Positive (41 page)

 

CHAPTER 117

C
olonel Parkhurst tried very hard not to show it, but I could see how uncomfortable we made him. I think he expected the lot of us to zombie out on the spot, to rush his men in one big wave of red-­eyed madness. When we didn't, he relaxed a bit . . . but only a bit.

Enough to show pity on us, anyway. We must have looked so emaciated they couldn't believe we were still alive. The colonel's men came among us and handed out the MREs they'd brought with them. There weren't enough to go around, of course. He only had thirty men with him, and they'd only brought enough food for themselves for a few days. Still, hungry as we were, even a scant mouthful of reconstituted pasta or a spoon of beef gravy was enough to revive us a little. He'd brought other things, too, other gifts I didn't care so much about. A few old guns that they didn't need anymore. A hand-­cranked two-­way radio that would have been nice if I knew anybody else who had one, anyone I could talk to.

“You're all positives. This, uh, changes things, of course,” the colonel said.

“Of course,” I said. “You can't have positives in your ranks.”

“It's . . . regulations, you see. The men have to be kept safe.”

“I understand,” I told him. I was just glad he wasn't going to scoop up half my population and send them off to die in a battle somewhere out west.

“It's a shame, too. We really do need everyone we can get.” He leaned in close—­as close as he dared—­and whispered it. “This maniac we're fighting—­he's just not like anything we've seen before. Anubis took Chicago last year. Turned a whole city against us. They handed over all their weapons and half their population for his armies. Made a deal with him. They would help him knock over Indianapolis, and he would let the rest of them live.”

My blood chilled a little when I thought of what I'd seen, the fountains full of burned skeletons. The city wall blown open like it was made of tinfoil.

“Still. Nothing to worry you, son,” Parkhurst said. He visibly straightened himself up in his chair, recovering some of his lost composure. “We're massing troops in Denver, even now, and by summer we'll drive up into Montana, hit him where he lives. We'll have him marched down New Pennsylvania Avenue in chains before you know it. I have to tell you, it does my heart some good. You're too young to remember what war was like before the crisis. But this is real blood and thunder stuff. Roman Empire reborn.” The light in his eyes was alarming—­but only because I'd seen it before. I'd seen it in Ike's eyes when he looked on what had been done to Indianapolis. I'd seen it in Red Kate's eyes, most of the time.

A certain kind of mad joy. A desperate need to live in a world on fire. A realization, never to be spoken aloud, that the end of the world was a glorious thing. A chance to live life as grand, heartbreaking, showstopping theater.

It was exactly what I'd built Hearth to contradict.

I was not sad when he announced he had to be going, just as he was happy to get away from the town full of zombies-­in-­training. He left us with a promise to return if he could, to bring us supplies and support and communications from Washington. To make us, as he put it, a “real town,” which apparently meant getting our name on his maps and the right to vote in meaningless congressional elections.

I held out my hand and wished him well. He stared at my outstretched hand for a very long time before he shook it. Before he'd even let go, we both looked up because we'd heard a clattering in the hallway.

Some of the soldiers reached for their weapons, but before they could raise them, Ike had come staggering into the room. He looked bad. He was pale and thin, and I could see by the way he swayed back and forth that he was dizzy with malnutrition.

But he found the strength to stand up straight and tall and raise one hand to his brow in a proper salute.

“Colonel, sir, begging your pardon,” he said.

Colonel Parkhurst returned the salute. “Go ahead and speak, son. You don't need to call me ‘sir,' either.”

Ike shook his head. “If you'll pardon me, sir, I do. I was a private first class in the army a while back. Never officially discharged. I was cut off from my unit and fell in with this bunch. But I'd like to return to duty, sir, if I may.”

I stared at Ike, dumbfounded. I'd never heard him talk like that before. Never seen him act like a real soldier.

I also couldn't believe what was happening. Even though he'd warned me the time would come. He was leaving us. A rat jumping off a sinking ship.

The colonel made a big deal of checking Ike's left hand. There was no tattoo on it, of course—­Ike had never been a positive. He was almost certainly an infected, considering how much of my mom's blood he'd gotten on himself. I could have said as much, right then and there, and I'm sure Colonel Parkhurst would have had Ike shot on the spot. Or I could have claimed Ike was a positive who just never got a tattoo. Then, at least, he would have been forced to stay in Hearth. With me.

I met Ike's eye for just a second. Just long enough to see the look there. He looked sorry. Very, very sorry. But his mind was made up.

If I didn't let him go, I think he would have run away the next chance he got. He'd never understood my dream for Hearth. He'd never shared it. He'd stuck around only because he was my friend. And now something better had come along.

So I let him go.

He flew away with the colonel in a big troop transport. Just one more helicopter, heading to the front.

I had no idea what was happening out in Denver, out where the army was fighting Anubis. Where Ike had gone. We saw fewer and fewer helicopters pass overhead as winter went on. That was all I knew. By the time spring came we saw none at all.

 

CHAPTER 118

I
made a mark on my office wall for every day that passed, trying to keep a calendar so I would know how long the winter had to go. The snow kept falling all through February. March came, as best I could count the days, but with no relief in sight—­the wind kept howling down from the north, from that far-­off, polar land called Canada that I saw on all my maps. The lack of food claimed many of us, and then disease swept through Hearth and took many more.

By the time the snow started to thaw, out of the original five hundred of us, no more than three hundred remained—­and many of those were at death's door. We'd all lost so much weight we looked like something the skeleton cult would worship. Kylie's spine looked like a snowy mountain range when I saw her dress in the morning. My muscles withered until it was all I could do to break through the ice on the stream when it was my turn to fetch water.

Even when the snow did begin to recede, when the longer days brought breezes that didn't cut to the bone, it was like a cruel joke. So the grass showed up again, yellow and furrowed like an unmade bed—­still there was no game. Tiny flowers appeared among the bases of the trees, but you couldn't eat flowers.

I went whole days without seeing another human being other than Kylie. Without speaking, even to her. When I did encounter my ­people, carrying water or gathering firewood, they wouldn't meet my eye. They'd given up hope. They'd even given up on being angry at me. They were just waiting to die.

This—­this futility, this waiting—­it was what I'd turned my back on. The idea, so prevalent among the first generation, that the world was done with humanity and we were just holding on by our fingernails before the inevitable, all-­too-­welcome plummet into the abyss, haunted me. I'd wanted to make a promise, a vow, to live, to really
live,
and I'd brought us all to the brink of death.

Even Kylie had stopped believing. “One good thing about starving to death,” she said one night, her voice as flat as it had been when I met her. “I don't get my period anymore. My body doesn't have enough blood left to spare.”

I tried to join in, to make a joke of it, based on something I'd read in the township library. “Just before the crisis, there was an obesity epidemic,” I said. “They were all so worried about being too fat, about ruining their health because they couldn't stop eating. The old magazines are full of stories about it.”

“So the zombie apocalypse was just a fad diet?” she asked.

I started to laugh, but she stopped me.

“Finn, don't bury me here,” she said.

“I . . . what?”

Her face was scrunched up with apology and guilt and sorrow and worry. She looked nothing at all now like the girl who had taught me how to loot houses back in New Jersey. She looked more like a ghost—­pale and insubstantial, her eyes bloodshot and furtive. “I don't want to go to sleep where I was hungry and scared. Take me back to the road. To the place we made love the first time. That's where I was happy, for a while.”

I couldn't speak. I couldn't handle the thought of her dying at all. I couldn't stop thinking about my hands sinking into the hard, frozen ground, my nails scratching away at the dirt to dig her grave. I couldn't stop seeing the first handful of black earth scattered across her closed eyes, her scarred face.

In the morning I went back to the forest, to get wood, to make a fire for her. I smashed the ice on the stream, so thin and brittle now, and brought water back, so she would not be thirsty.

It took me most of the day.

The next morning I went back and did it again. Too stupid to give up.

And the next.

There came a day when the stream had no ice, even at its edges. No snow on the ground around me. I stared down into the clear running water and saw a death's-­head staring back. A gaunt, hollow face, my face, eyes the color of old faded newsprint, dark shadows underneath.

And another face, too.

A face with tusks and bristles and a snout.

I startled, jumping back, looking up. Just in time to see the wild pig, the pig that had come down to the water to drink, running off into a stand of new undergrowth.

The pigs were back.

 

CHAPTER 119

T
he positives came out of the houses one or two at a time, drifting out like ghosts. None of them could seem to figure out what to do with their hands. Their clothes hung on them like shrouds. Their hair was lank and long, as if they had all zombied out during the winter, changed into something horrible.

But their eyes weren't red.

And when they smelled the smoke, they began to smile and shout and run.

Before dawn I'd taken a hunting party out into the woods with the best weapons we had. We had expected to find one or two pigs that would run as soon as they saw us, run so fast we couldn't catch them.

We found a herd. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

I think they had migrated south for the winter, headed for places the snow couldn't reach, where the plants hadn't died off. I could only imagine such balmy and pleasant lands. Maybe the pigs had eaten everything down there, leaving the ground stripped and bare. Maybe they had come back north just to mate. It didn't matter. They filled clearings in the forest. They stood out on yellow ground beyond the farthest trees. More of them than I could count.

We took as many as we could carry. Enough meat for twice the population of Hearth. We bled them and gutted them, cut off their heads and their hooves. It was nasty, messy, smelly work, and we laughed like demons as we carved into their bodies. When you're that hungry, butchery is nothing. It's
fun
.

Covered in blood, stinking of shit, we brought the carcasses home. What turns my stomach to think of now was at the time the grandest thing in the world. We dug fire pits in ground that wasn't frozen over anymore. We burned wood until we had hot coals, and we roasted all that pig until the smell made the entire town crazy.

Some of them grabbed at the pigs on the spits, tore at the flesh before it was even fully cooked. Some ­people sat and waited, forks in their hands, plates on their laps, their knees bouncing up and down in anticipation.

We ate so much we got sick. We ate so much we rolled on the ground in pain, but with smiles on our faces. We laughed and made jokes and rubbed our swollen bellies. Some of us danced and sang and clapped to keep time. And then we ate some more.

Spring had come, and winter was over, and it was
good
.

 

CHAPTER 120

W
ith spring in the air, the real work of Hearth could start again. We had survived—­more than half of us—­the greatest test we thought we would ever face, and we approached the new year with surprising optimism and joy, considering all the death and privation we'd just escaped. Maybe because of it. There is a point where tragedy becomes inspiration. I had read in the library of the Black Death of Europe, and how, when it finally ended, a continent-­wide party had broken out that lasted for years. Hearth went through much the same transformation, on a much smaller scale.

With our bellies full, our thoughts turned to other pleasures. There were new romantic rendezvous being whispered and giggled about every night, and more than one fight broke out over who was with whom. We sang and told stories around a bonfire almost every night, and Kylie even organized a dance by torchlight. She had found a book on dancing and taught us all new steps. Even the clumsiest among us took a turn, with much laughter and clapping of hands. We ate well, gorging ourselves until we started to look like humans again and less like skeletons. Our cooks had built a still, which I pretended not to know about, and jars of moonshine started showing up everywhere.

Which is not to say we weren't industrious. We worked hard through the last weeks of March and all of April. There was plenty to do. The winter had claimed a ­couple of houses, their roofs collapsed under all that snow. Dozens of us came together to repair them, to put the houses back in order. The fence was sagging at one point and Macky was certain that zombies would show up any day now that the world had thawed out, so we labored tirelessly at shoring up our defenses. We built new furniture and tools for tending the few crops we managed to plant, drying racks for cured meat, window shutters to replace broken panes of glass. There were plenty of woodworking tools left in Hearth, good, precrisis stuff that never wore out or broke, and we made good use of it. One man named Grumman even started turning out little sculptures in his spare time, carved pigs and bears and even miniature zombies that were surprisingly lifelike, and these started showing up in every house as decoration.

We had very few seeds left—­most of them had been eaten during the winter. But what we did have we planted and tended more lovingly and with greater attention than I imagine food crops have ever been shown before. Soon we had squash plants sprouting from the earth, and the start of tomato vines, and tiny saplings that would one day become fruit trees. We desperately needed to vary the crops and improve our diet—­I knew from my reading what would happen if we tried to subsist on pig meat alone—­and I sent out parties to scour the forest, looking for edible plants of any kind. I suffered and fretted constantly over where we could find the seeds to start growing some kind of grain, and beets for sugar, and even fiber plants like flax or cotton so we could eventually make our own clothes. There was a week when I was obsessed with bees, reading all I could on apiculture and how to build hives and how to catch queens, though we never did find any. Bees would have given us not just honey but wax for candles and for waterproofing rain jackets. We would have them someday, I was sure.

It was Luke, though, who had the brilliant idea to catch some pigs and put them in a corral inside our fence. If we could breed them and raise them inside town, we wouldn't have to spend so much time hunting. Catching them turned out to be a dangerous and—­I'll admit it—­hilarious proposition, as we raced around them, waving our arms and spooking them into running between hastily erected fences. Far more of them got away than we caught, but eventually we had a small herd. Luke forbade anyone from slaughtering his new pets—­he wanted to see if he could domesticate them.

Little by little Hearth stopped being a place we'd found and taken over and became more and more a place we built with our own hands. We started putting up small sheds in the undeveloped lots—­places to store tools, smokehouses, woodsheds to keep our firewood dry in the rain. We built a lot of outhouses that spring, to replace the open pit latrines we'd been using. We made changes to the existing buildings as well, putting up veneers over rotten siding, cutting rough shingles to replace the broken and weather-­worn roofing we'd inherited. We even made paint by grinding up rocks from the stream and mixing the resulting powder with pig blood, so we could cover up the peeling walls of our houses.

The work, and the plentiful meat, put muscles on all of us. We worked all day, and when night came, we fell readily into our beds. Kylie and I barely had time for each other, with all our responsibilities. But we found a few minutes every day to talk or just hold hands or lie in each other's arms as we lingered in bed before getting up in the morning. My love for her grew with every day that passed.

So, too, did her belly grow. It didn't show for a long time, as she put back on the weight she'd lost over the winter. It was hard to imagine any of us getting fat—­we were working too hard—­but she developed a cute little potbelly that I loved to kiss. Then she mentioned that she still wasn't getting her period, though every other woman she talked to in town had started menstruating again. When she started throwing up all the time, I think we both knew, but neither of us would say a thing.

Then one night in late May, as we lay in bed, I reached down and put my hand on her stomach. I expected her to push it away—­she'd started to get self-­conscious about how big it was. Instead she put her hand over mine, our fingers meshing together. She closed her eyes and started to cry, and I kissed away her tears.

And that was when I felt it. Something moving inside her. A tiny foot, kicking in dreams. A new life. A new citizen for Hearth.