Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  I got used to mud, more or less. I stopped caring if I was dirty or not—­there was no way to get truly clean. My stomach adjusted to the tiny amount of food I got every day, and for the most part, my hunger pangs gave way to a generalized gnawing in my guts that I could mostly ignore. I even got used to the insects that stung and bit me all night. Well, I kind of got used to it.

  Luke became a kind of friend, though he was always guarded. He showed me the ropes of the place, helping me survive. It was Luke who shaved my head for me after I’d been there a few days. I’d thought at first that was some kind of punishment, a way of dehumanizing the positives. It turned out it was a great relief—­I hadn’t realized why my head itched so much until Luke cut off my hair and showed me the lice crawling around on my scalp.

  Luke knew a lot about getting along in the camp. He taught me the best times to use the latrine (a big open pit in one corner of the camp, and a favorite place for robbers to wait for their victims). He showed me how to get water from the camp’s well when I got thirsty. He helped me find a safe place to sleep and showed me how to hide valuables—­not that I ever had anything of true worth. He taught me to save a little of my food, when I could. The economy in the camp, it turned out, was thriving. Any slight comfort was something to be treasured. Saved up for. A pair of shoes, so I didn’t have to feel the mud squelching between my toes all the time, was the first thing I purchased. Luke had a deck of cards that was missing only the three of diamonds. He put out the word that he would trade generously for just that card. It was something to do, something to think about other than how slowly the time passed, how boring the work was.

  He eventually told me why the guards wanted all those circuit boards. “They’re for the helicopters,” he said. “Sometimes we assemble other parts, too—­door latches, wheel hubs, anything that wears out or breaks, they constantly need more. Once they had us putting together machine guns, and some of the guys talked about . . . well . . . it was just talk. There weren’t any bullets for the guns.”

  I filed away the idea that there were some ­people in the camp who wanted to fight their way out. Or maybe just kill some guards or each other for revenge. Facts like that helped me stay paranoid, helped me sleep light.

  I was interested in something else, though. “How many helicopters does the military have? We must have put together thousands of those boards.”

  Luke shrugged. He had his cards in his hands, and he shuffled them back and forth, the red and black pips flickering between his fingers, the cards bridging through the air to land back in his hand again. He’d been practicing for a long time. “Who knows?” he said. That was the answer to the vast majority of my questions. “More. More than they used to have, I think. There used to be a lot less work.” He shook his head. “I think they’re gearing up for something. Some kind of big fight.”

  I thought about the name I’d heard a ­couple of times now—­Anubis. The guy Red Kate was looking to join. He was supposed to be a warlord out west. Caxton had made him sound pretty serious. But the army could take down any warlord, couldn’t they? There was no way this Anubis was a real threat.

  I tried talking to Luke about that, but it quickly became clear he didn’t understand anything I said. I would often forget that Luke had never been outside of a set of sturdy walls. Unlike me, he’d never seen the wilderness—­he’d been brought to the camp straight from Milwaukee. Just like I was supposed to be brought from New York. He didn’t have any real information about what the army was doing.

  “It doesn’t matter why we put the boards together,” he said finally. “It’s work. It’s how we get food. That’s all that matters. And it’s better than it used to be. I met a guy when I first came in—­he got cleared and he’s gone now, but he must have been forty years old by then. He was here almost from the crisis. He said originally they didn’t have us assembling parts. He said they used to take us out and make us farm—­endless hours out in the sun or the rain, or slogging through the snow. He said it was awful, that positives used to just drop dead out in the fields because they froze to death, and the guards didn’t care.”

  “Why’d they change to this kind of work?” I asked.

  “Nobody wanted to eat food grown by positives. We’re infected, right? Or we might be. The food could be infected, too.”

  That was why the guards stayed up on their catwalks, I realized. Why they made sure they never had to touch us or so much as breathe in our air. As far as they were concerned, we were little better than zombies.

  Another reason the wilderness had been better than the camp—­at least for me. Out on the road, it had been rare that anyone thought twice about the tattoo on my hand. Nobody had treated me like I was less than human.

  Luke was done talking, then. He wanted to play cards. We didn’t know any of the same games, but that was fine—­we had plenty of time to learn. He taught me to play gin and poker and go fish. I taught him hearts, which we used to play back in New York. I was a little fuzzy on the rules, but we had plenty of time to figure it out.

  When I got tired of cards, and tired of thinking about what I could trade, and tired of just talking, I would head over to the double layer of fence between the male and female camps. I would stand there, looking through the chain link. Looking for Kylie. I had no idea if the woman I’d spoken to had ever bothered to pass on my message. As days passed it seemed likely she hadn’t.

  It was unlikely I would ever see Kylie just by chance. The women stayed well clear of the fence on their side, and for good reason. Male positives pressed up against our side all the time, hoping for just a look at a girl. Some of them were more insistent about it than others, calling out to the women, whistling at them, shouting boasts or threats or just calling out their fantasies of what they would do if they got inside the female camp, even for just a few minutes.

  Still—­I had no better idea than to just stand there, hoping Kylie would walk by. Sometimes I would stand by the fence until it was time to go back to work. Sometimes I could bear it for only a few minutes. The guilt was sometimes too much to bear. I’d convinced Kylie to come here. I’d told her it was going to be paradise.

  I spent many nights half awake, thinking of it. Turning it over and over in my head—­what I owed her. What I would say if I ever saw her again. Sometimes I hoped I never had to.

  CHAPTER 71

  Day after day of the same thing. Long hours of work with no breaks, followed by just enough food to keep from starving to death. The occasional slap or punch from Fedder just to remind me I worked for him. Long hours of downtime with nothing to do but watch Luke practice with his cards. Heat and flies and mud, with absolutely nothing to show for it but time passed. Days were boredom and casual brutality and work that made my hands ache and swell. Days were bad.

  Nights in the camp were much worse.

  There were lights up on the wall, thousands of them. Big fluorescent floodlights and banks of LED bulbs that glowed a violent blue. Searchlights that could turn a patch of mud white with their glare, that prowled the camp at night blinding anyone caught in their beams. But the lights rarely penetrated more than a few hundred yards from the walls. They covered the factory sheds and the columns nearest the wall and nothing more. The center of the camp, where we slept, was pitch-­black on moonless nights and anything could move around out there, anyone bent on mischief or harm. In the tiny lean-­to that Luke and I shared, huddled in too-­thin blankets, I would listen for the sound of feet squelching through the mud. I would hear whispered voices, sometimes, or maybe it was just the noise of hungry rats.

  Twice men came to the entrance to the lean-­to and stuck their heads inside. Maybe they were just looking for their own place, but I didn’t think so. I think they were looking to rob us, but when they realized there were two of us, they lost their nerve. You heard stories—­just gossip—­about positives who were murdered in their shelters in the night. About ­peopl
e who just went to bed one night and never woke up because they had an extra pair of socks or a crust of bread that they were saving.

  The camp had plenty of desperate ­people, ­people who probably thought they had no other choice. If you were too sick to work, or if you were kicked out of your boss’s crew (they called it being “fired,” which made me think of being shot out the barrel of a gun), there was no way to get food. Not unless you had something to trade. I thought of the obsequious mechanics and car washers and hangers-­on in the looter camps, the ones Adare had sneeringly called “retailers.” Even after the crisis, even after ninety-­nine percent of the human race was wiped out, it seemed there would always be surplus ­people.

  Luke had a knife, just a short-­bladed pocketknife, but it meant he could defend us in the night if it came to that. My own knife was long gone, of course, but I saved up for a replacement. It was clear, right from the beginning, that the guards would never stoop to protecting us.

  They had other things to worry about. As I discovered the night the dogs came.

  I was half asleep when I first heard them barking. It wasn’t a sound I was familiar with at the time, though I would hear it again many times later. We’d never had dogs in New York—­they would just be more mouths to feed—­and the looters I’d met didn’t keep animals. So I could only lie there, puzzled by what that throaty growling noise was and what it meant. I thought it was some positive, driven crazy by boredom or stress, making strange noises just to hear himself.

  The barking got closer, and suddenly Luke was awake, bolting upright in his blanket. “Oh, man,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Dogs. They sent in the dogs. It’s been a week already . . . come on, Finnegan. Come on!”

  He grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the lean-­to. I could just make out his silhouette against the starlit sky. He lifted his arms over his head and told me to do the same. My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I saw that we weren’t alone. All around us positives were emerging from their shelters and taking up the same posture. “If you don’t present yourself for inspection, the dogs will come in after you,” Luke told me. “If you resist them, they’ll tear you up.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. But then I saw a light off in the darkness, a searchlight beam drifting across the ground. It picked out every detail of a corrugated tin shelter, blowing out the colors and sending long shadows stabbing outward into the dark. At the center of the light was a pack of maybe a dozen dogs, big brown animals with black faces. They trotted through the mud, running up to one positive after another. As each of us was examined, they would be pinned by the searchlight for a few seconds, their thin bodies turned skeletal by the powerful light. The dogs would run up and thrust their noses into the positives’ armpits and groins, rearing up with their paws on chests and hips to get a closer sniff.

  I’d seen pictures of dogs before, but I’d never understood how terrifying they could be. The dogs had mouths full of white triangular teeth and claws that looked like they could shred the flesh off your back. They barked and growled and snapped as they ran around the camp, studying every positive they could find.

  “What are they looking for?” I asked Luke.

  “They’re trained to smell the virus,” he told me. “They can tell if you’re going to zombie out.”

  “But—­that’s supposed to be impossible! That’s the whole reason we’re here, because there’s no test.”

  “Not until right up at the end,” Luke said. “Not until maybe two or three days before it happens, when you start getting the headaches. Then the dogs can smell it. Once a week the guards send them in to search like this. They almost always find something.”

  I stared in horror as the dogs pawed and sniffed a positive not two hundred yards from where I stood. They knocked him backward out of the light and then moved on, heading for the next standing figure. The barking got louder and more strident as they came closer, until the whole pack was roaring, their ears twitching back and forth, their tails dancing behind them.

  “Crap,” Luke said. “They’ve got the scent—­there’s somebody here who’s close.”

  “This is horrible,” I said.

  “I know,” he told me. “What if the asshole went zombie on us last night? He could have infected half the camp before we found out. Thank God for the dogs.”

  I stared at him. A human being was being hunted right before us, and he seemed to think that was a good thing. On one level I could kind of understand—­the biggest danger any of us faced was that one of the positives was, in fact, infected, and that he would go zombie without warning. But—­

  “No!” someone shouted. “No, I’m clean! I swear I’m clean, I was—­”

  And then he started screaming.

  Luke ran forward into the dark, toward the sounds of agony. I didn’t want to be alone, so I ran after him. Soon enough I saw what had drawn him. The circle of light had focused on a positive fifty yards from us, a guy I’d seen a hundred times since I’d come to the camp, though I’d never learned his name. The dogs had smelled the virus on him.

  And now they were eating him alive.

  They tore the skin off his arm. One dog fastened its jaws around his leg and wouldn’t let go. It shook its whole body until it dragged him down. He tried to fight back, but it was hopeless. The dogs were singing in their bloodlust, yowling like wolves as they tore and rent his flesh. Still he screamed.

  All around me positives had crammed up close together to see. To watch. Some of them were cheering. Even in the dark I could see how bright their eyes were.

  “The blood,” I said, to whoever was standing next to me. “The blood’s infected, this is—­this is a terrible way to—­”

  “Dogs can’t get it,” I was told. “They’re immune.”

  Over our heads, a guard shouted out a command. “Back,” I think it was. “Back!” and the dogs instantly stopped what they were doing and scampered away from the bleeding thing, the victim they’d so efficiently savaged. I couldn’t see the wounded positive’s eyes. I was glad for that. I couldn’t have borne it if he had looked up at me, if he had begged me for help.

  Once the dogs were clear, the guard opened fire with an assault rifle. It sounded like a machine was driving nails into a bowl of wet plaster. Blood and chips of bone leaped out of the dying positive’s body and then he dropped to the mud, his arms curling across his chest. Another salvo tore open his skull and then he was dead, definitely dead.

  More merciful, I suppose, than letting the dogs have their way.

  The light moved on, and the dogs ran to follow it, moving farther into the camp, barking in glee. I could see how wet and red their muzzles were. I could see how excited they were to look for another kill.

  I dropped to my knees and vomited in the mud. Thank God it was so dark and no one could see me. Eventually I found my way back to the shelter I shared with Luke. He was inside already, fast asleep in his blanket.

  CHAPTER 72

  We’re positives,” Luke said the next morning, by way of explanation.

  I had spent all morning ranting at him. ­People shouldn’t have to live like this, I’d said. The government has a responsibility to us.

  “Their responsibility is to make sure we don’t hurt anyone else,” he told me. “They’re doing all they can. Things are never going to be like they were before the crisis. It just isn’t possible now. The world ended, and we’re living in the ruins.”

  I’d heard it before. If Luke started telling me we were all maggots, I knew I was going to scream.

  “Just hang in there, Finnegan. You don’t have so very long to go. You’ll be cleared—­I know you aren’t infected, I can just tell. You’ll be cleared, and you’ll get to go home.”

  Back to New York City. Where everyone spent their days working in their gardens, producing just enough to survi
ve. Fishing in the subway system that used to be a wonder of the world.

  It just wasn’t . . . enough.

  It wasn’t acceptable. It wasn’t what I wanted for my life.

  It had taken the medical camp, that pit of horror, to teach me this: that sometimes, good enough isn’t good enough. That you can’t just accept things as they are.

  Which was great, as far as it went. As I had no idea how to change things—­or even, really, in what way they should change—­it just made me depressed. And then I did something stupid, and I lashed out at the one friend I had there.

  “That’s fine for me,” I pointed out. “You’re going to be here for twenty years. If you survive—­if—­you’ll walk out of here an old man.”

  His eyes flashed with anger, but he said nothing. He just laid down a fan of cards on his blanket and stared down at the pips and the face cards as if they could tell the future.

  “You’ve accepted this because you’re afraid to try for anything more,” I told him. My anger had to go somewhere. “Because you—­all of you—­are too chickenshit to stand up to the guards and demand your human rights.”

  “They’ve got guns. And dogs. And electrified fences. Not to mention helicopters.”

  “I’ve seen what they can do. In Trenton—­I saw what their guns and bombs could do.” I’d told him my whole story by that point, though I don’t think he actually believed most of it. “Guns and bombs and electrified fences—­they don’t ever make anything better. They can only make things worse.”

  He sighed and gathered up his cards into a solid deck again. A deck missing the three of diamonds. Nothing in this world was ever complete. Nothing worked, nothing was ever right.

  “So fix it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t like things? You fix them. If you really feel like you can’t live like this, like you’re too good for this place, then make it better.”