Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  “Nothing. Better get back to your friend out there. You didn’t find out who they are, did you?”

  “I thought maybe you’d know,” Vincent said.

  “Weiss called them the Accountants. There’ve been rumors of another group out there,” Stony said. “Running black sites overseas, hunting LDs in other countries. They want to make undead soldiers to fight terrorists. Or something equally idiotic.” He sat down on the metal table. “Doesn’t matter. The rest of the plan is still intact. It’s three-thirty now. Garbage pickup is four or four-fifteen, and they deposit at the dump by six at the latest. You come pick me up as soon as it gets dark, say seven, and then we’ll—”

  “No,” Vincent said. “Do it now.”

  “What? You’re at work.”

  “You run off without me, or get crushed by the compactor, I’m fucked.”

  “Come on, we’ve already proven that I’m indestructible. One of my best friends spent months being crushed by garbage.”

  “You could still ditch me.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” Stony said. “I gave you my word. Plus, I still need your help to get out of town.”

  “Or they catch you—what do I do then? No. Do it now. You said I’d have six hours.”

  “More or less. It’s not guaranteed to—”

  “Do it or the whole thing’s off.”

  Stony stood up again, walked toward him. “You can’t make it on your own, Harry. Even if you make it through the conversion without me, you’ll need me to lead you to the underground. Without our help, the Diggers will find you. Probably they’ll shoot you immediately. If you’re lucky, and the doctor gets interested in your case, you might earn a cell. Maybe mine. But I wouldn’t count on it. The doctor’s not going to be keeping his job for long.”

  “Here,” Vincent said. He unzipped the top of the suit and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his uniform. “In the shoulder. They won’t see that.”

  “You can’t take this back,” Stony said. “You have to be sure.”

  But of course he was sure. Vincent was desperate, running for his life—his next life, anyway. This one was over. The cancer was eating through his abdomen, churning tissue into tumors.

  “Do it,” Vincent said. He turned his head and pulled down his shirt.

  Stony had promised himself that he would never bite in anger. But this was the man who’d burned Valerie, who’d maimed Stony, who’d abused a dozen other prisoners. Stony could rip him apart now, and to hell with his resurrection among the living dead.

  But then Stony would never get out of Deadtown. They’d find him and burn him.

  Stony put one hand on Vincent’s neck and another on his shoulder. He could be gentle, as gentle as he’d been with Cornelius. Just a nip to start the infection.

  “This is going to hurt,” Stony said, and chomped down.

  Everything had been going so well.

  The Dumpster had been picked up promptly at four. He’d tumbled undetected into the truck and had managed to keep the metal rake perpendicular to his body as the big compactor blade moved back. The rake had bent under the pressure and Stony had been pressed deep into the already compacted garbage—but his bones had not been crushed.

  The trip out to the dump was almost pleasant. Then the truck had tilted up and spilled him out. He was knocked about, but that was okay. He huddled in the bag to wait first for the garbage collectors to leave, and then for dark. Then he heard the beeping of a second truck backing up nearby.

  No, not nearby. On top of him. He winced as a shushing rumble of a load emptied on top of him.

  The weight flattened him in his bag. His one good arm was trapped beneath him. His legs were completely immobile. This was much worse than the truck; he felt like he’d been buried in concrete.

  He panicked then. He bucked and twisted, screaming. Somehow he managed to make a small space beneath his body, and he brought his hand up to his face. He tore through the black plastic in front of his eyes and saw no daylight. He faced a solid wall of compressed garbage.

  Sometime later—an hour? Two? In some low-rent Einsteinian process, time had been distorted by the mass above him—he began to talk himself down. Come on, Stony. You’ve been tunneling since you were twelve. You can’t suffocate, you can’t even get tired. And didn’t Mr. Blunt tell you that he’d spent months hiding in the dump, in mounds just like this?

  Move, he told himself. Make like a worm.

  He stopped his thrashing. He anchored his feet, bowed his back, and shoved his one good arm forward. The effort gained him a couple of inches. Then he pulled his legs up and shoved again.

  As he worked, he thought of the myriad other ways his plan had failed him. Yes, he’d made it out of Deadtown. But that was a ticket for one. There were 119 souls still behind bars in the prison. How could he ever explain to someone like Thomas—kind, dim Thomas—why he’d left him? And even if he escaped this heap—shut up, Stony, of course you’ll escape—he wouldn’t yet be safe. He was only thirty miles from Deadtown, and dependent on a sociopath to take him to safety.

  A sociopath who was infected.

  Vincent would be able to hide the symptoms for a few hours, but soon he’d be sweating and anxious, and then he’d start hallucinating. Six hours after the bite, give or take an hour, he’d be dead. And then the transformation would begin.

  Stony planted his feet, bowed, and shoved again. And again.

  * * *

  His arm punched through into air. He forced his head through the opening. He was midway up the slope in a hill of refuse.

  It was still dark, but the moon was low and dawn seemed close. He saw no one, heard nothing. A few more minutes of struggle and he was able to pull the rest of his body from the mound. He was naked, coated in grime. His thin jumpsuit had been shredded by the effort.

  He was late. So late.

  But instead of going down he climbed higher, up to the peak of his little knoll. In the faint light the dump was almost pretty. He was in the outer precincts of a vast hilly landscape, black mounds stippled with gleaming plastic and slivers of metal that winked in the light. A dirt road wound through the valleys of the dump like a dark seam. In the distance, a cluster of lights marked the front gate.

  He’d made it, then. Out of an early grave. Out of Deadtown. He’d been imagining this moment for thirteen years. He’d thought he’d be happier.

  He followed the winding road toward the lights. He walked around a curve and then saw the entrance to the dump: Two light poles, an expanse of blotchy cement, and a small shack with yellow vinyl siding. A light shone in the single window he could see. The gate, chain link on a metal frame, was slightly ajar, kept open by a dark lump.

  He stopped, looked at the shack, then back at the thing by the gate. He felt the last scraps of his plan—let’s call it a fantasy, hey?—slip out of his hands and blow away.

  He walked forward. When he was perhaps thirty feet away he realized that it was the body of a dog. It was darkly furred, perhaps a German shepherd. Then he heard a growl from inside the shack—but not a dog’s growl.

  He went around to the front of the shack. The door was open. On the floor, Harry Vincent squatted over the remains of a man. Blood coated the linoleum floor and had spattered across the walls and furniture: a pine desk and the white computer monitor, a TV on a stand, a beige leather armchair with a duct-taped headrest. It was alarming how much was inside a living man when you started to turn him inside out.

  Vincent looked up, still chewing. His face was painted in blood. His eyes were vacant. He growled again, then turned back to his meal. The dead had nothing to offer the dead.

  “Oh Harry,” Stony said. He’d come to find Stony as planned. His pickup was probably just out of sight of the gate. And then the fever hit, and he’d come hunting.

  Stony did not try to pull him off the man. It was much too late for that now. Stony forced himself to go into the room. He stepped around Harry and his victim and went to the desk. The monitor
was on, showing a Windows screen. The computer under the desk was connected to a phone jack in the wall. Stony found the AOL icon, and then he typed out an email with his location. “Bring restraints,” he typed, “and two sets of clothes.” He clicked send. The email address was hosted in Canada, but the person monitoring the inbox should be close by. Hopefully very close.

  The sky beyond the doorway had turned silvery. A new day.

  Let’s go, Stony. Keep moving.

  The use of the third person, he found, gave him much-needed perspective. It was almost like not being alone.

  He went back outside (he did not look at the floor) to pull the dog from the gate, to find Harry’s pickup, to do whatever it was that Stony told himself to do.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  2009

  Calhoun Island

  o you remember doing the dead man’s float? Every kid tries it. Facedown in the water, arms drooping. After thirty seconds, a minute, your chest begins to burn but you don’t move: You hold out, staring at the blue cement of the pool floor, letting the waves rock your body like a rudderless raft. The shouting voices above mute to a low roar, and your ears tune to odd clicks and thumps, the whoosh of your pulse in your ear. Oh, how your mother will wail when they find your waterlogged body. Your father will fall to his knees, wondering why he didn’t appreciate you more. Imagine the funeral! And then almost against your will your feet come down and you pull your face out of the water. You gasp and ask your best friend, How long was that?

  Or so I’ve been told; I’ve never tried it. Neither had Stony. He’d never learned to swim, and he wasn’t much good at floating—he kept listing to the side like a ship taking on water. But he was very good at being a dead man. He could drift for hours in the crystal clear waters of the island as huge tropical fish, bright as cartoons, coasted beneath him. He’d learned some of their scientific names, but he preferred the ones he’d given them: Orange Killjoy. Blue Church Lady. Li’l Frenzy. He drifted and thought of nothing.

  Or tried to. His mind, wherever it was located, kept yammering like the only guy on the bus with a cellphone. For example, in the past ten minutes, his mind had repeatedly been asking, Why can’t they just leave me alone for a single hour?

  Someone on the beach was calling his name. Stony had pretended deafness, but then the intruder started tossing pebbles at him—they plopped into the water near his head. Then finally something heavier slapped the water a few inches from his left ear.

  Stony stood up—the water was only five feet deep at this spot. He picked up the chunk of driftwood that had nearly hit him and tossed it farther out to sea.

  The figure on the beach seemed to find this amusing. He was fabulously overdressed in a dark suit and homburg, holding a black rain umbrella over his head—as if he had anything to fear from sunburn.

  Stony began to slog through the surf. When he was a few feet from the beach Mr. Blunt said, “My apologies for disturbing your swim. If that was what you were doing.”

  “Zombie snorkeling,” Stony said. “It’s like snorkeling, but without the snorkel.” The skin of Blunt’s face had been blackened to a tarry, waxy substance. He’d been burned, perhaps several times, but not consumed.

  They regarded each other for a long moment. They’d talked many times via email, but they hadn’t seen each other in person since the congress, twenty-one years ago.

  Mr. Blunt looked him over. Of course Stony wasn’t pretty to look at, either. His skin was crisscrossed with thick stitches. The holes in his head, front and back, had been sealed with hard plastic and stitched closed by the Commander’s doctors, but he was conscious that the skin tone did not match, and that his forehead bore a slight indentation like an intimation of a third eye.

  “You’re leaking,” Mr. Blunt said.

  Stony laughed, stretched out his arms, or rather one arm and one stump. Water seeped from seams in his skin. “I’d hug you …”

  “Quite all right,” Blunt said. “Perhaps you’d like to put on some clothes?”

  Stony wore only a pair of torn khaki shorts. He shrugged, then nodded at a red-tiled roof several hundred yards down the beach, just visible behind the dunes. “My hut’s over there.”

  “Oh, I know,” Mr. Blunt said. “I met Chip, your guard dog.”

  “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

  “Of course not. He was very helpful.”

  They walked along the white sand, skirting the incoming waves. Half a mile in the distance was the Commander’s estate, a white palace perched on a cliff that jutted into the ocean. The water was brilliant blue, the sky clear but for a few clouds that would carry the afternoon rain to them.

  “So this is heaven,” Mr. Blunt said.

  “The closest we’ll get to an afterlife,” Stony said. “The trip went okay, then? You’re here three hours early.”

  “The Commander’s people were very efficient,” he said. “Though I suppose that’s largely your doing.”

  Stony shrugged. “And Calhoun’s money. Thank you for coming.”

  “You know I prefer to stay in the field.”

  “You have to come in from the cold sometime,” Stony said.

  They climbed a set of wooden stairs to a long, unfinished beach house. The walls were unpainted, and one corner was a rectangle of bare studs covered by flapping plastic. Chip sat cross-legged on the patio, naked except for a web of hemp netting spread across his lap. “Cool, you found him!” he said.

  “I did indeed,” Mr. Blunt said. “Thank you for the directions.”

  “No problem,” Chip said. He was a very pretty dead man, blond with full lips, his body unscarred but for the half-moon of a deep bite on his shoulder. He’d been trying to finish the hammock for days now, but the knots kept confusing him.

  “Did anybody call?” Stony asked him.

  Chip thought hard. The conversion had hit Harry Vincent hard. After the fever passed he didn’t recognize his own name and had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. His new mind remained as sunny and empty as this beach.

  “Never mind,” Stony said. “I’m sure voicemail picked it up.”

  “Oh yeah,” Chip said. “Sure.” He turned his attention back to the ropes on his lap. Stony let Mr. Blunt into the house and closed the door behind them.

  “How do you stand it?” Blunt asked. “Keeping him around like that?”

  “Stop it,” Stony said. “He’s got nowhere else to go.”

  “You’re a better man than I.” He looked around at the front room. “Though not much of a decorator.”

  The inside of the house was more incomplete than the outside: bare drywall, some walls open to the plumbing, wiring taped to the wood. Stony had been meaning to finish, but dozens of other projects had distracted him. Every flat surface was covered by books, magazines, blueprints, and printouts. A long drafting table, stacked high with drawings and engineering manuals, braced one wall. The glass top of the dining room table was crowded with equipment: two computers, a printer, a scanner, several flat-panel monitors. A tangle of blue and black cables connected them to the power and to a huge Océ 7055 blueprint printer squatting in front of one of the windows. Vertical tubes of rolled blueprints made an arsenal of one corner.

  “It’s a look,” Stony said.

  “You do it all from here?” Mr. Blunt asked.

  “The communication stuff? No, no. There’s a real data center at the Commander’s place, with a bunch of smart people. This is just for … my projects. I’m going to get dressed. Make yourself at home.”

  Stony was nearly dry from the walk back, but he could still feel the water sloshing under his skin, and he’d be weeping salt water for the rest of the day. Coming apart at the seams, he thought. His body was wearing out, the damages adding up. When he was younger he would have ignored injuries that he now worried over, and that worry kept the wounds from closing. Maybe that was the secret of youth: willful ignorance.

  But not all wounds were forgotten. He ran his fingers across the
place where his heart should be and found the stitches. There. The place where Kwang had shot him, where Alice and his mother had sewn him back together. He was still himself. Still Wanda Mayhall’s boy.

  He stripped off his damp shorts, then pulled on an identical pair from a pile on the floor. The bedroom was more of a disaster than the front rooms. Stony should probably do a little house cleaning, he thought. Or at least allow the maid to come in.

  He picked up his prosthetic arm from its spot on top of the dresser, pressed it to his stump, and wiggled the fingers to make sure he had a grip on it. Then he pulled on a white bamboo shirt and returned to the dining room, where Mr. Blunt had unfolded a map.

  “Is this Deadtown?” Blunt asked.

  “It’s nothing.” Stony took the map from him and began to fold it.

  “It looks like you’re planning an attack,” Mr. Blunt said. “You’re not going back there, are you?”

  “It’s a pipe dream,” Stony said. “I know how to get in. I just can’t figure out how to get them all out without everyone being shot.”

  “I noticed the names,” Blunt said. Taped to the wall were over a hundred index cards, grouped into three sections that roughly represented the cell blocks. Each card bore the name of a prisoner still in Deadtown when Stony had escaped. No one knew whether they were still alive. “You can’t save everyone, Stony.”

  No, Stony thought, just me.

  Mr. Blunt gestured at the other stacks of paper. “The rest of this—I suppose these are the reports you make us all fill out?”

  “Some of it’s my own writing,” he said. “A few papers for the OSWoG journal, that kind of thing. But the reports are important. If we don’t keep track—”

  “Your own writing? You realize your newsletters are already turning into scripture.”

  Stony picked up a printout of a spreadsheet with the latest figures. “It’s not good. In ’88 we had seventeen hundred in the census. We’re down to less than three hundred people who are still in contact, not counting Deadtown prisoners. Almost fifty of those live here.”