Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  “You were seen,” Macky said. “A ­couple of nights ago, one of my workers was out taking a piss. He saw you up there. I don’t know how you got up on the catwalks. Maybe they have a pole with a hook and they lift you up there.”

  One of the other bosses—­I didn’t know his name—­broke out laughing. “That’s impossible,” he said.

  Macky gestured at me, as if it were my turn to talk. I just blinked at him. I’m sure he wanted me to say how I got up to the catwalks, but I kept my mouth shut.

  There was a lot of muscle in that room. I’ll admit to being intimidated.

  “Obviously it’s not impossible,” Macky said. “We know it isn’t. We’ve seen girls up there sometimes.”

  “What?” the boss—­the one who had laughed—­asked.

  Macky ignored him and turned to me. “You know one of the guards, right? Is one of the guards gay? Are you fucking a guard?”

  “You watch the catwalks at night?” I asked, instead of answering.

  Macky frowned at me, like I’d disappointed him. “We run this place. And there are ­people who’d love to see us eat shit and die. So we keep our eyes open. Okay? Now, answer the damn questions. You know a guard up there?”

  “Yeah—­a friend of mine from—­from before I came here,” I admitted.

  Macky nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Finnegan’s the guy you were talking about?” Fedder asked. “You could have told me it was one of mine.”

  “Why, so you would have known not to trade him to me? He’s mine now,” Macky pointed out. “So shut up.” He looked around at the gathered bosses. “I called you here because we need to figure out how to make this work for us. How we’re going to benefit from it.”

  “They’ve got good food up there,” one of the others said. “Better than we get.”

  There was a general murmur of assent. “He could bring girls over here,” someone else said. “I mean, if they can go up on the catwalks, they can come down on this side, right?”

  “I won’t do that,” I said. I’d let them grind me to a paste before I started pimping for them. Not that I could have, anyway—­Ike was done with me. My access to the catwalks was over and done with.

  I didn’t tell the bosses as much.

  “You work for me now,” Macky pointed out. “You’ll do what I say.”

  “I can’t. You can beat me but—­I can’t,” I said.

  Macky frowned. “I think we’re scaring him,” he said. “You guys—­get out of here.”

  The bosses just grumbled for a second and didn’t move.

  “I said get the fuck out of here!” Macky roared, and that got them moving.

  When they were gone, when it was just the two of us in the shelter, he gestured for me to sit down at the table. I sank gratefully into a chair.

  “I’m not like Fedder,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I’m not going to beat you up for working slow. I figured out a long time ago, ­people with broken arms can’t work at all. So don’t be so scared of me, okay?”

  I must have frowned at that, because he laughed.

  “Look, I get it,” he told me. “You’ve had shit luck since you got here, and Fedder has got you sleeping with both eyes open. You think bosses are all about exploiting their ­people. Well, fine. That is part of it. But some of us—­the smarter ones—­we try to protect our ­people, too. Make their lives a little better. A happy worker is a productive worker. I can make your life here pretty easy.”

  Maybe I believed him a little—­but that just made me angry. “How?” I asked. “Are you going to shoo the flies away from me? Are you going to give me someplace dry to sleep at night?”

  “That’s not how things work here. Look, life is shit. But if you go along, you get along, right?”

  I fumed for a while after he said that. I’d heard it one too many times.

  “I refuse to accept that. Life doesn’t have to be like this,” I told him. I felt like Caxton was right behind me, one hand on my shoulder. “If we all agreed, if we decided tomorrow we didn’t have to live like this—­things would change. They would get better.”

  “Yeah, see, that’s the hard part,” Macky said. “Getting ­people to agree on things. You even talk to anybody in this camp? You ask if the sky is blue, you’ll get six different answers.”

  I shook my head. “You say you want to make life better for your workers. You’re in charge here, you said that, too. Then it’s your responsibility to change things. You, and all the bosses.”

  He smirked at me like I was crazy. “Look, just tell me you’ll snag some of that good guard food the next time you go up on the catwalks, okay? That’s all I need to hear for right now.”

  I said nothing of the kind. I walked out of the shelter then, and he didn’t try to stop me.

  CHAPTER 83

  I started working for Macky after that, and nothing much changed at all. He didn’t beat me. That was nice. But I was still working the same shift. In the same dismal conditions. At the end of every work shift, he would tell me to stay behind, and he would ask me when I was going up on the catwalks. I told him I couldn’t help him there, that I was done with the catwalks and the guards, but he didn’t believe me. I kept pressuring him to organize the workers, to improve our conditions. He had one response to that.

  “How?” he would ask.

  And then something did change. One day he asked that question, and I had an answer.

  I had a plan. I could see it all in my head, all the steps laid out in order.

  I’d felt helpless before—­but Macky wasn’t helpless. The bosses weren’t helpless, not if they worked together. He’d thought that by acquiring me he would gain access to the catwalks. Instead, it seemed I had acquired him. A way to talk to the only real power in the camp, down at the level of the mud. A boss who would listen.

  So that day, when he asked, “How?” I had an answer.

  I laid it all out for him. I showed him how it could work, how we could make it work, if we just stuck together. How we could get concessions from the guards. Basic health care—­maybe I could save Heather’s life. More food—­who knew how many lives that would make better?

  I could see in his eyes as I explained it that he almost believed it could work.

  Almost.

  In the end, he said he would think about it. He made a point of telling me he doubted he would get a yes, but he said he would take it to the other bosses.

  I walked back to the shelter I shared with Luke that evening, and for the first time since I’d come to the camp I felt like life was worth living. Like maybe everything could be okay, that it would be okay. Like we had a chance.

  Luke and I stayed up late playing card games. We didn’t work together anymore but we were still friends, and I was absurdly grateful to him for that. For being kind to me when I’d needed it the most. I found myself smiling so much my face hurt.

  Late, when we should have been in bed, I needed to pee. I put down my cards and went outside, headed for the latrines. Before I got even halfway there, though, I stopped. Froze in place.

  A light was shining down on me from the catwalks.

  CHAPTER 84

  It turned out Ike wasn’t done with me, after all.

  I was excited. This was great news, that Ike was still my friend and my ally. I was thrilled with my new plan—­I felt like I could actually achieve something. I desperately wanted to talk to Ike about it, see if he had any thoughts, any way he could help me.

  But he wouldn’t let me talk. He had news for me that couldn’t wait. He just broke it to me plain.

  “Your friend Heather died last night,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  I sat down on the floor. It wasn’t something I could control. I sat down because my legs wouldn’t work anymore. “Oh,” I
moaned. It was dangerously close to a wail.

  “I’m, um, sorry,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, no.” I didn’t choose to make those sounds.

  “Listen, Finn, you have to keep it down,” Ike said. “If somebody hears you—­”

  But I couldn’t stop. For a long time I just sat there, making plaintive noises. Rubbed at my face, at my shaved head.

  Heather. Dead.

  I was going to save her. I’d tried so hard to save her.

  She hadn’t wanted to be saved in the end. She’d wanted to die as some kind of sacrifice, some gift she would give to someone she might not even know. She’d thought her death could have some meaning if her life didn’t. She’d died not blaming me for what happened to her. She’d died thinking I was some great teacher who’d shown her the way to true wisdom.

  That made it so much worse.

  And Kylie—­what this would do to Kylie—­

  The thoughts were so dense in my head I couldn’t breathe.

  Eventually I wiped the tears off my cheeks and carefully, slowly, I stood up.

  “Listen,” Ike said. “What we said before—­last time, I mean. When I said we were through. That wasn’t true. It was never going to be true. I’ll keep bringing you up here when I can. I’ll keep helping you, however I can.”

  I think he was just so alarmed by my grief he would have done anything to get me to stop wailing and blubbering. I don’t think he meant me to hear what I heard then.

  “Help me?” I said. “You want to help me?”

  “Yeah, Finn, look—­”

  “Ike. I need your help. I need it badly, and it’s going to be tricky for you. Maybe dangerous. But I need it. Truly.”

  My big plan had to move forward. There was no doubt in my mind—­Heather’s death just made it all the more important. More meaningful than ever. And if it failed, and I got myself killed in the process—­I would take Ike down with me, if I had to.

  No more going along to get along. Things had to change.

  CHAPTER 85

  The next day my plan went into effect. Except I wasn’t the one leading the charge.

  At the end of second shift, when I’d finished assembling so many circuit boards for Macky that my fingers were bruised, I stepped out of the work shed with no thought in my mind but getting a food voucher for a stale sandwich. So you could say I was very surprised when I found Fedder out there. He was standing on an old rotten crate and shouting at everybody who walked past.

  “Nobody goes to work tomorrow,” he said. “When the whistle blows, you just stay wrapped up in your nice warm sheets. No first shift, no second shift. Nobody works! Not until we get better food!”

  I could only stare. My fellow workers listened, or just walked away, or did what they were going to do. But I stood there staring. Because Fedder had somehow decided to put my grand plan into effect.

  By himself.

  The whole point of the thing had been to get all the bosses behind the plan, all at the same time. To make sure every work crew refused to go to work. To stop the production of circuit boards entirely, so the army couldn’t fix its helicopters. I figured that was the only way to make them listen. To make them agree to our demands.

  I had worked up a whole list of those—­ways to make the camp better, to make our lives more tolerable. First on the list was basic health care for the positives in the camp. Better food was on my list, too, but it came farther down.

  Fedder, apparently, had reprioritized. “Two sandwiches every damned day,” he shouted. “And more meat! We’re starving down here. Nobody goes to work tomorrow!”

  I saw Luke—­he’d just come off his own work shift. He watched Fedder for a while, then came over to me and said, “He must have gone crazy. What does he think he’s going to achieve, other than getting shot?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I have to find Macky.”

  I ran to my new boss’s shelter. He was in there reading a tattered magazine, something about a sport nobody had played since before the crisis.

  “Have you seen what Fedder’s doing?” I asked Macky.

  He got up and went outside. He scowled. “Goddamnit,” he said. “He jumped the gun. We were still talking about this—­about whether or not it would work.”

  “You were?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

  “Yeah. Believe it or not, some of us bosses think maybe you have a brain in your head,” he told me. “Looks like Fedder was going to vote yes. I figure he got ahead of himself because he wanted the credit for making this work. Maybe he thought it would make him king of the camp or something.”

  The idea chilled me to my marrow.

  He grabbed a positive who was standing nearby. “You,” he said. “Who do you work for?”

  “Michaelson,” the guy replied.

  “Go get him. And tell him to get all the other bosses together.”

  When the guy had run off, I asked Macky, “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to support Fedder. Help him out.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been in a lot of fights, Finnegan. And I learned one thing. Once you’re in it, don’t look back. Hesitating gets you killed. I don’t like how this started, but it’s started—­and we’ll never get a second chance.”

  CHAPTER 86

  I don’t know if any of the positives in that camp understood what a “strike” was. None of us knew anything about labor or capital or negotiations. But we all grasped the idea pretty quickly.

  The next morning, only about half of the workers showed up for first shift. None of the bosses did. The workers went inside their work sheds and maybe they put circuit boards together, and maybe they just sat there waiting to be told what to do.

  I don’t know. I was part of the strike. I was out there talking to ­people all day, trying to convince them not to work. I went from shelter to shelter, wherever they would let me in, and explained what we were doing, and what we hoped to gain.

  A lot of the positives I talked to just stared at me, like they didn’t understand. Like it made no sense. Some were supportive, though not very many.

  Still—­when the whistle blew for second shift, only a trickle of workers headed over to the work sheds. Mostly it was the older guys, the ones who barely knew where they were. But among them were most of the shopkeepers, I noticed. The guys who ran the local economy, trading food vouchers or old magazines for clothes or toilet paper. I saw the guy who had sold me my shoes, and the one who had refused to give me clothes when I was naked, until Luke vouched for me.

  “Why aren’t they on our side?” I asked. “They have as much to gain as anybody else.”

  I was over by Macky’s shelter at the time, taking a quick break, eating an old sandwich so I would have the strength to continue my rabble-­rousing. Macky came out and leaned on the wall of his shelter and stared down the shopkeepers. One of them even turned around in shame and went back to his store.

  “They think they have something to lose,” Macky explained to me. “If nobody works, nobody has food vouchers. Which means they’ve got nothing to trade.” He shrugged. “We don’t need them.”

  “We need everybody,” I said.

  “We won’t get everybody. But maybe we’ll get enough.”

  The next day the first shift whistle blew, and less than a quarter of the positives obeyed its call. Second shift was even less receptive. Fedder stood on his crate and shouted up at the catwalks that we would work only if they listened to his demands. His personal demands—­Fedder was quite clear on that.

  There was a lot of groaning and complaining. ­People who didn’t work didn’t get food vouchers. They threatened Fedder, but of course he just thrashed a ­couple of them and they quieted down. Others came to me and asked if I actually thought this was going to work. They went to Macky and asked him if
I was crazy. Somehow ­people had figured out this wasn’t just Fedder’s game.

  In a quiet moment, I asked Macky if he’d been telling ­people as much. He just smiled and said, “Somebody’s coming out of this as king of the camp. Somebody you know real well, Finnegan. Don’t worry—­your part in this won’t be forgotten.”

  I didn’t care. I had no desire to be remembered as some great agitator. I just wanted to make sure nobody else died like Heather.

  The next morning, we all stood around waiting for the first shift whistle to sound.

  It never did. Instead, the guards responded to us.

  CHAPTER 87

  Loudspeakers blared to life, all around the camp. A wail of feedback made sure every single positive would be listening.

  “Due to the recent breakdown in discipline,” a voice told us, “there will be no work shifts today. There will also be no food distribution.”

  A few of the positives shouted back—­nothing coherent, just defiance or rage. The things ­people called out had nothing to do with having their rations cut off. Something had changed in the camp. Something ugly was building, just below the surface of things. It was going to take only one more push to make it come out in the open.

  That push came, but not in any way I expected.

  “Will patient Fedder please present and identify himself at the center of the male camp? He will be given fifteen minutes to do so.”

  That shut ­people up. The loudspeakers had drawn us all out of our shelters, and now we were standing around in clumps and knots of filthy humanity. We all craned our necks around, looking for Fedder. Where was we? What did the guards want with him?

  Fedder was no coward. It took only a few minutes for him to show himself. He’d been over by the work sheds. Maybe he’d been over there conspiring with his fellow bosses. He sauntered over to the middle of the camp with a cocky grin on his face, as if he was very pleased with himself for causing all this commotion. He put his fists on his hips and then looked up at the catwalks. For the first time I looked up there and saw that a number of soldiers had gathered just above the well.