Raising Stony Mayhall (29 page)

Harry Vincent did not appreciate being reported to his supervisor. His supervisor did not appreciate the doctor inserting himself into the running of the prison. So Stony Mayhall would be suspected of hiding contraband, and he would resist the guards, and he would be firmly subdued.

They broke both of his arms, and ripped the prosthetic hand from his stump, and cracked his shoulder blade. They jumped on his ribs, denting his torso like a wicker basket. They shattered his right cheek and flattened his face. They seemed to find it difficult to stop hitting him. Maybe if he had made some noise, or cried out in (mock) pain, they would have stopped sooner. Or maybe that would have only egged them on. Impossible to know.

Stony did not try to bite them, though he did have an opportunity to do so. One of the men slammed his arm down across Stony’s face, and his forearm pad slipped up toward his elbow. For a moment there was a rectangular patch of exposed flesh at the man’s wrist, only inches from Stony’s teeth. He let the moment pass. After Cornelius, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t bite anyone again.

Eventually the guards exhausted themselves. Harry Vincent squatted next to him, breathing hard. “I promise you, Stony. One day I’m going to be the one to throw you in the incinerator. I’m going to light a cigarette off your flaming head and watch you burn.”

Stony decided a reply wasn’t necessary. Later, on the floor of his cell, he attempted the first repairs on himself, imagining Alice talking him through the procedure. The tibia’s connected to the patella-a-a, the patella’s connected to the fee-murrr … Now hear the word of the Lord.

He was able to snap a knee into place, but the rest of his attempts at reconstruction were not very effective. He had only one hand to work with, a tool that was itself in need of repair. He could do nothing for his arm above the stump, which appeared to be broken in three places. Finally he rested his damaged cheek against the cement floor and watched the fluorescent light through the slot in his cell door.

’ve been thinking about the ship of Theseus,” Stony told the doctor. He struggled to enunciate clearly. Over weeks of surgeries the doctor and his team had stitched up the tears and punctures in Stony’s skin, wired his rib cage together, pinned the bones of his legs and arms, and reset his jaw. Still, damage remained. He’d not yet adjusted to the limitations of his new body.

Dr. Weiss sat beside the bed, arms on his knees, his face dour, as if he were in mourning. It was one of his daily visits, which had grown longer over the weeks, as if he were lonely, or seeking counseling. Most afternoons there was alcohol on his breath.

Stony said, “It was in a philosophy book I read once. A wooden ship is damaged in battle, so they take off one of the planks and replace it with, say, aluminum. Or plastic. Each time the ship is damaged, they remove a wooden plank and replace it with a plastic one, until years later, the ship is entirely plastic. So. Is it the same ship as before?”

The doctor frowned. He looked tired, his skin gray. Maybe it was the drink, or the stress of the job. Or maybe,
after so long among the undead, he’d started to resemble them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not following.”

“I’d like to continue with the experiment,” Stony said. He lifted his broken arm, and the damaged shoulder joint vibrated like a serrated knife sawing a pork chop bone. The arm was being held together by a contraption of rods and braces and ended in a new prosthetic hand. The new hand was lighter and more cheaply made than his previous model, but he’d adjusted to it quickly, and learned to move the fingers and thumb in the space of a few days. “I think we can go further.”

“No,” Dr. Weiss said, seeming to wake up. “Absolutely not.”

“The whole arm,” Stony said. “Right up to the shoulder. All new equipment.”

“I don’t understand why you keep volunteering to do this to yourself.” Then, with the token expression of concern dispensed with, he said, “What purpose would it serve?”

“To find out where it ends. I can already do this …” The index finger flexed, like a finger puppet. A small thing, but impossible to explain with conventional science. There were no wires connecting his finger to his arm muscles, no tiny motors to move the digit. No remote control. The finger moved because Stony made it move. He felt like a novice magician demonstrating the opening moves of a master’s illusion: Thank you, Mr. Blunt. He ought to write a paper for OSWoG. Stony said, “Don’t you wonder how far it can go? What if I can do an entire arm?”

“I’m worried for you, Stony,” Dr. Weiss said.

“This could redefine the living dead. Think about it. When they ask you, ‘Dr. Weiss, how
much
of one of these creatures do we have to destroy before we know it’s truly dead?’ And you can say—”

“All of it. Take no chances.”

Stony lowered his arm. “That’s not very scientific.”

“Better safe than scientific.”

“If you truly believed that,” Stony said, “Deadtown wouldn’t exist. We’re here exactly because knowledge of us is important, even if it comes with a little risk.” Stony lay back against his pillow. “All I’m saying is, think about it.”

The doctor had already been thinking of extending the experiment, and Stony knew it. Someday soon, Dr. Weiss would call in one of the prisoners, tie him or her down, and cut off a finger, a toe, a hand, an arm. It wasn’t that the doctor was Capital-E Evil. He was haunted, not only by the victims of 1968, but by the ghosts of the future dead, the millions who would die next time. Despite the Diggers’ successes, despite the record lows in reports of the undead, Dr. Weiss knew, as Stony did, that a second outbreak was inevitable. It was the Diggers’ failure at finding new hordes of ravenous biters that would allow them to reappear. The government was growing complacent, losing the rabid edge that would let it strike quickly when the next surge of undead erupted. Or—and this is what kept the doctor up at night—the next outbreak would begin in some third-world country, where the government was insufficiently prepared to put down an epidemic. Dr. Weiss would stare at his bedroom wall, thinking of a tide of undead rolling through the rural provinces of China, the plains of Africa. He’d begun his career desperately searching for a vaccine or treatment, but after thirty years the impossibility of the living dead, their immunity from rational understanding, had crippled that dream. Science was failing him.

His only hope now was to apply the scientific method to the irrational. He would amputate the limbs of the prisoners, not because he wished to hurt them, but because he wanted
to save them, the living and the dead alike. The limits of animation seemed central to the puzzle. The doctor had heard rumors of Mr. Blunt, and Stony had confirmed that the LD was more marionette than man, a thing of polished wood. Then the doctor had seen Stony learn to manipulate artificial limbs as if they were his own bones. How much further could he go? It was the flip side of the question of how much destruction an LD could take. How much of the artificial could be assimilated and still retain that person’s identity?

The doctor stared at him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head. “You’re not like the rest of them, Stony. Maybe it was the way you were born. But you’re different. You’re more … human.”

What does he expect me to say? Stony thought. Thank you? From day one, the doctor assumed that because Stony had betrayed Billy Zip, he was somehow on the side of the Diggers. Stony had done nothing but encourage that misunderstanding.

The doctor stood up to leave, and Stony said, “You’d have to save all the parts we remove. So we can try the Hobbes thing.”

“Oh, of course,” Dr. Weiss said, but Stony could tell he didn’t get the reference. Thomas Hobbes had taken the Ship of Theseus story one step further. What if, Hobbes asked, some man had saved each of the wooden planks as they were taken off, and then later built a ship out of them, putting each piece back in its original location? Wouldn’t the reassembled ship be the same one we started with? Then what about the plastic ship next to it?

“We can build another Stony,” Stony said. “I’ve always wanted a brother.”
Sometimes when he lay on the bed he put his plastic hand to the metal frame and said to himself, I am the bed. Feel those sturdy legs, the hard feet against the cold cement.

If the self could embrace a plastic prosthetic, he reasoned, why not furniture? Why couldn’t the self be larger than this man-shaped lump of dead material he found himself in? He was as curious as the doctor, perhaps more so. He concentrated, and made a chant of it:
I am the bed. The bed is me. I belong to you and you belong to me. I am the bed …

It was a struggle to stay focused. Even before Valerie’s torture, Stony had been losing time, and his thoughts darted and circled like a paper sack caught by the wind. The attack by Harry and the other guards had only accelerated the disarray. Often he thought about sleep, the Little Sleep that he used to envy in his sisters, and the Big Sleep that he envied in Valerie. That he took away from her.

Sometimes an image entered his mind that he could not shake for days. Junie, sobbing into his shoulder. Kwang, crushed under the dashboard of the car. Alice reaching down to pull him out of his cardboard fort at the edge of the fields. Bethany Cooper, bleeding to death in the snow. He tried to think of positive things, to summon a brighter future. He imagined traveling to Pennsylvania and meeting his grandparents. He imagined his grandmother reaching out an arm to him and saying, “It’s you, isn’t it? Bethany’s boy.”

But even that fantasy felt like a betrayal. His mother sat alone in a cell like his, in the Calvette Medical Prison. Dr. Weiss had promised to look into his mother’s case, but he’d done nothing. He hadn’t even managed to get his mother to read Stony’s letters—or if she had, to write back. Years ago the doctor visited Wanda Mayhall regularly. Stony had found folders thick with their transcribed conversations. At first she’d refused to tell the man anything, but her daughters were still
under threat of arrest, and the facts could not be hidden for long. The doctor learned all about how Stony was found, how he refused to grow, then how he refused to stop growing. He got everything from her, eventually. And then when he captured her son, he had no more interest in Wanda Mayhall.

Most nights Stony heard the guards—really one guard—making his rounds. He knew it was Harry Vincent. The man walked through the offices, sat at Dr. Weiss’s desk, rattled the file cabinets. Each night he stood for a long time in front of Stony’s cell. He never spoke, though sometimes he stood there for minutes at a time.

Of course Stony fantasized about revenge. Against Vincent, against the doctor, against the other guards who’d beaten him. The daydreams were vivid and bloody, an acid bath that burned away everything but a copper-bright circuit of hate. It was almost addicting. He tried to break himself out of these toxic spirals by willing himself to think of Ruby. She was ten now (or eleven, or twelve). He invented hobbies for her. He listened to her practice the cello, except when it was a saxophone or piano. He regarded her artwork as it hung on Crystal’s refrigerator. He imagined her letters, written on ruled paper:
Dear Uncle Stony, It sure has been a busy week!

And all other times he planned his escape. It was his duty as a prisoner. The Diggers’ helicopters were just outside the administration building, their black SUVs gassed up and ready to go. He fabricated elaborate escape plans worthy of a Jack Gore book. No, stranger than a Jack Gore book. He pulled himself up and went to the door of his cell. He put his plastic fingers to the wall and thought,
I am the door. The door is me …

Stony had spent years becoming one of the most reliable workers in the doctor’s office. Now that he’d moved into an
infirmary cell, he could be that diligent employee every day: the doctor’s most important research assistant. The nurses who rotated through the facility never lasted long, and outside scientists were not encouraged to visit. Dr. Weiss did everything he could to block other researchers from direct access to the prisoners, and he only reluctantly released data to the government teams studying the undead. The doctor thought Stony posed no threat, however, either to his ego or his health: Stony was never forced to wear a mask and was never handcuffed: The doctor wanted nothing to slow down his typing speed.

And Stony could type like a fiend, nearly 160 words a minute, and spent hundreds of hours at the computer, filling databases, and writing little DOS and VB6 programs to help the doctor churn out statistics. He typed an uncountable number of reports, memos, official letters, and articles. The articles had not been published, and would never be as long as the existence of Deadtown remained a state secret. “I’m sitting on a gold mine,” the doctor said at least once a week, “and I can’t tell anyone.” He feared for his legacy.

Sometime before, Stony had expressed concern about the archives. This was in 1995 or 1996, a couple of years before Valerie first tried to sleep. In the old animal lab there were almost a dozen file cabinets filled with documents going back to the first days of the prison. “They can take paper away from you,” Stony told the doctor. “They can burn it.”