Positive (46 page)

 

CHAPTER 136

I
just don't know. Garrett was the best at first aid and he's . . . he's in the morgue now,” Luke said, staring at my wound. “I don't
think
you're going to die?” He made it sound like a question.

The wound had stopped bleeding, at least. The bullet had torn open my stomach, just below my belly button. It looked bad, like raw meat, but we both knew the real problem. There was no corresponding hole in my back. The bullet was still in there.

We had no idea how to remove it or even if we should. So Luke had sewn me up with a piece of fishing line that he'd soaked in rubbing alcohol. It hurt like hell—­almost more than getting shot. But it didn't take very long.

Afterward I tried to stand up again. I could still feel my feet, which I took as a good sign. But the second I put weight on my legs, my whole body just cramped up with agony. It was unbearable. Luke helped me lie back down, and for a long time I could do nothing but stare at the ceiling as my pulse pounded in my ears.

This was going to be a problem.

I could bark orders at ­people just fine while sitting down. But if I couldn't be up, moving around town, checking on things—­those orders wouldn't mean much. “I have to be able to walk,” I said.

“We have some stuff for the pain,” Luke told me. “Pills. They're twenty years old so they might not work anymore. They might even be poisonous.”

“Fine,” I said, as if he'd said they might make me drowsy.

“Plus, the one thing I do know for sure about first aid is that the more you move around, the more likely you are to reopen your wound, or the bullet in your gut could move and tear something that will kill you on the spot. It's not safe, Finn.”

“Where are the pills?” I asked. Nobody in Hearth was safe just then. Any of us could be killed by a random bullet at any time.

He went and got them for me, though he shook his head in disbelief. When he came back, I took the bottle and looked inside and saw thirty or so old, crumbly white pills that smelled like pig urine. I put one in my mouth and swallowed it on the spot. While I waited for it to take effect, I said, “Luke, why do you always question my decisions? You always have, ever since we met back in the medical camp.”

“Because I'm smarter than you and I know better,” he told me, smiling.

“Seriously,” I said, though I smiled back. “Most ­people want me to just make a call and stick to it. They want somebody who will tell them everything's going to be okay, or that they're special and worthwhile. But not you. You disagree with almost everything I say and do and yet you've stuck with me, even when you didn't have to. If you'd gone with Macky—­”

“—­that would have been a lousy decision, as we see now,” he replied. He scratched at his nose for a second. “Finn, I could tell right away, I mean, really early on that you were going to be trouble. I figured you would end up as the boss of a work crew—­I had no idea you were going to take it this far. You were going to be powerful, though, and in my experience powerful ­people like it when the ­people around them agree with everything they say. When they fawn over their leader. I didn't want to be like that. I wanted to always tell you the truth. I was a little afraid you would hit me for some of the things I said to you—­but you never did. You weren't like any of the bosses I knew. I guess I stuck around wondering when you were going to change, when you were going to decide you were personally more important than the ­people who followed you.” He shrugged. “I'm still waiting. That day comes, I'm out of here.”

By the time he'd finished saying all that, the pill I'd taken had kicked in. It hadn't gone bad in the twenty years since the crisis. If anything, it must have gotten stronger. It took all my pain away, all right, which was very welcome, but it also left me feeling loopy and disconnected from reality.

Which could be just as bad as the pain had been.

I handed Luke the pill bottle. “Too much,” I said. “You keep these. When I ask for one, give me half of one, okay? Don't let me have more than that. And if I start acting really stupid, you cut me off entirely.”

“Got it, boss,” he said.

I nodded. It felt like I was underwater and all my motions were slowed down, exaggerated. But I got up on my feet and I could walk, without pain. Which meant I could work.

 

CHAPTER 137

J
ust before dark, Kate stopped sending her motorcyclists in to harass us. Maybe it was just costing her too many men—­Strong and her snipers were getting very good at hitting moving targets. I told my ­people to keep inside and keep their heads down anyway—­we didn't know when she would start up again.

What we did know, what I was sure of, was that she had something else planned for us. That she wasn't going to just leave us alone. And I was right.

It took Strong's sharp eyes to see what was going on.

The call came down, and I went to the gate right away. Strong ushered me up into her sniper's nest, the best vantage point we had. She told me what to look for and still I could barely see it. It looked like Kate was building something, a big wooden contraption. She was setting it up in a clearing about two hundred yards from town, a little open space among the trees. I could barely see it, though, for the intervening foliage. I thought maybe it had a long arm and a central pivot, and there were some metal parts attached to the sides—­springs taken from the suspension of one of her motorcycles, maybe.

It was dark before she finished building the thing, so I didn't get to see the finished product. I did, however, get to find out what it did, and all too soon.

It was a catapult. It was designed to throw Molotov cocktails right over our wall, right into the midst of town.

The first projectile sailed maybe a hundred and fifty yards before it clipped the side of a tree trunk and shattered. Half the town came out to watch the tree flare into a bright cloud of crisping leaves and dark branches silhouetted against the blaze. I shouted for everyone to get back inside, but they all ignored me.

The second Molotov hit our wall, square on. I was glad then that everyone was out watching, because I had to organize them into another fire brigade. We'd learned a lot about how to put out fires the first time Kate tried to burn us alive, and we made short work of it this time. But even as we were putting the fire out, another missile came arcing over our heads with a grumbling noise and then a shrill clatter as it burst against the hard earth of the main square.

I headed over there, waving for a team with blankets to follow me, but by the time I'd arrived the flames were already guttering out. The gasoline bombs used up their fuel quickly, it seemed. Unless they hit something that they could ignite, they weren't too dangerous.

That was a pretty big “unless,” though. Hearth had so many wooden homes, so many piles of firewood or old, dried-­out furniture. If a fire broke out in the southern part of town, where the older houses were, we might not be able to put it out before it spread through street after street.

I called for my blanket team to head down there, to the old houses, and stand guard. Our best chance was if they were on the scene when a firebomb hit, so they could take action before things got out of control. I grabbed a team who carried buckets of water and had them spread out around the main square, with instructions to watch for the next bomb. Then I turned around and—­and—­

I can't even remember what I was going to do next. Maybe it was the pain pills, but it's all a blank. All I do remember is someone shouting my name, right in my face, and waking up—­on my feet—­to find myself in the main square.

The fact that I couldn't remember how I got there scared me. But I couldn't focus on that at the moment. I turned and looked and saw a positive who was saying something to me, over and over.

“The army,” he said. “The army. The army!”

I couldn't believe it. When I'd told Lucy to work the radio, to try to raise some help, I'd assumed it wouldn't ever come to anything. But was it possible? Could it be that the army had come to save us—­a bunch of positives? A big smile started to spread across my face. “What about the army?” I asked.

“Lucy has them on the radio,” he said. “You need to go talk to them.”

 

CHAPTER 138

L
ucy—­our radio operator—­was in the municipal building, in the office of the town's former comptroller. She had our toylike wind-­up radio on a desk in front of her and she was turning the crank as fast as she could. When she saw me come in, she looked up with very wide eyes. “It's, um, a Colonel Somebody for you, Finnegan,” she said, and held the radio toward me.

“I don't know how to work this thing,” I said. “Do I turn the—­”

“I can hear you just fine, son,” the radio said. I took it from Lucy's shaking hands.

“Colonel Parkhurst?” I said. “You can't imagine how happy I am to hear from you, sir. We've been trying for days—­”

“I know, son, I know. And I can see you're in a real pickle over there.”

I frowned. “You can see through this radio? Does it have a camera in it?”

“No, no, I'm looking at satellite imagery. I can see your town full of positives there. And I can see the stalkers camping just outside. What the devil is that thing they've got? It looks like a catapult. Now, that's new.”

“Sir,” I said, “I don't actually understand what you're talking about, but it sounds like you've got things just about right. Can you—­”

“How's your wall? It's holding up okay?”

“For now,” I said.

“And you've got water, that's crucial in any siege-­type situation . . .”

His voice faded off into a crackling hum. Lucy jumped up and reached for the crank on the side of the radio, and I realized it had run out of power. I turned the crank wildly until I could hear the colonel again.

“—­medical supplies,” he said.

“Sir, I missed some of that. But I'm very happy you answered our call, because we could really use some help right now.”

“Couldn't we all?” he asked, and even laughed a little. “I'm in New Mexico right now, son. New Mexico, fighting the cultists. You understand? They came sweeping out of Denver like the devil's own, and they're pushing us back toward Texas. If they take Texas, they'll have our oil, and without oil there's no gasoline. Without gasoline we'll have no more helicopters, do you see? No more helicopters.”

“That sounds bad, sir. But if you could just send us
one
helicopter, with a bunch of soldiers in it, that would—­that would really help us out.” It wasn't so much to ask, I thought. That was what the army was for, wasn't it? To protect us from zombies and looters and cultists. Just one helicopter.

“Son,” the colonel said, “I want to help you.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” I said.

“I want to. But every single man we've got is needed right here. Without gasoline, without helicopters—­there is no army. And then what happens? That's the end of the United States right there. If we can't move our ­people around, the whole continent will get divided up by Anubis and ­people like him. No, son. I can't spare a single troop, much less a squad.”

I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see Lucy's face. I didn't want to see anything. “Colonel,” I said. “I—­I'll beg if I have to. Please. If you don't help us, every single person in Hearth could die.” I wished Lucy didn't have to hear that, but it was going to be evident to the entire town soon enough, anyway. “Colonel—­we need you.”

“Son, you've gotta hold out the best you can. Keep your water supply clean. Keep morale high. Just hold in there long enough and . . .”

He started to fade out again then. I didn't even bother turning the crank.

I handed the radio back to Lucy. She took it and set it carefully on her desk.

“You did an amazing job getting through to him,” I told her. “But maybe we should put you on a fire-­fighting team, now. I, uh, I don't think we need a radio operator anymore.”

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

I tried to give her a brave smile, even if I wasn't feeling it. “Maybe we keep this just between us, okay?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

 

CHAPTER 139

T
hat next day Red Kate mostly left us alone—­I had no idea why, but I was thankful for it. Maybe her catapult broke.

But at least I had a little space of time when I wasn't running all over town, literally putting out fires. When I realized things would stay quiet, probably until dawn, I found Kylie and let her help me into a bed. I even managed to get some sleep.

Pain woke me up. I called for Luke and he gave me half a pill, then left before I could order him to give me the other half. While I waited for the medicine to kick in, Kylie held my head in her lap and stroked my temples. I touched my forehead to the warmth of her pregnant belly and that helped.

“How's our food supply holding up? How long until we starve?” I asked.

“Don't worry about that now,” she told me. She shushed me and rubbed my ears.

“When we run out of bullets, Kate will know. She'll realize we can't shoot at her anymore, and she'll just have her stalkers snipe us through the gate.”

“That's not happening right now,” Kylie said.

“She can stay out there forever. We're trapped in here.”

“We're safe in here, you mean,” she told me.

I swiveled around until I could look up into her face. “If I die—­”

“Don't,” she said.

“No, listen, if I die, I need you to take charge, which means—­”

“Finn,” she said. “Shut the fuck up.”

I blinked at her. I thought about what to say in response. Then I just nodded, closed my eyes, and nestled closer, touching her with as much of my body as I could.