Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  Mother snatched her hand away from me and went to Father, arms outstretched, one warding her face and the other held out, the lightning freezing her pose like someone had taken a photo. “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t even think you can tell me what to do.”

  Lightning flashed and he threw the cardboard box at her and swung his arm around and then darkness made him disappear, but the sound of flesh hitting flesh rose above the rain and howling wind and someone laughed and I screamed, “I’m not hungry!” but she didn’t listen because the next flash showed her barreling into his stomach, but he did not move, not an inch, and then it went dark again but the wap of his hit sounded again and someone else laughed and then something hit me in the head and my thoughts spun in the dark until I didn’t know which direction I faced. I ran into another room, away from the shadows and found stairs and climbed them and hoped and hoped there would be no shadows up there because the holes in the roof let water in and people and demons did not like to get wet.

  The stairs creaked and a few gave way under my feet, but if I could find a place, just a little place where shadows could not fit. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, I couldn’t see where to go and the wind howled and filled the whole house with howls like a pack of demons would snatch me out of the house and drop me and I was too high because I had walked up four floors and when they dropped me my body would split and seep blood and all of me would get washed away by the river so no one could find me. A window shattered and threw glass on my left side like little bullets and wetness came with it and more cold because the demons had broken in!

  I ran and ran and smacked into a knob that punched into my chest and I clawed at the door until it unlocked and ran into the room and cried. “Please don’t punish me no more!” My stomach hurt and my head hurt and I fell onto the floor. I shivered and waited for the demons to grab me.

  “You ain’t being punished.”

  I looked up and in the next flash of lightning I saw an older boy curled on a towel next to me like Aunt June’s cat liked to do except this boy didn’t hiss at me and looked like he didn’t mind I was next to him.

  “It’s rain for the flowers and trees. It washes away the battles bad people wanted to have on the streets. It means the angels are trying to win,” he said.

  Light flickered and held and was a golden color from a lighter. There was another boy and a girl, and the boy looked older than everyone but the girl looked older than me but not too much. They sat cross-legged around a candle and did not stay shadows. My pounding heart slowed down and I sat up.

  “I’m Leaf,” the curled-up boy said. “That’s Mary, and that’s Spencer.”

  “Tell us your name now,” Mary said.

  “Gabriela,” I said, a sob catching my name in my throat.

  “No. Your real name,” Mary said.

  I felt confused and didn’t know what she wanted me to tell them. Then I said, “Gabbi with an ‘i’.”

  “Gabbi with an ‘i,’ are you here alone?” Leaf asked.

  I almost gave a different answer. It was on my lips but then it changed at the last second. “Yeah,” I said because it was both truth and a lie but mostly truth.

  Leaf shared a look with Spencer but the dancing lightning from outside covered it up except Leaf said, “We’re jumping the train to California. You can come if you want.”

  “It’s better in California,” Mary said. “It don’t take so much storms to get rid of all the bad stuff out there.”

  “There are more angels there. My cousin told me,” Leaf said.

  The storm held its breath. I stopped crying. I wiped my cheeks and hardened myself to the shadows downstairs. I could hear the truth in what Leaf said because I really wanted it to be true. “Okay,” I said. “I want to go with you.”

  The memory-rush faded and my senses came back to me.

  I moaned and pressed my face into the grate like I had pressed my face into that wood floor. My mouth felt thick with dust, but I was grateful the memory-rush hadn’t been one of the bad ones.

  I pushed on as soon as the memory let me. Weak people let the memories take over and made them feel sorry for themselves. I wasn’t weak like that. Even if I couldn’t always fight off the memories, I always tried.

  I crawled along the catwalk and noticed there were lots of dividers—at least twenty-four rooms to search. From above them I realized they formed a sort of double-row semi-circle. I guessed there must be a hallway in between. On the other side of the rooms, opposite the warehouse from where I climbed up, was a large room that opened like a hole beneath the grating. In the middle of it was a dentist’s chair with its back to me. Spotlights shone down on it and a tray on wheels was next to it. Equipment rimmed the edge. I knew how light refraction worked and how bright lights inside that room made it almost impossible for people to see me in the shadows. It took the rods in the retina of the eye many minutes to adjust from light to dark, that’s why pirates wore a patch over one eye. Not because they lost it in a fight, but because it kept an eye always at the ready for seeing what needed to be seen in dark places like the hold of an enemy ship or the coastline at night during a raid.

  I moved across the grating until I reached the room’s lip and saw the profile of the chair. A person was strapped to it. My breath shortened, my heartbeat increased, my fingers began to tingle as I thought about jumping. If it were Spencer or Leaf or one of the boys I was going to jump from this catwalk and rescue them. I’d land on all fours, and we’d barrel through the door, whatever door was closest, and I’d scream for Maibe and we’d take our chances on the run, because you always ran from a fight—

  A person wearing a doctor’s coat walked into the room and the light made it obvious that this doctor was also a Feeb. I moved silently across the grating until I faced the dentist chair head-on. I primed myself to launch off the edge and onto the woman’s back.

  But then I saw it was Corrina strapped to the chair and I stopped.

  I don’t mean to say I wasn’t happy to see her—well, I wasn’t happy to see her—but I wasn’t unhappy to see her, but she didn’t need my immediate rescuing either.

  She wasn’t one of us.

  The adrenaline rush faded and now that I knew where Corrina was, I crawled back to the cells and lowered myself to the ceiling. I dug at the drywall with my screwdriver. My hole took too long, this sort of thing always took too long, but I finally made an opening big enough to see through. This was when I discovered that all the drywall did was cover up a metal cage underneath.

  The pinhole let light through, which made it easy to see who was in the cell when I put my eye to it.

  A Feeb like me, but not one of my crew.

  I did not speak a word or otherwise let the whimpering person curled in a fetal position on the cot know about my presence. I continued onto the next cell and repeated my steps with the screwdriver.

  Once I punched through I saw this one also held a Feeb, his marks clear on his balding head. It was Officer Hanley. He paced his cell with his head buried in his hands and acted like he hadn’t heard me. He was probably so deep in the fevers he couldn’t hear anything. I moved on, feeling like I was in a sort of X-rated peep show. He’d gotten his payback but I felt sick to my stomach.

  The next ceiling hole revealed Leaf and I almost teared up from the joy of seeing his stupid, curly, unkempt hair while he carved into the wall with his fingernails. “Leaf,” I said while pressing my mouth against the hole. I quickly took my mouth away to replace with my eye.

  Leaf stilled for a moment, then resumed his carving.

  “Leaf! It’s Gabbi.”

  Leaf looked up with his Feeb skin marring an otherwise pixie-like face. He had stripped off all his winter clothes and wore his favorite yellow t-shirt because yellow was a bright, happy color and he liked to pretend the world was the same way. If anyone could be said to be the mother of the group, it was Leaf. I’d never understood how he had survived this far on the street, except that Spencer must ha
ve found him early on and took him in before the drugs and the survival sex that most of the rest of us had faced had done permanent damage. I’d made a pass at Leaf once, on a lonely night long before the Vs came on the scene, long before I’d known the true state of relationships in the group. He hadn’t humiliated me when he turned me down. Even though I’d gotten hot with embarrassment he’d said something to make me laugh and it was like it had never happened.

  If anyone was too good for the street, it was Leaf.

  He smiled, but only one side of his face turned up. “Hi, Gabbi. That’s the real you, right? Not some ghost-memory playing tricks on me? Though I guess if this were a ghost-memory I’d be seeing you instead of just hearing you, huh?”

  “Leaf,” I said in a strangled voice. I had to take my eye away to put my mouth over the hole and I hated to lose sight of him even for a second. “What happened? What have they done?” I switched back to my eye. Half of his face was strangely frozen. I pressed my eye harder onto the hole so that its edges gouged my skin but I didn’t care. It wasn’t just his face, but one entire half of his body seemed limp. My nose breathed in drywall dust and my throat constricted.

  “This is not a good place, Gabbi. Not a good place at all.” And then he burst into tears but they only came out of one eye and he bowed his head so I could not see it and I wanted to scream.

  “Leaf. Leaf! I’m going to get you out. I promise. I’m going to fix this, I’m—”

  “Spencer’s next door,” Leaf said.

  I switched back to my eye, cursing the hole’s smallness. He’d turned up his face again. Wetness made one cheek shine. His good hand brushed it away. “Hurry up, Gabbi, if that’s really you up there and not some side effect I had avoided the pleasure of experiencing until now, oh, the doctor will love this little development, won’t she…” He turned his head to the side as if forgetting he talked to an actual person, to the person who was going to rescue him.

  His head jerked and he gazed up. “Oh, there you are. In the hole. Nicely done, very sneaky, very Gabbi-chic.”

  I tapped out a message in Morse code because I couldn’t speak around the lump in my throat: S-T-A-Y A-L-I-V-E.

  Ano had made us learn the code from a stolen library book. We’d been traveling by train last year under big night skies, bright stars, and a feeling that everything was working out for us. We’d made a game out of learning it. We’d been headed back to California and dreaming about the future.

  Leaf smiled. “I’ll sure do my best, captain.” He fake saluted with his good arm.

  I scrambled up and over to the next room. I dug into the ceiling, using all my strength, caring little now for noise and everything now for speed. This time I made the hole more like a diagonal ditch. Dust flew into the air and coated my face, my eyelashes, my hands, my nose. I sneezed and snot came flying out, but I didn’t stop to wipe it, just kept digging until I punched through and widened it enough for both my eye and mouth.

  Spencer stood tall beneath me, staring at exactly where I worked. Dust coated his dark eyebrows and hair, turning it into an old man gray color that better matched his Feeb skin. His arms were crossed, both eyes blinked, both arms moved.

  “And does this rat have two legs or four?” he said quietly.

  “Spencer.” I whispered his name like a talisman of protection because that’s what he was to me and the others.

  “Ah, it comes on two legs, and is rather a sight, or should I say, sound, for sore ears.” He cocked his head to the side. “Gabbi, what the hell took you so long?”

  “I got here as fast as I could. I swear.”

  He held up a hand and my heart beat wildly. Could I have made it here faster, could I have done something different? Was this my fault? A sick feeling grew in my stomach that brought me back to long nights and dark moments and a hand gripping my bicep in such a way that I knew I’d never escape, no matter how much I screamed or kicked or cried.

  “You better stop whatever thoughts are in your head right now. You are not a victim. You can’t be. Victims don’t survive the streets, and here you are, alive.” He paused, stuck out his chin in that defiant, prideful way he had. “We’re not victims either. So cut that crap out. We’re alive and we’re going to stay that way—most likely, anyway. Do you have a plan?”

  “I…” I’d found them, that had been the plan. I’d found them and figured the rest would come and I’d just see a way out. But all I could see was the hours it would take me to dig out a hole big enough for even one of them to fit through if I could get something that would cut through the cage wire and they were all in separate rooms and I surely would not get them all out in time and who would we have to leave behind?

  “You never run without a plan, Gabbi. I thought you knew that.”

  “I do know that, I do…” It’s how I’d avoided capture by the police and the shelters and the pimps. It’s how come I knew how to make a fresh batch of bread and take a bath out of a bucket and sleep with the windows cracked in the midst of an apocalypse.

  But I didn’t have a plan for this.

  Spencer sighed. “Just kidding, twit. I’ve got a plan and it’s better than whatever dumbass thing you could have thought up.”

  Relief flooded me. You could count on Spencer. He would know what to do and I would be able to do it and stop trying to figure all this out on my own.

  “They’ve been checking on Leaf in the early morning,” Spencer said, “Take out the nurse and guard, and you’ll have the keys to every prison cell in this section. Think you’re up for that?”

  “Killing an uninfected…a real person?” I’d only killed Vs up until that point and no matter how much I wanted to claim it didn’t bother me because they were trying to kill me first—it did bother me.

  “It may come to that. Whatever they did to Leaf—” Spencer’s voice cracked. “He was screaming, Gabbi. I could here him through the walls and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t stop it.” The tough, laugh-at-the-world facade peeled off for a moment, revealing a seventeen-year-old who was angry and sad.

  I held my tongue for a long moment, examining myself to see if I was really capable of such a thing. And then like a ghost-memory, Leaf’s broken face rose before my eyes. “Yeah. No problem.”

  “Okay find some place safe to hole up for the night. I’ll figure out how to get a message to the others. Try to sleep or something.” He turned and lay down flat on his cot, threaded his hands together, and put them behind his head.

  “How are you going to get them a message?”

  “I’ll figure out something. I’ll claw open the walls with my bare hands if I have to.”

  I realized I didn’t know one thing and I wondered if it meant something really bad had happened, even worse than whatever had happened to Leaf, something so bad that Spencer couldn’t even bear to bring it up. “Spencer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are Ano and Jimmy and Ricker…are they okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 5

  I had figured out a plan that was going to work. At the first chance, I would go back to the trash can and get my crossbow. I would round up more Vs somehow and bring them back and it would give me enough time to get everyone out. It had worked once before. It would work again.

  In the meantime, I made us trap ourselves on the catwalk. Maibe went into this whole babbling argument about not going up there again. It was both the safest and stupidest spot to be. In the aisles there were places to hide, but it could also be patrolled. On the catwalk, I battled my fear of heights and a tumble to the ground was our only escape.

  Softly, Maibe said, “How are you doing this? How can you be up there?”

  I scratched at the bites around my ankles until it felt like it was turning into one huge, itching mess. I’d break skin soon if I wasn’t careful but I didn’t care. It kept me in the present and away from the memory-flashes and away from thinking about having to kill a guard.

  “Maybe it’s not one of your
triggers?”

  “No,” I whispered. “It’s one of my triggers.” Instead of the grating I imagined the hard floor of that upper story of the house and Leaf curled up next to me on a towel.

  The guard had come back while I’d been digging through the ceiling—the guard I’d promised to get bread for. He looked torn up, as if he’d been battling Vs. I wondered if he would remember my promise and if that was going to get us caught. I wanted to go back for my crossbow, but I couldn’t, not as long as the guard was back.

  We waited for hours, watching and listening. My muscles cramped and my throat felt dry, like if I even tried to speak all that would come out would be a croak. The guard didn’t leave.

  The guard had to leave.

  In the middle of the night, there was finally a commotion. I sat up and tried to see through the shadows. If the guard had left I would run down the stairs and for the door.

  Two soldiers burst inside the warehouse. A light was turned on, just enough to see they were running for the door where Spencer and the others were.

  People yelled and boots slapped on the cement and then they were dragging out the doctor on a stretcher, and there was Corrina too, and both of them were being taken away. They left through the outside glass doors. Maibe sprang up and raced for the staircase.

  I was about to go after her, but then a familiar face caught my eye. Spencer. A guard was dragging out Spencer.

  I lost precious seconds thinking about what to do. They’d be gone to the outside before I made it halfway down the stairs. There wasn’t time for any of my plans now. I ran without thinking and launched myself into the air. Wind rushed passed my ears and my throat choked up. The darkness made the leap feel like it lasted forever. I landed on the soldier holding onto Spencer and my impact sounded like the wap my father’s fist always made in my mother’s stomach.

  Spencer grabbed my shoulders and shook them. “Snap out of it, Gabbi. We need you now!”