Raising Stony Mayhall Read online

  BOOKS BY DARYL GREGORY

  Pandemonium

  The Devil’s Alphabet

  Raising Stony Mayhall

  Raising Stony Mayhall is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,

  or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Daryl Gregory

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon

  is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Gregory, Daryl.

  Raising Stony Mayhall / Daryl Gregory.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52238-2

  1. Zombies—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction.

  3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607 R48836R35 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2011010016

  www.delreybooks.com

  Cover design: Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design

  Cover photograph: © Rachel Querrien/Arcangel Images

  v3.1

  For the sisters, Robin and Lisa

  And the kids, Emma and Ian

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  2011 Easterly Enclave

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  2011 Easterly Enclave

  Excerpt from The Devil’s Alphabet

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  2011

  Easterly Enclave

  t is traditional to end with the Last Girl, the sole survivor, a young woman in a blood-spattered tank top. She drops her chain saw, her sawed-off shotgun, her crowbar—these details differ—and stumbles out of the ramshackle house and into the light. Perhaps the house is burning. Dawn glows on the horizon, and the ghouls have been defeated (for now, for now—all happy endings being temporary). Perhaps she’s found by her fellow survivors and taken to an enclave, a fortress teeming with heavily armed government troops, or at the very least gun-toting civilians, who will provide shelter until the sequel. Perhaps this enclave is located in Easterly, Iowa, about sixty miles northwest of the ruins of Des Moines. Perhaps the girl’s name is Ruby.

  That’s her sitting in the high summer grass, head tilted like a painter. She is twenty-three, and wears her dark hair short, which on these postapocalyptic mornings can be a real time-saver. She’s lived in the enclave for a little over a year, since the start of the second outbreak, and on most days, even through the icy winter, she’s ridden her bike out here to the Mayhall farm, to watch for movement amid the blackened timbers where the house once stood. She is always disappointed. Out here, nothing moves but the wind.

  Often she totes books with her. Sometimes she reads from a thick, five-ring binder jammed with typed pages, and at other times from the old-fashioned girl’s diary she inherited, a thin book with a cloth cover of green and pink plaid, whose lock she opens with a safety pin. Mostly, though, she sits and thinks. She has a plan, this girl. And today is one of the red-letter days in that scheme.

  A rider approaches, pedaling down the long gravel drive, a middle-aged woman with steely hair pulled into a fierce ponytail. Her aunt Alice. “Are they coming?” Ruby asks.

  “Should be here within the hour,” Alice says. “Thought you’d like to know.”

  “Ride out to the gate with me,” Ruby says. Alice frowns; she is a woman with Things to Do. “Oh come on,” Ruby says, and puts her arm around her. “You know you want to.” Side by side, they could be taken for mother and daughter. Both are tall, with strong noses and high cheekbones. They are beautiful.

  They ride down the drive to the highway, then head toward town. The enclave consists of twenty square miles of flat farmland, old housing divisions, and a few boarded-up stores and fast-food restaurants that used to make up Easterly. The clean zone is enclosed by two rings of fences topped with razor wire and spotlights. Good for keeping out the shambling hordes of last year, and good now for keeping out the federal government—the illegitimate federal government, people in the enclave say.

  The road is flat and makes for easy riding. Ruby is anxious to reach their destination, but it is very hot and Alice, a doctor, will not be rushed into heatstroke. It’s nearly an hour before they reach the southern guardhouse and its lobster trap of inner and outer gates. Sheriff Tines comes out to say hello, and he and a few of the guards stand around chatting with the women. Not for long; within minutes a man in the high tower calls down that a truck is approaching.

  Ruby can’t see anything on the road, and then she makes out a mercurial blob shimmering through the haze of heat. The truck gradually slows as it approaches the outer gates, where the federal troops are stationed. The helmeted and dark-visored guards briefly inspect the cab of the truck, as well as the yellow backhoe being towed on the trailer, then allow truck and trailer to pass into the no-man’s-land before the inner gate. This movement signals a transfer in jurisdiction, and an entirely new bureaucracy springs into action. Civilian guards, without uniforms but with guns even larger than those carried by the federal officers outside, sweep forward and demand that the two men in the cab exit the vehicle.

  The driver is a burly Korean man. He steps down slowly, then sees the women and walks toward the fence in a clumping gait. Both legs have been removed below the knee, and the prosthetics don’t fit well. The guards yell at him to stop and be searched, but he laughs and waves them off.

  “So you found one,” Alice says.

  “Did you doubt me? Did you doubt me?” the man says, laughing. “Found it at a place in Ankeny, with plenty of diesel, too. I claimed it as an unscheduled donation to the enclave. How you doing, Ruby? You girls didn’t have to come out here and meet me.”

  “Not much going on today,” Ruby says. “We really appreciate this, Kwang.”

  “Don’t you worry, we’ll find him,” he says.

  “Come on, Kwang,” one of the guards says, making his name rhyme with clang. Even though Kwang’s lived here almost his entire life, Iowans can’t seem to get his name right. “Gotta do the bite check. ’Less you want us to do it out here in front of the ladies.”

  Kwang laughs. “I don’t think they could take the excitement. You all want a ride back to the house?”

  “We’ve got our bikes,” Alice says.

  “Awfully hot for pedaling,” Kwang says. “Come on, you can throw ’em up on the trailer and ride in the cab. I’ve got air-conditioning.”

  Ruby touches Alice’s arm. “It’s only polite to keep him company,” she says. It’s been a year without many things, but at the moment, perhaps air-conditioning feels like the greatest loss of all. Th
ere’s generator power in the enclave, but it’s strictly rationed.

  “We shouldn’t be wasting fuel on that,” Alice says. But of course they shouldn’t be wasting fuel on this project at all. It was Ruby who pushed this idea, who convinced Kwang to find them a backhoe for the excavation, who convinced her relatives to hold a funeral. Her determination to carry out this plan is a mystery to them, but they’re indulging her.

  Fifteen minutes later, after Kwang has passed the bite check, the women climb up into the cab with him; his co-driver has decided to hang out at the gate awhile and shoot the shit.

  Traveling by vehicle, even a slow-moving semi, makes it obvious how tiny the enclave is. Someday, maybe soon, they’ll have to expand, push back the fences as the population expands. There are pregnant women in Easterly.

  Kwang nods to their right, at a patch of untended field. “That’s where your mom found him, right, Alice?”

  “About there,” she says.

  “Who?” Ruby asks.

  Kwang says, “Stony and his mother.”

  “Wait, slow down!” Ruby says. She leans across her aunt, and presses the button to roll down the window. “How come you’ve never pointed this out to me?” She’d traveled this road a hundred times with Alice.

  Kwang slows the truck to a crawl. There’s nothing to mark the exact location. Ruby says, “There ought to be a cross or something. A monument.”

  “It was about there,” Alice says.

  “There?” Ruby asks. It’s just a patch of grass.

  “Your grandmother was driving us home through a snowstorm,” Alice says.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1968

  Easterly, Iowa

  t was a wonder she saw the dead girl at all. The first winter storm of the season had rolled in well ahead of the forecast, and Wanda Mayhall drove hunched over the wheel, squinting through a shrinking ellipse of clear windshield at a road being erased by drifts, and singing in a high, strong voice. The wind buffeted the Ford Falcon station wagon and threw snow across her headlights, making a screen of white static. She sang “I Will Meet You in the Morning,” a belter of a hymn that would keep her three girls from worrying.

  And there, at the edge of the road, a dark lump on the white snow.

  She thought it was a downed cow, or maybe a dog. Then, a moment after her headlights had swept past, she thought she’d seen a glimmer of yellow. Something about that wink of color made her think, Rubber rain boots.

  She pressed on the brake as hard as she dared. Still the car slewed, and the two girls in the backseat squawked excitedly. Alice, her oldest at thirteen, braced herself against the dash and yelled, “Mom!” Ever since her father died, Alice had bestowed upon herself all the privileges of an adult, including the permanent right to ride shotgun and criticize her mother’s driving.

  Wanda put the car in reverse and slowly backed up, her eyes watching the rearview mirror for headlights barreling out of the snow, until she reached the spot where she thought she’d seen the dark blot. She left the car running and the lights on. “Don’t get out of the car,” she told the girls.

  She walked around to the rear of the station wagon. The wind whipped at her skirt, and icy snow bit her ankles through her nylons. Typical Iowa snowstorm, raking the empty fields at fifty miles per hour. A few feet from the taillights the dark closed in; she could barely distinguish gray field from pitch-black sky. She should have taken the flashlight from the glove compartment.

  Then she saw the lump, perhaps ten feet from the road. She stepped off the shoulder and instantly plunged into snow up to her shins.

  It was a girl, not more than seventeen or eighteen. She lay on her side, half buried in the snow, her arms curled in front of her. She wore an imitation rabbit fur coat, a dark skirt, black tights, and yes, yellow rubber boots. Wanda pulled off one glove and crouched in the snow beside her. She pushed the girl’s long brown hair from her face and touched a hand to her neck. Her skin was the same temperature as the snow.

  A light illuminated them. “Is she dead?” Alice said. She held the big silver flashlight. Of course she’d remembered it; Alice was as levelheaded as her father had been.

  “I told you to stay in the car,” Wanda said.

  “Chelsea’s watching Junie. Who is she?”

  Wanda didn’t recognize her. Maybe she was a runaway, trying to make it to Des Moines. But how did she get way out here, sixty miles from the city? And what killed her—exposure? A hit-and-run driver?

  The girl’s arms were wrapped around her stomach. Wanda had a bad thought. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and tried to push her onto her back, but only moved her a few inches; a drift had formed against her, holding her in place. Wanda pulled on the girl’s arm—it felt heavy, but not stiff—and moved it down to her side. Then she tugged up the hem of the jacket.

  The infant was wrapped in what looked like bath towels. Only its tiny gray face was visible, its eyes closed, its lips blue. Wanda made a low, sad sound. She worked her hands beneath the child, her hand cradling its neck, and brought it to her chest. It was cold, cold as its mother.

  Alice moved closer to her, and Wanda put up a hand—the girl didn’t need to see this. The dead girl’s pale shirt and dark skirt were stiff with frozen blood. Her black tights, she realized, were crusted with it.

  Alice stepped forward anyway, frowning. She didn’t scream, didn’t panic. She looked at the girl, then the baby in her mother’s arms, and said, “We have to get them to the hospital.”

  “Oh, honey,” Wanda said. She’d witnessed a few kinda-sorta miracles in her years as an RN, but there was no hospital on earth that could help this baby now. She held it to her and got to her feet. Then she carried it back to the station wagon. Alice said, “Shouldn’t we bring the girl?”

  “We’ll come back for her,” Wanda said. The mother she could leave, but she couldn’t imagine abandoning an infant, even a dead one.

  When they reached the car she made Alice get in first, then put the baby in her arms, as gently as if it were a living child. The younger girls leaned over the seat back, amazed. “You found a baby?” Chelsea said. She was seven years old, Junie only three and a half.

  Alice said, “It’s not—”

  “Sit in your seats, all of you,” Wanda said, cutting her off. The last thing she needed was three hysterical girls. She wouldn’t allow herself to cry, either.

  She eased the station wagon into the lane. In all the time they’d been pulled over not a car had passed them in either direction. The closest telephone was their own, a couple of miles away. She’d have to call the police, or maybe the fire department, and tell them where to find the girl.

  Then Alice shouted and Wanda nearly slammed on the brakes. “Alice, you can’t—”

  “Mom!”

  The baby’s eyes were open.

  After a moment Wanda said, “That happens sometimes.” She used her nurse voice. Maybe Alice would believe her if she used the nurse voice.

  “It’s moving,” Alice said.

  One of the towels had come open, exposing a little gray hand. Wanda looked at the road, back to the child. Its tiny fingers flexed.

  Wanda felt a stab of panic. Suddenly she had a dying newborn to save. She couldn’t floor it; the Falcon would never stay on the road. “Hold him up to the heater,” she said. “Her. It.”

  The ten minutes to the farm seemed to take forever. The baby’s arms shifted feebly under its wrap, and its lips moved silently. Alice talked to it the way she talked to Junie after a bad dream: Don’t you worry, little one. Don’t you cry.

  Wanda drove up the lane and didn’t bother to put the car in the garage. She killed the engine and took the baby from Alice. “Help the girls out,” she said.

  “Chelsea, carry Junie in,” Alice said, and followed her mother into the house. With one hand Wanda plugged the kitchen drain and turned on the warm water. The baby looked into her face. Its eyes were the color of clouds before a heavy rain.

  “We have
to treat it for hypothermia,” Alice said.

  Wanda had long ago ceased to be surprised by the things Alice knew. “That’s right. Now go get me some towels.”

  Wanda unwrapped the child. Ah, a boy then. He was blue-gray from top to bottom, with a black umbilical cord a couple of inches long, and a tiny gray penis. Dark hair with a bit of curl to it. She stirred the water in the sink, decided it would do, then lowered him into it.

  Chelsea dragged over a kitchen chair so she could see. Junie climbed up with her and wrapped her arms around her sister’s waist. “We should name him,” Chelsea said.

  “He’s not ours to name,” Wanda said.

  The boy seemed to like the water. He kicked his legs, waved his arms. He still hadn’t made a sound. Then she realized that his chest wasn’t moving. No: hadn’t moved. The boy wasn’t breathing. Junie reached out to touch him. “Get down, girls,” Wanda said. “Down!”

  She’d never been this scared caring for a patient. She decided she had to treat his hypothermia and breathing at once, so she cradled him in the water with one hand and pinched shut his little nostrils with the other. Then she bent her lips to his. Gentle, she thought. New lungs were fragile.

  She puffed a bit of air into his mouth. His chest rose a fraction, dropped—and stayed down. She breathed into him again, and again. After a minute she put her fingers to his neck. No pulse.

  He gazed up at her with those cloud-colored eyes, perfectly calm. His hand came up, seemed to reach for her face. And in that moment she made her decision. If it was a decision. If she had any choice at all.

  “Mom?” Alice said. “Is he okay? You want me to call the hospital?”

  “No. No hospital.” Alice started to argue, and Wanda said, “They’re snowed in. Nobody could get here anyway. Please, put the girls to bed.”