They still weren’t sure. We’d seen so many little towns that couldn’t be defended, towns that lacked water or were too close to the highway or that were tainted by having skeletons painted on their walls, towns full of zombies, towns that were the wrong size, too big to defend, too small for comfort. We’d been searching so long they’d pretty much given up.
But not me. I’d found the place. I’d found Hearth.
My Hearth.
At the very center of town stood a municipal building, not exactly an old-fashioned town hall but it served that purpose. It had a big meeting room, dark now because it lacked windows, but we could get half of the positives in there all at once. It had a combination police and fire station, full of old electronic gear that would never work again, but with walls strong enough to survive anything. It had a little library that was, surprisingly, fully stocked with books, all of them lined up neatly on metal shelves. And on its top floor, it had a suite of offices clearly meant for the people who once ran this town. Offices for people with titles that sounded important, comptrollers and treasurers and school supervisors and—the biggest of all—the mayor.
I took that room as my own. I was the mayor of Hearth now, because I said so. I put my things inside, my scant possessions.
Then I turned and left the office and found Kylie and Macky and the rest.
“This is the place,” I told them. “Tomorrow we’ll go back and fetch all the positives. This is their new home.”
CHAPTER 113
We moved the positives down into Hearth in waves, because Macky was worried that somehow a horde of zombies was waiting in the trees, biding their time until there were enough of us to make a decent meal. Zombies don’t think that way—they don’t think at all—but the fact of it was that the strongest and healthiest of us came first, and we got to work immediately. All day long we hauled fencing around and bolted it to high steel poles, filling in the gaps between houses, bracing the fence with wooden supports. We built a big gate where the one road led into town and strung up barbed wire along its top and built sniper nests up there. And in time, eventually, the place was safe. Maybe not as safe as Macky would like, but it worked for me.
The second wave came in, and we started cleaning.
It seemed like there wasn’t a single house or building in Hearth that nature hadn’t invaded. We found whole troops of ants marching in long supply lines across the factory floors. Piles of leaves five feet deep in the basements of houses. The school building was infested with bats in its roof, thousands of them all sleeping up there in the day, flocking out at night to eat bugs.
“Maybe we just don’t use this building,” Luke said.
“We’ll find a way to get rid of them.”
“But not today,” Luke suggested.
“Yeah,” I said, mentally adding it to my list of things to do. “Not today.”
Some of the buildings were just too far gone, too far along in their decomposition, and we had to pull them down. It was always a moment for excitement and laughing and hooting when a wall came down in a puff of dust and a clattering bang. I hated seeing the houses go—it was like pulling teeth out of a mostly healthy jaw—but I made sure we saved whatever wood and brick and glass we could. In the spring we could build new houses. New homes.
There was so much work I had to spread it around, give people authority over things I wished I could supervise myself.
Ike took over the little police and fire station in the municipal building. It was a good place to keep our small arsenal of guns, where they wouldn’t be a danger to anybody when they weren’t in use. It had a jail cell, too, just a room with a securely locking door, and I knew we would eventually need that. I asked him to be our sheriff, like in an old western, and he agreed. “See?” I told him when we were alone. “You said you wouldn’t be here when I found what I was looking for. But here you are.”
“Sure,” he told me. “It’s not like I’m going to set off on foot with winter coming on.”
It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but it would do for the moment.
Macky built a kind of firing range and started training more of us how to shoot. He insisted that the snipers’ nests be occupied at all times, day or night. I thought that was a waste of manpower, but he couldn’t sleep until he knew we were safe. “It was one thing when we were on the road, walking. Moving around like that, you aren’t in one place long enough to get mobbed. This place is a death trap if even a couple of zombies get through the fence.”
By the time dark fell every night, I was exhausted and ready to collapse into my bed—still just a nest of blankets in one corner of the mayor’s office. Some nights I was asleep before Kylie even came in. Some nights she was there, asleep before me.
There was just so much to do. And so few days left before it snowed.
CHAPTER 114
There wasn’t enough time—and so much work to do. So many meetings to discuss our plans.
Winter came on like the wrath of an angry god.
It started snowing in mid-November, and it didn’t let up for weeks. The first couple of days it was actually fun. Snowball fights kept breaking out spontaneously, and eventually I declared that everybody could have a day off so we could have one epic battle in the square in front of the municipal building. I put a whole haunch of smoked pig meat in the lobby and said whoever could get it without getting hit by a snowball could keep it. Soon the building was being stormed from every direction. Kylie and I built a wall for cover and pelted anyone who tried to get close, but Ike beat us all—he climbed up on the municipal building’s roof and took us all out with an aerial bombardment. As Kylie and I succumbed, half buried under a constant fusillade from every side, I kissed her cold lips and she was laughing, laughing even as she flinched and threw her hands up to fend off the incoming missiles.
When the snowstorm entered its fifth day, however, spirits began to sag. We ran through our supply of firewood—mostly old, broken furniture—faster than I had thought possible, and that became a new chore we had to complete every day, running out to the woods to gather up whatever had fallen from the trees. Soon I knew we would have to start chopping them down. That worried me—one of our principal advantages at Hearth was that we were nearly invisible, hidden inside our forest. If we ended up clearing out all those trees, anybody passing by would see us right away. It was bad enough we had so many fires going, with plumes of smoke writing our presence across the sky.
We made do, as we always had. Most of the positives spent the early winter turning the abandoned houses into homes. In New York, the first generation had all wanted to live on top of one another, filling up just a few dozen blocks of Midtown. The vast majority of the positives were second generation, however, and everybody wanted space of their own. Hearth, at the height of its glory, had a population of more than three thousand, so there were plenty of houses to go around.
I stayed in the mayor’s office with Kylie. We made a bed of blankets and a little kitchen in the break room down the hall. We might have been more comfortable in an actual house, but I wanted to stay in a central place so everyone would be able to find me easily when problems arose—as they did, constantly.
As the people were forced to spend most of the short days and long nights indoors, tempers started to flare. Grudges and grievances that had started out on the road but had been put aside in the name of mutual survival suddenly revived and came back stronger than ever. I spent hours each day listening to people tell me how someone else was stealing from them, and then listening to the accused party explain in laborious detail how the stolen property in fact belonged to them. We had fights break out over romantic triangles, and one man beat up another over a woman (who seemed disinterested in either of them). People argued over whose turn it was to fetch wood or water or stand guard up in the snipers’ nests where the wind blew right through
you. I made sure to take a turn up there myself—I wanted to know just how bad it was. By morning they nearly had to pry me off the scaffolding, and it was days before I felt warm again.
But Macky was insistent we keep a constant watch at the gate, and in fact we did get some zombies driven mad and desperate by the snow, so desperate they attacked our fence with their teeth and fingers. We used up some of our small supply of bullets to put them down. Not that they had a chance to get through our wall—it would take a mob of them for that—but I didn’t want anyone seeing them out there and getting demoralized.
I wondered how long it would be before we looked like a looter camp, with the bones of zombies piled around our gates. That was how it happened, of course—one zombie at a time, wandering right into a sniper’s cross hairs.
Of course, we had our own homegrown zombies, too. We were positives, and some of us were infected. I had a plan to use the school as a kind of quarantine facility and it worked, sort of. It relied on people to identify themselves when they started having headaches. For every one of us who voluntarily went into the school, there was one who was afraid to admit what was happening. More than one morning I woke up to screaming as we discovered an entire house of people had been attacked by one of their number who had zombied out in the night.
We handled that as we had out on the road, by following our new laws.
Zombies were less distressing, however, than the fact that some of our buildings fell apart without warning. The snow piled up on rooftops until it collapsed some of the weaker structures. I had to detail teams to go up on top of every building and shovel it off. A new accumulation gathered within days.
Our biggest problem, as it always had been, was food.
We had collected as many old cans and as much smoked pig meat as we could over the autumn. We’d known this was coming. Yet by early January it was clear we wouldn’t have enough to get through the winter. We could ration it, cut back drastically on how much we ate per day, but it still wouldn’t be enough. Panic started to move through the people like a phantasm whispering in their ears. Hungry people got stupid, and they did stupid things. The little jail cell in Ike’s police station turned out to be useful not for holding criminals but as a place to keep the dwindling food stocks—otherwise they were at risk from constant pilferage.
“I don’t understand this level of craziness,” I told Luke one day, as we shared a single ration between us, as we had so many times in the camp. “People should be used to going hungry by now. None of us has had enough to eat since we got our tattoos.”
“Ah,” he said, “but there’s the funny thing about human nature. We did. We had enough to eat when we first arrived here. People can go without forever if they need to. But once they have a taste of something, they can never get enough again.”
I thought about it for a while. “The pigs must still be out there—in the forest. Some of them, anyway. We can send out hunting parties.”
“You’re going to make people go out in the freezing snow, and probably get frostbite and have their feet cut off, because there might be game?”
I sighed and glanced at the pitiful remains of our food supply locked up like a felon. “That’s the thing. In a couple of weeks, I won’t have to make people. They’ll volunteer to do it.”
CHAPTER 115
One day we went to the food stores, and there wasn’t enough to feed everyone in town. The next day there was nothing left at all.
We chewed on tree bark, or sucked on stones, to try to fool our bellies. We slept as many hours of the day as we could so we could ignore the way they rumbled. Nothing really worked, but you had to keep trying.
The worst thing about hunger is that it makes you like a zombie. You stop thinking. At first you just get distracted. Your brain stops working for a few seconds, then a few minutes, at a time. That’s a bad phase, because distracted people can get killed very easily. But it’s not as bad as the next phase, when you start thinking more vividly than ever—but all you can think about is food. You start thinking there has to be some somewhere. You just know you left a piece of pig jerky in a desk drawer somewhere, or maybe hidden under a blanket. You go and look and it’s gone. You start thinking it must be somewhere else. You can tell yourself all you want there is no pig jerky, that you’re fooling yourself. But then you start thinking somebody took it. That somebody stole your food, and that’s why you’re so hungry.
I had to make a new law. As people started to succumb to hunger, as the dead piled up outside where they would freeze until the ground was soft enough to bury them—I had to make a law against cannibalism. The punishment was exile, the worst punishment we had.
I don’t know if the law was generally obeyed or not. My lieutenants and I were too weak to go house to house enforcing it.
Soon enough I had my volunteer hunting parties. They wrapped their feet up as best they could. They took guns and wooden bows and arrows and sometimes just knives, and they marched off into the forest.
Sometimes they didn’t come back.
The ones that did didn’t bring back any pigs. If they found any, they ate them out in the woods so they wouldn’t have to share. In my hunger I thought that had to be the case, that they were cheating us. Later on I would realize there probably just weren’t any pigs to be found.
The hunters did spot something, though. They were the first ones to see the helicopters.
Just one at a time, at first. Small spotter craft, with just one rotor and room for two people up front. They moved fast and never stayed overhead for long. Within a week they were followed by bigger aircraft, twin-rotored attack ships and troop transports. When they came close enough, I was told, you could see the guns bristling from their sides.
I was terrified that they were coming for us, that the army had finally sent a force to round us up. But as the reports kept coming in, it was clear there were far too many of them for that. Sometimes a hundred would go by in a single day. They never came directly overhead of Hearth. I thought about hiding from them anyway—I knew they could see for miles with their onboard sensors, both optical and infrared, and that if we could see them, they could definitely see us. But to camouflage our presence would mean telling people they couldn’t light fires. The main thing giving us away was our smoke. And if we couldn’t have fires, we would freeze.
So I could only hope they would ignore us. Pass us by on their way to their destination, whatever it might be.
CHAPTER 116
I tried everything I could think of to find food. I tried boiling pinecones and washing acorns until they were edible, even though the books in the library said this was a waste of time—it took more energy to make them edible than they gave back. I tried rendering down leather from the chairs in the conference room in the municipal building. I tried digging for roots in the frozen ground. The people of Hearth watched me with little more than scorn. Those few who were willing to help me grew quickly distracted and wandered off.
If they’d had the strength left, I think they would have killed me and replaced me with somebody—anybody—who promised to find food. Anybody who would lie to them. They didn’t dare threaten me to my face, but someone did spit on Kylie as she passed by. She refused to tell me who it had been, since she knew the last thing we needed was for me to beat up one of my citizens for revenge.
Mostly they stayed indoors and tried not to think about how long it would take to die of starvation. As usual I was too stupid to give up and die.
The thought occurred to me that there must be fish in the stream, and that since it had frozen solid, some fish must be trapped in the ice. So one morning while it was still dark—it seemed always to be dark in that long winter, when it wouldn’t stop snowing—I got an ax and an awl and various other sharp tools and I headed out to where the stream was widest, just outside of the town. I took a pistol with me in
case any zombies showed up, though at that point they would have frozen stiff—zombies aren’t smart enough to put on winter clothes. Some of them aren’t even smart enough to hide in caves or animal dens and wait out the cold.
The snow was three feet deep by then. I couldn’t walk through it so much as push through, digging a path with my body. Weak as I was, each step was a nightmarish effort, and I was sweating under my layers of clothes before I’d even cleared the gate. I knew that sweat would freeze, and I’d probably end up with frostbite, but I’d reached the point where food was more important than keeping all my toes.
Out at the creek I stopped and just breathed heavily for a while. I started gathering deadfall for a fire, though I wasn’t sure where I would put it—I would need to dig out a sizable pit or it would just drown itself in snowmelt. I set down my pile of sticks and just stared at them for a while. I remember the snow was an incredible blue in the predawn light, a blue that sort of buzzed in my head. Maybe I was just hallucinating from malnutrition and exhaustion.
I know I wasn’t paying attention to anything around me. A zombie could have walked up right then and started chewing on my arm and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Luckily for me it wasn’t zombies that found me.
I reached down and picked up my ax, intending to chop some ice. The fire was forgotten. Before I could lift the ax, though, a sharp voice barked an order at me.
“What?” I asked, standing up straight.
“I said, put down the weapon or we will fire.”
That penetrated the thick fuzz in my head. I looked up, startled, and saw that I was surrounded by soldiers who seemed to float in the air around me.
They were wearing snowshoes, and they were on top of the snowpack while I was hip-deep in it, essentially standing in a hole. The soldiers were dressed for winter fighting. They had on white jackets over their uniforms. Their eyes were hidden by night-vision goggles. All except their commander, who wore a flat cap with birds on it. Just like the officer I’d seen at the medical camp. He must be the same rank.
Positive: A Novel Page 37
