Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  He stepped around her and came at me with the stick. I trembled in my chair from excitement. He held it outstretched from his body and pointed it straight at my nose. The electricity raised the hairs on my face and sent an energy thrumming through me. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t eaten all day. Something else was powering me now and all he needed was to step a little closer and I would catch his suit in my fingers too.

  Something crackled. He looked away, down onto the heap of cloth that had become a person sitting up, legs straight out, gloved hand holding a radio to the helmet face.

  Another moon suit opened the flaps and ordered the stick-man out. The stick-man left as if lit on fire.

  “That is not the way to get what we need,” new moon suit said. “Please proceed. I will remain as your second for now.”

  “Thank you.” She rose up from the ground and brushed the dirt off her formerly-pristine suit.

  “Hold,” he said, command filling his voice. “There is damage.” He said this in a quieter voice, but it sounded like judgment raining down.

  She froze, arms outstretched, body like a marshmallow. “Oh my god, where?”

  “In the back. Near your hip. A three-inch-wide slit. I can see the garment underneath—it’s also damaged…There is blood.”

  A long silence and I wondered if I had ripped it. I didn’t think I’d touched her suit. I only imagined it. She had stayed out of my reach. It must have been when she fell. It must have been.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I have not been near the subject. Nowhere close.”

  “You would risk…?”

  “I…” She turned away, back again, in a circle, looking for a way out and finding none.

  “You will get the best care. We will not rest until we have solved this.” He held out his hand for the radio still in hers.

  She drew her arm away.

  “You have witnessed the research. You know there is not much time,” he said.

  Even though a suit covered her body, something about her posture changed. She slumped down in defeat. She handed him the radio. “I understand.”

  He walked to the far end of the tent and spoke quickly.

  She began undoing the various layers, removing the gloves, unlatching the helmet, lifting it off her head to reveal thick chestnut curls cut close to her scalp. Her blue eyes under the orange-rimmed glasses looked haunted, her lips were set in a grim line, stress wrinkles surrounded her mouth. She looked like she was in her late thirties. She looked competent and authoritative and like a lost little girl all at once.

  “You must tell us,” she said again, no helmet distorting her face or voice anymore. She reached for what I thought had been a tray of medical tools, but now saw held a container of hypodermic needles. She tore a needle from its sterile packaging, inserted it into a vial, and drew out the liquid.

  “I am going to tell you the truth and it’s not going to be pretty,” she said. “We can’t save you. Too much time has passed. But there is a cure…There’s a way for us to help your friends, or anyone you’ve infected—”

  “I am…no…snitch—”

  “We have to give them the injection within two hours or the initial infection gets too much of a head start. That’s our window. You have to let us fix this before it spreads any further. You have to tell us where your friends are.” She injected herself in the arm and winced as she pushed down on the plunger. She withdrew the needle, tossed it into a metal receptacle, and rubbed the injection. Then she just waited.

  My brain felt like it was full of blood-soaked cotton. She was asking me to lock my friends up. She was asking me to destroy their dreams, their freedom, to be the one who put them back into the system we’d all run from.

  Then I realized I had already done worse to them than that, by my own hands, my own mouth. I’d infected them with this virus. I had waited too long to run.

  Now my friends had to pay with everything that still mattered to us.

  “When it’s Time to Go”

  Posted August 10th at 8:49PM on Do More Than Survive: How to THRIVE as a Runaway

  Become a really good observer. Notice when people start staring at you (time to go). Notice when a cop gives you a second look (time to go). Notice when the other runaways and homeless and prostitutes you are used to seeing are no longer around (time to go).

  Notice when the friends you make on the street become worse than the family you left behind (time to go).

  Notice when you are the friend on the street worse than the family they left behind (time for you to go).

  Remember that no matter how big or small your dreams are for your life and your future and for the people around you that you care about—the street will eat them all and there won’t even be crumbs left behind for your dog to lick.

  Chapter 4

  “Shed.”

  “You last saw them at a shed?”

  “Here.”

  “At a shed here at the train station?”

  I nodded.

  “How long ago?”

  I shook my head even though it made the tent spin.

  “You don’t know. Okay, that makes sense. The virus distorts perception of time. How many have you infected?”

  I tried to think back, only my friends, all my friends, all our dreams for the future. “Six. All of them.” A tear slipped down my cheek, but I couldn’t wipe it away with my hands strapped down. It stayed there for all the world to see, to know, to despise.

  She counted out the vials and separated them from the box.

  The other suit returned and she filled him in. He rested a glove on her bare shoulder for a moment.

  “You will need to decontaminate that now,” she said.

  He returned to the far side of the tent and spoke again into the radio. The responding voice, crackling with static, was recognizable. Officer Hanley.

  A keening noise started, and then I realized it came from me, from my throat. I thrashed in the chair, raising my hips and stomach, lurching like a caterpillar rising from a leaf, but the straps kept me in place even as the moon suit jumped back into the folds of the tent.

  Someone outside yelled, and then there were footsteps. I settled back into the chair, my tantrum doing nothing. Moon suit shouted everything was fine, it was fine, stay away, and then the steps went away.

  “I promise you this will save your friends. They will be getting the same treatment as me,” she said. But something else hitched in her voice and told me that whatever this treatment did, it wasn’t much better than death.

  She wavered on her feet, as if swaying to slow music. She pressed her hand to the back of her forehead and closed her eyes. “It works so quickly, so damn quickly.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me, as if trying to read whether there was anything human left inside of me. I thought there was, but not much, not enough.

  She grabbed a needle, emptied a vial into it, plunged the liquid into my IV, then did this a second and a third time.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “We are losing control over this thing. We can’t waste our resources.”

  “It probably won’t work,” she said, not really answering him, I think, but more answering the question in my eyes. “It hasn’t yet worked this long after, but I had to try…” The needle and vials fell out of her hands and she swayed again, this time with her eyes closed, as if she had fallen asleep standing up. Moon suit caught her just as she went down, softening her fall to the ground. He laid her out carefully and then jumped back and checked over his suit as if it were covered with red fire ants.

  When he could not find a tear or hole, his hands came to rest at his sides. He heaved deep breaths, almost sobbing, but there was no sound except for the rustling of his clothes and the low, soft hiss of his air tank.

  I closed my eyes and swam in a sea of red. Metal dinged against metal, steps sounded, a plastic tent flap rustled.

  I opened my eyes and saw he was gone and had taken the tray of vials with him.

>   She sat up and crawled a few feet away, her hands and knees dragging in the dirt like she had weights tied to them.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  My throat closed up again. My damn throat. It itched but the straps kept me from relieving it and this set a fire in my stomach and I pulled hard on the straps.

  The left strap loosened an inch.

  She looked around, dazed, as if not seeing who spoke and then locked eyes on me before drifting away to look at something on the tent wall. I craned my neck and saw nothing. There was nothing to see, nothing that deserved the attention she gave it, as if she were watching someone who was about to die.

  But she wasn’t looking at me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this,” she said. Talking to the tent wall. “I know,” she said, as if in response to someone. “I understand, we all understand. It was an unexpected mutation. Clearly, no one thought—”

  She looked to the side, as if ashamed. “It’s the only chance you’ve got, but it will make it impossible not to remember. You’ll remember everything and sometimes all at once and—”

  She went silent, as if listening. Then, “That’s a possibility. But the psychologist will be here. There’s no guarantee, but you’re strong. You’re not going to go crazy.”

  I worked at the left strap and it relaxed a little more. A low buzzing started in the tent as if someone had flipped on a generator from far way. I looked around, trying to place the direction. A roar of blood rushed into my ears and should have blocked the buzzing, but it didn’t. The noise grew louder.

  I realized the buzzing came from inside me. Inside my mind.

  “We have a plan,” she said, barely cutting through the noise in my head. “Camp Mendocino. We’ll be taking you there and it will be okay. We’ll find a real cure.” Tears streamed down her face. She kept her eyes open, unblinking, and didn’t wipe away the wetness. She pantomimed giving someone a shot in the arm. She caressed the air and moved her fingers as if pushing aside a stray tendril of hair. “Drink some water while you still can.” She grabbed an imaginary cup and gently, like handling a baby, brought it to someone’s mouth and tipped the cup in her hand. “I’ll be here the whole time. I won’t leave. I promise.”

  She set the cup down on the dirt and the tears kept flowing and she crossed her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth.

  As if someone had flipped a switch, she slumped over. Her breath stayed heavy and uneven. Her forehead glistened with sweat and flushed with fever.

  She’d gone crazy, but I felt crazier, because the buzzing kept rising, became insistent and I needed to do something, anything to make it stop.

  A hazy pink film lay over my vision like a vintage photo filter, but somehow it made everything clear. No wavy lines, though the fire in my stomach and my head remained. The buzzing was there too, but more pleasant now, tickling me. A woman lay on the dirt. A slight breeze moved the tent flaps. Voices rumbled outside.

  My eyes felt lazy, as if waiting to lock on to something, as if something important was about to happen. Saliva filled my mouth and part of me understood that it dripped down my chin and dribbled onto the dirt. Most of me did not notice.

  I felt distant from my body, as if down a long tunnel from the me I used to be. The girl who laughed and made her friends laugh, the girl who had been hurt and then loved anyway. The girl who always put herself between her friends and danger. The girl who dreamed about living in a Garden of Eden with her friends. The girl who will forever be upset with herself for not finishing high school, for not going to even one school dance. But this desire, this regret danced away into a hot fog and I couldn’t remember why I felt it.

  Figures blocked the tunnel path. Shapes, bodies, six of them, and another, a seventh body in a white suit. The others were dark, even though the light shined.

  The others were familiar.

  I knew them from somewhere. Dark boxes, rumbling train wheels, laughing at an oogle—memories on the tip of my tongue and then I swallowed and they disappeared and the pain in my throat returned. Confusion buzzed up like a bee. I shrank away from it, flinching, swatting at it. But my hands didn’t move. The buzzing increased and filled my head as if a swarm of bees kept running into each other, running into the sides of my skull, darting backward and forward again.

  “She told us where you were,” white suit said.

  “She wouldn’t have done that,” one of the dark bodies said.

  “Look at her. She doesn’t want you to turn into this.”

  Silence, except for the buzzing, that damn buzzing. Gabbi would laugh when I told her this new craziness that had started in my head. First talking to myself, now a bunch of insects haunting me. Was Gabbi here? I peered at each person. Sullen faces, bloody bites, kids my age, but I couldn’t place them. Familiar, but—

  The woman on the ground twitched. A shudder went through her body. The group jumped back as if coming unexpectedly upon the edge of the cliff.

  “I’ve allowed you to see her, to see what could happen, but there’s not much time.”

  The tallest one, the one with light eyes and a steady look that never wavered from my face—he stepped forward. The edges of his body smeared as if he were in a painting. “Give me the shot.”

  “There will be recovery time. We will take care of you—”

  “I understand. Give me the shot.”

  White suit pulled out a needle and vial. It bothered me that I knew the voices but not the names of those faces. Gabbi would be angry with me for forgetting like this.

  The suit injected the group one by one. They talked low among themselves so I could not hear the words over the buzzing and this made me want to shout at them to speak up or else I was going to punch somebody.

  One of the bodies dropped like a feather to the ground. The others helped each other to sit.

  As if by magic, a strap gave way and my wrist was free and the white suit hadn’t seen because he was too busy checking wrists and necks and spreading out legs as people fell over from their cross-legged positions.

  I become free of the other strap, and then the ankle straps gave way like they never existed. I fell out of the chair and on the ground next to the one who was still cross-legged. There were shouts, movement, shadows against the tent fabric. Something pulled at me and I turned and my mouth opened and I chomped down on something fleshy, and a part of me, that distant part, far away down the dark tunnel, gagged, but most of me didn’t.

  I turned back to the dark face, the face going dark in front of me, the face that was both familiar and strange and the face that made me both sorry and angry because I wanted to know who it was, I wanted to remember who, I wanted to remember this feeling that was nothing more than an empty bowl because it used to be important, it used to mean everything to me but I can’t remember. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

  Gabbi.

  Her eyes were wide, her brown irises so clear I could see the texture. Her pupils were huge and black and the whites of her eyes showed that she was more scared than I have ever seen her except for that night it stormed and we first met her, holed up in a house that might as well have been haunted, with a mother and father worse than being haunted.

  “Mary?”

  I heard my name and her voice saying my name and this was familiar enough and I remembered how much I cared about her, how many times I told her to lighten up, how the world was full of bad things but also a lot of good things too. I remembered all the times I made her laugh and all the other times I tried to make her laugh and then those memories fell away. As soon as I thought them someone plucked the threads from my brain and threw them aside and I could not get them back no matter how much I wished. The desire to wish them back faded and I realized the world was a bad place, the world was full of darkness and people hurting people and turning on people and becoming animals and turning on each other like animals.

  And then like a lightning strike—I did not have much time left because soon
it would all be gone, all the memories, all the feelings.

  “Kill me,” I said. I think I said it. I hope it came out, but I could not hear it. Only I knew I must have said it because she, this girl I was supposed to know, this girl whose name started with a G, I think, her eyes went impossibly wide and she shook her head and said, “No. No, Mary.”

  Suits rushed into the tent but milled around, almost afraid, almost tripping over themselves not to be the first one to me.

  “Do it,” I snarled.

  She shrank. This little girl shrank from me as if I had hit her.

  I stumbled backwards and cupped my mouth and felt the saliva, cold and wet on my chin. Never. I would never. I would never.

  I took another step and another. Someone yelled and grabbed my shoulders.

  His face. His brown eyes. This was Ano and I held that name in my mind with all my strength. I would not lose this name because this name had always spoken kind words to me. He had stood between Jimmy and me when I had turned dangerous. I wish I could have been as courageous.

  I wish I could remember where I had seen those eyes before. I was supposed to tell those eyes something. It had been important.

  The buzzing returned and I swore there were insects in the tent. They were landing on my head, my forehead, my arms, crawling inside my ears and nose and mouth to get to the other insects already inside my empty cave of a brain.

  And then my brain cleared and I saw all of their faces and knew all of their names and knew I was still a danger to them. This anger filled me and made me want to destroy things. I would destroy them.

  Run away. This distant voice said from down a far, far tunnel. It was a trustworthy voice. It was my own voice.

  Run away, my voice said again.

  I clawed through the tent fabric and it was dark on the other side except for the street lights that threw orange rays onto the pavement—and the trains.