Raising Stony Mayhall (11 page)

Kwang didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t quiver.

Stony got out of the car, went around to the passenger side, and opened the door. “Come on, man. Now.” He shook Kwang by the shoulders, slapped his face. But he was unconscious, inert. Dead drunk.

“Fuck.” Stony shut the door, turned toward the house. He’d have to go inside. Maybe everyone would be too drunk to notice his dead skin, his black gums, his milky eyes.

Sure.

He started across the lawn, stopped. The red ski mask was still in his pocket. He pulled it out and tugged it over his head.

Nobody on the lawn paid him any attention, but as he stepped onto the porch a kid in a Motörhead T-shirt looked at him and laughed. Stony said, “I’m looking for Junie Mayhall. Do you know where she is?”

“I don’t know, inside?”

He didn’t want to go through the door. The place was crowded.

“Can you go get her?”

“What are you going to do, rob her? And what’s wrong with your face?”

Stony pushed through the people clogging the door. In the living room he grabbed a girl by the arm and she yelped. “Where’s Junie Mayhall?” He had to yell above the music. She pulled her arm away and he asked someone else. Then someone else. Someone thought she was in the family room downstairs, so he headed toward the stairs.

Three boys—teenagers, probably, though they looked older—started up as he started down. “Is Junie Mayhall down there?”

“She’s fine,” one of them said.

That stopped him. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing’s wrong with her.” The one in the middle stepped around his friend. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and two leather wristbands. “Who the hell are you?” He reached to grab the mask.

Stony brushed his hand aside. “Get out of my way.”

“Fuck you,” the boy said, and pushed Stony in the chest.

“No,” Stony said. “Fuck you.” He put two hands on the boy’s shoulders and shoved. He fell into the boy behind him and they went down in a heap. Stony stepped over them. The
remaining kid, a boy not older than thirteen or fourteen, grabbed Stony by the shirt. The arm was pale, skinny. Not much flesh at all.

For the first time in his life, Stony felt it. It ran like a hot wire, up from his spine, to the base of his skull. His mouth opened on its own.

He wanted to bite. He wanted to bite hard.

The boy jerked his hand back.

“That’s right,” Stony said. “I’m smallpox. I’m a fucking ICBM.”

He turned away from them, went the rest of the way down the stairs. The room was dim and hazed with cigarette smoke. Pot, too, he guessed; he recognized the smell from his sister’s clothes. Perhaps a dozen people sat on couches or on the floor. He finally spotted Junie curled up on the carpet in a corner of the room, between a lamp and an armchair.

“Junie? Junie?”

She looked toward his voice. Something was wrong with her eyes. Her pupils were so large, making her look excited as well as scared.

Something struck him in the back of the head, something solid and thick. He felt no pain. He half turned, seized an arm—he didn’t know if it belonged to one of the boys from the stairs or someone new—and yanked. The person screamed and fell aside. Someone else stepped forward and punched him in the jaw. Once again he felt nothing. It was no worse than getting shot in the chest.

He turned his back on the attackers and reached out a hand to his sister. “Can you walk?”

A blow to his back made him take a half step forward. Then someone yanked the mask from his head.

He turned. It was the boy with the wristbands.

Stony grabbed him by the throat. The movement was so
fast, the boy didn’t have time to flinch. With his other hand, Stony reached out behind him. “Come with me, Junie.”

She grasped his hand and Stony stepped forward, still holding the boy by the throat. The boy backpedaled awkwardly. Stony walked him back to the doorway, then up the stairs. When he stumbled, Stony held him upright. His face turned cartoon red.

When they reached the top of the stairs, Stony pushed the boy away from him, into the bodies of the onlookers. Only a few people seemed to understand that there was some sort of fight going on.

Stony led Junie outside. Halfway across the lawn he glanced back. Figures filled the open doorway, staring at him. The wristband boy broke through their ranks and shouted hoarsely.

“We have to hurry,” Stony said to Junie.

She was babbling about being sorry. He didn’t know what she’d taken, but it must have been strong. He opened the back door for her and told her to lie down. Then he jumped into the front. Kwang was still passed out.

He started the car, put it in gear, looked over his shoulder, and pressed on the gas. The car lurched forward, and he slammed on the brakes. Reverse, reverse! He changed gears and backed out. At the end of the driveway he spun the wheel—the wrong way, but he quickly corrected and got the car pointing in the right direction.

He heard shouts, and someone slammed the trunk of the car. Oh God, he thought, please don’t dent Mr. Cho’s Buick.

He put the car in drive and gunned it. He turned at random, zigzagging through the residential streets, sure that they were going to follow him. Then suddenly the street he was on ended at a T-section with a two-lane road. He couldn’t remember if he’d come in this way, or if he was on the other end of the neighborhood. He turned left and floored it, driving
with one eye on the rearview mirror. So far, no lights were following him.

Junie was crying. He said, “You okay back there?”

She sobbed harder. “Don’t tell Mom.”

Stony knew he’d blown it. Why did he fight with those boys? Why did they have to keep attacking? They’d seen his face. They’d seen him with Junie. And now they’d be calling the police, reporting one of the living dead.

It was an accident, he thought.

A light in the rearview mirror caught his eyes. Headlights, moving up fast. He crested a hill, too fast. The car seemed to float for a moment, not quite airborne, then slammed down on its suspension. Junie shouted.

“Whoa,” Kwang said. “Where are we going?”

“Not now,” Stony said.

A sign flashed past. The junction for Route 59! He knew where he was. The entrance to the road was at the bottom of the hill. He braked, but he had too much mass, too much momentum, and he stomped harder. The car began to skid. Kwang yelled. Stony tried to correct the skid—and then they were spinning.

Kwang slid into the passenger door with a thump. Another thunk might have been Junie hitting the back of the seat. Stony gripped the wheel, willing the car to stop, but the vehicle seemed to move in slow, heavy motion, spinning and traveling at once, like a planet revolving as it glided through its orbit. Through the windshield he saw an open field, then a patch of highway, then a line of trees … and then headlights. Too close, too bright.

The windshield turned white.

e’d read that people in car accidents sometimes lost all memory of the event. He wasn’t that lucky. Each moment had been captured as a vivid image, then set running in his head, a series of educational slides. Here is the windshield exploding. Here is the dash, suddenly curled over them, a solid wave. Here is Kwang’s body half swallowed in plastic and metal. The pictures kept coming—click, click, click—so that he could barely see the room in front of him. He tried to concentrate on the closet full of clothes, the half-filled suitcase on the floor. With his working hand he grabbed a jacket from a hanger and threw it into the pile. Still the images flickered, every moment of the crash and after.

Only the sounds, the words, had been erased. He knew that he must have heard Kwang’s voice first, but he couldn’t remember what his friend had been saying. Something about the pain, probably. Or an appeal to God. Stony tried to open the driver’s-side door, but there was something wrong with his left arm. He twisted in his seat, managed to pull the handle, and half fell, half crawled out of the car.

The vehicle that had struck them—a blue pickup—sat a dozen yards away, its grille crumpled, its windshield crazed with white impact webs. A man with silver hair stared at him through the starry glass. Stony couldn’t tell if he was injured.

He turned to the back door of Mr. Cho’s car. He couldn’t see Junie, and thought that she must be on the floor. He yanked at the door with the arm that was still working. The metal squealed and popped, and the door opened. The backseat was empty, the floor was empty.

He could not process the impossibility of it. She was gone. Raptured.

Then he noticed that the rear window had been blown out. They’d been hit in the front, but the car had been spinning. Had she been thrown clear? He began to call her name. He walked to the trees beside the highway, crossed back to the fields on the other side, then back again.

A car stopped, then another. At some point someone must have driven to find a phone, or neighbors had called to report the accident, because an ambulance arrived, and then a fire engine. The banks of strobing lights helped him find her.

She was curled up under a tree, twenty or twenty-five feet deep in the woods. He knelt next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t move except to blink at the ground a few inches from her face. Her cheeks and forehead were puffy and white, as if she were suffering from some allergic reaction. He remembered talking to her, pouring words over her, but he could not remember what he said.

Someone had spotted them under the trees. Flashlight beams lit up the surrounding grass and leaves. Perhaps they called out to him.

Junie was talking, too, or trying to: Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. He bent over her and felt her breath on his skin. He must have asked her what she was saying; that was
the natural thing to do. He flattened onto his belly, his forehead touching hers. She inhaled, a quick sharp breath, and said, “Run.”

An orange-jacketed man, a fireman or paramedic, appeared next to him. Stony didn’t remember what he said; he was studying his sister’s face.

“Run,” she said again. “Run. Run. Run.”

But he failed her again. He didn’t move—couldn’t move—away from her. And then the man in the orange jacket played his light across Stony’s face. He started to say something, and then stepped back as if he’d been punched. He called for other men in a thin, barely controlled voice, but the panic was rising in him like a siren, clear enough even for Stony to hear. Maybe he knew what he was seeing. Maybe he wasn’t sure. But finally, finally, Stony obeyed his sister.

He closed the half-filled suitcase with his good hand. He was forgetting things, he knew. He’d been imagining this moment for years, picturing it as clearly as the escape from the Deadtown prison in book 5 of the Jack Gore series,
Bad Brains
. But now that the moment was upon him he realized he hadn’t prepared at all. There was no one here to help him. When he’d made it back to the house, after twenty minutes of frantic running through pitch-black fields, he’d found the lights on in the kitchen and living room, but his mother gone. A quick check of the driveway confirmed that she’d taken the car.

They must have called her. She’d be at the hospital, with Junie. And soon enough, they’d be coming for him.

He opened the trapdoor to the basement, tossed the suitcase below, and jumped down. He went to one of the shelves and reached up to bring down a thick book. When he was ten he’d stolen an idea from the Hardy Boys and carved a hiding place out of the pages. Inside was $220. His life savings, his
emergency fund, his ticket out of Easterly. And also, he knew, completely inadequate. The plan had called for getting to Chicago and hiding out with Alice. He’d planned on driving there, but that was out now. He didn’t think he’d ever drive again.

He had only a few hours until daylight. By then he had to be miles away.

He walked to an expanse of wood-paneled wall covered by his old Kiss poster, put a finger into the small hole next to Paul Stanley’s star-painted eye, and pulled. The panel slid out from the wall. Behind it was a thick metal door that Mr. Cho had rescued from salvage for him. He pulled open the door to reveal a narrow closet lined with sheet metal. There was just enough room for a pallet of old blankets and a small bookshelf that held his favorite books and two flashlights. It was his secret vault. His fortress of solitude.

Jesus, what had he been thinking?

Hanging from a hook above the pallet was a long overcoat with high lapels, and a broad-brimmed hat—a costume straight out of Jack Gore’s closet in Deadtown. He put the hat into the suitcase. Then he shrugged into the coat, forcing his dead arm into the sleeve.

He heard the distant sound of helicopter blades. From the floor above him, a door slammed open, and a voice called his name.

He didn’t climb up through the trapdoor—he didn’t want anyone to know about that route—but went out through the cellar door. Outside, the sound of the helicopters was thunderous. A chopper had passed over the house and was flying in the direction of the hospital. He hurried around to the front of the
house and saw the lights of a second helicopter, a few hundred yards away, rising up out of the dark. It had set down in the yard in front of the Chos’ house and now it had nosed forward, heading toward him. He pressed himself against the wall of the house—and miraculously, it passed overhead, barely clearing the roof. He watched the lights of the two aircraft disappear in the distance.