Positive

by David Wellington

  “I went to work without her. My boss hit me because she said I was responsible for Heather, and now we were short a worker. It didn’t hurt all that much.”

  “Kylie, you said she joined a cult—­what did you mean?”

  “Yes,” Kylie said. She seemed to struggle to get the words out. “These ­people. They worship a . . . a skeleton. Some women came and they said Heather was going to die, they could tell. Heather started crying, but they hushed her and one of them stroked her forehead and told her it was all right, that she was going to die but that that was a good thing, that it could be a wonderful thing. They carried her away. That was the last time I saw her. Then I put the signal out for your friend. Except I can’t remember why I did that.”

  I looked up at Ike. “I have to stop this,” I told him.

  “Why are you looking at me?” he asked.

  “Take me over there. Take me down into the female camp. Right now.”

  “Oh, no, oh, fuck no,” Ike said, shaking his head. “Oh, no—­do you have any idea what would happen? If I let a male into the female population, I would be court-­martialed. Do you even know what a court-­martial is?”

  “I’m sure it’s bad. But, Ike, a girl’s life depends on this. We have to do it.”

  He started to protest again. There was no time for it, no time to explain to him how much I owed Heather, how much I needed to do this. I rushed out of the guardhouse and across the catwalks, running toward the female camp. Ike came running after me, his rifle in his hands. I think he wanted to shoot me. To stop me, to keep me from getting any farther. But something in our past, our old friendship, stopped him.

  “Which column do I want?” I demanded when he caught up with me. I was over the female camp by that point, looking down into the murk. It looked very much like the male camp, of course. There could only be so many possible variations on corrugated tin and scrap lumber. Just like in the male camp the catwalks ran over every part of it, supported by yellow brick pillars. One of them had to be hollow, with a spiral staircase inside. The guards would need some way to get down there.

  “This is it, Finn. This is it. You stop now.” He had his rifle in his hands, and it was pointed at me. I’d seen him shoot my mother, but somehow I knew he would never shoot me. “The deal we had? You take another step and that’s over. No more MREs. No more late-­night visits. You’re fucking up a good thing. You can’t be over here. You think my CO doesn’t know that I help you out sometimes?”

  “They know?”

  “My bosses tolerate a little bit of rule breaking,” Ike said. “They put up with a tiny bit of it, for whatever reason. But they won’t let this go.”

  “Come on, Ike.”

  “This,” he said, gesturing at the female camp with his rifle, “this is not okay. This is not fucking okay. You head back now; you go back to your crappy little house right now. Or we’re done.”

  I studied his face, trying to determine just how serious he was.

  Pretty serious, by the look of it.

  But I had to do what I had to do. “Fine,” I said. “I take the latter option.”

  “What?”

  “You take me down there, into the female camp, so I can help my friend. And then our arrangement is over. You never have to worry about me again.”

  CHAPTER 80

  Ike took me down the hollow column and unlocked the door at its bottom. “When you come back, knock three times and I’ll open this up for you and take you back to your own place.” A little light burned inside the hollow column, and I could see just how grim his face had become. “You know you can’t bring her back with you?”

  “I know.”

  Kylie came down the stairs behind us, and for a second I thought Ike would shoot her, he was so jumpy. But instead he just shook his head and switched off the light. He opened the door for us, and we headed out into the female camp.

  In the dark, in the mud, it should have looked exactly like the male camp. It had all the same elements, and was just as featureless, as my side of the camp. But it was just different enough to be creepy—­everything was in the wrong place, the shelters clumped in strange patterns. They had a well for fresh water, right in the middle of their camp. It added up to make me feel like all of reality had been strangely twisted.

  That, or I was just afraid of being caught.

  Kylie led me to a shelter near the wall. “This is where the sick women go,” she said. We saw no one on our way there, but when we arrived, I was shocked to see a little light coming from inside. I glanced through a crack between two planks of crumbling wood and saw candles burning inside. “You have candles?” I whispered. “How did you get candles?”

  “We make them,” she said. “That’s what we do for work here. Candles and soap, and we patch up old clothes. Sometimes we steal some of what we make.”

  Another weird thing. I’d assumed the female camp was hard at work putting together circuit boards, just like the male camp. But Luke had told me that sometimes the work changed, and that it wouldn’t always be circuit boards. I guess the army needed other things, too. I knew nothing then of the old division of labor that had been disappearing even before the crisis, the idea that there was such a thing as “woman’s work” as opposed to that done by men. It seemed that someone in the camp’s administration still thought that way.

  Whatever. It didn’t matter—­I wasn’t here to learn all about the female camp. I found the door of the makeshift shelter and stepped inside.

  A group of women were kneeling on the floor together, in front of a foot-­high statue of a human skeleton. It looked like it was made of wax, and had been carefully, if inexpertly, sculpted. I could make out the various bones and even tiny carved teeth in the miniature skull.

  One of the women looked up and saw me, and she gasped. The others jumped up and pressed back, moving away from the door.

  The only exposure to men these women had since coming to the camp had been the leering suggestions of the men who pressed up against the fence between the two camps, the ones who called out rude suggestions all day long. The ones who shouted out their fantasies of what they would do if they ever got through that fence. The women I was facing now must have thought I was there to ravage the lot of them.

  I might have corrected them, but the last thing I wanted was for them to think I was safe, that they could shout at me to get out and I would. I needed to do this quickly and quietly and if that meant scaring them, I was okay with that.

  “Heather,” I said. “Where’s Heather?”

  They didn’t say a word, but one of them, younger than the rest, glanced toward a little alcove at the back of the shed. I pushed past her and headed back there, Kylie in tow. I knew I was in the right place when the smell hit me.

  Flies buzzed angrily and swarmed around my face as I pushed aside a threadbare curtain and looked in on Heather. She was lying on a makeshift mattress of piled blankets, and a candle burned by her head. The sleeve of her shirt had been torn away to expose the wound on her right arm. It was festering, and badly—­weeping pustules had formed all around the gash, and I could see black veins under her greenish skin. As I knelt down beside her I could hear her laboring for breath, and I could see that her eyes, while open, weren’t focusing on anything.

  “Heather,” I said. I grabbed her hand, her left hand with its plus sign tattoo. “Heather, it’s me. Finnegan. I’ve come to get you out of here. It’s the least I could do.”

  “Ky—­ky—­” Heather gasped.

  “Kylie’s here, too. She came and got me. I know she isn’t the warmest of ­people, but she does care about you, Heather. She wanted to save you.”

  “Kylie,” she managed to pant. “Kylie, why? You know—­know what I—­want.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told Heather.

  “I know—­know it is. Came to—­to save me? From what?” />
  “These ­people out there,” I said, pointing back toward the main room. “I’m not sure what they think they’re doing here—­”

  “They’re helping me die,” Heather said. Her eyes were fever bright.

  I started to shake my head, but she had more to say.

  “Die the—­right way,” she said, nodding a little. “Die so somebody.” She coughed, then had a single spasm that seemed like it would shatter her fragile body. “So somebody else. Can live.”

  “What?” I couldn’t understand.

  “If I die now, then somebody else doesn’t have to.”

  “That’s nuts, Heather! That’s nonsense. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t know what they’ve been telling you, but if you die like this, you just—­you just die. But if you fight this thing, if we can get you some medicine, you could live. Make it through your time in the camp and then you can go home. Don’t you want to see your family again? Your old friends?”

  “Not—­going to happen. This way. This way I. Do something good. Something important. Not just survival,” Heather told me. She looked so very weak and tired. “Something more. There has to be something more in a life.”

  “These women who taught you that—­”

  She squeezed my hand. I could barely feel it. But I could see the angelic smile on her face. “They didn’t. Teach me anything. You did, Finnegan.”

  “I . . . what?”

  “When you sacrificed—­yourself. Went with Red Kate. So we could get here. You didn’t know—­you thought this place was safe.”

  “I—­I—­”

  “Showed me. What a life is worth.”

  I tried to argue with her further, but it was no use. Talking had worn her out, and soon her eyelids were drooping and she stopped speaking altogether.

  I turned to Kylie then and glared at her. Why hadn’t she sent for me sooner? Why had she waited until Heather was about to die?

  But of course it wasn’t Kylie’s fault. Kylie was just convenient; I knew if I lashed out at her, she wouldn’t fight back. I stopped myself before I could say anything I might regret and hurried out into the main room. The women there were still pressed up against the walls, staying as far away from me as possible.

  True hatred is a rare thing, even in this desperate world, but I hated those women. I hated everything they believed, everything they’d created. I would gladly have torn down their wax skeleton and stamped on it. If it had been in my power, I would have eradicated their little religion from the earth.

  “She’s going to die for nothing,” I told them. “Your belief is false. Your idol means nothing.”

  “Of course,” one of them said. “It’s only an image. Something to focus on while we pray. We know Death looks nothing like that.”

  I shook my head. “You’re full of crap. This idea, that you can somehow transfer life, give it to somebody else—­it’s crap!”

  The woman who had spoken gave me the same sweet smile Heather had shown. “You can’t know that. You can’t prove it.”

  Suddenly I couldn’t handle it anymore. I couldn’t look at these women and argue with them as if they were rational ­people. I stormed out of their shelter and back to the hollow column, fuming all the way. I knocked and Ike let me in.

  Neither of us said a word as he escorted me back to the male camp. When I got back down to my own patch of mud, he closed the door in the column behind me. I heard its lock turn, with a terrible finality, and I was alone.

  CHAPTER 81

  I could not stop thinking about Heather. Lying in candlelight. Lying there waiting to die.

  I tried to think of other things, but I couldn’t get the images out of my mind. Kylie so far gone she’d lost the power of speech. How long before she stopped eating? Would she go and kneel in front of the skeleton idol? Would she offer up her life? Maybe she’d give it to me. Or Luke. Or somebody in California none of us would ever meet.

  The reed bends, the oak breaks. She was supposed to be a survivor. She had built that armor to protect herself. But maybe even reeds break if the wind blows hard enough.

  I felt so helpless, so powerless. I knew I had to do something, something to help Heather, to convince Kylie that there was some reason to hope. To keep living. But what could I possibly do?

  It was hard to concentrate on work. My productivity dropped, and twice I broke a circuit board by plugging the component into the wrong slot. The first time Fedder refused to let me eat. The second time, he said I was in for a beating. “A bad one, this time.”

  I thought about the last one, which barely left me able to move. I was filled with the need to attack, to run at Fedder and hurt him before he could hurt me, as stupid as I knew the impulse was. I considered running away. But there was nowhere I could go, nowhere I could get away from him. As he stomped toward me, every muscle in my body cringed, and I thought—­no, thought is the wrong word. What went through my head then was nothing short of animal instinct.

  I ducked my head, put out my arms, and threw myself at him, aiming my skull right for his stomach. I think I was trying to knock the wind out of him, but that suggests I had some kind of plan.

  In my brain there were visions of getting him on his back and tearing into his guts with my fingernails, tearing out his still-­beating heart and holding it over my head like a prize.

  The reality, of course, was a lot more prosaic. I did hit him, and I did knock the wind out of him, but Fedder had strength to spare. He wrapped one arm around my waist and picked me up like a bag of potatoes. I’d lost a lot of weight in the camp, and I don’t think he even had to strain to carry me like that.

  He stepped outside the work shelter and dropped me on my head in the mud. My head bent forward under my own weight, and I saw black spots swim before my vision.

  I managed to twist around, enough that I could look up. All I could see was Fedder’s massive boot, caked in stinking mud, lifting up over my face. He was going to do it. He was really going to do it this time—­stomp on my face. Maybe crush my skull. When he’d beaten me before, it was almost clinical. I think that when I stood up to him, when I attacked him, I’d finally made him mad.

  Now I was going to pay for it. Maybe with my life.

  Except it didn’t come to that.

  “Fedder!” someone shouted.

  The boot lowered—­to the ground beside my head. Fedder looked to his right. “Fuck off, Macky. This is none of your business.”

  “Don’t be so hasty.”

  A new guy walked into my field of view. I’d seen Macky before, though I’d never spoken to him. He was a big guy, like Fedder—­maybe not quite so big. He was a boss, with his own work crew. That was how you got to be a boss, by being big enough to thrash your workers.

  Other than that I knew nothing about him.

  “How about I take this kid off your hands?” Macky asked. “How about he comes to work for me? Looks like you’re through with him.”

  “I’m not through until he’s a puddle of blood and guts,” Fedder said. Yet I could tell he had some respect for Macky—­that he wouldn’t kill me until they’d finished their negotiation.

  “He won’t be much use to me dead,” Macky pointed out. “Listen, I’ll trade you. Any one of my guys for this one.”

  Fedder looked confused, but not like he was deep in thought.

  “We have a deal?” Macky asked. He reached down and hauled me to my feet. I still felt a little dizzy, but it wasn’t too bad.

  “I get one more punch,” Fedder said. “For my aggravation.”

  Macky mused that over for a second. “Yeah, okay.”

  Then Fedder punched me in the stomach so hard I couldn’t eat for three days. I fell backward and landed on my ass in the mud and just lay there vomiting for a while.

  When I was done, Fedder was already gone. Macky dragged me to my feet and took
me back to his shelter, where he told me to lie down until he came for me.

  I tried very hard to go to sleep, because you don’t feel pain when you’re asleep. The problem with that idea is that if you’re hurting enough, it keeps you awake.

  By the time Macky came for me, the boredom was almost as bad as the pain.

  He stepped inside the shelter and looked down at me. Frowned, like he wondered if he’d made a good deal with Fedder. Then he shrugged and helped me stand up. “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To talk to some ­people,” he told me. ­“People who are very interested in you, all of a sudden.”

  CHAPTER 82

  He took me to a shelter, a big one—­you could stand up straight inside. There were no beds in it, just a table with some mismatched chairs. A deck of cards lay on the table, and I immediately thought of Luke’s deck, with its missing card. I wondered if Macky might want to trade.

  But that wasn’t why he’d brought me there.

  At first we were alone inside the shelter, but soon it started to fill up with other ­people. They were big guys, covered in muscles—­so well fed. Some of them had noses that looked like they’d been knocked to one side, or bad scars. They’d been in lots of fights. None of them looked scared or tired or sick.

  I soon realized who they were. They were the bosses of all the work crews in the male camp.

  All of them. Fedder came in last of all, scowling at me. But he came.

  Macky nodded at each one of the bosses as they came in. He slapped a ­couple of them on the back, shared a laugh with one. It was clear to me he’d summoned his fellow bosses in for a meeting, and that I was the only item on the agenda.

  “This is him,” Macky said. That was it. No preamble, no small talk. “This is the guy who went up on the catwalks.”

  I lifted my hands in protest. “What? No way,” I said.

  Macky gave me a significant look. It was clear that if I lied to him now, there would be consequences. Maybe he would give me back to Fedder.