Positive (19 page)

 

CHAPTER 50

P
ennsylvania was not without its horrors, but with the help of Adare's map we avoided most of them. Unfortunately, there were some red marks in the atlas I couldn't decipher. One place had a little picture of a man tied to a wheel, while another one showed two swords inside a circle. One big swath of the state had been marked with a carefully drawn skeleton—­Adare had taken his time drawing the skull, the rib cage, the dangling bony limbs. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. At the time it was enough that it was red and sinister looking. I told Kylie to detour well around it.

One mark I couldn't figure out, but I got to learn what it meant. Adare had meticulously drawn a little tube with wavy lines emerging from its top. The tube, I think, was supposed to be a test tube, and the lines were fumes. To Adare that must have meant something.

“Do we go around this one?” Heather asked as I pointed it out on the map.

I sighed because I didn't want to. The detours we'd already taken had led us farther and farther from the main highway that ran straight across Pennsylvania from east to west. From New Jersey to Ohio. It was difficult to follow the map once you were off the main roads, and I was always worried we would get lost out there, wandering around looking for road signs until we ran out of fuel.

The tube symbol was well off the road. It might be something we could avoid by just zipping past it at twenty miles an hour. And I suppose I had grown a little complacent (which you will remember, in the wilderness, is a synonym for “dead”). Pennsylvania had been good to us, days of easy travel with little or no danger. We hadn't even seen any zombies.

“Just stick to the course,” I told Kylie. “But everybody keep an eye out. At the first sign of trouble, we'll head south, here,” I said, showing Kylie a place on the map where two roads intersected.

It was nearly an hour before we saw what this new hazard was, and even then we didn't recognize it. The road took us over the top of a ridge and then down into a green and leafy hollow. Ahead of us was another ridge, a great swelling wave of earth, but this one was different. No trees grew on its slopes and no rough line of rock crested its top. It was a pile of dark earth untouched by vegetation, and its sides were terraced into a series of curving tiers.

“It looks like somebody cut pieces off that hill,” Mary said. “Do you think this is like Trenton, Finnegan? Did this place get bombed by the army?”

I frowned. “I don't think so,” I said. “Those terraces are way too regular. Trenton was all craters and trenches. This looks like somebody cut the top and sides off that ridge deliberately.”

It bothered me that there were no trees up there. Everywhere else in Pennsylvania, plant life had taken over as soon as humanity went away. Thirsty roots had cut their way through concrete, pushed up through asphalt until it cracked and fell away. We'd seen whole towns overrun with creeping vines and stands of slender trees, entire fields of flowers that had once been fast-­food restaurants or superstores. Yet here only a few gray weeds stuck up from the gravelly soil.

As we got closer I saw pools of water around the base of the ridge, standing muck that looked like brown glass reflecting a sky leached of color. As I watched one pool, a black, greasy liquid bubbled up to the top and burst with a splatter of viscous droplets. The air filled with a stink like concentrated car exhaust.

The road swung away from the ridge, curving around its southern limb as if even the road builders had wanted to avoid that blighted land. The smell got worse as we drove away from the polluted pool, not better, and soon we had all wrapped scraps of cloth around our noses and mouths to keep the fumes out. Addison kept coughing and couldn't seem to stop, as if she was allergic to something in the air. I could only hope the wind here itself wasn't poison.

Eventually we left that blighted land behind. By then we all felt sick, and for days afterward we didn't breathe right; we wheezed and coughed. But the air grew sweet again, and the trees returned like sentinels on either side of the road.

I could only wonder what had happened to that place, to the hill that had been cut open until its toxic blood ran free. It made me think of how the first generation always told us that life was so much simpler now. As a child that had made me laugh—­we were barely surviving, clinging by our fingernails to a dangerous world, chased by zombies, plagued by thieves and a government that couldn't protect us. But that poisoned place was part of their world, the world before the crisis—­not mine. As much as they'd had, as easy as their lives were, the ­people who lived back then had found some good reason to pollute the ground they stood on and the air they breathed. Maybe my generation did live in a simpler time after all.

 

CHAPTER 51

W
e passed by Harrisburg without even seeing it. It was marked with a badge symbol on Adare's map, but we didn't discover immediately what that was supposed to mean. The city was either covered over by new vegetation or far enough away from the main highways that it couldn't be seen from the road.

I looked up from the road atlas in my lap. Glanced across at Kylie. “This is as far west as he ever got.” I'd taken up her habit of only ever referring to Adare as “he.” “There aren't any more red marks.” I held up the map book to show her, but she didn't even glance at it.

“We'll be okay,” Kylie said. But her voice was empty. I think she just said it because it was what I wanted to hear. Maybe she was just repeating what I'd said to her so many times.

I started to form a reply, but the noise of Addison coughing in the seat behind me broke my concentration. I turned around to see if she was okay.

Addison was doubled over with effort, while Mary rubbed her back to try to help her bring up whatever was in her lungs. I still thought it was just dust from the carved ridge, something nasty that had to work its way out of her system.

I should have known better. I should have paid attention to the fact that we'd been taking a lot more bathroom breaks than usual. That Addison had loose bowels and that she'd vomited twice the day before. But that wasn't such a strange thing for us. Some of the food we ate was twenty years old—­we had stomach bugs often enough. As it was, I didn't even suspect anything was wrong until she started coughing like that.

The cough persisted all the next day. I kept thinking I should call for a rest stop, that we should give her a rest from having cold air blasting on her through the broken windshield all day, but when I asked her, she said she was fine. As Pennsylvania rolled by and we ate up the miles, everyone tried to pretend that she was right, that it was nothing, just a cough. We started a hundred conversations about nothing at all—­about the weather, about all the trees. Every time it seemed like we were going to get back on track, that everything was going to be all right, Addison would start coughing again.

“Allergies,” Heather suggested. ­“People get allergic, right? In the spring, when the flowers are blooming. That's all.” She patted Addison's shoulder.

We all knew it wasn't just allergies, but nobody wanted to admit that Addison was sick. When she started vomiting, we couldn't deny it any longer. Kylie pulled over to the side of the road, and we cleaned Addison up as best we could. “I always feel better after I throw up,” I told her when we were back on the road. Vomiting was not an uncommon occurrence among us, given some of the food we were eating was twenty years old. This time, though, Addison didn't seem to get any relief from it. Her face was gray and she was sweating, even with the cold wind whipping through the broken windows of the SUV. “Try to sleep,” I told her, and she nodded. But the coughing kept waking her up.

“She's sick,” Heather said, two words nobody had dared speak so far. We all knew it was true.

In New York, we had lived in constant fear of disease. Of some new flu or fever that would come sweeping through the streets, passing from mouth to hand to nose, mowing us down while we were helpless to stop it. My understanding of germ theory was pretty rudimentary, but I remembered the quarantines from my youth, the ­people herded into abandoned buildings. I remember how we would throw food in through the doors and not let the sick out until they could prove they were well again.

We didn't have that option in the SUV. What were we going to do, strap Addison to the roof rack?

“She'll come around if she can just get some rest,” I suggested.

But instead she just got worse. She grew weaker until she could barely lift her head, and she was only half conscious at the best of times. Sometimes she muttered to herself. Nothing that made any sense, just halves of syllables and animal sounds. When I touched her forehead, it was like a bonfire was raging inside her skull.

We had some pills in the SUV, left over from our last looting expedition. I studied them intently, comparing their colors and shapes and the strange words written on their bottles. Eventually I had to admit I had no idea what any of them were. Some of them might bring her fever down. Others might kill her. I didn't dare to give her any of them. “Keep a wet rag on her forehead,” I told Mary, who had become Addison's nurse solely by dint of sitting next to her. “Try to make her comfortable.”

“What if she dies?” Mary asked.

Heather leaned over and slapped her. “Addison isn't going to die,” she said.

I looked at Kylie, but the emotional armor was up, screwed on tighter than ever. I don't think Kylie was even blinking at that point. I would dearly have loved to have her advice, to have her tell me what to do. But this was the same state in which she'd said that killing Bonnie was the right thing to do, or that we should sell Addison for fuel at Prince­ton. A state that let her survive the worst the world had to offer her.

If I had asked Kylie at that moment, she would have told me to leave Addison by the side of the road. Let the zombies have her.

There was absolutely no chance of that.

“This is my fault,” Mary said at one point. I turned around to say no, no, that wasn't possible, but I saw right away from Mary's face that she was serious. She was crying and she couldn't look me in the face. “It was a while back, before we saw that big machine. You stopped the car so we could stretch our legs, remember? At that place, that place with the picnic benches and the little creek that ran over a waterfall.”

“I remember the place,” I told her.

“Addison and I went off to pee. I watched for zombies while she went, but while I wasn't looking she went wading in the creek. Before I knew it she was drinking some of the water. She said it was really fresh and sweet. It was really good.”

“Oh, no,” I said, the words coming out of me despite every effort to keep them down. I'd grown up in a place surrounded by water, water one must never, ever drink. I had a healthy fear of anything that didn't come out of a bottle. Apparently nobody had ever taught Addison that lesson. “What about you? Did you—­?”

“I didn't drink any,” she said. She rubbed at her nose with one hand. “I knew better. But I figured . . . it looked so clear and clean. It was like glass, it was so clear. I figured it would be okay.”

“It's not your fault,” I told her. “You couldn't have stopped her. You didn't know she was going to do that.”

Knowing why Addison was sick didn't help us treat her. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't relieved, a little. If Addison had been poisoned, then she wasn't contagious. None of the rest of us were going to get what she had.

I wanted to punch myself for even thinking that. But it was true.

That night Addison started vomiting up blood. Her eyes were as red as a zombie's, and her skin felt like soft wax. Heather and Mary stared at me, begging me to make a decision.

Only one thing was possible. “They'll have medicine for her in Ohio. We keep driving, as fast as we can. If we can get there in time, they can help her. We
will
get there in time,” I added, because they clearly needed to be told a lie right then. “We
will
make it.”

Heather and Mary nodded in unison.

Kylie stepped on the gas.

 

CHAPTER 52

W
e followed the Pennsylvania Turnpike because it was the fastest way to Ohio. Of course it was also the place we were most likely to run into looter gangs or worse. All we cared about was speed, though, and that meant taking risks we couldn't really afford. Kylie took potholes at speed, swerved around abandoned cars without slowing down. The towns of Bedford and Somerset were just blurs we shot past—­they could have been thriving walled cities, they could have been camps full of road pirates looking for an easy score. I didn't even turn my head to look at them. I was too busy watching Addison. She was neither asleep nor awake at that point, but somewhere in between. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes saw nothing. There was a chance her body could fight this thing, that she could just get better on her own. I could see her getting weaker, though. We had no way to get food down her throat. Mary dripped water into her mouth from a wet rag, but half the time that just made her cough and retch.

The road swung northwest, and Kylie tapped the road atlas in my lap. I didn't know what she was trying to tell me. She tapped it again, and when I just shook my head, she said, “Pittsburgh.”

I looked at the map. The turnpike passed north of Pittsburgh. We wouldn't even see it if we kept to our current course. But I knew exactly what she meant.

Pittsburgh was a living city. Even I'd heard of it, back in New York. It wasn't an island like Manhattan, but it had the next best thing, a triangle of land protected on two sides by rivers wide enough that zombies couldn't swim across them. The Emergency Broadcast Ser­vice radio announcers always said it was a shining example of survival in the face of adversity.

Pittsburgh would have the drugs we needed to save Addison. There was no question about that. We could be there in an hour or two. But that assumed they wouldn't just shoot us on sight. That they would let us in or even talk to us. I didn't want to say what I was thinking—­I didn't want Mary and Heather to know what Kylie had suggested, because I wasn't sure what we should do and I didn't want to give anyone false hope. So I held up my left hand and tapped the tattoo on the back of it.

Kylie nodded. She understood—­she had a tattoo as well. We were positives. No walled city would let us get close. Addison didn't have a tattoo, though. She was, theoretically, clean. But what did that do for us? Could we really just drive up to the wall of Pittsburgh and leave Addison by the gate? Hope they would take in a sick girl rather than just leaving her out there to die?

By contrast, the medical camp in Ohio was—­well, a hospital. They were in the business of taking in ­people who were sick.

There was a problem there, too, though.

When I'd originally set out on this journey, walking across the George Washington Bridge, I'd had a very shaky grasp on just how big America was. I'd assumed Ohio was only a few dozen miles from New York. I'd also assumed that “Ohio” was the name of a city, or some imposing landmark. I'd had no idea it was an entire state. The thing was, I had no idea now
where
in Ohio the medical camp was located. Ohio was nearly as big as Pennsylvania according to Adare's road atlas. I assumed the camp had to be on one of the major roads, but that still meant we were going to have to search for it. It could be right over the border or a hundred miles away.

We had no idea how much longer Addison could hold on. Or whether it was already too late to save her.

Kylie said nothing. She didn't tap the atlas again or shake her head or even look at me. It was clear that she was shut down, that she was incapable of helping me. The decision was mine alone. Take our chances with Pittsburgh, where they might just turn us away—­wasting priceless hours—­or keep going? Hope we found the medical camp in time. Addison's life was in my hands. If I made the wrong choice . . .

“Ohio,” I whispered.

Kylie nodded. A little while later we saw the off-­ramp that led to Pittsburgh. We blew past it at forty miles an hour. The die was cast.

It turned out to be up there with the worst decisions I've ever made.