Positive by David Wellington

Giant round structures, some of them bigger than the buildings I’d grown up around in Manhattan. It seemed I had entered an entire new world of industrial decay, of rust and stinking winds and weeds chewing up the concrete that was the only soil. Sometimes we could see water on our left—­the Arthur Kill, Adare told us, a name that made some of the girls look at each other in fear. Sometimes we would see great stands of golden plants at the edge of the water, lifting their plumed heads toward the sun, but always they were surrounded by more ancient, crumbling machinery, by towering girders attached to nothing and broken pipes wide enough for one of us to crawl through.
    Adare told us, at one point, that we were driving past the Newark airport, or the town of Elizabeth, or the entrance of the Goethals Bridge. I remember seeing none of those things. Only that weird alien landscape of steel and peeling paint.
    Linden turned out to be more of the same—­and then it became much worse. Our destination was not the old town of Linden, Adare cheerfully announced, but an industrial sector east of that place. “A refinery, from before the crisis. A refinery and a sewage treatment plant. Don’t worry. All that’s long gone. But it sat on some nice defensible ground, so when the looters needed a place to set up shop, they couldn’t have asked for a better place.” By this point we had left the turnpike and were following a long pipeline, a cluster of pipes reinforced with barbed wire above and below. The road bent and turned until I knew I would never be able to find my way back to the turnpike alone, and then, before us, we saw the gates of Linden.
    They stood twenty feet tall, made of corrugated steel that had been painted white to prevent rust. Along their top ran a catwalk of iron girders where men with sniper rifles stood guard. In front of the gates, filling a wide empty lot, was nothing but bones: skeletons, human skeletons, hundreds of them, no, thousands—­definitely thousands. It seemed to go on forever. They lay heaped in piles, skulls and pelvises and femurs and phalanges all mixed together, bleached yellowish white by the sun. Dark birds picked them over, though it looked like nothing was left for them. Only a narrow strip of asphalt had been swept clear to allow vehicular traffic—­otherwise that great killing ground was nothing but bones.
    â€œZombies,” Adare said, in what he must have considered a reassuring tone. Then he shrugged with one shoulder. “Mostly. I guess they don’t give you much chance to prove you’re not a zombie, if you come walking up here. No self-­respecting looter comes to Linden without wheels under him.”
    He honked the SUV’s horn and the gates were opened, rolling back just far enough to let us inside. They were closed again as soon as we had passed through. “This is the only way in. The camp’s got water on three sides, and this whole stretch of land other than the gate is one continuous fence. Don’t worry, Stones. You’re as safe here as you were in New York.”
    I found that hard to believe. For one thing, there were a lot of ­people in the camp, and every single one of them was carrying some form of firearm, a pistol or a rifle or a submachine gun. Most of them had knives as well, worn at their hips where they were clearly meant to be seen. They turned to watch us pass with appraising eyes, sizing us up as if deciding whether it was worth it or not to shoot us and take what we had.
    We were not stopped or molested, however, as we made our way into the middle of the camp. We passed rows of shanties built of old car tires, corrugated tin, car parts heaped up and welded together. Wispy smoke leaked from some and went wandering among the narrow streets in white tendrils. Other huts were lit up with one or two flickering fluorescent tubes. None of them was big enough that Adare could have stood