Raising Stony Mayhall (9 page)

“I’m not going to—this is not …” He shook his head.

Junie put an arm around his waist. “We’re not trying to embarrass you. We just want to help. You haven’t exactly had a normal childhood. And with your condition, well …”

Alice said, “We didn’t know what your sex drive was like.”

“There is no sex. There is no drive.” That night, Kwang had nonchalantly wiped himself clean with a tube sock and put his pajama pants back on. Stony just stopped rubbing. Since then, every time Kwang made a joke about jerking off, or loaned him a porn mag he’d found, Stony would laugh conspiratorially. But Kwang never again did it in front of him, and Stony never made a second attempt on his own. His penis remained quietly in its place.

“Can we stop talking about this now?” he said. “And why am I doing the dishes at my own party?”

In a break with protocol, Mom decided that they should eat dessert in the living room, all the better to watch Stony unwrap his gifts. The Chos had bought him a Skilsaw, something only Mr. Cho would know to buy. Alice presented him with a boxed, two-volume set of the
Oxford English Dictionary
(abridged) that included a magnifying glass in its own drawer. Junie gave him a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Ace Hardware, as well as a handmade certificate for messenger services, promising to go back to the store as many times as it took to get the right screws.

His mother went to her bedroom and came back with a JCPenney garment bag. Alice frowned. Stony took the bag, unzipped it.

The jacket and pants were navy blue. Inside were two shirts, one white and one blue, and two paisley ties. He looked at Junie, whose eyes had gone wide in surprise. He couldn’t look at Kwang—he’d crack up.

“Wow, that’s …”

“A young man needs a suit!” his mother said angrily. “That’s true,” Mrs. Cho said.

“What for?” Mr. Cho said. “He going to a funeral?”

Kwang lost it then. He collapsed sideways on the couch, hooting in laughter. Stony stood up and said, “I’ll try it on.”

Mom snatched the garment bag from him. The pants slipped from the hanger and fell to the floor. “Never mind.”

“Mom, I like it! Let me try it on.”

She stormed out of the room. Alice stood up. “Mr. Cho, would you like more coffee?”

His mother didn’t return from the bedroom. The Chos left soon after, with Kwang carrying a Tupperware bowl full of Italian beef.

Junie hung around for a while, then announced she was going to another graduation party for some burnout named Tony. She still went to her youth group meetings, and she still wore a gold cross around her neck. But she also maintained a separate and nonoverlapping circle of friends, mostly big-haired seniors who partied hard, listened to heavy metal, and smoked pot. In the Venn diagram of her relationships, Junie was the point where the two circles met, the intersection of Jesus and Judas Priest. She always told him not to wait up, but of course he was up every night, and knew exactly when she
sneaked back into the house. He’d never told Mom about her comings and goings, and Mom had never asked—all of them complicit in maintaining the force field of Everything Is Fine.

Stony tried to do some work in the basement, couldn’t get into it, and finally went back up to the dining room and sat down across from Alice. She’d covered the surface of the table with books and papers, and was pecking at a portable electric typewriter.

He picked up one of the books,
Human Virology
. “Mom’s still pouting.”

Alice didn’t look up. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll be over it soon.”

“I should have acted happier.”

She grunted, kept typing.

He dropped his voice. “I just don’t get it. A suit? She might as well buy me dance lessons.”

Alice kept working. It was like this every time she visited, even at Christmas: relentless cramming. He wondered if she ever wished she could be like Stony and go without sleep. He would have had a huge advantage in college.

“So do they study me in medical school?” he asked. “The walking dead?”

“They talk about what you did,” she said. “Not what you are.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked up from the typewriter, then took a breath and leaned back in her chair, allowing him to interrupt her for a while longer. Alice and Crystal both took after the Mehldaus, Mom’s side of the family: black hair, deep brown eyes, Cherokee-quality cheekbones, strong noses. At a casual glance you could take them for twins. But in Crystal those features added up to a kind of dark beauty, a mystery that drew you in. In Alice what you noticed first were the angles
of her face, the severity in every expression, the certainty in her gaze. One sharp look and you’d rethink your next step.

“They teach us about the outbreak. How many died, how many were bitten, how many were transformed. The world should have ended that night, John. We don’t know how the hell they transmit the disease, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. The math is scary, John. One living dead person, biting and transforming one other person per hour—that’s all you need. In three days all the humans are dead or turned into walking dead.”

“What?”

“Those are raw numbers. Let’s say you manage to quarantine people as they’re bitten—say ten or twenty percent. That cuts down on the spread rate. But the world still ends in five days. Six billion people, dead or undead.”

“But the world didn’t end. They stopped it once.”

“The only way the model works out for human survival is if you kill off almost every single undead in the first two days. A ninety-nine-point-four-percent kill rate. Not ninety-eight, not ninety-nine-point-three—ninety-nine-point-four. And that’s what happened on the East Coast. Everyone who could carry a gun organized into gangs, and they went door to door shooting anything that moved. If that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be here today.” She shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t.”

“Shit,” Stony said.

“You’re a walking threat to national security, John. You’re smallpox. You’re an ICBM.”

“They have to find a cure,” Stony said. “Somebody’s got to be working on a cure, right? A vaccine or something.”

“Sure they are. But there’s a problem. The living dead break all known rules of biology and common sense. There’s no virus that works like this, we can’t find a pathogen, and it’s certainly not caused by space radiation or whatever the government
tried to tell us it was. All the corpses that were examined after the outbreak, the ones they rekilled? They were just that—corpses. No one’s found anything to tell us what the disease was, or how we can prevent it. So the medical people threw up their hands. There was no way to study it with the normal tools of science, so they booted the whole subject down the road to the theoreticians. All a young doctor can do is pray that it never comes back.”

“But it hasn’t gone away,” Stony said. “I was reading a newspaper article about a sighting in Indiana in 1971—”

“Stragglers, kid. Some of the infected were smarter than the others and tried to hide once the cleanup gangs came out. And some were hidden by their crazy relatives.”

“That
is
crazy.”

“In the early seventies there was a lot of hysteria, a lot of paranoid books being written. You had Dennis Wenger on television talking about the ‘hidden dead,’ and antiwar activists claiming solidarity with them. People were seeing the living dead everywhere, turning in sick people, the elderly. New hunter gangs formed, though that was mostly rednecks looking for a reason to walk around with guns. I thought Mom was going to start drinking.”

He didn’t remember any of that. All he remembered was playing with Kwang and his sisters.

“So if they’re stragglers, why aren’t they biting people? The disease should be spreading. You said all it takes is one victim.”

“Not all the victims were homicidal a hundred percent of the time. We don’t know why. Some of them could talk. Well, at least form words. Residual brain function.”

“That wasn’t in anything I read. None of the magazines or books.”

She shrugged. “I’ve looked at all the newspaper stories,
and even went back to the original incident reports. I wrote a couple of papers on it, before my advisor told me to drop it.” She leaned forward. “People
are
studying the outbreak, John, just not the people at my level. And sooner or later, somebody is going to have to study you.”

“Great.”

“You grew up, John. How you did that is a complete and utter mystery. There’s not a whiff of this in the literature—at least the stuff I’ve been able to get access to. I don’t know how it’s even possible. Somebody needs to figure out how you did it.”

“Somebody like you,” he said. “You want to be one of those theoretical people.”

“I’ve got to get through med school first,” she said. “Then pay off my loans. But yes, I’d like to be that person. Does that scare you?”

“Scare me? Are you kidding?” He laughed. “Alice, there’s nobody else I’d want doing this.”

She seemed taken aback. “John, you don’t have to—”

“Nobody else. And I want to work with you.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean really work with you. I want you to train me. Teach me. I want to take college courses. By correspondence, I guess—I haven’t thought through this yet. But I don’t want to be just a test subject, I want to be one of the investigators.”

“John—”

“Just tell me what to read, I’ll read it. Tell me what to study, and I’ll pass the test.”

She regarded him for a long moment. “All right, Brother John. I guess you
have
graduated from high school.” She tapped the virology textbook. “Read the first two chapters, then write me a two-page essay on bacteriophages—what they are, their different types, et cetera.”

“Do you want it typed?”

“I’m using the typewriter, thank you. Now get to work.”

He worked for an hour and got halfway through chapter two. He learned pretty quickly that a bacteriophage was a virus that ate bacteria. But there were just so many new terms and concepts to track down. What was a lysis gene? What was RNA replicase? He wanted to know it all,
now
. Alice refused to answer questions. “Work through it,” she said.

He realized he’d have to find an introductory textbook, something at the level of Alice’s undergraduate courses. There was no such book on the shelves downstairs; he’d have to ask Mom to get one from Des Moines. Just like he had to ask her for everything. He was trapped here, in this farmhouse, his own personal Deadtown. Kwang was leaving for college at the end of the summer, Junie would be gone in a year, and Alice and Crystal weren’t ever coming back—at least not to stay. It would be just him and Mom. He was the retarded kid who could never live on his own, the crazy lady in the attic—the vicious dog you could never let off the chain.

Alice typed away, concentrating so hard she looked angry. Eventually she noticed he was staring at her. “Yes?”

Take me with you, he thought. Get me out of here.

“Still confused?” she said.

“Kind of. But it’s cool.”

“Good. Struggle is part of the process.”

Mom came out of the bedroom sometime after nine. She still wore her green dress—her only party dress. “Doing homework, John? I thought you could take at least one day off.”

“I’ve enrolled in the University of Alice,” he said.

“I see.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “How about we go for a drive?”

Stony looked up from his page of notes. “What?” One of the cardinal rules was to never leave their farm or the Chos’.
And as far as they knew, he’d never broken that rule. He hadn’t been caught the night of the deer, and he’d never told anyone in his family about it.

“It’s not far.” Her eyes were tired, but her mouth was set, exactly like a woman who’d been crying for a long time and then had decidedly stopped crying. He’d seen that look a lot over the years.

“We’ll hide you in the back,” Mom said.

“Okay …” He got up to put on his gym shoes, then realized something. “Would you like me to wear the suit?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Then, “I also bought you dress shoes. And socks. I put them in your room.”

He got dressed, choosing the white shirt and the most colorful of the two ties. He had no idea how to tie it, though. Jack Gore always wore a tie, but of course he never explained how he knotted it. Stony carried it out to the kitchen and his mother told him not to worry about it for now, but that he’d have to get Mr. Cho to teach him. She buttoned the middle button of the jacket. “You look handsome,” she said.

He knew it was a lie. He looked like a corpse in a funeral suit. But he also knew his mother would never say so.

He lay down in the very back of the station wagon, on a fresh blanket to keep his clothes clean. She spread another blanket over him. “If we get pulled over,” she said, “act like cargo.”

He turned on his side and watched the lights of the town scroll past the windows. Then they were leaving town, and his mother began to speak. “It was so cold the night we found you,” she said. “You should have been stiff as a board. But your mother had you wrapped up in her rabbit fur coat, with her arms around you. She was trying so hard to keep you warm that she spent all the heat in her body.”

He could barely hear her over the sound of the engine and the wind coming through the windows, but it didn’t matter: He’d heard this story countless times. He used to beg her to tell him about that night, and she used almost the same words every time. He used to lie in his bed at night thinking of his mother—his first mother—burning down like a candle to protect him.

Mom told him about trying to resuscitate him, and how she had bathed him in warm water at the kitchen sink, a “low-rent baptism.” She laughed. “The girls were so excited. Junie thought you were her pet.”

The car slowed, turned, and came to a stop. It had been twenty minutes since he’d seen any houselights. “We’re here,” she said.

She opened up the back of the wagon for him and he climbed out. They were in a cemetery. The gravestones stretched out into the dark.

His mother turned on a flashlight and led him back into the rows. She seemed to know where she was going. After a minute she stopped and aimed the beam at a patch of grass.