Raising Stony Mayhall (23 page)

The men rushed past him. The first of them reached the truck and pulled the driver from the cab. A second man circled an arm around the driver’s neck and yanked viciously down; the driver yelped and went down, hitting the pavement on his side. His other arm flailed upward and caught the second guard across the mouth. The LD laughed.

The undead men swarmed. They covered the driver’s arms and legs, though any one of them was strong enough to hold him down. The driver screamed.

Stony yanked one of the LDs away. “Stop it! What are you doing?”

The first guard, now straddling the driver’s waist, ripped open the man’s blue shirt. His belly was huge and white. The guard looked up at Stony and said, “You want to do the honors?”

“Please, don’t—” Stony said.

The guard shrugged. He opened his jaws and bit down. The driver screamed again. The guard rose up, his mouth awash with blood. “Your ass is ours now!”

The driver screamed again. A second guard rose up with blood on his face. The LDs made a sound between a growl and a cheer. They began tearing at the man. Stony put an arm around an LD and pulled him backward. The man knocked Stony away and threw himself back into the pile.

The fat man screamed, and screamed, and kept screaming, until suddenly going silent. Someone severed an artery and
bright blood sprayed into the afternoon light. Then he became a fountain.

The congress disbanded. No, that sounds too orderly. The congress exploded. News of the killing reached the warehouse, and delegates scrambled for their bags, called for their human drivers, and fled in their vehicles. They scattered. Calhoun’s bus was the first through the gate.

Stony was aware of none of this. Delia found him next to the highway, sitting in the grass, staring at the blood-smeared patch of pavement where the driver’s body had been. Blunt’s men, when they finished their meal, had thrown the eviscerated corpse into the back of the pickup and driven it back to the warehouse. The hole in the fence, and the stain, were all that remained to mark the site of the murder. It wouldn’t even look like a crime, necessarily. Some large animal, perhaps a three-hundred-pound buck, had charged through the gap in the fence and been struck here, and the driver had carried off the roadkill for his freezer. Probably happened all the time out here.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Delia said. “They were only supposed to bite him. To turn him.”

“Of course,” Stony said. He felt disconnected from his body, as if he were hovering perhaps four feet above his right shoulder. “It was an accident.”

The driver was beyond revival, Delia said. He wouldn’t be joining the ranks of the undead, but on the positive side, neither would Aaron. He’d been battered, Delia said, and his arm had been broken, probably in several places, but he would live. One of his fellow breathers would be taking him to a hospital.

After a moment he realized Delia was waiting for a response, so he said, “Good. That’s good to hear.”

Delia looked at him worriedly. “Let’s get going, kid.” They wouldn’t be going back by freezer truck, she told him. She had a separate vehicle that would be taking them someplace else. He didn’t bother to ask where. And later, he wouldn’t remember much about the trip. The two of them were tucked into the back of a moving van. Delia spent the first hour of the journey talking into a military-quality walkie-talkie. Perhaps he heard her say “civil war.” Perhaps he only realized later what she’d been talking about. Then they were out of range of whomever she was talking to, and she put the radio back into the Commander Calhoun backpack. For the next five or eight or twelve hours neither of them said much at all that he could recall. And then the breather driver, a man Stony had never met, opened the back doors of the van. They were in a one-car garage, the cinder-block walls scuffed with red clay. A small door led to what had to be the house.

“Where are we?” Stony asked.

“We contacted one of our retired volunteers,” Delia said. “She offered to put you up temporarily.”

“Just me? Aren’t you staying?”

The door opened. A very tall woman holding a very small child stood in the doorway.

“Crystal!” he said. He walked to her, then stopped short, afraid to hurt the baby.

She laughed and pulled him in tight. “Brother John.”

er name was Ruby. He could not stop holding her, and when he was not holding her, he could not stop looking at her. That shock of jet-black hair, the blue-gray eyes, the puffy, Pia Zadora lips. Last night they’d stayed up late talking, Ruby sleeping in the crook of his elbow, and he would only surrender her to Crystal when she needed to eat. Then, just after dawn, he heard her fussing and went in to get her before she could wake Crystal. As soon as Ruby saw him she stopped crying and regarded him silently.

“I think we have a connection,” he told Crystal later that morning. “She knows me.” They sat on the couch in the converted sunroom, Crystal at one end with a mug of green tea in her hands and her legs curled beneath her, Stony at the other end with Ruby in his arms, the baby tucked into a nest of blankets to insulate her from his cold skin. They looked out through a wall of glass at a Martian December, miles of empty red rock dotted with alien trees, pink desert light shifting across the surface. Not since Iowa had he sat in front of an open window in daylight.

He had decided not to tell Crystal about the congress,
about how he’d helped kill an innocent man. He wouldn’t bring that poison into this house. He would be Crystal’s little brother, and Ruby’s big uncle.

“It’s like I know her,” he said. “Like I knew she was coming.”

“Hah,” Crystal said. “A tarot reader in Moab—she’d never been wrong before—told me she’d be a boy.”

“A tarot reader? You couldn’t just get a sonogram?”

“Would a sonogram tell me that he’d be strong-willed, impulsive, and a lover of words?”

“Or have a vagina?”

She laughed. Oh, he’d made her laugh. “I didn’t see
any
doctors, Stony. Everything happened here, at home. The only doctor I let near this child was Alice. She came in, you know, for the birth.”

“I meant to be here,” Stony said.

“That’s sweet. But you would have only gotten in the way. You know how weak menfolk are around birthin’ and babies.”

“I just think it’s so … cool. I mean, I can’t get over the idea that you
made
her, inside you.”

“I had help.”

“Yeah, but still. It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?” Somehow a bundle of overeager cells had stolen a strip of chromosomes from an incoming sperm, decided to rampantly duplicate, then organized themselves into eyes and ears and fingers. Then, at some indeterminate point, the wad of tissue became conscious, a sentient being with thoughts and feelings of its own. A person. A specific, unique person.

Ruby.

The entire process seemed massively improbable, a joke. If it weren’t happening every second of every day, with every type of animal on the planet, nobody would believe it.

Crystal was dozing again. She reclined against the pillows, still balancing the mug on her stomach, eyes closed. Not only had she had to wake up for the regular feedings, but she’d stayed up late last night, letting Stony ask her questions about the baby. Delia had said little, frequently vanishing into the garage for long smoke breaks. When Crystal could no longer keep her eyes open she’d set out blankets and pillows for them and told them to make themselves at home. As if they would sleep, or wanted to. As if they were run-of-the-mill visitors who’d dropped in for a visit.

Crystal was so good at playing pretend, he could almost pretend to be normal himself. He could almost ignore the corpse of the driver that he saw whenever he closed his eyes, or the ghost of their sister that hovered at the edge of every anecdote, every family reminiscence. Because of Ruby. She was a little battery of life, jamming the death signal.

“You’re humming,” Crystal said, her eyes still closed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was doing that.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s nice. Ruby likes it.” She sat up, took a sip of tea. “When I was carrying her, she’d start kicking whenever I sang. I think she’s going to be musical, like her father.”

“He’s a musician? You never talked about him in your letters.”

“He’s not a professional musician. He’s not a professional anything, really. He works as a river guide in Moab, and he likes to mountain climb.”

“Does he know about the baby?”

“Oh, he knows. This just isn’t the kind of adventure he’s interested in. Not the type to stick around the house and mix formula. Sometimes he stops by. And he sends me money for the electric bill when he remembers.”

“A marauder from the land of Moab,” Stony said.

“What?”

“Zombie Bible story. Your guy, he sounds like an asshole.”

“No, he’s just …” She put down her mug. “Well, he can
be
an asshole. I’m just not sure if he
is
an asshole. He’s himself. I knew what he was when I picked him up, as the Indians say. And God, he’s beautiful. He looks like Jesus with his shirt off, all skinny and beardy.”

He heard the door to the garage open, and Delia’s familiar footsteps. For the past hour she’d been in the garage, whether smoking or doing something else was unclear. She appeared in the doorway behind him, scanning the landscape outside the window. “You shouldn’t be sitting out here,” she said. “Somebody could have binoculars.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Crystal said. “Sit down and enjoy the sunlight.”

Stony said, “Ruby and Crystal and I are—hey, I just realized that. Ruby and Crystal.”

“And Stony,” Delia said.

“What?” he said. Then: “Crystal, did you—?”

Crystal burst out laughing. “I can’t believe you just figured this out.”

He was stunned. “I thought it was just your hippie name.”

“Well, that, too. But I was trying to show solidarity with you. I thought about calling myself Igneous, but my boyfriend didn’t like it.”

“I’m an idiot,” he said.

“Noted,” Delia said. She stepped down into the sunroom and squatted on the floor against one wall, out of sight of the outdoors. “Let’s talk about plans.”

Crystal said, “I’d forgotten what it was like to work with you, Delia. Good morning to you, too.”

Delia’s expression didn’t change. “Mr. Blunt is in Salt Lake, watching Zip’s safe houses. He has three that we know
about, only two of them occupied. Blunt says that so far Zip hasn’t moved any of his people, but we have to expect that at any time.”

For Delia, he thought, the murder of the warehouse manager was nothing, a blip that unfortunately ended the congress too soon. The only thing that concerned her now was Zip, and his plans for the Big Bite.

“Why would he move his people?” Stony said.

“Who’s Zip?” Crystal asked.

Delia said, “He has to expect that we’d turn him in if that was the only way to stop him.”

“Call in the Diggers?” Stony asked. “We wouldn’t do that, would we? Would we?”

Delia didn’t answer, and Crystal said, “Could
some
body tell me who Zip is?”

“Billy Zip,” Stony said. “He’s an LD, and kind of an extremist.” He said to Delia, “When did you talk to Blunt? Just now, on the radio?”

“They don’t reach
that
far. Last night I walked out to the pay phone at the gas station, called our answering service. I’ve been trying to figure out our next move. Aaron and Mr. Blunt are going to stay on watch in Salt Lake. We have others watching the houses of people we know are in Zip’s camp. But we’re worried that Zip will go after
our
houses—Blunt’s house, my house, the satellites … basically, any parish run by a security council member.”

“This is crazy,” Stony said. “We can’t have LDs turning on each other.” Even if the LDs are murderers, he thought.

“He’ll do whatever he needs to, kid. He’s not supposed to know the location of all our houses, but we can’t be sure of that. I’ve got to go move our people. When they’re safe, we’ll be free to take him down.”

He thought of Valerie, Thomas the mailman, Tanya and
Teddy, all the other residents of the house. They were frail, and some of them were like children. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

“Uh, no.” She’d treated him differently ever since she found him at the roadside, like he was an unstable chemical. Like he was a child. “You’re staying here,” she said. “If things go badly in the city, Aaron and Blunt may have to hide out here, so you two will have to—”

“Wait a minute,” Crystal said. “I said I’d put up Stony, not a house full of you. Look, I like Aaron and Mr. Blunt, I appreciate what you all did for my family—but I can’t do what I did before, I can’t run a safe house. I’ve got a life now, friends who stop by—”

“Tell your friends you have the flu.”

“Delia, I have a two-week-old baby. If they think I’m sick, I’ll have a dozen people coming by to take care of her.”

Delia stood up. “You’ll have to figure something out.”

Stony said to Delia, “Can I talk with you privately for a minute?”