Raising Stony Mayhall (18 page)

“You may know that now,” she said. “But I bet it didn’t feel that way when you were growing up with them.” He didn’t say anything. She said, “We were worried about you that first year in the house. You were pretty depressed. Blunt put your odds at fifty-fifty.”

“Fifty-fifty of what? Killing myself?”

“You’ve been here long enough now to see it. Some people can’t take the constant hiding. They don’t see any end in sight, so pretty soon they start making one. They start checking out. Doing crazy things.”

“Roger’s not your fault,” he said.

“Yeah? Whose fault is it?”

He’d known her for six years now. He’d watched her hold the house together, and knew that other houses were depending on her. But even though he talked with her almost every day, even though they’d shared thousands of hours in the same house, he still didn’t know if she considered him a friend. She held something in reserve, as if preparing to burn down the house at a moment’s notice—or burn herself to save them.

“They’re going to hold the congress,” she said. “Sixty, seventy delegates, from all over the country.”

“Wow.”

“And I need you to go with me.”

“Really?”

“Settle down. We could all die if we don’t do this right.”

“Right. But I thought it was just cell leaders.”

“And delegates,” she said. “You’re now a delegate.”

“Wait, when is this happening?”

“You have somewhere to be?”

“We’ve talked about this. You know Crystal is pregnant—she may have already had the baby.”

“We can’t get you to southern Utah, Stony. It’s impossible.”

“I need to be there. I haven’t seen any of them since I left.”

“You want to risk one of the volunteer’s lives to drive you there?”

“No, but—”

“We all want to be somewhere else, Stony. But I’m sorry. The congress is risky enough. We just can’t afford casual trips for weddings and bar mitzvahs.”

“This is not
casual
, this is important.”

“Important to you, Stony. But the community’s needs come first. Plus, the Lump suggested you go.”

“What? Why?”

“Consider it part of your education. There are people you need to meet—people who can affect your future.”

“You’re talking about the benefactor!”

She took a suspiciously long drag on her cigarette before answering. “There’s no such thing,” she said, and exhaled a stream of smoke. “That’s just house gossip.”

Gossip and cigarettes were the only currencies available in the LD world, and trading was heavy. Rumors of a millionaire backer for the underground circulated constantly. The candidates fell into three broad categories, the most popular of which was the Celebrity with a Heart of Gold, the talk show host/sitcom star/supermodel whose undead sibling cried out for justice from the Hollywood basement. Less popular, but more doctrinally pure, was the benefactor as Hometown Boy, the billionaire LD who’d died but somehow managed to hold on to his money, unliving proof that LDs didn’t need breathers to bail them out, no siree—the corpses were doing it for themselves.

And then there were the rumors of the Evil Masterminds. No one would
really
help the living dead, the thinking went; the money
had
to be coming from some political group or foreign power or multinational corporation bent on using the dead for its own ends. It could even be the U.S. government itself, its cash flowing into the community like CIA-purchased heroin, lulling them into dependency so that they could be rounded up in one fell swoop.

Stony thought
someone
had to be bankrolling them. He wasn’t seeing any of the money here in the house, but there had to be a reason the LDA had lasted twenty years in the wild.

Delia stood up, then toed her cigarette into the floorboards. “And if there
was
a benefactor? He wouldn’t be there. Way too risky.”

* * *

In the morning, Stony led Thomas up the stairs, guiding him with an arm around his shoulders. Stony had cleaned him as best he could, replacing his sweat-drenched shirt and soiled pants with a UCSD sweatshirt and a pair of nylon track pants.

Stony called out, “Everyone? Could you come out here?”

Delia and Elizabeth came out of the kitchen. Valerie and the other residents drifted in from their rooms.

Thomas stared at each of them as they appeared, his mouth open. He was shaky and weak, and had no memory of how he’d come to be here, no memory of his own name. Perhaps some of that would come back in time.

“Everyone, I want you to welcome Thomas.”

Teddy, an LD with a golden, hard-shell toupee that might have been stolen from a Sears mannequin, stepped forward. “Happy birthday,” he said, and hugged the man. Thomas accepted this awkwardly. The other residents embraced him in turn. Even Valerie welcomed him, though she seemed sorry to have to do so.

Elizabeth, the only living person in the room, wiped tears from her cheeks. “I have to go,” she said. She touched Thomas on the arm, then quickly left the house. The man looked frightened.

Delia stepped up and took his hand. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine.” She pulled him close. “Welcome to our family, Thomas.”

hey watched from the trees as Aaron the Beard walked to the back of the semitrailer, fiddled with the lock, and finally pulled open one of the doors. A cloud of cool mist puffed into the dry air and evaporated.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Stony said.

“Is there a problem?” Delia asked.

“Yes. It’s a freezer truck. Inside it’s going to be, what’s the word?
Cold.
”

“That’s right, just a word,” she said. “A little cold won’t hurt you.”

“Then why did we bring blankets?”

“So we don’t stick to the floors.”

Delia and Stony walked briskly across the parking lot, carrying their small travel bags and blanket rolls. Aaron was turned away from them, scanning the empty parking lot as they scrambled up into the back of the trailer. The interior was stacked to the ceiling with white cardboard boxes, all stamped with the familiar line drawing of Commander Calhoun’s face. Evidently they were traveling with fish sticks—
strike that,
fishstix
. Delia edged into a narrow gap between two walls of boxes and inched sideways toward the front of the trailer.

Aaron came up to close the door, and Stony said, “When did you learn to drive a truck?”

“Just try to keep it down in there,” he said, and slammed the door. The compartment went dark, but not completely; after a moment he realized that a light from the other side of the boxes was playing off the aluminum ceiling. Voices he didn’t recognize greeted Delia happily. Stony squeezed into the gap Delia had taken, and soon emerged into a cleared space at the front of the trailer, just under the rumbling air conditioner. Two white men reclined on furniture made from arrangements of white boxes and luggage. A big flashlight was propped up and aimed at the ceiling.

Delia said, “Stony, meet Stitch and Stitch.”

Stony laughed. “I thought you two would be joined at the hip.” The Stitch Brothers were two of his favorite characters from the Deadtown Detective books.

“Ah, a connoisseur of fine literature,” the first Stitch said. The truck lurched into motion and the air conditioner roared louder, forcing him to raise his voice. “A good sign.”

Stony sat on a box, hunched against the cold. Stitch and Stitch, he learned, ran a parish in New Mexico, and had been the first on Aaron’s “bus.” They’d be picking up more people on the way to the congress. The LDA was using only the most loyal and trusted humans in the organization to do the driving.

Stony still had no idea where they were going. Mr. Blunt had disappeared a week earlier “to make preparations,” but they hadn’t trusted Stony with the information. Well, fine. He wasn’t about to ask now.

As the frost accumulated on their skin and clothes, the
Stitch Brothers told appalling and hilarious stories about narrow and failed escapes, about LDs who had outfoxed the Diggers or had been captured by them, about violent deaths and accidental maimings, stories with lines like, “So now the rebar’s sticking all the way through him.” Stony laughed along with them. After six years in the community he’d adopted their sense of humor. The only LD comedy was black comedy.

“Stony, tell us about old Roger,” one of the men said.

“And stop acting like a breather,” Delia said.

“What do you mean?” Stony asked.

“Are you really cold? Or do you just think you’re supposed to be cold?”

He straightened up. “Okay, fine.” He told them the story of Roger and the mailman, and they all laughed some more, but Stony felt bad making fun of the old LD. Yes, a number of their people were a bit slow, addled by the fever, or brain-damaged by death, but that wasn’t their fault.

“Well at least you got a new recruit for the house,” one of the Stitches said, and the other said, “What
do
you think about recruiting?”

“What, me?” Stony glanced at Delia, but she was offering no clues. “I don’t think we ought to go out biting people, if that’s what you mean.”

“Why not?” one of them said. He said it lightly, as if only making conversation. “If we don’t replenish our numbers, we’ll die out.”

“Or people
think
we’re dying out, and they get desperate,” the other said.

“Clearing the way for whackos like Zip,” said the other.

Delia and Mr. Blunt had told him all about Billy Zip. He was the prime advocate of the Big Bite. “You make some good points,” Stony said.

The men laughed, and one of them said, “So you
would
bite humans, to keep us going?”

“No. I mean—”

“What he
means
,” Delia said, “is that he doesn’t know what he means. He’s here to learn.”

In other words, Stony thought, shut up and listen.

Nearly twenty-four hours after leaving the parking lot in L.A., the truck slowed, then stopped and backed up. Someone cheered, though not loud enough to be heard from outside the walls of the trailer. The compartment was standing room only, packed with thirteen delegates that they’d picked up along the way, and as the truck began to back down the ramp and the floor tilted beneath their feet, the LDs swayed and bumped each other like slabs on meat hooks. Despite the cold, a festival mood had held during the hours of travel, but Stony was glad to be getting off. Much longer, he thought, they’d all have frozen solid, and how embarrassing would that be? A carton of LDs dumped clattering into the second living dead congress like giant gray fishstix.

They listened as Aaron—or someone—detached the trailer and lowered the jacks. The tractor rumbled away. Delia edged her way to the trailer doors and found them unlocked. “I guess we’re here,” she said.

The trailer had been backed up to an internal loading dock. They stepped out into a cavernous warehouse, a massive open space with a ceiling two stories above them. Up ahead, LDs wearing name tags were checking off the names of the new arrivals, and a few were opening luggage. Beyond them, the floor of the warehouse looked like an indoor campground: Over two dozen RVs were parked near the surrounding walls, noses pointed inward toward a central area set
up like a park, complete with Astroturf carpeting, potted trees, benches and picnic tables, and a large central tent.

Stony stopped short. There, in the park, were sixty or seventy figures, all living dead. More seemed to be inside the tent, which made for how many: A hundred? Two? More LDs than he’d ever seen.

A voice at Stony’s side said, “The security check is standard, my boy.”

“Mr. Blunt!” The man had appeared out of nowhere. He could move silently for a giant marionette. “This is—I mean …” Stony didn’t know how to explain it. He felt excited, yet
afraid
. He nodded toward the park. “All those people LDs, right?”

“Every one of them. No breathers allowed, my boy—they’re all outside with the trucks.” Mr. Blunt frowned. “Are you all right?”

The sight of so many of his people paralyzed him. For most of his life, he’d thought that he was alone. And then he’d met Delia and Mr. Blunt, and he’d gotten to know the LDs at the safe house and perhaps a dozen others. He’d known intellectually that there were many more of them out in the world. But
this
, this blatant display, flew in the face of everything he felt about the world.

We could be a
real
army, he thought. We could be a nation.

One member of the security team marked off his name, another unzipped his bag and ran a hand through his clothing, and another asked him questions: Was he carrying any weapons? Was he carrying any radio or communication device? Had he talked to anyone about the location of the congress?

“I don’t even know where we are,” he said.

“Then welcome to the congress.”

The melting frost was running off him like sweat. He removed his damp jacket and followed Mr. Blunt and Delia into the park. The Stitch Brothers and the rest of his mates from the trailer had already scattered.