Positive (49 page)

 

CHAPTER 148

K
ate went rigid with fear. The gun in her hand moved, just a little, so that the barrel wasn't pointing at my head. Then she lifted it and pointed it at Kylie instead.

“No,” I shouted. “No!” I reared upward, definitely reopening my wound, but I didn't care. I had to get in the way of the shot.

Kate fired her pistol. The blast deafened me, and I could feel the bullet digging through my flesh, down the side of my neck and across my shoulder. It didn't hurt at all, not at first. I shoved into her with my shoulder, and the gun flew out of her hand. In the same moment I grabbed my knife out of her belt.

I brought the knife up, and I could distinctly see the eagle engraved on the blade, flashing in firelight.

Kate wasted no time. She drew her own, longer knife, the cult's knife.

I don't know what Kylie saw outside. I don't know if she ordered our ­people to attack, or if she told them to stand back and let me finish this personally. Either way, the effect would be the same. It would take a ­couple of seconds for even the closest positives to get inside the house to help me. I was on my own until then—­and in that time, this would all be over.

Kate brought her blade high as if she would stab me in the face or the throat. I went low, aiming at her legs. Maybe I intended to take her alive—­I have no idea. I wasn't thinking in words or even fully formed thoughts.

I saw Kate's blade come down toward me, and I twisted out of the way. She danced back to avoid my strike. Suddenly there was space between us, room to maneuver. She started to sidestep, but I cut her off with a feint.

Ike had trained me how to fight with the knife. He'd shown me what they taught him in basic training. There were two kinds of knife fights, he'd explained. You could dance around each other, slashing each other until one of you bled out.

Or you could go for a single attack, right for the kill.

With all the strength I had left in me, all the rage, all the adrenaline, I lunged forward and stabbed right for her heart.

She was fast, much faster than me, and she brought her arm down to block my attack. Her blade cut through all the flesh of my wrist and knocked my blade down, below the level of her heart.

But I had enough momentum going that my lunge couldn't be stopped. My knife sank deep into her abdomen, just below her sternum. I could feel its top edge rasp against bone.

I had to let go—­one of the muscles in my arm was completely severed, and I couldn't control some of my fingers anymore. I took a step back and watched as she dropped her own knife.

She stared down at herself for a second as if she couldn't believe what had happened. Then she grabbed my knife and pulled it out of her body.

Blood spouted from the wound, jetting across the floor and splashing on my shirt. It gushed out with the rhythm of her pulse. She gulped noisily and then coughed and red bubbles flicked her lips.

“Got my lung,” she wheezed. “Jesus. All I wanted, St . . .” The word turned into a gasping cough that spilled blood all down her chin. “All I wanted . . .”

I never got to find out what she wanted.

She was dead before the door slammed open, dead before positives started running in from the back of the house.

I could hardly believe it. After so long—­Red Kate was dead.

I felt exactly the same way as I had when I saw Adare die. Like at any second she was going to stand back up and terrorize us some more. She was, like Adare, a fixture of the wilderness, of the world after the crisis. She was supposed to live forever.

Except the world was changing. And she wasn't going to be part of what was yet to come. The world hadn't ended, it wasn't dead—­there was no room for maggots like her anymore.

Kylie put a tourniquet on my sliced-­up arm, kept me from bleeding out. Others carried me to the hospital in the municipal building. Somebody fetched the pain pills. So much motion, so much activity all around me. I didn't care, didn't pay much attention.

Hearth was safe.

 

CHAPTER 149

O
f course, it might all have been temporary. All I'd fought and bled to achieve, all the positives who'd died defending Hearth—­all of it might have meant nothing. I'd killed Costa and twenty stalkers. So they sent Kate and a hundred. Next time maybe they would send Michigan Mike or Anubis himself—­legendary figures I could barely imagine—­with an army of thousands.

Maybe.

We were pretty scared, I'll admit, when the helicopters came. It happened three weeks later and the whole time we'd been waiting, hoping.

The aircraft landed on the open ground out near the highway, five of them setting down like giant birds coming to roost. It was already dusk by then so we couldn't see the paint on their fuselages. Couldn't tell if it was army green or a pattern of skulls.

So we were ready. We were armed for whoever came, even though we knew we would never survive another battle like the one we'd fought against Red Kate.

It was dark beneath the trees. As the first emissary of this new force arrived, I could see him only in silhouette as he approached. I tried to calm myself as he came closer. Then he walked up to our front gate and gave me a big smile and said, “Finn—­it's me, buddy! Finn, let me inside!”

It was Ike.

Ike, my partner from my subway fishing days. Ike, who'd gotten me out of the medical camp. Ike, who'd walked away when I needed him the most, in that bad first winter.

I let him in. I let him and all his fellow soldiers in, and they were amazed to see all the gravestones in the main square, but they were also amazed to see we were still alive.

For my part, I was startled to see that Ike had a scar all the way down his side from his armpit to his rib cage. A souvenir from the battle he'd fought in New Mexico. He pulled up his shirt to show it to me. “A stalker put about six bullets in me,” he said. “I lost my spleen and my gallbladder, but as long as I don't eat spicy food, they say I can have a pretty normal life.”

I did a quick calculation in my head. He was fifteen years old.

I showed him my own scars. The one on my stomach was almost healed, though we never did get the bullet out. The damage to my hand was a lot worse, and I didn't think I'd be using it anymore. But I had a spare one.

“Wow,” Ike said as we toured the half of town that had been destroyed in the fire. We'd had time to rebuild our wall but nothing more, not yet. “I kind of wish I'd been here to see the fighting.”

I turned to stare at him. “You could have been,” I said. I forced myself not to say that he had abandoned us when things got tough.

He looked so stricken anyway, so embarrassed that he'd left us when we could have really used his help, that I relented and pulled him into a hug.

His unit had brought some medical supplies with them—­just what they normally carried, first aid kits, really. We desperately needed everything they could spare. So many injured still, so many in makeshift bandages, arms in slings, so many fighting off infections that might have killed them. There was stuff in those medical kits we didn't even know what to do with. The soldiers didn't want to touch us, of course. We were still positives. But they showed us how to clean out gunshot wounds and how to fight off sepsis and how to administer a course of antibiotics.

If that was all they came to do, to help us heal, I would have been grateful. But they had a different mission.

Part of it was taking our prisoners away. The stalkers who had surrendered in the main square—­twenty-­seven in total—­had been languishing in the municipal building's library, locked in with our books. We had fed them and given them water. We'd tried to tend to their injuries, but they were too terrified we would infect them. Three of them had died even before the army showed up. I didn't cry about it.

There was no big ceremony. The stalkers were herded into one of the helicopters, and it flew away. I knew I would never see them again.

The commanding officer of the soldiers, a Texan named Lieutenant Groves, explained why they'd brought so many helicopters and troops. “We weren't sure who we would find here,” he said. “Not to put too fine a point on it—­we expected y'all'd be dead, and that lot'd be in charge.” He laughed. “Colonel Parkhurst hoped we'd find you still here, but we doubted it. A hundred stalkers ain't small potatoes. I can see why he respects you so much, taking 'em all down with what you got here.”

“Give the colonel my thanks, please,” I said.

“I think we can do better than that.”

 

CHAPTER 150

I
'd never flown in a helicopter before. I have to say it wasn't the best experience of my life. I was sick most of the time, I couldn't hear a word over the noise of the rotor, and every time we changed course I thought we were going to fly into a mountain.

When we slowed down over Denver and then hovered over a place called Cheesman Park, I wasn't fit to talk to anybody. Especially after I looked out over the skyline of the city and saw grinning skulls painted on every skyscraper. At least the ones that weren't collapsed in piles of rubble. The army had just finished taking Denver back from the cult, and from what I saw, only part of the city had survived.

The helicopter settled down to the ground and they let me lie in the grass until I felt like I wasn't going to vomit. The soldiers laughed at me but I didn't care.

When I felt better, they took me into a stone pavilion that was covered over by camouflage netting. Inside I saw a table with a big map on it, and a soldier who was busy drawing little red crosses on the towns and mountains it showed. It made me think of Adare's marked-­up atlas, which had helped us so much in New Jersey.

There was nobody else in the pavilion. I figured we were waiting for somebody else to show up.

Maybe to pass the time, the soldier straightened up and looked at me for a second, then pointed at the bandages wrapped around my forearm. “That looks like quite the wound,” he said.

“This?” I asked. I shrugged. “Worth it.”

I looked at him for the first time and saw how old he was. Not just worn down by time and circumstance, but chronologically old. His skin hung in wrinkles from his face, and he was so thin he looked like somebody had hung an army uniform on a broomstick.

I didn't know enough about the army to understand their insignia. He had four stars on his shoulders and a bunch of medals on his chest, so I guessed he was kind of important. He had a nametag on his uniform that said
CLARK
.

“We heard about the battle you fought. Ours was a little bigger,” he said, making a sweeping gesture to indicate the city around us. “But maybe they weren't that dissimilar. This is my hometown, you see. It's a place I love. A place I've fought for many times—­first the zombies, now the cult. Just like you fought for your Hearth.”

“I'm from New York, originally,” I told him.

He nodded. “I actually knew that already, Finnegan. I know a fair bit about you. I checked your records. Saw your birth date. Somebody helped me do the math.” He pointed at my left hand. “That tattoo's out of date, you know.”

“What?” I was just beginning to suspect that we weren't waiting for someone else. That this was the man they'd brought me so far to meet.

“You're twenty-­one years old. It's been more than twenty years since you were potentially infected. That means you're not a positive anymore.” He gave me a gentle smile. “If you'd like, I can have you flown back to New York. You can start a new life there.”

I laughed. “Seriously?”

“Oh, yes,” the man replied.

“Thanks, but . . . I don't know. For one thing, I've been exposed to so many zombies over the last year or so, I can't imagine I'm actually clean. I've got to be infected, right? And for another, well, you know so much about me. You must know I've already made a new life for myself in Hearth. With the woman I love.”

“And soon a baby,” he said, and a beatific smile lit up his face. It was like he'd never been happier in his life than imagining Kylie and me and our baby. “Exactly what I expected you to say, of course. I just wanted to let you know you had options. All right. I have a lot of things to see to, but while we have this chance, I wanted to ask you one thing.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What can we do for you?”

I shook my head. “I don't understand.”

“You're a hero, young man. You and your town took care of a hundred stalkers, troops of the cult we didn't have to fight here. Beyond that—­there's the fact that you're rebuilding. It's been twenty years. I've spent all that time putting out fires, fighting insurgencies, achieving nothing. In the last year you created a new walled town and showed that it could thrive. I respect that, more than I think you know.”

“Okay,” I said again, not getting it. What I'd done—­it hadn't been so I could help the army.

It didn't seem to matter, not to him.

“You're not a soldier, so I can't give you a medal. But I'd like to give you something to show my respect. Something for your town. What'll it be, Finnegan? Do you need a water purification still? Guns to fight off zombies? A herd of cattle?”

I thought about it for a second. “We can get or make all those for ourselves. If we don't know how yet, we'll learn.”

He nodded approvingly.

“I'll tell you what we want, actually,” I said, having a sudden inspiration. “We want ­people.”

­“People?”

“You have a medical camp in Akron. I, uh, I kind of emptied that one out. But there's another one somewhere out west of here, I think.”

“In Pasadena, yes.”

I took a breath. “I want the ­people from that one, too.”

“The positives.”

“That's who lives in Hearth.”

“Positives,” he said. He smiled. Then he held out his hand for me to shake. He laughed for a second, then held out his left hand, since I couldn't use my right.