Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  “Stop that,” I yelled. It reminded me too much of watching a girl cut herself. She'd scraped scissors against her thigh until it bled. That’s what this guy looked like he was doing—hurting himself physically so he could stop hurting emotionally, even if just for a few moments.

  He kept up the banging, further opening the gash on his forehead.

  “Hey!” I tapped the flat side of my knife against the glass.

  He stopped. Opened his eyes.

  “Oh, crap,” Jane said.

  His eyes stunned me. They were completely bloodshot, unseeing, as if he were sleeping with his eyes open.

  “Wow,” Dylan said.

  The front door rattled against its hinges. I flinched. All three of us turned as if following some dance cue.

  “Not more,” Jane cried, bat raised for a swing that would knock me in the head if she didn’t step away first.

  An eerie quiet settled over the house. I looked back. The intruder was gone. Left behind were trails of black potting soil, smears of yellow saliva and red blood on the glass, a tipped-over rosemary plant, a shattered pot of lavender, my boneset ripped to shreds. My beautiful, pitiful mess of a garden, destroyed.

  Chapter 2

  “Corrina!” A muffled shout made it through the door.

  “Stan,” Dylan said, disdain in his voice.

  Stan was our neighbor two houses down. He liked to over fertilize his lawn, creating pesticide puddles that had made Blitz sick once. I’d said something to Stan about it, but I guess in such a nice, subtle way, he had acted as if I had made up the excuse just to talk to him.

  Dylan had not been so subtle.

  “We have to let him in,” I said.

  “The hell we do,” Dylan said.

  “Dylan.”

  “I’ll look,” Jane said, walking back to the front door.

  Dylan and I hovered behind her as she peered through the eye hole.

  “Corrina! You in there?” Stan yelled.

  Jane turned around. “He’s alone.”

  Dylan raised the gun.

  “Open it up then,” I said.

  Jane shifted the bat to her right hand and opened the door.

  Stan looked at the three of us, his face flushed. I almost laughed at how piggish the red made his cheeks look. Stan was very fit for a man in his late forties. He liked to talk about how often he worked out and how many miles he’d run over the weekend. His cologne always gave away his presence.

  It swamped me now—that newly revamped, Old Spice musk. The front pocket of his shirt was torn and a smudge of dirt marred his khaki pants, but his oiled brown shoes still looked untouched. He could probably have any woman his age. He preferred to chase women twenty years younger than him instead.

  “You coming in or not?”Dylan said.

  “Dylan,” I said again, but he ignored me.

  Stan’s regained control. “I’ve come to save you. The whole block is overrun so I’ve decided to save the lot of you—whether you deserve it or not.”

  Stan glanced at Dylan while he said this last bit, then looked at the gun still pointed at his chest. “You don’t want my help, that’s fine. But you should know, there are no police in sight and they killed Mrs. Crozier on her front porch. They’re—”

  He shook his head.

  “—You don’t need to know what they did. But here’s what you do need to know: I’m getting out of here. Corrina, you were always the nicest to me in the neighborhood, and that might not mean much to some people, but it matters to me. So, I came to see if you needed help, but we have to leave right now.”

  He pivoted without waiting for an answer and hurried back to Luna—his luxury RV. He'd parked it halfway up our lawn. He liked to tell us how Luna cost more than the median American home and how he planned to sell his house and go RVing around the country, maybe even dip into Central America, meet lots of women on the road, throw off all responsibilities.

  Dylan called it Stan’s mid-life crisis on wheels. I called it a rich man’s pedophile van. Jane had laughed and said rich was right—she’d peeked in the window and seen granite flooring and white leather bench seats.

  I figured the story about Mrs. Crozier being dead couldn’t be true. No way that cranky old widow opened the door to some strange men, not when she kept the chain on even when Dylan and I visited.

  Breaking glass sounded from across the street, from Mr. Sidner’s place. He lived alone with his two golden retrievers with the sore paws.

  A woman standing on his porch had smashed her hands through his front window.

  “Hey!” I shouted, moving out the door and across the lawn. Fog swirled dense in the sky and in all directions, creating a sort of bubble. There was Luna, the brilliant green of the grass, the open street, Mr. Sidner’s porch.

  “You get away!”

  Didn’t matter if the woman was crazy or sick. Mr. Sidner should be left alone with his two dogs and the memory of his dead wife.

  The front door opened and Mr. Sidner appeared, trying to reason with the woman. She removed her bleeding hands from the broken window, let out a scream, grabbed Mr. Sidner by the shoulders and tossed him down the steps onto his lawn.

  I sprinted across the street, made it to the other side, and tripped on a cracked piece of pavement. I went down hard on one knee but bounced back up. I crossed the last few feet at a galloping limp and prayed I hadn’t fractured anything.

  Mr. Sidner grappled with a woman who looked to be in her twenties. He was beneath her and both pairs of feet pointed at me so that I could make out plenty of strange details. She was supposed to be another escaped hospital patient, or maybe a homeless woman, or a drug addict. But she wore a pastel blue pencil skirt, torn pantyhose, black, low-heeled pumps. A piece of pink gum was stuck to the bottom of her right shoe.

  Mr. Sidner screamed.

  I dropped the knife and barreled into the woman’s backside, sending both of us flying.

  The fog-soaked grass wet my clothes and chilled my bones. The pain in my knee flared up and I stared at the white blankness of sky and waited for the dizziness to pass.

  The woman’s face was less than a foot away from mine. She must have been unconscious, her eyes were closed and she didn’t move except for what looked like some sort of involuntary twitching. Blood covered her exposed skin—I feared I’d done that, face-planted her into a rock or something. Her breath stank of rotting food. Her hair was a ratty brown, her white-ruffled shirt had torn, exposing a matching blue bra, and there were bite marks up one arm and purplish bruising around her neck, as if someone had choked her.

  “Corrina?” Dylan’s voice.

  “I’m okay,” I said shakily.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Dylan said.

  I ignored what was usually an opening line to one of our arguments and tried to still the dizziness in my head. “Is Mr. Sidner okay?”

  Silence.

  “He’s dead. It looks like she…broke his neck.”

  I closed my eyes and forced myself not to throw up. When I opened them, the young woman twitched again. “I don’t know what I did to her. I only pushed her—”

  She opened her eyes. Bloodshot eyes. Blown pupils.

  Dylan lifted me up and dragged me backward across the lawn.

  “What’s going on?” Stan bellowed from across the street. A car alarm started blaring. A low boom echoed down the block, setting off more alarms.

  Dylan stumbled on the same piece of sidewalk as me and unbalanced us both. I dropped to my hurt knee. The woman teetered to a standing position on her black pumps and then fixated on me.

  “Uh,” I said, and then air rushed past me. Stan ran toward the woman, Jane’s bat in hand, and slugged her on the side of the head. She toppled over Mr. Sidner’s body.

  I placed both palms flat on the grass and puked my heart out. It wasn’t much since we’d never gotten around to breakfast. Next to my pitiful pile of vomit, I saw my knife. I picked it up. This was supposed to be a street of people who
held petty grievances against each other about tree pruning, lawn watering and dog walking.

  “That’s right,” Stan screamed at the woman’s unconscious form. He waved the bat around.

  Dylan helped me up. Stan tucked the bat under his arm and supported my other side.

  “Let’s get you inside Luna,” Stan said.

  “It’s just a bruise. I can walk. Give me fifteen minutes for the sting to wear off and I’ll be able to run,” I said.

  “We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Dylan said quietly. “The fog is making it difficult to see, but I'm pretty sure there are more.”

  Shadows continued to move in the fog, just far enough to stay indistinct, to maybe believe it was my imagination. Two, three, a dozen, there was no way to know.

  Jane waited inside Luna and secured the door after we entered. She tilted her head to the window. “Stan was right. They took out Mrs. Crozier too.”

  I didn't want to look. My eyes skipped to the sycamore trees lining the street. They were taller than most of the houses with roots strong enough to have cracked almost every section of sidewalk, except for the mulberry tree that Stan nubbed into a garish skeleton every year because he thought the leaves were too much trouble.

  If you stood in the middle of Grove Street on a sunny day the trees combined overhead into a beautiful canopy, with trunks you couldn’t fully reach around, with limbs grown into a complex system of crooked mazes, with leafy crowns that didn’t quite meet each other across the road.

  This neighborhood was supposed to make things right again.

  “Corrina,” Dylan gently shook my shoulder. “Don’t ever do that again. What were you thinking?”

  “Stop it, Dylan,” I said, knowing I was taking out my sadness on him, but not being able to stop myself. “Don’t treat me like I can’t take care of myself. I did just fine before you came along.”

  He looked away from me.

  The bench rocked under me as Stan took off down the street. The rumble of the road and the engine soothed me, but did nothing to release the tension in Dylan's face.

  I sighed. “You take risks, too. Mr. Sidner needed our help.” My stomach roiled as if thinking about cramping again. “But we didn’t help him.”

  Luna made a wide turn. My stomach flipped and the dizziness came back. I focused on a potted cactus sitting on the back of the opposite bench. Stan turned again and the cactus moved an inch. I grabbed for the pot before it fell.

  “How’s your knee?” Dylan asked quietly.

  I thought about his question for a long second and then my mind tripped away into a different thought. “Sidner’s dogs! Wait, Stan, we have to go back for them!”

  I rushed to the driver’s seat, but my shoes slipped on the granite floor and I went down hard on my tailbone and jammed my knife wrist on the side of a cabinet. The pain seared away the rest of my dizziness.

  “No way!” Stan whirled the steering wheel counterclockwise, forcing my forehead into the bench siding. “Those dogs are dead, dead, dead. What do you think made me bring out Luna?”

  Dylan helped me onto the bench. “Just sit here for a minute, Corrina. Please.” He stood behind Stan and grabbed the back of the chair. His other hand held the gun like it was part of his body now. “Take us back out by your house. That’s the quickest way out of the neighborhood.”

  “I know it. You think I don’t know that?” Stan gunned the engine. “I came to save you when I could have just left. You don’t need to tell me.”

  People ran around—none of them our neighbors. They crossed in front of us and then disappeared in bushes or behind trees or jumped fences, or vanished into the fog. Dozens of shapes in motion. And another dozen shapes, people-size, lay still in front yards, across porch steps, along the sidewalk. Our neighborhood looked ransacked, pillaged, looted, and now the survivors were abandoning it, letting the weeds grow unchecked, leaving the doors left ajar, the lights on, the alarms ringing.

  A thick column of smoke rose a block away, transforming the fog into a poisonous brown. No police or firefighters were in sight. Would the entire neighborhood burn? I almost said we needed to go back for the Corrina CD, for the computer hard drive with all our files, for the picture of my parents, for Blitz’s collar.

  Stan turned Luna onto the outlet street. I remained silent. I would not be that person—the one who puts those she loves in danger because of things that don’t matter. I had Dylan and Jane with me. No thing could be more important than them.

  Jane moved to the passenger seat and placed the blood-stained bat across her lap. Luna’s windows were meant to showcase beautiful mountain vistas and long stretches of prairie hills, but now they gave a panoramic view of the destruction. Even inside Luna with all the windows closed, everything sounded wrong. Sirens, alarms, rumblings, and booms like the last time a transformer had exploded on our street, sounds like gunfire, and the screech and crash of cars colliding.

  And yet it was otherworldly too, sounds that drifted in through the fog, detached from sight, like an old radio drama. No picture, only sound and imagination, which felt somehow worse.

  Dylan turned to me, his face whitewashed and sallow, the stubble standing out. “There’s a girl,” he said. He nodded through the window. “That girl who moved in with her uncle last week, same age as Krista.”

  Krista, his dead sister. It’s part of what had connected us at first, being in the club with other people who’d lost loved ones.

  “Let’s go get her,” I said without a second thought.

  “We don’t even know her.” Stan whipped his head around, then turned back to the windshield. “She’s some Pakistani or something, just moved in. Don’t think she even speaks English. Besides, Luna doesn’t like backing up or making u-turns. Better just to keep moving.”

  “Just stop then,” Dylan said.

  “She could be like them,” Jane said. “She could be crazy like the others.”

  I refrained from shouting at Jane to shut up. Didn’t she know how deep a trigger Krista was for Dylan? Instead, I focused on what might convince Stan to stop. “I thought you came to save us,” I said, knowing it was a lame attempt as soon as the words came out.

  “Yeah, you…” He glanced back at Dylan. “All of you. Because you’re my neighbors and all, and you treated me right.”

  “Stop, Stan.” Dylan’s voice was pitched low.

  My panic increased, something that should have been impossible with the day’s trauma. But Dylan never used that tone of voice, not unless he was thinking about the drunk driver who had murdered Krista while Dylan had been driving, about the helplessness he felt being unable to save her, about how if he had just been a few seconds slower or faster that everything would have turned out different.

  Dylan raised the gun. A silent scream mounted in my brain. Dylan wouldn’t do anything that crazy. Except, I wasn’t totally sure.

  I grabbed my knife off the floor, pushed Dylan aside and pressed the blade into Stan’s throat. The adrenaline made me lose all feeling in my hand so that I wasn't sure how hard I was pressing. “Stop, Stan.”

  Stan’s eyes bulged, but he kept driving. “Come on, Corrina. Don’t play stupid now. Me and Luna will take care of you.”

  “Stan,” I said.

  “I know you don’t have it in you,” Stan said.

  “You don’t know me,” I said, letting my fear of Dylan’s gun dig the blade in a little deeper. Not enough to break skin, but enough for him to notice. “You don’t know the trouble I got into when I was in school. You don’t know how well I know how to use this knife. You don’t know how much it pisses me off to hear you want to leave that girl behind because she’s Pakistani. I’m Egyptian, Stan. What do you think about me?”

  “You’re not Egyptian. Where’s your accent? Sure, you tan real nice, but you didn’t come from any foreign country.”

  “The girl could be like them,” Jane said.

  I stared at Jane and the coldness that had entered her hazel eyes. “The only way
to know,” I said, driving ice into every word, “is if we stop and find out. Otherwise, we’re leaving a defenseless little girl to die.”

  Stan kept driving.

  If I didn’t follow through now it would be as if we crowned him king of the RV. And then there was what Dylan would do.

  Stan was calling my bluff, and I knew, just as surely as I’d known in school before a fight—it was always better to take the first punch. Most people saw it as an act of courage. I knew it for what it was—an act of desperation. Can’t take the beating, too afraid to turn the other cheek, so you hide behind violence and act like you asked for it.

  “Stan.” I held my breath and nicked his neck with my knife.

  Stan slapped a hand to the bleeding scratch. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he slammed on the brakes. I tumbled forward. The steering wheel punched me in the chest.

  “Back up, people!” He licked his lips. “I saved you all, didn’t I? I’m all about saving people.” His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.

  I coughed. Blood dripped down Stan’s neck and disappeared into his shirt collar.

  I had done that.

  I had never done that before.

  “I just want to be careful about it,” Stan said. “What if it’s Ebola or rabies or something? You don’t want to catch it. You want the girl so bad? All right. I’ll turn at this roundabout.” Luna teetered a bit as he sped around the circle.“But we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “We will,” Dylan said. “After we get her on board.” His voice sounded strained, but I dared to look at him now. He pointed the gun at the floor.

  “It’s not Ebola,” I said. “That makes people sick. Not violent.”

  Stan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s here and that means we shouldn’t be.”

  The girl, wearing a pink hoodie and jeans, stood in the middle of the street a few yards away, the fog closing in behind her like a curtain. She must have run after us.