Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  “No!” Stony said. “You have to remain positive. We can get out of here. There’s always a way out.”

  Kerry laughed. “You really are as upbeat as you are in the Sunday Deadline.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “The weekly news. Though I suppose that’s over now, isn’t it?”

  “For now,” Stony said. He didn’t know they’d called his messages anything. He liked the idea that it had been a kind of newspaper.

  He stared at the fake limb. I am the arm. The arm is me. I belong to you and you belong to me.

  Consciousness was the key. The self. Experiments from the animal lab had proved that to Stony. None of the bitten animals—and Stony had bitten some of them himself—had become undead. The closest they’d come was a chimpanzee that Stony had privately named Cornelius.

  It had been a horrible experience. After they’d secured the animal to a table, Stony bit him in the finger as gently as he could, though of course it had to be hard enough to break the skin. Dr. Weiss stopped the chimp’s heart with 500 milligrams of sodium pentobarbital. Cornelius screamed in rage—and kept screaming. It seemed to go on forever, but later, when they reviewed the videotape, they saw that the tantrum had gone on for just over three minutes, before the chimp suddenly went rigid, his mouth stretched wide. During the entire episode, his heart had never beat. Had he briefly been undead, or was he simply one pissed-off chimp? Dr. Weiss was terribly excited, and over the next year he killed a score of chimpanzees, none of which did more than screech for a couple of seconds before dying.

  Dr. Weiss concluded that the disease was a human malady, specific to the species, but that was the wrong way to think of it. It was the idea of self that animated. Lose faith in yourself as an individual—lose integrity—and things fell apart.

  I am the arm. The arm is me.

  The fingers curled as if stroking the keys of a piano. There we go, he thought, and waved back at himself. He had three, four days tops before they came for him. He had to be absolutely ready.

  “Tell me about the Lump.”

  It was the first time Harry Vincent had spoken to him during one of his night visits to the infirmary. It was after Valerie’s escape but before the towers fell, so perhaps winter of 2000 or spring of 2001. Stony still spent most nights with his plastic limb pressed to the bed, the wall, the steel of the cell door.

  Vincent dragged a chair into the open doorway. He sat hunched over, the truncheon across his knees. Finally he said, “They say you talked to him.”

  Stony didn’t answer. He lay on the bed as if he were capable of sleeping.

  “Come on,” Vincent said. “Tell me. Is he real?”

  “People like to make up stories,” Stony said.

  “I’m not fucking interrogating you!”

  Stony sat up. What was this then, a chat? “I don’t have my mask on,” Stony said. “I could bite you.”

  Vincent stared at him, then looked at the floor. His forehead shone with sweat, though the room was not warm. “They say he’s just half a person. A chest, a head, one arm.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Stony shrugged. “It’s not.”

  “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to turn into that. Shit.” He pressed the billy club against his forehead. “How long do you think he’s been alive?”

  “He’s not. That’s kind of the whole trick.”

  “Right.” Vincent stood up, pushed the chair back into the office. He looked around at the cell. “Right.” He shut the door and locked it.

  The visits would go on. Eventually Vincent would tell Stony that he’d been diagnosed with late-stage peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare cancer usually caused by exposure to asbestos, but also linked to other toxins. It was incurable. Surgery was not an option. Treatment with chemotherapy was available, though it was strictly palliative. He’d decided to keep his condition secret from his employers. Yet for some reason he confided in Stony.

  This was in the future. That first night, Stony didn’t know what Vincent wanted, what violence he might be planning. As the guard walked away, Stony thought, There goes one damaged human being.

  Three days after Stony’s expulsion from the infirmary, Harry Vincent and four other guards burst into his cell and quickly masked him.

  “I always knew you were up to something in there,” Vincent said, loud enough for the prisoners in the nearby cells to hear. “And now you’re going to burn.” He yanked Stony to his feet. Vincent had lost weight recently, but he was still strong.

  Stony’s prosthetic arm lay on the floor. There was some debate among the guards as how to shackle a one-armed man, and finally they chained his arm to his waist and padlocked it shut. One of the guards carried the prosthetic arm with him.

  Dr. Weiss was nervous and distraught. “I can’t believe you’d betray me like this,” he said. “I thought we had a relationship.” Strangers were there, four white men in their mid-thirties, hair longer and arms more muscled than what you’d expect from brainy desk jockeys. They wore jeans and sport shirts, and one of them even wore sandals. Casual Friday for the Accountants.

  They’d found everything: the extra accounts, the stash of encrypted email, the secret VPN. Stony knew they would. There was no way to hide the evidence, if you knew what you were looking for.

  The man who was clearly the leader of the Accountants was as blandly handsome as a Lands’ End catalog model. He folded his arms and said, “You’ve been doing some tunneling.”

  The challenge of a military network is that, with a few notable exceptions, it only talks to itself. Computers within the network—say, the ones in Dr. Weiss’s office, and the file server that kept the HR files—can be compromised with a little work. But getting out to the public networks, the Internet, is another level of difficulty. The wires leaving the building are owned by the government, and most of the satellites carrying traffic are dedicated solely to it. A network of the military, by the military, and for the military.

  What is required to jump from the private network to the public one is a machine connected to both (never allowed), and a program to ferry the packets of data through the firewall. These programs aren’t difficult to write. The difficult part is finding an illegally connected computer, then tricking the owner of it to install such a program.

  Stony had simply handed Dr. Weiss a floppy disk and said, run this.

  Stony thought about claiming that he’d done it all under the doctor’s orders. (Prescription: Treason!) But if anyone would be able to figure out the truth from the electronic evidence it would be the Accountants. Besides, the doctor was so hurt, Stony almost felt sorry for him. Relationship. What an overloaded word. Of course they had a relationship. It just wasn’t the kind the doctor thought it was.

  When Stony first began to work for the man, he didn’t know whether he had the stomach for duplicity. He didn’t think of himself as wily. He was from Iowa, for Christ’s sake. But it turned out that he had a talent for it, and lying could be improved with concentration and diligence. Craftiness was a craft. And it helped that much of the work he did to get into and stay in Dr. Weiss’s good graces was work he wanted to do anyway. He kept his fellow prisoners alive. He studied the history of his people, and how they worked, and the workings of the prison. And he was doing science. Though he had no formal training, and no education beyond what Mrs. Cho could teach him, he was discovering things that—

  There, you see it? The ego. The knife edge to pry open the locked box.

  Over the years that he became Dr. Weiss’s trusted assistant, his confidant, Stony began to fear that he and the doctor weren’t so different. Stony wanted to learn about LDs, their limits and their possibilities, as much as the doctor did. He wanted to know what would happen after he bit a mouse, a spider monkey, a chimp. How long Perpetual Joe could run. How much of Stony’s self he could lose without losing himself. And like Dr. Weiss, Stony was afraid that all that research, all that data on h
is people, would be locked away, or burned.

  “Tell us where you sent the files,” the head of the Accountants said. He was deeply tanned and creased, a man who’d spent a lot of time outdoors. He was not in his thirties, as Stony had first thought, or even his forties. He might have been an extremely fit sixty-year-old. “Who received them?”

  Stony had been moved to the animal lab, where there was enough room for the Accountants and several of the Deadtown guards to gather around him. They’d chained him to a metal chair and padlocked the chain. Stony shook his head. “You’re going to have to torture it out of me.”

  “That’s on the table,” the handsome man said.

  Dr. Weiss barked an ugly laugh. “Don’t even bother. He doesn’t feel pain. He’s been beaten to a pulp by guards. He’s been shot. I’ve sawed off his arm and he didn’t feel it.”

  The man frowned. “What’s he afraid of?”

  Dr. Weiss thought for a moment. “Death?”

  “Life or death. That’s awfully binary,” the handsome man said. “Still.” He reached behind him and produced a small gray automatic.

  “How did you get that in here?” Dr. Weiss said.

  He put the pistol to Stony’s forehead. “In my experience, this is pretty much the only thing that kills you folks.”

  “Pretty much,” Stony said. “Is that loaded?”

  “Wouldn’t do much good empty,” the man said. “Now. Who have you been in contact with? My team will know all that in a few hours, but you could save us a lot of time.”

  “You’re not really an accountant, are you?”

  “It’s more of a nickname. I’ll count to three.”

  “Let me think.” Stony closed his eyes.

  “I will shoot you,” the man said. “Legally, you’re not even a person. Ethically, it’s my duty to find out what you know. Morally, you’re a threat to human life.”

  Jesus, Stony thought, an accountant and a philosopher. “Could you stop talking for just a second?” he asked. “I’m trying to decide whether I’m going to comply with you or not.”

  Another lie. But one more couldn’t hurt. He kept his eyes closed and tried to concentrate. He was just a dead stick—a stick that moves in the wind and believes that it moves itself.

  He’d told Perpetual Joe that the question was, What is the wind? Maybe it was God. That would have made Valerie happy. But the more he’d learned, and the more he’d experimented, the more he came to believe something different. It’s because the dead stick believes that it moves itself, that it moves. Joe was right: I’m moving me.

  His body was a dead thing tied to a chair, which was itself another dead thing. The chain was made of inert metal and secured by mechanical devices whose gears and pins could not turn by themselves. Where one dead thing ended and another began was largely a problem of perception and definition.

  I am the lock, the lock is me. I belong to you—

  He flexed his tiny metal fingers, and the locks clattered to the floor. He shrugged, and links snapped apart and the chains clattered to the ground. Then he leaned forward, the first motion in his attempt to stand, which pressed the barrel of the pistol more forcefully into his skull. The handsome man fired.

  Later, LDs would turn this moment into folklore: Stony’s Release. Painters and graffiti artists made it a frequent subject, with Stony’s expression variously determined, sad, angry, beatific. Was he ready to die the final death, or was he placing his faith in some future resurrection? Was he trying to escape, or trying to kill himself? The debate lent each painting a political weight. Curiously, none of the artists portrayed Stony as surprised when the locks opened—pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless—an expression that was undoubtedly still on his face when the trigger was pulled.

  Oh, but the damage to that face, that body. None of the paintings tried to capture what happened when you fired a .38 into a man’s head at point-blank range. The bullet went through Stony’s forehead and blew a large chunk from the back of his skull. Stony’s body bent backward from the force, then fell back against the chair and tumbled to the floor.

  The head Accountant, as well as every living man in the room, was stunned. After a long moment of silence, Dr. Weiss pointed at the handsome man and said, “What did you do? Do you have any idea how valuable he was?”

  “Shut up,” the leader said. He put his gun back in the holster at the small of his back and said to the Deadtown guards, “Who secured the prisoner?”

  “I did,” Vincent said. “And no one’s ever gotten out of them before. That’s Superman shit.”

  The leader turned to the doctor. “You didn’t say he was that strong.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “This facility is mine now,” the leader said. “And you are under arrest, Doctor. Put him in a cell.”

  “By whose authority?” Weiss said.

  The man frowned as if he were surprised at such a stupid question. “Mine. And somebody dispose of this body.”

  “My pleasure,” Harry Vincent said.

  “Go with him,” the handsome man told one of his men.

  Vincent wheeled out a gurney and they heaved Stony’s body onto it. “How about the arm?” Vincent asked, and nodded toward the prosthetic and its leather straps.

  “We’ll donate it to another needy corpse,” the leader said.

  Vincent and the assistant spook loaded Stony’s body onto a gurney and wheeled him outside. There were three incinerators on the site, but now that the facility was no longer an active disposal site, only one was kept working. It was housed in the main physical plant, a building a hundred yards from the administration building and attached to it by a covered walkway. The walkway had been added when the facility became Deadtown, perhaps because someone was nervous about satellite pictures.

  Vincent pushed the rattling gurney and the spook trailed him. “So,” Vincent said, “you guys are from what agency?”

  The man didn’t answer. Vincent said, “What’s the matter, can’t tell me or you’d have to—”

  “That’s right. And then burn your body. Standard procedure.”

  “You think I’m one of them?”

  “Can’t be too careful.”

  “Fine. Keep fucking with me. I’m just trying to make conversation. I mean, Jesus, we both work for top-secret organizations, you’d think … never mind.” He stopped to unlock the double doors leading into the physical plant. Three cement rooms were set aside for garbage disposal: an outer room to hold the Dumpster of nonhazardous garbage that was hauled away twice a week; another, larger room to store hazardous materials and medical waste generated by Deadtown and the doctor’s labs; and one to house the incinerator. The garbage room smelled ripe—not nearly enough air-conditioning. Vincent crossed the room and stopped before the door to the hazmat room. He unlocked it, leaving his keys in the lock. A thick suit hung on a hook beside a full mask. He started to pull on the suit.

  “I hate this shit,” Vincent said. “Two guys I used to work with died of cancer—the exact same kind of cancer. You think that’s an accident?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “They’re trying to kill us, man. Half the time the suit doesn’t even fucking seal.” He pulled on the mask and zipped up. He pushed open the door. Inside were dozens of red barrels marked with the yellow and red hazmat stickers.

  The spook leaned in. “Where’s the incinerator?”

  “On the other side of this room. You coming?” Vincent had to raise his voice to be heard through the mask. “Didn’t think so.” He pushed the gurney inside and kicked the door shut behind him.

  He wheeled past the red barrels, then went through the next door into the incinerator room. He could have gotten to the furnace from the far side of the plant and skipped the hazmat room altogether, but then the spook would have wanted to come with him.

  He shut the incinerator room door and flipped on the lights, but only one of the fluorescents above sputtered to life. The furnace was a gray steel b
ox with a thick door and a long, double-hinged handle. A metal rake leaned against the wall next to a steel table. The table could be tilted to slide the body into the mouth of the furnace, and the rake was there to finish the job. Vincent turned and began to unfasten his mask. Already he was sweating.

  In every horror movie, there’s the scene in which the next victim, sure that he or she is alone in a room, suddenly knows that someone or something else is there in the dark. The camera glides in for a close-up, which cleverly heightens the tension because the shot narrows what the audience can see. The victim’s eyes shift left. The mouth frowns in concentration. We seem to be inside the character’s mind: Is that the sound of breathing? Did that shadow move? And why did the background music stop?

  The victim waits for a second, perhaps two … and nothing happens. Then—and this is mandatory—the victim breathes in and begins to relax.

  That was the moment Stony tapped Vincent on his shoulder. The man jumped, spun around.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  “Shhh,” Stony said. “And don’t look so surprised.”

  Vincent backed away from him. “I thought you were dead. Really dead.”

  “I told you to trust me.”

  “You didn’t stick to the plan! You were going to escape, then I was going to shoot you in the head.”

  “I didn’t know he had a gun,” Stony said. “I had to improvise.”

  “But point blank? Jesus.”

  “I had to force his hand.” He touched a finger to the edge of the hole in his forehead. It felt ragged and slightly … crispy. “I have to admit I was a little nervous about that.”

  “Shit, don’t poke it,” Vincent said.

  Stony hadn’t been completely sure he could survive a direct shot. It was a measure of his desperation that he would have been all right with it going the other way. Yet here he was, moving and talking and thinking, no worse than Winnie the Pooh with a little stuffing knocked out of him.

  Vincent said, “What the fuck are you smiling about?”

  “Winnie the Pooh. A bear of very little brain.”

  “What?”