Positive (34 page)

 

CHAPTER 98

D
ay by day, things got harder.

Though the farmland gave way to small towns, the scouting parties could never seem to bring back enough food for everyone. We took turns eating. All of us were used to a near-­starvation diet, but somehow, since leaving the camp, the positives had begun to expect more. Maybe because they were walking so much, expending more energy. Or maybe they'd thought escaping the camp would solve all their problems.

The grumbling started with just a few individuals, who couldn't or wouldn't put up with the grueling hours of walking followed by little or no food. They would threaten to just sit down in the road and stop walking. They never actually did it, of course—­they were terrified of being left behind. And at first the ­people around them would just tell them to shut up and conserve their energy.

But eventually they began to organize.

I suppose I'd taught them how to do that. I couldn't very well blame them for wanting to improve their lives.

The first group to approach me was a former work crew, led by their former boss. He'd been one of the meaner sort, the bullies, and I'd expected trouble from him, but I hadn't expected his erstwhile workers to stand behind him. They came up to me one night while I was conferring with my advisers. Macky stood up very tall, his chest puffed out, when he saw them approaching. “That's Garrett,” he said. “This ought to be fun.”

I looked up from my road atlas and gave Garrett a wave. He wanted a confrontation, so I figured I would make it seem like this meeting was my idea. “I need to hear what you're thinking,” I told him.

A momentary look of confusion crossed his face. But then he glanced over his shoulders at his workers and that seemed to restore his bluster. “We need more food.”

“We all do,” I said. “Did you come up with some idea how we can get some more? Because I'd love to hear it.”

“No. No. My group here, specifically, we need more food. We need to eat every day. We're already getting weaker. And you need us.”

“I need everyone. I need all the help I can get,” I said.

I could see him getting frustrated. “We're strong. We want to stay that way, so when the zombies come, or whatever, we can fight them off. You're going to need fighters.”

I nodded agreeably. “Absolutely. In fact, I've been thinking I need a group to scout ahead and check for threats. We're going to start seeing zombies sooner than we expect, and there could be more human dangers, too. What do you think, Garrett? Are your guys tough enough for the job?”

It gave me a priceless moment of entertainment to watch him squirm. He desperately wanted to say no, but doing so would make him look weak and invalidate his argument for more food.

Eventually I decided to ease up a little. “Of course, while you're scouting ahead you're likely to come across plenty of canned food in the houses you pass. You'd be welcome to whatever you could find.”

Garrett wanted to say no, but he'd made the mistake of not coming alone. His workers shouted him down. As they walked away, discussing plans among themselves, Macky laughed and turned to me. “Nicely played,” he said.

And so I got a vanguard and neutralized a threat to my authority. Sadly, it wasn't always that easy.

A woman came to me to tell me her friend was sick and getting weaker by the day. She couldn't walk anymore, and she needed to eat or she was going to die. I gave her a can of twenty-­year-­old creamed spinach out of the day's pile, far more than one sick person ought to have received, but I remembered how I felt when I heard Heather was sick. “Make sure nobody sees her eating this,” I said. “Or they'll be jealous. Maybe dangerously jealous.”

The woman looked a lot less grateful than I had hoped. Even worse, later on I found out I'd made a sentimental mistake. Kylie came to me that night and told me the truth. There had been no sick friend. The woman had eaten the entire can herself. Unused to so much food in one sitting, she'd thrown most of it back up. That can could have fed four ­people, if it was parceled out correctly.

That episode hardened my heart against ­people claiming sickness, which also turned out to be a mistake. Because ­people really
were
getting sick. I don't know if it was exhaustion or exposure or what, but one by one ­people started dropping out of the back of the line as we walked, falling down on the side of the road. Others had to come pick them up, and sometimes carry them. Soon enough we had our first death.

And our second, the same night.

And our third, the next morning.

Suddenly the agitators, the complainers, weren't being told to shut up. They were getting nods and muttered agreement. A big cohort of them wanted to turn back. To return to the camp. We were only marching to our death, they said. I was leading them nowhere, I was insane, I had fooled them all into leaving the camp in the first place because I wanted them to die.

At one point we passed a car that had been abandoned on the road. Its tires were just rotten tatters and its chassis was rusted through, so I ignored it. I barely even registered the skeleton in the front seat. Others, however, saw the bones. They lifted them reverently free of the broken windows and wired them together and carried them along with us. And each night they knelt before that skeleton and prayed.

“I hoped we'd left that shit behind,” I said as I watched them go about their devotions. Making their bargains with Death.

­“People need something to believe in,” Luke told me. “For a while, you fit the bill. But it's been too long since you did something for them.”

“I'm making decisions for them all day long!” I said. “Without me—­”

“They might get a chance to find out what they'll do without you,” he interrupted. “I'd say you have two days, maybe three, before they decide you're the wrong one to be in charge.”

“Fine. Let somebody else take over. It would be a relief,” I said. But of course I didn't mean it. Luke could see I didn't, so he let it drop.

The next day the scouting parties came back almost empty-­handed. And six more ­people died, almost all at once. The skeleton worshippers looked positively smug.

“We need something to bring us back together,” I said. Macky and Luke and Ike and Kylie all just looked at me, waiting to hear what I was going to say next.

I had nothing.

 

CHAPTER 99

W
e're not here to demand food. Or that you heal the sick. We know some things are just too much to ask from you.”

“That's a relief,” I said.

This latest committee of supplicants was a mixed bag. Men and women, a few scrawny children. One of them had been a boss back in the camp, and a ­couple had been shopkeepers. Now they were just concerned. They were worried, and they'd come to me asking to be heard. I sat down on my blanket and looked at them one by one. They were starving. I could see it in the sharp cheekbones. In the rail-­thin arms. I was sure I looked just as bad. They were exhausted. Only a few of them had decent shoes anymore. The rest had their feet wrapped in bloody pieces of fabric.

What they were not, for the most part, was angry. Unlike most of the groups that came to me, they didn't look like they wanted a fight. What they did want remained to be seen.

“This isn't about ultimatums.” Their spokesperson was a woman with dreadlocks who was, if no fatter than the rest, slightly taller. Her eyes stayed on my face as she spoke. She took her time. I didn't know her, but I could already tell she was a born leader. I would have to create some new task force or scouting group and put her in charge. It had worked—­kind of—­so far. “We don't want miracles.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, thanks for coming by, anyway. If you don't mind—­”

“We just want to know where we're going.”

I closed my mouth.

So this was it. The big question. The one I couldn't answer.

For ­people like Adare or Red Kate, it wasn't a question that ever needed a real answer. They were happy to just roam the world, looking for whatever it brought them. Some of the positives who walked out of the camp were probably of the same type—­born wanderers, survivors who knew that staying in one place too long was going to get them killed. But these ­people were different.

These weren't looters. They weren't, as Red Kate put it, maggots on the corpse of the world. These were ­people who had been born in cities, who had expected to spend their lives there gardening and maintaining. Whatever had made them positives—­whatever exposure they'd had to the virus—­had changed that and uprooted them. But the camp had held out the promise they could go home again.

They were, on the surface, like me. Wasn't that what I'd been fighting for all this time? A safe place to sleep? Food enough to keep me alive? Friends and family around me, and the security of knowing they were likely to be there when I needed them?

It's funny. Until that very moment I'd had no idea how much I'd changed. Of how much more I expected from life now.

“We're going west,” I said.

The woman with the dreadlocks frowned. “That's it?”

I reached behind me and picked up my road atlas. “Eventually we'll hit Indiana. See? Here. Indiana.”

“And there's something in Indiana we're headed for?” the woman asked.

I could feel them all tensed up, feel them like coils bent in my direction, metal springs held back by a loose catch. What I said to them now could make them nod and accept things and go back to their blankets and get ready for the next day's march. All I had to do was say that something was there, some refuge, and they just had to hang in there. I could say that the city of Indianapolis would take us in. I could say there were looter camps where we could make a new life.

In other words, I could lie.

But I'd been taught one thing along the road, one thing that stuck. You could look at the ­people who'd come before you, the ­people who you went to with these questions, and you could do exactly what they'd done. Or you could try to do better.

“I won't lie to you,” I said.

“That's—­good,” the woman told me.

“I don't know what's out there. I honestly don't. I just know that west is better than east. Because east means going back and pleading with the camp guards to let us back in. To admit we made a bad mistake and we're sorry and we'll be nice children from now on. We'll put up with the mud and flies and the dogs and the guns and everything we left behind. West,” I said, trying to make it sound profound, “is better than east. It has to be.”

I'd hoped that would at least stir them. Make them nod and bite their lips and think,
Okay, he's right, and we'll give him a little more time
.

Even then I didn't fully understand what hunger and exhaustion could do to rational ­people.

“Many of us think east is better than west,” she said.

“What do you think? Personally?”

“I think we got food back there for our work,” she told me. Which wasn't a real answer. That was the point, of course. I had tried to single her out and make this about individual decisions, and she was here to present a unified front. She knew how the game was played as well as I did.

So all I could do was give her more honesty. It was the one thing I had in good supply. “I'm not your boss,” I told her. “I'm not your CO. You walk with me because you want to. If you want to be in charge and lead these ­people back east, it's up to you to convince them to do that. Looks like you've got a head start.”

One or two ­people in the crowd chuckled. Well, that was something.

“I'm going to ask you for a favor, though,” I told her. “Give me one more day. Walk with me tomorrow, walk like we did today, to the west. And then tomorrow night you can make up your mind.”

She never did say yes. She just shook her head and walked away, and her ­people followed.

Macky spat on the ground when she was gone. “You need to start showing some backbone. ­People want to be bullied, a little. They want to know their place.”

I smiled at him. “You want that, you can head back to camp. Because,” I said, rising to my feet, “I won't do it like that. I'll lead these ­people honestly, or not at all.”

“That second thing you said,” Luke said, “is looking pretty likely.”

“We'll see. She didn't say no. A lot can happen in a day.”

Except for most of that next day, it didn't. We got back to walking, the endless, foot-­killing walking. The sun burned us until I wished it would rain—­pour down on me, as miserable as that might be, because it would be better than this late-­summer dry heat. The scouts went out and I waited for them to come back, waited for them to bring me some kind of sign. Anything.

And then . . . amazingly enough . . . they did.

“It's about three hours away,” one of them told me, still panting from having run most of the way back. The rest of his crew had stayed with the thing they'd found.

“We have about an hour's daylight left,” I said, frowning.

“Keep 'em walking. It's worth it.”

I nodded at the scout and sent the order back—­we would keep walking, even when night fell. More than one emissary of the disgruntled came hobbling forward to tell me I was on borrowed time, that making them walk all night wasn't going to get me anything. I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

And then—­just after the moon rose—­they all saw it, and a noise went up from the throng behind me. Not exactly a jubilant whoop. They were too tired for that. But a sound of thanksgiving, all the same.

Up ahead, just off the side of the road, was an enormous building behind a parking lot full of abandoned cars. In giant letters over the building's doors read the legend:
FOOD QUEEN
.

A grocery store big enough to feed an army.