Raising Stony Mayhall

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. There’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.