Positive (18 page)

 

CHAPTER 47

A
wave of relief washed over me as I pulled my seat belt across my chest. Kylie must have seen something I'd missed. Free of the terror and hopelessness I felt, she had found some way out of the trap. As rocks hammered down on the SUV's roof and sides, I turned to look at her and said, “Where? Where's the way out?”

She threw the SUV in reverse, and we shot backward. I jerked forward in my seat belt and grabbed the dashboard, dropping the machine pistol, which landed painfully on my feet.

“So we're going to back out through them?” I asked.

But Kylie had other ideas.

There were too many Trentonites back there, and most likely they had some way of keeping us from getting out the way we'd come. Kylie had figured that out without any help. So she took the one way open to us.

She put the SUV back into drive. Slamming her foot down on the accelerator, she hurtled forward, straight at the wall of burnt and trashed cars ahead of us. At the last possible moment she spun the wheel and we smashed right into the front end of a car that had already been crumpled out of recognition. The SUV came to a sudden stop, and my head banged against my window, cracking the glass.

“What the hell,” I had time to say.

Kylie threw the gearshift into reverse. She backed up as far as she could, then rammed forward again, this time sending the broken car spinning away from us.

Behind us a crowd of Trentonites were running toward us, lengths of rebar in their hands, howling for our blood. They had no problem showing themselves now—­maybe they assumed we had lost our minds. I wasn't sure if I disagreed. But Kylie had known what she was doing. There was a gap ahead of us, a narrow lane through the pile of destroyed cars. A way out, maybe.

“This might be loud,” Kylie said, and jammed us through that gap as fast as she could. The squeal of metal scraping metal was deafening, and I heard pieces of the SUV scream and then snap off. We slowed to a halt as our engine whined and smoke leaked from our hood. But Kylie never let off the accelerator.

Just as the first Trentonite reached the back of the SUV and started hammering on our rear window with a rock, we started to move again, inching our way forward. An iron bar broke through a side window and Addison screamed as someone grabbed her hair and started to pull her out of the SUV.

I drew my knife. I had no idea what I was doing—­my body just took over—­as I released my seat belt, then clambered up over the back of my seat and slashed again and again at the hand holding Addison's hair. When the hand wouldn't let go, I cut her hair instead.

And then the SUV shot forward and I was thrown into the backseat, into Mary's and Heather's laps. The scream of grinding metal stopped and we were free, moving forward, racing away from the trap.

Not that we were home free. The street ahead was full of rubble, half of an entire house having slid down to block the way. Kylie swung the wheel to one side, and I went sliding across the backseat, my head ending up down by Heather's legs. I scrambled back up, grabbing onto the back of the driver's seat, just in time to see Kylie take a chain-­link fence at full speed. The fencing wrapped around the windshield, and I saw one of the steel uprights—­a six-­foot-­long lance of metal as thick as my forearm—­come spinning and shearing straight toward us. The windshield exploded in a cloud of shattered glass, and the upright slammed right through the passenger seat where I'd been sitting less than thirty seconds earlier. It impaled the vinyl seat cover and went right through the springs and everything else in the seat, its jagged edge poking through the seat back to come within inches of Addison's face.

I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her closer to me, just in case the steel pole wasn't done spearing through the SUV.

Ahead, through the empty place where the windshield had been, I looked to see if the road was clear—­and saw there was no road. Beyond the fence lay a gravel shoulder and beyond that only railroad tracks and another fence. Kylie swung us up onto the tracks and the SUV bounced and I went flying, bouncing off the seat in front of me, off Heather's face and chest. There was a noise like a gunshot going off right next to my ear. “What was that?” I asked.

“One of our tires exploded,” Kylie said, her voice as flat as our road was not.

We rattled and shook and bounced, but we were moving forward. Behind us a mob of Trentonites came running, some of them carrying lit torches now, but we were past them, we were free. The railroad tracks stretched ahead of us, clear as far as I could see, and though I was certain we were doing terrible damage to the SUV's suspension, we were picking up speed.

The crowd behind us lost ground as we sped forward. And then the ruined buildings on either side fell away, and there was only blue sky around us as we hurtled across a railroad bridge.

Wind whipped through the SUV's cabin. It was suddenly, surprisingly quiet, for all the noise the SUV made as it bounced over the railroad ties. I looked around, at all the girls, and saw they were still there. Still alive.

“Look,” Heather said, and pointed to her right, through the broken window.

The bridge we rode on ran parallel to another, a bridge meant for cars and motor traffic. If our way hadn't been blocked, if we had just driven straight through Trenton, we would have been on that bridge.

And we would have been in serious danger. Half of that bridge had been sheared clean off, its steel girders twisted and red with rust at the break. Half the span had collapsed to fall down into the river below, where the water had slowly devoured it. If we had taken that bridge at speed, we could have ended up down there as well.

Like something out of a dream or a parable, a huge sign hung from the intact half of the bridge, a message written in letters ten feet high:

THE WORLD TAKES

I could only stare at it and wonder who had left that message and what they were trying to say.

Eventually we crossed the river, and Kylie got us off the railroad tracks. We got back onto good familiar asphalt, and she stopped the SUV. It shook and complained and took a long time for the engine to power down.

We were in Pennsylvania.

 

CHAPTER 48

T
he damage to the SUV was severe, but it still ran.

The main problem was the blown tire. We wouldn't get very far riding on the rim, and I was worried we were going to have to go hunting for a replacement—­or even worse, find someone to fix it for us. After Prince­ton, I knew we couldn't approach any more looter camps in New Jersey. I had no idea what to expect if we ended up limping to one in Pennsylvania. It seemed fate was against us and we would never make it to Ohio—­

—­or at least, it seemed that way until Kylie pulled open a hidden compartment in the trunk and showed me the spare tire hidden back there.

“Adare thought of everything,” I said.

“Except one thing,” Kylie said, standing aside as I pulled the tire out of its hiding place. “Everybody forgets one thing. That's the thing that kills them.”

I was too happy with the new tire to work out what that meant.

It took us a long time to figure out how to replace the tire. Long hours with jacks and tire irons and losing bolts in the weeds by the side of the road, with Heather the whole time up on the battered roof, keeping an eye out for zombies. But we did it.

Together we extracted the broken steel fence post that had impaled my seat, so I would have a place to sit again. The springs stuck out of the hole, and it would never be as comfortable a place for me to ride again, but the seat belt still worked.

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
Z
s, 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.