Daryl Gregory - Raising Stony Mayhall

B OOKS BY D ARYL G REGORY

Pandemonium

The Devils Alphabet

Raising Stony Mayhall

Raising Stony Mayhall is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are the products of the authors 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. ZombiesFiction. 2. Mothers and daughtersFiction.
3. Brothers and sistersFiction. I. Title.
PS3607 R48836R35 2011
813.6dc22 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

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 crowbarthese details differand 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 nowall happy endings being temporary). Perhaps shes 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 girls name is Ruby.

Thats 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. Shes 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, shes 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 girls 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 youd 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 governmentthe 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. Its 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 cant 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-mans-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 dont 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 didnt have to come out here and meet me.

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

Dont you worry, well find him, he says.

Come on, Kwang, one of the guards says, making his name rhyme with clang. Even though Kwangs lived here almost his entire life, Iowans cant 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 dont think they could take the excitement. You all want a ride back to the house?

Weve 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. Ive got air-conditioning.

Ruby touches Alices arm. Its only polite to keep him company, she says. Its been a year without many things, but at the moment, perhaps air-conditioning feels like the greatest loss of all. Theres generator power in the enclave, but its strictly rationed.

We shouldnt be wasting fuel on that, Alice says. But of course they shouldnt 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 theyre 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, theyll have to expand, push back the fences as the population expands. There are pregnant women in Easterly.