Positive (7 page)

 

CHAPTER 17

F
or a long time I couldn't speak except in monosyllables. I was just too weak. My benefactor made up for it by talking a great deal.

“You've got some stones, I'll give you that,” he told me. “You must, being out here on foot. Didn't nobody ever tell you how stupid that was? Stones, but stupid. I'm Adare. You were up there a while, huh? Too stupid to come down. Too stupid to give up. I gotta say I kind of like that. Here.”

He handed me a bottle of water. I nearly cried, I was so grateful.

When I'd clambered down from my perch and then joined him in his car, I'd assumed he was alone in there. He wasn't, but he might as well have been. Besides the two of us, the car was full of girls, all younger than me. They were drab, mousy ­people, and they never said a word unless they were spoken to, which was very rare. Mostly they just stared out the windows, no expression at all on their faces. Some of them had tattoos like mine, plus signs inscribed on the backs of their left hands. If they caught me looking at their tattoos, they quickly pulled their sleeves down to cover them. I was to get to know them individually, later on, but for the time being they were simply other human bodies, other nonzombies, and their presence alone was encouraging. It seemed it was possible to survive out here—­if you had someone like Adare looking after you.

“What's your name?” he asked me.

“Finnegan,” I told him, because Finn, the name I usually used, was what my parents had called me. It felt like a child's name. I had some absurd notion I could treat this man as an equal.

Absurd, because he was twice my size. Maybe forty, maybe younger—­it can be hard to judge ages out in the wilderness. ­People wrinkle fast out there. He had a beard and a flannel shirt and six earrings in one ear, silver hoops that looked like they had some special significance I couldn't guess. He was not fat at all, just big—­big through the shoulders, big through the arms. His seat was pushed back as far as it would go and still his knees brushed the steering wheel.

“Dumb name. I'm calling you Stones from now on,” Adare said, and then he laughed at his own joke. He had been eating a piece of stale bread when I got in the car. He wiped the crumbs off himself now—­I would gladly have swept up those crumbs and made a feast of them, but I didn't dare—­and got the car moving. I knew nothing about how to drive, and it seemed like he was constantly adjusting levers, twiddling knobs, and almost dancing with his feet as he accelerated and braked and clutched around potholes and debris and abandoned cars.

It was neither warm nor cold in the SUV; Adare could adjust the temperature. A radio was mounted in the dashboard—­he kept the volume low, so we could talk, but underneath it all was the old nerve-­jangling music they played on EBS between the ser­vice announcements. There was plenty of water, stowed away in a compartment on my side of the dashboard, and it was clean and sweet.

The transition from my perch above the zombies to this rolling extension of the comforts of home was so jarring I couldn't even get it through my head. Within a few minutes it seemed like I'd always been in the car, just as a few minutes before it might have seemed I was always on the road sign. Maybe that had something to do with the way the road just flowed beneath us, a stream of concrete unending and boundless. Maybe I was just so hungry I was hallucinating. I considered begging Adare for some food, but it seemed impossible. I think I was more frightened of the man than I had been of the zombies.

Which was strange, because if he was a little uncouth, he was certainly friendly. He told me how glad he was to have me aboard and how I was going to change everything for him. “Another man on the team. That's key. That's mission critical. Yes, sir, things are going to be better from now on.”

He was not a positive, he assured me, nor was he with the government. “I'm a king of the road, like in the old song.” I didn't know the song he meant. That didn't matter at all to Adare. “I go where I like, Stones, do what I feel. I work my way up and down the 'pike, collecting a few luxury goods from this town or that, and I sell what I find to the military for food and water and fuel. It's a good life.”

“A looter,” I said, except—­the military shot looters, the radio had always told us that. How could he trade with them if they knew what he was?

“That's the technical term, I guess. It can mean a lot of different things, though, Stones. Don't forget that. Not all looters are created equal. I'm one of the good ones.”

I had to admit there seemed a world of difference between Adare and the predatory woman who had chased me into Fort Lee, the fur-­draped looter whose knife I still had at my belt. Adare hadn't tried to kill me or enslave me yet, for one thing.

“You must've come from a city, huh? Yeah, from New York, that's the closest one, the closest one still going. I'm guessing you don't know the lay of the land yet. Let me tell you a little something for free, Stones. You play nice, you get along, and nobody fucks you. Take me, for instance. The feds, they could shoot me any time they wanted, sure. They've got standing orders for that—­martial law. Now, that's just the rules, and some ­people, they can't live with rules. So they run around scared like rabbits, trying to stay under the feds' radar, robbing and killing and doing whatever desperate shit they must, just to keep breathing. Now other folks—­yours truly being a perfect example—­understand the importance of rules. The desperate need for a civil society. Maybe they have to kiss a little brown, now and again. Maybe they've got to doff their hats and call ­people sir. In the navy I learned all about that. You fucked around, you got the shit jobs, or maybe you ended up in the brig. You saluted when you were supposed to and you shined the right shoes, you did just fine. Nothing's changed where that's concerned. I perform a valuable ser­vice, as far as the government is concerned, so they turn a blind eye to my movements. I provide the things they need to stay sane, right? And I help keep this road clear, moving debris when I have to, blowing away some red-­eyes when they pop their heads up. Every fed on this road knows Adare, and they all know to let him pass; they know to even give him a friendly wave when he drives by. Because I play nice with others. It's the most important thing in the world.”

In the back of the SUV, one of the girls started to cry. Not noisily or obtrusively, just a soft, liquid sound. I could see her in the rearview mirror, but she didn't meet my look.

“Stones, you know how to go along to get along? Do you? Because that's what we need in this company.”

“Sure,” I said, because it was clearly what he wanted to hear.

One of the other girls grabbed the crying girl's arm and twisted it cruelly. Her mouth was set in a hard line. The crying stopped soon afterward.

 

CHAPTER 18

A
dare asked me nothing of my past, and I didn't volunteer any information. Even when I was feeling well enough to talk—­though still ravenously hungry—­I let him carry most of the conversation. It seemed crazy to think I could ask him to just drive me to Ohio and the medical camp, which meant I was going to have to find some other way to get there. That meant I would be spending more time in the wilderness, and it was clear Adare knew how things worked there. I had spent much of my life listening to first-­generation survivors go on and on about the way things were before the crisis, about all the things we'd lost—­and I'd found that if I paid attention, I could learn a great deal about the few things that remained. I figured the same strategy would work with Adare.

We spent the greater part of that day just driving. I have no idea what roads we took or even what direction we were headed. Adare seemed to have some destination in mind, and I figured that was better than being lost and standing still. While he drove he provided me with a wealth of information about the government—­most of which proved to be false, though it was closer to the truth than what I'd heard over the radio. He told me about the looter communities in New Jersey, like Linden and Cape May, that were safe havens for those who could pay for the privilege. And he told me the ones to avoid, like the desperate secret camps in the Pine Barrens that were rumored to be full of cannibals.

If I'd thought that rumor had any truth to it, I would have been chilled to my core. I knew that early in the crisis, when it looked like humanity was facing its extinction, ­people had been forced to desperate ends. But the idea that twenty years later anyone was still eating human flesh was a nightmare, and it was so horrible I refused to give it any credit.

Hearing about it did make me a little less hungry, I guess. Though not as much as you might think. It had been nearly two days since I'd had any food at all.

Adare had plenty of supplies. Between the seats of the SUV, under the legs of the girls in the back, in every possible space inside the vehicle were boxes and bags of gear and preserved foods. Adare had no real home—­the SUV was where he kept everything he owned. Yet somehow I never managed to ask if I could have so much as a strip of beef jerky or a moldy half of a bread roll. I guess I was waiting for him to offer it.

So when he asked me if I was hungry, after three or four hours of driving on an increasingly empty stomach, I nodded vigorously and burbled over with gratitude.

“One thing,” he said. “Nobody eats for free. You have to work for it.”

“I'll do anything,” I said.

He grinned wickedly, and I realized I should probably have asked first what would be required of me.

He didn't beat around the bush. For a while we had been driving through increasingly narrow suburban streets, over roads that were little more than fields of rubble. On either side of us were row after row of two-­story houses, jammed up against each other even tighter than the skyscrapers in Manhattan. Now Adare brought the SUV to a stop in the middle of one such road, and my eyes went wide with the realization we'd reached our destination.

“This is how I make my living,” Adare told me. “You see these houses? They've been sealed up tight since the crisis. Probably nothing but bones and old keepsakes inside, but sometimes I get lucky.”

“What are you looking for?” I asked. I understood what he meant. He was going to go through those houses looking for gear or canned food, just as I had done in the skyscrapers back in New York. Ike and I had spent much of our youth doing that, and I'd never thought of it as looting. I figured I could do this.

“Liquor, mostly,” Adare said, rolling his head along the muscles of his neck, working out kinks and stiffness. “Pornography is always good. Medication, any kind of medication. You think you can recognize that stuff if you see it?” I nodded. He popped open his door and slid out onto the road.

I opened my own door and got out of the SUV. I had a bad moment when I put my feet down on the road surface—­I had felt safe in the vehicle, but being back on solid ground just brought back my ordeal on the road sign—­but I forced myself to walk around the pinging hood of the SUV to stand next to him. Behind me one of the girls slipped out as well and joined us. She had long hair the color of rain-­slicked concrete, and a bad, poorly healed cut across the bridge of her nose. She smiled at me when she saw me looking, and I tried to smile back. She had a tattoo of a plus sign on the back of her left hand.

“This is Kylie,” Adare told me. “She's got a nose for this shit.” He glanced at her and chuckled. “Half a nose for it, anyway. She'll show you the ropes. Why don't you start over there?” He pointed at a house at the end of the street. “Work your way along this side, then do the other.”

Then he climbed back into the SUV and started its engine again.

“Wait!” I said. “Wait—­you aren't going to drive off without us, are you?”

Adare shook his head. “I'll be around. I'm going to take the rest of the girls a block or two over.”

“But—­what if zombies come?” I asked.

“Fight 'em off,” he told me, and threw his vehicle into gear and drove away. I started to run after the SUV, terrified of being left alone, but Kylie called out to me and told me to stop.

“You can't let him see you're scared,” she said. “He likes it too much.”

I turned and looked at her. “What?”

She didn't elaborate. Instead she started walking toward the first house we were supposed to search. The door was sealed shut, with thick planks hastily nailed across its width. Over twenty years the wood had nearly rotted away. “Come on,” she said. “Help me get these boards down.”

 

CHAPTER 19

T
he interior of the house was dark and still. So quiet it worried me. When Ike and I had looted the skyscrapers of Manhattan, it had never been so quiet. There had always been noise from ­people moving around in the streets below, or the sounds of the buildings themselves, swaying in the wind, creaking as they slowly fell apart. Here the air inside the house was as solid and motionless as if the whole structure had been encased in glass.

Two or three shafts of gray sunlight cut across the front room, leaking in from places where the boards across the windows had fallen away. The house had been sealed during the crisis in a way I'd seen before—­­people back then had really believed that the crisis was a temporary problem, that they would be coming back to their homes in a few days or weeks. They had closed up their buildings with wood across the windows and doors, just enough to keep zombies out. Based on what I'd seen in New York, I had some idea what I would find inside: sheets and clothes folded neatly and put away, furniture covered in plastic wrap to preserve it from dust and mildew.

A stairway led up to the second floor at the far end of the room, and a kitchen lay beyond that. All of it felt empty and—­not even dead. Sterile. Like nothing had ever lived there. I didn't even see any signs of rats or bugs.

“Come on,” Kylie said, walking past a piano covered in old photographs.

I glanced at the pictures, but they were old and faded, like images of ghosts. Some had spots of mold on them, while others had slipped down in their frames, cutting off a face here, obscuring what someone was holding or doing. I followed Kylie into the kitchen and together we pulled open all the cabinets. They were stuck tight by damp, so we made a lot of noise in the process. I kept glancing at the windows that looked out on a tiny backyard.

“What if there are zombies here?” I asked in a whisper.

Kylie shrugged. “There will be. That's how this always goes. They can't get into sealed houses, though. They mostly stay in the yards and under porches, places out of the sun, unless they're hunting. They probably already know we're here, so whispering isn't going to fool them. They'll be out in the street by the time we're done.”

“And we just—­what? Run past them?”

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were like two balls of cut glass, totally blank of emotion. “Unless you want them to eat you,” she said.

The cabinets were full of old cans, but Kylie ignored these, passing over soups and preserved vegetables and all the things I would have grabbed if this had been a skyscraper in New York. I was so hungry I couldn't help myself. I grabbed a can of cream of mushroom soup but quickly found I couldn't open it. I grunted in frustration and turned to the sink, intending to bash it open, I was so desperate.

Kylie put a hand on my arm and pinched me hard. I yelped, but she ignored the sound and went to a drawer next to the sink. Opening it as if she'd lived here all her life, as if she knew exactly where everything would be, she reached inside and took out a can opener and handed it to me.

“How did you know that was there?” I asked.

“I've been in a lot of old houses. There were a lot of ­people before the crisis. Maybe hundreds of thousands, if you count everybody around the world,” she said. “They all lived the same way. All the knives and forks and spoons in the same place. All the cans in the upper cupboards, pots and pans in the lower cupboards.” She shrugged. “Sometimes you see that somebody did it different, but it doesn't matter. They're still dead. Being different didn't save them.”

While I opened the can she found me a spoon. I ate the soup inside, thick and gelatinous and cold. I choked it down, not because it tasted foul but because I was so hungry I wasn't tasting it at all, just shoving big spoonfuls in my mouth and swallowing them as fast as I could.

In a cabinet next to the dead refrigerator, Kylie found a bottle of bourbon that was still half full. She found a plastic bag in a closet and put the bottle inside. “Drugs will be upstairs, in the bathroom. Come meet me up there when you're done eating.”

We probably should have stuck together, but there was so much food in those cupboards I couldn't drag myself away. I ate a can of string beans, gray with time but they still smelled okay. I ate half of a can of pork shoulder before my stomach started protesting. I was full to bursting, but still I wanted more. As long as I had food in my mouth I didn't feel so scared.

I forced myself to stop and went upstairs, looking for the bathroom. The second floor was a series of rooms attached to a single long hallway. Pictures of other houses hung on the wall, houses lit up in pink and blue light. Some of the pictures showed houses by the ocean. The wallpaper was coming down, curling in great tongues that licked at the old, moldy carpet.

The bathroom was at the end of the hall. The door stood open and I could hear Kylie inside, so I went to the door and looked in.

She was sitting on the toilet, her pants down around the ankles. She looked up at me with the same blank expression she always had, and I heard her urinating into the bowl.

“Oh, God, I'm so sorry,” I said, and danced backward away from the door, pressing my back against the wall outside the bathroom so she couldn't see me.

“Why?” she asked. “Come in here. You can check the medicine cabinet while I do this.”

“I—­what?” I asked.

She didn't say anything else.

I decided there had to be different notions of privacy out in the wilderness. I didn't want to seem like a prude. So I stepped inside and, careful not to look at her, went to stand before the sink. In the mirror I saw her looking up at me, her eyes still made of glass. When she was finished, she stood up, making no attempt to cover herself, and reached for a piece of toilet paper.

I opened the cabinet, swinging the mirror away from me so it blocked my face. So I couldn't see her. Inside the cabinet were a number of cardboard boxes and little bottles. There were three pill bottles, bright orange with white tops. I took them and studied them, not wanting to say a word, but eventually I had to ask. “The labels on these have all faded so much I can't read them,” I told her.

“Just take them all.” I heard her zip up her fly. “A lot of them will have gone bad over time, but the soldiers don't care. They buy them anyway. There might be some porno in the bedroom. It's usually hidden, so we'll have to search for it.” She went to the bathroom door, but then she stopped, just standing in the doorframe. She was still and silent for a long time.

Then she turned around and looked me right in the eye.

“Did it gross you out, seeing me pee?” she asked.

“No—­no,” I protested. Though it kind of had. “No.”

“I forget sometimes. I forget other ­people are real,” she said. “I think they're all zombies. Sometimes. I don't care if a zombie sees me pee.”

“I'm not a zombie.”

“I'm not a zombie, either,” she told me. I was beginning to think she was, in her own way. “Really. I know, well—­this,” I said, holding up my tattooed hand. “I know what it means. But I don't have the virus. I am definitely not a zombie.”

She turned around and walked down the hall toward the bedroom.