Positive

by David Wellington

  “Come on. I’m just one guy.”

  “Fix it,” he said, “or shut the hell up. If you talk to me like this again, you can find someplace else to sleep. I don’t need this shit.”

  I stormed out of the lean-­to, intending to—­I don’t know. Go over to the fence between the male and female camps and shout for Kylie, like I had the day before.

  What else was there to do?

  I didn’t get as far as the fence between the two camps. On the way there, I heard someone call my name. No. Everyone in the camp knew me as Finnegan. I definitely heard someone call out “Finn!”

  I whirled around, my lips curling back in rage, intending to tell whoever had come chasing after me that he couldn’t use that name, that only ­people I truly cared about could call me that, and whoever he was, he wasn’t even close to that.

  But there was nobody there. I turned around in a full circle and couldn’t see anybody nearby, not close enough to have called me like that.

  And then a light hit me. A light shining down from above.

  It was tiny, like the light of a match, but steady like an electric light. It shed more shadows than illumination. It hit my face and made me scowl and squint, while leaving its owner completely silhouetted in the dark.

  “Finn. Damn it, it’s me.”

  That made my frown deepen. I lifted one hand to cover my eyes and looked up, toward the source of the light.

  “Finn! It’s me. It’s Ike,” he said, and he turned the light around so I could see his face.

  The face of the boy who killed my mother.

  CHAPTER 73

  Ike put a finger to his lips, then gestured for me to head out into the darkness, off to my left. He started moving as well, up on the catwalks. I saw he was headed toward one of the yellow brick columns. As I got closer, a hidden door opened in the side of the column, swinging open to let me in. It had never occurred to me before that the columns might be hollow—­they had always seemed as solid and unyielding as the walls.

  Inside the column a narrow steel staircase wound around a central girder. I headed up those steps, listening to my footfalls clang on the metal risers. I couldn’t understand what was happening, but I headed up anyway, climbing to the level of the catwalks.

  I had never thought I would see the view from up there—­I hadn’t even entertained the notion. The mud was for positives. The upper air was for soldiers. It was one of the most basic facts of existence.

  It was too dark to get a good view of the camp from up on the catwalks, but I could see the rude shelters below me, clustered here and there in the shadows. They looked tiny and insignificant, even though I was only about ten feet above their corrugated tin roofs. I didn’t have much chance to look at my pathetic little world from that vantage. Ike came up to me, looming out of the darkness. He plucked my sleeve and led me across a catwalk, toward the nearest wall. The catwalk ended in a door there, and beyond lay a spacious bunkhouse, a room walled with windows and full of television screens. I’d never seen a working television before. These were glowing blue, shedding a low light across the room. On their screens shapes of green and flickering orange huddled together or moved slowly back and forth.

  “Infrared,” Ike whispered. I looked up from the screens and saw him grinning in the blue light. “We keep an eye on you when you’re sleeping. Nothing gets past us.”

  Underneath the television screens were banks of controls—­switches, dials, gauges. Nothing I understood. Ike showed me a few of them: the ones that controlled the lights, the ones that activated the electric fences at the two entrances to the camp.

  I was so bewildered by it all that when a door opened at the far end of the room and a soldier walked in, I didn’t even duck or cower. Surely if Ike and I were discovered here we would be shot on sight—­or worse.

  The soldier, though, just glanced at me and then shook his head. “Whatever, man. Way stupid,” he said to Ike.

  “Nobody has to know,” Ike replied. “I just wanted to get him something to eat.”

  “You could have dropped sandwiches on his head or something,” the soldier said. He sighed in disgust and then slipped back out the door.

  “Ike,” I began, but then I actually took a good look at my childhood friend.

  He’d cut his hair very short. He was wearing a uniform. An army uniform. In my confusion I had just assumed that he was a positive, like me. A patient of the medical camp. I was wrong.

  He was one of the guards.

  CHAPTER 74

  A hot plate sat in one corner of the guardhouse. Ike peeled foil off the top of a metal box, and then he sat it on the plate to warm up. “Just MREs, but it’s better than the stuff you usually get. We’ve even got a fork around here somewhere. We have to share it because it’s the only one.”

  “Ike,” I said again. I knew I had to ask a question, but I had no idea where to start.

  The last time I’d seen Ike he’d been covered in my mother’s blood. That was just before I was hauled away to be examined, to be judged and found positive. I’d had no time to think of what might have happened to him. I’d assumed it wouldn’t be good. If any of that blood had gotten in his mouth or nose, he would be as positive as I was. He could be infected. I think I’d assumed—­though never out loud or even consciously—­that he’d been quietly killed, just in case.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “If my CO knew I was fraternizing with a patient . . . well. I’d be in trouble.”

  “In trouble,” I said. “Ike, you’re a soldier.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, well.” He shrugged, and then he laughed. “We’ve still got rules we have to follow. I mean, it’s pretty serious; if you get caught bringing a positive up here, you get thrown downstairs, in with the general population. Which would suck. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “I must be the first positive ever to come up here,” I said.

  “Well, no. Some of the guys bring girls from the female camp up for, you know. Fooling around.”

  I stared at Ike. It was hard to remember sometimes just how young he was. Younger than Heather. “You mean sex?”

  “Mostly just with their, their hands,” he stammered. “Sometimes the mouth. It’s harder to get infected that way. And nobody wants to get infected. But some of the guys get lonely. The girls don’t mind. They get a decent meal out of it.”

  I stared at him in horror. It had been one thing for Adare to keep his harem of girls to work out his needs—­that had been bad enough. But this was whoredom on an institutional level. What if the girls said no? What if they didn’t? What if Kylie had been up here, in this very room, on her knees—­

  “You never did that, did you?” I demanded.

  “God, no! You’re the first I brought up here and—­and—­I mean, I didn’t bring you up here for that—­”

  “Ike,” I said, trying to stay calm, “I have a million questions. But first I think you should tell me how you ended up here. Tell me why you’re not in New York right now.”

  The food on the hot plate was steaming. Ike found the fork for me and I tucked in. It was bland fare, but he was right—­it was better than the stale sandwiches I’d been living on. While I ate, he told me his whole story.

  CHAPTER 75

  I guess you know some of it, right at the beginning. How they took us to the hospital and split us up. They were pretty freaked out. Nobody wanted to touch me. I needed to clean up, but nobody offered me any water or anything. They were polite, sort of. But like you’d be polite talking to a wild dog or something.” He shrugged. “They had me in this room, with your dad—­look, Finn, maybe some of this you don’t want to hear.”

  “No. Please. What happened to my dad?”

  “They kept telling him it was fine, everything was fine. Then one of the doctors gave him a shot.
Just something to help him sleep, they said. Nobody sleeps that deep.”

  I clenched my eyes shut and tried to ride through the wave of emotion that swept through me. The pounding of blood in my head. Eventually it receded enough that I could nod and say, “Okay. Go on.”

  “I, uh, I knew I was next, and I didn’t want to go out like that. I jumped up, found my way out of the hospital, and started running. They chased me, but nobody wanted to catch me, not really. Not when I was covered in infected blood.” He shook his head. “They chased me all the way to the river. They told me I was cornered, that I had no place to go. I looked down at the poison water. I figured, hell, it would just be nice to get that blood off me, to wash it off. So I jumped in and tried to swim across.”

  “You swam across the Hudson?” I asked, amazed.

  “Not—­exactly—­successfully,” Ike said with a sheepish grin. “As it turned out, I’m not as hot shit at swimming as I thought. There was this current and it was pretty strong, and it kept dragging me downriver. Down toward the harbor and out to sea. I thought I was going to drown. But then something bumped into me, and I realized it was a big piece of wood. It must have floated down all the way from upstate somewhere. I climbed up on top of it and suddenly I had a raft.”

  He laughed, like he’d come to the funny part of the story. I never did understand why he thought it was so hilarious.

  “I don’t know how long I was out there,” Ike went on. His face was taut with emotion as he remembered that day on his makeshift raft in New York Harbor. “I was ready to die, and time just—­you know.”

  I didn’t know; I had no idea what that was like. Or did I? I remembered when I’d been up on the road sign in Fort Lee. He and I had both faced that moment when death was the only possibility, when life was just a question of duration. I could see in his eyes we’d taken different lessons from our respective experiences.

  He shrugged as if he were wrestling with something he couldn’t understand and knew he couldn’t control. “I guess I got lucky,” he said.

  His usual cockeyed grin slowly crept back across his face.

  “The army had been watching me for hours, they said. They’ve got cameras on their helicopters, cameras that can see things miles away. They’d been flying over New Jersey and they saw me out there, floating away. They seemed to think it was bizarre, some kid on a raft floating by the Statue of Liberty. The helicopter was huge and so loud, and the wind it made nearly flipped my raft over and me with it. I barely held on. They dropped a rope almost right on top of me and shouted down for me to climb up.”

  “I saw one of those helicopters close up, too,” I told him. “The soldiers inside nearly shot me for daring to touch it. I got the sense they thought I wasn’t worthy.”

  Ike tilted his head to one side. “No offense, Finn? But, uh?” He held up his left hand and showed me the back of it. No tattoo there.

  Right. Sometimes I could forget that I wasn’t as human as somebody who didn’t have one of those tattoos.

  “I made up some story,” Ike said. “I told them I was from upstate, from a place where it was just me and my family, and my family had all been eaten by zombies. I jumped in the river to get away before any of them could touch me.”

  “Why’d you tell them that?”

  “Because the last thing I wanted was for them to take me back to New York. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t long before they suggested it themselves. They flew me to a place down in Maryland. That’s way, way south of New York. There’s a fort there, a place with a huge-­ass wall to keep the zombies out, and all around it for like a mile the ground has just been scorched clean. Nothing but dirt and rocks. They gave me a medical examination there and then asked me some questions, I think to figure out if I was crazy. Not too crazy for them, it turns out.” He laughed. “Then they gave me a uniform and a gun and made me go through basic training, and then they said, congratulations, you’re an American soldier. They made me swear some oath about holding up my constitution or something, which made no sense at all, but who cared? I was a soldier! I was going to go fight zombies! It was going to be awesome!”

  I frowned. “And then they sent you here?”

  “Yeah.” He deflated, just thinking about it. “It’s a seniority thing. You have to work in a camp for a year before you get put on active duty. This place sucks in so many different ways.” His face brightened. “But sometimes we get to play with the dogs.”

  I couldn’t repress a shudder. Clearly he had a different relationship with the dogs than I did.

  “When they sent me here, I looked for you,” Ike said. “I really did. I couldn’t find you, and I wondered what had happened. You were supposed to be here a month ago. I guess I assumed you were dead, after all that time. When you did show up, it was a real surprise. I’ve been trying to find ways to help you ever since. It’s tough, because we’re strictly forbidden from talking to you or even looking at you if we don’t have to.”

  “I guess the soldiers are afraid of catching the virus,” I said. It made sense. For the first time I understood things from their side. Not that it excused the way they treated us, but it made sense. To the army, we weren’t ­people—­we were a logistics problem.

  “At least you’re safe from zombies in here,” Ike said.

  “It wasn’t so bad out in the wilderness,” I told him. “Maybe better than in here.” I gave him an abbreviated version of my own story, of my travels.

  “It sounds like you didn’t have a chance to get bored,” Ike suggested.

  “No. Not very often. I’ve heard ­people say that running for your life all the time can get old, but I didn’t really have a chance to experience that. It wasn’t zombies that were the big problem, though. It was other ­people. Looters and road pirates and ­people who’ve just given up on their humanity. But—­there were others. There were some ­people I met, ­people who taught me things. And ­people I started caring about.”

  That was when it hit me. There was a chance for something here.

  “Ike, I need your help,” I said.

  “There’s only so much I can do,” he told me. “Maybe you come up here sometimes for a meal. And if I can find that knife for you, I’ll get it back to you somehow. I can make your time here a little more comfortable, but that’s it.”

  “There’s one more thing you can do for me,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 76

  It took a while to get Ike to agree to my plan, but eventually I wore him down. It was strange. He was a soldier now, with a gun. He had the entire weight of the government behind him. I was just a positive, and if he’d wanted to kill me on the spot or make my life a miserable hell, there was nothing, nothing whatsoever to stop him. But in the end what mattered to him was this: I’d always been the older brother he never had. I’d been his only friend as a child. There weren’t a lot of children in New York City—­a few of us crisis babies, but almost no births since then. As a result Ike had spent his formative years with no one but me for a role model.

  I think he would have done anything I asked.

  I knew better than to abuse that power. When we were done talking, I headed back down into the darkness and mud of the camp below and went back to my life as if nothing had happened.

  It was days before I heard from Ike again. He came for me in the middle of the night, just like he had before, shining a flashlight down on my head. I was ready this time.

  I headed across the darkened camp to the hollow pillar, and once again I ascended to the level of the catwalks. Our destination this time wasn’t the bunkhouse I’d visited before, however, but one on the far side of the camp.

  That is, over on the female side of the camp.

  There was no difference in the catwalks that ran over that half of the camp, as far as I could tell, and when I looked down into the female camp, I saw little difference between it and the world I’d come
to know. Their shelters were in different places, but they were equally decrepit and just as many of them had collapsed. I couldn’t see anyone moving below, but it was dark enough to make that unlikely anyway. Ike kept us moving at a good pace—­if he was spotted out here with me, if another guard saw us, he would have a lot of explaining to do.

  “Normally I don’t work this side,” he whispered to me. “We have our own patrol routes we’re supposed to stick to. But we get bored, and we break the routine sometimes. I don’t think anybody will shoot us, you know, just on principle. But if somebody tells you to halt, you better do it.”

  I didn’t respond. I wasn’t paying much attention to what he said. I was too busy thinking about what was about to happen.

  Ike took me to a bunkhouse perched on top of the wall, about as far from my shelter as we could get without leaving the camp entirely. No lights were on in the bunkhouse and its door was locked, but he had a key.

  “We have to make this quick, okay?” he asked. “Finn? Okay?”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  He opened the door and I stepped inside.

  She was waiting for me there, in the dark.

  I found I couldn’t speak. Not right away. I walked toward her, and every step seemed to make me more nervous about this reunion. She didn’t look up or move at all. I could just make out the scar across her nose in the darkness.

  “Hi,” I said, finding my voice. It croaked out of me, but it was a recognizable sound. “Um. Hi, Kylie.”

  “Finn,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice at all. Of course.

  “That guy—­that soldier? That’s, that’s Ike,” I said. “He—­he and I—­we were friends back in New York. He wanted to do me a favor, I guess. That’s why he brought you here. So we could talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “How have you—­uh, been?”

  “Fine.”

  Of course.