Positive (25 page)

 

CHAPTER 68

I
wrapped my fingers around the wire of the fence between the two camps, unsure if I was going to get shocked or not. When I didn't, I grabbed the fence and shook it. “Hey! Anybody over there, please! I need to talk to you.”

Two lengths of fencing and a five-­foot-­wide strip of land between the two layers of fence separated the men's camp from the women's. My voice had to carry across that patch of weeds and catch somebody on the other side. I shouted for quite a while before anybody even looked up, and only when I kept shouting did anyone come to answer. It was a woman of maybe thirty years, her head shaved like everyone else's.

“Go away,” she said. “Nobody wants to talk to you. Nobody wants to see your dick.”

I was shocked. It was such a specific possibility that I thought it must be something that had happened before. “They do that?”

“You guys get horny. What else are you going to do through all this fence? You come over here and offer to show us yours if we show you ours. As if that would actually do anything for us.” The woman stared at me. I think she was looking at my hair, which was still on my head. “You're the new guy. We saw you come in. I guess maybe you haven't had time to turn into a pervert yet.”

“My name's Finnegan, and I—­”

“I honestly don't care. Listen, I only came over here because I was tired of listening to you shout. What the hell do you want so badly?”

“Some girls came in here a little while ago. Just a ­couple of days ago. I need to talk to them. They're my—­my family. There's one named Kylie, she's . . . I really need to talk to her. Or at least send her a message. Please. We were supposed to come in here together, but it didn't work out.”

The woman scratched behind her ear. “I saw them. Two of them, right?”

“There should have been four,” I said, my heart sinking.

“Nope. Just two. Maybe it was somebody else. But wait—­yeah, one of them was named Kylie, I think. I haven't seen them, but you hear things, right? Not much to do in here except gossip.”

At least Kylie and Heather had made it, I thought. I had no doubt that Heather was the other girl who'd just come in. Addison and Mary weren't positives—­or at least they didn't have tattoos on the backs of their left hands. I had no way of knowing what had happened to them, not until I talked to Kylie.

“I have to talk to her. Please. Please, find her and tell her that Finnegan is here, and he's looking for her. Please?”

“Why should I?” the woman asked.

Because I love her,
I thought.

Like a sister, of course,
I told myself.
I love her like a sister.
How could you love somebody who couldn't even smile at you? Who was so closed off she could barely function?

It didn't matter. I knew better than to say anything like that out loud.

“Kylie definitely wants to talk to me,” I told the woman. “If you pass on the message, I'm sure she'll find some way to repay you.”

“Yeah, sure. She's probably glad to be rid of you,” the woman suggested, though it sounded more like she was haggling than anything else.

“I promise you, she'll pay you back. Somehow.”

“I'll think about it,” the woman said, and then she walked away. I shouted after her until I was hoarse, but she didn't turn around or look back.

I could only hope the message got through.

 

CHAPTER 69

S
oldiers patrolled the catwalks that arched over the camp, carving the sky into segments. They never seemed to look down, even when I waved my arms at them and shouted for them to look at me. I thought if I could get their attention, I could explain what a mistake I'd made.

I'd had no idea what I was getting myself into.

For so long the idea of Ohio, of the safety of the camp, had been everything to me. It had been the only thing that kept me going when I was stranded out in the wilderness, cut off from civilization and its security. I'd thought if I could just get here, just get the girls here, everything would be all right.

It seemed impossible that this could be what I'd fought so hard to obtain. This patch of mud under a gray sky, the sullen faces of the other positives, the total lack of concern on the part of those who were there to guard us. The soldiers had shocked the positives back so I could get inside, but after that, as I was torn and scratched and beaten, they'd done nothing. They'd stood aside and watched. They didn't seem to care if I lived or died.

I was soon to find out what they did care about. As I stood there in the mud, feeling sorry for myself, utterly without an idea of what to do next, I started noticing that the positives were drifting over toward the factory shelters—­the row of slightly larger shacks over by the wall that Luke had pointed out to me. I had no idea what all this talk of shifts and working meant, but I knew I needed to be there when a whistle blew, so I fell in with those drifting over there, intent on not screwing this up as well.

The positives formed a line outside each of the shacks. There weren't any signs or any way of telling one shack from another, so I just picked one line at random. The positives in that line stared at me as if I'd done something wrong, so I said, “Fedder? Fedder?” until someone lifted his arm and pointed me to a different line. When I got there, I saw Luke standing in the door of the shack, counting the ­people in his line. When he saw me, he nodded.

Fedder arrived just as an ear-­piercing whistle cut the air. I'd only ever seen Fedder before while lying on my back, looking up at his foot as it came streaking toward my face. He'd seemed huge then, but I'd had no idea. He wasn't as broad through the shoulders as Adare, but he had to be seven feet tall. As he walked up to the line he slapped some of the positives across the face, though none of them had done anything to provoke the attack. He said nothing as he pushed inside the shack. Once he was inside, Luke gestured for the rest of us to follow.

The interior of the shack was lit by a pair of electric bulbs, each of them surrounded by a cloud of suicidal insects. The shack's floor was taken up by three long tables lined with wobbly stools. Heaped on the table, apparently without any scheme or order, was a pile of green flat objects I'd never seen before. It turned out they were modular circuit boards. There were also boxes of smaller black components.

Without a word the positives filed in and took up positions on the stools. There didn't seem to be assigned spots—­everyone just grabbed a stool at random. Luke pointed me to a stool next to his own. I sat down, and he handed me one of the circuit boards. “See this?” he asked, picking one of the black components out of its box. “It goes in here,” he said. He showed me a socket on the board. The component fit into the socket with a little click. There were four other sockets, each of which had a different shape. “It only fits in one of the sockets. If you try to push it into a different socket, you'll snap the connectors. That's bad. Broken boards make Fedder look bad—­he's responsible for your work; he has to turn in all the complete boards, and if his tally's short, he gets in trouble.”

Luke didn't need to tell me that if Fedder got in trouble because of my faulty work, I'd get a beating. That was pretty self-­evident.

“We need to get through all these boxes before nine o'clock,” Luke told me. “Normally I'd say you could take your time, but we're short three ­people on this shift, and so we all have to work faster to make up for them.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

Luke said nothing, but his eyes flicked in Fedder's direction. The big positive, who I was told was now my “boss,” was sitting on a stool at the back of the shack reading a magazine. He didn't look up.

I watched Luke insert a few more of the components. His hands moved fast over the boards, deftly inserting a component and then pushing the board back into the pile in seconds. I tried to match his speed but couldn't. It was easy to tell which socket I wanted—­they were, in fact, numbered—­but I kept forgetting which direction the component went into it and had to turn it around and around in my hands. When I did get the component seated properly and reached for another board to repeat the process, invariably I would grab a board that already had its component installed.

The other positives on the shift stared at me with open hatred. They all moved as fast as Luke, churning out completed boards at a rapid pace. I was slowing them down. I had no doubt as to what would happen if we hadn't finished all the boards by nine o'clock—­Fedder—­but I had no way of measuring time and no way of knowing how badly I was screwing up.

Nine o'clock came, but the only way to tell was that Fedder grunted and got off his stool to check the boxes of components. When he was sure they were empty, he nodded and went back to his magazine. Nobody came to take away the circuit boards—­instead, Luke went over to the far end of the shack and brought back three new boxes, all of them holding a slightly different black component that fit into a slightly different socket.

And so we started all over again.

The work went on for hours and hours. I was used to hard work from my days in New York, of course. Fishing in the subways all morning, then working in the gardens all afternoon and into the twilight every day had taught me how to handle the fatigue and the sore muscles. But this all seemed so . . . pointless. At one point I asked Luke what the boards were for, but Fedder growled and said, “No talking,” and I resolved to hold my question for later. I didn't get a chance until the shift was over.

By that point I was dead tired, and my stomach was clenched in a knot of hunger. I knew not to ask questions, but I was really hoping we would get some food soon.

A positive came into the shack. He said he'd come to collect all the circuit boards, which we had stacked neatly in the empty boxes. He checked the boxes, then handed Fedder a receipt. Luke led us out of the factory shack and along the wall to a big open pavilion with a roof that looked like it was about to collapse. There Fedder turned his receipt in for yet another cardboard box. At least this one contained food. Sandwiches, with stale bread and some kind of meat that might have been beef. Luke handed out the sandwiches to everyone on the shift, but when he gave me mine, Fedder came over and scowled down at me.

“You did about half a shift's worth of work,” he said. He tore my sandwich in half. I didn't try to fight him, though I wanted to. He stuffed half the sandwich in his own mouth, cramming it in between his teeth. Then he dropped the other half in the mud at my feet.

I am not ashamed to say I picked it up, dusted it off the best I could, and ate it anyway. No one should ever be ashamed of being hungry.

 

CHAPTER 70

I
got better at the work. I had no choice—­it was that or starve. Each day I moved faster, assembled more components quicker. The other positives in the crew still hated me, but their venomous glares never turned into anything more violent.

I got used to mud, more or less. I stopped caring if I was dirty or not—­there was no way to get truly clean. My stomach adjusted to the tiny amount of food I got every day, and for the most part, my hunger pangs gave way to a generalized gnawing in my guts that I could mostly ignore. I even got used to the insects that stung and bit me all night. Well, I kind of got used to it.

Luke became a kind of friend, though he was always guarded. He showed me the ropes of the place, helping me survive. It was Luke who shaved my head for me after I'd been there a few days. I'd thought at first that was some kind of punishment, a way of dehumanizing the positives. It turned out it was a great relief—­I hadn't realized why my head itched so much until Luke cut off my hair and showed me the lice crawling around on my scalp.

Luke knew a lot about getting along in the camp. He taught me the best times to use the latrine (a big open pit in one corner of the camp, and a favorite place for robbers to wait for their victims). He showed me how to get water from the camp's well when I got thirsty. He helped me find a safe place to sleep and showed me how to hide valuables—­not that I ever had anything of true worth. He taught me to save a little of my food, when I could. The economy in the camp, it turned out, was thriving. Any slight comfort was something to be treasured. Saved up for. A pair of shoes, so I didn't have to feel the mud squelching between my toes all the time, was the first thing I purchased. Luke had a deck of cards that was missing only the three of diamonds. He put out the word that he would trade generously for just that card. It was something to do, something to think about other than how slowly the time passed, how boring the work was.

He eventually told me why the guards wanted all those circuit boards. “They're for the helicopters,” he said. “Sometimes we assemble other parts, too—­door latches, wheel hubs, anything that wears out or breaks, they constantly need more. Once they had us putting together machine guns, and some of the guys talked about . . . well . . . it was just talk. There weren't any bullets for the guns.”

I filed away the idea that there were some ­people in the camp who wanted to fight their way out. Or maybe just kill some guards or each other for revenge. Facts like that helped me stay paranoid, helped me sleep light.

I was interested in something else, though. “How many helicopters does the military have? We must have put together thousands of those boards.”

Luke shrugged. He had his cards in his hands, and he shuffled them back and forth, the red and black pips flickering between his fingers, the cards bridging through the air to land back in his hand again. He'd been practicing for a long time. “Who knows?” he said. That was the answer to the vast majority of my questions. “More. More than they used to have, I think. There used to be a lot less work.” He shook his head. “I think they're gearing up for something. Some kind of big fight.”

I thought about the name I'd heard a ­couple of times now—­Anubis. The guy Red Kate was looking to join. He was supposed to be a warlord out west. Caxton had made him sound pretty serious. But the army could take down any warlord, couldn't they? There was no way this Anubis was a real threat.

I tried talking to Luke about that, but it quickly became clear he didn't understand anything I said. I would often forget that Luke had never been outside of a set of sturdy walls. Unlike me, he'd never seen the wilderness—­he'd been brought to the camp straight from Milwaukee. Just like I was supposed to be brought from New York. He didn't have any real information about what the army was doing.

“It doesn't matter why we put the boards together,” he said finally. “It's work. It's how we get food. That's all that matters. And it's better than it used to be. I met a guy when I first came in—­he got cleared and he's gone now, but he must have been forty years old by then. He was here almost from the crisis. He said originally they didn't have us assembling parts. He said they used to take us out and make us farm—­endless hours out in the sun or the rain, or slogging through the snow. He said it was awful, that positives used to just drop dead out in the fields because they froze to death, and the guards didn't care.”

“Why'd they change to this kind of work?” I asked.

“Nobody wanted to eat food grown by positives. We're infected, right? Or we might be. The food could be infected, too.”

That was why the guards stayed up on their catwalks, I realized. Why they made sure they never had to touch us or so much as breathe in our air. As far as they were concerned, we were little better than zombies.

Another reason the wilderness had been better than the camp—­at least for me. Out on the road, it had been rare that anyone thought twice about the tattoo on my hand. Nobody had treated me like I was less than human.

Luke was done talking, then. He wanted to play cards. We didn't know any of the same games, but that was fine—­we had plenty of time to learn. He taught me to play gin and poker and go fish. I taught him hearts, which we used to play back in New York. I was a little fuzzy on the rules, but we had plenty of time to figure it out.

When I got tired of cards, and tired of thinking about what I could trade, and tired of just talking, I would head over to the double layer of fence between the male and female camps. I would stand there, looking through the chain link. Looking for Kylie. I had no idea if the woman I'd spoken to had ever bothered to pass on my message. As days passed it seemed likely she hadn't.

It was unlikely I would ever see Kylie just by chance. The women stayed well clear of the fence on their side, and for good reason. Male positives pressed up against our side all the time, hoping for just a look at a girl. Some of them were more insistent about it than others, calling out to the women, whistling at them, shouting boasts or threats or just calling out their fantasies of what they would do if they got inside the female camp, even for just a few minutes.

Still—­I had no better idea than to just stand there, hoping Kylie would walk by. Sometimes I would stand by the fence until it was time to go back to work. Sometimes I could bear it for only a few minutes. The guilt was sometimes too much to bear. I'd convinced Kylie to come here. I'd told her it was going to be paradise.

I spent many nights half awake, thinking of it. Turning it over and over in my head—­what I owed her. What I would say if I ever saw her again. Sometimes I hoped I never had to.