Raising Stony Mayhall (19 page)

Delia seemed to know everyone, at least by name; he gathered that this was the first time that most of the LDA had met in person. He shook hands with a dozen people as they made their way slowly to the central tent, as Mr. Blunt and Delia made introductions. From the air temperature—much warmer than in the freezer truck, but much colder than Los Angeles—he guessed that they’d traveled north. In twenty-four hours they could have driven halfway across the country.

“Who’s this pretty boy, Delia?” a man said. He was a short, stocky white man who wore a porkpie hat pulled low on one side of his head. The skull on that side was alarmingly concave, the gap large enough to cradle a bowling ball. The hat, rather than disguising the absence, accentuated it.

“Stony, this is Billy Zip.”

Ah, Stony thought. The Big Biter.

“You must be the boy from Iowa,” Billy said. “I heard about Delia’s
daring
rescue several years ago.” He held out a gloved hand whose fingers were too short; each seemed to have been broken off at the second knuckle. It felt like shaking a dog’s paw.

“She saved my life,” Stony said.

“Then you should put it to good use,” he said. He nodded to Mr. Blunt—somewhat warily, Stony thought. “Keeping ’em sharp, Blunt?” He moved off, and a small group of people followed him.

“What an asshole,” Delia said.

“I liked his hat,” Stony said.

“As in heads,” Mr. Blunt said, “not all hats are created
equal.” A woman on the security team caught Blunt’s eye, and he said, “Much to do. Enjoy yourselves, my dears.”

Delia said, “There are some people you need to meet—one guy in particular.” They dropped off their bags at their assigned quarters, a silver Airstream trailer near the middle of the warehouse, then weaved their way back to the main tent. Round plastic tables and chairs were set up as if for a reception, and there were LDs at half of them, and stacks of paper on all of them. Clouds of cigarette smoke formed an atmospheric layer under the tent roof. Once again he felt that thrill of seeing so many of his people in one place, but already he was relaxing into it, embracing it. Yes, they were horrors. Black tongues and yellow teeth, gray skin and exposed bones, gaping, never-healing wounds, and everything that
wasn’t
there: the missing hands and feet and eyeballs. But they were his people. What did he have to fear from his own?

At the far end of the tent was a raised stage with a podium and microphones, where a man whose left jacket sleeve was pinned at the elbow read announcements from a clipboard. The secretary of the congress, Delia told Stony. Then she commanded him to sit tight, and waded into the center of the tent, moving from table to table, shaking hands and exchanging hugs. Stony picked up a packet from a pile of mimeographed blue and white sheets. The blue sheets contained a schedule for the next three days; the white sheets seemed to be agenda items and proposals.

Stony laughed, then looked up quickly, hoping nobody was paying attention to him. No one had noticed. He sat, and began to flip through the pages. He was starved for information. He’d spent years with Delia, most of it in the same dozen, dim rooms, but she’d been withholding information from him—for his own good, and for the good of the community, she told him—and he had so many questions. How many of his people were still at large? What kept the organization functioning? Did they have spies in the government? How many of their people had been captured?

On stage, the one-armed secretary announced that 162 delegates, from fourteen states and one Canadian province, had made it to the congress. A cheer went up. Stony thought, Canada? We’re in Canada?

“There are others we believe to be still on the road,” the secretary said. “Our thoughts and prayers are for their safety.” This sobered the crowd. After a moment of silence the secretary said, “On to the first order of business. That would be …” He looked down at his papers. “Rose from the San Francisco parish.”

Rose, the Lumpist he’d met years ago, walked to the podium, but she was so tiny that she had to step out in front of it and hold the microphone. “I’m Rose,” she said. “And the Lump says …” She lifted one arm and waved slowly.

Laughter erupted. Stony turned and saw scores of arms in the air, waving back.

“I’ll relay your greetings back to him,” she said. She talked about the number of residents her parish was sheltering, and the generosity of the volunteers. “I want to tell you that things are changing,” she said. “Attitudes are shifting. I’ve met people who are not cowed by the government’s fearmongering. They are not afraid. They’re committed to helping us. They realize
that they must stand by us, because any one of them could be the next outcast, the next target, the next victim.”

The crowd liked the sound of that. Rose finished her talk and left the stage to applause, which Stony supposed was more for the Lump than Rose herself. The next speaker struck a more pessimistic note. Bonnie, a woman sporting a white Cleopatra-style wig, made a plea to recruit volunteers from among the living. The number of supporters, she said, was dropping rapidly. Most of the original volunteers had been relatives and friends of the victims in the ’68 outbreak, and now twenty years of life in the underground had taken its toll. Some volunteers, like the Scanlon Sisters, had been arrested; some had dropped out when their relatives had been captured; others quit because of the stress; others had simply died. The LDs needed to identify breathers who might be sympathetic to the cause, and reach out to them in a way that wouldn’t get both parties killed or captured.

Not for the first time he wondered how Crystal had managed to win the trust of the LDA. Delia had told him that his sister had met Aaron first—at a party? a concert?—but it was a mystery how each had sussed out where the other stood in regard to the walking dead. Crystal was beautiful and gregarious, a charmer, but wouldn’t that have made them suspicious? He couldn’t imagine all the delicate steps in that negotiation, the dance of suggestion and hint.
How ’bout those dead people, huh?
Everyone knew that the FBI was on the lookout for necro-symps, and that fear of a second outbreak ran deep. Every breather was a potential Judas. The human drivers who’d brought them here were supposedly the most trusted volunteers. But what if the government got to them somehow? Suppose Aaron’s brother wasn’t dead, but captive in Deadtown. How hard would it be to pressure Aaron into turning over LDA secrets?

Other parish officers stepped up to make their reports. They all began with statistics—the count of houses and volunteers, the number of new members, the larger number of residents who’d fallen to the police or committed suicide—but none of them could stick to the dry facts; they were there to tell stories. A woman from Maryland talked about how the breather who’d owned one of their houses had died at the hospital, and the owner’s sons had shown up unexpectedly, and the four LD residents had been forced to hide in a tiny attic space above the garage for two weeks until another parish could rescue them. The story was told lightly, and drew sympathetic laughter, but the event had clearly been terrifying for the four involved. A parish leader from Columbus, Ohio, spoke about a group suicide: All three members of a house decided together that they couldn’t go on, and had walked to a parking lot and doused themselves with gasoline. Another representative told how his safe house had been discovered by a neighbor, and how their breather volunteer had managed to talk the neighbor into meeting the LDs, eventually recruiting him.

The stories rolled on, and gradually Stony realized there was something wrong with the census numbers. Delia had told him that there were eight to ten thousand LDs in hiding across the country. But he’d been keeping a running total in his head, and so far, with many states reporting, the counts of LDs were in the hundreds, not the thousands. Was there a secret, massive community of his people somewhere?

Delia said, “What’s the matter, Stony? You look like you’re in shock.”

“No, I’m—fine. Where have you been?” She’d been gone for over an hour. Beside her was a man wearing a red-orange Afro wig and large aviator sunglasses. His face was impassive,
and Stony couldn’t tell if he was angry or merely bored. Delia said, “This is the kid I was telling you about. Stony, this is F.M.”

“Oh, hi,” Stony said, and they shook hands. “Is that F.M. as in—”

“Fucking Monster,” he said without expression.

Delia laughed, and something in the adjustment of F.M.’s lips suggested he was yanking Stony’s chain. Stony said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Monster.”

Delia said, “F.M.’s the coordinator of Oswog. I told him you were a scientist.”

“What? No, not really—”

“Okay then,” Delia said. “I’m going to leave you boys to it.”

Stony thought, leave to what? He didn’t even know what Oswog—Ozwog? OSWOG?—was.

“This way,” F.M. said, and led him toward the edge of the tent. “Cigarette?” It was a Kool. All the LDs smoked either menthols or, worse, clove cigarettes.

“I really shouldn’t. I’m watching my health.”

F.M. halted, extended the pack to Stony, and they lit up together. “Thanks,” Stony said.

“Thank God for
smokes,
” F.M. said. “We can’t drink, least not enough to get a buzz on. Yeah we can eat and maybe get a little taste in our mouths, but then what? Just fills you up and doesn’t do a damn thing for you, and then you got to move that shit
out
. Pain in the ass.”

“Literally,” Stony said. “I was wondering, this OSWOG—”

“But smoke, that gives you something to move in and out of your lungs, a little warmth, a little flavor. We all need a way to pass the time. Hell do we need it. Sitting around arguing about what to call ourselves. Did you see that proposal?”

“Right, ‘differently living’—”

“You know what word I use?” He was interrupted from feedback from the speakers.
“Test, test. Sibilance. Sibilance.”
On stage, LDs milled about carrying guitars and banjos.

“I use the word
human,
” the man said. “Forget dead, forget un-anything. We’re just as alive as anybody else. Do we not move? Do we not think?”

“Yes!” Stony said. He’d been thinking along these lines. “And we reproduce, too.”

“The holy bite,” the man said, nodding. “Not exactly screwing, but it works.”

“The problem is, how do we reproduce in a safe way, without violating the rights of others?”

“That’s easy,” F.M. said. “Make it a religion.”

“What?”

“Start a church, and make it a sacrament. People will line the fuck up.”

“Hi ho!” said a voice from the speakers. An LD with a gray beard and a wild head of hair had stepped up to the mike. He held what looked like a sawed-off banjo. “We’re the Stump Thumper Jug Band, and we’d like to do a few tunes for you. This one’s called ‘Resurrection Breakdown.’ ”

F.M. groaned. “Jesus Christ, they’re trying to kill us. Come on, Stony.”

He marched off, and Stony struggled to keep up. “Tell me what you meant by sacrament,” Stony said.

“The
host
. Instead of taking a bite out of Jesus, he takes a bite out of you. Everlasting life. Me, I had diabetes before I got bit, and my blood pressure—” The Stump Thumpers cranked up into a high whine, and F.M. had to raise his voice. “My blood pressure was through the
roof
. If it wasn’t for getting turned, I’d be dead right now. Deader.”

They passed beyond the banjo’s kill radius, and were
crossing the warehouse floor toward a line of RVs. Stony said, “So, this OSWOG you’re the coordinator for—”

“It’s not that formal, anybody could run it, and anybody can join. Delia said you studied a convert as he was going through the change. You should write that up, present it to the group.”

“But I didn’t find anything out.”

“Then you’ll fit right in,” F.M. said. “We cover a lot of issues. The fever, amnesia and memory recovery, outbreak epidemiology. But mostly we’re after the big question, Stony. The origins of undeadness—what the fuck we are, and where the hell we come from. Somebody’s got to work on this shit, right? Certainly not
those
damned LDs.” He nodded toward a group of a dozen graveborn sitting on the ground, all listening to a man preach to them. Oh, Stony thought, the
Damned—
Valerie’s fellow-believers. What could the sermon be about, then? If all LDs were doomed, then self-improvement was a waste, and Evangelism was right out.

F.M. led him to a circle of LDs sitting in camp chairs in front of an RV. The three men and two women were in various states of frozen decay. One of them, a man with a yarmulke resting on his bone skull, was reading from a paper when F.M. interrupted him.

“Everyone, this is Stony. Stony, meet the Ontological Studies Working Group.”

Oh, Stony thought. OSWoG.

“In summation,” said Chuck, the bony Jewish man, an hour and a half after Stony had joined the group, “the government’s original claim that the outbreak was caused by radioactivity from an exploded space probe has no support in the scientific
literature, and in fact can be traced to a deliberate attempt by government-paid scientists to
obscure
the cause of the outbreak; by assigning blame to an ‘accident,’ the government hoped to mask the true cause, which we now know, from the epidemiological data, must have originated from either (a) a security breach within the government’s biological weapons program, or more likely, (b) a deliberate test of a bioweapon that—Yes, mister …?”

“Stony.”

“You don’t have to raise your hand, young man,” Chuck said.

“Right. Sorry.” He lowered his arm. The other members of OSWoG regarded him with varying levels of interest, humor, and annoyance, and F.M.’s expression behind his aviator glasses was unreadable. “You’re saying that the outbreak is due to some virus?”