Positive

by David Wellington

  Of course there were dead bodies. There were dead bodies all over Manhattan, way too many of them for us to ever clear away. The building where I lived with my family was twenty stories high, of which we used the bottom four. Nobody ever went to the sixteen floors above us; statistically speaking, there had to be at least a ­couple dead ­people living upstairs from us. I tried not to think about that.

  So much lost. They tell me when the end came and the power went out, the whole subway system flooded after only two days. Millions of ­people used to use those trains every hour of every day, and in just two days it was all gone, with nothing to show for all that engineering and hard work.

  My rope caught and I sat down, sighing. I gave it some tentative tugs this way, then that. Sometimes a rope shook free the first time. Usually not. I settled in to work at it. Ike was having more luck—­his line hadn’t snagged at all, and he was nearly at its end. A ­couple more tugs and his trap came bumping up the stairs, a big brown box made of recycled wood. A funnel made of chicken wire was mounted at one end, narrower where it opened to the water and wider where it met the trap so crabs could climb in but had a hard time climbing back out.

  I kept tugging at my line, twitching it this way and that. Maybe some playful octopus was tugging back at it, undoing all my progress. My brain started to wander again until Ike dropped his trap and jumped back.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “What is that?”

  I dropped my line and jumped up the steps with him, having no idea what he’d found. He looked like he might run away. Below us, half in the water, something long and brownish green was thrashing inside the trap.

  I glanced at Ike. He wasn’t going near the thing. He was great with dead stuff, but live things creeped him out. I took a step down the stairs, toward the trap, intending to get a better look.

  Inside the trap was a creature I’d never seen before. It had claws like a crab but a lot bigger. It was maybe two feet long, whereas the crabs we caught were never bigger than our hands. This thing looked more like a cockroach than anything I’d caught before. Its long segmented body ended in an armored fishlike tail. Its two globular black eyes stared at me in the flickering torchlight.

  Behind us Brian came clattering down the stairs, shotgun raised and pointed at the water. “What is it?” he demanded. “What the hell did you see?”

  Ike pointed mutely at the thing in the trap.

  Brian lowered his gun. “Fucking no way,” he said. “You caught a lobster?”

  “Kick it back in the water,” I said. “Just let it go, and maybe it’ll leave us alone.”

  “What’s a lobster doing this far south?” Brian asked. He reached down, utterly fearless now, and grabbed it, his fingers weaving through its flailing legs. Its claws swung around and tried to grab for him but couldn’t quite reach. Brian held it up in the air and we saw its underside, what looked like dozens of legs pawing at the air. Water dripped from its shell onto the subway steps.

  “Just—­just throw it back,” I suggested.

  “Hell, no,” Brian said. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

  “You can eat those things?” Ike asked, with a shiver. “I will never, in a million years, eat anything that looks that much like a roach.”

  “What about you, Finn?” Brian asked.

  “You can have some, since you kind of helped catch it,” I told him. I couldn’t afford to let food out of my hands. I had a family to take care of. Even if eating the thing seemed about as attractive as trying to make a meal out of a drawer full of steak knives.

  CHAPTER 3

  Everyone wanted to see the lobster.

  As we headed up Broadway the sun made yellow rectangles on the high buildings, glinting where the windows hadn’t been broken by the wind and the rain. Brian looked excited and kept up with our fast pace, barely even scanning the side streets as we passed them. By the time we reached Thirty-­Third Street we began to see other second-­generation ­people out and about, at work on one project or another—­shifting old cars off the weed-­cracked roads, cleaning up the debris where a sign or a window had fallen into the street in the night. My generation likes to keep busy, even if there’s no point to it.

  “Come look,” Brian kept shouting. “You won’t believe this.” One by one the others came racing over, hungry for any new excitement. The ­couple of first-­generation ­people there—­those few who would actually come this far downtown—­stared into my bucket with naked greed on their faces. They shook their heads and smiled with half their mouths and told us how lucky we were.

  “Do you think there will be more?” they asked, and I knew that starting the next day the subway stations would be crowded with fishers. We ate just fine in Manhattan, don’t get me wrong—­between what the government gave us and our rooftop gardens and the crabs and eels we pulled up, we made sure nobody went to bed hungry. But because we ate the same things week after week, year after year, the promise of some new dish was enough to get ­people salivating. “What kind of bait did you use?”

  “Just some old fish guts,” I told them, and they nodded sagely, like everybody knew that was how you attracted lobsters.

  On Thirty-­Eighth Street, a bunch of kids—­younger than Ike, some of them barely old enough to be set free in the streets—­came up and looked in the bucket and screamed, laughing, and danced away as the lobster waved its green claws at them. We knew all about crabs—­claws were nothing new—­but these were huge and fat and they looked like they could take your fingers off. By this point the lobster was getting sluggish and only waved one claw at the kids halfheartedly, but it was enough to make them jump back.

  We skirted around the edge of Times Square, staying well clear of the roped-­off areas. There used to be a million lightbulbs in those ­couple of blocks, my dad had told me. He said when they were all lit up, the night sky glowed with a kind of haze of light. Like most things he tells me about the time before the crisis, it was just words to me. Nights in Manhattan get really dark, since the skyscrapers block the moon and the stars. Those million lightbulbs hadn’t been turned on in twenty years, and most of them were down in the street now, torn down by wind and rain and lightning strikes. Broken glass made an ankle-­deep carpet in Times Square, a field of glittering gem-­bright snow nobody had ever bothered to clean up.

  The buildings we lived in were well to the west, closer to the river though still protected from the wind and the rain by the shoulders of high buildings on every side. There was no one at the guard posts when we arrived, which wasn’t too surprising—­it was springtime and everyone was working in the gardens, weeding and planting and scaring off birds. Only about a hundred ­people were down in the street. A gang of them were breaking up the concrete of the road with picks and claw hammers, pulling up the debris and carting it off in wheelbarrows. That ground would be better used for plants that didn’t need much light.

  Someone must have run ahead and told everybody we were coming. There was a throng of ­people waiting outside my building, just standing around talking quietly, their eyes darting in our direction as we approached. Sticking close by the door in case they had to run back inside. As we came up to the front door, the crowd parted and the mayor stepped out of the lobby, his two bodyguards keeping their traditional places right behind his shoulders.

  Jimmy Foster had been in charge of New York City as long as I could remember. Elections were held every so often, but nobody ever ran against him. My dad said nobody else wanted the job, but my mom wasn’t so sure—­she thought maybe if someone else did try to run for mayor, that person would get a friendly warning in the night, and then a not-­so-­friendly visit from the bodyguards if the potential candidate didn’t withdraw his or her name. Foster was a big guy. He’d been big through the shoulders when I was younger, but his age was starting to melt the muscles off him. During the crisis, twenty years ago, supposedly he’d been in charge of o
ne of the refugee shelters where ­people hid from the zombies, and he had a bad scar on one palm where they said he’d been shot by a looter, the bullet passing right through his hand. It always felt weird and rough when he shook your hand, which he did every time he talked to you. He took mine now and pumped it a ­couple of times, and then he turned and waved at the crowd. Maybe he was expecting them to cheer. Instead they just all looked impatient and like they wanted to see the lobster.

  “If we had any butter, I’d buy that thing off you, kid,” Foster said. A ­couple ­people in the crowd laughed at that. I didn’t understand what he meant. “I guess you and your folks are eating good tonight. Any chance of an invite to dinner?”

  I just shrugged and tried to press through the mass of bodies, intending to get inside before the lobster died in my bucket. You’re not supposed to eat dead crabs, and I figured the same rule applied to lobsters.

  “This is a big day,” Mayor Foster announced, and his bodyguards nodded vigorously. “It goes to show how things are turning around. Our lives are back on track, ­people. Haven’t I been saying that for a while now? Huh?”

  Some of the crowd agreed with a halfhearted yes. They were pushing their way toward me, struggling a little with one another. Just behind me I could hear Brian gasping for breath. He was watching the crowd very carefully, like he expected them to rush us and take the lobster for themselves. It was a big monster, but it couldn’t feed more than a ­couple of them, so I didn’t see why they would bother.

  Brian rubbed the stock of his shotgun. The wood there was shiny and had lost its grain from all the times he’d done that.

  “We work hard,” Mayor Foster announced. “We work hard, and we live good. Right? Am I right?”

  He seemed not to be paying attention to me anymore. I ducked under his upraised arms and shoved my way through the crowd. Most of them were first generation and didn’t offer any resistance; they just moved back, swaying in that kind of boneless way they get. Like they’re afraid of anybody touching them. I stepped into the cool darkness of the lobby, and a second later Ike and Brian joined me.

  “That could have gone bad,” Brian said. “You kids don’t know what a crowd can do. A real crowd.”

  “There aren’t any more real crowds,” Ike pointed out.

  As I started up the stairs, he was still following me. “What do you want?” I asked him. “You already said you would never eat this thing.”

  “Yeah,” he told me, “but I want to see how you kill it.”

  I sighed in disgust and headed up the stairs, Brian needlessly guarding my back. What was he so afraid of? What were they all afraid of, all the time? Life was good.

  In Manhattan, life was really good.

  CHAPTER 4

  We lived on the fourth floor, which was a pain only because the stairwell got so dark, even during the day. All the doors were propped open, and a little light came through from windows on the various floors, but still it was way too easy to trip and fall on those steps. The light on the third floor was blocked, and when I got up there, I saw why—­old Mrs. Hengshott was standing in the doorway, half her body hidden by the doorframe. She almost never came out of her place anymore, relying on her cousins to bring her what she needed. She was wearing an old patched bathrobe and her white hair was all twisted to one side, but her eyes were bright when I showed her the lobster.

  “They’re bottom-­feeders,” she said, tapping one of its claws. The lobster tried to scuttle backward in its plastic bucket and curl up on itself. “Five hundred years ago, in Boston, they used to pull up lobsters six feet long. They fished out all the big ones, though, and only these little fry were left. You boil them alive, and they scream when the water gets hot enough. Then they turn bright red and you can eat ’em.”

  This was getting weirder by the second, but my mom had taught me to respect my elders, so I just nodded politely and let her go on and on. My mom had told me Mrs. Hengshott was big in computers back before, which is a skill set there’s not much call for anymore. She said Mrs. Hengshott was a geek, but she could never quite explain what that meant, except she knew lots of stuff nobody cared about. By my estimate, there are a whole lot of geeks in Manhattan now.

  “Must have come down from up north,” she went on. “Swum down the Long Island Sound. The water must be getting colder, now we’ve fixed global warming.” She laughed, which wasn’t the cackling kind of sound you’d expect but sounded more like a little girl laughing. “Took care of that little problem. Might be interesting to set up a temperature-­monitoring station in the Hudson, track what’s going on.”

  “Sure,” I said, though it sounded like the stupidest idea ever. The river was too polluted to swim in, and the fish were all toxic, so who cared how cold the water was? “Well, thanks for the info, Mrs. Hengshott—­”

  “Probably decreased levels of mercury, too, though the runoff from the industrial cities up north is a concern.”

  “Uh-­huh. Thanks again,” I said, walking backward up the stairs. Ike made a face at her, and she disappeared in a blink, slamming the door behind her, making the stairwell even darker.

  At my floor, a candle was burning by the door, waiting for me. I guess my mom and dad had heard I was coming home early. I led Brian and Ike to my door and pushed it open with my shoulder. Inside, the apartment was pretty bright compared to the hall, and I had to let my eyes adjust for a second. My dad was in the front room working on the wall where the plaster had been damaged by water leaking down from above. He’d been working on that wall for over a year now. Had to teach himself how to work with plaster, which wasn’t easy when he never really left the apartment. He put down his trowel when he saw me, and he was all smiles.

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  I held up my bucket, and the lobster obliged by tapping one antenna against the side, a dry, nasty little sound. “It was really Ike who got it,” I said, gesturing at my friend. “He doesn’t want it, though.”

  “You’re crazy if you actually eat that thing. How are you going to break the shell? It’s huge. You’d need a sledgehammer or something,” Ike said.

  “More for the rest of us,” my dad said. “Brian, hi, good to see you.”

  Brian gave him a stiff nod.

  My dad led us all back to the kitchen.

  “Let me see, let me see,” my mom said, rushing over. She was wearing her overalls, and her hands were still dirty from working in the garden on the roof. She always said she needed to get out in the sunshine or she would go crazy, but of course, going down to street level was a bit much. She kissed me on the top of the head before she even looked in the bucket. When she did, there were tears in her eyes. “I used to have a lobster every year, for my birthday,” she said, just standing there, staring at it. “Your dad and I used to go up to Maine, to Acadia, for vacations before you were born—­you could get a lobster everywhere. I chipped a tooth one year sucking the meat out of a leg.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Ike said.

  The oven in our kitchen was electric, and we never got enough juice to make it work. It was good for food storage, though, since rats couldn’t gnaw through its metal walls. We did our cooking in a little firebox with a plastic chimney that ran out the window. My dad had nearly asphyxiated us a ­couple of times while building that, but it worked pretty well now. Mom had a pot of water already boiling over the coals. She grabbed the lobster, not even trying to be careful with its claws, and dumped it inside the pot. She put a lid on it and told me to set the table. Ike helped. Meanwhile Brian stood near the door with his shotgun. Standing guard. As if Mrs. Hengshott or the mayor might come bursting in with guns to take our lobster away. I smiled and rolled my eyes, and my dad laughed and punched me in the arm.

  “Be nice,” he whispered. “You have no idea what it was like, during the crisis. We all had to learn to be paranoid. It takes longer for some of us to unlearn things, you k
now?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I really didn’t understand at all. I mean, the world is what it is, right? They tell me it was different before. I don’t know. It must have been just as dangerous, especially with all those cars shooting up and down the streets. How could you even walk anywhere?

  The lobster made some pretty freaky sounds as it boiled, though I don’t think it really screamed.

  I felt pretty good. I was home with my family and some friends. We had food to eat, even a special treat if what they all said was true and lobster was better than crabmeat. We had a place to live that was warm and dry, and an hour of electricity every night when the government sent us fuel for the big generators.

  Now, looking back, I realize just how perfect it all was. Back before all this—­before I got my tattoo. It was like paradise. Hard to hold on to that kind of perfection. But we did it. We kept it going.

  While the lobster cooked, Ike and I made a salad with lettuce from the roof and herbs from the window gardens. My mom and dad moved around the kitchen almost as if they were dancing, smiling and clutching each other’s hands. It was great to see them like that—­like most first-­generation ­people, they rarely seemed actually happy. Even Brian seemed more, well, more there than he usually was. He turned the crank on the radio and we pulled in the Emergency Broadcast Ser­vice. In between tips on boiling all your water and how to make a tourniquet, they played some old music. Music from before always sounded to me like it was coming from a much louder world, like it had to compete with all the other sounds. Now it felt like the musicians were right in the room with us, crowding us. But my parents loved it when they played music, so I didn’t mind too much.

  When the time came, my mom opened up the pot and grabbed the lobster out with a pair of tongs. It had turned bright red, just like Mrs. Hengshott predicted. It was like a magic trick, I guess. My dad hushed everyone while he prepared to crack it open. “A claw for Brian, and one for Finn. You and me, honey, we’ll share the tail, all right?”