Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  I looked up from the road atlas in my lap. Glanced across at Kylie. “This is as far west as he ever got.” I’d taken up her habit of only ever referring to Adare as “he.” “There aren’t any more red marks.” I held up the map book to show her, but she didn’t even glance at it.

  “We’ll be okay,” Kylie said. But her voice was empty. I think she just said it because it was what I wanted to hear. Maybe she was just repeating what I’d said to her so many times.

  I started to form a reply, but the noise of Addison coughing in the seat behind me broke my concentration. I turned around to see if she was okay.

  Addison was doubled over with effort, while Mary rubbed her back to try to help her bring up whatever was in her lungs. I still thought it was just dust from the carved ridge, something nasty that had to work its way out of her system.

  I should have known better. I should have paid attention to the fact that we’d been taking a lot more bathroom breaks than usual. That Addison had loose bowels and that she’d vomited twice the day before. But that wasn’t such a strange thing for us. Some of the food we ate was twenty years old—­we had stomach bugs often enough. As it was, I didn’t even suspect anything was wrong until she started coughing like that.

  The cough persisted all the next day. I kept thinking I should call for a rest stop, that we should give her a rest from having cold air blasting on her through the broken windshield all day, but when I asked her, she said she was fine. As Pennsylvania rolled by and we ate up the miles, everyone tried to pretend that she was right, that it was nothing, just a cough. We started a hundred conversations about nothing at all—­about the weather, about all the trees. Every time it seemed like we were going to get back on track, that everything was going to be all right, Addison would start coughing again.

  “Allergies,” Heather suggested. ­“People get allergic, right? In the spring, when the flowers are blooming. That’s all.” She patted Addison’s shoulder.

  We all knew it wasn’t just allergies, but nobody wanted to admit that Addison was sick. When she started vomiting, we couldn’t deny it any longer. Kylie pulled over to the side of the road, and we cleaned Addison up as best we could. “I always feel better after I throw up,” I told her when we were back on the road. Vomiting was not an uncommon occurrence among us, given some of the food we were eating was twenty years old. This time, though, Addison didn’t seem to get any relief from it. Her face was gray and she was sweating, even with the cold wind whipping through the broken windows of the SUV. “Try to sleep,” I told her, and she nodded. But the coughing kept waking her up.

  “She’s sick,” Heather said, two words nobody had dared speak so far. We all knew it was true.

  In New York, we had lived in constant fear of disease. Of some new flu or fever that would come sweeping through the streets, passing from mouth to hand to nose, mowing us down while we were helpless to stop it. My understanding of germ theory was pretty rudimentary, but I remembered the quarantines from my youth, the ­people herded into abandoned buildings. I remember how we would throw food in through the doors and not let the sick out until they could prove they were well again.

  We didn’t have that option in the SUV. What were we going to do, strap Addison to the roof rack?

  “She’ll come around if she can just get some rest,” I suggested.

  But instead she just got worse. She grew weaker until she could barely lift her head, and she was only half conscious at the best of times. Sometimes she muttered to herself. Nothing that made any sense, just halves of syllables and animal sounds. When I touched her forehead, it was like a bonfire was raging inside her skull.

  We had some pills in the SUV, left over from our last looting expedition. I studied them intently, comparing their colors and shapes and the strange words written on their bottles. Eventually I had to admit I had no idea what any of them were. Some of them might bring her fever down. Others might kill her. I didn’t dare to give her any of them. “Keep a wet rag on her forehead,” I told Mary, who had become Addison’s nurse solely by dint of sitting next to her. “Try to make her comfortable.”

  “What if she dies?” Mary asked.

  Heather leaned over and slapped her. “Addison isn’t going to die,” she said.

  I looked at Kylie, but the emotional armor was up, screwed on tighter than ever. I don’t think Kylie was even blinking at that point. I would dearly have loved to have her advice, to have her tell me what to do. But this was the same state in which she’d said that killing Bonnie was the right thing to do, or that we should sell Addison for fuel at Prince­ton. A state that let her survive the worst the world had to offer her.

  If I had asked Kylie at that moment, she would have told me to leave Addison by the side of the road. Let the zombies have her.

  There was absolutely no chance of that.

  “This is my fault,” Mary said at one point. I turned around to say no, no, that wasn’t possible, but I saw right away from Mary’s face that she was serious. She was crying and she couldn’t look me in the face. “It was a while back, before we saw that big machine. You stopped the car so we could stretch our legs, remember? At that place, that place with the picnic benches and the little creek that ran over a waterfall.”

  “I remember the place,” I told her.

  “Addison and I went off to pee. I watched for zombies while she went, but while I wasn’t looking she went wading in the creek. Before I knew it she was drinking some of the water. She said it was really fresh and sweet. It was really good.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, the words coming out of me despite every effort to keep them down. I’d grown up in a place surrounded by water, water one must never, ever drink. I had a healthy fear of anything that didn’t come out of a bottle. Apparently nobody had ever taught Addison that lesson. “What about you? Did you—­?”

  “I didn’t drink any,” she said. She rubbed at her nose with one hand. “I knew better. But I figured . . . it looked so clear and clean. It was like glass, it was so clear. I figured it would be okay.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I told her. “You couldn’t have stopped her. You didn’t know she was going to do that.”

  Knowing why Addison was sick didn’t help us treat her. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved, a little. If Addison had been poisoned, then she wasn’t contagious. None of the rest of us were going to get what she had.

  I wanted to punch myself for even thinking that. But it was true.

  That night Addison started vomiting up blood. Her eyes were as red as a zombie’s, and her skin felt like soft wax. Heather and Mary stared at me, begging me to make a decision.

  Only one thing was possible. “They’ll have medicine for her in Ohio. We keep driving, as fast as we can. If we can get there in time, they can help her. We will get there in time,” I added, because they clearly needed to be told a lie right then. “We will make it.”

  Heather and Mary nodded in unison.

  Kylie stepped on the gas.

  CHAPTER 52

  We followed the Pennsylvania Turnpike because it was the fastest way to Ohio. Of course it was also the place we were most likely to run into looter gangs or worse. All we cared about was speed, though, and that meant taking risks we couldn’t really afford. Kylie took potholes at speed, swerved around abandoned cars without slowing down. The towns of Bedford and Somerset were just blurs we shot past—­they could have been thriving walled cities, they could have been camps full of road pirates looking for an easy score. I didn’t even turn my head to look at them. I was too busy watching Addison. She was neither asleep nor awake at that point, but somewhere in between. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes saw nothing. There was a chance her body could fight this thing, that she could just get better on her own. I could see her getting weaker, though. We had no way to get food down her throat. Mary dripped water into her mouth from a wet rag, but half the time
that just made her cough and retch.

  The road swung northwest, and Kylie tapped the road atlas in my lap. I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me. She tapped it again, and when I just shook my head, she said, “Pittsburgh.”

  I looked at the map. The turnpike passed north of Pittsburgh. We wouldn’t even see it if we kept to our current course. But I knew exactly what she meant.

  Pittsburgh was a living city. Even I’d heard of it, back in New York. It wasn’t an island like Manhattan, but it had the next best thing, a triangle of land protected on two sides by rivers wide enough that zombies couldn’t swim across them. The Emergency Broadcast Ser­vice radio announcers always said it was a shining example of survival in the face of adversity.

  Pittsburgh would have the drugs we needed to save Addison. There was no question about that. We could be there in an hour or two. But that assumed they wouldn’t just shoot us on sight. That they would let us in or even talk to us. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking—­I didn’t want Mary and Heather to know what Kylie had suggested, because I wasn’t sure what we should do and I didn’t want to give anyone false hope. So I held up my left hand and tapped the tattoo on the back of it.

  Kylie nodded. She understood—­she had a tattoo as well. We were positives. No walled city would let us get close. Addison didn’t have a tattoo, though. She was, theoretically, clean. But what did that do for us? Could we really just drive up to the wall of Pittsburgh and leave Addison by the gate? Hope they would take in a sick girl rather than just leaving her out there to die?

  By contrast, the medical camp in Ohio was—­well, a hospital. They were in the business of taking in ­people who were sick.

  There was a problem there, too, though.

  When I’d originally set out on this journey, walking across the George Washington Bridge, I’d had a very shaky grasp on just how big America was. I’d assumed Ohio was only a few dozen miles from New York. I’d also assumed that “Ohio” was the name of a city, or some imposing landmark. I’d had no idea it was an entire state. The thing was, I had no idea now where in Ohio the medical camp was located. Ohio was nearly as big as Pennsylvania according to Adare’s road atlas. I assumed the camp had to be on one of the major roads, but that still meant we were going to have to search for it. It could be right over the border or a hundred miles away.

  We had no idea how much longer Addison could hold on. Or whether it was already too late to save her.

  Kylie said nothing. She didn’t tap the atlas again or shake her head or even look at me. It was clear that she was shut down, that she was incapable of helping me. The decision was mine alone. Take our chances with Pittsburgh, where they might just turn us away—­wasting priceless hours—­or keep going? Hope we found the medical camp in time. Addison’s life was in my hands. If I made the wrong choice . . .

  “Ohio,” I whispered.

  Kylie nodded. A little while later we saw the off-­ramp that led to Pittsburgh. We blew past it at forty miles an hour. The die was cast.

  It turned out to be up there with the worst decisions I’ve ever made.

  CHAPTER 53

  There’s somebody back there,” Heather said, about half an hour later. I turned in my seat and saw her pointing through the back window. I could just see a tiny, dark dot on the road far behind us. Then the curving road took us around the side of a hill and the dot disappeared.

  “That didn’t look big enough to be a car,” I said. “It was probably just a deer. Or at worst, a zombie, wandering out into the road.”

  Sometimes you say things just because you wish they were true. It doesn’t mean you’re foolish enough to believe them. Soon enough the dot came back. It was following us, and it was picking up speed. Before long I could see it was a man on a motorcycle.

  He was dressed, head to foot, in tan leather.

  “Fuck, no,” I said. I’d been raised not to use profanities often—­New York had taught me manners and basic courtesy. But if there’d ever been a right time, this was it. “We don’t have time for this,” I said.

  The girls were all silent. Mary was wiping Addison’s brow for the thousandth time. Heather sat frozen in her seat, immobilized by tension. None of us had really had time to get afraid. Not yet.

  Kylie kept her eyes on the road. Her mouth was a perfectly straight line on the front of her face. I wished I could draw composure from her. Siphon off some of her dispassion.

  I couldn’t, of course.

  Especially not when she slammed on the brakes and we all went catapulting forward against our seat belts. I spun around, a fresh curse on my lips—­“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” was the one that came to mind. But then I saw why she had to slow down.

  Up ahead of us the road was blocked by a line of motorcycles, parked lengthwise across the turnpike. We could have just plowed through it, run down anyone who got in our way. But the ­people on those motorcycles were all armed, and some of their guns were pointed right at us.

  If it comes down to a shootout, so be it, I thought, as the car rolled to a stop. “Heather,” I said, “get the guns out and—­”

  But then a man dressed in camouflage pants and nothing else ran right up to the side of the SUV, to the driver’s side. He reached through the broken window and pressed the barrel of a pistol against Kylie’s temple. She didn’t flinch.

  “Don’t think,” the man said. “Don’t move.”

  Behind us, Andy Waters in his tan leathers rolled to a stop, his feet dropping casually to the pavement so his motorcycle didn’t fall over. He had a machine pistol in one hand. In the rearview mirror he winked at me.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “You can have anything. But we have a sick girl here and we need to get her to help. Just leave us the SUV and enough fuel to get us to Ohio.”

  “I’m not the one who makes deals,” the half-­naked man said. His head was shaved but poorly. Patches of stubble stuck up behind one ear, above his left eye. His body was lean and stringy, like he was a bundle of steel cables painted to look human. I had no doubt whatsoever he would shoot Kylie given the slightest provocation.

  Up ahead, on the roadblock, a pile of furs on top of one of the motorcycles stirred and rose up as if it had been asleep until just now. It was Red Kate, of course. She had a new streak of dyed blue hair, but I recognized her instantly.

  Without hurrying, without the slightest bit of interest, it seemed, she swung one leg over her motorcycle and dropped to the asphalt, then ambled toward the SUV, taking time to say something to one of her crew, something that made him laugh. She came to my side of the SUV, and for a second it looked as if she would walk right past me. As if she hadn’t even seen me there. Then she stopped and a smile stretched across her face.

  “Oh, Stones, you do know how to run,” she said. “It took us days to catch up with you. A bunch of times Andy or one of these other dipshits said you’d gotten away, and I should give up. Just . . . let you go. Shows what they know, huh?” She bent over and touched her toes, then stretched her arms high in the air. She had no guns on her, just the long, swordlike knife with the hand guard made of skulls. It dangled from her belt like a charm on a bracelet. She turned and looked at the SUV, let her eyes roam up and down its length. “You have got to take better care of your vehicle, Stones. That way it will take care of you. Hey there, Kylie,” she said, leaning on my window to wave across me.

  “Kate,” I said. “Please—­”

  “Quiet, Stones. I’m talking to Kylie. How you doin’ in there, K? Looks like you’ve traded up. Tired of the old ball and chain, so you thought you’d cut yourself off a new piece of tail. I know how that goes. K, if you don’t say anything, I’m going to think you’re rude.”

  Kylie hadn’t even turned her head. She wasn’t blinking. I couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.

  “Archie,” Kate said, looking at the half-­naked man
on the other side of the SUV, “if she doesn’t say something pleasant in three seconds, shoot her. One.”

  “No!” I shouted. “You know how she is; she—­”

  “Two,” Kate said. “Two and a half.”

  “Hello, Red Kate. It is very nice to see you again,” Kylie said. Her eyes didn’t move. Nothing about her moved. She merely said the words and went back to being a statue.

  “Perfect,” Kate said. “That’s pure survival instinct right there. You could learn a little something from her, Stones. But then you wouldn’t be as much fun.”

  I wanted to put my head in my hands. I wanted to scream in frustration. But at least I knew better than that. “How did you find us?” I asked.

  “You told everybody where you were going. Only one good road to Akron.”

  I gritted my teeth. Why had I been so foolish? I’d thought if ­people knew I was headed to Ohio, someone might help me get there. Instead I made the dumbest mistake you can make out in the wilderness: giving away your position.

  “Once I heard about what happened to Adare, I knew you lot were going to need somebody else to look after you. A mama bear to replace your daddy bear,” Kate said. “Who’d have thought it, huh? Adare! Eaten by zombies! Sure.” She leaned in through the window, leaned in so close her lips were nearly touching my ear. “You must have got him from behind, right?” she whispered. “Shot him in the back? Maybe while he was asleep? I really want to know.”

  I shook my head. “Kate, if you’re really interested in our welfare—­”

  “I so am,” she said.

  “Addison’s sick. She’s dying. If we don’t get her to the medical camp in the next few hours, she isn’t going to make it. If you just let us go—­”

  “We both know that isn’t going to happen.”

  I closed my eyes. “You can save her life, Kate. You can do some good for once. Be a hero. I know you’re not just plain evil. I know you don’t want Addison to die.” I knew nothing of the sort. But a man could hope.