Only once did they have to leave the interstate and weave through city streets. Stony told Ruby to keep her head down, but she thought this was primarily because he did not want her to see the bodies as they stumbled in front of his van. People would not get out of the way, and Stony could not slow down for them. It was a relief to get back onto the interstate.
Ruby said, “Did Alice tell you where to find me?”
“She gave me directions,” he said. “But I already knew your address.”
“Yeah, I got your birthday cards.”
She opened her eyes. The sunlight, even filtered through the blood-smeared windshield, was too bright. She closed them again. The air smelled of gasoline, from all the extra plastic cans Stony kept in the back of the van. She said, “How much longer?”
“Four hours if nothing gets in our way.”
“No one lives there, you know. It’s all boarded up.”
“Even better,” Stony said. “You’ll be safe there.”
She opened her eyes to slits. He was driving with both hands on the wheel—one hand dead flesh, one plastic—and staring straight ahead. The driver’s-side window had blown out during the escape, and the wind whipped at the dirty bandanna he kept tied around his forehead. She’d never seen a dead man close up. His skin was the texture and color of concrete. There was a gash on his neck, but it did not bleed; the dry flesh lay open, revealing not blood or tissue, but a deeper shade of gray. When he wasn’t talking to her, or when he thought she wasn’t looking at him, his face set into an expression that looked like grief, or anger.
“What’s wrong?” Ruby asked.
He forced a smile, then let it slip away. After a time he said, “I need to tell you, Ruby. I’m responsible for this.”
Ruby said, “What do you mean?”
“All of it.” He glanced at her, then back to the road. His eyes were milky white, blind man’s eyes. “The man who started the bite—I made sure everyone trusted him. Trusted me. Then I let him get away with it. I could have stopped it at any time, but I thought I was the smartest guy in the room.”
“I don’t understand. If you didn’t know what he was doing, you can’t take responsibility. You didn’t start the outbreak.”
“Oh, Ruby,” he said. “They couldn’t have done it without me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
April 29, 2010
Iowa
he road cleared, and they crossed the Illinois border without incident. He kept the speedometer pegged to 90, and even then cars zoomed past him.
He talked as he drove. He told her everything.
He started with Commander Calhoun, the island, the theory and practice of the Big Bite. She asked questions, and he told her more, going back years: The Living Dead Army, the safe houses, the congress, Billy Zip and the ZCMI attack, Deadtown. She needed to know how the undead had waited underground like a bomb, like a poisonous gas. A thousand pockets of inevitability. She needed to know the crimes he’d committed. “I wrote it all down,” he said. “I’ve got a printout in my bag. It’s about twelve hundred pages. Plus there’s a diary my mom kept—my biological mom. And there’s this novel—”
“You wrote a novel?” Ruby asked.
“It’s a draft,” he said.
They were making good time. The infection would be rolling west from Chicago, north from Madison, south from Des Moines. If they could beat that wave to Easterly, Ruby might live through the day.
Then they reached the rolling hills outside Iowa City.
He stopped the van at the top of a hill. Ruby stirred, and Stony said, “I don’t want you to panic.”
She sat upright. At the bottom of the hill, the four lanes of interstate had become a parking lot: semis, school buses, dozens of cars. Foraging among the vehicles were hundreds and hundreds of LDs, like the graduating class of the University of Iowa on an undead field trip. Some of the LDs had noticed Stony’s van and were heading up the hill.
“Turn around,” Ruby said.
“I told you not to panic,” he said. “You just need to go lie down in the back of the van. I’ll help you get—”
“You’re not going to drive through them? There are too many, Stony. They’ll swarm us.”
“I should have tried this earlier. I know how to get through them.”
“You’ll get through them. They’re not trying to eat you,” she said. “Just turn the van around and we’ll find some other way.”
Jesus, she was stubborn. Absolutely no doubt she was a Mayhall woman. “Please, Ruby, just trust me, okay?”
“If I get bitten, I’m going to come back and kick your ass.”
“That’s a given. Now please, before they get here.” He got out of his seat and went to the back of the van. He pried up a section of the aluminum floor to the left of the drive shaft and showed her the coffin-like space below. It was a metal box with a bit of foam padding to dampen the noise when going over bumps.
She frowned. “You’re putting me in a coffin.”
“Coffins are smaller, trust me.”
She got in the compartment, lay back, and crossed her arms over her chest, one hand holding the pistol. He placed the flooring over the compartment, thought for a moment, and lifted it again.
“What?” she asked.
“I just remembered that this may be airtight. Just a sec.”
“What the fuck! Get me out of here!”
“Shhh,” he said, and set the lid at a slight angle so the corners were open, then threw a tarp over the area. She should be fine; there were handles on the inside of the lid so she could push her way out if she needed to.
He climbed back in the driver’s seat. A ragged column of fevered LDs shuffled up the hill, the nearest of them less than twenty yards away. Stony put the van in drive, covered the brake—and closed his eyes. He felt his hands gripping the steering wheel. Relax, he told himself. Feel your hands …
He heard a thump and glanced up. A huge white man in a Blackhawks shirt smacked the fender of the van and reached for the passenger door.
Stony shut his eyes again. He rubbed his palms against the plastic wheel. It was a part of his hands, an extension of him. He felt the steering column, the engine, then each axle like a set of limbs …
I am the car. The car is me. I belong to you and you belong to me.
The passenger door shook and the LD howled in hunger, but Stony kept his eyes closed. He slowly eased up on the brake, and the van began to roll forward. He rode the brake against the gravity of the hill, never letting the van get over walking speed. The road was warm and rough beneath his wheels. His skin was dented sheet metal. His eyes were shattered glass. He could see everything.
The LDs stepped aside as the car approached, and then they began to walk away from him. The vehicle had become another dead thing. Not food, not even a container of food.
He slipped down the hill, one undead among many. As he approached the helter skelter of stopped vehicles at the bottom of the hill he was forced to pull into the grassy median, but even that did not alarm his people. He rolled past cars with sprung doors, shattered glass. He forced himself to look into the cabins of the cars, through the open door of the yellow school bus. He memorized what had been laid out on the road.
He’d done this. He’d brought this moment to them.
He did not tell Ruby it was safe to leave the compartment until they were miles past and the road was clear again. She’d seen enough, hadn’t she? Awful enough to witness horrors in the dark. But in bright sunlight, on a beautiful spring day, with the wind blowing across the Iowa fields? Too much. Too much for anyone.
An hour later and fifty miles from Easterly, Ruby told him to pull over. “I have to pee like a racehorse,” she said.
He scanned the scrub brush by the side of the road and decided it was unlikely an LD would be lurking here. She grabbed her backpack and stepped off the road. “Be quick,” he said, and turned his back to her.
But she wasn’t quick. After five minutes she sti
ll hadn’t returned, and without turning around he called out for her.
“Bite me,” she called back. In another minute she came out of the brush. She’d tried to wash the blood from her face, and had only partially succeeded. Still, she was beautiful. He saw Crystal in her, of course, and therefore Alice: those high cheekbones, that narrow, stern architecture of shoulder and hip and knee. But there was something in the way she walked, the way she swung her arms climbing up to the roadway, so unself-conscious, that reminded him of Junie.
“Your turn to drive,” he told her. “And my turn for the box.”
“Are you sleepy?”
“We’re ahead of the wave now,” he said. “The next people we’ll see are likely to be breathers. They might be police, or just armed gangs. Who knows how crazy it’ll be. I’ll be back there if you need me, but it’ll be up to you to get us the rest of the way. I know you can—why are you smiling?”
“You’re using the Patton voice.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mom does that to me all the time. And Aunt Alice, too. You sound just like them.”
“I do?”
“You Mayhalls all sound like you’re about to march into battle. Now, are you going to tell me how you got through those undead in Iowa City?”
“What do you mean? I just drove slow and—”
“What? No. They ignored the van.”
He shrugged. “I’m dead, they’re dead—”
“Bullshit. They didn’t even try to get in. They were pawing through all those other vehicles for food, hungry, and you just sailed right through them. They walked away from you.”
“You peeked.”
“It’s like back at the apartment,” she said. “Those zombies you commanded to stop. Can other LDs do that?”
“I’ll remind you that that didn’t work so well.”
“Tell me what’s going on, Uncle Stony. What are you, King of the Zombies?”
“Don’t use that word,” he said. He was stalling for time. “It’s just that, well, some of the newly turned LDs are suggestible.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Never mind. If you’re going to blow me off, fine. Where are the keys?”
She was mad. A little bit. But at least she’d stopped interrogating him. “In the ignition. Always leave the keys in the ignition in case—”
“Patton.”
“Right.”
He sat in the back of the van, next to the open compartment, ready to slip inside at the first sign of breathers, and jump up front at the first sign of LDs. He told her to exit on Route 59. The highway that led into Easterly.
“The Shell station looks closed,” Ruby said. “The BP, too.”
“We should have enough gas in the tank to get to Easterly.”
“I’m just trying to be a good tour guide. Oops—cops ahead.” He saw the flashers reflecting in the windshield. “They’re blocking the road.” Her voice rose slightly.
“It’s fine,” Stony said. “As soon as you can, roll down the window and yell something, so they know you’re not a zombie,” he said.
“Zombies don’t drive cars,” Ruby said.
“Listen to me. Tell them you’re on your way to see Kwang Cho, he lives in Easterly. Keep your hands visible, you don’t want them to shoot you. They’re going to search the van, so for goodness sake don’t even look at the floor. Also—”
He saw her face.
“Also, that is the last instruction I’ll give to you.” He dropped into the compartment and pulled the lid down over him.
The van rolled to a stop. After perhaps a minute he heard a door open, and Ruby speaking. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.
He thought, She might want to stay with the cops. Her own people. There were other towns near here, and they’d probably armed up. She might think her chances were better with them than with her deranged undead uncle. She’d be wrong, but he could see her thinking that.
After several minutes the car door shut. The engine started and the van began to move.
Was that Ruby driving, or was a cop in the van? Maybe they were pulling it over so they could search it.
A minute later the van accelerated. Judging from the smoothness of the ride, they were still on the interstate. He waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore—perhaps two minutes—then popped the lid and slid it back a few inches. All he could see, though, was the roof of the van. He really should have put a periscope in this thing. He listened, but she wasn’t talking to anyone in the van, and he couldn’t hear anything else.
Finally he said, “What happened?”
She said, “Nothing. I told them I was alone, and desperately trying to reach my uncle’s house in Easterly. They said most of the town’s evacuating, and my uncle probably had already left, but they let me through.”
He slid the lid back farther and sat up. His head was still well below the windshield. “Without searching the van? Why would they do that?”
“Because they’re a bunch of old white guys, and I’m a cute white girl.”
“No, really.”
She tilted down the rearview mirror so she could see his face. “You don’t understand living people, do you? Breathers.”
“Of course I do. I—no. Not all the time.”
“Haven’t you ever fallen in love?”
He thought of Valerie, the long hours with their arms entwined. Was that what breathers were talking about when they talked of love? Or was what he experienced some shadow emotion, some impersonation of romance? He had no nervous system, no capillaries to flush with arousal, no glands to manufacture oxytocin to bind him to his mate. How the hell could he know?
He said, “It’s not really in my nature.”
He climbed out of the compartment and squatted behind her seat. The way ahead looked utterly unfamiliar. Where had all these houses come from? Where did all the money for these houses come from? Clusters of pale, tasteful two-story homes had filled in the cornfields. At the center of town were actual fast-food restaurants: a McDonald’s, a Subway, and a Wendy’s.
“Holy cow,” Stony said. “There’s a Walmart.” Perhaps a hundred cars were in the parking lot, and the people were pushing through the doors with shopping carts piled high.
“Those must be the ones who are staying,” Ruby said. “Or looting the place on their way out of town.”
“Iowans don’t loot,” Stony said.
“Oh yeah? Wait till the zombies attack.”
They passed through the little downtown area, and he directed her onto a two-lane road. Out here the fields were still open, still undeveloped. And now, he thought, they never would be.
“There,” he said, and pointed toward a distant barn roof.
And then he was home.
“We’re not staying here, are we?” Ruby asked.
The windows were boarded up with weathered plywood, and the white paint was flaking from the wood siding, but otherwise the house looked exactly as it had the day he left it—sturdy and firm, braced for another blazing summer, another hard winter. A horde of brain-eating zombies.
“The lawn is mowed,” Stony said.
“So?”
“So nobody lives here.”
“Maybe you have really nice squatters.”
Then he thought: Kwang. He must be keeping an eye on the place. Stony looked around. The rise in the land still hid the house from the road, if not the barn, and the Cho house was obscured by the row of trees that separated their fields. The front door of this house was locked, another good sign.
“Okay,” Stony said. “You turn the van around so it’s facing nose out, and leave the keys in it. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He walked around the side of the house. The crawl space door was still there but padlocked shut. He held the lock in his hand, smiling at it, until it clicked open.
The light from the doorway only partially illuminated the room, but he could see that it had been nearly emptied. His tool bench was still there aga
inst one wall, though his collection of power tools was gone. The handmade bookshelves were bare.
Oh. Of course his sisters couldn’t hold on to this stuff. He was in hiding, their mother was in prison, and Crystal was two thousand miles away. Still, he’d imagined this basement room sealed up like a tomb, his Batcave, waiting for him.
He tried the light switch, but of course the electricity was off. He walked across the room. The cement floor was water-stained, but still smooth. On the far wall, the Kiss Alive poster was gone. Where it had hung was the clear outline of the paneling that hid the door to his little secret room. He’d thought he’d been so careful, so clever.
Above he heard Ruby banging on the front door. He walked to the spot in the room that was beneath his bedroom, and reached up. The trapdoor popped out of the way, exactly like the lid in the van. That’s right: This was his first tongue-and-groove door. He’d been reusing the design for years.
He pulled himself up into his bedroom—his bedroom closet, actually—and stepped out. There were no windows, and the only light was from the faint glow from the living room. The room was an empty box, stripped to nothing.
He went to the front door and unlocked it. The wood had swelled in the frame and he had to yank hard to open it.
“I could have been bitten by now,” she said.
“Sorry.”
The house was nearly empty. The sale had taken every article of furniture, even the carpets. Ruby kicked at a dark clump of something clinging to the floorboards. “I think animals have been here,” she said.
“I’d be offended if they hadn’t,” Stony said.
In the kitchen they found a plastic patio table he didn’t recognize and a cardboard box. Ruby peeled back the lid. “Christmas decorations,” she said. “So we’ve got that covered.”
“I’ll get us something to sit on,” Stony said. He went back to his bedroom and dropped back through the trapdoor. He was thinking he could unbolt the bookshelves, maybe improvise some benches. But unless he just smashed the boards apart, he’d need a screwdriver at least.
He went to the section of paneling that hid his room, pulled it aside, then opened the metal door. On the sheet metal floor of the tiny room were stacks of cardboard boxes, four deep and five high. He went to the nearest stack and lifted the topmost box—surprisingly heavy—and carried it out into the light slanting through the cellar door. He opened the flaps, and the rich, familiar smell of pulp filled his nose. The top of the box was lined with faded, colorful covers and white-crackled spines.
Raising Stony Mayhall Page 32