Positive

by David Wellington

  Ike was the big surprise. He’d never seemed very practical minded to me, but once we were under way he was simply indispensable. That first night, when we found ourselves standing in a mob on the highway, watching the sun go down, it was Ike who said we needed to set up a camp.

  “But we don’t have any shelters. Or even tents,” I pointed out. I think I had planned on just walking through the night. It was what I would have done on my own. The funny thing about a herd of five hundred ­people, though, is that they move much slower than a single man. Some of them were just too weak to go any farther, and I refused to leave them behind. Some were already griping about blisters and sore legs and wondering what they were supposed to eat.

  “A camp is just wherever you sit down,” Ike told me. “But there are a ­couple of things that’ll make it a lot more bearable. We need to dig latrine pits. We need to set up some kind of watch system—­if zombies come in the night, we need to know about it in advance. If one of us goes zombie, we need to be ready for that. And we need to get ­people organized in groups. We need a head count of how many of us there are, so we know if anybody goes missing.”

  I just stared at him. Where had he come up with all this?

  He shrugged. “Basic training. It was boring as hell, but they repeated everything until it stuck. Made me memorize stuff I was never going to need at my new job as a soldier. I think most of the time it was just to keep me busy so I didn’t wander off.”

  So we made camp that first night, with everyone sleeping under the stars, wrapped in whatever clothes or blankets they’d brought from the camp. Ike’s system of watches worked well—­watchers had to stay awake for only an hour, since we had plenty of ­people to take their places. No zombies appeared, which surprised me a little—­a group this big made plenty of noise, and I knew how active the zombies got at night. By morning I had figured it out, though. It was the army. The medical camp was one of their important assets, and they’d done a thorough job of clearing the land around it. A sort of invisible perimeter surrounded the camp where there were no zombies at all. Eventually we would walk past that unseen border, but for the moment we had a little grace.

  CHAPTER 97

  In the morning, Macky came and told me everyone was accounted for. Ike had wanted an inventory of how many ­people we had, but it had fallen on Macky and the former bosses to compile it. I wasn’t crazy about that. I wanted to throw over the old boss system and let ­people make decisions for themselves. But I needed some kind of organization, and the bosses were more than happy to step up. Anything that let them hold on to a little of the power they’d lost when we left the medical camp. Just counting heads was something.

  “We can get work crews together, if you tell us what we need to get done,” Macky told me. When he’d bought me from Fedder, he’d seen me as a useful tool, somebody who could help make him stronger. Now he treated me like I was the boss and he was the worker with bright ideas. I knew many of the other bosses—­the ones who had beaten their workers for fun, the ones who’d become bosses by dint of muscles, not brains—­weren’t as willing to accept my authority. They respected Macky, though, and it became clear he was going to be my highest-­ranking officer. It was amazing how fast we re-­created old power structures.

  I thought about what I could do with five hundred workers. “We need food. We’re going to need weapons, and tents, and a million other things. Medical supplies.”

  “Okay. How do we do that? Where do we find that stuff?”

  I rubbed at my face. “Well,” I said, and paused as if I were thinking. I knew the answer. I didn’t like it, but I knew. “Well. We’re going to have to start looting.”

  I hated the life I’d left behind, the life Adare had taught me about. But it had kept me and the girls alive.

  “The first thing we need is a map. We’ll find a gas station, and there’ll be maps there. Once we know where we are, we can figure out where the loot will be. Can you get together some ­people who are strong and fast who can scout ahead?”

  “Sure,” Macky said.

  “We’re going to need food sooner than that,” Luke said.

  Luke had always questioned me—­always pointed out the flaws in my logic. I’m only human, and sometimes it annoyed me to no end. But he was almost always right, and I knew if I listened to him, I could avoid some costly mistakes. Plans that made perfect sense in my head rarely worked out smoothly in the real world, and I needed somebody to keep me on my toes.

  “There’ll be houses around here somewhere,” I said. I stood up in the road and peered north and south. The land here was so flat I could see for a fair distance. On either side of the highway I saw nothing but overgrown fields, stretching away to the horizon. They could have been great prairies of weed except for the way they were divided into enormous rectangular plots. “This used to be farmland,” I said. “There have to be farmhouses, stores—­something. Macky, I want you to get together two more groups. Pick ­people who are sharp, you know, the kind who’ll keep their eyes open. Send one north, one south to look for any sign of houses. There’ll be canned food there, stuff we can still eat.” Something caught my eye, and I looked at the fields again. Most of the overgrowth was just green, ragged and dusty and distinctly nonedible. But here and there I saw stands of golden tassels blowing in the wind.

  Wheat.

  This had been farmland once. The weeds had reclaimed it, but some of the old crops seemed to be making a good show of surviving. They had grown wild and probably wouldn’t provide all we needed, but it was something.

  “Luke, find me someone who knows how to make flour. And bread.”

  “Out of . . . that?” Luke said. “I mean, I know that’s what you make flour out of. But we don’t have any ovens. Or anything else we need.”

  “Somebody might know how to get around that,” I told him. “In the meantime, we need to get everybody else moving. Walking. We can keep the pace slow today, so the scouting parties can catch up with us later. But the farther we get from that camp, the better. I don’t think the army really wants us back at this point, but I don’t want to give them a reason to come round us all up.”

  My advisers all nodded and went about the errands I’d given them. For a second I let myself relax. Maybe this was possible. Maybe I could keep all these ­people alive.

  That day we walked no more than seven miles, judging by the mile markers at the side of the highway. The positives weren’t used to this kind of active lifestyle, and many of them just refused to go any farther until I personally came over and asked them nicely. I was beginning to see why so many of the powerful ­people I’d known had used threats and violence as motivators. It would have been so much easier if I could have just bullied the ­people into moving.

  But that wasn’t right. It would make me as bad as Adare or Fedder, or the guards back at the camp. And I refused to lead like that. There was another way to motivate ­people—­you could inspire them. If you gave them something to believe in, they would follow you toward that goal.

  Now I just needed to think of what that goal would be.

  That night the scouting parties came back, with mixed success. I got my map—­a beautiful road atlas, just like the one Adare had annotated. This one was pristine, with no red marks to indicate what we were walking into, but it had a full map of Ohio and I could see we wouldn’t be traveling through desolate farmland for long.

  The scouts who went out looking for food turned up some canned goods. It looked like a lot when they hauled it back to camp, but once it was divided up, it didn’t go nearly far enough. A lot of ­people got nothing. I couldn’t do much about that, except give my share to the scrawniest kid I could find. That got me some smiles and pats on the back but did little to appease the hungry ­people who just stared at me.

  My idea for harvesting the wild wheat turned out to be a dud. A ­couple of positives turned up who had been gardene
rs and cooks back before they were exiled from their cities. They took one look at the sheaf of wheat I’d gathered and shook their heads. “It needs to be ground down for flour, and I have no idea how to do that,” one of them, a young woman, said.

  The man standing next to her shrugged. “That’s not the hard part. The hard part would be collecting enough wheat to make even a pound of flour. It would take days to go through these fields and find a significant amount. On the other hand,” he said, and he showed me a plant he’d found on his own. It had a straight stalk with fingerlike pods hanging from it. Each pod contained a ­couple of small beans. “This is soy.”

  “Never heard of it,” I told him.

  He nodded in understanding. “I don’t think it grows out east. Here it’s everywhere—­all over these fields.”

  “And you can eat it?” I asked.

  “You can boil the beans and eat them right out of the pod. They don’t taste like much but they’ll fill you up.” He shrugged. “There’s supposed to be other things you can do with it, but I don’t know how.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. Then I looked at the woman standing next to him. “This is something. This is huge. I want you to look for any other plants we can use as food. You two could be the ones who keep us alive.”

  Both of their faces lit up at the sound of that. I could see in their eyes that they wanted it. They wanted to be the ones who fed us. Maybe they just knew that whoever came up with food for this camp was going to get a lot of perks. It didn’t matter. They had their goal.

  Two done, four hundred and ninety-­eight to go.

  My final adviser was Kylie. When she came to me in the camp that night, I had a lot of questions for her. I knew almost nothing about the women we’d liberated, the former residents of the female camp. She’d lived among them, and she knew who could be trusted with various tasks.

  She also knew about the special challenges they faced.

  “Some of the men are going to be a problem,” I told her. “I don’t want to scare you, but the way they used to talk about what they would do if they ever got their hands on a girl—­”

  “Finn, I know what sex is. And I know what rape is,” she said.

  Right. I’d almost forgotten.

  “It’s under control,” she said.

  Her mask was on. For a brief moment after we left the camp she’d been human. The human woman who had cared about Bonnie and Addison and Heather and mourned for them. Now her armor was back up. She needed to survive out here, and she would do whatever it took.

  “Care to tell me how?” I asked.

  “You had work crews in your camp. So did we. Our bosses knew what to do. We stay together. We never go anyplace alone. The men who would hurt us are cowards. They’ll prey on a woman who’s alone and vulnerable. So we’ll make a point of never being alone.”

  “Good,” I said. “I won’t let that happen to my ­people.”

  She just watched my face. Like I was something to be studied. Something she’d never seen before.

  We sat in silence for a long time, while the camp around us prepared for sleep. The noise of five hundred ­people took a long time to die out, but as night fell and the sky lit up with stars, something like peace came over us.

  “Sleep here tonight,” I told her. “Next to me. We can keep each other safe.”

  She nodded. Then she laid out her blankets and settled into them. I showed her how to make a bed on the road surface—­I’d already learned that it stayed drier overnight than the softer ground on either side. Then we curled up, back to back.

  Eventually, slowly, she turned to face me. She held out her hand, and I pulled it around myself, wrapping her around me like a blanket.

  It just felt so right.

  CHAPTER 98

  Day by day, things got harder.

  Though the farmland gave way to small towns, the scouting parties could never seem to bring back enough food for everyone. We took turns eating. All of us were used to a near-­starvation diet, but somehow, since leaving the camp, the positives had begun to expect more. Maybe because they were walking so much, expending more energy. Or maybe they’d thought escaping the camp would solve all their problems.

  The grumbling started with just a few individuals, who couldn’t or wouldn’t put up with the grueling hours of walking followed by little or no food. They would threaten to just sit down in the road and stop walking. They never actually did it, of course—­they were terrified of being left behind. And at first the ­people around them would just tell them to shut up and conserve their energy.

  But eventually they began to organize.

  I suppose I’d taught them how to do that. I couldn’t very well blame them for wanting to improve their lives.

  The first group to approach me was a former work crew, led by their former boss. He’d been one of the meaner sort, the bullies, and I’d expected trouble from him, but I hadn’t expected his erstwhile workers to stand behind him. They came up to me one night while I was conferring with my advisers. Macky stood up very tall, his chest puffed out, when he saw them approaching. “That’s Garrett,” he said. “This ought to be fun.”

  I looked up from my road atlas and gave Garrett a wave. He wanted a confrontation, so I figured I would make it seem like this meeting was my idea. “I need to hear what you’re thinking,” I told him.

  A momentary look of confusion crossed his face. But then he glanced over his shoulders at his workers and that seemed to restore his bluster. “We need more food.”

  “We all do,” I said. “Did you come up with some idea how we can get some more? Because I’d love to hear it.”

  “No. No. My group here, specifically, we need more food. We need to eat every day. We’re already getting weaker. And you need us.”

  “I need everyone. I need all the help I can get,” I said.

  I could see him getting frustrated. “We’re strong. We want to stay that way, so when the zombies come, or whatever, we can fight them off. You’re going to need fighters.”

  I nodded agreeably. “Absolutely. In fact, I’ve been thinking I need a group to scout ahead and check for threats. We’re going to start seeing zombies sooner than we expect, and there could be more human dangers, too. What do you think, Garrett? Are your guys tough enough for the job?”

  It gave me a priceless moment of entertainment to watch him squirm. He desperately wanted to say no, but doing so would make him look weak and invalidate his argument for more food.

  Eventually I decided to ease up a little. “Of course, while you’re scouting ahead you’re likely to come across plenty of canned food in the houses you pass. You’d be welcome to whatever you could find.”

  Garrett wanted to say no, but he’d made the mistake of not coming alone. His workers shouted him down. As they walked away, discussing plans among themselves, Macky laughed and turned to me. “Nicely played,” he said.

  And so I got a vanguard and neutralized a threat to my authority. Sadly, it wasn’t always that easy.

  A woman came to me to tell me her friend was sick and getting weaker by the day. She couldn’t walk anymore, and she needed to eat or she was going to die. I gave her a can of twenty-­year-­old creamed spinach out of the day’s pile, far more than one sick person ought to have received, but I remembered how I felt when I heard Heather was sick. “Make sure nobody sees her eating this,” I said. “Or they’ll be jealous. Maybe dangerously jealous.”

  The woman looked a lot less grateful than I had hoped. Even worse, later on I found out I’d made a sentimental mistake. Kylie came to me that night and told me the truth. There had been no sick friend. The woman had eaten the entire can herself. Unused to so much food in one sitting, she’d thrown most of it back up. That can could have fed four ­people, if it was parceled out correctly.

  That episode hardened my heart against ­people claiming sic
kness, which also turned out to be a mistake. Because ­people really were getting sick. I don’t know if it was exhaustion or exposure or what, but one by one ­people started dropping out of the back of the line as we walked, falling down on the side of the road. Others had to come pick them up, and sometimes carry them. Soon enough we had our first death.

  And our second, the same night.

  And our third, the next morning.

  Suddenly the agitators, the complainers, weren’t being told to shut up. They were getting nods and muttered agreement. A big cohort of them wanted to turn back. To return to the camp. We were only marching to our death, they said. I was leading them nowhere, I was insane, I had fooled them all into leaving the camp in the first place because I wanted them to die.

  At one point we passed a car that had been abandoned on the road. Its tires were just rotten tatters and its chassis was rusted through, so I ignored it. I barely even registered the skeleton in the front seat. Others, however, saw the bones. They lifted them reverently free of the broken windows and wired them together and carried them along with us. And each night they knelt before that skeleton and prayed.

  “I hoped we’d left that shit behind,” I said as I watched them go about their devotions. Making their bargains with Death.

  ­“People need something to believe in,” Luke told me. “For a while, you fit the bill. But it’s been too long since you did something for them.”

  “I’m making decisions for them all day long!” I said. “Without me—­”

  “They might get a chance to find out what they’ll do without you,” he interrupted. “I’d say you have two days, maybe three, before they decide you’re the wrong one to be in charge.”

  “Fine. Let somebody else take over. It would be a relief,” I said. But of course I didn’t mean it. Luke could see I didn’t, so he let it drop.

  The next day the scouting parties came back almost empty-­handed. And six more ­people died, almost all at once. The skeleton worshippers looked positively smug.