“You’re twenty-one years old. It’s been more than twenty years since you were potentially infected. That means you’re not a positive anymore.” He gave me a gentle smile. “If you’d like, I can have you flown back to New York. You can start a new life there.”
I laughed. “Seriously?”
“Oh, yes,” the man replied.
“Thanks, but . . . I don’t know. For one thing, I’ve been exposed to so many zombies over the last year or so, I can’t imagine I’m actually clean. I’ve got to be infected, right? And for another, well, you know so much about me. You must know I’ve already made a new life for myself in Hearth. With the woman I love.”
“And soon a baby,” he said, and a beatific smile lit up his face. It was like he’d never been happier in his life than imagining Kylie and me and our baby. “Exactly what I expected you to say, of course. I just wanted to let you know you had options. All right. I have a lot of things to see to, but while we have this chance, I wanted to ask you one thing.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What can we do for you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re a hero, young man. You and your town took care of a hundred stalkers, troops of the cult we didn’t have to fight here. Beyond that—there’s the fact that you’re rebuilding. It’s been twenty years. I’ve spent all that time putting out fires, fighting insurgencies, achieving nothing. In the last year you created a new walled town and showed that it could thrive. I respect that, more than I think you know.”
“Okay,” I said again, not getting it. What I’d done—it hadn’t been so I could help the army.
It didn’t seem to matter, not to him.
“You’re not a soldier, so I can’t give you a medal. But I’d like to give you something to show my respect. Something for your town. What’ll it be, Finnegan? Do you need a water purification still? Guns to fight off zombies? A herd of cattle?”
I thought about it for a second. “We can get or make all those for ourselves. If we don’t know how yet, we’ll learn.”
He nodded approvingly.
“I’ll tell you what we want, actually,” I said, having a sudden inspiration. “We want people.”
“People?”
“You have a medical camp in Akron. I, uh, I kind of emptied that one out. But there’s another one somewhere out west of here, I think.”
“In Pasadena, yes.”
I took a breath. “I want the people from that one, too.”
“The positives.”
“That’s who lives in Hearth.”
“Positives,” he said. He smiled. Then he held out his hand for me to shake. He laughed for a second, then held out his left hand, since I couldn’t use my right.
CHAPTER 151
It took a while for them all to get to Hearth, all the patients from the camp in Pasadena, but they’re here now. All the positives who were still being shipped to Akron, too—they come here now instead, in twos and threes, flown in by army helicopter. And Hearth grows. It gets bigger every day, and we’re not afraid of the coming winter.
It grows another way, too.
In case you’re wondering, it was a girl. Kylie gave birth to a little girl, just a little over seven pounds, easily the most beautiful child who ever lived. If you ask me.
We named her Heather.
We didn’t tattoo her little hand, and we’re not going to.
About the Author
Photo by Jennifer Dikes
DAVID WELLINGTON was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where George Romero’s classic zombie films were shot. He is the author of an online zombie serial, the Monster Island trilogy; Thirteen Bullets, a serialized vampire novel; and the Jim Chapel missions, including the digital shorts “Minotaur” and “Myrmidon,” and the novels Chimera and The Hydra Protocol. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Also by David Wellington
Jim Chapel Missions
Chimera
“Minotaur”
“Myrmidon”
The Hydra Protocol
Monster Island
Monster Nation
Monster Planet
13 Bullets
99 Coffins
Vampire Zero
23 Hours
32 Fangs
Frostbite
Overwinter
Den of Thieves (as David Chandler)
A Thief in the Night (as David Chandler)
Honor Among Thieves (as David Chandler)
Credits
Cover design by Adam Johnson.
Cover photographs: road © by Jayne Szekely/Arcangel Images; woman/car © Shutterstock.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Harper Voyager and design is a trademark of HCP LLC.
POSITIVE. Copyright © 2015 by David Wellington. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-231537-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-240035-2 (international edition)
EPub Edition MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780062315380
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Positive: A Novel Page 46