Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  The rest of the damage wasn’t so easily fixed. The Trentonites had battered the steel skin of the SUV until it looked like something we’d dragged out of a junkyard after twenty years of decay. The paint was missing in broad stripes down the sides. All the barbed wire had been torn away from the windows, and a big chunk was missing from the radiator grille. All the lights were broken, and all the windows cracked where they weren’t smashed altogether. The lack of a windshield was going to make driving a lot less fun—­hard to watch the road carefully when your eyes are constantly watering from the wind tearing at them. It created a bigger problem, too. Always before when we’d stopped for the night, we knew we would at least have a few minutes of safety when the zombies found us. They could claw and beat at the windows with their hands, but without tools they couldn’t break the glass, at least not right away. That had meant we had time to get the SUV moving and get away.

  Now we wouldn’t have that luxury. They could reach through the broken windows and grab us as soon as they found us. “We’ll just have to take turns, standing watch through the night,” I said.

  “What if I fall asleep during my watch?” Addison asked, her eyes very wide.

  “Don’t worry. It’s only a few days from here to Ohio,” I told her. “We’ll be okay.”

  I’d said that so many times I’d stopped doubting it myself. I was really starting to believe. Even though we had no idea what was to come.

  Adare’s map only covered the eastern half of Pennsylvania. He’d spent twenty years wandering over this country, but in all that time it seemed he’d never gotten farther than Harrisburg, which was marked on the map with a red badge symbol (which meant nothing to me—­so I planned on avoiding that city, just as I should have avoided Trenton). Beyond that were only a few Zs, marking concentrations of zombies, and some of those even had question marks next to them. Once we passed that point, we would have no information to guide us, no warning about potential dangers.

  On the plus side, there was a lot more blank space on the map. Pennsylvania seemed to have far fewer zombie infestations—­and looter camps—­than New Jersey. At least, assuming Adare’s annotations were complete as far as they extended.

  We were alive. That was the main thing, the thing I kept telling myself. We were alive and we were armed to the teeth, and if the SUV was beaten to a pulp, that could actually work in our favor. Road pirates would be less likely to attack us, since we looked like we were about to fall apart. They wouldn’t expect us to be loaded up with fuel and supplies.

  On top of that—­Pennsylvania was a beautiful land.

  New Jersey, what I’d seen of it, had been endless sprawl, ugly subdivisions of identical houses where it wasn’t built up into industrial wasteland. Pennsylvania seemed much less settled, much less crowded. The road we took that day led us over endless ridges, wrinkles in the earth covered from their sunlit tops to their shady hollows in growing green things. Trees grew everywhere, entire forests of them. Kylie had been taught a little geography in Connecticut, and she said that Pennsylvania was named after its immense number of trees. There were signs it may not have been as idyllic before the crisis—­big rectangular swaths of land that must have been fields once, roads lined with square and ugly buildings that must have been shops and strip malls. But the trees had reclaimed this land with a vengeance, growing right up to the side of the road, their roots carving their way through parking lots and office buildings, tearing up old houses and turning them into mulch. Stands of flowering plants twenty feet high waved pennons of green across our path and brushed the sides of the SUV as we drove past. Utility poles and road signs were covered in a kind of hanging ivy that twisted around any available surface.

  The sun was up, with just a few clouds that cast long, striped shadows that lay over the landscape like cool shawls of shade. From the tops of the ridges we looked down on little towns that seemed unharmed by the crisis, the sun glittering on their windows, perfect little scale models of the world that used to be. As long as you didn’t get too close, as long as you didn’t look for all the ­people who should have been there, the illusion persisted. The few small towns we did pass through gave us no trouble.

  Nor did the roads. I have no idea what Pennsylvania was like during the crisis, but it looked like the ­people hadn’t just abandoned their cars, like they did in New Jersey. Our way wasn’t blocked by dead traffic jams. In fact, that whole day we didn’t see a single abandoned car. Nor did we see any other occupied cars on the road. We didn’t see any human life, nor the pale imitation of zombiedom. We did see herds of deer moving through the woods, skittering away as soon as we came close. We saw birds dipping and bobbing through the sky.

  Kylie’s armor stayed up. Trenton seemed to have reminded her of what the world was really like. But the other girls were smiling and laughing and playing complicated hand-­clapping games in the backseat.

  It was a good time. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get to Ohio, I would have tried to enjoy it more, I think. I would have stretched it out. Instead I forced Kylie to keep driving, long after the sun had gone down. She didn’t seem to mind. In the back the girls slept, while I kept my eyes peeled, looking for any new danger in the road. With no headlights, we could only creep along, the night air cold on my face to keep me awake.

  For a while we traveled like that in silence, both of us intent on keeping our eyes peeled. It felt right, somehow. It felt like Kylie and I were partners, in a way it had never felt when we were looting houses together for Adare. We had a shared purpose and a common dream, and I felt like we belonged together.

  It still shocked me when she spoke.

  “We need to talk,” she said, out of nowhere. I jumped in my seat.

  “We do?” I asked.

  “We need to make some decisions,” she told me, keeping her eyes on the road.

  CHAPTER 49

  I think I should be your girlfriend,” Kylie said.

  “You—­wait. Wait, what?”

  “Or, no. No. Not your girlfriend.”

  I had no idea where this was coming from. “Okay,” I said, for the want of any better response.

  “That other thing. The one that’s more serious. We should be married. And Addison should be our baby.”

  I was too confused to speak.

  “Heather and Mary can be our sisters. Um, Heather can be your sister, and Mary can be mine. That way, we’re a family. They can’t split us up if we’re a family, right? That’s how it’s supposed to work. Families sticking together.”

  “Sure,” I said. I think I can be forgiven for feeling a twinge of weird emotion when she said that, given what had happened to my family in New York. But I was unsure where Kylie was going with this and didn’t want to push.

  She glanced over at me, and I saw her brow was furrowed. She’d put a lot of thought into this. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time, Finn. I don’t want to lose that now. I don’t want you taken away from . . . from us.”

  “Where would I go?” I asked her.

  Her eyes narrowed. She looked back at the road and swerved around a huge pothole that we hadn’t been able to see coming in the moonlight.

  “When we get to Ohio, I mean.”

  I was still puzzled.

  She sighed in irritation. “When we get to Ohio, we should tell them we’re a family. That you and me are married, and Addison is our baby, and Mary and Heather are our sisters. They’ll probably ask whether Mary is my sister or yours, and we need to get our story straight. That way they can’t split us up in the medical camp.”

  “Oh. Oh!”

  “I thought I was speaking clearly,” she said.

  “Okay, okay, I get it now,” I told her. “There’s a problem, though. Addison is too old to be our daughter. Even if we had her when we were kids, she’d only be around eight by now. And she’s closer to twelve.”

/>   “We can lie about her age,” Kylie suggested. “Or ours. We can say we’re older.”

  “Why not just say that Addison is your little sister?” I asked.

  Kylie had to think about that for quite a while.

  “I just wanted her to be my baby,” she said finally, with another exasperated sigh. “You won’t let them split us up, will you? You’re a man. They’ll have to listen to a man. If they split us up, some man will just come along and take us again. Like—­like he did.” She meant Adare, of course. She hadn’t spoken his name since she’d killed him. I think that every man in the world—­other than myself—­had become Adare to her.

  “It’s not going to be like that in Ohio,” I told her. “Do you remember Stamford?”

  “Not very well. Everything before I got my tattoo is sort of . . .” She struggled to describe it. “Brighter. And louder. But like when a car horn goes off next to your ear. Deafening, it makes it so you can’t hear anything else. You know?”

  I wondered if my own memories of New York were going to get like that. Like some half-­remembered fever dream of a better world. I wondered if that process had already begun. But no. I didn’t remember New York as paradise. I remembered its flaws, its weaknesses. The slow, soft decline of the first generation. The pointlessness of second-­generation life.

  I shook my head. “Ohio is going to be like that, but—­but better.” I said it because I believed it. And because I wanted it to be true. “It’s going to be safe. There are no zombies there, and no looters. No slaves, either. They obey the law in Ohio. Women aren’t treated like property. They have just as many rights as men.” As I warmed to my subject I felt like I could almost see it. “There will be gardens there. Places where you can plant seeds and watch them grow. We’ll make our own food, instead of having to steal it from dead ­people. And if we want a house, we can make that, too. Build it with our own hands. Knowing that nobody is going to come along and tear it down for firewood. We can build a life together there.”

  “As man and wife,” she said, nodding.

  “Well, sure, if—­”

  “That’s what we’ll tell them. And Addison is my little sister. I have to remember that. She’s not my baby. Even though that would be nice.”

  It was too dangerous to drive without lights. Even I knew that. Eventually I gave in and told Kylie to pull over at the next building we saw. It turned out to be an old farmhouse, abandoned and falling apart. It had a barn to one side where we could stash the SUV out of sight of the road, and a big front room where we could huddle together. The girls were still half asleep as I marched them inside and told them I would take the first watch. Kylie went to lie down with them, next to Addison. She stroked the younger girl’s hair until she fell asleep.

  A family.

  I guess we kind of were one, by that point.

  It had not occurred to me before, though. Always I’d assumed I had an obligation to get these girls to Ohio, but after that, the obligation would be discharged. I’d assumed we would all go our separate ways. We would spend the necessary amount of time in the medical camp, long enough to prove we weren’t infected. Then somehow the tattoo on my hand would be removed, and I would be shipped back to New York, to live out the life destiny had already chosen for me. The life that had been interrupted.

  But—­how strange that seemed now. To go back to New York and never see Kylie again. Or the others.

  Maybe they could come to New York with me. Not that I had a lot to go back to. Maybe the lot of us would go to Stamford, and I would see what life was like there. If it was any different. Maybe the ­people there were actually living, instead of just waiting to die. I kind of doubted it, but it might be nice to find out. Kylie still had family there. She’d lost her real sister, but her parents must still be there, wondering if she would ever come back to them. I could show up with her in tow and they would thank me—­call me a hero, even. They would take the other girls in, too, adopt them as their own. Mary and Addison had been born out in the wilderness, raised to be slaves to a series of violent men. If I could bring them to civilization, give them a safe home—­maybe I’d even call myself a hero.

  The thought made me laugh. I got up and went outside to pee, and to look around and see if there was any sign of zombies or any other threat out there. The night air was still, but filled with the noise of a trillion crickets, their song rising and falling like waves beating on an ocean shore. The trees towered over me, dark and always moving. Anything at all could be out there.

  Behind me was light and warmth and ­people I could trust.

  I didn’t need to be a hero, I thought. I didn’t need to be thanked.

  When we got to Ohio, I would tell them we were a family, and we had to stay together. I would make them understand.

  CHAPTER 50

  Pennsylvania was not without its horrors, but with the help of Adare’s map we avoided most of them. Unfortunately, there were some red marks in the atlas I couldn’t decipher. One place had a little picture of a man tied to a wheel, while another one showed two swords inside a circle. One big swath of the state had been marked with a carefully drawn skeleton—­Adare had taken his time drawing the skull, the rib cage, the dangling bony limbs. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. At the time it was enough that it was red and sinister looking. I told Kylie to detour well around it.

  One mark I couldn’t figure out, but I got to learn what it meant. Adare had meticulously drawn a little tube with wavy lines emerging from its top. The tube, I think, was supposed to be a test tube, and the lines were fumes. To Adare that must have meant something.

  “Do we go around this one?” Heather asked as I pointed it out on the map.

  I sighed because I didn’t want to. The detours we’d already taken had led us farther and farther from the main highway that ran straight across Pennsylvania from east to west. From New Jersey to Ohio. It was difficult to follow the map once you were off the main roads, and I was always worried we would get lost out there, wandering around looking for road signs until we ran out of fuel.

  The tube symbol was well off the road. It might be something we could avoid by just zipping past it at twenty miles an hour. And I suppose I had grown a little complacent (which you will remember, in the wilderness, is a synonym for “dead”). Pennsylvania had been good to us, days of easy travel with little or no danger. We hadn’t even seen any zombies.

  “Just stick to the course,” I told Kylie. “But everybody keep an eye out. At the first sign of trouble, we’ll head south, here,” I said, showing Kylie a place on the map where two roads intersected.

  It was nearly an hour before we saw what this new hazard was, and even then we didn’t recognize it. The road took us over the top of a ridge and then down into a green and leafy hollow. Ahead of us was another ridge, a great swelling wave of earth, but this one was different. No trees grew on its slopes and no rough line of rock crested its top. It was a pile of dark earth untouched by vegetation, and its sides were terraced into a series of curving tiers.

  “It looks like somebody cut pieces off that hill,” Mary said. “Do you think this is like Trenton, Finnegan? Did this place get bombed by the army?”

  I frowned. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Those terraces are way too regular. Trenton was all craters and trenches. This looks like somebody cut the top and sides off that ridge deliberately.”

  It bothered me that there were no trees up there. Everywhere else in Pennsylvania, plant life had taken over as soon as humanity went away. Thirsty roots had cut their way through concrete, pushed up through asphalt until it cracked and fell away. We’d seen whole towns overrun with creeping vines and stands of slender trees, entire fields of flowers that had once been fast-­food restaurants or superstores. Yet here only a few gray weeds stuck up from the gravelly soil.

  As we got closer I saw pools of water around the base of the ridge,
standing muck that looked like brown glass reflecting a sky leached of color. As I watched one pool, a black, greasy liquid bubbled up to the top and burst with a splatter of viscous droplets. The air filled with a stink like concentrated car exhaust.

  The road swung away from the ridge, curving around its southern limb as if even the road builders had wanted to avoid that blighted land. The smell got worse as we drove away from the polluted pool, not better, and soon we had all wrapped scraps of cloth around our noses and mouths to keep the fumes out. Addison kept coughing and couldn’t seem to stop, as if she was allergic to something in the air. I could only hope the wind here itself wasn’t poison.

  Eventually we left that blighted land behind. By then we all felt sick, and for days afterward we didn’t breathe right; we wheezed and coughed. But the air grew sweet again, and the trees returned like sentinels on either side of the road.

  I could only wonder what had happened to that place, to the hill that had been cut open until its toxic blood ran free. It made me think of how the first generation always told us that life was so much simpler now. As a child that had made me laugh—­we were barely surviving, clinging by our fingernails to a dangerous world, chased by zombies, plagued by thieves and a government that couldn’t protect us. But that poisoned place was part of their world, the world before the crisis—­not mine. As much as they’d had, as easy as their lives were, the ­people who lived back then had found some good reason to pollute the ground they stood on and the air they breathed. Maybe my generation did live in a simpler time after all.

  CHAPTER 51

  We passed by Harrisburg without even seeing it. It was marked with a badge symbol on Adare’s map, but we didn’t discover immediately what that was supposed to mean. The city was either covered over by new vegetation or far enough away from the main highways that it couldn’t be seen from the road.