Positive

by David Wellington

  My mom closed her eyes as if she was already imagining what the lobster would taste like. Then my dad picked up the lobster carefully, wincing a little because it was still boiling hot. He held its body in one hand and the tail in the other and with a kind of flourishing motion snapped the tail section off the rest.

  Black, sludgy liquid poured out and splattered on the kitchen counter. The smell was horrible—­not like sewage, like the worst kind of chemical smell you get from bad water. The meat inside was veined with black and green and fell apart in wet chunks.

  Everyone just stared.

  “Is it supposed to look like that?” I asked, just to fill the silence.

  “No,” my dad said, very quietly. I could tell he was trying very hard not to lose it. “No. It must have been eating bad chemicals from the Hudson. It’s . . . we can’t eat this.”

  My mom still had her eyes closed. Her face screwed up like she’d just been shot or something. Dad put down the lobster and wiped his hands on a towel.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s—­nothing. We got our hopes up, and you know what that always leads to. But it’s all right. We have other things to eat, and—­”

  “It’s not okay,” my mom said. Her eyes were still closed.

  “Honey—­”

  “It’s . . . not . . . okay,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked down at the mess on the counter. The stink was making my eyes water, and she was a lot closer to it. But she grabbed the two pieces of the lobster in her hands.

  “Just throw it out,” my dad tried to say, but she was shaking her head wildly. Tears were gushing from her eyes.

  “It’s not fucking okay! It’s not okay it’s not okay it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s . . .”

  Spit flecked the sides of her mouth, and her hands squeezed the lobster until the black-­veined meat slid out of the shell.

  “It it it,” she said, her mouth twisting around the words. It looked like she was trying to say something else, but the words wouldn’t come. She stared at my dad, and he looked like he was going to panic.

  “I,” she said, one last time. It was the last word she ever said.

  She slammed the lobster shell down on the counter, shattering it into pieces. She punched and smacked the shell fragments until bits of red shell flew everywhere. The spit around her mouth had turned to foam.

  Her eyes were staring at nothing, staring right through us. As we all watched in utter horror, a vein popped inside her left eye and the white slowly filled with blood until her eye was as red as the lobster shell in her hands. Her lips pulled back from her teeth, which suddenly looked very sharp.

  “Dad,” I said. “Dad!”

  But he pushed past me and raced for the door. He shoved Brian out of the way and didn’t even look back as he ran into the hall. Brian couldn’t seem to move.

  My mom lifted the diseased lobster to her mouth and started cramming it inside, shell and all. She looked hungry enough to eat anything, anything she could grab.

  Everybody in the world knew what that meant. Even those of us who’d never seen a zombie before.

  CHAPTER 5

  I could hear myself talking, but it felt like it was somebody else. I don’t know where I was, just, I wasn’t there. Not in my own body. It was too unreal, too impossible.

  “Mom. Just sit down. Sit down and it’ll be okay,” I guess I said.

  I could see Ike edging around the kitchen, always keeping the counter between himself and my mom. I couldn’t see Brian. I didn’t know what he was doing.

  I saw Ike very carefully reaching for a kitchen knife.

  Behind me, where I couldn’t see him, I was certain that Brian was raising his shotgun, ready to shoot my mom.

  My brain was certain that was the correct thing to do. There was no question about it, nothing to debate. There was a zombie in the kitchen. When you saw zombies, you had to shoot them. Or stab them, though we’d been told since birth that was an inferior option and one to be chosen only in emergencies.

  Ike picked the knife up off the counter. Light from the window glinted on the blade, and I was certain everyone for miles could see it.

  “Mom, you have to calm down,” my mouth said. I don’t remember thinking those words, just hearing them. I wasn’t thinking very clearly at all. “Sit down.”

  Any second now Brian’s shotgun would go off. I tensed my muscles in anticipation of the noise and the blast.

  Ike’s hand moved in slow motion. The knife was moving through the air.

  Then my mom spun around and smacked it out of Ike’s hand as if she were swatting a fly. The blade cut deep into the flesh of her index finger, and blood splattered the countertop, flecked the fragments of the lobster shell. Ike screamed and I wondered, idly, if she’d scratched him with her fingernails.

  They tell us zombies don’t feel any pain, that the virus that causes this burns out the thinking parts of their brains. That they don’t feel anything except hunger and thirst. They tell us a lot of things. I guess that one was true.

  “Brian, please,” I guess I said. I’m not sure if I was asking him to shoot her or asking him not to.

  I was the only one talking, the only one making noise. That was a mistake—­it got her attention. She came for me. Her hands reached for me like she was going to give me a hug. Her mouth opened wide like she was going to give me a big kiss.

  This was my mom.

  This used to be my mom.

  My body, it turned out, could act independently from my brain. I lifted one foot and kicked her back across the room, toward the windows. She knocked over half of the herb planters and a stack of plates, which clattered and broke on the floor.

  “Brian,” I said, and turned around, and suddenly it was like the air in the room had changed, like everything snapped into place and locked down and I was thinking and acting in the same body again. “Brian—­”

  He was standing by the door, pressed up against the wall. His shoulders pulled up around his neck. He had dropped the shotgun on the floor, and his mouth hung open as if he’d forgotten how to close it.

  “Not now,” he whispered. “Not after all this time. We were so careful.”

  My mom was back on her feet. Zombies are slow and weak, they tell us. Dangerous only in numbers. One zombie alone is no great threat.

  Some of the things they tell us are probably lies.

  “Finn!” Ike shouted, because she was going for him now. He dove around the side of the counter, but she grabbed his ankle, grabbed him and started reeling him in like a fish.

  I went for the shotgun. Sometimes if you stop and think about things, if you really try to work out what they mean, you are utterly damned. I grabbed the weapon and tried to point it, tried to figure out if there was a safety or not. I’d been trained how to handle firearms—­of course—­but that had been pistols and rifles, not shotguns.

  In the end I swung it like a club. Brought it down like a hammer on my mom’s wrists. She didn’t scream in pain, but she let go of Ike and drew back, hands pulled back like an injured animal.

  I turned the shotgun around in my hands, looking for the trigger, which suddenly I couldn’t find. My hands were sweaty, and I nearly dropped the thing. Was it even loaded? Did Brian keep it loaded?

  I think—­well, in hindsight, I just don’t know. I don’t know what I might have done. I wonder sometimes. Late at night, especially, I wonder if I could have shot my own mom.

  I didn’t have to. Ike stood up next to me and snatched the gun out of my hands. I was shocked at how rough the motion was, how my finger nearly got caught in the trigger guard. He could have broken my finger.

  I was supposed to be the mature one. I guess not.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” he said, because I wasn’t moving fast enough. I grabbed Brian
and ran out of the apartment, into the darkness of the hall. Up and down the way, every door was open. ­People were leaning out of their doors, looking for what was making so much noise. I let go of Brian and dropped to my knees on the hallway carpeting. I couldn’t stand up anymore.

  All those ­people watching me.

  There was the sound, which I was expecting but it still made me jump. I’m sure you’ve heard a shotgun fired before.

  One by one, the ­people in the hallway nodded to themselves. Bit their lips and nodded, because they knew the right thing had been done. And then they went back inside, closing their doors behind them, leaving me there in the dark of the corridor.

  I don’t remember if I cried.

  CHAPTER 6

  I guess it was Brian who led me downstairs and sent me to the hospital. It was funny, you got used to the first generation never doing much of anything, wasting all the time they had left. But when somebody zombied out, they moved like lightning. They took Ike and me down in the ambulance, the first time either of us had ever ridden in a car. We were fine, and I couldn’t figure out why they were making such a fuss. The ambulance had to go slow, crawling over debris and potholes for the three-­block ride. The siren ran the whole time, which made it impossible for us to talk.

  Ike was covered in blood. My mom’s blood. It had ruined his clothes, smeared on his face. He looked calm and okay. I don’t know what I looked like.

  The hospital was just another building, a five-­story building with a shop front that still had its plate glass. Inside you could see ­people lying on beds, staring at one another, at the walls. Most of the ­people in the front room were first generation. Vegetable types, the kind who just never recovered after the crisis. Sometimes they can work; if you put a hoe or a trowel in their hands, they’ll garden away all day until you tell them to stop. Sometimes they just lie down in their beds and don’t get up again.

  Nobody looked at us as we were hurried through, into back rooms. The ­people in charge of us—­I don’t remember who they were—­split us up pretty fast. I didn’t have a chance to say anything to Ike. What would I have said? Thank you? I hate you because you killed my mom? I understand you did what you had to do, so thank you, but I still hate you? I didn’t even look at him.

  The room they put me in was empty except for two chairs. It was probably a closet of some kind originally—­it wasn’t big. The walls were painted a pristine white. Everything in the hospital is clean. An electric light was burning in the ceiling, even in the middle of the day, which felt wrong to me. There were no windows, so without the light it would have been pitch-­black in there.

  My dad came by a while later. He looked into the room where I was waiting and smiled at me, but it was the worst smile I’d ever seen. Totally fake, and we both knew it, and still there was nothing to say. Someone came and took his arm and led him away, and I continued to wait.

  Eventually a doctor came and sat in the chair across from me.

  I knew why he was there.

  “I wasn’t bitten,” I told him. I held out my arms and my hands. He glanced at them, but like he was just being polite. “She foamed up a lot, but I didn’t get any of the saliva on me. I did touch her once, but just with my shoe.”

  He nodded and looked at a piece of paper he was holding.

  “I know how to be careful,” I told him. He hadn’t said a word. “I’ve heard it all, on the radio, from my—­my parents. From everybody. I know how it spreads. You can’t get it from casual contact. You have to exchange body fluids. This was my mom we’re talking about. That would be gross.”

  He nodded in agreement but still said nothing.

  “What else?” I said. I was talking to myself. “Blood transfusions, but we never had to do that. She kissed me plenty of times, but only on the head or on the cheek. There was a lot of—­of blood at the end there, she cut herself on a knife, but I didn’t touch it. I never touched the blood. And I wasn’t there when she was shot. I wasn’t in the room. I’m telling you, there’s no way I could have got the virus.”

  He sighed and looked down at his paper again. I was starting to wonder if he was even a doctor. He was dressed like anybody else, like me. I’d never met him before, which was unusual but not weird. It’s a big city, New York. I couldn’t know everybody.

  “I’m clean,” I told him.

  I knew why I’d been isolated, of course. I knew how important it was to stay clean. Maybe I’d never seen a zombie before, but that didn’t mean I was an idiot. If there’s even a chance that somebody’s infected, that’s a reason for everybody to worry. This disease takes a long time to incubate. You can have it for twenty years and never show a sign, and then one day—­it just happens. Out of nowhere. My mom was probably infected during the crisis, maybe she got a bite or she accidentally got some blood in her mouth. To listen to ­people like Brian talk, that kind of thing happened all the time. You could be infected and not know it. The only symptom is a bad headache a ­couple of days before you finally go, and sometimes ­people don’t even get that. I’m willing to bet my dad had no idea. That he didn’t know that for twenty years he’d been married to a woman who was a time bomb, ticking down her humanity, ticking down her time left.

  The only reason New York was so safe, so perfect, was because ­people had learned never, ever to trust someone who might have the virus. They’d learned what to do, how to fight back against this thing that nearly wiped out the human race. Proper hygiene and quarantine was the only weapon we had.

  So if there was even a chance I was infected, that was going to be a major problem. I thought I knew what would happen to Ike. The amount of blood on him, when I saw him in the ambulance—­there was no way he hadn’t been exposed. I remember feeling so sorry for him. He’d done this thing, this horrible fucked-­up thing that was the very definition of nobility and sacrifice. And they were probably going to have to . . . well, they could . . .

  I didn’t want to think about what they were going to do to him.

  Or my dad. My dad had been sleeping with my mom for twenty years. Sexual contact is one of the best ways to get this thing. It’s even more likely than a bite.

  I could feel it all piling up. I could feel my whole life being taken from me, piece by piece. My family. My best friend. But I was okay. I was clean. I knew it.

  “I’m clean,” I said again. “I mean, maybe she had it when she was pregnant with me. Maybe she had it even then. But it can’t cross the placenta, right? You can’t give it to your baby. They say that all the time on the radio. There were all those women who had abortions, and they wanted to stop that, so they ran a whole series of announcements about it. You can’t give it to your unborn baby.”

  The doctor, or whoever it was, nodded. That was true. Everyone knew it was true. I didn’t get it in the womb. I didn’t get it from her blood or a bite or anything else. I was clean, I would be fine, and even with all the fucked-­up things that had happened that day, at least I was safe. I had no idea how I would pick up the pieces of my life and move on, but I would. I was sure of it. I was going to walk out of that room.

  “We’re good, right?” I asked. “I haven’t forgotten anything, have I? There’s no way I could have it. No way I could be infected.”

  He looked me right in the eye and there was something so sad in his expression, so piteous, that I wanted to scream. No, I was right. I was certain of it. I’d gone through the checklist a hundred times in my head and I was clean.

  “Breast milk,” he said.

  CHAPTER 7

  I’m not sure why I didn’t fight them. Not that it would have done any good. They’d had twenty years to figure this out. If the first generation knew anything, it was how to deal with physical violence. They moved me to an even smaller room with a locked door, nobody touching me more than they absolutely needed to. They handcuffed me and strapped me to a rolling chair and just shoved me through
the door and slammed it behind me. I could do nothing but shout that I was clean, that this was unnecessary.

  I was about eighty percent certain that the next time the door opened, someone would point a gun through it and shoot me in the back of the head.

  There’s no wiggle room, you see.

  There can’t be. The crisis taught them that. The year when ninety-­nine percent of the human race died, because they didn’t know how to do this. They had wasted far too much effort on mercy and compassion and other niceties. Things they couldn’t afford then. They still couldn’t.

  Zombies aren’t human. They are wild animals, and they have to be put down. And if someone is a positive—­if there’s even a chance he or she has the virus—­the person is no better than the zombies.

  Maybe a little better.

  The next time the door opened, it wasn’t so they could kill me. It was so the mayor could come in. He was carrying a folding chair, which he set up in front of me so we could talk. Someone else came in behind him, but I couldn’t see who it was—­that person stayed behind me the whole time. A buzzing sound started up, a weird electrical noise. And then something sharp and hot touched the back of my left hand.

  I tried to jerk my hand away but it was restrained perfectly, tied down just so. Like I said, they’d done this before.

  “We feel just terrible about this,” the mayor told me. He was smiling, that warm uncle smile he has. The first generation all trust that smile for some reason. I always expected it to open up on rows of shark teeth. “You know we wouldn’t want it this way, not if we had a choice, right, Finn?”

  Behind me a needle dug again and again into the flesh of my hand. It hurt, a lot. I gritted my teeth and refused to scream. It wasn’t just defiance that kept me from making a noise. I wanted to convince the mayor I was still human. That this had all been a terrible mistake. I still thought, at that moment, that this could all be reversed. That if I could just explain things, I could be let go. Allowed to go back home and rejoin society.