Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  Eventually the guards exhausted themselves. Harry Vincent squatted next to him, breathing hard. “I promise you, Stony. One day I’m going to be the one to throw you in the incinerator. I’m going to light a cigarette off your flaming head and watch you burn.”

  Stony decided a reply wasn’t necessary. Later, on the floor of his cell, he attempted the first repairs on himself, imagining Alice talking him through the procedure. The tibia’s connected to the patella-a-a, the patella’s connected to the fee-murrr … Now hear the word of the Lord.

  He was able to snap a knee into place, but the rest of his attempts at reconstruction were not very effective. He had only one hand to work with, a tool that was itself in need of repair. He could do nothing for his arm above the stump, which appeared to be broken in three places. Finally he rested his damaged cheek against the cement floor and watched the fluorescent light through the slot in his cell door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Turn of the Century, More or Less

  Deadtown

  ’ve been thinking about the ship of Theseus,” Stony told the doctor. He struggled to enunciate clearly. Over weeks of surgeries the doctor and his team had stitched up the tears and punctures in Stony’s skin, wired his rib cage together, pinned the bones of his legs and arms, and reset his jaw. Still, damage remained. He’d not yet adjusted to the limitations of his new body.

  Dr. Weiss sat beside the bed, arms on his knees, his face dour, as if he were in mourning. It was one of his daily visits, which had grown longer over the weeks, as if he were lonely, or seeking counseling. Most afternoons there was alcohol on his breath.

  Stony said, “It was in a philosophy book I read once. A wooden ship is damaged in battle, so they take off one of the planks and replace it with, say, aluminum. Or plastic. Each time the ship is damaged, they remove a wooden plank and replace it with a plastic one, until years later, the ship is entirely plastic. So. Is it the same ship as before?”

  The doctor frowned. He looked tired, his skin gray. Maybe it was the drink, or the stress of the job. Or maybe, after so long among the undead, he’d started to resemble them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not following.”

  “I’d like to continue with the experiment,” Stony said. He lifted his broken arm, and the damaged shoulder joint vibrated like a serrated knife sawing a pork chop bone. The arm was being held together by a contraption of rods and braces and ended in a new prosthetic hand. The new hand was lighter and more cheaply made than his previous model, but he’d adjusted to it quickly, and learned to move the fingers and thumb in the space of a few days. “I think we can go further.”

  “No,” Dr. Weiss said, seeming to wake up. “Absolutely not.”

  “The whole arm,” Stony said. “Right up to the shoulder. All new equipment.”

  “I don’t understand why you keep volunteering to do this to yourself.” Then, with the token expression of concern dispensed with, he said, “What purpose would it serve?”

  “To find out where it ends. I can already do this …” The index finger flexed, like a finger puppet. A small thing, but impossible to explain with conventional science. There were no wires connecting his finger to his arm muscles, no tiny motors to move the digit. No remote control. The finger moved because Stony made it move. He felt like a novice magician demonstrating the opening moves of a master’s illusion: Thank you, Mr. Blunt. He ought to write a paper for OSWoG. Stony said, “Don’t you wonder how far it can go? What if I can do an entire arm?”

  “I’m worried for you, Stony,” Dr. Weiss said.

  “This could redefine the living dead. Think about it. When they ask you, ‘Dr. Weiss, how much of one of these creatures do we have to destroy before we know it’s truly dead?’ And you can say—”

  “All of it. Take no chances.”

  Stony lowered his arm. “That’s not very scientific.”

  “Better safe than scientific.”

  “If you truly believed that,” Stony said, “Deadtown wouldn’t exist. We’re here exactly because knowledge of us is important, even if it comes with a little risk.” Stony lay back against his pillow. “All I’m saying is, think about it.”

  The doctor had already been thinking of extending the experiment, and Stony knew it. Someday soon, Dr. Weiss would call in one of the prisoners, tie him or her down, and cut off a finger, a toe, a hand, an arm. It wasn’t that the doctor was Capital-E Evil. He was haunted, not only by the victims of 1968, but by the ghosts of the future dead, the millions who would die next time. Despite the Diggers’ successes, despite the record lows in reports of the undead, Dr. Weiss knew, as Stony did, that a second outbreak was inevitable. It was the Diggers’ failure at finding new hordes of ravenous biters that would allow them to reappear. The government was growing complacent, losing the rabid edge that would let it strike quickly when the next surge of undead erupted. Or—and this is what kept the doctor up at night—the next outbreak would begin in some third-world country, where the government was insufficiently prepared to put down an epidemic. Dr. Weiss would stare at his bedroom wall, thinking of a tide of undead rolling through the rural provinces of China, the plains of Africa. He’d begun his career desperately searching for a vaccine or treatment, but after thirty years the impossibility of the living dead, their immunity from rational understanding, had crippled that dream. Science was failing him.

  His only hope now was to apply the scientific method to the irrational. He would amputate the limbs of the prisoners, not because he wished to hurt them, but because he wanted to save them, the living and the dead alike. The limits of animation seemed central to the puzzle. The doctor had heard rumors of Mr. Blunt, and Stony had confirmed that the LD was more marionette than man, a thing of polished wood. Then the doctor had seen Stony learn to manipulate artificial limbs as if they were his own bones. How much further could he go? It was the flip side of the question of how much destruction an LD could take. How much of the artificial could be assimilated and still retain that person’s identity?

  The doctor stared at him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head. “You’re not like the rest of them, Stony. Maybe it was the way you were born. But you’re different. You’re more … human.”

  What does he expect me to say? Stony thought. Thank you? From day one, the doctor assumed that because Stony had betrayed Billy Zip, he was somehow on the side of the Diggers. Stony had done nothing but encourage that misunderstanding.

  The doctor stood up to leave, and Stony said, “You’d have to save all the parts we remove. So we can try the Hobbes thing.”

  “Oh, of course,” Dr. Weiss said, but Stony could tell he didn’t get the reference. Thomas Hobbes had taken the Ship of Theseus story one step further. What if, Hobbes asked, some man had saved each of the wooden planks as they were taken off, and then later built a ship out of them, putting each piece back in its original location? Wouldn’t the reassembled ship be the same one we started with? Then what about the plastic ship next to it?

  “We can build another Stony,” Stony said. “I’ve always wanted a brother.” Sometimes when he lay on the bed he put his plastic hand to the metal frame and said to himself, I am the bed. Feel those sturdy legs, the hard feet against the cold cement.

  If the self could embrace a plastic prosthetic, he reasoned, why not furniture? Why couldn’t the self be larger than this man-shaped lump of dead material he found himself in? He was as curious as the doctor, perhaps more so. He concentrated, and made a chant of it: I am the bed. The bed is me. I belong to you and you belong to me. I am the bed …

  It was a struggle to stay focused. Even before Valerie’s torture, Stony had been losing time, and his thoughts darted and circled like a paper sack caught by the wind. The attack by Harry and the other guards had only accelerated the disarray. Often he thought about sleep, the Little Sleep that he used to envy in his sisters, and the Big Sleep that he envied in Valerie. That he took away from her.

  Sometimes an image entered his mind that he c
ould not shake for days. Junie, sobbing into his shoulder. Kwang, crushed under the dashboard of the car. Alice reaching down to pull him out of his cardboard fort at the edge of the fields. Bethany Cooper, bleeding to death in the snow. He tried to think of positive things, to summon a brighter future. He imagined traveling to Pennsylvania and meeting his grandparents. He imagined his grandmother reaching out an arm to him and saying, “It’s you, isn’t it? Bethany’s boy.”

  But even that fantasy felt like a betrayal. His mother sat alone in a cell like his, in the Calvette Medical Prison. Dr. Weiss had promised to look into his mother’s case, but he’d done nothing. He hadn’t even managed to get his mother to read Stony’s letters—or if she had, to write back. Years ago the doctor visited Wanda Mayhall regularly. Stony had found folders thick with their transcribed conversations. At first she’d refused to tell the man anything, but her daughters were still under threat of arrest, and the facts could not be hidden for long. The doctor learned all about how Stony was found, how he refused to grow, then how he refused to stop growing. He got everything from her, eventually. And then when he captured her son, he had no more interest in Wanda Mayhall.

  Most nights Stony heard the guards—really one guard—making his rounds. He knew it was Harry Vincent. The man walked through the offices, sat at Dr. Weiss’s desk, rattled the file cabinets. Each night he stood for a long time in front of Stony’s cell. He never spoke, though sometimes he stood there for minutes at a time.

  Of course Stony fantasized about revenge. Against Vincent, against the doctor, against the other guards who’d beaten him. The daydreams were vivid and bloody, an acid bath that burned away everything but a copper-bright circuit of hate. It was almost addicting. He tried to break himself out of these toxic spirals by willing himself to think of Ruby. She was ten now (or eleven, or twelve). He invented hobbies for her. He listened to her practice the cello, except when it was a saxophone or piano. He regarded her artwork as it hung on Crystal’s refrigerator. He imagined her letters, written on ruled paper: Dear Uncle Stony, It sure has been a busy week!

  And all other times he planned his escape. It was his duty as a prisoner. The Diggers’ helicopters were just outside the administration building, their black SUVs gassed up and ready to go. He fabricated elaborate escape plans worthy of a Jack Gore book. No, stranger than a Jack Gore book. He pulled himself up and went to the door of his cell. He put his plastic fingers to the wall and thought, I am the door. The door is me …

  Stony had spent years becoming one of the most reliable workers in the doctor’s office. Now that he’d moved into an infirmary cell, he could be that diligent employee every day: the doctor’s most important research assistant. The nurses who rotated through the facility never lasted long, and outside scientists were not encouraged to visit. Dr. Weiss did everything he could to block other researchers from direct access to the prisoners, and he only reluctantly released data to the government teams studying the undead. The doctor thought Stony posed no threat, however, either to his ego or his health: Stony was never forced to wear a mask and was never handcuffed: The doctor wanted nothing to slow down his typing speed.

  And Stony could type like a fiend, nearly 160 words a minute, and spent hundreds of hours at the computer, filling databases, and writing little DOS and VB6 programs to help the doctor churn out statistics. He typed an uncountable number of reports, memos, official letters, and articles. The articles had not been published, and would never be as long as the existence of Deadtown remained a state secret. “I’m sitting on a gold mine,” the doctor said at least once a week, “and I can’t tell anyone.” He feared for his legacy.

  Sometime before, Stony had expressed concern about the archives. This was in 1995 or 1996, a couple of years before Valerie first tried to sleep. In the old animal lab there were almost a dozen file cabinets filled with documents going back to the first days of the prison. “They can take paper away from you,” Stony told the doctor. “They can burn it.”

  Soon the office had a scanner. Stony set about digitizing the most important of the years of paper documents and saving those first to Zip disks, then later burning to CDs and DVDs. Stony made two copies of everything. “Just in case you need to take a few home.” Internet access was forbidden at Deadtown, but Stony set up a VPN, a kind of private digital tunnel, between the office and the Weiss home, so the doctor could get at the files remotely.

  The work beat cleaning the animal cages. Those experiments were over now, thank God. Now his most interesting task was making the rounds of the special patients in the infirmary. Some of these were sleepers, inert men and women chained to their beds, who would lie there until the doctor decided to dispose of them. Stony tried to talk to them as he had to Valerie, but he never felt that they were listening to him, or that he was breaking through. Maybe it was because he didn’t know them as well as he did Valerie, or care for them as deeply. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to rob them of their escape from Deadtown.

  Many of the patients were headbangers. Suicide was no easy task for an LD, but a determined prisoner could bash his skull against the floor or wall with enough force to destroy himself. If he (and most of the headbangers were male) failed to finish the job, or if the guards heard the distinctive thumping and interrupted him, he’d be brought to the administration building and strapped to a bed in the infirmary. Sometimes the prisoner recovered, and went back to his cell, living for months more like a dented aluminum can on a grocery shelf. Sometimes he went back to his cell and finished the job.

  Stony’s most unusual, and favorite, patient was Perpetual Joe. Most of the man’s cell was taken up by a sturdy, squealing treadmill that was little more than a rubber mat wrapped around a set of steel rollers. Joe ran full-out, chest up, arms pumping. A slight hitch in his step—caused, perhaps, by one leg being shorter than the other—gave him a jazzy, swinging gait. He always seemed happy to see Stony, though he never paused or slowed.

  Stony checked the battery and connections, recorded the output from the voltmeter, inspected the treadmill for wear and tear, all the while trading small talk with Joe. The man had risen from the grave during the original outbreak, been captured at dawn the next day, and had spent the last thirty years as a prisoner of successive Deadtowns. In 1982, Dr. Weiss had decided to test LD endurance. He started with four LDs, on treadmills wired to generate a current. The other prisoners had damaged themselves, or stopped in protest, or pleaded fatigue. Joe kept going. Joe liked it. He spent all day, every day, running toward the cement wall three feet in front of him.

  “How much today, Stony?” he’d ask, and Stony would read him the latest figures. He’d recently passed the 25 million-mile mark, and had generated enough power to electrocute every prisoner in Nevada. Part of Stony’s job was to inspect Joe himself, especially his feet and legs and knees. Joe ran barefoot, and his feet should have been pulverized by the constant pounding, his knees and hips destroyed. But his body was unchanged from the day of Stony’s first report. Maybe, Stony thought (for the thousandth time, the millionth), we are wounded only by what we expect to wound us. Anything beneath our notice—like the wear and tear of constant running, or obsessive digging, or the daily microscopic impacts with air and ground—cannot harm us because we forget to allow it to harm us. Integrity is all, as the Lumpists said.

  “Better check that third roller,” Joe would say, or point out some disturbing squeak or incipient tear in the rubber pad. He was as conscientious about his equipment as any professional athlete. When the backup treadmill was out for repairs, as it was now, he was constantly nervous. He’d been forced to stop only three times. Stony had seen only one of those stoppages. Joe, the most upbeat LD that Stony had ever met, flew into a rage and had to be restrained.

  “Keep up the good work,” Stony would tell him. And Stony kept working, too. Tasks kept him from losing time, kept the white void from blanking his mind. He had a job to do every day, and long-term goals, and people to care for. Most of the time he
didn’t think about going to sleep. Whole days went by in which he didn’t imagine crushing his skull against the cement floor of his cell.

  On Sundays, Stony’s job was to go through the collected journals, summarize them and log them into a database, and set aside the most interesting entries for the doctor’s consideration on Monday morning. In the first weeks of the project the doctor read every tablet, but it soon became clear that most of the LDs had nothing of interest to say: They doodled, or copied down nursery rhymes, or wrote, “I prefer not to.” A few of the prisoners became memoirists, describing their lives before they were bitten, or how they’d stayed hidden during the years. Stony scanned these for mentions of other LDs still at large, or for information that might help the Diggers find a remaining safe house, and when he found these references he cut those pages free using an X-Acto knife, then ate them. Later, sometimes days later, he would sneak into a bathroom and vomit the paste into the toilet. Delia was still out there, and Commander Calhoun had not been discovered. Rose and the Lump, as far as he knew, were still free. Even Mr. Blunt might still be alive. So he swallowed the evidence, and every Sunday he unboxed a fresh stack of blank tablets to distribute to the prisoners. On some of the middle pages, he wrote messages in faint pencil. Sometimes he passed on news from the outside world. Sometimes he gave them assignments called DGCs, for Drive the Guards Crazy.

  DGC #84. On Tuesday, everyone softly hum “Climb Every Mountain.”

  And, They are waiting for us outside.

  And, Give a man a stick and he will beat you for a day. But give him a uniform, and he will beat you every day, then complain about how tough it is on his rotator cuff.

  The journal entries that most interested Dr. Weiss were the ones in which LDs talked about their feelings. If they talked about their feelings about death, the doctor became almost giddy. “Listen to this,” the doctor said one Monday morning. “ ‘We are proof that God exists. We may be the only proof that God exists. We are dead sticks moving in the wind, and the wind is God.’ That stick thing again! Why do they keep talking about sticks? Is that code?”