Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  The only other feature of the camp was its population. All the positives.

  The camp, when it was originally built, had clearly been meant to hold thousands of us. If you herded us in until we were standing shoulder to shoulder, maybe ten thousand positives would have fit. Now, though, I could see only a few hundred. The vast majority of them were my age or a little younger—­there were a few older adults, and a scattering of children, but they were rare and they kept mostly out of view. The ones my age sat in groups in the mud, or clustered around the shelters, staring at one another, talking, some just sitting hugging their knees. All of them had shaved heads. All of them looked sickly and pale, even if they clearly spent most of their time out in the sun. I didn’t see anyone who wasn’t thin as a rail.

  Some of the positives at least had an occupation to keep them busy. Some of the bigger shacks proved to actually be stores, where a few shoddy goods could be procured. For a while I watched this basic economy at work. It was entirely based on the barter system—­a customer would come forward and offer a deck of cards or a piece of bread or something less tangible, and the shopkeeper would decide whether it was a fair trade. One store was selling clothes—­old T-­shirts with holes in them, drawstring pants that looked like they were made of paper instead of cloth, dirty bandannas. I had to get something to put on, so I ducked under the store’s corrugated tin sign and stepped up to the counter.

  “You’ve got nothing I want,” the positive behind the counter told me. He was dressed in a shirt that was almost clean. He didn’t even look at me—­he was too busy sorting through a cardboard box of rags. “Fuck off.”

  “Please,” I said. “I can’t run around here naked. I’ll find some way to pay you back, I—­”

  He sighed. “Who’s your boss?” he asked. He looked up and must have seen the blank expression on my face. “You’re new here, I get it. I saw when you came in. Somebody would have drafted you to their work crew. Who was it?”

  “Fedder,” I said, assuming that was what he meant.

  “Did he say you should come here? I can give you something on credit, but then he has to pay me back. Fedder’s a beast. If it turns out you’re lying, he’s going to break both our heads. So be clear on this.”

  “No, no, it’s Fedder,” I stammered. “He said—­he said I worked for him now. And—­and he can’t possibly want me running around naked, can he? That’d make him look bad.”

  The shopkeeper looked skeptical.

  I probably would have walked away empty-­handed if, at that moment, another positive hadn’t slouched into the store and stared the shopkeeper down. “It’s true, what he says,” the newcomer told him. “You give him something good. Or Fedder’s going to come down here and whale on your ass.”

  That seemed enough for the shopkeeper. He handed over a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of thin pants without too many holes in the crotch. He didn’t have any underwear or shoes, but at least I wasn’t naked anymore. By the time I’d finished pulling on the clothes, my benefactor had already ducked out of the shop and started to walk away. I chased after him, intent on at least thanking him.

  “I’m Finnegan,” I told him. “You really helped me out back there.”

  “Sure.” He looked me up and down. “Luke.” He was tall and thin, but he looked more wiry than sick. His eyes were very narrow, as if he was squinting all the time against the sunlight. He seemed to think about it for a second; then he held out his hand and I shook it. “I’m with Fedder, too. Second shift—­he told you that, right?”

  “He did, but I have to admit I have no idea what he was talking about.”

  “That’s our work shift. You see that factory over there?” He pointed at a row of shacks that looked slightly bigger than the rest of the shelters I’d seen, but just as ramshackle. “That’s our place. When the whistle blows, you’d better be there. You get to eat when work is done,” he said. “That’s why you want to work for Fedder. If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Just be glad you’ve got a job. Plenty of the ­people here don’t. They have to beg for scraps—­or starve.”

  “The guards let that happen?”

  “The guards only care about one thing: zombies. They’re here to watch us and make sure we don’t zombie out. Other than that, they don’t give a shit.”

  “Jesus. This place—­”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not exactly what I thought it was going to be.” I didn’t know what else to say. I had to express what I was feeling, somehow, but that was the best I could manage.

  Luke smirked. “Nobody expected this. Listen, you keep your head down, you do what we tell you to do. Don’t ask for anything, don’t look at anybody but me and Fedder, and when you look at him, don’t try to meet his eye. You’ll survive. How long have you got?”

  “What?”

  He waved insects away from his face. “Until you’re cleared.” When I still didn’t understand, he nodded patiently. “It can take twenty years for the virus to incubate. You do know that, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So how long ago were you exposed?”

  “Oh,” I said. I did the math in my head. “I guess I’ve got eighteen months until I’m, uh, cleared.”

  “That’s nothing,” he said.

  “Doesn’t feel like it. What about you?” It was hard to tell under the dirt and stubble, but I guessed Luke was my age, give or take a year.

  “You actually want to know, or are you just trying to suck up?”

  I frowned. “I don’t know. I guess I want to know.”

  “I’m in for the full stretch,” he told me. “I’m from Milwaukee—­it’s a shit town, but better than this. I spent my whole life being clean. Then one day a whole herd of fucking zombies shows up in our sewer system. Guess who they sent down to take care of it? Second generation, of course. None of the old folks could be bothered. Me and five of my best friends went down there. I was the only one who came back. Not a scratch on me, not a drop of blood anywhere near my mouth. They couldn’t take the chance, they said. I had to go away. Just until they were sure. That was a little more than two years ago.”

  I could feel my jaw dropping. “You mean . . . ?”

  “Seventeen years, nine months, twelve days,” Luke said. “And then I get to go home.”

  I could only shake my head in horror and sympathy.

  “Fuck it. You show up for work when the whistle goes. You do that, we’ll make sure you’re okay. You got it?” I had the feeling he was just grateful for somebody new to listen to his tale of woe, though he was too guarded to let it show.

  “I—­I do. I’ll be there. But there’s something I have to do first,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 68

  I wrapped my fingers around the wire of the fence between the two camps, unsure if I was going to get shocked or not. When I didn’t, I grabbed the fence and shook it. “Hey! Anybody over there, please! I need to talk to you.”

  Two lengths of fencing and a five-­foot-­wide strip of land between the two layers of fence separated the men’s camp from the women’s. My voice had to carry across that patch of weeds and catch somebody on the other side. I shouted for quite a while before anybody even looked up, and only when I kept shouting did anyone come to answer. It was a woman of maybe thirty years, her head shaved like everyone else’s.

  “Go away,” she said. “Nobody wants to talk to you. Nobody wants to see your dick.”

  I was shocked. It was such a specific possibility that I thought it must be something that had happened before. “They do that?”

  “You guys get horny. What else are you going to do through all this fence? You come over here and offer to show us yours if we show you ours. As if that would actually do anything for us.” The woman stared at me. I think she was looking at my hair, which was still on my
head. “You’re the new guy. We saw you come in. I guess maybe you haven’t had time to turn into a pervert yet.”

  “My name’s Finnegan, and I—­”

  “I honestly don’t care. Listen, I only came over here because I was tired of listening to you shout. What the hell do you want so badly?”

  “Some girls came in here a little while ago. Just a ­couple of days ago. I need to talk to them. They’re my—­my family. There’s one named Kylie, she’s . . . I really need to talk to her. Or at least send her a message. Please. We were supposed to come in here together, but it didn’t work out.”

  The woman scratched behind her ear. “I saw them. Two of them, right?”

  “There should have been four,” I said, my heart sinking.

  “Nope. Just two. Maybe it was somebody else. But wait—­yeah, one of them was named Kylie, I think. I haven’t seen them, but you hear things, right? Not much to do in here except gossip.”

  At least Kylie and Heather had made it, I thought. I had no doubt that Heather was the other girl who’d just come in. Addison and Mary weren’t positives—­or at least they didn’t have tattoos on the backs of their left hands. I had no way of knowing what had happened to them, not until I talked to Kylie.

  “I have to talk to her. Please. Please, find her and tell her that Finnegan is here, and he’s looking for her. Please?”

  “Why should I?” the woman asked.

  Because I love her, I thought.

  Like a sister, of course, I told myself. I love her like a sister. How could you love somebody who couldn’t even smile at you? Who was so closed off she could barely function?

  It didn’t matter. I knew better than to say anything like that out loud.

  “Kylie definitely wants to talk to me,” I told the woman. “If you pass on the message, I’m sure she’ll find some way to repay you.”

  “Yeah, sure. She’s probably glad to be rid of you,” the woman suggested, though it sounded more like she was haggling than anything else.

  “I promise you, she’ll pay you back. Somehow.”

  “I’ll think about it,” the woman said, and then she walked away. I shouted after her until I was hoarse, but she didn’t turn around or look back.

  I could only hope the message got through.

  CHAPTER 69

  Soldiers patrolled the catwalks that arched over the camp, carving the sky into segments. They never seemed to look down, even when I waved my arms at them and shouted for them to look at me. I thought if I could get their attention, I could explain what a mistake I’d made.

  I’d had no idea what I was getting myself into.

  For so long the idea of Ohio, of the safety of the camp, had been everything to me. It had been the only thing that kept me going when I was stranded out in the wilderness, cut off from civilization and its security. I’d thought if I could just get here, just get the girls here, everything would be all right.

  It seemed impossible that this could be what I’d fought so hard to obtain. This patch of mud under a gray sky, the sullen faces of the other positives, the total lack of concern on the part of those who were there to guard us. The soldiers had shocked the positives back so I could get inside, but after that, as I was torn and scratched and beaten, they’d done nothing. They’d stood aside and watched. They didn’t seem to care if I lived or died.

  I was soon to find out what they did care about. As I stood there in the mud, feeling sorry for myself, utterly without an idea of what to do next, I started noticing that the positives were drifting over toward the factory shelters—­the row of slightly larger shacks over by the wall that Luke had pointed out to me. I had no idea what all this talk of shifts and working meant, but I knew I needed to be there when a whistle blew, so I fell in with those drifting over there, intent on not screwing this up as well.

  The positives formed a line outside each of the shacks. There weren’t any signs or any way of telling one shack from another, so I just picked one line at random. The positives in that line stared at me as if I’d done something wrong, so I said, “Fedder? Fedder?” until someone lifted his arm and pointed me to a different line. When I got there, I saw Luke standing in the door of the shack, counting the ­people in his line. When he saw me, he nodded.

  Fedder arrived just as an ear-­piercing whistle cut the air. I’d only ever seen Fedder before while lying on my back, looking up at his foot as it came streaking toward my face. He’d seemed huge then, but I’d had no idea. He wasn’t as broad through the shoulders as Adare, but he had to be seven feet tall. As he walked up to the line he slapped some of the positives across the face, though none of them had done anything to provoke the attack. He said nothing as he pushed inside the shack. Once he was inside, Luke gestured for the rest of us to follow.

  The interior of the shack was lit by a pair of electric bulbs, each of them surrounded by a cloud of suicidal insects. The shack’s floor was taken up by three long tables lined with wobbly stools. Heaped on the table, apparently without any scheme or order, was a pile of green flat objects I’d never seen before. It turned out they were modular circuit boards. There were also boxes of smaller black components.

  Without a word the positives filed in and took up positions on the stools. There didn’t seem to be assigned spots—­everyone just grabbed a stool at random. Luke pointed me to a stool next to his own. I sat down, and he handed me one of the circuit boards. “See this?” he asked, picking one of the black components out of its box. “It goes in here,” he said. He showed me a socket on the board. The component fit into the socket with a little click. There were four other sockets, each of which had a different shape. “It only fits in one of the sockets. If you try to push it into a different socket, you’ll snap the connectors. That’s bad. Broken boards make Fedder look bad—­he’s responsible for your work; he has to turn in all the complete boards, and if his tally’s short, he gets in trouble.”

  Luke didn’t need to tell me that if Fedder got in trouble because of my faulty work, I’d get a beating. That was pretty self-­evident.

  “We need to get through all these boxes before nine o’clock,” Luke told me. “Normally I’d say you could take your time, but we’re short three ­people on this shift, and so we all have to work faster to make up for them.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  Luke said nothing, but his eyes flicked in Fedder’s direction. The big positive, who I was told was now my “boss,” was sitting on a stool at the back of the shack reading a magazine. He didn’t look up.

  I watched Luke insert a few more of the components. His hands moved fast over the boards, deftly inserting a component and then pushing the board back into the pile in seconds. I tried to match his speed but couldn’t. It was easy to tell which socket I wanted—­they were, in fact, numbered—­but I kept forgetting which direction the component went into it and had to turn it around and around in my hands. When I did get the component seated properly and reached for another board to repeat the process, invariably I would grab a board that already had its component installed.

  The other positives on the shift stared at me with open hatred. They all moved as fast as Luke, churning out completed boards at a rapid pace. I was slowing them down. I had no doubt as to what would happen if we hadn’t finished all the boards by nine o’clock—­Fedder—­but I had no way of measuring time and no way of knowing how badly I was screwing up.

  Nine o’clock came, but the only way to tell was that Fedder grunted and got off his stool to check the boxes of components. When he was sure they were empty, he nodded and went back to his magazine. Nobody came to take away the circuit boards—­instead, Luke went over to the far end of the shack and brought back three new boxes, all of them holding a slightly different black component that fit into a slightly different socket.

  And so we started all over again.

  The work went on for h
ours and hours. I was used to hard work from my days in New York, of course. Fishing in the subways all morning, then working in the gardens all afternoon and into the twilight every day had taught me how to handle the fatigue and the sore muscles. But this all seemed so . . . pointless. At one point I asked Luke what the boards were for, but Fedder growled and said, “No talking,” and I resolved to hold my question for later. I didn’t get a chance until the shift was over.

  By that point I was dead tired, and my stomach was clenched in a knot of hunger. I knew not to ask questions, but I was really hoping we would get some food soon.

  A positive came into the shack. He said he’d come to collect all the circuit boards, which we had stacked neatly in the empty boxes. He checked the boxes, then handed Fedder a receipt. Luke led us out of the factory shack and along the wall to a big open pavilion with a roof that looked like it was about to collapse. There Fedder turned his receipt in for yet another cardboard box. At least this one contained food. Sandwiches, with stale bread and some kind of meat that might have been beef. Luke handed out the sandwiches to everyone on the shift, but when he gave me mine, Fedder came over and scowled down at me.

  “You did about half a shift’s worth of work,” he said. He tore my sandwich in half. I didn’t try to fight him, though I wanted to. He stuffed half the sandwich in his own mouth, cramming it in between his teeth. Then he dropped the other half in the mud at my feet.

  I am not ashamed to say I picked it up, dusted it off the best I could, and ate it anyway. No one should ever be ashamed of being hungry.

  CHAPTER 70

  I got better at the work. I had no choice—­it was that or starve. Each day I moved faster, assembled more components quicker. The other positives in the crew still hated me, but their venomous glares never turned into anything more violent.