Positive (26 page)

 

CHAPTER 71

D
ay after day of the same thing. Long hours of work with no breaks, followed by just enough food to keep from starving to death. The occasional slap or punch from Fedder just to remind me I worked for him. Long hours of downtime with nothing to do but watch Luke practice with his cards. Heat and flies and mud, with absolutely nothing to show for it but time passed. Days were boredom and casual brutality and work that made my hands ache and swell. Days were bad.

Nights in the camp were much worse.

There were lights up on the wall, thousands of them. Big fluorescent floodlights and banks of LED bulbs that glowed a violent blue. Searchlights that could turn a patch of mud white with their glare, that prowled the camp at night blinding anyone caught in their beams. But the lights rarely penetrated more than a few hundred yards from the walls. They covered the factory sheds and the columns nearest the wall and nothing more. The center of the camp, where we slept, was pitch-­black on moonless nights and anything could move around out there, anyone bent on mischief or harm. In the tiny lean-­to that Luke and I shared, huddled in too-­thin blankets, I would listen for the sound of feet squelching through the mud. I would hear whispered voices, sometimes, or maybe it was just the noise of hungry rats.

Twice men came to the entrance to the lean-­to and stuck their heads inside. Maybe they were just looking for their own place, but I didn't think so. I think they were looking to rob us, but when they realized there were two of us, they lost their nerve. You heard stories—­just gossip—­about positives who were murdered in their shelters in the night. About ­people who just went to bed one night and never woke up because they had an extra pair of socks or a crust of bread that they were saving.

The camp had plenty of desperate ­people, ­people who probably thought they had no other choice. If you were too sick to work, or if you were kicked out of your boss's crew (they called it being “fired,” which made me think of being shot out the barrel of a gun), there was no way to get food. Not unless you had something to trade. I thought of the obsequious mechanics and car washers and hangers-­on in the looter camps, the ones Adare had sneeringly called “retailers.” Even after the crisis, even after ninety-­nine percent of the human race was wiped out, it seemed there would always be surplus ­people.

Luke had a knife, just a short-­bladed pocketknife, but it meant he could defend us in the night if it came to that. My own knife was long gone, of course, but I saved up for a replacement. It was clear, right from the beginning, that the guards would never stoop to protecting us.

They had other things to worry about. As I discovered the night the dogs came.

I was half asleep when I first heard them barking. It wasn't a sound I was familiar with at the time, though I would hear it again many times later. We'd never had dogs in New York—­they would just be more mouths to feed—­and the looters I'd met didn't keep animals. So I could only lie there, puzzled by what that throaty growling noise was and what it meant. I thought it was some positive, driven crazy by boredom or stress, making strange noises just to hear himself.

The barking got closer, and suddenly Luke was awake, bolting upright in his blanket. “Oh, man,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Dogs. They sent in the dogs. It's been a week already . . . come on, Finnegan. Come on!”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the lean-­to. I could just make out his silhouette against the starlit sky. He lifted his arms over his head and told me to do the same. My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I saw that we weren't alone. All around us positives were emerging from their shelters and taking up the same posture. “If you don't present yourself for inspection, the dogs will come in after you,” Luke told me. “If you resist them, they'll tear you up.”

“What's going on?” I asked. But then I saw a light off in the darkness, a searchlight beam drifting across the ground. It picked out every detail of a corrugated tin shelter, blowing out the colors and sending long shadows stabbing outward into the dark. At the center of the light was a pack of maybe a dozen dogs, big brown animals with black faces. They trotted through the mud, running up to one positive after another. As each of us was examined, they would be pinned by the searchlight for a few seconds, their thin bodies turned skeletal by the powerful light. The dogs would run up and thrust their noses into the positives' armpits and groins, rearing up with their paws on chests and hips to get a closer sniff.

I'd seen pictures of dogs before, but I'd never understood how terrifying they could be. The dogs had mouths full of white triangular teeth and claws that looked like they could shred the flesh off your back. They barked and growled and snapped as they ran around the camp, studying every positive they could find.

“What are they looking for?” I asked Luke.

“They're trained to smell the virus,” he told me. “They can tell if you're going to zombie out.”

“But—­that's supposed to be impossible! That's the whole reason we're here, because there's no test.”

“Not until right up at the end,” Luke said. “Not until maybe two or three days before it happens, when you start getting the headaches. Then the dogs can smell it. Once a week the guards send them in to search like this. They almost always find something.”

I stared in horror as the dogs pawed and sniffed a positive not two hundred yards from where I stood. They knocked him backward out of the light and then moved on, heading for the next standing figure. The barking got louder and more strident as they came closer, until the whole pack was roaring, their ears twitching back and forth, their tails dancing behind them.

“Crap,” Luke said. “They've got the scent—­there's somebody here who's close.”

“This is horrible,” I said.

“I know,” he told me. “What if the asshole went zombie on us last night? He could have infected half the camp before we found out. Thank God for the dogs.”

I stared at him. A human being was being hunted right before us, and he seemed to think that was a good thing. On one level I could kind of understand—­the biggest danger any of us faced was that one of the positives was, in fact, infected, and that he would go zombie without warning. But—­

“No!” someone shouted. “No, I'm clean! I swear I'm clean, I was—­”

And then he started screaming.

Luke ran forward into the dark, toward the sounds of agony. I didn't want to be alone, so I ran after him. Soon enough I saw what had drawn him. The circle of light had focused on a positive fifty yards from us, a guy I'd seen a hundred times since I'd come to the camp, though I'd never learned his name. The dogs had smelled the virus on him.

And now they were eating him alive.

They tore the skin off his arm. One dog fastened its jaws around his leg and wouldn't let go. It shook its whole body until it dragged him down. He tried to fight back, but it was hopeless. The dogs were singing in their bloodlust, yowling like wolves as they tore and rent his flesh. Still he screamed.

All around me positives had crammed up close together to see. To watch. Some of them were cheering. Even in the dark I could see how bright their eyes were.

“The blood,” I said, to whoever was standing next to me. “The blood's infected, this is—­this is a terrible way to—­”

“Dogs can't get it,” I was told. “They're immune.”

Over our heads, a guard shouted out a command. “Back,” I think it was. “Back!” and the dogs instantly stopped what they were doing and scampered away from the bleeding thing, the victim they'd so efficiently savaged. I couldn't see the wounded positive's eyes. I was glad for that. I couldn't have borne it if he had looked up at me, if he had begged me for help.

Once the dogs were clear, the guard opened fire with an assault rifle. It sounded like a machine was driving nails into a bowl of wet plaster. Blood and chips of bone leaped out of the dying positive's body and then he dropped to the mud, his arms curling across his chest. Another salvo tore open his skull and then he was dead, definitely dead.

More merciful, I suppose, than letting the dogs have their way.

The light moved on, and the dogs ran to follow it, moving farther into the camp, barking in glee. I could see how wet and red their muzzles were. I could see how excited they were to look for another kill.

I dropped to my knees and vomited in the mud. Thank God it was so dark and no one could see me. Eventually I found my way back to the shelter I shared with Luke. He was inside already, fast asleep in his blanket.

 

CHAPTER 72

W
e're positives,” Luke said the next morning, by way of explanation.

I had spent all morning ranting at him.
­People shouldn't have to live like this,
I'd said.
The government has a responsibility to us.

“Their responsibility is to make sure we don't hurt anyone else,” he told me. “They're doing all they can. Things are never going to be like they were before the crisis. It just isn't possible now. The world ended, and we're living in the ruins.”

I'd heard it before. If Luke started telling me we were all maggots, I knew I was going to scream.

“Just hang in there, Finnegan. You don't have so very long to go. You'll be cleared—­I know you aren't infected, I can just tell. You'll be cleared, and you'll get to go home.”

Back to New York City. Where everyone spent their days working in their gardens, producing just enough to survive. Fishing in the subway system that used to be a wonder of the world.

It just wasn't . . . enough.

It wasn't acceptable. It wasn't what I wanted for my life.

It had taken the medical camp, that pit of horror, to teach me this: that sometimes, good enough
isn't
good enough. That you can't just accept things as they are.

Which was great, as far as it went. As I had no idea how to change things—­or even, really, in what way they should change—­it just made me depressed. And then I did something stupid, and I lashed out at the one friend I had there.

“That's fine for me,” I pointed out. “You're going to be here for twenty years. If you survive—­if—­you'll walk out of here an old man.”

His eyes flashed with anger, but he said nothing. He just laid down a fan of cards on his blanket and stared down at the pips and the face cards as if they could tell the future.

“You've accepted this because you're afraid to try for anything more,” I told him. My anger had to go somewhere. “Because you—­all of you—­are too chickenshit to stand up to the guards and demand your human rights.”

“They've got guns. And dogs. And electrified fences. Not to mention helicopters.”

“I've seen what they can do. In Trenton—­I saw what their guns and bombs could do.” I'd told him my whole story by that point, though I don't think he actually believed most of it. “Guns and bombs and electrified fences—­they don't ever make anything better. They can only make things worse.”

He sighed and gathered up his cards into a solid deck again. A deck missing the three of diamonds. Nothing in this world was ever complete. Nothing worked, nothing was ever right.

“So fix it,” he said.

“What?”

“You don't like things? You fix them. If you really feel like you can't live like this, like you're too good for this place, then make it better.”

“Come on. I'm just one guy.”

“Fix it,” he said, “or shut the hell up. If you talk to me like this again, you can find someplace else to sleep. I don't need this shit.”

I stormed out of the lean-­to, intending to—­I don't know. Go over to the fence between the male and female camps and shout for Kylie, like I had the day before.

What else was there to do?

I didn't get as far as the fence between the two camps. On the way there, I heard someone call my name. No. Everyone in the camp knew me as Finnegan. I definitely heard someone call out “Finn!”

I whirled around, my lips curling back in rage, intending to tell whoever had come chasing after me that he couldn't use that name, that only ­people I truly cared about could call me that, and whoever he was, he wasn't even close to that.

But there was nobody there. I turned around in a full circle and couldn't see anybody nearby, not close enough to have called me like that.

And then a light hit me. A light shining down from above.

It was tiny, like the light of a match, but steady like an electric light. It shed more shadows than illumination. It hit my face and made me scowl and squint, while leaving its owner completely silhouetted in the dark.

“Finn. Damn it, it's me.”

That made my frown deepen. I lifted one hand to cover my eyes and looked up, toward the source of the light.

“Finn! It's me. It's Ike,” he said, and he turned the light around so I could see his face.

The face of the boy who killed my mother.

 

CHAPTER 73

I
ke put a finger to his lips, then gestured for me to head out into the darkness, off to my left. He started moving as well, up on the catwalks. I saw he was headed toward one of the yellow brick columns. As I got closer, a hidden door opened in the side of the column, swinging open to let me in. It had never occurred to me before that the columns might be hollow—­they had always seemed as solid and unyielding as the walls.

Inside the column a narrow steel staircase wound around a central girder. I headed up those steps, listening to my footfalls clang on the metal risers. I couldn't understand what was happening, but I headed up anyway, climbing to the level of the catwalks.

I had never thought I would see the view from up there—­I hadn't even entertained the notion. The mud was for positives. The upper air was for soldiers. It was one of the most basic facts of existence.

It was too dark to get a good view of the camp from up on the catwalks, but I could see the rude shelters below me, clustered here and there in the shadows. They looked tiny and insignificant, even though I was only about ten feet above their corrugated tin roofs. I didn't have much chance to look at my pathetic little world from that vantage. Ike came up to me, looming out of the darkness. He plucked my sleeve and led me across a catwalk, toward the nearest wall. The catwalk ended in a door there, and beyond lay a spacious bunkhouse, a room walled with windows and full of television screens. I'd never seen a working television before. These were glowing blue, shedding a low light across the room. On their screens shapes of green and flickering orange huddled together or moved slowly back and forth.

“Infrared,” Ike whispered. I looked up from the screens and saw him grinning in the blue light. “We keep an eye on you when you're sleeping. Nothing gets past us.”

Underneath the television screens were banks of controls—­switches, dials, gauges. Nothing I understood. Ike showed me a few of them: the ones that controlled the lights, the ones that activated the electric fences at the two entrances to the camp.

I was so bewildered by it all that when a door opened at the far end of the room and a soldier walked in, I didn't even duck or cower. Surely if Ike and I were discovered here we would be shot on sight—­or worse.

The soldier, though, just glanced at me and then shook his head. “Whatever, man. Way stupid,” he said to Ike.

“Nobody has to know,” Ike replied. “I just wanted to get him something to eat.”

“You could have dropped sandwiches on his head or something,” the soldier said. He sighed in disgust and then slipped back out the door.

“Ike,” I began, but then I actually took a good look at my childhood friend.

He'd cut his hair very short. He was wearing a uniform. An army uniform. In my confusion I had just assumed that he was a positive, like me. A patient of the medical camp. I was wrong.

He was one of the guards.