Positive

by David Wellington

  I couldn’t bear to see her like this. Perfectly quiet and unemotional. It sounds funny to say now, but I would have much preferred if she jumped up and punched me in the face, or screamed insults at me, or anything—­I didn’t expect her to leap into my arms and tell me how much she’d missed me and how glad she was that I was still alive. Anger would have been enough.

  “I guess the female camp is about as bad as ours,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “Everywhere is like this. This is what life is like,” she said.

  “You mean—­dirty and painful? I guess a lot of it is,” I said. I sighed.

  I had hoped for more than this, even as I expected nothing less. I’d wrestled with the idea of just letting her go. Of forgetting about Kylie and focusing on my own misery. But I owed her something. I owed her my life, at the very least, several times over. I owed her more than that—­a sum I couldn’t begin to articulate. But she wasn’t going to let me repay it, because that would suggest there was some kind of justice or at least balance in the world, and she couldn’t handle that thought.

  It would be cruel of me to insist otherwise. It was cruel of me to pretend she was right. I couldn’t win.

  I went over to her chair and squatted down in front of her. “Listen. We don’t have a lot of time, and I have a bunch of questions. I might be able to visit you again at some point, but for now, I just need to know what happened. When you got here. Remember? Addison was sick. Is she still here? Did she get better?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Was there the tiniest flicker of anger in her eyes? It was impossible to say in the darkness of the bunkhouse.

  I shook my head. “Tell me what happened.”

  “We got here a few hours after you left us. The SUV made it that far, and even had some gasoline left. We could have kept going. We could have found somebody else to protect us. But you said we should come here.”

  “I did,” I admitted.

  “We came to the gate, and Heather told the man there who we were, and why we’d come. He wouldn’t look at us, not close up. He wouldn’t come over and look at Addison. She was having trouble breathing by then. He just wanted to see our left hands. Our tattoos. He said that Heather and I should exit the car and head into processing. Heather kept asking him what would happen to Mary and Addison. He didn’t say anything, he just kept yelling the same order over and over. Heather refused to go inside until they’d sent somebody for Addison. Mary was crying. It was very loud. The man had a gun, and he kept threatening to shoot us, but he never did.”

  “Jesus. They just split you up?” I don’t know if I’d hoped Addison and Mary were inside the camp or not. If they were, they would at least be alive, but if they weren’t . . . well, the camp wasn’t something to be wished on an enemy, much less a friend.

  “Heather wouldn’t move, and the man didn’t want to touch her. He couldn’t drag her inside, because he wouldn’t touch her. Eventually someone else came. They brought a stretcher for Addison, and they took her away. They said that Heather and I had to go inside, into processing. They couldn’t take Mary. They could only take positives. I said that Mary was a positive, she just never got the tattoo.”

  “You said that?” I asked.

  “Yes. I lied. It seemed like the best idea at the time.”

  “It was a good idea. Did it work?”

  “No.”

  “So—­what did they do with her?”

  Kylie didn’t shrug. Instead she scratched at her cheek with one hand. “They wouldn’t let her come inside. They wouldn’t let her go with Addison. She had the SUV. It’s okay, Finn.”

  “It is? It’s okay?”

  “Yes. She knows how to drive.”

  I buried my face in my hands. She could drive. She had some gasoline. Exactly how far could she get before it ran out? Exactly where would she go?

  I had to accept that Mary was probably dead.

  “Have you heard anything about Addison since?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I rose slowly to my feet. “Kylie, I’m—­I’m sorry. I don’t know what I could have done to make it different. If I was there. But I should have been there. I should have—­I don’t know. I shouldn’t have pissed off Red Kate in the first place. Or I should have killed her there on the road; we should have taken our chances, so we could at least have all gotten here together, and—­”

  “No,” Kylie said.

  “What?”

  “No. None of that would have mattered. If you were there or not. It would have been exactly the same. You can’t change what happens. Finn.” She shot out one hand and grabbed my wrist. Not hard, not soft. “Nobody can.”

  I could barely believe it.

  As far gone as she was—­she was trying to comfort me. She was trying to explain how the world worked. I thought back to when we’d met. To when Adare sent the two of us to loot my first house. It had been the same. She’d helped me then. She’d tried to explain things to me. Because I was the one who clearly didn’t understand how the world worked. The one who still thought it was possible to fight back.

  Despite all her armor, despite how withdrawn she was, she still cared enough to tell me there was no hope.

  It was the closest thing to kindness—­to love—­she could muster.

  “I’m going to do what I can,” I said. “I’ll find out about Addison. I’ll see if the soldiers can’t go and find Mary and help her.” I had no idea how I would make either of those things happen, but I would try. “I promise.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

  I clenched my eyes shut.

  “How’s Heather?” I asked.

  “She’s not adjusting very well,” Kylie said. She sounded like she was describing the weather. “Some of the women here, especially the older women, they make it hard on the younger ones. They give them a hard time. Heather doesn’t know how to go inside herself. Like me.”

  “She was never as strong as you,” I said, trying for a compliment.

  “Strong?”

  “You can do anything. You can survive anything.”

  “Oh. No,” Kylie said. “No, you’ve got it wrong. That’s not strength. I’m not strong. I’m weak. I’m weaker than everybody. I just use that weakness.”

  “Okay.”

  “The reed bends and survives the storm. The oak stands proud and breaks,” she said. Not for the first time, I got the impression it was a saying she’d memorized, words that weren’t her own. “The reed bends.”

  CHAPTER 77

  The next day I spent wandering around the camp in a kind of haze.

  What I’d learned from my meeting with Kylie did not have a good effect on me. What she’d told me—­what I’d so desperately wanted to know, what had happened to Addison and Mary and Heather, how she was handling life in the camp—­these things had seemed like such burning questions. They’d nagged at me, kept me awake at nights. I’d known I wouldn’t like the answers much. But I’d thought there would be some kind of resolution. Some finality to it.

  Instead, my guilt, my shame, my fear were all redoubled.

  I had never asked to be responsible for the girls. I’d never wanted anything but to live a nice, quiet, safe life in Manhattan. Hadn’t I?

  I spent the day so lost in thought, so consumed by own self-­loathing, that I completely missed the whistle for second shift. Eventually I saw the crowd of ­people streaming over toward the work sheds, and I hurried to join them, but I was already late.

  Fedder waited for me at the entrance to our shed. I tried not to meet his eye. Tried to duck around him so I could get inside.

  I might as well have tried to tunnel under the camp wall.

  “You’re late,” he said. “That looks bad. You work for me. That makes me look bad.”

 
; “I’m really sorry,” I told him.

  “So the fuck what? This isn’t about sorry.”

  I tried to say something else. I tried to explain or make excuses—­I don’t even remember. I do remember what his fist looked like, coming straight at my face.

  The beating he gave me was methodical. It was supposed to be instructive. It wasn’t about anger, or even about proving that he was my superior. That was taken as read. No, it was about teaching me to be on time.

  I went down quickly, unable to fend off any of his blows. The kicking started in then. It lacked the savagery of the first time, when I arrived at the camp. It was mostly aimed at keeping me from catching my breath. The pain had to be sustained, kept at a certain level, so the lesson could sink in.

  I’d always thought Fedder was an idiot. A pile of muscles with nothing else to show for them. But he knew his trade very well. He was an expert at ass-­kicking. I might have actually admired his precision and restraint, if I wasn’t on the receiving end.

  When it was over, he spat in my hair and left. Luke came out of the work shed and helped me get to my feet, which took longer than I would have liked.

  When I could stand without falling over, he helped me inside and put a circuit board in front of me. “You need to be more careful, maybe,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  ­“People in here, they go along to get along, you know? They don’t make waves. And they don’t get beaten up so much.”

  “I’ve heard that before.” Maybe Adare had been right. Maybe I was too stupid to give up. “Keep your head down, right? Don’t ask for anything more, since you won’t get it. Makes sense.”

  “It’s kept me going this long,” Luke agreed.

  I had trouble sleeping that night, mostly because of the pain. I never slept well in the camp, but that night was especially torturous. It gave me plenty of time to think, which was something I didn’t want.

  Time to think about the eighteen months I still had before I could leave that place. Time to think about what could happen to me in that span of time. Would it break me down? Would it finally teach me to keep my mouth shut?

  Maybe. And maybe that should have been good enough.

  But there was Kylie to think of, and Heather. I still felt like I owed them. And now Luke, who had befriended me when he had no reason to and was giving me what I knew was good advice I knew I could never follow.

  CHAPTER 78

  Ike and I had arranged a system of signals so we could communicate without anyone knowing it. It was a crude code, and it couldn’t convey much in the way of information, but it worked. When I needed to send him a message, I would put three rocks on the roof of my shelter. He would see them and open the door to the catwalks, and I would sneak up to his guardhouse.

  We’d set up a signal that he could send as well, one that would tell me Ike needed to talk to me. He had only used it once before, so I was very surprised when I found the empty pouch of an MRE lying in the mud near a certain yellow brick pillar. I glanced upward involuntarily as if I expected to see him up there, as if I expected him to be waiting for me, waving and jumping up and down. Of course he wasn’t there—­it would get him in a lot of trouble to be seen even making eye contact with a positive, much less talking to one.

  So I lowered my eyes and went about my business. But that night I told Luke I needed him to run an errand. I needed a new blanket—­the one I lay on at night was full of holes. Summer was coming to an end, and the nights were getting colder. I found an unused food receipt and said he could trade it for a new blanket.

  “Right now? It’s already dark out,” he said. “All the stores will be closed.”

  “For this,” I said, shaking the receipt, “they’ll open back up. Please, Luke. I nearly froze last night.”

  Maybe he suspected something was up, but he didn’t say anything. He left on my invented errand (I really did need a new blanket, but it could have waited), and I hurriedly dressed and went to the door of the shelter to wait for Ike.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Ike shone his flashlight down on me from above, and I moved quickly and quietly to the guardhouse with its televisions and its controls for all the camp’s power. It was a room I had become familiar with, just another part of the camp, for all its difference from the shelters and sheds below. This time Kylie was there, which always made me glad.

  At least until I got a good look at her.

  She was sitting on a stool in front of the television screens, her hands folded in her lap. The blue and orange glow from the screens made long colored shadows across her eyes and highlighted the scar across her nose. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she looked, just sitting there. But beautiful like a statue or a sculpture. There was no life in her face, her posture.

  Like an optical illusion, her beauty faded as I studied her. I started to see what the camp had done to her. Her hair was filthy, and her clothes were in tatters. There were fresh bruises on her forearms.

  “You’ve been in a fight,” I said. You got bruises like that from trying to protect your head when someone was kicking you. I should know.

  She glanced up at me. She didn’t say anything. She just sat there looking at me, blinking occasionally. She was very far gone. I thought she wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Something very bad had happened, I thought, and my stomach clenched in nausea. Kylie’s armor was nothing new to me. I knew she could make herself a zombie if it meant surviving in a world full of pain and horror. But this was worse than it had ever been. She wasn’t just a zombie, she was dead for all intents and purposes.

  Ike filled me in on what was going on. “After that first time, that time she came up here and you guys talked,” he said, “she and I set up a system like the one you and I have. If she ever needed me, she just had to put some rocks out in a certain pattern and I would see it.”

  “Sure,” I said. I shook my head to clear it. “I mean, thank you, Ike. It means a lot to me that you’re looking out for her.”

  He shrugged.

  “I know you run a big risk every time you contact us,” I said. “Believe me, I’d be dead right now if not for you.”

  “I guess. Whatever. As I was saying, I set up the system with her. But she never used it. I would have fed her, got her stuff, whatever, but she never signaled me. Until yesterday. I went down to find her and she was like this, though. I don’t know what she wanted. She must have wanted it pretty bad. But now she can’t even tell me what it is. I came and got you because I figured you might know.” He shook his head. “Listen, we’ve only got a few minutes before I have to send you back. Maybe you can talk to her.”

  I nodded. I went over and squatted down in front of Kylie, where she couldn’t help but see me. I reached up and touched one of her hands. She didn’t pull it away, but she didn’t move it, either.

  “It’s me, Kylie. It’s Finn. Stones.”

  Her face didn’t change, but her lips moved. She said “Stones,” though so softly I could barely hear it. After a second, her brow furrowed as if she was trying desperately to remember something.

  “Finnegan,” she said. “Finn.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Finn. I need . . .”

  She stopped. I waited for her to finish the thought but she didn’t.

  “What do you need, Kylie? What did you want to tell me?”

  Very slowly she nodded. She had it now.

  “Oh, right. It was about Heather,” she said, and she did something very weird—­she gave a little self-­conscious laugh and reached up and pulled her hair down over her eyes. It was the gesture of a normal teenage girl, maybe one a few years younger than Kylie. I thought it might have been something she would have done before she became a positive, before she was abducted in the wilderness. “You know Heather.”

  Mystified as I was, I
knew this had to be important. “I do know her. How is she doing?” I asked. Kylie had said at our last meeting that Heather was having trouble getting used to the camp.

  “She’s sick,” Kylie said, pulling her shoulders up around her ears. Something inside her seemed to have broken. “She’s sick and I think she’s going to die. Oh! And she joined a cult,” Kylie continued. “I thought you should know.”

  Then she looked up at Ike. He jumped—­he didn’t know her as well as I did, and I guess she unnerved him.

  “That’s all,” she said to him. “You can take me back now.”

  CHAPTER 79

  She stood up and headed over toward Ike, clearly done with what she’d come for.

  “What? No, wait!” I said. I grabbed her arm and pulled her around until she was looking at me. She offered no resistance. “What do you mean? She’s sick—­like, with a fever, or, or—­” I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to ask if Heather was suffering from bad headaches. She was a positive. If she was infected, if she was about to zombie out—­

  Kylie’s voice was perfectly flat as she told me what had happened. “There were some women who didn’t like us. They said we were stuck up. I don’t know what that means. They waited for us by our workplace one night and they beat us up. It wasn’t too bad. Adare did worse sometimes.”

  I had to look away and bite my lip. I’d brought the two of them here, to this place. It didn’t matter in the slightest that I’d thought it would be better. I’d gotten them into this.

  “I was okay, but she got it worse. Heather, I mean. She had a big cut on her arm, where one of them kicked her hard enough to break the skin. It was just a cut, but then it got worse. It got all red and purple, and then it started to smell really bad. Then she got feverish, and yesterday morning she couldn’t get up. I told her if she didn’t get up and come to work, she couldn’t eat, but she didn’t listen to me.”

  Jesus. I could only imagine how frightened Heather must have been. And with no one there to comfort her but Kylie—­who wasn’t exactly a model of tact.