Positive (29 page)

 

CHAPTER 80

I
ke took me down the hollow column and unlocked the door at its bottom. “When you come back, knock three times and I'll open this up for you and take you back to your own place.” A little light burned inside the hollow column, and I could see just how grim his face had become. “You know you can't bring her back with you?”

“I know.”

Kylie came down the stairs behind us, and for a second I thought Ike would shoot her, he was so jumpy. But instead he just shook his head and switched off the light. He opened the door for us, and we headed out into the female camp.

In the dark, in the mud, it should have looked exactly like the male camp. It had all the same elements, and was just as featureless, as my side of the camp. But it was just different enough to be creepy—­everything was in the wrong place, the shelters clumped in strange patterns. They had a well for fresh water, right in the middle of their camp. It added up to make me feel like all of reality had been strangely twisted.

That, or I was just afraid of being caught.

Kylie led me to a shelter near the wall. “This is where the sick women go,” she said. We saw no one on our way there, but when we arrived, I was shocked to see a little light coming from inside. I glanced through a crack between two planks of crumbling wood and saw candles burning inside. “You have candles?” I whispered. “How did you get candles?”

“We make them,” she said. “That's what we do for work here. Candles and soap, and we patch up old clothes. Sometimes we steal some of what we make.”

Another weird thing. I'd assumed the female camp was hard at work putting together circuit boards, just like the male camp. But Luke had told me that sometimes the work changed, and that it wouldn't always be circuit boards. I guess the army needed other things, too. I knew nothing then of the old division of labor that had been disappearing even before the crisis, the idea that there was such a thing as “woman's work” as opposed to that done by men. It seemed that someone in the camp's administration still thought that way.

Whatever. It didn't matter—­I wasn't here to learn all about the female camp. I found the door of the makeshift shelter and stepped inside.

A group of women were kneeling on the floor together, in front of a foot-­high statue of a human skeleton. It looked like it was made of wax, and had been carefully, if inexpertly, sculpted. I could make out the various bones and even tiny carved teeth in the miniature skull.

One of the women looked up and saw me, and she gasped. The others jumped up and pressed back, moving away from the door.

The only exposure to men these women had since coming to the camp had been the leering suggestions of the men who pressed up against the fence between the two camps, the ones who called out rude suggestions all day long. The ones who shouted out their fantasies of what they would do if they ever got through that fence. The women I was facing now must have thought I was there to ravage the lot of them.

I might have corrected them, but the last thing I wanted was for them to think I was safe, that they could shout at me to get out and I would. I needed to do this quickly and quietly and if that meant scaring them, I was okay with that.

“Heather,” I said. “Where's Heather?”

They didn't say a word, but one of them, younger than the rest, glanced toward a little alcove at the back of the shed. I pushed past her and headed back there, Kylie in tow. I knew I was in the right place when the smell hit me.

Flies buzzed angrily and swarmed around my face as I pushed aside a threadbare curtain and looked in on Heather. She was lying on a makeshift mattress of piled blankets, and a candle burned by her head. The sleeve of her shirt had been torn away to expose the wound on her right arm. It was festering, and badly—­weeping pustules had formed all around the gash, and I could see black veins under her greenish skin. As I knelt down beside her I could hear her laboring for breath, and I could see that her eyes, while open, weren't focusing on anything.

“Heather,” I said. I grabbed her hand, her left hand with its plus sign tattoo. “Heather, it's me. Finnegan. I've come to get you out of here. It's the least I could do.”

“Ky—­ky—­” Heather gasped.

“Kylie's here, too. She came and got me. I know she isn't the warmest of ­people, but she does care about you, Heather. She wanted to save you.”

“Kylie,” she managed to pant. “Kylie, why? You know—­know what I—­want.”

“It's going to be okay,” I told Heather.

“I know—­know it is. Came to—­to save me? From what?”

“These ­people out there,” I said, pointing back toward the main room. “I'm not sure what they think they're doing here—­”

“They're helping me die,” Heather said. Her eyes were fever bright.

I started to shake my head, but she had more to say.

“Die the—­right way,” she said, nodding a little. “Die so somebody.” She coughed, then had a single spasm that seemed like it would shatter her fragile body. “So somebody else. Can live.”

“What?” I couldn't understand.

“If I die now, then somebody else doesn't have to.”

“That's nuts, Heather! That's nonsense. It doesn't work that way. I don't know what they've been telling you, but if you die like this, you just—­you just
die
. But if you fight this thing, if we can get you some medicine, you could live. Make it through your time in the camp and then you can go home. Don't you want to see your family again? Your old friends?”

“Not—­going to happen. This way. This way I. Do something good. Something important. Not just survival,” Heather told me. She looked so very weak and tired. “Something more. There has to be something more in a life.”

“These women who taught you that—­”

She squeezed my hand. I could barely feel it. But I could see the angelic smile on her face. “They didn't. Teach me anything. You did, Finnegan.”

“I . . . what?”

“When you sacrificed—­yourself. Went with Red Kate. So we could get here. You didn't know—­you thought this place was safe.”

“I—­I—­”

“Showed me. What a life is worth.”

I tried to argue with her further, but it was no use. Talking had worn her out, and soon her eyelids were drooping and she stopped speaking altogether.

I turned to Kylie then and glared at her. Why hadn't she sent for me sooner? Why had she waited until Heather was about to die?

But of course it wasn't Kylie's fault. Kylie was just convenient; I knew if I lashed out at her, she wouldn't fight back. I stopped myself before I could say anything I might regret and hurried out into the main room. The women there were still pressed up against the walls, staying as far away from me as possible.

True hatred is a rare thing, even in this desperate world, but I hated those women. I hated everything they believed, everything they'd created. I would gladly have torn down their wax skeleton and stamped on it. If it had been in my power, I would have eradicated their little religion from the earth.

“She's going to die for nothing,” I told them. “Your belief is false. Your idol means nothing.”

“Of course,” one of them said. “It's only an image. Something to focus on while we pray. We know Death looks nothing like that.”

I shook my head. “You're full of crap. This idea, that you can somehow transfer life, give it to somebody else—­it's crap!”

The woman who had spoken gave me the same sweet smile Heather had shown. “You can't know that. You can't prove it.”

Suddenly I couldn't handle it anymore. I couldn't look at these women and argue with them as if they were rational ­people. I stormed out of their shelter and back to the hollow column, fuming all the way. I knocked and Ike let me in.

Neither of us said a word as he escorted me back to the male camp. When I got back down to my own patch of mud, he closed the door in the column behind me. I heard its lock turn, with a terrible finality, and I was alone.

 

CHAPTER 81

I
could not stop thinking about Heather. Lying in candlelight. Lying there waiting to die.

I tried to think of other things, but I couldn't get the images out of my mind. Kylie so far gone she'd lost the power of speech. How long before she stopped eating? Would she go and kneel in front of the skeleton idol? Would she offer up her life? Maybe she'd give it to me. Or Luke. Or somebody in California none of us would ever meet.

The reed bends, the oak breaks.
She was supposed to be a survivor. She had built that armor to protect herself. But maybe even reeds break if the wind blows hard enough.

I felt so helpless, so powerless. I knew I had to do something, something to help Heather, to convince Kylie that there was some reason to hope. To keep living. But what could I possibly do?

It was hard to concentrate on work. My productivity dropped, and twice I broke a circuit board by plugging the component into the wrong slot. The first time Fedder refused to let me eat. The second time, he said I was in for a beating. “A bad one, this time.”

I thought about the last one, which barely left me able to move. I was filled with the need to attack, to run at Fedder and hurt him before he could hurt me, as stupid as I knew the impulse was. I considered running away. But there was nowhere I could go, nowhere I could get away from him. As he stomped toward me, every muscle in my body cringed, and I thought—­no,
thought
is the wrong word. What went through my head then was nothing short of animal instinct.

I ducked my head, put out my arms, and threw myself at him, aiming my skull right for his stomach. I think I was trying to knock the wind out of him, but that suggests I had some kind of plan.

In my brain there were visions of getting him on his back and tearing into his guts with my fingernails, tearing out his still-­beating heart and holding it over my head like a prize.

The reality, of course, was a lot more prosaic. I did hit him, and I did knock the wind out of him, but Fedder had strength to spare. He wrapped one arm around my waist and picked me up like a bag of potatoes. I'd lost a lot of weight in the camp, and I don't think he even had to strain to carry me like that.

He stepped outside the work shelter and dropped me on my head in the mud. My head bent forward under my own weight, and I saw black spots swim before my vision.

I managed to twist around, enough that I could look up. All I could see was Fedder's massive boot, caked in stinking mud, lifting up over my face. He was going to do it. He was really going to do it this time—­stomp on my face. Maybe crush my skull. When he'd beaten me before, it was almost clinical. I think that when I stood up to him, when I attacked him, I'd finally made him mad.

Now I was going to pay for it. Maybe with my life.

Except it didn't come to that.

“Fedder!” someone shouted.

The boot lowered—­to the ground beside my head. Fedder looked to his right. “Fuck off, Macky. This is none of your business.”

“Don't be so hasty.”

A new guy walked into my field of view. I'd seen Macky before, though I'd never spoken to him. He was a big guy, like Fedder—­maybe not quite so big. He was a boss, with his own work crew. That was how you got to be a boss, by being big enough to thrash your workers.

Other than that I knew nothing about him.

“How about I take this kid off your hands?” Macky asked. “How about he comes to work for me? Looks like you're through with him.”

“I'm not through until he's a puddle of blood and guts,” Fedder said. Yet I could tell he had some respect for Macky—­that he wouldn't kill me until they'd finished their negotiation.

“He won't be much use to me dead,” Macky pointed out. “Listen, I'll trade you. Any one of my guys for this one.”

Fedder looked confused, but not like he was deep in thought.

“We have a deal?” Macky asked. He reached down and hauled me to my feet. I still felt a little dizzy, but it wasn't too bad.

“I get one more punch,” Fedder said. “For my aggravation.”

Macky mused that over for a second. “Yeah, okay.”

Then Fedder punched me in the stomach so hard I couldn't eat for three days. I fell backward and landed on my ass in the mud and just lay there vomiting for a while.

When I was done, Fedder was already gone. Macky dragged me to my feet and took me back to his shelter, where he told me to lie down until he came for me.

I tried very hard to go to sleep, because you don't feel pain when you're asleep. The problem with that idea is that if you're hurting enough, it keeps you awake.

By the time Macky came for me, the boredom was almost as bad as the pain.

He stepped inside the shelter and looked down at me. Frowned, like he wondered if he'd made a good deal with Fedder. Then he shrugged and helped me stand up. “Come on,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“To talk to some ­people,” he told me. ­“People who are very interested in you, all of a sudden.”

 

CHAPTER 82

H
e took me to a shelter, a big one—­you could stand up straight inside. There were no beds in it, just a table with some mismatched chairs. A deck of cards lay on the table, and I immediately thought of Luke's deck, with its missing card. I wondered if Macky might want to trade.

But that wasn't why he'd brought me there.

At first we were alone inside the shelter, but soon it started to fill up with other ­people. They were big guys, covered in muscles—­so well fed. Some of them had noses that looked like they'd been knocked to one side, or bad scars. They'd been in lots of fights. None of them looked scared or tired or sick.

I soon realized who they were. They were the bosses of all the work crews in the male camp.

All of them. Fedder came in last of all, scowling at me. But he came.

Macky nodded at each one of the bosses as they came in. He slapped a ­couple of them on the back, shared a laugh with one. It was clear to me he'd summoned his fellow bosses in for a meeting, and that I was the only item on the agenda.

“This is him,” Macky said. That was it. No preamble, no small talk. “This is the guy who went up on the catwalks.”

I lifted my hands in protest. “What? No way,” I said.

Macky gave me a significant look. It was clear that if I lied to him now, there would be consequences. Maybe he would give me back to Fedder.

“You were seen,” Macky said. “A ­couple of nights ago, one of my workers was out taking a piss. He saw you up there. I don't know how you got up on the catwalks. Maybe they have a pole with a hook and they lift you up there.”

One of the other bosses—­I didn't know his name—­broke out laughing. “That's impossible,” he said.

Macky gestured at me, as if it were my turn to talk. I just blinked at him. I'm sure he wanted me to say how I got up to the catwalks, but I kept my mouth shut.

There was a lot of muscle in that room. I'll admit to being intimidated.

“Obviously it's not impossible,” Macky said. “We know it isn't. We've seen girls up there sometimes.”

“What?” the boss—­the one who had laughed—­asked.

Macky ignored him and turned to me. “You know one of the guards, right? Is one of the guards gay? Are you fucking a guard?”

“You watch the catwalks at night?” I asked, instead of answering.

Macky frowned at me, like I'd disappointed him. “We run this place. And there are ­people who'd love to see us eat shit and die. So we keep our eyes open. Okay? Now, answer the damn questions. You know a guard up there?”

“Yeah—­a friend of mine from—­from before I came here,” I admitted.

Macky nodded. “Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Finnegan's the guy you were talking about?” Fedder asked. “You could have told me it was one of mine.”

“Why, so you would have known not to trade him to me? He's mine now,” Macky pointed out. “So shut up.” He looked around at the gathered bosses. “I called you here because we need to figure out how to make this work for us. How we're going to benefit from it.”

“They've got good food up there,” one of the others said. “Better than we get.”

There was a general murmur of assent. “He could bring girls over here,” someone else said. “I mean, if they can go up on the catwalks, they can come down on this side, right?”

“I won't do that,” I said. I'd let them grind me to a paste before I started pimping for them. Not that I could have, anyway—­Ike was done with me. My access to the catwalks was over and done with.

I didn't tell the bosses as much.

“You work for me now,” Macky pointed out. “You'll do what I say.”

“I can't. You can beat me but—­I can't,” I said.

Macky frowned. “I think we're scaring him,” he said. “You guys—­get out of here.”

The bosses just grumbled for a second and didn't move.

“I said get the fuck out of here!” Macky roared, and that got them moving.

When they were gone, when it was just the two of us in the shelter, he gestured for me to sit down at the table. I sank gratefully into a chair.

“I'm not like Fedder,” he said.

I nodded.

“I'm not going to beat you up for working slow. I figured out a long time ago, ­people with broken arms can't work at all. So don't be so scared of me, okay?”

I must have frowned at that, because he laughed.

“Look, I get it,” he told me. “You've had shit luck since you got here, and Fedder has got you sleeping with both eyes open. You think bosses are all about exploiting their ­people. Well, fine. That is part of it. But some of us—­the smarter ones—­we try to protect our ­people, too. Make their lives a little better. A happy worker is a productive worker. I can make your life here pretty easy.”

Maybe I believed him a little—­but that just made me angry. “How?” I asked. “Are you going to shoo the flies away from me? Are you going to give me someplace dry to sleep at night?”

“That's not how things work here. Look, life is shit. But if you go along, you get along, right?”

I fumed for a while after he said that. I'd heard it one too many times.

“I refuse to accept that. Life doesn't have to be like this,” I told him. I felt like Caxton was right behind me, one hand on my shoulder. “If we all agreed, if we decided tomorrow we didn't have to live like this—­things would change. They would get better.”

“Yeah, see, that's the hard part,” Macky said. “Getting ­people to agree on things. You even talk to anybody in this camp? You ask if the sky is blue, you'll get six different answers.”

I shook my head. “You say you want to make life better for your workers. You're in charge here, you said that, too. Then it's your responsibility to change things. You, and all the bosses.”

He smirked at me like I was crazy. “Look, just tell me you'll snag some of that good guard food the next time you go up on the catwalks, okay? That's all I need to hear for right now.”

I said nothing of the kind. I walked out of the shelter then, and he didn't try to stop me.