Positive: A Novel

by David Wellington

  “What’s going on?” Luke asked me.

  I could only shrug.

  “Are you patient Fedder?” the loudspeakers asked. It sounded like they needed some kind of official identification.

  Fedder grinned and said something, then spat into the mud. Some of the positives nearby laughed. Maybe Fedder had made some incredibly witty remark—­I wasn’t close enough to hear it.

  “Pursuant to the Crisis Emergency Powers Act,” the loudspeakers said, “inciting your fellow positives to riot is a crime considered equal to treason or looting. The penalty is death. Proceed.”

  I’ll never forget the look of surprise on Fedder’s face.

  The soldiers up on the catwalk took aim and fired down at him with their assault rifles, shooting him so many times his body jerked and flew about in a kind of horrible, spasmodic dance. His blood splattered everyone standing nearby as he fell into the mud. He did not move again.

  The screaming that followed seemed to go on forever. Positives ran for their shelters, for the work sheds, for any kind of cover. ­People were trampled in the mad rush. Luke had to grab my arm and pull me backward, into our own shelter, where he heaped blankets on top of us as if they could protect us from bullets. I tried to get up, to get out of the shelter, but he just pulled me back down. The second or third time I decided I agreed with him, that I should keep my head down.

  So it wasn’t until after dark that I dared to show my face again.

  CHAPTER 88

  Luke thought I was crazy.

  “They’ll come for blood. Your blood,” he said, glaring at me. “If you start riling ­people up again, the guards will blame you for all this. You really couldn’t just go along? You couldn’t play the game?”

  “Sometimes you have to choose a different game,” I told him. I felt weightless. Like a good breeze could blow me away, high up into the air, where I would never be seen again. I knew perfectly well that my life could be over come morning. Fedder had been so strong, so big and vicious, and now he was gone. There was no reason to expect that I wouldn’t be next.

  But somehow . . . I didn’t care.

  My life was less important than what was happening here. Than what could happen, if the cards played out right.

  I didn’t sleep that night, because I was far too busy.

  I went around from shelter to shelter. Nobody questioned why I was there or that I had a right to talk to them, though I was met with mostly hostile stares. I told them we didn’t have to live like this. I spoke of what we could accomplish in the morning, if we worked together. I didn’t expect applause or reasoned arguments. I spoke my piece and then I moved on.

  There was only one shelter where I didn’t try to make my case. It was a shelter full of the sick and the dying. It was just like the one on the female side of the camp, the place where Heather died.

  I hadn’t realized that we had one of those, too. It had never occurred to me. But there it was—­the stink, the low whispered prayers. Even the skeleton idol. This one was smaller than the one the women prayed to. Instead of carved wax it was made of twisted wire broken off old circuit boards, with three little holes in its face. Eye sockets and a grinning maw.

  The skeleton worshippers had collected Fedder’s body from the mud. His corpse lay in state, just below their pathetic little skeleton idol. Positives on their knees prayed before him, maybe for him. Somehow his death—­his sacrifice—­meant more to them than just any death. Somehow his spectacular public demise was going to mean life for lots of ­people.

  I turned away in disgust, but when I turned to go, a boy of no more than twelve grabbed my arm to stop me.

  “When you die, we’ll bring you here, Finnegan,” he said. It sounded like a promise. “Your life will help others.”

  “You mean my death,” I told him.

  I knew better than to argue with their faith. They didn’t need evidence that their prayers worked, that they had the power to barter with Death. They didn’t need reasonable arguments to know what they were already sure of.

  Nor did I ask if they were with me or against me. I would find out soon enough.

  I moved on. I went to the next shelter down, where a bunch of positives I didn’t know were huddled, scared of the night, more scared of what the morning would bring.

  I gave them my message. Like I’d given it to everyone else.

  “I want things to be better,” I told them. “That’s all. I want us to have a chance to make lives for ourselves. We deserve better. We deserve a chance.” I explained very carefully how I was going to try to make that happen. They listened but said nothing. I hadn’t expected them to.

  The whole time, overhead in the catwalks, the guards looked down at us, rifles in their hands. Watching me go about my business.

  CHAPTER 89

  In the morning the work sheds stood empty. The mud around them was deserted. A few positives were out by the stores or the latrine pits, but almost everyone remained inside, in the shelters.

  For an hour nobody stirred. I doubt that very many of them were sleeping in. They were just afraid. I couldn’t blame them.

  Especially when the loudspeakers cut through the morning air, just like they had the day before. I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear what they had to say.

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

  “Jesus,” Luke said. “I thought they would call for Macky next.”

  I forced a shrug of nonchalance I didn’t quite feel. “Maybe they want to hear our demands.”

  “Are you kidding? They’re just going to shoot you! They’re going to shoot anybody who stands up to them, and then—­what? What will any of it have meant? Things will go back to the way they were, they’ll—­they’ll—­”

  I don’t know what he saw in my face, then, but he stopped talking.

  “It’s all right,” I told him. I got up and started moving toward the door.

  “Finnegan, please, don’t go out there,” he begged.

  But I had to. I had to say what I was going to say. “It doesn’t matter,” I told Luke. “They can drag me out of here by force if they need to. They could send their dogs for me. Better this way.”

  I stopped at the entrance to our shelter and looked back at him.

  “Luke—­you’ve been a good friend. That’s such a rare thing in this world. I want you to know, I appreciate it.”

  He nodded. His eyes were so wide I thought they might bug out of his head.

  Outside the sun was blasting down. It was a truly hot summer day, and the mud under my feet was cracked and almost solid. I walked over to the center of the camp in no great hurry, but not dragging my feet either. I didn’t want anyone to think I was less brave than Fedder.

  I had gone from feeling weightless to feeling like I was made of nothing but light. Like I was an image on a television screen. Probably I felt that way because everyone was watching me.

  When I reached the center of the camp, I stopped and looked up at the guards. A firing squad had gathered up on the catwalks, just as they had for Fedder. If this was how I was going to die, I figured I’d get one last speech in. Or at least I would try. I would keep talking until they shot me down. That would have to be enough.

  “I speak for the camp,” I said.

  Somewhere, inside one of the shelters, someone shouted, “Not for me he doesn’t!” Someone else laughed. I ignored them.

  “I speak for the camp,” I said. “For the positives in the male camp. We have a list of demands that I will now present—­”

  “Pursuant to the Crisis Emergency Powers Act,” the loudspeakers said, just as they had before Fedder was killed, “inciting—­”

  And then, for no reason that I could see, the loudspeakers went silent.

  Silence filled the camp, thou
gh it didn’t last. The soldiers up on the catwalks turned to look at one another, as if they were as confused as I was. Positives started emerging from their shelters, looking at me like I’d worked some kind of miracle.

  It was strange. It made no sense. If I started thinking about it, I knew I would start getting scared. I would run away. So I didn’t think about it.

  “The first of those demands,” I said, my voice weak with tension, so I raised it and shouted, “first of those demands is an immediate resumption of food distribution. Second is the provision of medical care for all positives. Third is—­”

  “Stop.”

  I looked up at the wall, at the nearest loudspeaker. But the voice I’d heard wasn’t amplified. It came from one of the catwalks, from a soldier in a flat cap. He had gold birds on his collar, which I thought must mean he was a high-­ranking officer.

  “You. Patient Finnegan. Come over to the intake center, and we’ll talk about this privately.”

  I frowned. I’d expected to be shot by now. My big plan had been to state the list of demands before I was shot.

  Fortunately I’d made a contingency plan.

  “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. I won’t let you murder me in private where nobody can see. I speak for the camp, and the camp has a right to hear what I say.”

  More and more of the shelter doors were opening up. Positives started emerging into the sunlight. They moved toward me, toward the well. Not all of them. I hadn’t convinced everybody. But at least half the work crews came. Macky’s crew was there. Fedder’s old crew, too, which was being run now by a kid younger and no bigger than me. Plenty of others.

  They moved to stand around me. They didn’t shout or cheer or chant slogans, and they didn’t make any show of violence. They just came and stood with me, there in the line of fire.

  Hundreds of them.

  “I speak for the camp,” I shouted. “We have a list of demands! First of those demands is an immediate resumption of—­”

  The officer lifted an arm, as if he was going to issue the order for my execution. I don’t know if it was an accident or a guard who got scared, or if it had all been planned out from the beginning, but someone fired a shot. I couldn’t see if it hit anyone. It could have been fired into the air.

  The result, regardless, would have been exactly the same.

  The camp went insane.

  Suddenly every positive in the male camp was outside, running one direction or another. A great wave of them staggered back as more shots were fired, and I was nearly knocked off my feet and trampled, but somebody grabbed my arm and pulled me up, helped me get running. The noise of the gunshots was impossible to discern from the shouting, the screaming and wailing, the angry demands and the general roar of hundreds of voices all talking at once. The loudspeakers started roaring again, but I couldn’t hear what they said.

  It was utter chaos.

  Somebody had the idea to start pulling down the shelters. They tore them apart, throwing sheets of corrugated tin and eroded wood into the mud. One of the work sheds came down with a massive crash and a cloud of dust that kept me from seeing even half of what was going on.

  Luke ran up to me out of the mob and shouted my name three times before I even realized he was talking to me. “What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Tell us what to do—­this is just crazy!”

  Macky came up on my left. “If they keep shooting, they’re going to kill half of us in the cross fire,” he said. “You got some plan to keep us from all getting killed?”

  I could only stare at him. He expected me to take charge—­to fix this situation. All I’d wanted to do was present some demands. To try to make life a little better for everyone. Apparently that was enough—­I’d stuck my head up, and now I was responsible for everyone. My immediate reaction was to shrug off that mantle, to refuse to serve. But that wasn’t who I was, not anymore. As soon as I’d taken charge of the SUV, as soon as I’d led the girls here, I’d already made my choice.

  “They won’t listen to us now—­not while all this is going on,” I said, gesturing at the riot around us. It looked like someone had made a pile of broken wood and set it on fire. Meanwhile the occasional shot still rang out from above us, though thankfully I didn’t see any dead bodies. “When this dies down, they’ll just punish us for what we’ve done.”

  “So we need to think about how to control the damage,” Luke said, nodding.

  “No,” I told him. “No. This is the moment—­this is the only chance we’re going to get. If we want this to mean anything, we have to move now, while things are in chaos. It’s the best opportunity we’ll ever have. But we need to make sure we don’t all get killed in the process.”

  I was just thinking out loud, trying to come up with a brilliant idea in the middle of a riot. But Luke and Macky nodded like I’d just said something amazing. They were ready to jump if I gave them a direction.

  “We need some kind of cover,” I said. “Somewhere we can regroup and get ­people organized.”

  “There’s nowhere to go,” Luke said, waving at the camp full of collapsing shelters. “Nowhere to hide in these walls.”

  I stared at him. Because what he’d said made perfect sense to me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “We have to leave.”

  CHAPTER 90

  What?” Macky laughed at me. “Leave? Leave where? The camp? We just walk out of here? And how exactly are we supposed to get through the walls?”

  “We don’t have to. We’ll go through the intake center. The one on the western side of camp. Get everybody moving over that way,” I told him.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Just—­think of something,” I told him.

  He shrugged and pushed his way into the crowd, shouting for ­people to follow him.

  “There’s a fence in the way,” Luke told me.

  “Any twenty of us could tear that fence down,” I pointed out.

  “Not if it’s electrified.”

  I smiled. No, more than that, I let a big, goofy grin erupt across my face. “I’ve got a plan,” I said. “Just get everyone over to the fence.”

  This was something I’d been considering for a while—­how to keep that fence from being electrified. I’d seen what happened every time a new positive entered the camp, how the ravening mob would press up against the fence only to be driven back when the power was turned on. I knew exactly how to keep that from happening.

  Not that it would be easy.

  I ran for cover, dodging around knots of rioting positives, once having to throw myself down into the mud as bullets whizzed over my head. I still hadn’t seen any dead bodies, and I thought maybe the guards had been ordered to fire into the mud, to scare the positives rather than kill them. But even if that was the case—­and it seemed like too much to hope for—­it couldn’t work forever. Eventually one of the positives was going to get shot by accident, if not by intention. And if Macky was successful in getting everyone over to the fence, I had no doubt the guards would use lethal force to protect the camp’s containment. I had to work fast.

  I headed over to the yellow brick pillar that held up the catwalks. ­People rushed past me, screaming, but none of them bothered to look in my direction. I glanced around one last time, to make sure nobody was looking right at me. Then I raised one fist to knock on the side of the pillar.

  The hidden door popped open as soon as I touched it.

  Ike must have known that this was the day. He must have left the door unlocked for me the night before, ready for whatever I had planned.

  If it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t given me that one last chance, it would have been the end of things. It would have been my death.

  But apparently, even after the end of the world, friendship still counts for something.

  CHAPTER 91

 
I reached the level of the catwalks and, still hiding inside the pillar, looked around for a long time, making sure no guards were nearby. If any of them saw me, I had no doubt they would shoot me without warning. When I was sure it was safe, I climbed out of the pillar and crouched down on the catwalk, trying to get my bearings.

  I got a good view from up there of just how far the riot had spread. Nearly half the shelters in the male camp were down by then. Many had been set on fire. A large number of positives had moved toward the western fence, toward the exit from the camp. Right where I wanted them. Clearly Macky and Luke had been hard at work.

  I glanced over at the female camp and saw a weird dichotomy. Over there, there was no riot. The women and girls in the female camp were all pressed up against the fence that separated them from the male camp, but they were standing motionless, only able to watch what was going on.

  I wished I’d had more time, that I could have organized some kind of demonstration over there, but it was too late to think of that. Just then I had to worry about staying alive for another thirty seconds.

  I could see a dozen or so guards from where I crouched. None of them were looking at me—­they were far too busy watching what was happening below them, their rifles trained on the rioting positives. I kept low and moved fast, weaving a circuitous course that would take me as far from them as possible while still heading toward my main goal—­the guardhouse where Ike had fed me MREs from a hot plate. Where I’d gotten to see Kylie. I had to cross half the camp to get there, but my luck held. None of the guards so much as glanced in my direction.

  Inside the guardhouse I breathed a sigh of relief. The little room full of television monitors was empty, all the guards having been called out to quell the riot. I was alone with a dozen views of the camp, playing out in silence on the screens. More important, I was alone with the controls that operated the electric fence.