather, a cross between a fencer’s mask and a catcher’s. Stony fit it over his face, then turned his back. Harry stepped forward to buckle it tight. Then they handcuffed his arms behind his back and led him out to the elevated walkway, Harry in front, the other guard trailing. As they passed the cells, prisoners stepped to the rectangular slots to whisper hellos to Stony, or to simply catch his eye. Stony nodded, saying nothing.
The cells were set on columns inside a larger cement box, surrounded by air on all sides. No one would be tunneling out of this Deadtown. There’d been four facilities that inherited the name. The first had been in Indianapolis, an army barracks that had been quickly converted to an emergency holding area during the 1968 outbreak. The next Dead town was a prison farm in upstate New York, then an asylum in Florida, and finally this place, a hundred acres in the Nevada desert that had once been, and was still publicly known as, a federal toxic waste disposal facility. Wherever the dead were held, there was Deadtown.
The guards took Stony down the central stairs to the main floor, where two other guards worked the gate that allowed access to the next cell block. There were acres of cement buildings that stored several thousand tons of toxins and biological agents awaiting disposal, and among them were three oblong buildings that held the prisoners. There was no exercise yard, no cafeteria, no weight room. Most of the prisoners never left their block for the entirety of their stay. The length of their sentence largely depended on how long they could remain sane. Prisoners who acted out were destroyed. Those who tried to escape were destroyed. But those who tried to destroy themselves, or tried to escape by more subtle means, were prevented at all costs from doing so.
Stony’s entourage entered the B block. As in the other building, the prisoners here were quiet, because the guards liked them quiet. But as Stony was led past the cells, LDs again came to the doors and tried to get his attention. These prisoners saw Stony less often, and they were more insistent.
“Stony, hey. Ask them about our radios. They took away the radios—” And “You have any books with you, Stony?” And “Hi, Stony. It’s me, Thomas.”
This last voice caused Stony to slow. If he stopped completely, the guards would become angry, so as he passed he made a minimalist wave with one bound hand, and Thomas nodded in return. The postman had almost no memories of his life before being bitten, and he’d had little time to make new ones. He’d been captured by the Diggers only a few weeks after his conversion—the day before Zip had tried to launch his Big Bite. Delia had
never made it to the safe house, and she’d evidently eluded the authorities. At least Dr. Weiss had never caught her. But every LD at her safe house had been shot or captured. They’d also arrested Elizabeth, the living owner of the house.
The farther the guards took Stony down the walkway, the more his dread grew. Soon they reached the next-to-last cell, and the guards stopped to open the door. It was Valerie’s cell.
The interior was identical to his own: an iron frame cot, a toilet with a waterless bowl, and a small desk and chair. On the desk was a paper tablet and a pencil. Months ago Stony had suggested to the doctor that the prisoners keep journals, and these documents could be analyzed for psychological insights peculiar to the undead. The doctor had ignored the suggestion until enough time had passed that he could think it was his own idea. Now the tablets were collected every Sunday like homework and replaced with fresh blank paper. No one knew what they were supposed to write about, only that they had to write something. Express yourself, the doctor told them.
The prisoner lay on the bunk, eyes closed, arms at her sides.
“Valerie?” Stony said.
The figure inside the blue prison jumpsuit was almost a skeleton: completely bald, with parched white skin stretched over her bones. A thin blanket covered her legs and feet.
He asked the guards, “How long has she been like this?”
“Two days. About.”
“You should have moved her to the infirmary,” he said, trying to hide his anger. “That’s where the doctor wants them.”
“The doctor wasn’t here.”
“All right. Could you at least take off the handcuffs, then? I need to examine her.”
“Work around it,” Harry said.
Stony said, “I thought the doctor didn’t want to lose another one.”
Harry swore, then grabbed Stony by the back of the neck and pressed his masked face to the wall. The other guard worked the key of the handcuffs.
“Thank you,” Stony said when they released him.
“Leave the mask on,” Harry said. Then the two guards stepped out of the cell and pulled the bars closed.
Raising Stony Mayhall Page 20