Raising Stony Mayhall

by Daryl Gregory

  “Sorry about that,” Stony said. He watched the phone’s screen, waiting for an answer.

  “You know, you say sorry a lot when you don’t mean it.”

  “I’m—” He looked up, smiled briefly. “Two miles ahead, take the next exit.”

  “Where are we going?” He didn’t answer. “Then how far are we going? Because I have to pee.”

  “Not too much farther,” Stony said. And it was the truth: A few miles later he directed her to pull into an Exxon station and park away from the lights.

  “Can you tell me now why we’re here?” Nessa said.

  “I need to make some calls,” Stony said. “In private.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you go to the bathroom, get a snack or something. I just need a few minutes.”

  She looked hurt. “Fine.” She grabbed her cloth shoulder bag, a huge colorful thing made in India, and stalked toward the gas station building. There was only one car at the pumps, and one other car parked in front of the building. He decided he could stay in the passenger seat.

  He checked his phone again, but as he expected, there was no new message from Delia. He’d lied to Nessa, a bit. He didn’t need to make any phone calls, but he did need to wait here for a while.

  He wished he hadn’t destroyed the flash card from the red phone; he wanted to look through those names in the pictures while he waited. Well, Delia would have a copy, and they’d look through them together.

  He had recognized one of the three names he’d seen. Eric Hamm was one of Calhoun’s “employees,” an LD plucked from a group of immigrants to the island. Mr. Blunt had spent months tracking these recruits. All of them left the island by ship or helicopter, made their way to a Calhoun-owned compound in Pensacola, Florida … and never came out. As far as Blunt could determine they were still inside. For some time now Blunt had wanted to break into the compound, but Stony had talked him out of it. They couldn’t risk Blunt’s life, and they couldn’t risk alerting the Commander.

  As soon as the strange voice had called him from Blunt’s phone, Stony was sure that Mr. Blunt had done something extreme to get these names—and gotten caught. He wouldn’t have allowed the phone to be taken from him without a fight.

  So, they probably had the names of Calhoun’s recruits. But what did the words after their names mean? Eric Haslett was mad. Elena Gomez was in a bog. Terry Alsup was … whatever iad was: in a ditch? They seemed too short for passwords. Too short even for code names. Abbreviations, then?

  Nessa’s head appeared in the window of the station—she had a phone to her ear. She looked toward the van, then turned away from the window. He supposed she could be calling family, but doubted it. She’d be complaining to her boss.

  He thought: Gomez is bogged, Haslett is mad, Alsup is I.A.D.—.

  IAD. Dulles International Airport.

  He opened his phone again. Even though Delia wouldn’t read the message for a while, he had to tell someone.

  They r airport codes, he typed.

  A minute later Nessa was walking back to the van, still holding the phone. She walked up to the passenger door and held up the phone to him. She looked like she was keeping the lid on some strong emotion: anger, maybe. He opened the door.

  “The Commander?” he said.

  She put the phone in his hand. He checked out the parking lot again, then scanned the road in front of the station. No one else was outside, and no headlights were coming this way. He glanced at his wristwatch, then lifted the phone. “Hello?”

  “Stony my boy!” His voice, bouncing a thousand miles over satellites and cell towers, boomed as clear as if the old man were standing beside him, shouting into his ear. He was using his stage voice, which meant that there were people around him, listening in.

  “Good evening, Commander,” Stony said.

  “I’ve heard you’ve had a Goddamn barnstormer of a trip. Vanessa says that the people admire the hell out of you. You’re like a Goddamn Bob Hope!”

  “That was the goal.” Nessa stared at him with that same tense expression on her face. Her hand was inside her Indian bag.

  The Commander said, “I just wanted to tell you, you were right and I was wrong. You’ve done a great service for our people. You’ve reminded them that we’re a community, a community that cares for each other.”

  Stony made a vaguely affirmative noise and glanced at his watch again.

  The Commander said, “I also wanted to say that I don’t have any hurt feelings about this.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t trust you, and you didn’t trust me. That’s regrettable. But I think you’ll agree that the blame goes both ways.”

  Stony said, “Would you like to tell me what we’re talking about?”

  “Don’t do this, boy. I know about the spying. I know about those messages he sent to you—I’m holding the phone. Had to clean it off, but I’ll give him this, he was clever.”

  “Where’s Mr. Blunt, Commander?”

  “Jammed the damn thing inside Sheila’s body cavity! I don’t think we’d have found it for hours if you hadn’t called back.”

  “Where is Mr. Blunt?”

  “I’m sorry, Stony. Had to be done. In the navy, they shoot spies.”

  “You were never in the fucking navy! You worked on a fucking dock!”

  “Stony, get a hold of yourself.”

  “You shot him?”

  “Well, with Mr. Blunt we had to be a little more thorough. You know his history. We just couldn’t risk a comeback.”

  Nessa had stepped back, and now the gun was out, a little black pistol. Her hand shook, and she looked stricken.

  “Put that away,” Stony said. “Put it to hell away!”

  Nessa took another half step back, then steadied the gun with her other hand.

  The Commander said, “You won’t be able to act on those names, Stony. It’s too late. They’re scattered across the globe, and they’ve already received the signal. I sent it as soon as we discovered what Mr. Blunt had done.”

  “You—you can’t. Why would you do that? On D-day—”

  “I was willing to give D-day a chance, Stony! But I was also pretty Goddamn sure that when we went public, the breathers would cut down any LD who dared step into the light. The backup plan was always in place. It had to be. What choice did we have?”

  “Blunt was right. You’re insane.”

  “I never expected us to see eye to eye on this. But what I’m doing is for the best interest of our people.”

  Nessa said, “I’m supposed to take away all your phones now.” Her voice quavered.

  “You’re aiming a gun at me?” Stony said. “Have you not listened to a single thing I’ve said?”

  The Commander said, “Give her the cellphones, Stony. We’d like you to avoid calling the Diggers for a while. Then Vanessa will take you to an airport, and if it’s at all possible, we’ll fly you out here to the bunker. You know better than anyone else that this is the safest place to be. I’m going to hang up now, okay?”

  Stony clicked off the phone and handed it to Nessa.

  “And the other one?” she said.

  He dug into his pocket and fished out the silver Nokia he used for talking to Alice and Crystal. “There,” he said. From the road came the sound of an engine. Stony glanced through the windshield. A single headlight swerved into the parking lot.

  Nessa started to turn toward the noise and Stony said, “What about my guns?”

  Her eyes jerked back to his. “You have—?”

  “No, I don’t believe in them. Motorcycle.”

  “What?”

  The bike flashed past, and a black boot caught Nessa under the ribs and catapulted her sideways. She hit the pavement, then bounced, tumbling, and came to a sudden rest, facedown. The pistol had disappeared—sent flying.

  The motorcyclist braked hard, whipped back toward Nessa. The bike slowed, rolled forward, and stopped with the front wheel touching the woman’s head.
/>
  “Wait!” Stony said. “Don’t kill her.”

  The cyclist pulled off the black helmet and set it on the gas tank. “She had a gun on you,” Delia said. Her jawbone gleamed in the reflected lights of the gas station. “Does this mean Calhoun knows about Blunt?”

  “He killed him,” Stony said. “But it’s worse than that.”

  “How can it possibly be worse?”

  “He’s starting it,” Stony said. “The Big Bite.”

  “Jesus,” Delia said.

  Nessa moaned, started to lift her head. Delia looked down at her, then said, “You need to tell me how to get onto that fucking island.”

  “You won’t get to him,” Stony said. “He’s in a bunker. A whole series of bunkers. A city of them.”

  “What did you do, Stony?”

  “The spaceport was a decoy, something to fool the spy satellites. We needed the time to build something nuke-proof.”

  A man—the clerk?—stepped half out of the station door, holding it open. Then he saw Nessa on the ground and started to jog toward them. Delia reached inside her leather jacket, withdrew an automatic, and fired two shots, well over the head of the man. He ducked and ran back into the building.

  “You know, it’s almost a relief,” she said.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Stony said. “It’s the end of the world.”

  “For them, maybe,” Delia said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  April 28, 2010

  Chicago

  hose who were transformed during the outbreak know everything they need to know. Even the fortunate amnesiacs, their memories scoured by fever, have since heard a hundred stories they can substitute for their own. She (or he) was bitten. Sometime later—a day, two days—she awoke to a strangely quiet world, the streets silent except for the moans of the still-hungry dead, the skies empty of planes. There was a taste in her mouth.

  Ah, but those few who lived through it, who survived still breathing—they don’t talk about it much. When they do, someone inevitably says, It was just like a movie. Perhaps it’s because they saw the opening days of the outbreak through television screens. When the ghouls finally threw themselves against the door, when it was finally time to act, it felt as if they were being called in front of the camera, ready to recite their lines, to scream, to run.

  But we’re jumping ahead again. It’s Ruby’s story we need to tell.

  She was just twenty-two that April of the Big Bite, finishing her first year of law school at Loyola University. She was living in a tiny, third-floor apartment in Lincoln Park. One window overlooked a slice of West Altged, a tree-lined street that had recently burst into full spring gorgeousness. The other window was semi-blocked by a semi-functional air conditioner.

  Thanks to the rules drilled into her by her mother and aunt, Ruby was better prepared for the zombie apocalypse than most. She maintained a three-day supply of bottled water and canned food. She kept a 9-mm Heckler & Koch USP (a gift from Alice) in a gun safe in her bedroom, and an aluminum baseball bat by the door. Her front door was metal and could be secured by two deadbolts and a chain lock. She kept a backpack ready with clothes, antibiotics, ammo, and tampons.

  When she heard of the outbreak that morning, she did not panic. The cellphone transmissions were jammed, and she could not get through to Alice, who lived on the other side of the city. But she was able to get a text message to her mother in Utah. Crystal told her to stay put. Do not answer the door, do not let anyone in, and do not leave the apartment. If she tried to flee the city, if she risked the highways, they might never find her.

  Ruby had never been the most compliant of children, but in this instance her mother seemed to be making sense. She closed the windows and pulled the drapes. She sat on the floor of the living room, out of sight of the windows, with the HK beside her. She opened her laptop and was relieved to find that her Wi-Fi was on and the cable modem was still up.

  Well, she thought. Facebook has certainly taken a dark turn.

  The Internet was awash in second-by-second horrors: pictures, video, and eyewitness reports. Twitter had turned into an unrelenting stream of exclamation marks and bad advice. Friends and acquaintances across the country and overseas reported various levels of infection. In some places no LDs were in sight. But in the largest cities, especially those in America, the streets were filling with undead. New York, Philadelphia, Newark, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati … Chicago.

  Outside, sirens blared, and gunshots cracked like slamming car doors, and car doors slammed like gunshots. Whenever she heard something particularly close—a scream, a car alarm—she went to the window, careful not to move the drapes. Most of the time she saw nothing. As the day wore on, slow-moving figures appeared in the streets. When darkness fell she did not turn on her lights, and opened her laptop only when she was covered by a blanket. She typed with one hand now. The other gripped the pistol.

  She could admit to herself now that yes, she was terrified. Afraid of dying, afraid of—could she use the word?—the zombies. And God help her, afraid of turning into one.

  She was disappointed in herself. She’d grown up knowing about LDs, thinking about them, advocating for them. When she was ten years old, Crystal had told her about her uncle, and where he was being held (secret emails from Deadtown had begun to arrive by then), and why her grandmother was also in prison. Ruby did not freak out. Quite the opposite: She was thrilled. By thirteen she’d become something of an undead ally, an activist who picked schoolyard fights whenever her classmates played Humans vs. Zombies. In eighth grade she went door to door with a petition demanding that the government give amnesty to any undead in hiding (she got five signatures). When she was seventeen she joined Amnesty International and started a blog, Dead to Rights. The amount of hate mail she received—and answered—was stunning. When people told her about the coming apocalypse, she called them bigots.

  Bet they’re laughing it up now. As they get their arms bitten off. Fuckheads.

  But it wasn’t just the undead she needed to worry about; the living could kill her, too. What if one of her fellow tenants tried to fight LDs with a torch—the whole building could come down. She would have to flee the building and take her chances on the street. Even if she managed to stay in the apartment undetected, eventually she’d have to leave to find food, and risk being shot by a survivor.

  Alice had taught her that the outbreak, when it came, would not be over soon. The fever lasted only forty-eight hours, but that didn’t mean everything would be over in two days max. It was a rolling infection, so even as some of the first to die recovered their sanity, others were dying, or in the throes of the fever.

  Near 11 p.m. she got a text from her friend Gina: Where r u? Help.

  Ruby stared at her phone. Gina lived two blocks away, on Lincoln Avenue. Another message from Gina popped up: Zs in my building.

  Hide, Ruby typed. Don’t make a noise.

  A minute passed. Two.

  Gina?

  She couldn’t tell if her texts were getting through. None were coming to her anymore.

  She sent again: Gina? Are you there?

  Months later, long after the cell networks had gone silent, Ruby would not throw away her phone. She had a vague idea that someday the electricity and the satellites and the cell towers would all come back online. Someday, Gina would call her.

  * * *

  Sometime later—this must have been two or three in the morning, after her cell battery had died—she lurched awake, blinked at the dark room. Her hand still gripped the gun. She didn’t know she’d been asleep. She didn’t know what had awakened her. There’d been a huge noise—an explosion, from somewhere outside.

  She pulled the blanket from her. Her laptop screen was dead. The clock above the microwave had gone out, too. A blown transformer, then?

  She went to the window. The street was dark: street lamps out, not a window lit. In the distance was the faint orange glow of a large fire. Were there shapes moving on the street?
She could see nothing, but imagine everything.

  She thought she heard a voice, calling thinly like a drawn-out note on a violin. She leaned her head against the window, but the sound slipped away. She walked to the center of the room and stood in the dark, straining to hear. Yes, someone crying. She let the sound pull her to the apartment door and she heard it more clearly. It was Hernán Trujillo, she realized. A third grader who lived with his mom only three doors down, a boy Ruby had babysat for half a dozen times. She’d heard him cry before, but this was different. He’d been hurt, or perhaps pushed by fear into a sound that was both smaller and more primitive than a scream, the whine of a trapped animal.

  Or maybe it’s not Hernán, she told herself. Maybe the sound wasn’t even coming from her floor, maybe it was winding up the stairwell. That high voice could have belonged to one of a dozen children who lived in the building, someone she didn’t know at all. It could even be a woman. There was no reason to leave the apartment.

  Ruby moved closer to the door and looked through the peephole. She saw nothing.

  She went back to the living room and felt around for the flashlight. She didn’t turn it on. She made sure the gun’s safety was on, tucked the pistol into the front waistband of her jeans, and went back to the door.

  The crying had stopped. This only made her feel worse.

  She put her hand on the deadbolt. The Trujillos’ door was only what—twenty, thirty feet away? She could yank open the door, and run to their door. Hernán might even be wandering in the hallway. She would scoop him up and bring him back to her apartment, slam the door.

  Or she could wait until he started screaming as the dead things ate him.

  She slowly slid back the bolt, the scrape as loud in her ears as if it had been amplified. She waited, listening. After half a minute (or perhaps only ten seconds—time slowed when you were panicked) she unlatched the chain and bent to look again through the peephole. Nothing but black. The butt of the pistol grip was hard against her belly. Ruby moved the flashlight to her other hand and dried her sweat-slicked palm against her pant leg. She reached for the last lock and twisted it.