Raising Stony Mayhall (30 page)

Soon the office had a scanner. Stony set about digitizing the most important of the years of paper documents and saving those first to Zip disks, then later burning to CDs and DVDs. Stony made two copies of everything. “Just in case you need to take a few home.” Internet access was forbidden at Deadtown, but Stony set up a VPN, a kind of private digital tunnel, between the office and the Weiss home, so the doctor could get at the files remotely.

The work beat cleaning the animal cages. Those experiments were over now, thank God. Now his most interesting task was making the rounds of the special patients in the infirmary. Some of these were sleepers, inert men and women chained to their beds, who would lie there until the doctor decided to dispose of them. Stony tried to talk to them as he had to Valerie, but he never felt that they were listening to him, or that he was breaking through. Maybe it was because he didn’t know them as well as he did Valerie, or care for them as deeply. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to rob them of their escape from Deadtown.

Many of the patients were headbangers. Suicide was no easy task for an LD, but a determined prisoner could bash his skull against the floor or wall with enough force to destroy himself. If he (and most of the headbangers were male) failed to finish the job, or if the guards heard the distinctive thumping and interrupted him, he’d be brought to the administration building and strapped to a bed in the infirmary. Sometimes the prisoner recovered, and went back to his cell, living for months more like a dented aluminum can on a grocery shelf. Sometimes he went back to his cell and finished the job.

Stony’s most unusual, and favorite, patient was Perpetual Joe. Most of the man’s cell was taken up by a sturdy, squealing treadmill that was little more than a rubber mat wrapped around a set of steel rollers. Joe ran full-out, chest up, arms pumping. A slight hitch in his step—caused, perhaps, by one leg being shorter than the other—gave him a jazzy, swinging gait. He always seemed happy to see Stony, though he never paused or slowed.

Stony checked the battery and connections, recorded the output from the voltmeter, inspected the treadmill for wear and tear, all the while trading small talk with Joe. The man had
risen from the grave during the original outbreak, been captured at dawn the next day, and had spent the last thirty years as a prisoner of successive Deadtowns. In 1982, Dr. Weiss had decided to test LD endurance. He started with four LDs, on treadmills wired to generate a current. The other prisoners had damaged themselves, or stopped in protest, or pleaded fatigue. Joe kept going. Joe
liked
it. He spent all day, every day, running toward the cement wall three feet in front of him.

“How much today, Stony?” he’d ask, and Stony would read him the latest figures. He’d recently passed the 25 million-mile mark, and had generated enough power to electrocute every prisoner in Nevada. Part of Stony’s job was to inspect Joe himself, especially his feet and legs and knees. Joe ran barefoot, and his feet should have been pulverized by the constant pounding, his knees and hips destroyed. But his body was unchanged from the day of Stony’s first report. Maybe, Stony thought (for the thousandth time, the millionth), we are wounded only by what we expect to wound us. Anything beneath our notice—like the wear and tear of constant running, or obsessive digging, or the daily microscopic impacts with air and ground—cannot harm us because we forget to allow it to harm us. Integrity is all, as the Lumpists said.

“Better check that third roller,” Joe would say, or point out some disturbing squeak or incipient tear in the rubber pad. He was as conscientious about his equipment as any professional athlete. When the backup treadmill was out for repairs, as it was now, he was constantly nervous. He’d been forced to stop only three times. Stony had seen only one of those stoppages. Joe, the most upbeat LD that Stony had ever met, flew into a rage and had to be restrained.

“Keep up the good work,” Stony would tell him. And Stony kept working, too. Tasks kept him from losing time, kept the white void from blanking his mind. He had a job to
do every day, and long-term goals, and people to care for. Most of the time he didn’t think about going to sleep. Whole days went by in which he didn’t imagine crushing his skull against the cement floor of his cell.

On Sundays, Stony’s job was to go through the collected journals, summarize them and log them into a database, and set aside the most interesting entries for the doctor’s consideration on Monday morning. In the first weeks of the project the doctor read every tablet, but it soon became clear that most of the LDs had nothing of interest to say: They doodled, or copied down nursery rhymes, or wrote, “I prefer not to.” A few of the prisoners became memoirists, describing their lives before they were bitten, or how they’d stayed hidden during the years. Stony scanned these for mentions of other LDs still at large, or for information that might help the Diggers find a remaining safe house, and when he found these references he cut those pages free using an X-Acto knife, then ate them. Later, sometimes days later, he would sneak into a bathroom and vomit the paste into the toilet. Delia was still out there, and Commander Calhoun had not been discovered. Rose and the Lump, as far as he knew, were still free. Even Mr. Blunt might still be alive. So he swallowed the evidence, and every Sunday he unboxed a fresh stack of blank tablets to distribute to the prisoners. On some of the middle pages, he wrote messages in faint pencil. Sometimes he passed on news from the outside world. Sometimes he gave them assignments called DGCs, for Drive the Guards Crazy.

DGC #84. On Tuesday, everyone softly hum “Climb Every Mountain.”

And,
They are waiting for us outside
.

And,
Give a man a stick and he will beat you for a day. But give
him a uniform, and he will beat you every day, then complain about how tough it is on his rotator cuff
.

The journal entries that most interested Dr. Weiss were the ones in which LDs talked about their feelings. If they talked about their feelings about death, the doctor became almost giddy. “Listen to this,” the doctor said one Monday morning. “ ‘We are proof that God exists. We may be the only proof that God exists. We are dead sticks moving in the wind, and the wind is God.’ That stick thing again! Why do they keep talking about sticks? Is that code?”

“It’s something we all say,” Stony said. “I’m not sure where it started.”

“It sounds like a verse. Take a note, Stony—we need to survey the population and see which of those were most religious before they died, and compare to how religious they are now. Maybe those who believe in a higher power are more resilient.”

“Like alcoholics,” Stony said.

The doctor gave him a blank look. “I suppose.”

The doctor had taken to drinking at work. Some afternoons he sat at his desk, refilling his travel mug from a bottle he kept out of sight, and talked at Stony. Stony called it Unhappy Hour.

He complained about the Department of Justice’s attempts to grab his funding, or other researchers trying to steal his data. But mostly he railed against his bosses at the Pentagon. They were undermining him, trying to shut down Deadtown. There were even rumors of a second LD project somewhere overseas, a black site.

“They’re keeping me in the dark,” the doctor said one afternoon. “It’s not just the CIA. Someone else is working domestically. Another agency. First, every tip we get for a zombie foxhole turns up empty, and
now—
” He lurched out
of his chair and unlocked his briefcase. “Now this. Look at these photos.”

He tossed a manila folder into Stony’s lap. Inside were several dozen eight-by-ten color photographs. Shots of corpses—decapitated corpses.

“Those are undead,” the doctor said. “Notice the lack of blood.”

Stony stared at the bodies, wondering whether he knew any of these people, but it was impossible to identify them. “When did—when did this happen?”

“Two days ago,” the doctor said. “But this has happened before. Some other team is finding LDs, and they’re chopping their Goddamn heads off. They take the heads, but don’t bother to dispose of the bodies—they leave those for us. Every couple of years we get a call from some cop or civil servant saying they’ve found a room full of headless corpses.”

“Maybe it’s a vigilante,” Stony said.

“What?”

“A lone hunter. Perhaps his family was bitten in the outbreak, or he was attacked himself, and now he’s out for revenge.”

“I never know when you’re pulling my leg, Stony.” He waved dismissively. “We’re talking about a roomful of zombies. This requires
organization
. Someone at our level or higher—an FBI-level organization.”

“You think the FBI is behind this?”

“I can’t get anyone to tell me! And I have a higher Goddamned clearance than anyone.”

Stony said, “I wouldn’t worry about it, Doctor. They can’t keep it a secret forever.” He was already planning the news items he’d write into the fresh tablets of paper the guards would distribute this Sunday.

The civil war continues. More LDs destroyed by partisans. Mr. Blunt is alive
.

Dr. Weiss stared at the photos, exhausted. “Stony, you have no idea how difficult my job is.”

“Hey Joe, did I ever tell you about the time I met the Lump?”

Stony sat on the floor looking up at Perpetual Joe, who was running as hard as always. He was the true Unstoppable, Stony thought. He did not get depressed. He did not worry. He ran away from his problems, but in the most Zen-like way possible.

Stony said, “When I met him, he scared me, frankly. I’d never met anyone who … who was that far gone. I thought it was a trick, that he was some kind of puppet. Then he said something that floored me. He said that we were all impossible. Flat-out impossible.”

Joe laughed. “Yet here we are.”

“That’s right—we’re walking miracles. Well, running miracles.” Joe liked that, too. Stony said, “The doctor is confused, Joe. We’re just lumps of dead meat, yet we move, we talk, we think, we love. We
are
alive. And we’re alive in a way that’s much more profound than normal life. The breathers are machines that take in food and oxygen and turn it into electricity. Their muscles twitch, their neurons fire. It’s an amazing process, but it’s
knowable
. It’s reducible to facts and processes down to the microscopic level.”

Joe frowned. “Are you calling me a machine?”

“What? No!” But of course he was, in way: a perpetual-motion machine that generated electricity out of nothing. Stony said, “I’m just trying to say that the living dead aren’t reducible at all. There are no sets of smaller facts to explain us. We’re moving statues, tin men and scarecrows.”

“I’m not a tin man,” Joe said.

“I’m not saying that. We’re
like
tin men, because—”

“I’m a person.”

“I’m not saying you’re not!” Stony got to his feet and tried to start over. “Look, you know how everybody quotes the Lump: ‘The dead stick moves in the wind, and believes it moves itself.’ For years I mulled that over. What I thought it meant was that I was a dead thing who only
believed
he was alive. But lately I’ve been thinking that I was paying attention to the wrong part of that sentence. The question is, What is the wind? What is it that’s moving us? Valerie thinks maybe it’s God, or the devil. That idea is spreading through Deadtown.”

Joe was shaking his head. He did it in rhythm with his arms, to keep his momentum. “I’m moving me,” he said. “I can stop any time I want to.”

Harry Vincent made his rounds only once per night. Once he’d made his presence in the infirmary heard, rattling the cabinet drawers and door handles like a poltergeist, no other guard came through before the morning shift. It was in those predawn hours that Stony let himself out of his cell and set to work on the doctor’s private safe. He had hours in which to work, and any number of nights to experiment. He told himself to be patient. But the night the safe opened for him, he was so surprised that he almost shut the door again by accident.

On top was the file folder from Detective Kehl:
MAYH70381
. Stony took it out and looked again at the picture of Bethany Cooper. He wanted to slip it into his pocket, but he couldn’t risk that it would be missed. He removed other files, being careful to stack them in the order that he removed them: reports from capture teams; letters to a general in the Pentagon; and the file he’d been looking for, marked
JOHN MAYHALL
.
Did the doctor think Stony would not notice that his own file was not kept with those of the other prisoners?

The folder was filled almost to bursting. Stony opened it carefully to avoid spilling the contents on the floor. The first thing he saw were a dozen envelopes, addressed in his own handwriting. The envelopes were unsealed.

If he were a living man, perhaps his hands would have been shaking in rage. Perhaps his heart would have been pounding. But Stony slowly removed the pages from the envelope to confirm what he suspected. It was a letter he’d written to his mother, dated only a month earlier. He put it aside and opened another one, and another. Dr. Weiss hadn’t delivered a single letter.

Stony knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course Dr. Weiss had been lying to him. But to stare at the bald evidence was a fresh blow. Still think you’re clever, Stony? No matter how crafty he thought himself, how much he hardened himself for survival in Deadtown, he always found a way to fool himself. He’d wasted years writing these letters. He’d wasted years waiting for a response.

Okay, he thought. Burn every damn thing in the safe. Sit here in the middle of the office until Dr. Weiss came in that morning with his fat face and smudged glasses, that
BE ALL YOU CAN BE
travel mug, that ridiculously self-important eight-hundred-dollar briefcase. Shove the envelopes and files down his throat until he choked. Then wait for the guards to burst in and shoot him in the face. Suicide by cop.

He began to put away the files, then noticed a fat cardboard binder with a string fastener. He unwound the string. The binder was stuffed with envelopes. Each had his name on them, written in a familiar hand. At the top of each was a date in black marker, in Dr. Weiss’s typewriter-like print. He sorted through them, and found the earliest, dated 11–4–92.