Positive

 

Dedication

For Adrian, Rakie, Nemesis0, and everyone who was there at the beginning

 

Acknowledgments

I
would be remiss if I did not thank a number of ­people who helped make this book a reality. Diana Gill, Lyssa Keusch, Kelly O'Connor, Rebecca Lucash, and Jessie Edwards at Harper­Collins; my redoubtable agent Russell Galen and the tireless Ann Behar; and Jennifer Dikes for being relentlessly awesome. Thanks, everyone!

 

Contents

 

PART 1

The
Beginning
of the
World

 

CHAPTER 1

N
ew York City is still in pretty good shape.

Manhattan, I mean. Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have all been left to rot—­there just weren't enough ­people to hold them. So they can be pretty dangerous, not so much because of the occasional zombie you find around the peripheries, but because the buildings are falling down and the water out there is very toxic. Staten Island—­well, nobody wants to go to Staten Island. Parts of it are still on fire.

But in Manhattan we have electricity, sometimes, and the skyscrapers in Midtown were built to hold up. The elevators don't work, but the lowest ­couple of floors are still livable. On top of the smaller buildings we've planted gardens to catch the sun and the rain, to supplement the daily minimum caloric ration the government provides. That's where most of us work, every day. Even some of the first generation—­the ones who weren't too traumatized during the crisis—­work in the gardens. It's not like they're much use for anything else. They're always scared to go down to street level, even though nobody's seen a zombie in Manhattan in fifteen years.

The second generation, my generation, pretty much have the run of the place. There are still caches of canned food to find—­old civil defense bunkers and fallout shelters and supplies set aside for hurricanes or floods or earthquakes that never came. You can't catch fish off the piers, because the Hudson and the harbor aren't clean yet. But you can trap eels and crabs in the old subway stations.

That's what I was doing the day I got my tattoo: subway fishing.

My friend Ike and I headed down early to the West Twenty-­Eighth Street station. It was still mostly dark, with just a little blue light frosting the concrete fronts of all the buildings. The Empire State hovered over us in the dawn mist, its dark spire like a line cutting the sky in half. A ­couple of birds that had a nest on a streetlight were making the only sound, fluttering their wings and screaming at us, warning us away from their territory. We ignored them and headed down a long street full of boarded-­up shops. There was nothing in those stores anybody could want—­just crates of perfume, and cell phones, and women's dresses in faded patterns. Every one of those stores had been picked over a dozen times and stripped of anything of real value.

Ike was younger than me, fourteen maybe, with long sandy hair and eyes the color of the mud in Central Park. He was a good guy, if a little morbid. He and I used to scout together, working our way up skyscrapers floor by floor, breaking into old apartments hoping to find food. We never found anything but skeletons, of course. When the crisis started, a lot of ­people had been so scared they locked themselves inside their apartments and starved to death rather than risk going down to the street to look for food. By the time we found them there was nothing left but bones and empty cabinets—­even the rats had moved on. Ike would take out his frustration by arranging the skeletons in rude poses. That never had much attraction for me. Maybe I was just more mature, owing to my age. Who knows? By the time I was a teenager, it was obvious we weren't going to find any amazing caches of food in the high-­rises, just mortal remains, and climbing all those stairs was a pain in the ass.

Now when we went looking for food, we went down instead of up.

At the entrance to the station Brian was waiting for us. Brian was first generation, about forty years old, but still pretty tough. One of the few who wasn't just sitting around waiting to die. He'd seen it all, lived through it and managed to survive. Now he carried a shotgun around with him everywhere he went—­to the public assemblies in Madison Square Garden, to the rare wedding and the much more frequent funerals, even when he went to the bathroom. He wore an old leather biker jacket that he claimed was bite-­proof. When I was younger, I imagined him testing it out at night, chewing on his own sleeve just to make sure.

“Ike,” Brian said, nodding at us. “Finn. Let's get this over with.” As if we had something better to do than checking our traps. He kept looking up one street, then another.

“See anybody you recognize?” Ike asked.

Brian's eyes shot around to stare at us. There was nobody in sight, of course, not a living human soul. Most ­people lived farther up, near Times Square, crowded into a ­couple of dozen safe blocks. That I never understood. ­People had so much room to spread out in, thousands of blocks in Manhattan. With only about fifty thousand of us to share the island, everybody could have had their own mansion. Instead, the first generation chose to cram together in a tiny little corner of the city.

“Just get down there and check your traps,” Brian said. “I'll stand guard.”

I shrugged and turned to head down the steps, but Ike was still having fun. “You mean in case a zombie shows up, looking for eel sushi?” He laughed. “What if one of them is down there in the station? Maybe we should have guns, too.”

Brian glanced at the dark stairway. He looked like he wouldn't go down there if you made him mayor of the city. “Nothing down there,” he said. “It's flooded.”

“One of them could have come over from New Jersey,” Ike pointed out. “Floated across on a raft of garbage, then got sucked in through an intake somewhere. He could be swimming around in the tunnels right now, waiting to grab our tender young ankles.”

Ike wasn't going to let up. I'd seen him play this game before. The first generation are all so touchy. They're all so confused about why they didn't die, when ninety-­nine percent of everyone else did. None of my generation understand it—­things are good. Things are safe now. But still you can push their buttons so easily. For some of us, like Ike, it was an endless source of fascination. I found it mostly annoying.

Like I said, I was older than Ike. Maybe more mature. I started down the stairs, but then Ike said something and I stopped because I half saw Brian rush him and grab his arm. I turned around, one hand on the cold silver stair railing.

“Listen,” Brian said, “you've never seen a zombie in your whole fucking life. You've got no idea.”

He had Ike in a pretty good grip, but Ike just laughed.

“When it came, there was plenty of warning, but it didn't make a difference. The TV told us all about it but not what to do. ­People were going crazy every day, shoving other ­people in houses and then setting fire to them. There were piles of bodies in the street and men with bullhorns and uniforms telling us the same useless information over and over. Nobody was safe, there was nowhere to—­”

“Brian!” I shouted. My voice cracked and echoed around the stone façades of the buildings around us. “Let him go.”

Brian stared down at me. I could see he was back there. Trapped in something that happened twenty years ago. The first generation did that a lot.

“We've heard it all before. A bunch of times,” I told him.

Ike pulled himself out of Brian's grip and clattered down the stairs, passing me by. He was still laughing.

“Everybody I knew back then is dead,” Brian told me.

“I know,” I said, trying to sound soothing. Sometimes it takes them a while to come back when they get like that.

“I didn't know anybody in the shelter. I didn't recognize anybody. The ­people I knew all changed. I couldn't go back home. My old place—­I had a car, an old Nissan piece of shit but it was mine, I'd made all the payments, and I just had to—­”

“Nobody has cars anymore, Brian. Just the one ambulance.” Which was just an old taxi put together out of spare parts. The government didn't send us enough fuel for anything else. “We're in this together.”

He nodded. His mouth was a tight, trembling line. One of his hands was clutching the barrel of his shotgun.

“We'll be back in a little while,” I told him, and headed down into the station. “Just wait for us, okay?”

“I've got your back,” he told me, slapping the stock of his gun.

“That's—­fine. Good. Thanks.” I said it over my shoulder. I'd run out of patience with him. It was hard to listen to their stories, the same stories they'd been telling for twenty years. You could tell it meant so much to them. That they just needed somebody to listen. But I had work to do, you know?