Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  The crumbling red of the fitness center’s sign took up most of the view through the front windshield. The van hadn’t moved from where we’d abandoned it months before. Months ago, when things were just the normal amount of messed up for a kid living on the street, Mary had gone crazy for a second in the fitness center’s showers and I had been so scared because she’d been about to hit me and Mary wasn’t like that. But the worst of it was when Mary had infected us with the V virus and turned us over to the scientists and the soldiers to get the cure. Sergeant Bennings said Mary had killed herself. But I didn’t believe it. No way she would just give up like that. No way.

  I glanced at Maibe. She was still waiting for an answer. I sighed. “When you’re hiding, you want to do it in plain sight, in a place that locks and that won’t get noticed. Think about how big a house is, how many windows it’s got, how easy it is to break into.”

  “But what if we wake up and…and we try to leave, but Vs surround us?”

  “A running vehicle is safer than a house. Way safer.”

  “But you said the van won’t start.”

  I bit back a retort. She was right, but it didn’t matter to me even though it should. When Spencer, Leaf, and the others had stormed the fairgrounds yesterday with a V mob at their backs, they had gotten themselves captured. All I could think of was getting us to the van. To our old home base.

  I looked up at the crumbling, yellowed fabric of the van’s ceiling and tried to think about what would prove it to Maibe. “Picture yourself in your house when all this started. Did the Vs get in? Even though you locked the doors and windows and—”

  A strangled sound came from Maibe’s side. Her eyes glazed over, her jaw became slack.

  I jumped from the bench. My papers hit the floor with a smack and the pen bounced and rolled somewhere out of the light. I yanked off her blanket, grabbed her by the shoulders, and then I slapped her—hoping to surprise her out of the memory-rush.

  But then she screamed.

  My muscles froze and my brain locked up. Too loud.

  I slapped her again because I like to learn things the hard way, I guess. She screamed again and I swore something groaned low and close to the van.

  “Get on your feet, Maibe,” I said, fierce desperation in my voice. I didn’t dare touch her. “Stand up, walk around. Push it back and shut up.” My breath came in short gasps, the cold air in the van turning it into mist.

  Slowly, slowly, she closed her mouth. Her eyelids blinked once, twice, and then focused on me. “I’m okay.”

  “No. Get up and walk around.”

  Her shoes struck the floor like the sharp closing of a book.

  “Quietly,” I said.

  She paused, shoe in midair, then put her foot down toe first. The space around the flashlight allowed for only a few steps.

  I peeked through the window. The V had stopped punching the bench and was back to throwing around trash. I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  “You freaked,” I whispered. “You just totally freaked when I slapped you.”

  Maibe waved her arms around and kept walking. Exercise was the only thing we knew that sort of worked to beat back the side effects of the cure. “I was having a memory-rush and… it’s my zombie trigger, I guess—getting slapped.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “But for the record, zombies eat brains, they don’t scream like that.”

  “My aunt used to—”

  I held up my hand and forced it not to shake. Three red dots marked where a flea or a spider or who knew what had bitten me. No surprise that bugs tried to eat us up, we didn’t hang out in the cleanest places. Corrina had showed us how to make something out of oatmeal so the itching would stop, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “I don’t really want to know, kid. It’s enough to know that it’s one of your triggers. FYI, one of mine is heights. Do you know any of your others? A slap to the face and…”

  Maibe shook her head. “I didn’t even know about that one.” The flashlight cast spooky shadows onto her face and highlighted the lined, wrinkled, aged look of her skin—the cure did that. It was weird on a thirteen-year-old like her, as if a prop artist had done a bad makeup job, but no amount of scrubbing would take it off.

  I touched my cheek and felt the same webbed texture. “We’re only here for the night,” I said as much for me as for her because a little voice in my head said that going back to the van had been the act of a scared sixteen-year-old girl running from the friends who needed her help. My stomach twisted into knots. I should have gone in to rescue them right away. That’s what Ano and Leaf would have done.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll take the bikes and go in like stealth ninjas to save them all from their stupid selves.” I pictured the looks on their faces when I came to save the day. Leaf, Ano, and Jimmy would be grateful, Ricker would act like it was no big deal, but Spencer would act annoyed and like he was just about to save himself and the others and why did I interfere? But he’d feel grateful deep down and that’s what mattered.

  Maibe settled back into her blanket with a sigh. “I don’t know how to be a stealth ninja. In the movies, people always died when they left the shelter, or when they tried to save someone, or when they went outside, or—”

  “This isn’t the movies,” I said. “And just so you know, a shelter is the most dangerous place out there. It gives the illusion of safety, but that’s where people really get hurt.” She couldn’t know that I meant homeless shelters, group homes, and the like, she didn’t know that much about me. But what applied there applied elsewhere. Get any amount of people together in a place that was supposed to be safe—like a family in a house—and horrible things happened behind closed doors and under darkness.

  “But in the movies—”

  “This isn’t the movies!”

  “But—”

  “I can’t sit here and not know what happened to them—not help them out!”

  “I wasn’t saying that, Gabbi, I wasn’t—”

  I jumped up angry and unsettled because deep down—in a dark place I didn’t want to admit existed—for a split second, for a half second, for almost no time at all, I’d thought about running and leaving them behind because they’d gotten caught but I was still free. My foot accidentally hit the flashlight and knocked it over. The rays danced around the cabin sides. A shadow passed across the back door’s curtained window. I stumbled back, shocked at the movement. My arms swung around to keep me from falling. Before I realized it I grabbed the curtains and tore them away and the magnets pinged to the ground like a handful of pebbles.

  It was a girl, not much older than us. The trash-throwing, bench-punching V from across the parking lot. Her blonde hair looked like a bird’s nest. Her face was dirty and streaked with crusted blood. Her blue eyes were crystal clear and totally insane. They were the opposite of empty. They were full of emotion, full of some interior knowledge, full of hate—and they were locked on my face.

  The girl tracked me. Blue, angry dots that could see me but didn’t really see me. Mary had looked like that at the end. The V virus was the scariest thing. It’s like it took everything bad that happened to you and made you relive it over and over again like a song on replay.

  Did I dare go outside? And then what? I wished Mary were there. She would know what to do.

  I picked up the magnets and forced myself to begin fixing the curtain back into place. My fingers didn’t want to work and the magnets kept dropping and pinging against the metal floor. I had fought off plenty of Vs by now—that wasn’t the problem. But she was just a girl and I didn’t want to deal with any of it.

  “She’s not going away,” Maibe said. “You know she won’t.”

  The V slapped her hand against the glass and smeared it, leaving behind a bloody streak. Her knuckles were cracked open, probably from all the punching she’d been doing. Everything drifted away and I was back on the hot sidewalk and there was Officer Hanley and the air conditioning blasting cold air out his open window. Mary
had wanted us to run and I was so angry. I was mouthing off to Officer Hanley and the guy had slammed into the police car. We’d lost all those seconds to run away, because of me.

  “Hey.” Maibe grabbed my shoulder. I flinched.

  The girl’s hand—the Vs hand—mirrored mine. I told myself there wasn’t a real girl in there anymore. This V would rip me apart if I let her. I swore I could feel her hot breath on my face—

  Maibe finished attaching the curtain for me with shaking fingers. The girl was blocked out by an inch worth of glass and a little bit of cloth with a pattern of pink ice cream cones against a yellow background. Mary’s idea of a joke. I blinked, shuddered, dropped my hands to my side.

  “What memory-flash did you have just then?” Maibe whispered. “You just froze up and your face turned angry and scared all at once.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. We shouldn’t be talking at all.”

  Silence. Except for the V breathing.

  “She already knows we’re here,” Maibe said finally.

  A sick feeling entered my stomach. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t want this job. I didn’t want any of this. “She’ll go away if we’re quiet.”

  “They never go away,” Maibe said.

  There was the sound of shuffling steps. The V girl had come around to the front windshield. Another V joined her.

  This one was an older man. Hunched at the shoulders and looking as if he would have needed a cane to walk in any other situation. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears. The Vs would surround us, smother us, block all the light and hope for escape. Why had we hidden in the van?

  I grabbed for the flashlight and switched it off, plunging the van into darkness. I stared at a ceiling I couldn’t see anymore except for the faintest rim of light around the vent, and I prayed and prayed for the Vs to go away.

  The only sounds were the two of us trying not to breathe, and the Vs bumping up against the van, and the shuffling that meant more were coming to join them.

  Chapter 2

  I changed into more layers, pulled a knit beanie tight over my ears, put on knit gloves with the fingertips cut off, and set to making coffee. The little camp stove had fed me and Spencer and everyone else many a cold night. A warm can of beans made all the difference in luxury eating compared to eating it cold.

  I positioned the stove under the vent. Spencer always told the story about this guy he had known who’d killed himself because he’d slept all night with the windows closed and then had lit up his stove in his enclosed car. Stupid. I didn’t understand how the guy hadn’t felt it coming and just cracked open a stupid window and I wondered if Spencer had made the story up, which he’d been known to do, but then again, I never forgot to open a window, no matter how cold it got outside.

  I handed Maibe a cup of coffee and offered cream and sugar packets hoarded long ago from some breakfast splurge at Denny’s. She held the cup, sniffed it, took a tentative sip, and curled her lip.

  “You never had coffee before?”

  “No.” Her dark hair haloed her face. I’m sure she would have looked young if not for the double infection turning her skin into an old leather sofa beat to hell. Someone else had infected her with both the V virus and the bacteria cure weeks before we’d met. It was one of the few things she didn’t like to talk about.

  I kept myself from rolling my eyes, but it was a close call.

  She must have seen me hold it back though because she said, “My aunt wouldn’t allow it.”

  I handed her a bowl of steaming oatmeal next. I’d done the same morning after morning for everyone. Spencer made the coffee, I did the oatmeal, Mary made bacon or eggs or potatoes, and we’d all eaten out of bowls in our laps, knee-to-knee on the benches.

  Yeah, we might have been a bunch of kids living in a van, but in the homeless street world, the van meant we had been rich and we tried to make life better for each other whenever we could.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t let my mind wander, otherwise I’d become ripe for a memory-rush and Spencer and the rest didn’t have that kind of time.

  Something shifted.

  The bowl in Maibe’s hands shivered.

  I noticed the wood walls, the metal door, the field that led to the trees that led to the river.

  A part of me screamed at myself to snap out of the memory-rush. We were in the van and it was me and Maibe and we had to get to the others.

  Sunlight pulled me out of the memory-rush. The rays glared in my eyes because the ceiling vent was wide open.

  I sat up and looked around. The van was back, the windows were curtained, the front windshield—

  The Vs were gone.

  Maibe was gone too.

  Panic made me dizzy and the van’s walls and windows and cabinets blurred as if I were taking a turn on a carousel. I scrambled through the vent and pulled myself onto the roof. My weight created depressions in the metal that popped back up when I stepped away. I scanned the parking lot, the gym’s entrance, the street full of houses built just long enough ago for the paint to fade.

  There. Movement on the street.

  It was happening so fast, I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first.

  Five Vs. Maibe out in front. The V girl was closest to Maibe, the old man last of the bunch.

  Maibe was sprinting down the block, drawing the Vs away. She ran just like Mary had run when that V in the plaid shirt had chased us. Mary had made us split up. The V had followed her and bitten into her and I cursed and jumped off the van’s roof before the memory-rush could go any further. I needed to move or I was going to lose it and Maibe would die for nothing.

  As soon as I went weightless in the air I knew I was going to land wrong. I tucked like I’d learned to do while jumping off moving trains. The shock of the ground was jarring and I thought about how fast I would die if I managed to sprain my ankle right then.

  A yell from Maibe snapped me to attention. I slammed open the van door and grabbed for my crossbow—a stolen piece of property thanks to the local hunting supply store. I ran after them but they disappeared around a house. I ran anyway, thinking I’d catch up just in time to watch them tear Maibe to pieces and it would be my fault because I hadn’t found a way. The V girl had freaked me out and I’d hid and pretended everything would be okay if I ignored it for long enough.

  My breath came out in gasps, but my legs were used to running. Halfway down the block a figure darted out from a side street.

  I skidded to a stop, dropped to one knee, and raised my crossbow.

  Maibe looked at me like I was crazy as she ran by. “Come on, Gabbi!”

  I sprinted after her, fear mixed with admiration. She’d outrun them by herself. She’d actually done it.

  When we made it to the van I bent over and took in huge, gulping breaths while pressing my head against the cold metal. If she had died, I would have been alone. “What were you thinking!?!”

  “I knew I was faster than them,” Maibe said. Her hair was in disarray and she didn’t even carry any weapons. “But we don’t have much time.” She showed me her arm.

  One of the Vs had bitten her. She’d be lost to the fevers soon.

  Suddenly I was moving through the air as if I’d been hit by a car. The street and sky switched places. My crossbow flew away from my hands as if tied to a string someone had yanked. Air rushed into my ears and I landed on my gloved hands and bare knees and cheek. The shock of the asphalt sent tremors through my skull. My eyes couldn’t focus and the world spun. I raised stinging fingers to my cheek and felt wetness.

  There was a growl, low and deep, behind me. I flipped over and stared into the eyes of what had once been a man but was now a V. He must have been drawn by the commotion we’d made.

  He leaned over me, too close. Burst capillaries formed red rivers through the whites of his eyes. His breath stunk of spoiled milk. Half of his face seemed paralyzed. The other half showed a rigid snarl. I waited for him to rip me apart. He cocked his head like a dog mig
ht, opened his mouth so I could see his straight pearly-whites and the thousands of dollars he must have spent to make them so before the virus took him. He growled again and clicked his teeth shut with enough force to take off a finger.

  The Vs eyes widened in fury, like he was reliving every angry moment of his life all at once. I dared not move.

  A metal bat swung into view and slammed into the back of the V’s head. He dropped like a brick.

  I scrambled to the side, crab walking to my crossbow.

  Maibe stood over the unconscious V, hesitating now that he was down but not dead. Would Maibe have the guts to deliver a second blow and finish him off?

  I readied my crossbow but waited to see.

  She held up the bat and then dropped it to her side.

  I aimed and shot into his head. His body hiccuped and stilled.

  “Coward,” I said even though she had outrun a pack of Vs all by herself.

  She looked ashamed. “Did you really have to—”

  “Them being sick doesn’t give them a free pass to hurt us.” I went to the van. “We’ve got to keep going before you lose it.”

  She turned and puked.

  It was like we were on speed as I made us gather our stuff: some food and water, the bat I bungee-corded to my back, a knife I insisted Maibe carry. We grabbed up the bikes. Our breath came out in long twirls of mist that made me ache for a smoke. The fog had a light brown tint to it because of the sunrise and the fires. The air smelled like a gross mixture of damp campfire and overcooked meat. The fires would only get worse with no one to put them out.

  Maibe pedaled for a couple of blocks before the memory-fevers took over. I tried tying a shopping cart to my bike and dragging her along but the noise was terrifying.