Raising Stony Mayhall (31 page)

There were many more letters, as well as Christmas greetings, birthday notes, and in one case an inspirational poem that she’d copied out for him. He read them all and then started again, more slowly, only stopping when he felt the vibrations of doors opening at the far end of the administration building: the guards of the morning shift on their way to the infirmary. He put the last of the letters away into the binder and put everything away exactly as he’d found it. Even in his anger and
disgust he found that he could be careful. Patient. He considered it a small victory that he did not scream, that he closed the safe door without lighting a match, that he returned to his cell without murdering a single person.

“I don’t want to live in this kind of world,” Dr. Weiss said. It was the Unhappy Hour, and the doctor had wandered into one of his regular existential crises. “All I want is a
reason
. If we have a reason, that changes everything. Suddenly we’re living in a rational world, a world of science, where one man, a Newton or a Leibniz, can examine the evidence, draw conclusions, and make a difference.”

Stony thought: Dr. Weiss, brother to Newton.

“I want to write that sentence, Stony. ‘The cause of the plague is
X
. Here is the vector
Y
, here’s how it works, here’s how you kill it.’ I want it printed in
Nature
, damn it. Because if we never find a reason, then we’re living in fantasy land, where wishes come true and unicorns eat your brains. But as things stand now …”

The doctor seemed to have lost his train of thought. He reached for his stainless steel mug, swirled it without drinking, proving to himself, perhaps, that he didn’t have to take another drink. Stony said, “As things stand now …”

“It’s untenable, Stony.” He took a drink from the mug. “I’m in hell. I’m trapped in a prison full of zombies. You know what they are? They’re an insult to the scientific worldview.” He made a vague gesture. “Present company—”

“No, no. I quite agree. We don’t make a lick o’ sense.” The doctor grunted, and Stony said, “And maybe we’re never going to get an answer. Would that be so bad?” This was a grenade lobbed to the heart of the doctor’s soul, and had the desired effect.

“Not bad?” The doctor’s face, already flushed, closed on itself like a fist. “Not bad?”

“I’m just saying that maybe we shouldn’t expect every little mystery—”

He was prevented, or rather rescued, from finishing this sentence by the entrance of one of the guards. Stony knew he was pushing it. If the doctor lost his temper, he could do anything to Stony he wanted to. And then Stony would have to decide what he would do with the doctor. He’d promised himself ten years ago that he would never harm another breather, but he was no longer sure it was a promise he could keep. He was stronger than the doctor and could kill him easily. When they were interrupted, both Stony and the doctor were saved.

The doctor yelled at the guard, “What is it for Christ’s sake?”

“We’ve got another sleeper.”

“Who is it this time?”

“Kind of a repeat, actually,” the guard said. “That woman that we almost lost.”

“Valerie?” Stony said. He thought he was masking his terror well. To the doctor he said in a steady voice, “Take me with you. I can help.”

“You ain’t helping this time,” the guard said, but the doctor instructed him to mask Stony and bring him with them. They marched through two cell blocks. No one tried to speak with Stony. The prisoners, his people, stood at the front of their cells and watched silently as they passed.

Several guards, one of them Harry Vincent, loitered at the entrance to Valerie’s cell. The doctor pushed them out of the way, and Stony followed in his wake without making eye contact with Vincent. On the bed was a gray, papery shell of something that resembled a woman.

“My God, the smell!” Dr. Weiss said.

It was the smell of rot. Of death.

Stony put out a hand. Her skin was as cold as before, as gray as before, but somehow she’d slipped from stasis—undead, unalive—to true death. She was meat again. Microbes were feasting on her, turning her flesh into energy for their little bodies. She’d been returned to nature.

At last, Stony thought. Valerie’s escaped.

ome dates are easier to remember than others.

“They want to make soldiers,” Dr. Weiss told him. It was September 18, a week after the towers fell. “Undead soldiers.”

Stony had already read the memo—the doctor had been keeping it in his private safe—but he feigned surprise. “That’s a very bad idea,” he said.

“They want to bite perfectly healthy soldiers, let them convert, then use them on the battlefield. Send them into—remote regions.” He couldn’t just say Afghanistan? As if Stony had anyone to tell this to.

Stony said, “That hasn’t been approved, has it?”

“I’m fighting it tooth and nail. It’s a crackpot idea, worse than any of our existing biological weapons. I’m not saying we wouldn’t get valuable data from living volunteers …”

“Of course.” The doctor had never been allowed to experiment on humans, and paid lip service to the idea that that would be immoral. But so many times over the years he’d started sentences with “If we could monitor the transformation in a controlled setting …”

“But the blowback!” the doctor said. “You wouldn’t be able to control them. They could start an outbreak in a foreign country that we’d be powerless to stop.”

“I can run the infection scenarios again,” Stony said. “Show them the spread rates—”

“Have them ready by Thursday,” the doctor said. “That’s when the Accountants are coming.” He said their name with a capital A. “You’ll have to move back to a real cell before then.”

“Why? And who are these guys?”

“They’re doing a full security audit. Every prisoner locked down, in masks.” The doctor removed his glasses and pressed his palms to his eyes. “Just try to get all the file cabinets organized and locked by today, all right?”

“But what does that mean? What’s covered by an audit?”

“When you’re dealing with these people?” the doctor said. “Everything.”

No one spoke to him when he was escorted back to the cell block and to a new cell. After an hour, though, a voice from the cell next to him called his name, and Stony went to the door.

“So,” the voice said. “Back from the massa’s house.”

Stony said, “Is that you, Kerry?” Kerry was a prisoner from Peoria who’d been brought in kicking and screaming a few years ago. Stony had helped talk him down and kept him from being killed. The doctor liked to keep him around because he was one of the only Chinese in Deadtown; the doctor liked diversity in his sample.

“Looks like they patched you up some,” Kerry said.

There were mirrors in the administration building bathrooms, but he’d avoided them. He didn’t need to be reminded
that he was no longer one of the pretty LDs. Dr. Weiss had tried to restore his face to something like his old one, but the doctor was no plastic surgeon. Stony walked with a limp now, and his torso automatically wanted to sit on a slight angle to his hips, as if his spine had been twisted. Maybe it had.

Stony sat down on the floor in front of the cell door. “So tell me what’s new,” he said. “How are people on the cell block?” He took off his shirt. His plastic arm was secured to his torso by a web of leather straps. He loosened one of the straps, then another, and pulled down on his arm so that a gap opened between the rubberized base and his gray skin. He thought about clenching his fist, and the fingers curled appropriately.

Kerry said, “There’s a lot of talk about sleeping. Ever since Valerie passed.”

“Is anyone trying it?” Stony unbuckled several of the straps completely. Now there was a six-inch gap between his artificial arm and the stump.

“What are you doing in there?” Kerry said.

“Just getting comfortable.”

“Well, everyone’s tried it. Nobody’s gotten the hang of it. It’s harder than it looks.”

Stony pulled the arm free and set it on the ground in front of him. It looked like an object now, a sculpture. And that was entirely the wrong frame of mind to be in.

Wave, Stony thought. The arm didn’t move. The fingers didn’t even twitch.

“Wave,” he said aloud.

“Wait for what?”

“Nothing,” Stony said. Then: “We just have to wait them out. That’s our talent.”

“That’s your talent for bullshit,” Kerry said. “We’re all going to die here. We’re just trying to speed it up.”

“No!” Stony said. “You have to remain positive. We can get out of here. There’s always a way out.”

Kerry laughed. “You really are as upbeat as you are in the
Sunday Deadline.
”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The weekly news. Though I suppose that’s over now, isn’t it?”

“For now,” Stony said. He didn’t know they’d called his messages anything. He liked the idea that it had been a kind of newspaper.

He stared at the fake limb.
I am the arm. The arm is me. I belong to you and you belong to me
.

Consciousness was the key. The self. Experiments from the animal lab had proved that to Stony. None of the bitten animals—and Stony had bitten some of them himself—had become undead. The closest they’d come was a chimpanzee that Stony had privately named Cornelius.

It had been a horrible experience. After they’d secured the animal to a table, Stony bit him in the finger as gently as he could, though of course it had to be hard enough to break the skin. Dr. Weiss stopped the chimp’s heart with 500 milligrams of sodium pentobarbital. Cornelius screamed in rage—and kept screaming. It seemed to go on forever, but later, when they reviewed the videotape, they saw that the tantrum had gone on for just over three minutes, before the chimp suddenly went rigid, his mouth stretched wide. During the entire episode, his heart had never beat. Had he briefly been undead, or was he simply one pissed-off chimp? Dr. Weiss was terribly excited, and over the next year he killed a score of chimpanzees, none of which did more than screech for a couple of seconds before dying.

Dr. Weiss concluded that the disease was a human malady, specific to the species, but that was the wrong way to think of
it. It was the idea of self that animated. Lose faith in yourself as an individual—lose integrity—and things fell apart.

I am the arm. The arm is me
.

The fingers curled as if stroking the keys of a piano. There we go, he thought, and waved back at himself. He had three, four days tops before they came for him. He had to be absolutely ready.

“Tell me about the Lump.”

It was the first time Harry Vincent had spoken to him during one of his night visits to the infirmary. It was after Valerie’s escape but before the towers fell, so perhaps winter of 2000 or spring of 2001. Stony still spent most nights with his plastic limb pressed to the bed, the wall, the steel of the cell door.

Vincent dragged a chair into the open doorway. He sat hunched over, the truncheon across his knees. Finally he said, “They say you talked to him.”

Stony didn’t answer. He lay on the bed as if he were capable of sleeping.

“Come on,” Vincent said. “Tell me. Is he real?”

“People like to make up stories,” Stony said.

“I’m not fucking interrogating you!”

Stony sat up. What was this then, a
chat
? “I don’t have my mask on,” Stony said. “I could bite you.”

Vincent stared at him, then looked at the floor. His forehead shone with sweat, though the room was not warm. “They say he’s just half a person. A chest, a head, one arm.”

“That’s what they say.”