Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  Stony went to the bunk and squatted down beside her. He took her hand in his. Of course it was cold, but the fingers were lifeless. She had not started to decompose—at least, no further than she’d been the day she climbed from the grave. She did not smell like a corpse.

  “Hey, sweetheart.” He touched her face. “Time to wake up.”

  The first sleeper had been discovered about a year ago. He was an LD from Maryland named Lawrence who’d been in Deadtown for over twenty-five years. One night he lay down on his bunk—and never got up. The guards eventually realized he’d stopped moving. They pulled him from the bed, yelled at him, beat him. They tried sharp tools and electricity. He never made a sound, and his eyes never flickered.

  The doctor examined Lawrence’s body, and allowed Stony to see him as well. It was a riddle. The working definition for “walking dead” was a dead person that walked. If the corpse stopped moving, was it only a corpse? Or an LD playing possum? They watched Lawrence for weeks. He never moved. Eventually the doctor ordered Lawrence to be destroyed. Stony argued furiously with the doctor. How could he kill a man, because we don’t know he’s gone yet! But the doctor was fed up. The destruction was carried out in the usual way: one .38 round through his forehead, then off to the prison incinerator. But Lawrence had started some kind of trend. Over the next year, seven more prisoners entered the sleep.

  “I know you don’t want to be here,” Stony said to Valerie. Here being not just this cell, or Deadtown, but the world. “You’ve served your time. You’ve earned the right to leave, if that’s what you want to do. But you know I can’t let you go without a fight.” This last he said lightly. It was a joke between them that he could argue for days about the smallest thing.

  She didn’t respond. Outside the bars, Harry and the other guard were already bored. Stony tried to think of what he could say to her that hadn’t been said in all the hours they’d spent together. The doctor allowed him to visit the prisoners, and he’d used that privilege sometimes selfishly. He went to Valerie’s cell at least once a month, where they continued their conversation (argument, debate, competing monologues) wherever they’d left off. Sometimes they talked about trivial things. When the guards weren’t watching, he would sit beside her, their hands and arms entwined. Of course they didn’t have sex—that was impossible for them—but these moments seemed to be the kind of intimacy that (he imagined, after reading countless novels and watching so many films) breathers drifted into after sex, the languorous morning in bed between lovers, or settled into long after the last act of intercourse: the deep comfort taken by couples in their eighties. Sometime since arriving in Deadtown, Valerie had stopped being his substitute mother, his older sister, and had become something else that he’d never heard an LD describe. And now she was trying to leave him.

  She’d never lost her belief that the LDs were in limbo, cut off from God. He couldn’t blame her for finally wanting to cross over. If he were a good person, an unselfish person, he’d kiss her good night and wish her a safe voyage. But he wanted her to stay.

  “You’re setting a bad example here, Valerie. If you decide this second life isn’t worth living, how many others are going to take your exit as an example?” He thought, How long until I decide to follow her?

  He glanced behind him, and saw that the guards had disappeared. The cell block had gone silent. LD ears would be straining. Whatever he said now that wasn’t whispered would be heard and passed along the block. If Valerie died tonight, this would be the only eulogy his people would hear.

  Well, he had no interest in delivering a eulogy. But he did want them to hear one thing. He removed his mask, and in a normal voice, said, “Some people say we’re cursed, Valerie. That we’re the work of Satan. But I don’t believe that. I know that we’re special because of people like you. You’re kind. You cared for me when I first came to the house; you took care of every new arrival. Why would the devil create someone like you?

  “There’s a purpose for us, Valerie. And I don’t think it’s done with you yet. There’s work to do here. You may not know it, but people here depend on you. I depend on you. There’s a revolution coming, Valerie, and when these walls tumble down, we’re going to need the most humane of us to guide us.”

  There. He felt ridiculous, but he’d said what he needed to for the peanut gallery. And Valerie hadn’t moved.

  He lifted her slightly, and lay down beside her, his arm around her so that she rested her head on his chest. He stroked her arm with his prosthetic hand. After a long while he turned his head and whispered into her ear, “I know you’re awake in there.”

  She didn’t answer. He said in a low voice, “There’s something I never told you. I don’t know why—maybe because I thought you’d be grossed out, or think I was becoming a mad doctor or something. It’s about my pinky.” He laughed at his nervousness. “You know when I was captured, my hand was pretty much destroyed when one of Zip’s men shot it. I dragged that hunk of flesh around with me for six months before I asked the doctor to amputate it completely. But I’d already done my own experiment. I cut off—well, I guess twisted off is more accurate—my pinky toe on my right foot. I hid it in a hole in my mattress. I know, that’s a little weird, even for us.

  “Anyway, the toe didn’t rot. I checked it every day, and it was the same as always, a little gray nubbin with a black nail, just like the ones that were still attached. This is one of those impossible things that drive the doctor crazy—why don’t LDs rot? Why is the state of our decomposition frozen at the moment we die? Yes, we wear down, some of us lose our hair and our teeth, we get injured. But why don’t our cells break down and slough away? Why don’t microbes eat our flesh? Not even bacteria like our taste.”

  He stared at the ceiling for a minute. And then he whispered, “The point is, here was a body part that also refused to rot. I kept checking on it every day for months. Eventually I looked at it once a week, and then I forgot to check on it at all. Now the interesting part. One day I was hiding something else—I’ll tell you about that later, after you wake up—and I found the toe. It had fallen into the corner behind the leg of the bunk, and it was shriveled and black and it smelled awful. It had started decomposing. Why, though? What had changed?”

  He looked down at her. “Give up? It was me. I’d forgotten about it. I’d stopped thinking of the toe as part of me. And without me to believe in it, it started to rot.”

  He tapped her arm with his plastic hand. “And that’s how I know you’re still in there, Valerie. That’s how I knew Lawrence, our first sleeper, wasn’t really dead. You haven’t given up on your body yet.”

  He lay beside her for several hours, talking to her. Harry and the other guard didn’t return for him. It wasn’t until he heard the next shift enter the cell block that Stony moved to get up.

  Valerie’s hand tightened on his own. “I was almost there,” she said.

  “Valerie! Sweetheart!”

  She sat up slowly. He offered a hand to help her up, but she shook her head. She pulled the blanket from her legs and stared at her feet.

  She wore no shoes. The skin had been turned the color of charcoal.

  Stony looked at her face, then back to her feet. “What did they—?”

  The soles of her feet had been scoured away, exposing black bone. “I remember that now,” she said.

  He put a hand to his mouth to stop himself from screaming. They’d burned her. The fuckers had burned her.

  He stood up, went to the closed door of the cell, and peeked out. The guards were nowhere in sight. He turned, turned again.

  Eventually he went to Valerie and kneeled beside her. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Almost there,” she said again.

  * * *

  When Dr. Weiss returned, he was pleased to hear of Stony’s success and sent for him immediately. Guards escorted him to the administration building, and home to Dr. Weiss’s office, the lab, and the infirmary, a suite of private cell
s housing a few of the prisoners the doctor was particularly interested in. Stony worked in the lab three or four times a week. In order to do his work he needed to have his hands free, and once the handcuffs were removed it seemed pointless to leave the mask on. Yes, it was against all protocols, but Stony was a special case. See, Dr. Weiss and Stony were pals. Colleagues. Mentor and mentee.

  “Pleasant trip?” Stony asked politely.

  “Another near miss,” Dr. Weiss said sourly. “They’d been in the house not a day before.” He unlocked his briefcase and began removing thick file folders. He’d been traveling with one of the capture teams, tracking down rumors of walking dead in San Diego. More and more often they were missing the LDs. The dead, who used to hunker down to hide, had turned skittish. It was nothing like the late eighties, when Zip had tipped off the Diggers to the LDA phone network. In those years the teams had rolled up two dozen safe houses, and hundreds of LDs had been captured. Captured, but not kept. Deadtown’s population was capped at 120, and fewer than a dozen had been brought in to the prison. The rest had been destroyed.

  In the past few years, the teams had found only a few stray LDs, and no occupied safe houses. The doctor was growing impatient. He constantly worried that they’d cut his funding and end the program.

  Stony said, “I don’t suppose you spoke to anyone on the civilian side?” The breathers who were suspected of aiding the undead were kept in civilian prisons and fell under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Deadtown was controlled, for historical reasons going back to the emergency powers granted during the ’68 outbreak, by the army. Still, the two sides talked. Favors could be traded.

  “It wasn’t that kind of trip, Stony,” the doctor said. He stooped to spin the dial on his private safe, carefully blocking Stony’s view of the numbers.

  Stony said, “I only ask because you’d mentioned you’d be seeing someone from Calvette—”

  “I’m sorry, Stony, no.” He deposited a few of the files in the safe, then slammed the door. “I’m sure your mother is fine.”

  “But she hasn’t written back.” It was against all rules, but the doctor had taken Stony’s letters to his mother at the Calvette Medical Prison, and had promised to deliver any letters she wrote to him.

  “Stony, we’ve talked about this—I can’t force your mother to write to you. Now tell me—how did you do it? How did you get Valerie to snap out of it?”

  Stony tried to keep his voice level. “I just talked to her,” he said. Then he picked up a stack of remaining folders and said, “Do you want me to refile these?”

  “I need details, Stony! What did you say to her?”

  “She wasn’t as far gone as the others,” Stony said. “It was that simple.”

  “Huh. So early intervention …”

  “You have a problem with Harry Vincent,” Stony said.

  “What kind of problem?”

  Stony told him about what he’d done to Valerie. “He’s abusive. He could have killed her. You’re going to have to fire him.”

  “I think we both know that’s not possible. You’re overstepping your bounds, Stony.”

  Bounds. And what were those, exactly? Stony had made it his job to move those boundaries, a little bit every day. While Dr. Weiss studied the LDs, Stony studied the doctor. Stony tried a different tack. “He deliberately disobeyed your orders. He could have ruined one of your most important subjects. Valerie is one of the graveborn, one of the few we have in population.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m just saying, you might want to make sure to have guards who understand what’s at stake here. Professionals who don’t … undermine you with the other staff.”

  Dr. Weiss removed his glasses. “Undermine me? How?”

  “He’s not onboard with the research goals of the organization, Doctor. He thinks that you …” Stony frowned as if reluctant to pass on bad news.

  “What?”

  “He’s openly told the other guards that you should be replaced as director.”

  Dr. Weiss started to ask a question, then changed his mind. “You should file those.”

  Dr. Weiss coveted data. He hoarded files and folders and magnetic tapes and disks, and threw nothing away. When he came into possession of a particularly sparkly factoid, some juicy secret, he showed it off to Stony like Kwang unwrapping a mint-condition Astonishing Tales—and then told him to file it away. Sometime after he’d been in Deadtown a few years, but before he’d gotten his first prosthetic hand, the doctor had called Stony into his office and handed him a thick manila envelope. “A contact of mine at DoJ forwarded on something you might find interesting.”

  On the front of the envelope was scrawled, in thick black marker, MAYH70381.

  The doctor said, “It’s from a police detective in Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody named Detective Kehl.”

  Kehl. Stony remembered his mother talking about him.

  Weiss said, “He’s retiring, trying to wrap up some cold cases. He sent a request for a final interview with your mother. DoJ said no, of course, but they demanded all his files. Those are the pertinent bits.”

  Stony opened the envelope and took out a sheaf of papers. They were photocopies of manually typed reports, the text faint.

  Dr. Weiss said, “This detective’s been looking into the death of a homeless girl in December 1968. He finally tracked down her name.”

  Stony looked up. Dr. Weiss savored the anticipation; he was gleeful with it. “Bethany Cooper. From Evans City, Pennsylvania.”

  Stony thought, My mother—my biological mother—had a name.

  “The town was practically the epicenter of the outbreak,” the doctor said. “She was seventeen the year it happened, living at home. On the big night, October first, she disappeared. Her parents thought she died in the attacks. Most of the town was wiped out. Somehow, two months later, she turned up in Iowa by the side of the road.”

  “Where was she going?” Stony asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe she was running away from home, heading west. Maybe she was in shock. But at some point between leaving home and arriving in Easterly, she delivered you—perhaps on the night of the outbreak.”

  “The father?” Stony couldn’t say, my father.

  “Both parents are still in Evans City. They moved away briefly during the evacuation, but then came back and never moved. Property values probably never recovered.”

  “No, who was the father of the baby?”

  “Ah. I don’t believe that’s in the file. Another missing person. Detective Kehl, however, wanted to know what happened to the child.”

  “He doesn’t know about me?”

  “He must suspect something. So what do you think? Should we tell this retired cop the rest of the story? Solve the biggest mystery of his career?”

  “I don’t know, but if—”

  “I’m kidding, Stony. You’re classified.”

  Stony nodded, though he was still numbed by the news. He turned over another page in the stack and saw a wallet-sized photograph—it looked like a school picture—of a white girl with straight bangs and long brown hair. And now, he thought, she had a face.

  “She’s so young,” he said aloud. “Can I keep this?”

  “Stony.” The doctor’s tone was condescending. It was against the rules for the prisoners to keep any personal items. Besides: It was data, and all data belonged to Dr. Weiss.

  “Right,” Stony said, and slid the photo back into place beneath a paper clip. “You want me to file these?”

  “I’ll take them.” Ah. Destined for the private safe. Dr. Weiss had gotten more careful over the years; he no longer opened the vault in Stony’s presence, afraid that Stony would peek at the combination. The doctor said, “I just wanted to see if the face jogged a memory. You see, the girl died of severe internal injuries—as if she’d tried to give birth to a clawed animal. Detective Kehl didn’t know what to make of it.”

  Stony put the file on the desk. You fucker, he thought. />
  “Evidently,” the doctor said, sliding the file toward himself, “you weren’t the easiest child to bring into the world.”

  Sometime after Valerie’s awakening—two weeks, or perhaps a month—Harry Vincent and four other guards charged Stony’s cell. They wore the usual riot gear: hockey pads, thick gloves, and the Plexiglas helmets of the Diggers.

  To the guards, the undead presented a problem. The prisoners did not experience pain as the living did, and could not be subdued or intimidated as easily as normal prisoners. They were a challenge. And there was something about their resistance to pain that galled, that provoked. It was a Fuck You to every state employee with a truncheon. And so the constant struggle (easily lost) to treat them as anything but carcasses, as dumb meat on hooks fit to be punched, Rocky Balboa–style, then to be shoved around, carved up, and eventually—inevitably—thrown into the incinerator. The living dead are born out of the ground, but they rise in smoke.

  Harry Vincent did not appreciate being reported to his supervisor. His supervisor did not appreciate the doctor inserting himself into the running of the prison. So Stony Mayhall would be suspected of hiding contraband, and he would resist the guards, and he would be firmly subdued.

  They broke both of his arms, and ripped the prosthetic hand from his stump, and cracked his shoulder blade. They jumped on his ribs, denting his torso like a wicker basket. They shattered his right cheek and flattened his face. They seemed to find it difficult to stop hitting him. Maybe if he had made some noise, or cried out in (mock) pain, they would have stopped sooner. Or maybe that would have only egged them on. Impossible to know.

  Stony did not try to bite them, though he did have an opportunity to do so. One of the men slammed his arm down across Stony’s face, and his forearm pad slipped up toward his elbow. For a moment there was a rectangular patch of exposed flesh at the man’s wrist, only inches from Stony’s teeth. He let the moment pass. After Cornelius, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t bite anyone again.