Positive

by David Wellington

  I didn’t answer. Costa didn’t seem to mind.

  “One of those problems he has is all the positives he has under his control. Now, the church is a very inclusive institution. We take anyone who comes before us with humility and an honest heart. But there are some prejudices in this world that even the church can’t overcome. The ­people under our protection—­the ­people of Chicago and Milwaukee especially—­don’t want positives living among them. They’re too scared of what could happen. Now, Mike can’t just send his positives to the camps in Ohio or California—­those are run by the government, and Washington doesn’t have much use for religious folk these days. So Mike needs someplace to send his positives, someplace where he knows they’ll be taken care of. Out of sight, out of mind. You, of course, offer the perfect solution to this little problem.”

  “You want me to take all your positives.” I considered it. That was what Hearth was for, after all. To take all those unwanted ­people and give them a home. More ­people meant more hands to share the work, too. Normally, I would be happy to have our community grow.

  Of course, this meant accepting hundreds—­maybe thousands—­of positives who were already devotees of the skeleton cult. ­People who worshipped death. They would outnumber us, those of us who had escaped the medical camp. In the next election, they could just take over the town.

  Still. I’d built Hearth on a principle, that positives should be allowed to live decent lives.

  “Saying I take them,” I asked, “what’s in it for me?”

  “We leave you alone. You can continue your little social experiment here in total peace.”

  I turned to actually look at him for once. “Wait. You’re saying that if we accept your positives, you won’t bother us at all? You won’t come around demanding sacrifices or tribute or anything?”

  “That’s what being obedient gets you, Finnegan. That’s why we’re the fastest-­growing church in America. You get your reward in the here and now, not in some fanciful afterlife.”

  Freedom from persecution hardly seemed like a reward—­to me it felt more like a basic right. But the offer was surprisingly tempting. Admittedly, it meant making friends with butchers, with ­people capable of slaughtering entire cities. But it meant Hearth wouldn’t end up like Indianapolis.

  I closed my eyes. I tried to think about what he was offering. I thought about what it would cost me if I said no. I thought of whether I’d be able to sleep at night if I said yes.

  The thing is, when you lead ­people—­when they count on you—­it’s not your own values you have to worry about. It’s not what you can live with. It’s what your ­people need, what they can put up with.

  “Well,” I said. “That sounds pretty good.”

  Costa jumped up and lifted his hands in the air. “This is what I love! Dealing with rational ­people! You don’t know what a good decision you’ve made.”

  “All right. All right. I imagine you’ll want to get going, then. No point sticking around here.”

  “Sure, sure,” Costa said. “I’ll get my ­people moving. Just as soon as we’re finished with one last thing.”

  My blood went cold.

  “We’re going to need a show of obedience, of course. There are rules about these things. You don’t have to worship Death. You don’t even have to respect the church. But you do have to play by our rules if you’re going to live in our state.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew.

  “Normally, when I come to a town like this, I ask for a decimation. Do you know what that word means? A lot of ­people don’t. It means a sacrifice of one in ten. A tithe of your population. But that seems excessive, since we’ve gotten along so well. What do you say we just take ten?”

  I could only stare at him. Ten of my ­people? As a sacrifice?

  “There is a point to all this, you know. Michigan Mike needs a reason to trust you. He needs to know you’re one of us. So I’m going to let you pick the ten. And I’m going to have you do the culling.”

  CHAPTER 124

  Me,” I said, in a very small voice.

  “Yes,” Costa replied. He put an arm around my shoulders. “I know it’s going to be hard. But think of it this way. There are—­what—­three hundred ­people here? Ten of them die, and two hundred and ninety of them live. Come on. Let’s go tell them how it’s going to be. They deserve to know. Maybe some of them will volunteer. We always like it better when the sacrifices are volunteers. Death likes it better that way.”

  I turned to stare at him. What did he really believe? Did he truly think there was some great record book somewhere, a list of names of the dead, a balance sheet where when one name was crossed off, another was permitted to remain? I could accept it when we were in the camp, when death was always on top of us. I could accept that desperate ­people would become so warped in their minds that they would truly believe you could make a bargain like that. But this was no desperate man. He looked well fed. He looked healthy, and other than a thin layer of road dust, his clothes were clean. He had power. And yet—­did he really still believe it?

  You can’t ask a question like that and think you can trust the answer.

  So instead I asked, “Tell me something—­tell me why.”

  Costa grinned at me, but his eyes were narrowed. “Why what?”

  “Why do all those ­people have to die?” I shook my head. “Not just the ten here. All of them. All those sacrifices your god demands.”

  “Death is not a god. It is an impersonal force,” Costa said. “We give it a shape—­a face—­as a way to help explain Anubis’s teachings.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  Costa stood up and looked down at me. He dusted off his pants. “I can give you two answers. The theological answer, first. Anubis is our strength. He rebuilds the wilderness, returns it to a place where ­people can live. He hunts down zombies and roots out cannibals and the larcenous. To do this, he needs the strength that Death grants him. All those ­people must die to give power to his arm.”

  I didn’t even bother looking at him while he said all that.

  “There’s a practical answer, too,” he went on.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. It brings us together. If you choose and cull ten of your ­people, you will be taking an act that cannot be reversed. You will have that sin upon you for the rest of your life, do you see? You will be implicated. And that means, no matter where you go, no matter what you do subsequently, you will forever be part of the cult.”

  “Ten ­people have to die so I can join you,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s a ritual, but it isn’t illogical. In a place this size, one death is nothing much. ­People die all the time. But ten will be remembered.”

  I rose to my feet. Together with Costa I walked out into the square. Despite my instructions, almost no one had returned to their houses. They still stood around, biting their lips, wringing their hands. Wondering what was going to happen next.

  A lifetime of peace, for one savage, terrible act. For ten lives.

  Except—­it wouldn’t end there, would it? If I paid fealty to the cult, if I implicated myself as he’d said, it would be forever. The next time they came through town, the next time Anubis needed strength in his arm, would they ask for more sacrifices? And what choice would I have but to give them what they asked for? I would be one of them.

  Hearth would be part of their empire. And everything it originally stood for would be lost.

  Costa lifted his arms to get everyone’s attention, and then he began to preach. “Death,” he intoned, and waited until everyone was looking at him, “is greedy. Death is impatient. And Death is willing to make a deal.”

  The nineteen other stalkers all lifted their hands in the air, a salute to their faith.

&nbs
p; Which meant they took their hands off their guns, just for a moment.

  I’d made my choice. I don’t think I could have made any other, despite the consequences. I grabbed my knife from my belt, the knife I’d carried since I left New York, and I buried it in Costa’s chest. Hot blood spurted between us.

  He looked very surprised.

  “Snipers!” I shouted, but before I even had the word out, I heard gunshots.

  Some of them came from the snipers at the gate. Others came from just over my head.

  While Costa and I had been talking, Macky had made his own decision about whether we should join the cult. He’d headed up to the top of the municipal building with a ­couple ­people he knew were excellent shots. They had our best rifles; they were ready and they fired before the stalkers could even react.

  One of the stalkers fell to the ground, a smoking hole in the back of his motorcycle helmet. Another spun around, his arm covered in blood.

  Over at the gate, the snipers I’d called for weren’t much slower in reacting. I don’t know how many stalkers they took down before the general shooting started. I threw myself to the ground, rolling Costa’s body over me like a shield. He was still twitching.

  Bullets whizzed and hissed across the square as the ­people screamed. The stalkers lifted their assault rifles and started shooting blindly—­some aiming for the snipers and for Macky, some just firing into the crowd. “No!” I shouted, but I knew there was no chance of getting through this without casualties. I heard someone wailing in grief. I heard other ­people moaning in pain. One by one the stalkers fell, their rifles jumping from their hands, the faceplates of their helmets cracking with white stars, their bodies chewed up by shotgun blasts and revolver bullets and, eventually, by awls and hatchets and woodworking tools as the ­people turned on them.

  One of them, maybe the last one alive, ran for his motorcycle. Bullets chewed up the back of his leather jacket and his blood flowed across his gas tank, but he got the machine started and he raced for the gate.

  “Don’t let him get away!” I shouted, jumping up and running for the square. “Don’t let him get out or he’ll tell them what happened—­”

  But it was already too late. The motorcycle shot out through the gate and the snipers couldn’t get a bead on the stalker once he was out in the woods. He got away.

  The smoke took a long time to clear from the square.

  CHAPTER 125

  Two of us were dead, cut down by stalker bullets. One of the snipers, and a young guy who had run right at the stalkers, attacking them with just his bare hands.

  Fourteen more citizens of Hearth were wounded, some badly. They were all expected to live, if infections didn’t get them.

  They’d wanted ten deaths, and they’d gotten more than twenty, since all the stalkers were dead. I didn’t know how they expected Death to feel about that. Maybe the one who got away had thoughts on the matter.

  I’ll never know if I made the right decision. It was what I needed to do at the time, when I stabbed Costa. I couldn’t have done anything else. Which will never, ever let me off the hook for those who were hurt or who died.

  Just then I wasn’t thinking about who to blame. There was so much to do, right away, that grieving had to wait. We pulled our sniper off the gate and dragged him over to where we’d piled the other bodies. They needed to be buried right away. We pushed the motorcycles deep into the forest, into leafy shadows, and covered them with tree branches and fallen leaves so they wouldn’t be seen from the air.

  “It won’t matter,” Luke said. “They’ll come back. They’ll find us again.”

  I went through the stalkers’ things, the contents of their pockets and the saddlebags on their motorcycles. They didn’t have a radio, or any way of contacting their superiors. My hope was that the lone stalker who got away wouldn’t make it back, that he would die out in the wilderness. It was a lot to hope for, but if you want to believe something enough, it starts sounding possible.

  “They’re experts at wilderness survival,” Luke insisted. “He’ll make it back.”

  We scrubbed the blood off the houses and the front of the municipal building. Patched the bullet holes, filled them over, painted the walls around them until they couldn’t be seen. Made sure there was no trace of what had happened.

  “They’ll send more. They’ll send a lot more of them. Too many for us to fight.”

  I whirled around to face Luke. “Goddamnit, what else do you want me to do?” By that point night had come, and we were discussing strategy in the main square. Luke, Macky, Kylie, and me. The rest of the positives were all in their houses, dealing with what happened, each in his or her own way.

  I couldn’t think straight with Luke telling me again and again that we were doomed. I thought maybe somebody else might shut him up. “Macky,” I said, “you haven’t said anything yet.”

  His eyes were two cold stones in his head. He had saved us. He’d fought for Hearth. I thought he would back me up now. He didn’t. “Luke’s right. More of them will come. It’s not a question of if, but when. And next time they’ll send a hundred. If we kill the hundred, they’ll send a thousand. Until we can’t fight back anymore.”

  Kylie stood up and slapped the table with one hand. “Enough. We did what we did. We need to think about what’s next. About what we’re going to do next.”

  “And what’s that?” Luke asked.

  “I have no idea,” Kylie admitted.

  “I do,” Macky said.

  CHAPTER 126

  I did everything I could to convince them not to do it. I made a big speech in the town square, begging them not to.

  “Macky’s told you all his plan by now,” I said. They had all come out. This was far too important for anyone to miss. Even the wounded were propped up in chairs so they could listen. “I could have ordered him not to discuss it with you, but that’s not who we are.” I doubted he would have obeyed me anyway.

  I sighed and looked out at their faces. At their eyes. These ­people had followed me through hardship and pain. They’d worked with me, built a town with me.

  “In case you haven’t heard all the details, his plan is to leave. Just pack up everything he can carry and walk back east. Head back to the medical camp. I know you remember that place. I know you can’t forget it, just as I can’t.

  “I want to try to convince you to stay. Now, Macky will tell you how much danger we’re in here. He’s in charge of security. He understands what a threat is and that the best way to deal with it is not to be there when it arrives. That’s smart. It’s good planning, and I won’t tell you he’s wrong.

  “But I want you to think about what you’d be giving up. What you would leave behind. This place—­Hearth—­it’s special. Not because it’s got a big fence or snipers watching the road. Every place in the world has that. Not because we’ve got pigs in a corral or enough jerky to get through the winter. You could have that anywhere, if you worked for it. No, Hearth is special because it’s us. It’s become who we are. I led you here, not so I could find you a safe place. I led you here because I knew you could be Hearth. You could be this town. I believed in you, in us, in our ability to become more than what we were. To do more than just survive. To show the world that positives can build something real, and meaningful, and lasting.

  “If you walk out the gate now, if you just give up, you’ll be letting that dream die. If you go back to the medical camp, and knock on the door and say, ‘We’re sorry, we were mistaken, we can’t make it on our own,’ then you’re accepting that you’re nothing more than what they told you. Positives. A danger to yourself and others. Not even one hundred percent human.

  “Maybe you’re okay with that. Maybe you never felt the dream the way I did, and maybe, even now, you’re thinking this place isn’t worth defending. But I do. So I’m going to stay. No matter how many of you leave, I’m g
oing to stay.

  “I hope you’ll stay with me. That’s all.”

  In the morning, Macky was packed and ready to go, but he took his time about it. He spent a good hour talking to the snipers he’d personally trained, then going over the weapons stored in our armory, making sure they were in good shape.

  I found him there. He didn’t say a word as I approached, he just sighted down the barrel of a hunting rifle and frowned.

  “When they come,” he said, “go for head shots. Make every bullet count. Trust your snipers—­and get them training as many ­people as they can.”

  I nodded. “We’ll do our best.”

  He turned around until he was facing me, but his eyes never quite reached mine. “It’s not too late for you to come with us,” he said.

  “It’s not too late for you to stay.”

  But both of us were wrong, and we knew it. I’d made a speech about staying—­if I turned my back on Hearth now, no one would ever respect me again. Least of all myself. If he chose to stay now, he’d be letting down all the ­people who wanted to go.

  In the end, we shook hands and wished each other luck.

  Then he walked out the gate, with fifty of my ­people walking behind him. Luke, Kylie, and I watched from the top of the municipal building as they filed out of town. Down in the main square, a crowd of ­people who had decided to stay were gathered to jeer and mock the ones who left. I didn’t like it, but I knew it would bring them closer together. In a way they were just showing their pride and their faith in Hearth.

  Anyway, I was too busy watching the horizon. Wondering where the attack would come from, when it did.

  CHAPTER 127