Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  “They don’t tell me much,” she said, “but I know that’s their first priority right now. They’ve got every soldier they can scratch up headed out to California.” She shook her head. “It’s all right. What I do, chasing down zombies—­it’s more of a policing job, anyway. This is what I do, Finn. It’s who I am.” She shrugged. “You ever think we were made for a reason? Like we have destinies or something?”

  “I think I’d trade destiny for a nice quiet life in a walled city.”

  Caxton nodded. “For some, I guess that’s the right way. Me . . . well. My father was a lawman. A county sheriff. A good, good man. Had a lot of hardship in his life, but he never let his ­people down. I’m going to tell you a little story, okay? Take this with a grain of salt. I’m a crazy old woman who isn’t as sharp as she used to be, so maybe I just dreamed all this. But a ­couple years before the crisis—­back when everything was under control, and my biggest worry was whether some drunk I pulled over was going to try to seduce his way out of a ticket. Back then, I started getting this feeling. Like there was something else I was supposed to be doing with my life. Some great wrong that needed to be set right. Something . . . evil.” She squinted at the road. “That’s a weird word. But I could feel it out there. Like a wolf was hiding in the bushes outside my bedroom window, maybe. It used to bug me, quite a bit. Used to keep me up at nights. What was I missing? I figured I was just feeling guilty because I was still just highway patrol, instead of real law like my dad. But then the crisis came, and all these zombies. And it was like a switch just flipped in my head. ‘Okay,’ I said to myself. ‘Okay. Here we go.’ ”

  “You were born to hunt zombies.”

  She tilted her head to one side. Then she scratched her shoulder. “Yeah. Or close enough.” She shrugged. “Some ­people can’t live safe lives. They’ve got to be out here, making a difference. Maybe that’s you, too.”

  God, I hoped not. I’d seen enough of the road while trying to get off it. I had no desire to spend the rest of my life prowling one-­lane blacktops looking for red eyes and stringy hair.

  To change the subject I reached over and tapped a photograph that was clipped to Caxton’s sunshade. It was old and most of the color had leached away, but I could see it was a picture of a young woman with short black hair. She had Asian features and she was smiling, absolutely grinning at the camera. Her eyes sparkled with mischief.

  “Is that you?” I asked. I didn’t think Caxton was Asian, but age might have changed her features.

  “That,” she said, “is there to keep me sharp. To remind me of something. Something”—­suddenly the temperature in the pickup’s cab seemed to drop ten degrees—­“we will not be talking about.”

  Her whole body stiffened and grew hard, and I suddenly knew what it was like to be one of the zombies she hunted. As friendly and sweet as she seemed, there was molten steel running in Caxton’s veins.

  “So we need to figure out where I’m taking you,” Caxton said. “I assume you don’t want to reunite with those bikers.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “There’s Pittsburgh. They won’t take you in, not with that tattoo, but I don’t think they would shoot you on sight.”

  “That doesn’t help me much, if they just let me sit outside their wall and maybe throw me some food now and again.”

  “Better than starving. I could take you to the army base at Johnstown. They have some civilians there working for them. You might even convince them to take you to Ohio.”

  I thought of the soldiers I’d seen at Linden, who had wanted to cripple my arm for the crime of touching their helicopter. “I’ve had bad luck with the army,” I said, not wanting to tell her the details.

  “Well, you can ride with me on patrol for a while. I’ll be grateful for the company,” she said.

  CHAPTER 62

  I spent a week working with Caxton, culling the zombies of Pennsylvania. We fell into an easy routine almost right away—­she seemed almost absurdly grateful to have somebody to talk to, and I was just glad to be away from all the ­people who wanted to kill me.

  The hours were long. To put it another way, the hours never stopped. Many times I would beg Caxton to take us somewhere we could go and sleep in safety, and she would tell me we just needed to bag one more zombie before our work was done. We took only short breaks for food and for relieving ourselves during the day—­every other waking second was spent hunting.

  Not that the work was constant, or all that physically demanding. A lot of it simply meant driving around, looking for any sign of zombie activity. “I’ve basically cleared out the region around Harrisburg,” she told me. “At least, I haven’t seen one there in a long time. So I have to patrol farther and farther afield.” She didn’t seem to take any great satisfaction in this. The work wasn’t finished yet—­there were still zombies out there somewhere.

  “What happens when you kill all the zombies in Pennsylvania?” I asked.

  “Unlikely,” she said, while chewing on a piece of beef jerky. Her eyes focused on something invisible, and her face hardened. “Sometimes I do my work too well. If I clear out an area thoroughly, wild game starts coming back—­deer, raccoons, even coyotes. And that draws in zombies from areas where the animal life is still pretty scarce. They’re opportunists. They don’t care much about state lines. Besides,” she said, and inhaled deeply as she came back to this world, “I don’t think I’m going to live long enough to see that.”

  If she took little satisfaction in clearing out the center of the state, she seemed to take little displeasure in the fact her work would never be done, either. She just shrugged at the idea that she would die before all the zombies did. The work was what was important, not any kind of abstract end goal. And the burden wasn’t hers alone. “Not like I’m the only one doing this. And maybe I could train up an apprentice, somebody to take over when I’m gone.”

  It didn’t occur to me at the time who she had in mind. I pointed out to her instead that there was no one like her in New York or New Jersey. “Places like Fort Lee, and the southern part of New Jersey, are still swarming with zombies. The radio claims that they die off over the winter, and that eventually they’re all going to freeze to death.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio,” she told me. “Some of ’em definitely die out in the cold. But just because they’ve got the minds of animals doesn’t mean they’re helpless. Animals live through the winter just fine, you know that, right? They hibernate, or at least they find caves and places they can hole up. Zombies don’t know to come inside when it rains, but when they get too cold, they’ll gravitate to warmer places. Maybe they wander south, to where things aren’t frozen over. Or maybe they hide away from the snow in old barns and houses. We built them plenty of shelter to squat in. No, what’s eventually going to win the war is attrition. There just aren’t enough of us left to replenish their numbers.”

  It wasn’t a terribly comforting thought. But Caxton wasn’t interested in offering empty comfort. She was more interested in actions than words.

  She taught me a great deal in the short time we spent together. She taught me how to drive, for one thing—­a skill I should have had Adare or Kylie teach me, though we’d never seemed to have the time. Caxton figured if I could drive, she could spend more time looking out the pickup’s windows, spotting zombies. Caxton also taught me how to shoot. She was a patient instructor, even though she couldn’t really afford to waste the bullets I failed to put into tin cans and old bottles. “I’ll just have to get some more ears this time,” she said, shrugging off the waste.

  She taught me other things, less tangible things. But her most important lesson was her last.

  One day we were hunting around some old farmhouses, way back in the woods. We had to leave the pickup behind and hunt on foot. We’d found a place with a field full of rusting car chassis, their quarter panels and win
dow posts strangled by green vines that glowed in the sun. The ground was jagged with cubes of broken glass, but the plants didn’t seem to mind. Neither did the zombies. Caxton and I found half a dozen of them crouched inside the car hulks. She put one finger to her lips and holstered her pistol, then drew a hunting knife from a sheath at her belt. I took my knife out as well.

  During the day, the zombies’ senses were dull and it was possible to sneak up on them. The sound of a gunshot would have drawn them all out, caused them to rush at us in a mob. With our knives we were able to slit their throats before they could alert the others. It was nasty work and very dangerous—­the chance of being bitten was always there in my mind, a constant fear—­but Caxton excelled at it.

  When the field of cars was done and the ears were harvested, we headed toward a rambling farmhouse. Inside the air was cool and smelled of old, dry wood. Roughly woven blankets hung on the walls and were draped over the furniture, as if the owners of this place had planned on returning and had wanted to keep the dust off their things. That saddened me more than seeing their skeletons might have.

  Caxton pointed one direction and then another. I nodded and headed through an archway toward what had to be the kitchen, while she headed into a living room. If I ran into trouble, all I had to do was shout and she would come running, I knew. I didn’t think there were any zombies in the house, though—­it smelled like it had been uninhabited for a very long time—­so I suppose my guard wasn’t up like it should have been. The kitchen was deserted. I poked through some of the cabinets above the counter, resisting my urge to loot the canned food I saw there. Caxton never took anything from the houses she cleared out—­she was no looter. There was a closet in the kitchen, always a good place for a zombie to jump out of. I approached the door carefully, from the side as she had taught me—­this was an adaptation of an old police technique—­and swung the door open. A mop fell out and its handle clattered on the floor tiles.

  Caxton rushed in, her eyes scanning the room from side to side, top to bottom before she even looked at me. I grinned sheepishly and pointed at the mop. She nodded and smiled back at me, then she stepped into the kitchen to take her own look around.

  That was when the zombie under the sink nearly got her. It had wedged itself in the cabinets down there, probably while chasing after mice. The sound of the mop hitting the floor had stirred it to action, and now it shot out two scratched-­up arms, its withered, mummylike hands grabbing at her ankles. It got one of them, and she was pulled off-­balance, collapsing to the floor in a heap. She struggled wildly to get her gun off her belt and then fired all six shots into the cabinets, but the hands kept pulling her, dragging her feetfirst into the cramped space under the sink.

  I moved as fast as I could, dropping to my knees and whipping out my knife. I sawed and hacked at the wrists of the hands holding her. Eventually one and then the other came loose in a shower of blood. Caxton scuttled backward, away from the zombie, which had shoved its head and shoulders out of the cupboard. It was bleeding horribly, but still it kept coming, pushing its red eyes and lank hair farther into the kitchen. In a great panic of revulsion, I struck out at the zombie’s forehead with my knife, stabbing again and again at its eyes and brain.

  Eventually it stopped moving.

  Caxton and I were both covered in its blood. I found a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the closet and splashed it over us as best I could, trying to kill the pathogen in all that blood, just as Kylie had done so long ago. Caxton merely lay on the floor, trying to breathe normally.

  “Thanks,” she said eventually. She laughed. “It’s been a long time since I got in a spot like that.”

  I helped her to her feet.

  “I’m getting old,” she said, and the laughter drained from her face. “Slowing down.”

  “No, come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “It’s true.” She brushed alcohol off her sleeves and face. “Can’t do anything about it. But I guess, if I’m going to find somebody to take my place . . . now’s the time.”

  She looked at me with questioning eyes. This time I got the hint.

  “I don’t . . . I mean . . . it’s a good job, it’s . . . it’s important, but—­”

  “Just think about it,” she told me. She looked at the gun that was still in her hand. “We need to head back to the truck so I can reload. What a waste—­I knew there was no chance in hell of hitting that thing, but I lost my nerve. Damn. You should have seen me twenty years ago, Finnegan. I was something back then.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I told her. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Her smile came back, and together we headed out of the farmhouse and back toward the road. Before we got too far, though, we both heard something. The sound of an engine revving. We looked at each other, then we started running.

  “If somebody’s trying to steal my truck—­” Caxton began. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Up ahead in the clearing, the truck sat exactly where we’d left it, unmolested. But it was surrounded by motorcycles.

  Red Kate peered through the trees. “Stones? That you, Stones?”

  CHAPTER 63

  It’s that road pirate,” Caxton whispered to me. I nodded. I’d told her enough about Red Kate and her crew that she knew to be careful.

  Together we walked into the clearing and faced the crew. Andy Waters touched his forehead in salute. I didn’t see Archie, which worried me. He would be out in the trees somewhere, maybe overhead. I was certain he’d have a gun pointed at us.

  Caxton still had her pistol in her hand. It was empty, of course. My knife was in my belt, and I knew better than to reach for it.

  Red Kate seemed to find the situation hilarious. “Stones! I can’t believe it. We looked everywhere for you, you know. When you ran away like that, I was just sick with worry. I was sure that something would find you in the dark and just gobble you up. But look at you! You made it!”

  “I’m alive,” I confirmed. “Thanks to Caxton here.”

  Kate bobbed her head. “Morning, Officer.”

  Caxton glanced upward at the sky. “It’s midafternoon,” she said.

  Kate shrugged her fur-­clad shoulders. “I sleep late.”

  Caxton turned her head a little and spat on the ground. Kate didn’t move. I had no idea how this was going to shake out.

  “You looking to start something here?” Caxton asked. “I’ve never been a big fan of talking before a fight. If you’re not looking to tangle, I’ve got work to do and you’re blocking my truck.”

  Kate lifted one long leg over the top of her bike and dropped to her feet. She walked over to the truck and looked inside the cab. “I’ve heard of you, Officer. I’ve heard . . . stories. Enough to know Stones isn’t your type.” She reached into the bed of the truck and hefted the plastic bag full of zombie ears.

  “That’s my property,” Caxton said. “You put that down.”

  Flies buzzed around Kate’s hand as she dropped the bag. “Sorry. I’m just naturally nosy.”

  “We call that ‘larcenous’ where I’m from.”

  Kate favored Caxton with a big smile. “You’re a treat. A genuine throwback. Well, never let it be said that I don’t cooperate with the authorities. I mean, I totally don’t. But never let it be said. No witnesses, no crime, right?”

  Caxton’s face started to flush. Her fingers twitched on the grip of her pistol.

  Kate’s eyes drifted to the gun. She pursed her lips.

  Then she walked back to her bike. “Enjoy your day, Officer,” she said.

  I guess she’d heard enough about Caxton not to want to start a fight, after all.

  Of course, this was Red Kate. She couldn’t just leave things at that. “Stones, I’m glad to see you’re keeping well. Until we meet again, okay?” And then she started up her bike and roared out of the clearing. Her crew followed her, one by one.r />
  When they were gone, when they’d been gone a while and we were sure they weren’t coming back, we headed over to Caxton’s truck.

  Caxton climbed into the driver’s seat, the pistol still in her hand. I climbed in beside her. Caxton put the truck in gear and got us out of there. We could see the dust cloud the motorcycles left behind, so we headed in the other direction.

  For a long time Caxton drove in silence. She turned the radio on, then switched it off again when there was no music. Eventually she picked up a bottle of water and took a swig.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to mix you up with them.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Caxton told me. “I’ve seen warlords come and go. Maybe a year after the crisis, when nobody had heard from the government for a while, armies of folks like her were out here. Gangs of a hundred and more. They swept through Pennsylvania, knocking over the smaller walled towns. Killing anybody they found. Always looking for drugs and guns, and finding plenty of both.” She shook her head. “Mostly they burned themselves out. Got too drunk, too high, killed each other or the zombies got ’em. The ones that lasted, they turned into little tribes of barbarians. The army took care of them. The government never let them get too big or too organized.”

  “You think she’ll . . . just . . . I don’t know. Get herself killed somehow?” It seemed like too much to hope for.

  “Eventually. I’ll steer clear of her, and she’ll forget about me after a while. You, on the other hand—­she’s really got her hooks in you. Following you all this way. There’s something between the two of you. You’re chained up somehow.”

  “I cut her once,” I said. “I took a knife off her, and I cut her wrist. Apparently I’m the only man who ever did that and lived to tell about it.”

  Caxton tilted her head to one side. “I figure that’s worth following you to the state line for. All the way across New Jersey. But this far?”