Positive

by David Wellington

  “Because I’m smarter than you and I know better,” he told me, smiling.

  “Seriously,” I said, though I smiled back. “Most ­people want me to just make a call and stick to it. They want somebody who will tell them everything’s going to be okay, or that they’re special and worthwhile. But not you. You disagree with almost everything I say and do and yet you’ve stuck with me, even when you didn’t have to. If you’d gone with Macky—­”

  “—­that would have been a lousy decision, as we see now,” he replied. He scratched at his nose for a second. “Finn, I could tell right away, I mean, really early on that you were going to be trouble. I figured you would end up as the boss of a work crew—­I had no idea you were going to take it this far. You were going to be powerful, though, and in my experience powerful ­people like it when the ­people around them agree with everything they say. When they fawn over their leader. I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to always tell you the truth. I was a little afraid you would hit me for some of the things I said to you—­but you never did. You weren’t like any of the bosses I knew. I guess I stuck around wondering when you were going to change, when you were going to decide you were personally more important than the ­people who followed you.” He shrugged. “I’m still waiting. That day comes, I’m out of here.”

  By the time he’d finished saying all that, the pill I’d taken had kicked in. It hadn’t gone bad in the twenty years since the crisis. If anything, it must have gotten stronger. It took all my pain away, all right, which was very welcome, but it also left me feeling loopy and disconnected from reality.

  Which could be just as bad as the pain had been.

  I handed Luke the pill bottle. “Too much,” I said. “You keep these. When I ask for one, give me half of one, okay? Don’t let me have more than that. And if I start acting really stupid, you cut me off entirely.”

  “Got it, boss,” he said.

  I nodded. It felt like I was underwater and all my motions were slowed down, exaggerated. But I got up on my feet and I could walk, without pain. Which meant I could work.

  CHAPTER 137

  Just before dark, Kate stopped sending her motorcyclists in to harass us. Maybe it was just costing her too many men—­Strong and her snipers were getting very good at hitting moving targets. I told my ­people to keep inside and keep their heads down anyway—­we didn’t know when she would start up again.

  What we did know, what I was sure of, was that she had something else planned for us. That she wasn’t going to just leave us alone. And I was right.

  It took Strong’s sharp eyes to see what was going on.

  The call came down, and I went to the gate right away. Strong ushered me up into her sniper’s nest, the best vantage point we had. She told me what to look for and still I could barely see it. It looked like Kate was building something, a big wooden contraption. She was setting it up in a clearing about two hundred yards from town, a little open space among the trees. I could barely see it, though, for the intervening foliage. I thought maybe it had a long arm and a central pivot, and there were some metal parts attached to the sides—­springs taken from the suspension of one of her motorcycles, maybe.

  It was dark before she finished building the thing, so I didn’t get to see the finished product. I did, however, get to find out what it did, and all too soon.

  It was a catapult. It was designed to throw Molotov cocktails right over our wall, right into the midst of town.

  The first projectile sailed maybe a hundred and fifty yards before it clipped the side of a tree trunk and shattered. Half the town came out to watch the tree flare into a bright cloud of crisping leaves and dark branches silhouetted against the blaze. I shouted for everyone to get back inside, but they all ignored me.

  The second Molotov hit our wall, square on. I was glad then that everyone was out watching, because I had to organize them into another fire brigade. We’d learned a lot about how to put out fires the first time Kate tried to burn us alive, and we made short work of it this time. But even as we were putting the fire out, another missile came arcing over our heads with a grumbling noise and then a shrill clatter as it burst against the hard earth of the main square.

  I headed over there, waving for a team with blankets to follow me, but by the time I’d arrived the flames were already guttering out. The gasoline bombs used up their fuel quickly, it seemed. Unless they hit something that they could ignite, they weren’t too dangerous.

  That was a pretty big “unless,” though. Hearth had so many wooden homes, so many piles of firewood or old, dried-­out furniture. If a fire broke out in the southern part of town, where the older houses were, we might not be able to put it out before it spread through street after street.

  I called for my blanket team to head down there, to the old houses, and stand guard. Our best chance was if they were on the scene when a firebomb hit, so they could take action before things got out of control. I grabbed a team who carried buckets of water and had them spread out around the main square, with instructions to watch for the next bomb. Then I turned around and—­and—­

  I can’t even remember what I was going to do next. Maybe it was the pain pills, but it’s all a blank. All I do remember is someone shouting my name, right in my face, and waking up—­on my feet—­to find myself in the main square.

  The fact that I couldn’t remember how I got there scared me. But I couldn’t focus on that at the moment. I turned and looked and saw a positive who was saying something to me, over and over.

  “The army,” he said. “The army. The army!”

  I couldn’t believe it. When I’d told Lucy to work the radio, to try to raise some help, I’d assumed it wouldn’t ever come to anything. But was it possible? Could it be that the army had come to save us—­a bunch of positives? A big smile started to spread across my face. “What about the army?” I asked.

  “Lucy has them on the radio,” he said. “You need to go talk to them.”

  CHAPTER 138

  Lucy—­our radio operator—­was in the municipal building, in the office of the town’s former comptroller. She had our toylike wind-­up radio on a desk in front of her and she was turning the crank as fast as she could. When she saw me come in, she looked up with very wide eyes. “It’s, um, a Colonel Somebody for you, Finnegan,” she said, and held the radio toward me.

  “I don’t know how to work this thing,” I said. “Do I turn the—­”

  “I can hear you just fine, son,” the radio said. I took it from Lucy’s shaking hands.

  “Colonel Parkhurst?” I said. “You can’t imagine how happy I am to hear from you, sir. We’ve been trying for days—­”

  “I know, son, I know. And I can see you’re in a real pickle over there.”

  I frowned. “You can see through this radio? Does it have a camera in it?”

  “No, no, I’m looking at satellite imagery. I can see your town full of positives there. And I can see the stalkers camping just outside. What the devil is that thing they’ve got? It looks like a catapult. Now, that’s new.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I don’t actually understand what you’re talking about, but it sounds like you’ve got things just about right. Can you—­”

  “How’s your wall? It’s holding up okay?”

  “For now,” I said.

  “And you’ve got water, that’s crucial in any siege-­type situation . . .”

  His voice faded off into a crackling hum. Lucy jumped up and reached for the crank on the side of the radio, and I realized it had run out of power. I turned the crank wildly until I could hear the colonel again.

  “—­medical supplies,” he said.

  “Sir, I missed some of that. But I’m very happy you answered our call, because we could really use some help right now.”

  “Couldn’t we all?” he asked, and even laughed a little. “I’m in New M
exico right now, son. New Mexico, fighting the cultists. You understand? They came sweeping out of Denver like the devil’s own, and they’re pushing us back toward Texas. If they take Texas, they’ll have our oil, and without oil there’s no gasoline. Without gasoline we’ll have no more helicopters, do you see? No more helicopters.”

  “That sounds bad, sir. But if you could just send us one helicopter, with a bunch of soldiers in it, that would—­that would really help us out.” It wasn’t so much to ask, I thought. That was what the army was for, wasn’t it? To protect us from zombies and looters and cultists. Just one helicopter.

  “Son,” the colonel said, “I want to help you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  “I want to. But every single man we’ve got is needed right here. Without gasoline, without helicopters—­there is no army. And then what happens? That’s the end of the United States right there. If we can’t move our ­people around, the whole continent will get divided up by Anubis and ­people like him. No, son. I can’t spare a single troop, much less a squad.”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see Lucy’s face. I didn’t want to see anything. “Colonel,” I said. “I—­I’ll beg if I have to. Please. If you don’t help us, every single person in Hearth could die.” I wished Lucy didn’t have to hear that, but it was going to be evident to the entire town soon enough, anyway. “Colonel—­we need you.”

  “Son, you’ve gotta hold out the best you can. Keep your water supply clean. Keep morale high. Just hold in there long enough and . . .”

  He started to fade out again then. I didn’t even bother turning the crank.

  I handed the radio back to Lucy. She took it and set it carefully on her desk.

  “You did an amazing job getting through to him,” I told her. “But maybe we should put you on a fire-­fighting team, now. I, uh, I don’t think we need a radio operator anymore.”

  “No,” she said. “I guess not.”

  I tried to give her a brave smile, even if I wasn’t feeling it. “Maybe we keep this just between us, okay?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  CHAPTER 139

  That next day Red Kate mostly left us alone—­I had no idea why, but I was thankful for it. Maybe her catapult broke.

  But at least I had a little space of time when I wasn’t running all over town, literally putting out fires. When I realized things would stay quiet, probably until dawn, I found Kylie and let her help me into a bed. I even managed to get some sleep.

  Pain woke me up. I called for Luke and he gave me half a pill, then left before I could order him to give me the other half. While I waited for the medicine to kick in, Kylie held my head in her lap and stroked my temples. I touched my forehead to the warmth of her pregnant belly and that helped.

  “How’s our food supply holding up? How long until we starve?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that now,” she told me. She shushed me and rubbed my ears.

  “When we run out of bullets, Kate will know. She’ll realize we can’t shoot at her anymore, and she’ll just have her stalkers snipe us through the gate.”

  “That’s not happening right now,” Kylie said.

  “She can stay out there forever. We’re trapped in here.”

  “We’re safe in here, you mean,” she told me.

  I swiveled around until I could look up into her face. “If I die—­”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “No, listen, if I die, I need you to take charge, which means—­”

  “Finn,” she said. “Shut the fuck up.”

  I blinked at her. I thought about what to say in response. Then I just nodded, closed my eyes, and nestled closer, touching her with as much of my body as I could.

  CHAPTER 140

  Whatever the reason for the short respite, by nightfall Red Kate got it fixed. Soon she was keeping up a steady stream of gasoline bombs, about one every minute. We kept putting the fires out, but it was just a matter of time before she got lucky and one of the Molotov cocktails hit something vulnerable. I don’t even know what caught on fire first—­but soon enough a house was burning, roof to foundation, in the south part of town and then three of them were and then the fire was everywhere. My teams worked valiantly trying to put out the blazes, some of them rushing straight into the conflagration. I knew they would get themselves killed—­the fires were just too big, too out of control, so I ordered them to fall back.

  That was when I heard Luke shouting for help. I hurried toward him as fast as I could and when I got there I found him already ordering my teams around, telling them to throw their water on a house that wasn’t even on fire. For a second I thought he’d gone crazy but then I realized what he was doing—­he was trying to keep the fire from spreading.

  “You bunch,” he said, pointing at a blanket team. “Drop those. Blankets won’t cut it anymore. You see that shed?” he asked. “I want you to tear it down.”

  They looked at one another, not at him. I could see they were skeptical.

  But I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Do what he says,” I shouted, and they moved.

  Sometimes it helps to have the mayor on your side.

  The shed in question was right in the path of the spreading fire, but it was made of corrugated tin. It was in no danger of catching on fire. But I watched as they used claw hammers and pickaxes to tear it apart, and then I saw what Luke was after. Hidden inside the shed were a bunch of jugs and bottles looped together with pieces of rubber hose. It was a still. If the fire had gotten to it, it might have gone up like a bomb. Luke moved in fast and started carting away the various pieces of the still, in the process getting a lot of alcohol on his shirt and pants. When he started running back in to grab more of it, I grabbed his arm. “Get away from the fire,” I said.

  He looked down at himself and laughed. “That would be a pretty dumb way to go, huh?”

  “I’ll see to this—­you go see how far the fire’s spread on the other side of town.”

  He nodded and ran off without another word. I organized a team to finish cleaning up the still, then asked for some help getting up on a roof so I could see the extent of the damage.

  It was already devastating, and it looked like it would get worse. The whole southern third of town was on fire. I didn’t hear anybody screaming—­those houses weren’t occupied, since they were too close to the wall, too close to stray bullets fired by stalkers on motorcycles, so I’d had the ­people who lived there moved to more central housing. I could be thankful for small mercies, at least.

  The smoke started to get to me after a while. The flames dazzled my eyes, and as drugged up as I was, I started feeling very light-­headed. I had my team bring me back down off the roof, and I headed north, toward the municipal building.

  I had to get every single positive organized, get them limiting the spread of the fire—­Luke would have good ideas about that. I needed to organize rescue parties just in case anyone was trapped down there. I needed—­

  I came up short when I reached the main square. Maybe seventy ­people were there, all of them staring southward. Staring at the column of smoke and fire twisting over Hearth’s southern half. They were dumbfounded.

  I realized how calm I’d become. Maybe that was the pills, or maybe it was just because I knew somebody had to stay in control, somebody had to keep making decisions.

  But yeah. When I thought about it—­Hearth was on fire.

  It was too much. It was just too much. If I started thinking about it, I would cry or scream or something. This could be the thing that broke us, the final attack that destroyed us.

  Except I wouldn’t let it be. “It’s just houses,” I shouted at the gathered ­people.

  Some of them looked at me in horror. Just houses?

  “Hearth,” I said, “isn’t houses. We can build houses, re
build all of them. But if we don’t get to work right now, there’ll be no point. I need teams of ­people to fetch water, I need teams to dismantle structures, I need—­”

  I needed a lot of things. One by one, the ­people in the square began to snap out of their trance and give me those things.

  CHAPTER 141

  The fire burned all night, spreading despite everything we tried. Luke was nearly killed when a flaming house collapsed right next to him, but other than some superficial burns he came through okay. Within minutes he was back in charge of the crew dismantling a small factory on the east side of town.

  We had no way to stop the fire, nothing more effective than buckets of water and blankets to smother the embers that scattered everywhere every time a house sagged and collapsed into the street. There weren’t even enough of us to take care of what problems we could fix, much less think about how to stop the conflagration.

  Every single one of us, every positive in Hearth, worked tirelessly, bringing water from the well, throwing buckets of dirt on smoldering piles of rubble, dragging wounded ­people out of buildings that were at risk. Some ­people did die in the fire, trapped inside buildings they were trying to save. Dozens of others were burned or suffered such bad smoke inhalation they had to be taken to the hospital in the municipal building.

  I kept moving as best I could through all of it, though my wound and the pills made me dizzy, made me sway in the heat of the fires. I blacked out a ­couple more times, but I didn’t tell anybody when it happened. I tried not to worry about it. I just got back to what I had been doing.

  I think a lot of ­people were in that same condition, half dazed, half sick, barely able to stand but unable to stop working. Nobody was going to stop now, nobody was going to just lie down and admit defeat.