They were simple and clearly marked. There was a switch to turn on the power, and a knob to control its voltage. Someone had made a little red X on the dial, which I assumed meant that if it were turned up that high the charge in the fence would be lethal.
The power was switched on, the voltage down at the same level, I presumed, that drove people away from the fence when new positives arrived. I flipped off the switch, but that wouldn’t be enough. I had to make sure the guards didn’t turn it back on as soon as I left the guardhouse. I cast about the room, looking for something with which to smash the controls, and quickly I found a fire extinguisher big and heavy enough to do the job.
I picked up the extinguisher and carried it to the controls. Raised it over my head.
But that was when my luck ran out.
“Stop right there,” someone shouted from behind me. It was a guard’s voice, definitely. Then a shot rang out, and a television screen near my head exploded in shards of glass and sparks.
I dropped the fire extinguisher, then turned around to see who had captured me.
It was Ike.
CHAPTER 92
Ike,” I said, very calmly, very low, intending on somehow talking my way out of this situation. “Ike, you unlocked the door for me. I knew—”
“Save it,” he said.
I didn’t understand. “Ike, I just need to—”
That was when I noticed he wasn’t alone. A couple of dozen soldiers were behind him, all of them trying to cram inside the guardhouse.
Ike gave me a funny look I couldn’t quite figure out. I frowned, and that just made him roll his eyes. “You had your chance, Finn. You could have been set up for a nice cushy time here. You could have waited a couple years and gone home.”
I tried to smile. I doubt it looked very realistic on my face. “Things have gone too far for that now.”
“No shit. Come on, step away from there. I know you, Finn. I know you’ll try something stupid and heroic and make me kill you. Just like I had to kill your mom. That’s becoming kind of a pattern, isn’t it?”
Was he trying to anger me? Maybe he wanted me to run at him. To give him an excuse to shoot me.
I refused to give it to him. I lifted my hands.
He sighed and lowered his rifle, just a hair. “Okay. Come with me.”
I nodded, not daring to break eye contact. “What are you going to do with me?”
“I don’t make decisions. I’m a soldier. I do what I’m told. And I was not told to explain things to you. Come on.” He gestured with his rifle, indicating I should walk out of the guardhouse in front of him. Before we left he switched the power to the fence back on. He turned the voltage knob all the way up, well past the lethal level. If I’d had a way to contact the rioters below, I could have had them tear down that fence while the power was off. But it was too late for that now. I’d failed.
I stepped outside and saw half a dozen rifles aimed right at me. Had they known the whole time that I was up on the catwalks? Had the soldiers wanted me to come up here, where they could get me alone, where they could shoot me and nobody would see?
That didn’t seem to be the plan. Ike marched me through the cordon of soldiers, each of whom did nothing but scowl at me. We stepped outside onto the open catwalks, where I could hear people screaming in pain below. The soldiers didn’t seem to notice the sound.
At least they weren’t firing down into the camp anymore.
The officer, the one with birds on his collar, came out of a guardhouse and stared at me. He nodded at Ike, who saluted back. Then he came and leaned over me until our faces were only inches apart.
“We’ve kept this camp in good order for twenty years now,” he said. “Did you think you were the first rabble-rouser with a list of demands?” When I didn’t answer, he shook his head. “You are not.”
“The people down there have rights. You can’t make them live like this—”
“I can’t?” he asked. “I can’t? I have to! This camp is a necessity, patient. Segregation of positives from the healthy community is the only way we will ever eradicate the crisis pathogen.” He sounded like he was reciting something he’d memorized. Just like Kylie sounded sometimes. “We don’t have the resources to make the camp as comfortable as we might like—”
“Comfortable?” I shouted back. “This place is hell!”
The officer lifted his chin. “Well, at least you won’t have to endure it much longer.”
“You’re going to kill me?” I asked.
“Oh, no. That would just make you a martyr. It would probably start a whole new riot. So no, I’m not going to kill you. There’s another camp like this one, out on the West Coast. I’m going to ship you there. Make you their problem.”
I couldn’t believe it.
I’d been ready to die. I didn’t want to die, but I’d accepted it could happen, and that it would be worth it, if it improved things in the camp.
But to be shipped to the other side of the country—away from everyone I knew. Away from Kylie—
Somehow that seemed worse.
Luckily for me, it didn’t come to that. The officer started to turn away, started to issue an order to his troops. They didn’t get to hear it, though. There was a noise, just then, as if a lightning bolt had struck the catwalk under my feet. It made everybody flinch and look around in terror.
I happened to look over at the nearest guardhouse, and I saw a funny thing. All the television sets in there had gone dark. It was like they had lost electric power, as if—
Ike kicked my boot. I looked around at him and saw him gesture with his head. He was telling me to—what? I shook my head in confusion. Finally he had to whisper to me, “Fence is down.”
The officer had lost all interest in me, for the moment. He was pointing at the guardhouse, shouting for his soldiers to go and see what had happened.
I didn’t waste any more time. I leaned out over the catwalk and saw all the positives down there. “The fence is down!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs. “It’s down! Hit the fence now, while you’ve got a chance!”
I heard a great deal of roaring and shouting, questions and exclamations and simple noises of surprise. Soldiers grabbed me and threw me down on the catwalk and somebody pointed a gun at me, and somebody else grabbed the barrel of the gun and pushed it away. I ignored the soldiers. I blinked the sun out of my eyes and looked down at the muddy camp.
They were moving. The positives were moving, heading for the fence. They hit the fence like a wave and it just disappeared, torn apart by their combined weight. They started flowing out, into the processing center, in a great stampede. I saw the fence come down on the female camp side, too, and was glad for it—I hadn’t thought to give that instruction, someone had just thought of it on their own. Perfect.
Then a bullet hit the catwalk right between my feet. Not so perfect.
CHAPTER 93
I looked up and saw every soldier in the camp aiming his rifle at me. The officer had said I wasn’t going to be killed, but apparently somebody had rethought that decision. Bullets scored the air, and if I had waited even a fraction of a second more, they would have cut me down, torn me to pieces with sheer firepower.
I threw myself over the catwalk, knowing perfectly well that no matter how squishy the mud was below, it could still break my neck. Knowing only that my chances were better that way than if I just stood there and waited to be shot.
I caught one of the luckiest breaks of my lucky life right then. Directly below me wasn’t just mud, but the corrugated tin roof of a shelter. One of the few that hadn’t been torn down. I hit it hard with my shoulder and I felt something crack in my arm, but my head was safe. I rolled down the slope of the roof—I had no choice—and down into the mud. Bullets were still whizzing all around me, chopping up the mud on either side of me. At
any moment one of them could have hit me and I knew I would be dead.
There was no use thinking about that. I got up and I ran, straight for the gap where the fence had been.
By the time I arrived, the positives were gone. I hurried through the long hallway and into the processing center beyond. I saw a last few people running out of the door on the far side of the room, but that was all. Otherwise the big space with its blood-sampling stations was empty. It seemed unreal. It seemed like something from a dream. This room looked exactly like the one I’d seen when I first came here, the last place I’d ever felt safe.
I think I paused for only a second, for one last look around the place. Maybe I was too terrified to leave. I can’t speak very accurately about my mental state at that moment.
The point is, I was totally unprepared when someone came out of the door behind me, the door leading back into the camp. I was completely unready for that person to be Ike. He had his rifle in his hands, but at least it wasn’t pointed at me.
At the same moment there was a noise like something heavy being dropped, and then lights flickered on high overhead. It looked like power had been restored. The blood-sampling machines hummed away for a second, and then all their computer screens lit up.
Ike came over toward me. He slung his rifle over his back. Then he pulled something from his belt—it was a knife—and tossed it to me. I caught it and saw it was the knife I’d taken from Red Kate, the knife with eagle on the blade.
“Told you I’d find that,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. Any of it. “You—you powered down the fence, didn’t you?” I asked.
He shrugged and gave me a goofy grin. “Yeah. Man! You just couldn’t take a hint up on the catwalks, huh? Did you think I was actually just going to arrest you?”
“I, uh, didn’t know.”
Ike laughed. “That red X on the console? They told me on day one, the fence is old and it doesn’t work as good as it used to. Don’t ever turn the power up past that mark, or you’ll short out the generators. And they were right! Power’s back on now, though. They just had to throw a circuit breaker.”
I didn’t know anything about electronics. I just shook my head in disbelief. “Thank you,” I told him.
“Don’t thank me too much,” Ike said. “You’re really going to just leave? It’s just wilderness out there. It’s supposed to be suicide if you’re on foot.”
“I’ve seen it. I’ve seen worse.”
He sighed. “Better go. If the others figure out you’re alone down here, they’ll kill you. No joke.”
“I believe it.” I turned to go, to run after the others. But I couldn’t just say good-bye like that. Not after all he’d done for me.
So instead I looked him right in the eye and said, “Come with me.”
“Where?” he asked.
“No idea.”
We stood there staring at each other for a second. Eventually we both cracked up laughing. I was sure he would turn around and I would never see him again. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and walked past me.
“What the hell,” he said. “For a job where you carry an assault rifle and stuff, army life’s just so fucking dull.”
I figured I could promise him that whatever came next, it wouldn’t be boring.
CHAPTER 94
Outside the camp, the positives had torn apart the guard post. This side of the wall, the western side, looked exactly like the place where Caxton had dropped me off. The positives had gathered maybe a quarter mile away, out of range of the soldiers up on the camp’s wall. Ike and I hurried out to meet them. Nobody shot at us—maybe they were too confused about what had just happened.
When we met up with the others, there was a great deal of hooting and hollering and slapping me on the back. People flinched away from Ike’s uniform, until he tore off his shirt and threw it in a ditch. Then he grabbed me up in a hug and everybody cheered. Luke and Macky both found me and whooped with me and said they couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t believe I’d broken them out. They told me not everyone had come with them. A lot of the older positives, the first generation mostly, had stayed behind. A lot of the women from the female camp had stayed, but several hundred had run when they got the chance. All told, nearly five hundred of us left the camp that day.
There was one person I really wanted to see. I kept asking if anyone had seen Kylie. I worried she would have been one of the ones who stayed behind. Her emotional armor might not let her take a big risky jump like fleeing the camp. I was worried I would never see her again.
Luke kept asking me questions. “What are these people going to eat? Are you really thinking we’re going to walk out of here? What about the zombies? What about the army? Where are we going to sleep tonight? They’re in a great mood right now, and they love you, but how long do think that’s going to last?”
“A scar across her nose,” I kept saying. “Longish hair, and a scar across her nose. Have you seen her?”
Macky came up to me, laughing and whooping. “Goddamn, Finnegan,” he said. “I thought I was going to be king of the camp. That’s what I thought. Now there’s no goddamned camp anymore!” He picked me up and squeezed me hard, and all I could think to do was ask him about Kylie.
“She acts kind of, I don’t know, dead inside. The last time I saw her she was wearing this sort of green shirt. A scar across the bridge of her nose. Have you—”
“Finn,” she said.
Because she was suddenly there. Standing right in front of me. Her arms were folded across her chest like she was cold.
“You came,” I said, as if I’d given her a personal invitation. I couldn’t believe she was really there.
“Finn,” she said again, her voice flat. Emotionless. “Finn. Heather’s dead. She died, Finn.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
She nodded once. Then she hauled off and punched me across the jaw, knocking me down. The crowd couldn’t seem to decide if this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, or if they wanted to tear her apart for striking their hero.
“That’s for bringing me to that place,” she said.
I got up, slowly, unsure what she was going to do next.
She rushed forward and grabbed my face and kissed me, deeply, passionately. She was all there, the armor was down, maybe for the first time. Her arms wrapped around my neck, and I felt her tears running down between both our cheeks.
“That’s for getting me out,” she said.
PART 4
Hearth
CHAPTER 95
And so we headed west.
On foot.
There were no cars for us, no SUVs to ride in. We went on foot in a land where that was supposed to be suicide. We walked out of that camp because that was the only way out.
The positives didn’t need any rousing speeches. They didn’t need to be told why we were doing this. I led, and they followed. There didn’t seem to be any question that I was in charge. Even Macky just nodded when I gave him commands. I was the miracle worker, the great liberator.
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I tried not to let on about that.
I’d spent so much mental energy figuring a way to make these people’s lives better. I’d been willing to sacrifice myself to free them from the horrors of the camp. It turns out that dying in a blaze of glory is surprisingly easy, but living on, after your moment of triumph, is the hardest thing in the world.
Nobody asked me any questions at first. No one asked why I’d taken us west, when the majority of the positives had come from cities in the east. If they had asked, all I could tell them was that I’d seen what Pennsylvania was like now, and there was nothing for us there. Pittsburgh—any walled city—would have at best turned us away. A mob of potential zombies, knocking at the gate? Most likely they would have opened fir
e on us.
West was—potential. The unknown. Anything could be out there. Red Kate had said the government didn’t exert as much control out there, that people could be free in the west. Maybe there was a way to make a life out there, a life for positives. Maybe a better life than what we’d left behind.
Maybe.
I started walking. With Kylie and Ike and Luke by my side.
The rest followed. If they had any ideas about where we should go, what we should do, they didn’t share them. They seemed to think I must have something great up my sleeve, some secret plan.
I’d given them freedom. I wondered how long that would be enough.
CHAPTER 96
I knew I would never have more goodwill and trust from the positives than I had that first week out of camp. I needed it. I knew a little—just a little—about survival in the wilderness, but nothing at all about what five hundred people were going to need, or how to procure it.
Luckily I wasn’t alone. As we set off on foot, trying to get some distance between ourselves and the camp while we still had the strength, I had plenty of advisers to help me make decisions. I kept being surprised that none of them just pushed me aside and took charge themselves, considering how much more effective they were.
We could have all died in the first few days if a positive I didn’t know at all—just some random woman I’d never met—hadn’t come to me and told me we needed to start boiling our drinking water. There was no shortage of water in ditches along the side of the road, but I’d been afraid to touch it after what happened to Addison. Boiling the water couldn’t make it completely safe, but it killed all the germs and parasites—things I’d barely known existed.
Other advisers, some of whom I knew, some I was just meeting for the first time, had their own great suggestions. But the ones I listened to the most often, the ones I came to count on, were the people I already had come to trust with my life.
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