Positive (10 page)

 

CHAPTER 25

S
he didn't tell me to leave. She didn't order me off the tank and back to the tiny little room in the concrete building. As quickly as it had come, the emotion in her fled again and she shut down once more. So I sat down next to her, because I didn't have anywhere else to go, either. Ohio seemed very far away.

Together we sat and watched the looters as their party raged into the night. From up there they didn't seem so bad. By that time some of them had gotten drunk enough to pass out in their cars or just flat out on the asphalt. Others were singing a song together, wrapping their arms around each other. One guy was bent over the hood of his car, painting intricate flames with a tiny brush. I doubted he could even see what he was doing—­the only light came from the oil drum fires, and that was nearly as bad as the moonlight—­but he'd been at it for hours.

“They love those cars,” I said, just to hear myself talk.

“They have to. A looter on foot, out in the wilderness, is just zombie food. And the cars are all twenty years old, so they need constant repairs and attention.”

I hadn't considered the fact that nobody in the world had built a new car in twenty years. The looters' cars gleamed in the firelight as if they'd just been washed and detailed. The chrome on their bumpers was immaculate, unblemished by dings or scratches.

By way of contrast, the motorcycles parked to one side of the lot were covered in dust and grease, and they lacked the flowing lines and careful craftsmanship of the cars. Many of them looked as if they'd been assembled out of spare parts, sometimes parts that didn't quite fit together and had to be strapped down with duct tape or bent pieces of sheet metal. I thought of the huts near the gate, constructed out of whatever their inhabitants could find. The motorcycles looked equally slapdash.

Adare had said that the motorcyclist looters were all crazy, and I had no reason to doubt it. Some of them were down there now, fitting new parts onto their makeshift contraptions, or carefully adding or removing fluids from their small engines. Overseeing the work was a figure I could barely make out, but which I definitely recognized. I'd know that fur coat anywhere.

“Who's that?” I asked Kylie, pointing out the woman whose knife I'd taken.

“Her? That's Red Kate. She has her own crew. They take orders from her.”

I couldn't help pushing Kylie a little. “Sounds like the kind of woman who doesn't just accept the way things are.”

“She's from down in the Pine Barrens, originally. Things are different there,” Kylie said. “Much worse. I've heard stories about her. The things she's done to ­people.”

“What, like killing them?” Adare had told me a fair amount of murder occurred down in the southern part of New Jersey. The looters there didn't make deals with the army or the government. They hid under the trees in the Barrens when helicopters passed overhead, and mostly came out at night. To get the fuel and supplies they needed they hijacked other, more reputable looters—­the category in which Adare put himself—­and killed them, then took what they had. ­People like that were called road pirates, and the looters hated them more than zombies. “Killing ­people for the fuel in their cars?” I said, trying to sound a little more worldly.

“The previous leader of her gang was a man, I heard, a famous outlaw named Bill Green. She waited until he was drunk one night, then put a chain around his belt and put the other end on her bike. She drove off just a little faster than he could run, so he got dragged behind her. They say he didn't stop screaming for fifty miles.”

“Ah,” I said, more than a little horrified, but not wanting to show it. “But what's she doing up here, then? Adare said that the Barrens looters weren't welcome in Linden. And I can't imagine road pirates are welcome anywhere.”

“She went legitimate a ­couple of years back. Brought her gang up here and made a deal with the army. Now she's like us. Supposedly. There are rumors that she's still a pirate, she just does it where no one can see. But there are always rumors. Do you see that man there, the one wearing the top hat? That's Timmy Wallace. The rumor is he's the son of somebody important, like maybe the vice president. That he could leave here any time he wanted and go back to the Washington bunkers, but he doesn't because he prefers being out here where he can screw and drink all he wants.”

I was more interested in Red Kate, but I didn't want to explain why I was asking so many questions. So I let Kylie go on about the various personalities below us, listening with only half an ear. I barely noticed when she said we should go back. “Adare might wake up in the middle of the night to pee. He does that when he's not on the road.”

“You know when he's going to pee?”

Kylie nodded. “I know his moods and his habits. All his girls do. If he gets up, he'll check on the others, and if we're not there, it'll be bad.”

“How bad?” I asked.

She didn't answer. Together we headed back down the spiral stairway to the bottom of the tank, then cut across the side of the lot to get to the concrete building. Going up the side of the building was harder than going down, but we made it. Once we were in the little room again, Kylie went over to a corner and lay down without even looking at me. In a few minutes she was snoring. I sat down in a broken chair, knowing it would be a long time before I fell asleep.

Two of the girls, Mary and Bonnie, were still awake. They were both just a little older than Addison, and their eyes were bright in the dark of the room. Bonnie came over to me and started taking my shoes off for me. I pushed her away gently. “You don't need to do that,” I told her. “I'm not like him.”

She blinked at me as if what I'd said was in a language she didn't understand. “If you're fucking Kylie,” she said, “and he finds out, he'll punish you.”

“God! I'm not—­I'm not doing anything to Kylie,” I whispered back.

“Don't get caught,” she said. “Just don't. He'll punish you both.”

 

CHAPTER 26

I
n the morning Adare rose early and came to wake me.

“Gather up all the loot, Stones,” he told me, whispering so as not to wake the girls. He grinned merrily as he pointed at their sleeping bodies. “Let 'em get their beauty sleep.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was too tired and bleary eyed to respond. I picked up all the bags of liquor and pills and old, tattered pornography and followed him down to the parking lot. It was bitterly cold out, and the tanks and the industrial wasteland were still painted blue by predawn light. The wind rippled through the weeds with a hypnotic motion. I had barely slept at all, convinced by every little noise in the night that someone was trying to break into our little room and take what we had.

I had to push myself to keep up with Adare. He took me past the edge of the parking lot. Beyond that was a collapsing chain-­link fence that surrounded a wide square of concrete, crumbling around the edges and painted with a broad white letter
H.

Adare had a road flare in his pocket. He pulled it out and twisted it until a jet of red fat sparks jumped from one end. Throwing it down on the concrete, he gestured me to back up about fifty feet and then we waited. It didn't take long. The helicopter must have been just beyond the tanks, waiting for our signal.

The helicopter wasn't pretty to look at, really. It was a dull green color, and it had two rotors, one higher than the other, which looked wrong to me. But I'd never seen anything like it before. The way it seemed to just hang in the air, defying gravity, made me feel like
I
was floating. It filled me with awe. I couldn't help but let out a whoop of excitement. Adare looked over at me and beamed. He tousled my hair, and I didn't even flinch away.

Other looters started piling out of the camp buildings or from the backseats of their cars. They ran toward the helipad with bags and bundles in their arms, complaining loudly that Adare wasn't playing nice, that he should have waited for them to get up before he called in the helicopter. They pressed in tight around us, jostling and shoving to get closer to the helicopter.

A loudspeaker mounted on the helicopter blared out a warning. “STAY BACK FIFTY FEET. WE WILL NOT LAND UNTIL THE AREA IS CLEAR.” The voice was so loud it seemed to roll around the concrete and asphalt and bounce off the tanks until it came from every side, until it resonated in my chest. Grudgingly the looters moved back, away from the helipad. The helicopter settled down onto the concrete as gently as a feather wafting down from the heights of a skyscraper, its wheels just kissing the ground. Its rotors kept turning as fast as ever, and the wind from them threatened to blow me over, but I held my ground, even as twenty years of trash and debris, old rotten paper and pristine plastic sandwich containers, dust and soot, and torn-­up plant matter flashed by me, stinging my skin and making me clamp my eyes shut.

A hatch on the side of the helicopter opened, revealing two soldiers standing inside. I'd never seen a soldier before in my life. They looked like aliens from another world, their eyes made enormous and dark by their goggles, their heads misshapen by all the equipment strapped to their helmets. They wore full body armor, and each of them carried a massive assault rifle.

They waved the looters over, and the trading started. There was no order to it, just a frenzy of ­people shouting and holding up fingers, shoving packages forward and catching the trade goods that were thrown to them in return. The soldiers had what seemed like a never-­ending supply of things to trade. Bundles of food, and medical supplies, and plenty of fuel—­big drums of it, the stuff that made this economy possible.

Adare towered over the others, and his voice boomed out over even the noise of the rotors. I was pushed and nudged in every direction, barely able to stand up in the crowd, and it was all I could do to keep standing and keep handing loot to Adare as he asked for more and more.

As the trades were completed, the looters drifted away one by one, easing things up a little. When only a handful of them were left pressed up near the helicopter, I knew it was time to enact the plan I'd been thinking of all night.

It wasn't easy but I shouldered my way through, right up to the side of the helicopter. Adare said something but I ignored him. “I'm a positive,” I shouted, and held up my left hand, turned around so the soldiers could see it. “I'm from New York City. I was supposed to go to the medical camp in Ohio.” I screamed it over the rotor noise. “There are others here, some girls who—­”

It should have worked. The government was supposed to want me in that camp. The law was supposed to be on my side.

I had put my right hand on the bottom of the helicopter hatch, assuming that the soldiers would nod and help me jump up among them. I had thought I knew exactly how this would go.

It didn't go as planned. I had to cut off my speech in midsentence because the butt of an assault rifle slammed into my stomach, making me choke on my own air, making every nerve and bone in my body jangle with sudden pain and shock. My eyes went wide, and I nearly swallowed my tongue. A boot lashed out and clipped the side of my head, sending me spinning around, and there was no way to keep from falling facefirst onto the concrete. A knee pressed hard into my spine, and someone grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm so hard my shoulder squeaked in its socket.

“Don't you ever touch government property, you looter asshole,” the soldier on top of me said. “You're nothing, do you understand? You're nothing to us, and if I shoot you in the head right now, you know what the fallout'd be?”

I couldn't speak, but clearly he wanted an answer. I shook my head in the negative.

“Nothing,” he said.

I couldn't move, couldn't protest. I could barely breathe.

“I wouldn't even have to fill out a form,” the soldier told me. “I'm not gonna kill you, though. No. I'm gonna let you live.” He was bent low over me, his mouth nearly touching my ear. “But I am gonna break your arm. I know how to do it so it never heals right. You're gonna spend the rest of your life as a living example of why you filthy looters do not touch government property.”

He started to twist my arm in a direction it wasn't meant to go. The pain was excruciating. I couldn't struggle, couldn't think. I started to vomit, though whether from pain or fear I didn't know.

“Please!”

I looked up in surprise. Adare was holding his hands up, his fingers spread out in an imploring gesture.

“Please! Officer! He's my son! Please don't do this!”

The pressure on my arm eased, just a hair. It was a blessed relief. “This piece of trash? Come on,” the soldier said. “You've taken bigger shits, Adare.”

“Please—­he's my only help and hope in this world. Please, I'm begging you. At least leave him able to work. Please!”

Adare was down on his knees with his hands clasped in front of him. He was still taller than most of the ­people around him.

“Please.”

“Fuck off, Adare,” the soldier said, and twisted my arm again. The bones in my elbow started to scrape across each other in a way I'd never felt before and I hope to never feel again.

“Here,” Adare said, and he took something out of his pocket. A little orange pill bottle. He shook it to show it was nearly full.

“You gonna buy this piece of trash back for a ­couple Tylenol? Huh?”

“Percocet. Yellow ovals, man, the real stuff. Guaranteed. They're still good—­I've been hoarding them for a rainy day,” Adare said. “I figured, if I got bit by a zombie or something worse happened, I could just down all these and go out nice and peaceful. But they're yours. All yours, for free. Just let the boy go.”

Instantly the pressure on my arm was gone. There was plenty of pain left over, but it couldn't match what had come before. I lay with my cheek against the cool asphalt and just breathed, because that was all I could do.

The soldier took the bottle from Adare and shook it a few times. Then he stuffed it in one of his uniform pockets and nodded. He started to turn away, started to go, but then he stopped and looked back down at me.

I expected a final warning, or that he would go ahead and shoot me anyway. Instead he worked up a good mouthful of saliva and spat in my hair.

A minute later the soldiers were back in their helicopter and it lifted away from the pad, floating up into the air as if it weighed nothing at all. I watched it go. My delight in its seeming magic was gone now—­I just wanted to be sure it wasn't going to turn around and come back.

Eventually even the sound of its rotors faded. The other looters were gone by then—­it was just Adare and me on the asphalt, under an empty sky.

“You'd better be worth it, Stones,” Adare said. And then he kicked me in the ribs. Hard enough that my vision went black.

I didn't wake up again until we were already outside the gates of Linden, headed south. I woke up in the front passenger seat of the SUV, my seat belt holding me up. Drool had run down the front of my shirt. Every part of me felt sore.

“Hey,” Adare said, “look who's finally returned to the land of the living! Good morning, Stones. It's going to be a beautiful day.”

I looked at him in pure surprise. Only a moment ago—­from my perspective—­Adare had looked like he was of half a mind to kill me, just for the trouble I'd caused him. Now he was smiling at me. Beaming.

He never was a man to hold a grudge.