Positive

by David Wellington

  I really, really didn’t want her to see me there.

  CHAPTER 24

  Adare parked the car outside the large concrete building, and we all piled out of the SUV. I was at least glad for the opportunity to stretch my legs. We had to completely unload the vehicle—­Adare told me that anything left inside would be stolen by the time we returned in the morning—­and then we all headed inside. The building’s interior was stained with smoke, and every possible surface was covered in graffiti. I think it was some kind of office building once, but the looters had turned it into a hostel. He took us up the stairs to a metal door, which he hammered on with one fist. The man who answered was bleary eyed and half dressed, as if he’d been asleep when we showed up. He had tattoos all up and down both arms and a piece of jagged metal shoved through the septum of his nose. His back was ridged with muscle, and he looked pretty dangerous.

  He was about a foot shorter than Adare, though, and perhaps half of Adare’s weight.

  “Adare?” he asked, blinking his eyes.

  “This is my spot,” Adare told him.

  “What? But I just got here,” the man said.

  Adare sighed as if he regretted what was about to happen. Then he wrapped an arm around the man’s neck and dragged him through the doorway and over to the top of the stairs. “You want to go down headfirst or feetfirst?” he asked.

  “No, no, it’s not like that,” the man said. “That spot, it’s all yours!”

  “Like I said. You got any crap in there you need to clear out? Got a girl in for the night?”

  “No, no,” the man replied. “I was just leaving. All packed and everything!”

  “Good.”

  Adare let him go then, shirtless and with his pants unbuttoned. I must have looked confused, because Kylie whispered to me, “They’re all afraid of Adare. He’s like a legend around here. He doesn’t start fights often, but he ends fights all the time.” It sounded like another slogan that she’d memorized.

  Adare pushed open the metal door and led us all inside. Beyond lay a pair of rooms near the back of the building, tiny, cramped spaces full of ancient metal filing cabinets. Mattresses without sheets lay on the floor, and it was clear this was where we were going to sleep. The only light in the room came from a single kerosene lantern that guttered low as if it were nearly out of fuel. Next to it lay the previous tenant’s abandoned shirt and a half-­empty can of beans.

  “Stones, I’m counting on you to keep my girls safe,” Adare told me, and he put one finger along the side of his nose in a gesture he clearly thought I would understand. I didn’t. “I’ll be in the next room. If there’s real trouble, just holler.”

  “Is that likely?” I asked.

  “No. But with this crowd, you never know. Not a lot of rule followers, right? Not a one of ’em is like us. You got that knife. You’ll be fine.”

  I expected him to leave then, but instead he just leaned against the doorframe. The girls laid down their various burdens—­the loot we’d taken from the suburban houses, the water supply, the various gear and tools and weapons from the SUV—­and sank wearily onto the mattresses. None of them looked up or made eye contact with either me or Adare. Kylie went in one corner and squatted down with the youngest of the girls, whose name I’d learned was Addison. She sat in such a way to block Addison from Adare’s view.

  “Heather,” Adare said.

  Heather was maybe thirteen years old, and very skinny. She had hair that might have been red if it was clean. She flinched as if she’d been struck when he called her name, but she didn’t protest as he held out his hand toward her. She just went with him, not so much as glancing back.

  I closed the door behind them and looked over at Kylie. “What does he want with her?” I asked. “Somebody to wash his clothes, make his food, something like that?”

  I was not, of course, that naive. I was merely hopeful.

  Kylie looked up at me, but her eyes were blank.

  The walls of the office building were quite thin. It was soon obvious what Adare was doing to Heather in the next room over. I don’t want to dwell on this. It sickens me just remembering it. But I won’t pretend that life in the wilderness was different from how it was.

  I crouched down in the corner farthest from the separating wall, though I could still hear everything regardless of the distance. I tried to eat a little something—­we had a bag full of smoked meat and some cans of cut corn—­but I couldn’t seem to choke anything down.

  “Just—­just pretend it’s something else,” I told the girls. “Pretend he’s doing exercises in there, or something.”

  They looked at me with utter disdain. They were, of course, old hands at this. They’d been listening to those sounds every night since Adare acquired them. There was no doubt in my mind that they all took turns going with him when the day was over, and that they knew exactly what Heather was experiencing in the next room.

  “I’m sorry,” I told them. I may have said other things. I may have tried to justify why I was just sitting there, doing nothing. I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t want to remember this too clearly.

  Eventually the kerosene lantern burned out. A trace of moonlight came through the room’s single small window. The sounds from the next room had stopped by then. I dozed off, but only for a few minutes.

  When I woke with a snort, I looked around, for a moment forgetful of where I was. I saw the gleam of an eye staring at me and saw Addison watching me, watching me like a tiger or a feral dog she’d been locked up with. I tried to smile at her, but she didn’t respond. I needed to pee, so I slowly stood up and moved toward the door. It was then I noticed something was missing.

  Kylie wasn’t in the room. The little window was open, lifted just far enough to let someone her size climb out.

  If Adare found out she had run away on my watch, I knew I’d be in serious trouble. I depended on him for everything. I went over to Addison and questioned her, not so gently. She told me nothing.

  I went to the window and stared out. There was no sign of Kylie, of course, just the parking lot lit by trash-­can fires and in the distance, the looming white shapes of the tanks.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I had to go out and find Kylie. I looked around at the sleeping girls. I couldn’t leave them unprotected. Grunting a little, I moved a ­couple filing cabinets in front of the door so no one could break in without some trouble. Then I went over to the window and looked out. I saw plenty of ledges and windowsills below me. Kylie could have easily climbed down, and I figured I could as well. I nearly slipped as I headed down the side of the building. I managed to catch a handhold just in time as my heart raced and my lungs panted for breath. In the end I reached the ground without killing myself.

  Where to go next was a big question. I figured Kylie wouldn’t have gone over to where the last of the looters was partying in the lot—­alone and without weapons she would have been in real danger there. So I turned instead and headed into the dark, toward a line of high tanks at the edge of the camp.

  As I approached them, I saw the silhouette of a slender person perched on top of one of the tanks. It had to be Kylie. I expected her to duck down or run away when she saw me, but she didn’t.

  She didn’t wave or give me any other sign that she wanted to see me, but I didn’t expect anything like that from her. A narrow stairway led up around the side of the tank, curving around its massive shape. I hurried up toward her, even though the rusting steps creaked and threatened to give way under my weight. At the top, in the cool night air, I could hear the whole tank singing, a high-­pitched wailing and popping and moaning as the metal corroded beneath me. A single note constantly changing in pitch, distinctly unnerving. As I headed along the catwalk to where Kylie sat. I sat down next to her. She didn’t react at all to my presence.

  “Are you running away? I wouldn’t blame you. Listen, I had no
idea that he was using you like this. That he was—­”

  I couldn’t finish the thought.

  “He’s a man. We’re girls. What part of this surprises you?” she asked. Like a man keeping a harem of underage girls was the most natural thing in the world. This was the wilderness, her tone said. Such things were to be expected.

  “I’m not running away,” she said. “I just came out here to be by myself for a while,” she told me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “How far could I get on foot? You’re an idiot.”

  “Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. “Listen. I’m going to Ohio. There’s a medical camp there, for ­people like us. I’m not going to live like this.”

  There was no response. I might have been talking to the moon.

  “Come with me. You’re a positive, like me. They’ll take care of us there.”

  She said nothing.

  “Damn it,” I said, nearly shouting. “How can you just accept all this? How can you pretend like this is normal?”

  She turned to look at me then, and for the first time I heard real emotion in her voice.

  “Are you going to save me, Finnegan? Is that why you left New York? To save me? Or do you just want to fuck me?”

  “What?”

  “You’re a man. That’s what men do.” The smile was gone, and with it, her voice fell back into its old flat monotone. “Well, I’m sorry. But I’m spoken for.”

  CHAPTER 25

  She didn’t tell me to leave. She didn’t order me off the tank and back to the tiny little room in the concrete building. As quickly as it had come, the emotion in her fled again and she shut down once more. So I sat down next to her, because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, either. Ohio seemed very far away.

  Together we sat and watched the looters as their party raged into the night. From up there they didn’t seem so bad. By that time some of them had gotten drunk enough to pass out in their cars or just flat out on the asphalt. Others were singing a song together, wrapping their arms around each other. One guy was bent over the hood of his car, painting intricate flames with a tiny brush. I doubted he could even see what he was doing—­the only light came from the oil drum fires, and that was nearly as bad as the moonlight—­but he’d been at it for hours.

  “They love those cars,” I said, just to hear myself talk.

  “They have to. A looter on foot, out in the wilderness, is just zombie food. And the cars are all twenty years old, so they need constant repairs and attention.”

  I hadn’t considered the fact that nobody in the world had built a new car in twenty years. The looters’ cars gleamed in the firelight as if they’d just been washed and detailed. The chrome on their bumpers was immaculate, unblemished by dings or scratches.

  By way of contrast, the motorcycles parked to one side of the lot were covered in dust and grease, and they lacked the flowing lines and careful craftsmanship of the cars. Many of them looked as if they’d been assembled out of spare parts, sometimes parts that didn’t quite fit together and had to be strapped down with duct tape or bent pieces of sheet metal. I thought of the huts near the gate, constructed out of whatever their inhabitants could find. The motorcycles looked equally slapdash.

  Adare had said that the motorcyclist looters were all crazy, and I had no reason to doubt it. Some of them were down there now, fitting new parts onto their makeshift contraptions, or carefully adding or removing fluids from their small engines. Overseeing the work was a figure I could barely make out, but which I definitely recognized. I’d know that fur coat anywhere.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Kylie, pointing out the woman whose knife I’d taken.

  “Her? That’s Red Kate. She has her own crew. They take orders from her.”

  I couldn’t help pushing Kylie a little. “Sounds like the kind of woman who doesn’t just accept the way things are.”

  “She’s from down in the Pine Barrens, originally. Things are different there,” Kylie said. “Much worse. I’ve heard stories about her. The things she’s done to ­people.”

  “What, like killing them?” Adare had told me a fair amount of murder occurred down in the southern part of New Jersey. The looters there didn’t make deals with the army or the government. They hid under the trees in the Barrens when helicopters passed overhead, and mostly came out at night. To get the fuel and supplies they needed they hijacked other, more reputable looters—­the category in which Adare put himself—­and killed them, then took what they had. ­People like that were called road pirates, and the looters hated them more than zombies. “Killing ­people for the fuel in their cars?” I said, trying to sound a little more worldly.

  “The previous leader of her gang was a man, I heard, a famous outlaw named Bill Green. She waited until he was drunk one night, then put a chain around his belt and put the other end on her bike. She drove off just a little faster than he could run, so he got dragged behind her. They say he didn’t stop screaming for fifty miles.”

  “Ah,” I said, more than a little horrified, but not wanting to show it. “But what’s she doing up here, then? Adare said that the Barrens looters weren’t welcome in Linden. And I can’t imagine road pirates are welcome anywhere.”

  “She went legitimate a ­couple of years back. Brought her gang up here and made a deal with the army. Now she’s like us. Supposedly. There are rumors that she’s still a pirate, she just does it where no one can see. But there are always rumors. Do you see that man there, the one wearing the top hat? That’s Timmy Wallace. The rumor is he’s the son of somebody important, like maybe the vice president. That he could leave here any time he wanted and go back to the Washington bunkers, but he doesn’t because he prefers being out here where he can screw and drink all he wants.”

  I was more interested in Red Kate, but I didn’t want to explain why I was asking so many questions. So I let Kylie go on about the various personalities below us, listening with only half an ear. I barely noticed when she said we should go back. “Adare might wake up in the middle of the night to pee. He does that when he’s not on the road.”

  “You know when he’s going to pee?”

  Kylie nodded. “I know his moods and his habits. All his girls do. If he gets up, he’ll check on the others, and if we’re not there, it’ll be bad.”

  “How bad?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Together we headed back down the spiral stairway to the bottom of the tank, then cut across the side of the lot to get to the concrete building. Going up the side of the building was harder than going down, but we made it. Once we were in the little room again, Kylie went over to a corner and lay down without even looking at me. In a few minutes she was snoring. I sat down in a broken chair, knowing it would be a long time before I fell asleep.

  Two of the girls, Mary and Bonnie, were still awake. They were both just a little older than Addison, and their eyes were bright in the dark of the room. Bonnie came over to me and started taking my shoes off for me. I pushed her away gently. “You don’t need to do that,” I told her. “I’m not like him.”

  She blinked at me as if what I’d said was in a language she didn’t understand. “If you’re fucking Kylie,” she said, “and he finds out, he’ll punish you.”

  “God! I’m not—­I’m not doing anything to Kylie,” I whispered back.

  “Don’t get caught,” she said. “Just don’t. He’ll punish you both.”

  CHAPTER 26

  In the morning Adare rose early and came to wake me.

  “Gather up all the loot, Stones,” he told me, whispering so as not to wake the girls. He grinned merrily as he pointed at their sleeping bodies. “Let ’em get their beauty sleep.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was too tired and bleary eyed to respond. I picked up all the bags of liquor and pills and old, tattered pornography and followed h
im down to the parking lot. It was bitterly cold out, and the tanks and the industrial wasteland were still painted blue by predawn light. The wind rippled through the weeds with a hypnotic motion. I had barely slept at all, convinced by every little noise in the night that someone was trying to break into our little room and take what we had.

  I had to push myself to keep up with Adare. He took me past the edge of the parking lot. Beyond that was a collapsing chain-­link fence that surrounded a wide square of concrete, crumbling around the edges and painted with a broad white letter H.

  Adare had a road flare in his pocket. He pulled it out and twisted it until a jet of red fat sparks jumped from one end. Throwing it down on the concrete, he gestured me to back up about fifty feet and then we waited. It didn’t take long. The helicopter must have been just beyond the tanks, waiting for our signal.

  The helicopter wasn’t pretty to look at, really. It was a dull green color, and it had two rotors, one higher than the other, which looked wrong to me. But I’d never seen anything like it before. The way it seemed to just hang in the air, defying gravity, made me feel like I was floating. It filled me with awe. I couldn’t help but let out a whoop of excitement. Adare looked over at me and beamed. He tousled my hair, and I didn’t even flinch away.

  Other looters started piling out of the camp buildings or from the backseats of their cars. They ran toward the helipad with bags and bundles in their arms, complaining loudly that Adare wasn’t playing nice, that he should have waited for them to get up before he called in the helicopter. They pressed in tight around us, jostling and shoving to get closer to the helicopter.

  A loudspeaker mounted on the helicopter blared out a warning. “STAY BACK FIFTY FEET. WE WILL NOT LAND UNTIL THE AREA IS CLEAR.” The voice was so loud it seemed to roll around the concrete and asphalt and bounce off the tanks until it came from every side, until it resonated in my chest. Grudgingly the looters moved back, away from the helipad. The helicopter settled down onto the concrete as gently as a feather wafting down from the heights of a skyscraper, its wheels just kissing the ground. Its rotors kept turning as fast as ever, and the wind from them threatened to blow me over, but I held my ground, even as twenty years of trash and debris, old rotten paper and pristine plastic sandwich containers, dust and soot, and torn-­up plant matter flashed by me, stinging my skin and making me clamp my eyes shut.