Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  “It’s something we all say,” Stony said. “I’m not sure where it started.”

  “It sounds like a verse. Take a note, Stony—we need to survey the population and see which of those were most religious before they died, and compare to how religious they are now. Maybe those who believe in a higher power are more resilient.”

  “Like alcoholics,” Stony said.

  The doctor gave him a blank look. “I suppose.”

  The doctor had taken to drinking at work. Some afternoons he sat at his desk, refilling his travel mug from a bottle he kept out of sight, and talked at Stony. Stony called it Unhappy Hour.

  He complained about the Department of Justice’s attempts to grab his funding, or other researchers trying to steal his data. But mostly he railed against his bosses at the Pentagon. They were undermining him, trying to shut down Deadtown. There were even rumors of a second LD project somewhere overseas, a black site.

  “They’re keeping me in the dark,” the doctor said one afternoon. “It’s not just the CIA. Someone else is working domestically. Another agency. First, every tip we get for a zombie foxhole turns up empty, and now—” He lurched out of his chair and unlocked his briefcase. “Now this. Look at these photos.”

  He tossed a manila folder into Stony’s lap. Inside were several dozen eight-by-ten color photographs. Shots of corpses—decapitated corpses.

  “Those are undead,” the doctor said. “Notice the lack of blood.”

  Stony stared at the bodies, wondering whether he knew any of these people, but it was impossible to identify them. “When did—when did this happen?”

  “Two days ago,” the doctor said. “But this has happened before. Some other team is finding LDs, and they’re chopping their Goddamn heads off. They take the heads, but don’t bother to dispose of the bodies—they leave those for us. Every couple of years we get a call from some cop or civil servant saying they’ve found a room full of headless corpses.”

  “Maybe it’s a vigilante,” Stony said.

  “What?”

  “A lone hunter. Perhaps his family was bitten in the outbreak, or he was attacked himself, and now he’s out for revenge.”

  “I never know when you’re pulling my leg, Stony.” He waved dismissively. “We’re talking about a roomful of zombies. This requires organization. Someone at our level or higher—an FBI-level organization.”

  “You think the FBI is behind this?”

  “I can’t get anyone to tell me! And I have a higher Goddamned clearance than anyone.”

  Stony said, “I wouldn’t worry about it, Doctor. They can’t keep it a secret forever.” He was already planning the news items he’d write into the fresh tablets of paper the guards would distribute this Sunday.

  The civil war continues. More LDs destroyed by partisans. Mr. Blunt is alive.

  Dr. Weiss stared at the photos, exhausted. “Stony, you have no idea how difficult my job is.”

  “Hey Joe, did I ever tell you about the time I met the Lump?”

  Stony sat on the floor looking up at Perpetual Joe, who was running as hard as always. He was the true Unstoppable, Stony thought. He did not get depressed. He did not worry. He ran away from his problems, but in the most Zen-like way possible.

  Stony said, “When I met him, he scared me, frankly. I’d never met anyone who … who was that far gone. I thought it was a trick, that he was some kind of puppet. Then he said something that floored me. He said that we were all impossible. Flat-out impossible.”

  Joe laughed. “Yet here we are.”

  “That’s right—we’re walking miracles. Well, running miracles.” Joe liked that, too. Stony said, “The doctor is confused, Joe. We’re just lumps of dead meat, yet we move, we talk, we think, we love. We are alive. And we’re alive in a way that’s much more profound than normal life. The breathers are machines that take in food and oxygen and turn it into electricity. Their muscles twitch, their neurons fire. It’s an amazing process, but it’s knowable. It’s reducible to facts and processes down to the microscopic level.”

  Joe frowned. “Are you calling me a machine?”

  “What? No!” But of course he was, in way: a perpetual-motion machine that generated electricity out of nothing. Stony said, “I’m just trying to say that the living dead aren’t reducible at all. There are no sets of smaller facts to explain us. We’re moving statues, tin men and scarecrows.”

  “I’m not a tin man,” Joe said.

  “I’m not saying that. We’re like tin men, because—”

  “I’m a person.”

  “I’m not saying you’re not!” Stony got to his feet and tried to start over. “Look, you know how everybody quotes the Lump: ‘The dead stick moves in the wind, and believes it moves itself.’ For years I mulled that over. What I thought it meant was that I was a dead thing who only believed he was alive. But lately I’ve been thinking that I was paying attention to the wrong part of that sentence. The question is, What is the wind? What is it that’s moving us? Valerie thinks maybe it’s God, or the devil. That idea is spreading through Deadtown.”

  Joe was shaking his head. He did it in rhythm with his arms, to keep his momentum. “I’m moving me,” he said. “I can stop any time I want to.”

  Harry Vincent made his rounds only once per night. Once he’d made his presence in the infirmary heard, rattling the cabinet drawers and door handles like a poltergeist, no other guard came through before the morning shift. It was in those predawn hours that Stony let himself out of his cell and set to work on the doctor’s private safe. He had hours in which to work, and any number of nights to experiment. He told himself to be patient. But the night the safe opened for him, he was so surprised that he almost shut the door again by accident.

  On top was the file folder from Detective Kehl: MAYH70381. Stony took it out and looked again at the picture of Bethany Cooper. He wanted to slip it into his pocket, but he couldn’t risk that it would be missed. He removed other files, being careful to stack them in the order that he removed them: reports from capture teams; letters to a general in the Pentagon; and the file he’d been looking for, marked JOHN MAYHALL. Did the doctor think Stony would not notice that his own file was not kept with those of the other prisoners?

  The folder was filled almost to bursting. Stony opened it carefully to avoid spilling the contents on the floor. The first thing he saw were a dozen envelopes, addressed in his own handwriting. The envelopes were unsealed.

  If he were a living man, perhaps his hands would have been shaking in rage. Perhaps his heart would have been pounding. But Stony slowly removed the pages from the envelope to confirm what he suspected. It was a letter he’d written to his mother, dated only a month earlier. He put it aside and opened another one, and another. Dr. Weiss hadn’t delivered a single letter.

  Stony knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course Dr. Weiss had been lying to him. But to stare at the bald evidence was a fresh blow. Still think you’re clever, Stony? No matter how crafty he thought himself, how much he hardened himself for survival in Deadtown, he always found a way to fool himself. He’d wasted years writing these letters. He’d wasted years waiting for a response.

  Okay, he thought. Burn every damn thing in the safe. Sit here in the middle of the office until Dr. Weiss came in that morning with his fat face and smudged glasses, that BE ALL YOU CAN BE travel mug, that ridiculously self-important eight-hundred-dollar briefcase. Shove the envelopes and files down his throat until he choked. Then wait for the guards to burst in and shoot him in the face. Suicide by cop.

  He began to put away the files, then noticed a fat cardboard binder with a string fastener. He unwound the string. The binder was stuffed with envelopes. Each had his name on them, written in a familiar hand. At the top of each was a date in black marker, in Dr. Weiss’s typewriter-like print. He sorted through them, and found the earliest, dated 11–4–92.

  My John,

  I’ve started this letter so many times in my head and now Dr. Weiss
is waiting so I can’t start over. I’m sorry if this doesn’t read well. You and Alice were always such good writers and I’m sure it didn’t come from me. I’m out of practice, too. Dr. Weiss said he would bring this to you, and bring back anything that you write, if you do write back to me. I know it must be so hard for you. I’m so sorry. I think of you every day, and what it must be like for you wondering if anyone is still thinking of you. I am, John. I keep you in my heart and in my prayers. Do you have friends? Someone to talk with? Dr. Weiss says you talk often but I hope you have someone else to talk with, I mean someone like you. That’s important. I could never give you that.

  They’re knocking. I know I let you down. I let them I wouldn’t blame you if you found it too hard to write back. Dr. Weiss says you’re a bright young man and a credit to your race. Be careful.

  I love you.

  Mom

  P.S.

  Please, I hope you don’t have any grief about Junie. I know it was an accident.

  There were many more letters, as well as Christmas greetings, birthday notes, and in one case an inspirational poem that she’d copied out for him. He read them all and then started again, more slowly, only stopping when he felt the vibrations of doors opening at the far end of the administration building: the guards of the morning shift on their way to the infirmary. He put the last of the letters away into the binder and put everything away exactly as he’d found it. Even in his anger and disgust he found that he could be careful. Patient. He considered it a small victory that he did not scream, that he closed the safe door without lighting a match, that he returned to his cell without murdering a single person.

  “I don’t want to live in this kind of world,” Dr. Weiss said. It was the Unhappy Hour, and the doctor had wandered into one of his regular existential crises. “All I want is a reason. If we have a reason, that changes everything. Suddenly we’re living in a rational world, a world of science, where one man, a Newton or a Leibniz, can examine the evidence, draw conclusions, and make a difference.”

  Stony thought: Dr. Weiss, brother to Newton.

  “I want to write that sentence, Stony. ‘The cause of the plague is X. Here is the vector Y, here’s how it works, here’s how you kill it.’ I want it printed in Nature, damn it. Because if we never find a reason, then we’re living in fantasy land, where wishes come true and unicorns eat your brains. But as things stand now …”

  The doctor seemed to have lost his train of thought. He reached for his stainless steel mug, swirled it without drinking, proving to himself, perhaps, that he didn’t have to take another drink. Stony said, “As things stand now …”

  “It’s untenable, Stony.” He took a drink from the mug. “I’m in hell. I’m trapped in a prison full of zombies. You know what they are? They’re an insult to the scientific worldview.” He made a vague gesture. “Present company—”

  “No, no. I quite agree. We don’t make a lick o’ sense.” The doctor grunted, and Stony said, “And maybe we’re never going to get an answer. Would that be so bad?” This was a grenade lobbed to the heart of the doctor’s soul, and had the desired effect.

  “Not bad?” The doctor’s face, already flushed, closed on itself like a fist. “Not bad?”

  “I’m just saying that maybe we shouldn’t expect every little mystery—”

  He was prevented, or rather rescued, from finishing this sentence by the entrance of one of the guards. Stony knew he was pushing it. If the doctor lost his temper, he could do anything to Stony he wanted to. And then Stony would have to decide what he would do with the doctor. He’d promised himself ten years ago that he would never harm another breather, but he was no longer sure it was a promise he could keep. He was stronger than the doctor and could kill him easily. When they were interrupted, both Stony and the doctor were saved.

  The doctor yelled at the guard, “What is it for Christ’s sake?”

  “We’ve got another sleeper.”

  “Who is it this time?”

  “Kind of a repeat, actually,” the guard said. “That woman that we almost lost.”

  “Valerie?” Stony said. He thought he was masking his terror well. To the doctor he said in a steady voice, “Take me with you. I can help.”

  “You ain’t helping this time,” the guard said, but the doctor instructed him to mask Stony and bring him with them. They marched through two cell blocks. No one tried to speak with Stony. The prisoners, his people, stood at the front of their cells and watched silently as they passed.

  Several guards, one of them Harry Vincent, loitered at the entrance to Valerie’s cell. The doctor pushed them out of the way, and Stony followed in his wake without making eye contact with Vincent. On the bed was a gray, papery shell of something that resembled a woman.

  “My God, the smell!” Dr. Weiss said.

  It was the smell of rot. Of death.

  Stony put out a hand. Her skin was as cold as before, as gray as before, but somehow she’d slipped from stasis—undead, unalive—to true death. She was meat again. Microbes were feasting on her, turning her flesh into energy for their little bodies. She’d been returned to nature.

  At last, Stony thought. Valerie’s escaped.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  2001

  Deadtown

  ome dates are easier to remember than others.

  “They want to make soldiers,” Dr. Weiss told him. It was September 18, a week after the towers fell. “Undead soldiers.”

  Stony had already read the memo—the doctor had been keeping it in his private safe—but he feigned surprise. “That’s a very bad idea,” he said.

  “They want to bite perfectly healthy soldiers, let them convert, then use them on the battlefield. Send them into—remote regions.” He couldn’t just say Afghanistan? As if Stony had anyone to tell this to.

  Stony said, “That hasn’t been approved, has it?”

  “I’m fighting it tooth and nail. It’s a crackpot idea, worse than any of our existing biological weapons. I’m not saying we wouldn’t get valuable data from living volunteers …”

  “Of course.” The doctor had never been allowed to experiment on humans, and paid lip service to the idea that that would be immoral. But so many times over the years he’d started sentences with “If we could monitor the transformation in a controlled setting …”

  “But the blowback!” the doctor said. “You wouldn’t be able to control them. They could start an outbreak in a foreign country that we’d be powerless to stop.”

  “I can run the infection scenarios again,” Stony said. “Show them the spread rates—”

  “Have them ready by Thursday,” the doctor said. “That’s when the Accountants are coming.” He said their name with a capital A. “You’ll have to move back to a real cell before then.”

  “Why? And who are these guys?”

  “They’re doing a full security audit. Every prisoner locked down, in masks.” The doctor removed his glasses and pressed his palms to his eyes. “Just try to get all the file cabinets organized and locked by today, all right?”

  “But what does that mean? What’s covered by an audit?”

  “When you’re dealing with these people?” the doctor said. “Everything.”

  No one spoke to him when he was escorted back to the cell block and to a new cell. After an hour, though, a voice from the cell next to him called his name, and Stony went to the door.

  “So,” the voice said. “Back from the massa’s house.”

  Stony said, “Is that you, Kerry?” Kerry was a prisoner from Peoria who’d been brought in kicking and screaming a few years ago. Stony had helped talk him down and kept him from being killed. The doctor liked to keep him around because he was one of the only Chinese in Deadtown; the doctor liked diversity in his sample.

  “Looks like they patched you up some,” Kerry said.

  There were mirrors in the administration building bathrooms, but he’d avoided them. He didn’t need to be reminded that he was no longer one of
the pretty LDs. Dr. Weiss had tried to restore his face to something like his old one, but the doctor was no plastic surgeon. Stony walked with a limp now, and his torso automatically wanted to sit on a slight angle to his hips, as if his spine had been twisted. Maybe it had.

  Stony sat down on the floor in front of the cell door. “So tell me what’s new,” he said. “How are people on the cell block?” He took off his shirt. His plastic arm was secured to his torso by a web of leather straps. He loosened one of the straps, then another, and pulled down on his arm so that a gap opened between the rubberized base and his gray skin. He thought about clenching his fist, and the fingers curled appropriately.

  Kerry said, “There’s a lot of talk about sleeping. Ever since Valerie passed.”

  “Is anyone trying it?” Stony unbuckled several of the straps completely. Now there was a six-inch gap between his artificial arm and the stump.

  “What are you doing in there?” Kerry said.

  “Just getting comfortable.”

  “Well, everyone’s tried it. Nobody’s gotten the hang of it. It’s harder than it looks.”

  Stony pulled the arm free and set it on the ground in front of him. It looked like an object now, a sculpture. And that was entirely the wrong frame of mind to be in.

  Wave, Stony thought. The arm didn’t move. The fingers didn’t even twitch.

  “Wave,” he said aloud.

  “Wait for what?”

  “Nothing,” Stony said. Then: “We just have to wait them out. That’s our talent.”

  “That’s your talent for bullshit,” Kerry said. “We’re all going to die here. We’re just trying to speed it up.”