Raising Stony Mayhall (15 page)

“He didn’t choose this,” Valerie said. “We should have let him decide.”

Stony looked up from the eyepiece. “What? Let him die?”

“If that’s what he wanted.”

He swiveled to face her. She must have been a handsome woman when alive. Her bearing was erect, and she wore her plain, secondhand dress as if it were an evening gown. But she was graveborn, one of the LDs who’d already been dead when the outbreak swept through the East, and so her appearance had suffered even before she’d joined the others above-ground. Unlike most of the LDs, women and men alike, she refused a wig. She was perfectly bald, and her eyes were sunk so far that they seemed to be excavated from the gray stone of her skull.

Stony said, “But we can’t just let him
die
die.”

She looked down at Thomas. “This one had a chance to
get away. He could have been in heaven by now. And now, he’s here.”

“Being LD isn’t that bad, is it?”

“You’re young, Stony. Fresh. You were bitten what, seven years ago?”

“Uh, about that, yeah.” Valerie was his closest friend here, the one he could talk to most honestly, but he’d never told her about his birth. Delia’s orders.

“You’ve just begun. You’ll begin to realize that we’re not supposed to be here—we’re not part of the natural order. We’re in limbo, cut off from life, from God, even cut off from hell.”

“Come on, Valerie …” He said it lightly. “Even if we are all spawns of hell, I couldn’t make him
choose
, not under duress. It would have been cruel.”

He felt a little guilty making this argument; if there was one way to win a point with Valerie it was to appeal to her kindness. When he first arrived, it was Valerie who saw how lonely he was, how much he missed his family, and began to pull him into the life of the community. When she discovered how much he enjoyed building things, she convinced her sister, the breather who owned the house, to purchase materials and tools, and assigned him renovation projects that would please the other residents. It was Valerie who detected his hidden competitive streak and set him up with Tanya and Teddy, two Scrabble fiends who’d alienated everyone else in the house with their cutthroat style of play. And soon he discovered something he would never have imagined: He felt comfortable around dead people. At home he’d been so self-conscious about his dead skin, his inability to sleep, his fundamental difference from his sisters and his mother. But here he was hardly the most decayed person—in fact, he was
downright attractive. He felt shallow comparing looks, but he had to admit that he was in better condition than anyone else in the house.

And he was safe. Well, more safe. In Iowa he’d been almost constantly on edge, because he felt as if his security rested entirely on his shoulders. His mother might mean well, but she couldn’t really protect him. A circle of baking flour wasn’t going to keep the government troops at bay. But here, Delia and Mr. Blunt were so competent, so sure of themselves, that he could do something he could never before afford to do: relax. Hell, he could even be goofy if he wanted to.

He owed so much of this new sense of comfort to Valerie. She made everything easier for him. He knew that in some ways he was making her into a proxy for his sisters, or perhaps, more disturbingly, his mother. Lately, however, he’d become worried about Valerie, and their roles had begun to reverse. She had always had a melancholy nature, but in the past year she’d been talking more and more about the wrongness of undead existence. There was a strong self-loathing streak in the LDs—Delia said it was because they’d bought into the mainstream’s portrayal of them—but many of the graveborn had started calling themselves the Damned. All LDs were going to hell in an inescapable handbasket. The graveborn said they understood more because they’d gotten closer to the other side than anyone—they had a better idea of what was spiritually at stake. The bitten LDs argued that they’d
all
died, and the graveborn were putting on airs.

Thomas arched his back, then flipped himself onto his front. He raised his head and then bashed his face against the floor.

“Thomas!” Stony yelled. He jumped down from the chair and grabbed the man by the shoulders. “Thomas, stop it!”

The man suddenly went still. Stony turned him back onto his back, and the man stared into his eyes. Thomas was gone, lost in fever, but something glimmered behind his eyes.

“How did you do that?” Valerie asked.

“What?” Stony began checking the buckles on the leather straps, cinching them tighter.

“He listened to you. The fevered don’t listen to anyone.”

“It doesn’t last long.” Stony adjusted the strap keeping the gag in place, and Thomas shook his head like an angry child. “See?” he said. Valerie frowned, thinking, and Stony said, “Look, I know nobody would ask to go through this, but he was already bitten, the fever was already coming, and he wasn’t thinking straight. Even if he’d begged for death, I wouldn’t have killed him, because already he wasn’t in his right mind. He’d just been
attacked
by us, why would he want to become us? But in a few hours he gets a chance to really choose.”

“He won’t be the same person in a few hours.”

“Okay, maybe not,” Stony said. Many of the bitten lost their memory or emerged with altered personalities. “But at least he’ll be alive. Or moving at least. ‘The dead stick moves in the wind.’ ”

“Don’t start quoting the Lump to me,” Valerie said.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that—” He looked up at her, then back at Thomas. “Look, I haven’t told anyone in the house about this, but I had a chance once. Someone I loved was very hurt, and I—I didn’t do anything. I ran away before I even realized I could have saved her.”

Valerie looked appalled. “Are you talking about biting someone? On purpose?”

“She was dying. If I could have—”

“Not even then. Not ever. No biting. That’s our one rule, our most important rule.”

“Valerie, sometimes—”

“Think about that girl who lives next door. Would you want her to die?”

Stony grimaced in frustration. Why was she bringing up the girl next door? “Never mind,” he said. Every day he thought about the accident. Maybe Junie wouldn’t have wanted to be converted; maybe she would have thanked him. But even if she hated him for it, at least he’d be able to ask her forgiveness now.

Valerie tilted her head. “I’m worried about you, Stony.” She touched his head. He still had all his hair, smooth and brown. It never grew, but never fell out. “I would pray for you, if I thought God listened to us.” She stepped away from him, then stopped in the doorway. “We’ll talk about this more when Thomas’s fever breaks.”

“That’s right,” Stony said. “All three of us can talk about it then.”

He tried to get back to work, but now the slide show of the accident was firing behind his eyes. He saved the VisiCalc sheet where he’d been recording Thomas’s stats, then copied it to his backup floppy and ejected it. Then he crouched and touched the man’s shoulder, and Thomas twisted his head in a vain attempt to bite his hand. LDs didn’t hunger for other LDs—this was just an automatic response. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Stony said to him. “You’re almost done.” A lie. It might take another day and a half for the fever to pass.

Stony went to the bathroom, washed the last of the clown white from his face, and went upstairs. The two houses were small, falling down on the outside, but well tended inside, thanks largely to Stony’s renovation efforts. Every window was covered with heavy drapes. It was 8:30 p.m. but could have been 3 a.m., or noon. Most of the residents were in Yellow’s living room, smoking cigarettes and watching
Head of the Class
. Roger was laughing louder than anyone. LDs didn’t
need to sleep, but most of the ones Stony had met spent all of that extra time smoking and watching TV.

He found Delia in the kitchen, at the end of a phone cord stretched across the room. He was surprised to see Mr. Blunt at the table with her. Blunt lived in Aaron’s split-level in Culver City, where they sheltered four LDs. Aaron drove him over to Delia’s house once a week, but he wasn’t due for several more days.

“You have mail?” Stony asked him.

Mr. Blunt smiled, dipped into his briefcase with clacking fingers, and produced two envelopes, one thick and one very thin. “Stony” was written on the front of each: in elegant cursive on the thick envelope, and in blocky capitals on the other. Neither had a return address, but in the upper left corner of the thin envelope was the Hangul pictogram for “friend”:
. Upside Down Man and Legless Man, as Stony thought of them.

“I hear you’ve recruited someone to replace me,” Mr. Blunt said.

“I thought we should hire a professional,” Stony said. He tucked the envelopes into his back pocket and sat down. He nodded toward Delia. “How are the higher-ups taking it?”

This thing with Roger had to be an embarrassment for Delia. He knew that she was more than a cell leader; she was some kind of troubleshooter in the LDA hierarchy. Once a month, on average, she hit the road to inspect other safe houses. Other times she was constantly on the phone, and messages were left for her almost every day. The LDA used a system of voicemail dead drops. Cell leaders called a number that changed every week to leave messages for the group. Stony had offered to set up an electronic bulletin board, but Delia nixed the idea: most of the LDA didn’t know how to use a computer.

“The reaction has not been good, by the looks of it.” He leaned forward, creaking. “We have other problems besides Roger. We lost an entire house in Nevada.”

“What? How many people?”

Delia shushed him. Mr. Blunt lowered his voice. “Five LDs, two breathers. You ever hear about the Scanlon Sisters? Two lovely women in their seventies. They’ve been helping us since the outbreak.”

“Who turned them in?”

He shrugged. “We’re not sure. We wouldn’t know about the raid at all if one of their friends hadn’t contacted us. The Diggers sent in almost a hundred agents, sealed the entire block.”

“A
hundred
?” Stony said. LDs feared even a small squad of Gravediggers. But this was an army of them.

Delia carried the handset back to the wall and hung up. “They want to call a meeting,” she said. “Another fucking
congress
. All the cell leaders at least, and more delegates besides. I’ve tried to tell them it’s a mistake. It’s a fucking security nightmare.”

Stony looked from her to Mr. Blunt. “They’ve done this before?”

“Only once,” she said. “In ’76.”

“But isn’t it dangerous?” Stony asked. “I mean, for all of you to be together like that?”

“Desperate times,” Mr. Blunt said. “People are scared. We lost a dozen people in the past year, and now five in one blow.”

“And two of the living.”

Mr. Blunt shrugged.

Delia said, “The Big Biters are lobbying for action again.”

“That’s crazy,” Stony said.

“Even the Perpetualists are getting antsy. They’re afraid if
we don’t change course soon, then the Big Bite becomes our only option.”

“How about you?” Stony asked her. “Is that what you think?” In front of the residents, Delia toed the line of the Abstainer majority, but he knew that she was privately sympathetic to the Perpetualist agenda. It was suicide to keep to a strict no-bite policy, the Perpetualists argued. If the LD race was to survive, the community needed to recruit at least as many members as they lost. Not one Big Bite, but a measured conversion campaign, slow enough to fly under the radar of the government, quick enough to keep their community viable.

Mr. Blunt smiled. “If we’re running low on converts, we can always set Roger loose on them.”

“What did they say about him?” Stony asked Delia. “Did the leaders agree on a punishment?”

“He’s to be grounded,” Delia said. “Grounded and disarmed.”

“Shit,” Stony said.

“Better than burning,” Mr. Blunt said.

The back door opened. Elizabeth, the owner of the house, came in carrying a bag of groceries. She was a middle-aged white woman, perhaps twenty pounds overweight. Valerie was her sister, but Stony had never been able to detect a resemblance; the dead tended to resemble one another more than the living they’d left behind.

“Oh, we have company,” Elizabeth said. “Good to see you, Mr. Blunt.” She noticed something in their faces. “Is there something wrong?”

If LDs could cry, Roger would have been bawling. He pleaded with Delia, but she wouldn’t be swayed. She pronounced
his sentence in the living room, witnessed by the other residents of the house, as well as Elizabeth. Some of the LDs seemed nervous about doing this in front of her, but Delia said that everyone, even their partners among the living, had to understand what was going to happen, and why.

“Roger, you will be bound and blindfolded, then moved to a high-security house,” she said. “You won’t be told the location. You won’t be permitted to go outside or see the outside. If after ten years you haven’t broken any rules of the residency, you may be allowed more privileges. Do you understand?”

“I didn’t mean it!” Roger said.

Stony thought of Junie.
It was an accident
.