Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  When the noise and the light receded, I could hear her weeping. She just stood there, the gun in her hand, her face wet and slick with light. She wasn’t even looking at me.

  “Kylie,” I said, forcing the words out one by one, “you have to help me down. Please. I’m begging you.”

  She turned to look at me, and her face was creased with rage. “Why should I?” she demanded. “Look what you’ve done.”

  I had no idea what she meant, but I figured saying as much would be a mistake. “I know. I’m—­s-­s-­sorry. But I’m going to d-­d-­die if you leave me like—­like this. Is that what you want?”

  She grabbed the knife and cut me down. I dropped painfully to the floor, but the relief of not being strung up by my arms balanced the agony of the bruising impact. My fingers felt like sausages, and when I looked at them, they were bright purple. I knew I was running out of time, though, and I forced them to obey me, to pick at the knots holding the cord around my testicles. Every time I touched that cord a new wave of pain shot through my groin.

  Before I could get it loose, Kylie bent down over me and stuck the barrel of her pistol under my chin. She tilted my head up until I was looking her in the eyes.

  “I know nothing’s changed. Just a different man to hurt me,” she said. I knew better than to respond. “But I’m going to tell you one thing. If you fuck Addison, I’ll kill you. Not even once. She’s too young. If you touch her, if you take off her clothes—­”

  “Never,” I breathed. “I’m not like him. I don’t want that, not with any of you.”

  “Remember what I said,” she told me. Then she used the knife to cut the cord away from my swollen scrotum.

  The pain made me scream. It made pinkish light erupt across my eyes, scarring my vision. Blood rushed down to my testicles and with it, new life, and that hurt.

  I rolled on my side, and for a long time I just gasped for breath, there on the floor. I clutched my groin in my hands, shielding it from the cold air, from further damage, from who knows what. Eventually I rolled over, and I was eye to eye with Adare.

  He was dead. There could be no question. Only part of his brain was still in his skull. His blood had flooded the floor of that room, filling every corner. I couldn’t believe it, though. I was convinced he would just get up again, that any second he would rise to his feet and start punishing us.

  Eventually I managed to get up. Adare stayed down.

  I pulled my pants back on—­carefully. I put my belt on and gathered up my knife. I kept glancing at Adare. He never moved.

  Kylie stood by the door the whole time, holding her pistol down by her hip. She didn’t watch me dress, and she didn’t look at Adare. Contrasting emotions played across her face, none of them staying long enough to settle down.

  Eventually I was ready to walk out of there. I hobbled to the door. Kylie stepped aside to let me pass. I had to turn around, take one last look at Adare. He had been so alive, so vital. So big. It seemed impossible that could end. I’d seen plenty of corpses in my life, but none so fresh. None so . . . big. There’s no better way to describe it. He was a large man physically. But he’d also been so full of life and strength, and now that was gone, like a drained battery, an empty gas tank. It made no sense.

  He didn’t move. Didn’t so much as twitch.

  I walked back outside, through the room full of giant machines, through the dark, moonlit night. When I got to the SUV, I saw Addison, Heather, and Mary, their faces pressed up against the glass windows. They would have no idea what had happened. They could only see me now, covered in Adare’s blood, limping toward them.

  Kylie came up behind me. The moonlight seemed to have changed her face once more, smoothed out all the emotions and energy. Her mask was back on.

  “You’re in charge now,” she said.

  My eyes went wide. Me? “I don’t know how to drive,” I said.

  She nodded and headed around the SUV toward the driver’s-­side door. I went and got into my accustomed place, in the passenger’s seat, and we drove away.

  I kept glancing back at the door in the concrete wall, as long as I could see it. Even when it was gone from view, I kept looking over my shoulder. Adare was never there.

  PART 2

  The Road West

  CHAPTER 38

  Mary held the spare gas tank upside down, and a single drop of fuel fell from its lip. My eyes went wide. Only two more of the tanks were crammed into the cargo space at the back of the SUV. We’d used up the fuel in the vehicle’s tanks and one of the extra tanks just driving all night.

  “It’s okay,” I said, though I had a creeping suspicion it wasn’t at all. “There will be enough. Enough to get us to Ohio.”

  My big plan, my brilliant strategy, had simply been this: drive west as far as we could, and surely we would reach Ohio by morning. I had no idea how far away it might be, but I was sure it couldn’t be out of our reach.

  I’d been so certain. I’d wanted it so badly it had to be true.

  The dawn had come up over New Jersey, and we still weren’t there. For all I knew we’d driven right past it.

  Kylie had parked the SUV in a wide gravel lot at the edge of an abandoned shopping mall when a light came on the dashboard saying we were almost empty. Now the five of us were standing on the dewy gravel debating what to do next.

  The girls had made no comment when Kylie and I returned to the SUV without Adare. They’d asked no questions. Kylie had told me they didn’t want to know what happened. But they were full of thoughts and opinions now. They wanted to know what I was going to do. How I was going to keep them alive and safe.

  Reasonable questions. Too bad I didn’t have many answers.

  “We have to go to one of the looter camps,” Heather said. “They have fuel there.”

  “We’ve got nothing to trade,” Addison pointed out. “When Bonnie got killed, we didn’t take anything with us.”

  “So we go get some more stuff,” Heather said, shrugging. “It’s no big deal. We’ve done it a hundred times before.”

  “No,” I said. “No.” Even though I knew she was right. “It’s too dangerous. Every time we stop to loot we’re at risk. The zombies—­”

  “We can handle the zombies,” Mary said.

  I thought of Bonnie lying in the road, bites taken out of her face. I shuddered and closed my eyes. “There has to be another way.” I opened my eyes again and looked over at where Kylie stood guard, a few paces away. The lot was wide and open, and we could see any zombies coming for us long before they became a problem. Still I was tense, terrified I would let one of the girls come to harm. “There,” I said, and pointed at a row of cars abandoned at the edge of the lot. “Those. They have to have some fuel in them, right? When they were just left here—­”

  Mary started laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re silly. Those cars have been there for twenty years,” she said. “Whatever fuel was in them would have evaporated by now. Or gone bad.”

  “Fuel goes bad?” I asked.

  “Sure. It lasts a ­couple of months, tops. Then it turns dark, and you can’t use it anymore. That’s how the government controls us. They’re the only source for fuel. Adare always said—­”

  Heather and Addison turned to glare at her. Mary shut up. It was like even saying the name of the man who’d enslaved them was taboo now.

  I sighed and rubbed at my eyes and tried to think of what to say. Luckily I didn’t have to. Kylie came running back then, pointing behind her. I looked in the direction she indicated and saw a line of zombies at the edge of the lot, working their way toward us.

  “Time to go,” Kylie said.

  CHAPTER 39

  Where the hell is Ohio?” I asked, an hour later. We’d been making good time, riding away from the sunrise, burning what little fuel we had left. We had to be tr
aveling at twenty miles an hour, even with the road all chopped up and scattered with debris. I’d studied every road sign we passed, the big green rectangles that hung over us that listed how many miles away the next town was. I hadn’t seen a single one that said Ohio. We were getting close to someplace called Trenton, but beyond that I knew nothing.

  “It’s west of here, I think,” Kylie told me. She was an excellent driver. She never got bored or complacent, keeping her eyes on the road at all times. There was something to be said for being dead inside, maybe.

  “I already knew that,” I said, frustrated enough to snap at her. I would gladly have been just like her at the moment, just to shed all my worry and fear. I wondered idly what she was like underneath her armor. What it would be like if I was the vacant one and she was going crazy with uncertainty. I hated being in charge. “Damnit! If only we had some kind of map.”

  Kylie reached across me and opened the glove compartment. A dozen things fell out and spilled across my lap, including a big floppy book with a laminated cover that read Road Atlas of the United States.

  I stared at it as if it were the greatest treasure of a lost and ancient civilization. Which right then wasn’t a bad description.

  “No way,” I said, thumbing it open. I had trouble understanding what I was looking at, at first, understanding the scale of the maps inside, but I found a page marked NEW JERSEY and saw every town, every looter camp, every subdivision we’d roamed through. I saw all the names: Metuchen, Linden, Elizabeth, Fort Lee. I saw the George Washington Bridge. I traced my entire journey, my odyssey, with the tip of my finger.

  Someone—­it had to be Adare—­had drawn on the map of New Jersey with a red pen. Updated it, made changes to reflect how the country had changed since the crisis. Metuchen had a red circle around it, perhaps to show there was a looter camp there. Trenton, the town we were approaching, had been crossed out with a thick red X. Small letter Zs were drawn in a lot of the white space of the map, presumably places where the concentration of zombies was thick enough to be a hazard. The whole southern half of New Jersey was crammed with Zs.

  “I still don’t see Ohio,” I said, after I’d studied the map for the better part of an hour. I was sure I’d read every place name in New Jersey, and none of them were what I was looking for.

  “Maybe there’s an index at the back,” Heather suggested.

  I flipped to the last few pages in the book and saw column after column of nothing but names and codes. Page numbers and grid coordinates. This thing kept getting better and better. How smart they’d been before the crisis! They’d thought of everything. I ran through the columns quickly, looking for the Os, and soon I found the entry for Ohio. But there was something wrong there. The index listed a page number for Ohio, but not any grid references. It had to be an error, I thought. But then I flipped to the indicated page and saw the truth.

  There was an entire full-­page map for Ohio. Ohio wasn’t a town close enough for us to drive to on one tank of fuel. It was an entire state, a whole world of its own. And it was nowhere near New Jersey.

  At the front of the atlas was a two-­page spread showing the entire country. I knew what the silhouette of America looked like, I’d seen that before on government forms and a hundred other places. This was the first time in my life I’d seen a real map of my country, though.

  I found New Jersey. I found Ohio. There was something called Pennsylvania between them, a vast expanse, bigger, longer than the length of my entire wanderings so far. “No,” I said. I wanted to scream it. “No.” I shook my head. “No.”

  According to the map’s scale, Ohio was nearly five hundred miles away.

  “We’re going to need more fuel,” Heather said.

  CHAPTER 40

  We barely moved that day. Kylie only put the SUV in gear when the zombies started getting too close, and then we only drove a few miles, just far enough to lose the mob of them trailing after us. When it got dark, we found a desolate overpass, a place where the SUV couldn’t be seen, and parked there to spend the night.

  The girls went right to sleep. That made sense, when I thought about it—­there was nothing for them to do, no benefit to their sitting up all night thinking about our predicament. That was, after all, my job. I resented them a little for just assuming I would be in charge. That I would have answers. But in their place I think I would have done the same thing. Back in New York I had never questioned the mayor’s plans for the city. I’d never argued with my parents about the work that needed to be done, or how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d just done what I was told. It was a very comfortable way to live, and if I hadn’t been kicked out of the city, I would have spent my whole life that way. Only circumstance had forced me into this role.

  The first thing I discovered was that it was harder than it looked, to be in charge.

  I found I could only think about what to do next for so long. No ideas were coming, no brilliant insights. Eventually I leaned back in my seat and just stared out at the darkness.

  Without warning, Heather climbed over the front seat and plopped down in my lap. I had no idea what she was doing, but the confines of my seat meant I couldn’t really get out of her way. I guess I thought she was cold, or just wanted some reassurance. I had no idea how to give her any. She picked up my arm and wrapped it around her waist, then laid her head down on my shoulder.

  For a long time we just sat like that, warm and cozy, and it was almost nice. But she didn’t fall asleep there as I’d expected. Instead, she turned her face to look up at me. She looked almost as confused as I felt.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “If you don’t know how. Adare taught me, and I can teach you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She reached down and started unbuttoning my pants. I pushed her hand away and turned to look at Kylie, who was sleeping in the driver’s seat. She was turned away from me and gently snoring.

  “It’s okay, they’ve all seen it before,” Heather said. “Adare always said it helped him think. It cleared his head. And you need to think of something.” Her lips moved across my throat, and I felt my heart race. “We’re yours now, right?” Her hand moved back down to my lap. “Tell me how you killed him, Stones. I want to know.”

  Instantly my head did clear, and I knew exactly how wrong this was. “Stop. Heather. Get off me.” I grabbed her hands and held them away from me. In the dark of the SUV cabin I stared into her face. Her eyes were as cold as the night air outside. She looked angry that I’d stopped her.

  “What the hell do you want from us, Stones?” she demanded.

  “Nothing!”

  “Everybody wants something.” She glanced over at Kylie. “Oh. I get it,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “No. You don’t. Go back to sleep. Back there,” I said, jerking my head toward the seat behind me.

  She went.

  I had no trouble staying awake all night after that.

  CHAPTER 41

  It was, of course, inevitable.

  I had hated Adare by the end, thought everything about him was foul and wrong. I detested the way he put the girls in danger when he went looting, staying in the SUV himself all the time where he was safe. I’d loathed and feared the looter camps where he did business.

  If I was going to survive in the wilderness, though, if I was going to help the girls survive, I had to admit he’d known what he was doing.

  I was going to have to become a looter.

  We looted three streets in a suburb that day, places whose names I found in the atlas, places Adare hadn’t marked as dangerous. Which could mean nothing at all.

  I did my best to make the looting as safe as possible. Heather could drive, so I had her stay with the car while Kylie, Mary, Addison, and I went all together into each house. Before moving on to another house I made sure no zombies were coming.

  Adare’s way had
been much faster and more lucrative. But we got out of there with no casualties, so that was something.

  By the end of the day we were down to only what fuel remained in the SUV’s tank, and it was only about three-­quarters full. There was no other option. We would have to go to a looter camp and barter for more fuel.

  It would be dangerous, I knew. I was not enough of a fool to think the looter camps were safe for us. Adare’s reputation had kept us from being victimized, or robbed, or much worse. Nobody had dared to take what was his, because they knew what he would do to them.

  I wasn’t going to inspire any such dread.

  Still. It would be good to be behind walls, in a place where we could sleep for the night without worrying about red-­eyed faces peering in our windows. It would be good to see other human beings, even.

  I had Kylie drive us to another parking lot where we wouldn’t be surprised by zombies. Then we switched off the SUV to conserve fuel. While the girls waited I studied the atlas for hours, trying to make sense of where we were. We were somewhere near Trenton, I knew, still close to the turnpike. Earlier I’d seen an off-­ramp for Route 1. That helped me triangulate our position on the map.

  Adare’s annotations showed a vast region south of us where there was nothing but zombies. The big red X through Trenton worried me—­I had no idea what it meant, but it looked like something to avoid. Just a little to the north, though, assuming I knew where I was, there was the tiny circle of a looter camp called Prince­ton. I knew nothing about the place except one thing: we could get there on the fuel we had left.

  I turned around in my seat to face the girls. They were all looking at me.

  “I’m not like him,” I said, meaning Adare. There could be no other “him” now. His absence from the SUV seemed to take up all the extra space—­so big in life, it seemed even death couldn’t erase him from the space we inhabited. “I’m not like him at all.”