Free Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory Page B

sleep. He would have had a huge advantage in college.
    “So do they study me in medical school?” he asked. “The walking dead?”
    “They talk about what you did,” she said. “Not what you are.”
    “What do you mean?”
    She looked up from the typewriter, then took a breath and leaned back in her chair, allowing him to interrupt her for a while longer. Alice and Crystal both took after the Mehldaus, Mom’s side of the family: black hair, deep brown eyes, Cherokee-quality cheekbones, strong noses. At a casual glance you could take them for twins. But in Crystal those features added up to a kind of dark beauty, a mystery that drew you in. In Alice what you noticed first were the anglesof her face, the severity in every expression, the certainty in her gaze. One sharp look and you’d rethink your next step.
    “They teach us about the outbreak. How many died, how many were bitten, how many were transformed. The world should have ended that night, John. We don’t know how the hell they transmit the disease, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. The math is scary, John. One living dead person, biting and transforming one other person per hour—that’s all you need. In three days all the humans are dead or turned into walking dead.”
    “What?”
    “Those are raw numbers. Let’s say you manage to quarantine people as they’re bitten—say ten or twenty percent. That cuts down on the spread rate. But the world still ends in five days. Six billion people, dead or undead.”
    “But the world didn’t end. They stopped it once.”
    “The only way the model works out for human survival is if you kill off almost every single undead in the first two days. A ninety-nine-point-four-percent kill rate. Not ninety-eight, not ninety-nine-point-three—ninety-nine-point-four. And that’s what happened on the East Coast. Everyone who could carry a gun organized into gangs, and they went door to door shooting anything that moved. If that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be here today.” She shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t.”
    “Shit,” Stony said.
    “You’re a walking threat to national security, John. You’re smallpox. You’re an ICBM.”
    “They have to find a cure,” Stony said. “Somebody’s got to be working on a cure, right? A vaccine or something.”
    “Sure they are. But there’s a problem. The living dead break all known rules of biology and common sense. There’s no virus that works like this, we can’t find a pathogen, and it’s certainly not caused by space radiation or whatever the governmenttried to tell us it was. All the corpses that were examined after the outbreak, the ones they rekilled? They were just that—corpses. No one’s found anything to tell us what the disease was, or how we can prevent it. So the medical people threw up their hands. There was no way to study it with the normal tools of science, so they booted the whole subject down the road to the theoreticians. All a young doctor can do is pray that it never comes back.”
    “But it hasn’t gone away,” Stony said. “I was reading a newspaper article about a sighting in Indiana in 1971—”
    “Stragglers, kid. Some of the infected were smarter than the others and tried to hide once the cleanup gangs came out. And some were hidden by their crazy relatives.”
    “That
is
crazy.”
    “In the early seventies there was a lot of hysteria, a lot of paranoid books being written. You had Dennis Wenger on television talking about the ‘hidden dead,’ and antiwar activists claiming solidarity with them. People were seeing the living dead everywhere, turning in sick people, the elderly. New hunter gangs formed, though that was mostly rednecks looking for a reason to walk around with guns. I thought Mom was going to start drinking.”
    He didn’t remember any of that. All he remembered was playing with Kwang and his sisters.
    “So if they’re stragglers, why aren’t they biting people? The disease should be spreading. You