Positive (17 page)

 

CHAPTER 44

H
ere, take this route,” I told Kylie, showing her the atlas. I wouldn't feel truly safe until we were well clear of Prince­ton and everyone who had seen us there.

She agreed with a nod and followed the directions I gave her, taking us back toward the open road. Being out on the highways again actually did feel kind of good. It felt like we were making progress. It was going to be a long ride to Ohio, but we had everything we needed. Adare's map would show us the way to go. Our brand-­new cans of gasoline would carry us there. We had plenty of food and water in the SUV.

We were going to make it. We were really, truly, going to get to Ohio, and the medical camp, and safety.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy.

But for a little while, I could breathe. I could let down my guard, just a hair.

I wasn't the only one. That night, when we pulled into an old train shed where we could spend the night, Kylie switched off the SUV and then lay back in her seat, sighing in contentment. It was a very human sound, and I knew she had let down her armor, if just for the moment. I didn't want to interfere, afraid that if I said anything or touched her hand or made any sudden movements at all she would just freeze up again. I tried not even to look at her, though it was hard.

She surprised me, in the end. After the other girls had fallen asleep, when I was starting to doze off myself, I heard her move in her seat. It was so dark I couldn't see anything, but I felt her moving toward me, coming closer. Then her lips brushed mine. One of her hands came up to touch the side of my face.

“You don't have to—­” I said, but I couldn't finish the thought. Maybe for the first time—­maybe not—­I wanted her to . . . well. I'm not immune to temptation.

But whatever I might have wanted, it didn't matter.

“That was to say thank you,” she told me, in a whisper softer than the creaking and groaning of the steel shed around us. “I would have sold her. If I was in charge.”

“No,” I said. “No, you would have thought of something.”

“I'm glad it wasn't me who had to,” she said. “Stones?”

“Call me Finnegan. Call me Finn,” I told her.

“Good night, Finn,” she said, and went back to her own seat.

 

CHAPTER 45

I
told Kylie to keep as much as possible to the smaller highways and not go back to the turnpike. That definitely slowed us down. The less-­traveled roads were in bad shape, decayed by time, but much worse were the places where they were choked with abandoned cars. That had never really been a problem before—­Adare had told me that the government had swept the turnpike clear once, long ago, back when they still thought they could reestablish interstate commerce. Off the main road it was a major hassle. Several times that day we came to places where the road was just one long parking lot stretching off into the distance, filled with heaps of rust that used to be cars. I tried not to think of what it must have been like during the crisis, when ­people had to get away so fast they just left their cars where they sat. They must have been running just ahead of hordes of zombies, whole cities' worth of the things . . . it would have been panic, absolute, blind mayhem.

Now the roads were silent. But just as gridlocked.

There was no way to thread our path through those blockages—­the cars were nose to tail, and anyway, Kylie thought the rotting vehicles would make great nests for zombies. “They like to sleep in cars like that, to get out of the rain,” she said. “They come out at night to hunt, but if we wake them up now—­”

I remembered perfectly well what a crowd of zombies could be like, from my time atop the road sign in Fort Lee. “We'll go around,” I said.

Using Adare's map, I tried to find ways around the jams by taking surface roads, even though that meant we risked getting lost. In one place, though, there just didn't seem to be any options. The cars had clotted up all the ramps and access roads and there just didn't seem to be any way forward. I had Kylie stop the car while I studied the map.

“We'll have to double back,” I said finally. “Come around up here, on . . . Route 33.” I showed her the map.

“That takes us right into Trenton,” she said. She pointed at the city on the map. Adare had crossed it out with a big red
X
. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea,” I confessed. “It can't be good. Maybe it just means the place is overrun with zombies.”

“No, that's what we think all the
Z
s means,” she said.

I shrugged, feeling helpless. “Our only other option is to head all the way back to the turnpike. We've got fuel now, but not enough we can waste it like that. And once we cross the river here, on the other side of Trenton, we'll be in Pennsylvania.”

My logic seemed to be enough for her. She nodded and put the SUV in reverse, then made a U-­turn and headed back the way we'd come. Route 33 proved to be clear as far as we could see, but I kept my eyes open as the buildings of Trenton came into view ahead of us.

Or what was left of them.

There were no intact buildings at all, as far as I could tell. Most of them had been reduced to one or two walls, crumbling at the top and pierced with holes that might have been windows. The side streets were full of debris—­broken bricks and chunks of concrete. Piles of dust choked the buildings, dust that twisted up into the wind and splattered across our windshield. The road we traveled was mostly clear, but Kylie still had to keep swerving around downed telephone poles or collapsed piles of what might have been houses twenty years ago. In some places, the city looked like it had burned to the ground. In other places, plant life had moved in to take over from the former residents. Weeds sprouted everywhere in the vacant lots, and ivy was slowly strangling the broken walls in its green grasp. It looked like nobody, not even a zombie, had been there since the crisis.

I couldn't help but feel something was wrong with that place. Some subtle poison in its bedrock, some ancient curse that was dragging the town down into the earth, but very, very slowly. I got the distinct impression we didn't belong there, that we weren't welcome. I tried to push it away and think rationally, but Trenton had an uncanny feeling I couldn't shake.

“We could get stuck here,” Heather said. “If the road is blocked up ahead—­”

“We'll deal with that when it happens,” I told her.

We passed buildings that were leaning over, ready to collapse at the slightest provocation, their roofs tilted crazily like ocean waves ready to crest. We passed houses that had been cut in half, their insides laid open to view so we could even see the peeling wallpaper and the pink fluff of the insulation in their attics. Then we drove past the first crater. A big bowl-­shaped depression in the earth, everything around it charred or twisted. Whatever had been there once was completely gone, obliterated.

“What did this?” Heather asked. “Tornadoes, you think?”

I'd seen a tornado swirling over Staten Island once, when I was young. It had looked like just a dark streak in the air. My parents, all the first-­generation ­people of New York, had been terrified of it and of what it could do to Manhattan, but it had never come any closer, and eventually it just faded away. I looked back at Heather and shrugged. “Maybe? Or an earthquake.”

But that crater bothered me. Especially when I saw more of them. The closer we got to the heart of Trenton, the more common they became—­great scoops taken out of the ground, holes where buildings should have been. The piles of debris got bigger and the intact buildings farther apart. This wasn't a city anymore, it was a ruin.

We came to a place where a great notch had been cut through the city, a trench fifty yards wide as if a great knife had slashed across the face of the planet there. Nothing remained in the notch except rubble, most of it broken down to powdery dust. Kylie had to stop the SUV, and I jumped out to test that dust to see if we could even drive over it. I stomped on it with my foot and found that below a thin coating of dust the ground underneath was fused into slag. “It's fine,” I called back, waving my arms, and Kylie crawled forward, the tires making horrible popping sounds as they crushed the dust under their wheels.

I jumped back inside the SUV. “This isn't natural,” I said, just thinking out loud. “Somebody
did
this. Intentionally.”

“How?” Heather asked.

“I have no idea. It must have been—­I don't know. The army. This place was attacked.”
It had to have happened during the crisis,
I thought. I'd heard stories from the first generation of armies of zombies sweeping through the countryside, of millions of them shuffling forward, climbing over one another, clawing their way through fields and woods, eating anything they could get their hands on. The military had responded as best they could, with guns and bombs and tanks and everything they had. It hadn't been enough. Maybe they'd decided that Trenton was expendable. Maybe they had blown it up rather than let the zombies have it. I didn't know then, and I never found out the answer. I did know, at that moment, that the place was no good. I don't believe in ghosts, but a place like that has to be haunted, if that only describes the effect it has on those who travel there. Something terrible, truly horrible, had happened to the city. Something that even the earth wanted to forget, a wound it tried to heal with grass and trees and flowering plants, but it was taking a long time.

On the far side of the notch the road was clear again for a ways, though up ahead my view was blocked by piles of rubble and partially intact buildings that seemed to lean over the asphalt. The devastation wasn't as thorough up there, it seemed. It looked like one or two buildings were left that hadn't been damaged at all.

We were just crawling along, moving no faster than I could run on my own legs. It was a good thing, too. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen the survivors of Trenton until it was too late.

 

CHAPTER 46

T
here,” I shouted, and I pointed before my brain had even registered what I'd seen. Just a flash of movement, a scrap of color against the dull neutrals of the rubble. A hint of facial features, of eyes watching us.

“What was it? A zombie?” Heather asked.

The girls all swarmed over to the right side of the car to look out their windows, their faces pressed to the glass. All of them except Kylie. Her eyes stayed on the road ahead. Her armor was up, her emotions locked tightly away. For once I was glad for it.

“I don't think so,” I said. Those eyes I'd glimpsed hadn't been red. Not that I'd gotten a particularly good look. I leaned up against the glass of my window, scanning the rubble for any sign of motion, any indication at all that I hadn't just seen a bird, or a reflection off a broken piece of glass. It seemed impossible—­horrible—­that anyone could be living in Trenton, in that quietly desolate place.

Heather screamed, and we all turned to look, not at what she might have seen, but at her. It was a human enough instinct, but it served us poorly that time. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought—­”

“Finnegan,” Kylie said. I swung around in my seat and looked straight ahead. A man had walked out of the ruins and was sauntering across the road just ahead of us. Kylie braked the SUV so we didn't roll right into him.

He was not old, but hardly young. His face was covered by a thick and matted beard. His clothing was little more than a dull-­colored smock, and he moved with a limp. His eyes were human—­blue, not red—­and full of hatred.

He walked right out in front of us, right into our path. The SUV was still creeping forward, but he didn't seem to care if we ran him down. I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do—­whether we should try to talk to him or shoot him or what. I lifted one hand, but he ignored the gesture. Instead he picked up a rock and flung it at us. It smacked into the windshield with a noise like a gunshot, and a crack stretched through the glass.

Kylie stood on the brakes, stopping us altogether.

“Heather,” I said, “get the guns.”

“He's not even armed,” Mary pointed out.

I shook my head. “Heather—­”

The man in the road made some kind of obscene gesture. Then he loped off, back into the ruins, far faster than a man with a limp should have. A cold, uncertain feeling pierced my guts. I couldn't remember being so scared before.

All around us, on either side of the road, shapes were moving now, human shapes, barely seen through broken windows and gaps in the buildings.

“Kylie, go,” I said.

She started to protest. “The road here is—­”

“Just fucking go!”

She threw us into drive and we bounced and jumped over debris in the road. Up to this point the asphalt had been surprisingly clear—­now it was littered with fist-­sized chunks of broken concrete and tire-­slashing lengths of rebar. I didn't think that was accidental.

On our left side a girl no older than Addison came rushing out of a ruined building. She wore a scrap of cloth with a hole cut in it for her head, and nothing more. She was carrying three rocks, one of which she threw so it hit Kylie's door. If anyone else had been driving, the noise the impact made might have scared the hell out of them and made them jump. Not Kylie. Not even when the second rock hit her window and left a deep pit in the glass.

Over on my side, two women who were all but naked came rushing up, iron bars brandished over their heads. Heather handed me a machine pistol over the back of my seat, and I pointed it at the women. They were brave, but clearly not foolhardy—­as soon as they saw my weapon pointed at them they disappeared, dropping into a ditch on the side of the road.

Meanwhile three rocks hit the roof of the car, one two three, the third one leaving a dent we could all see. In the seat behind me, Mary and Addison were checking and loading pistols, but there was nothing for them to shoot. As soon as the Trentonites would appear and attack, they were gone again, too quick for us to get a bead on them.

“They've done this before,” I said. This was an ambush, a carefully crafted trap. The Trentonites had cleared the road this far and no farther, intending that we would come right to them.

Whether they wanted what was in the SUV—­the food and fuel we carried—­or they wanted to eat us, or they just hated anyone who wasn't a member of their tribe, I have no idea. But as Kylie pulled forward, inching her way through the scattered rubble on the asphalt, I saw we weren't the first to fall into the trap.

Up ahead, filling the road, was a jam of cars and SUVs and motorcycles, all of them rusting and rotting in the sun. But none of them were so decomposed that they could have been there for more than a year or two.

Some of them still had skeletons in them. Skeletons that, to my heated imagination, looked scorched by fire or hacked to pieces with primitive axes.

“Kylie,” I said, wanting her to get us out of there, having no idea how. Because I didn't see a way forward. The wrecked vehicles filled the road ahead, and piles of rubble blocked our way left and right.

Behind us human shapes flitted back and forth, never staying in one place long enough for us to fire on them. They hunkered down behind large rocks or slabs of concrete or vanished into empty window frames or down into ditches. This whole section of ruined city must have been catacombed with hiding places. I wouldn't have been surprised if the Trentonites had dug out bolt-­holes and communicating trenches just for this purpose.

I tried to think like they had. I tried to imagine myself setting up this trap, with the intention of finding a way out of it. It didn't look like there was one. From what I saw, the Trentonites had reverted to barbarism and primitive behavior in the twenty years since the crisis, but that didn't mean they'd gone stupid.

“Guns,” I said, thinking we would make a good stand, anyway. A good final stand. “Everybody arm yourselves. Don't shoot until they're close enough you're sure you'll hit something vital.”

The shapes behind us were getting closer. Rocks kept bouncing off the roof of the SUV. I think they were trying to make us panic. In my case, it was working.

“Kylie,” I said, “take this gun.” I held the machine pistol out to her.

She looked over at me with a question on her face. I had no time nor inclination at that moment to figure out what the question might be. She bit her lip, and still she hadn't taken the gun from me.

“Kylie,” I said again.

“Everyone,” she said. She looked back at the other girls. “Put your seat belts on.”