Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  Yeah. Maybe I thought they could give me my mom back, too.

  “You know we can’t take any chances now,” the mayor went on, when I didn’t say anything. “There are no tests we can run, no way to check for it.” At least, not without cutting open my brain. “You know. You’re a good kid, Finn. You’ve always made yourself useful. So you know the rules. You’re a positive now. I’m not saying you’ve got it. I want to assure you, I’ll be praying every day you don’t. But you might.”

  The hot needle buzzed and dug into my skin, over and over. Every time it hit a nerve or a vein I wanted to jump out of my bonds, out of my body if I had to. The pain only got worse the longer it went on.

  “It can take twenty years for this thing to show up,” the mayor said, telling me nothing new. “It incubates, see.”

  Yeah. It grows in the dark part of your head like a fungus. All the while eating holes in your brain until it’s a sponge full of virus, as toxic and polluted as the lobster was. That was what had happened to my mom. For twenty years, ever since the crisis, she’d been dying inside. A little more every day.

  And maybe it had been happening to me, too.

  “You’re nineteen now, Finn,” the mayor said. “Is that right? Nineteen?”

  I nodded. It was all I could give him. If I opened my mouth, my voice would have squeaked, from the pain in my hand.

  “She breast-­fed you for . . . what? Maybe six months after you were born. So twenty years . . . add it up . . . let’s say, when you’re twenty-­one, we’ll know you’re safe. If you don’t change by then, you’ll be clear. Negative.”

  Two years. It would be two years before they would treat me like a human being again.

  “Until then, somebody’s going to have to watch you all the time. Make sure you don’t turn on us.” The mayor grimaced like he found the whole idea ludicrous. “You know it’s not my decision to make.”

  My hand was on fire. Trails of agony stretched across the skin, like a series of match heads had been pressed there and then set on fire one by one.

  “There’s a place—­a camp, a medical camp, in Ohio. The government runs it, so it should be okay.” He patted his hands together, for emphasis. “Safe, Finn. Safe.”

  I couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Ohio? That must be twenty miles from here!”

  For a second his face changed. His eyes went wide as if I’d just said the sky was purple and rain fell up from the streets. “A bit farther than that,” he said. “But of course you’ve never been outside Manhattan. Never mind. It’s not like you’ll have to walk there. We’ve already notified the medical authorities, and they’re sending someone to pick you up. It’s going to be okay, Finn. It’ll be just a little while, and this’ll all be over.”

  He almost patted my knee. At the last second he pulled his hand back and stared at it as if there was a nasty stain on it. Then he smiled at me and left.

  Later on they unstrapped me. They were careful about it, like they were worried that I was going to bite them. That I might have turned while they weren’t looking. Or maybe they thought I would try to bite them, to infect them, just out of spite.

  My hand still hurt. There was a cloth bandage on it, held down with white tape. I tore it free and saw what they’d done to me. On the back of my left hand was a tattoo—­a huge black plus sign, running from one side of my hand to the other, and as far back as my wrist, so anybody could see it even from a distance. A plus sign.

  Positive. That’s what it meant.

  I was a positive.

  CHAPTER 8

  I got to ride in the ambulance again. Just me and the driver, with a thick piece of glass between us. We picked our way uptown, way past the inhabited section of town. We passed by Central Park, overgrown with huge trees. We drove through endless streets of shops and brownstones no one had been inside in a decade. The canyon light of New York followed us, and every once in a while I got a glimpse at New Jersey far away, over the water. That was where I was going first.

  Way uptown a little party of friends and neighbors were waiting to say good-­bye. They must have hiked all that way on foot. All of them were armed. When I stepped out of the ambulance, my hands still cuffed tightly behind me, none of them said a word, though some of them at least looked sorry.

  Everything was wrong with the scene. These were ­people I’d known my whole life, standing against a backdrop of empty concrete—­the only world I’d ever known—­and none of them were smiling, none of them were working. Just standing there watching me like I was about to grow a second head. Even the ground felt wrong under my feet. It was tilted at an angle, rising up before me, and I felt as if a strong wind could come along and send us all tumbling down, blow us along like those plastic bags you see scuttling down the street. Everything was floating.

  Kind of literally. We were in fact on a ramp, a ribbon of cracked concrete lifted high in the air, at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge. Since the tunnels had flooded, it was the only way to get to the mainland from New York. Its suspension cables hung over me like ropes let down from the sky, and its empty road surface stretched forward ahead of me, my whole future laid out in a—­

  No. It was nothing so poetic. It was a grayish-­brown strip of concrete like any other. It was a road, and one I had to walk.

  The bridge was falling apart because nobody felt the need to keep it intact. Cars couldn’t drive over it anymore, not safely. When the government needed to send us something, they came in helicopters. The only traffic that might come across that bridge into New York was zombies on foot, and they weren’t welcome.

  So I was supposed to walk across. The government car that would take me to the medical camp would be waiting on the other side, in New Jersey, a place I had seen probably every day in my life but that had always before been as far away as the other side of the moon.

  They took off my handcuffs. Nobody felt the need to make a speech. A big barbed-­wire gate stood across the entrance to the bridge, to keep the zombies out—­not that any had tried to come in for a very long time. The gate stood open now, for me.

  I started walking because if I didn’t get started then, I never would. I would just stand there and wait for them to shoot me.

  I tried not to look back. In that, I failed. They were all still watching me. Brian had his shotgun in the crook of his arm. Maybe it would be easier for him to shoot a human being than it had been for him to shoot a zombie. If I turned around and ran back . . . but of course I didn’t.

  I find it as hard to tell about that walk as I did to make it, honestly. Everything was simultaneously real and unreal. I could hear my shoes slapping against the road surface. I could feel the air whistling all around me as I came up to the top of the bridge, the place exactly between my world and the rest of it. The cables holding the whole thing up thrummed in the wind, like giant violin strings. They were slick with dew.

  At one point I walked over to the edge and looked down. I saw the river far below me, hundreds of feet down. It surged on like it always had, a poisonous green. Occasionally junk floated past—­old tires, a half-­submerged plank of wood, things I couldn’t identify.

  I kept walking. Sky on either side. Endless cables cutting it into segments. The road beneath me, and beneath that nothing. It was early afternoon, and I had six more hours of daylight. Plenty of time to get across. I wasn’t tired or hungry or anything. I mostly just felt numb. My feet shuffled forward. My hands swung at my sides. I kept getting a shock as my left hand appeared in front of me and I saw the tattoo again, as if I’d never seen it before. My mind blanked, and for a while I felt like I was flying, like I was hovering in midair, where nobody could touch me, where I could never get back down again.

  I passed the second tower and its shadow flickered over me like a great bird’s wing, and then I was going down again, carefully placing each foot so I didn’t slip on the broken road sur
face. Ahead of me I saw buildings and a ­couple of trees. New Jersey didn’t look all that different from the world I’d known. Maybe a little more run-­down than the city. Nobody lived there, I knew. Nobody had been there since the crisis, unless there had been others like me before.

  Had there been? I hadn’t asked. If there was a medical camp, that meant there had to be others like me. Other ­people with tattoos on their hands, ­people who might or might not be infected. There would be ­people at the camp who would understand what I was feeling, or maybe just ­people who could tell me what I was feeling, because I couldn’t put a name on it myself. There would be food there (maybe I was getting a little hungry by then), and a roof over my head. It would be safe.

  Maybe this was going to be okay.

  CHAPTER 9

  I didn’t see the car that was supposed to be waiting for me, but I figured it was just waiting around a corner, the driver bored and checking his watch, impatient to get started.

  I stepped down off the bridge. There was no clear line marking where it ended and New Jersey began, but I could feel it somehow. An elevated road passed over my head and then the New Jersey Turnpike opened up before me, a tangle of road and tollbooths. There were great reefs of old rusted cars that had been shoved over to one side of the road, their metal broken and twisted, all their glass broken. Left to rot. A drift of trash had washed across the road surface nearby—­suitcases, torn open, bits of cloth still stuck in their hinges. Plastic bags full of who knew what, their handles flapping angrily in the wind. Boxes and crates and piles of mildew that had probably once been paper bags. My guess was that this was what was left behind when residents tried to evacuate the city, back during the crisis. All the luggage those ­people had tried to carry with them. Why they’d left it here I’d never know.

  There was still no sign of the government car that was waiting for me. I tried to be still and listen for its idling motor, but the wind was empty. I couldn’t hear anything.

  I was getting pretty thirsty. The ­people behind me, the ­people of New York, hadn’t given me any food or water. I had nothing in my pockets, nothing at all. I went over to the drift of luggage thinking . . . I don’t know, maybe thinking I’d find some bottled water cached there. Maybe not. I kicked over one plastic bag and a bunch of photographs spilled out. Endless little cardboard squares, white around the edges. The ­people in the pictures were greenish and blue, their images bleached and changed by sun and time. I felt like I’d kicked over a grave or something, and I hurried away.

  No sign of the car. No sound. But eventually I started to smell smoke.

  Had the government driver made a campfire while he waited for me? Was he cooking up some dinner for us? He would definitely have water. I had to find him. I hurried along the turnpike, sheltered from the buildings around me by a high concrete berm. The road felt safe enough, empty and sacred in its way.

  I guess I was getting a little disoriented. I was definitely scared.

  It wasn’t woodsmoke I smelled. I told myself it had to be charcoal or something, even though it had a weird chemical tang to it.

  I started running.

  There was a place up ahead where the berm had been shattered by some huge impact. A hole had been torn through the side of the turnpike, forming a wide crater that spread debris through the streets and lots beyond. A twist of torn-­up chain-­link fence spiraled through the gap. Down at the bottom I could see the source of the smoke.

  I didn’t shout or say anything. I could feel the muscles in my chest tense up as I approached, but maybe that was just so I wouldn’t inhale the smoke. I was trying desperately to make things different, by sheer willpower alone, to change what had happened here.

  The smoke was curling up from the interior of a car with the seal of the United States government on its door. The cushions and seat coverings inside were smoldering, most of them already burned to ash. There was a body in the driver’s seat, partially burned. He hadn’t burned to death, though. I could see, even from twenty feet away, that his throat had been slashed.

  The car’s trunk had popped open, and I could see that the contents had been dragged out and spread over the ground. I got just close enough to see there was no water or food. Just a spare tire and a cardboard box that had been cut open. Pamphlets were spilling out of its side, just pamphlets about government programs you could apply for. Recruitment leaflets for the army. Official complaint forms. Nothing else.

  The box had been cut open. So had the driver’s throat. It didn’t look to me like either of those cuts had happened during a car crash. Somebody had killed the driver, intentionally.

  Whoever had done this might still be nearby. If they’d been willing to kill a government official, they would have no trouble killing me.

  I ran away.

  CHAPTER 10

  It hadn’t been zombies. I was sure of that. Whoever had killed the driver and searched the car had been human. Zombies are violent and wild and vicious, but they don’t use knives—­they didn’t slit that man’s throat. They certainly don’t tear open car trunks looking for supplies.

  I knew there were ­people out here, living in the zombie-­haunted wastelands between the cities. The government just called them “looters,” and we would hear all the time on the radio how the army had killed six or ten of them in some distant, all-­but-­unimaginable place like Kansas or Florida. I had no idea what they were like, though, or what they were capable of.

  I ran back the way I came, I guess thinking I might run all the way to New York. Except if I tried to get back into Manhattan, the ­people back there—­my ­people—­would just shoot me on sight.

  I was panicking, though, and I don’t know how well I’d thought anything through. Eventually I must have come to my senses, because before I knew it I had jumped over the berm, moving off the turnpike and into a vacant lot on the other side. The fence there was full of holes. I struggled through one and then threw myself under an old dead car on the far side.

  For a long time I just lay there, while old stale oil dripped from the bottom of the car, pooling in the small of my back. I didn’t dare shift to the side to get away from it. My whole body tensed, waiting for what came next.

  Except—­nothing happened. Nothing moved. I didn’t hear gunshots, or ­people shouting, or any of the things I’d expected.

  Maybe twenty minutes passed. Maybe it was only five, or one. I had no way of knowing. The light didn’t change. I started to think I’d been foolish. That whoever had killed the government driver was already long gone. I started thinking about my next move, about crawling out from under the car and what I would do then.

  Then I heard glass pop, as if someone nearby had stepped on a glass bottle and shattered it. Someone else—­the sound came from a different direction—­hissed angrily. And then nothing.

  I held my breath. I tried not even to blink. Very slowly I moved my eyes from side to side, trying to see something. Anything. From my vantage point under the car, I couldn’t see a whole lot.

  Except—­there. A pair of shoes, off to my left. I thought they’d just been abandoned, left over from the mass exodus from the city twenty years ago. They looked old and decrepit enough for that. But then one of them moved, shifting position just a few inches.

  I was absolutely certain that whoever those shoes belonged to would hear my heart jumping in my chest. That any second now the person would come over and do to me what he or she had done to the government driver.

  “Anything?” someone said in a whisper. The voice was way closer than I would have expected. They must have been right on top of me.

  “No,” someone said back, louder. “My guess? He started running and he won’t stop till he hits Pennsylvania.”

  “What the fuck was this fed doing out here, anyway?”

  There was no answer.

  The car I was hidden under sagged a few inches, as if s
omeone had climbed up on its trunk. Maybe they were trying to get a better view.

  “Fuck him. Just fuck him—­scrawny little bastard. No use to anybody. We need to get back before dark.” This came from the owner of the shoes, I thought.

  Again there was no reply. But eventually the car bounced on its creaking shock absorbers again, as if someone had jumped off it. And then the shoes started moving away. I watched them go, obscured now and then by some obstacle. I held absolutely still until I was sure they were well out of sight. Then I waited even longer. I waited for what felt like an hour. By then my legs were starting to cramp from being held so still and my stomach felt wet where the dripping oil had pooled underneath me. My lips were burning with thirst, and I was afraid my stomach would start growling soon.

  Slowly, careful not to snag myself, I inched myself backward, out from under the car. I was anxious to make sure no part of myself would be visible from the turnpike. I grunted a little from the soreness of my muscles, but I did everything I could to try to stay quiet. I had no real idea what I was doing—­I’d never in my life been in a situation like this before, but I guess there are some instincts, some reflexes we’re all born with. At least since the crisis. We all know how to hide and how to run away. Those who didn’t have those instincts didn’t make it.

  I got to a point where I was mostly out from under the car. I was still watching through the gap between the bottom of the car and the road surface for any sign of movement. Another car was behind me, and I decided I would crawl under that one as well, just to be extra careful. I started scooting underneath it and had to turn around to get my hips under its chassis.

  That left me facing upward, through the space between the two cars, looking up at a sky that was already turning orange.