Not anyone I recognized.
I moved to the next body.
Another V.
The next one and the one after were the same. I shuffled around like an old person, dragging my leg behind me and gritting through each step.
I checked each body in that classroom. Each time I waited for the shock of recognition, but it never came.
I was in a room full of dead Vs. I had been left behind.
I slumped to the ground, too shocked to remain standing. How could they have done this? Where could they have gone? Why had they left me alone during the fevers?
A tear slipped out, making my cheek itch. I wanted to curl into a ball and hide somewhere and be safe and never come out. I furiously scratched at the tear and forced myself back onto my feet. I needed to think about surviving and nothing else. I needed to clean my wound before an infection set in. I needed to find my bat. I needed to find food and a safer place to stay.
I limped into the courtyard and went to the closest water fountain. “Please work, please work, please work,” I whispered under my breath. I did not think I would make it if I had to travel to the river.
The water fountain shuddered and water came out.
I drank it up, then washed my hands as best I could, then gave myself a makeshift bath and lifted my wounded leg up to the spigot.
The moonlight was just bright enough for me to see the gash was deep but not into the muscle. I peeled my pants up to the knee and scrubbed the bite as hard as I could for over a minute while I tried not to scream in pain.
I wanted to strip everything off and clean the rest of me, but I feared trying to get my pants over my wounded leg. I settled for taking off my shirt and cleaning every other part I could reach without soaking my clothes. Where were they? Why had they left me?
I hobbled over to one of the cement benches and collapsed on the tabletop. There were bodies out here too, clumped near the wrecked classroom. I knew I should check them, just in case, but I couldn’t bear recognizing one of them and I couldn’t bear the thought of not recognizing any of them. I started to cry.
“Gabbi?”
A female voice. Was it real? Was it my imagination?
“Who’s there?” I said in the darkness. The moon had traveled past the horizon of the courtyard roof. I could not tell if I was asleep or dreaming.
“It’s…Corrina.”
“Corrina?”
I must be dreaming. She would not have come back for me.
A cool hand touched my hot forehead and it felt so much like the hand of the foster mom I’d wanted to stay with before they sent me to my grandmother.
“One of the Vs bit me,” I said. She was the last person I wanted to see, but in that moment, I suddenly didn’t care. At least I wasn’t alone.
“What happened to the others?”
“I…I don’t know,” I said.
“Are you injured besides the bite?”
“My shoulder hurts,” I said. “My head hurts like I hit it.”
“I got bit too,” Corrina said. “On my arm and they scratched up my legs pretty good.”
“Did they leave us?”
“I think so. They had to. They ran and drew the Vs with them I think.”
My head pounded as I tried to sort through a jumble of thoughts and memories. My mind grasped at the hope that I hadn’t been abandoned, that this was only a temporary situation, that they were coming back for me and this had all been part of a last-minute plan.
The hand left my forehead, making me ache. No one had ever put a hand to my forehead before, especially not my own mother.
“I’m just going to lay down,” Corrina said.
“Don’t go,” I said. I reached my hand out and brushed her arm and then grabbed it and moved down until I reached her fingers. “Don’t go.”
She squeezed back. “I thought you couldn’t stand me.”
“I can’t.”
She laughed softly and then went silent for a long moment before saying, “I have only ever tried to help you when I could. What did I do?”
I tried to pull my hand away. She would not let go. I released a long breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. Along with it went some of the anger I always nursed inside me. “You did nothing,” I said finally.
“You don’t get off that easy,” Corrina said.
A flame of anger flared, then died back down. She was right.
“People like you—”
“People like me?”
“People like you,” I continued, “People who—”
“—whose parents died when she was a teenager? Who was left an orphan at sixteen? Who lived in foster homes and was bullied mercilessly for being from a different country, who has never quite belonged and who was about to lose her house and job and boyfriend—people like that?”
I felt a mix of shame and defensiveness at her words. I’d wanted her to be a certain way because it was easier that way. “I didn’t know,” I said finally. I realized she had been trying to take care of us like Mary used to do and I couldn’t bear it—so I’d been a jerk. No surprise there.
“You never tried to find out.” She squeezed my hand as if to soften the judgment in her words.
“I…” I almost wanted to apologize. It was there, burning a hole in my chest. My mouth wouldn’t let me finish the sentence. Maybe it was the pain in my leg, maybe it was the virus and bacteria messing with my head, maybe it was being left behind by everyone except for Corrina—I started giggling. We were in the middle of an apocalypse. Our conversation was ridiculous, but I didn’t want it to stop.
“What?”
“You know you did make an ass of yourself from the very beginning.”
“Maybe,” Corrina said. “But you never gave me a chance.”
“I almost did but…”
“But what? You remembered that wasn’t your style?”
“Haha,” I said. “Probably.”
She started laughing. “I can’t believe this. I swear I’m having flashbacks to high school right now.”
“I never went to high school,” I said.
She paused. “You didn’t miss much.”
We lapsed into silence. A cricket chirped for a few seconds and then all was still again. I drifted into sleep realizing Corrina still held my hand.
I woke up all at once when warmth hit my face.
My eyes flew open but then I quickly closed them again. The fog was gone and even though it was a winter’s sun it shone bright and hard above me. Directly in my eyes.
My back ached. My shoulder was numb. My leg burned as if it were on fire.
I sat up and saw Corrina still asleep on the bench a few inches below my tabletop. Her arm slung across her eyes. Her other arm dangling to the ground. Idiot should have slept on the ground instead of half off the bench seat.
The bite on her arm wept blood. The scratches on her legs had crusted over.
Under the sunlight my bite wound looked gruesome, all chewed up. I tore up the cleanest part of my shirt and wrapped the wound as best I could to hold the skin together. There was no puss for now. I hope it stayed that way.
Bodies still lay everywhere and the flies swarmed the pools of blood. I gagged at a severed arm just a few yards away.
“Wake up, Corrina,” I said and shook her gently. Better not to spend another minute here, better to get clear of this and breathe clean air again.
She mumbled in her sleep but did not move.
I shook her harder and moved her arm from across her eyes. “Get up!”
She cracked an eye open, closed it, then opened both eyes. She pulled up a sleeve to check out a bite on her wrist. I wondered what she had relived but dared not ask in case she would ask me in return.
She hobbled over to the water fountain and began rinsing off her wrist and splashing water on her face. “Did I dream it, or are we getting along now?”
“It wasn’t a dream,” I said.
“I was awake for part of your fevers. What…was that your mother?
” She kept her back to me.
My relief faded. Did I owe her a description of my memory-fever? No, I sure the hell did not. But something else compelled me to explain to her what I’d relived, to make up for how I’d judged her, for how I hadn’t given her a chance. “No, it was my grandmother. After I ran away the first time, they tried putting me with her. That didn’t work out.”
“Oh.”
“Running away was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I couldn’t have survived one more day with them.”
“With your family.”
“Yeah, with my so-called family.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Just…okay. Okay, I believe you. Okay, you made the right choice because you’re still surviving. Better than a person like me.” She turned and smiled to reinforce she was making a joke.
I half-smiled in return and rolled my eyes. “This doesn’t make us friends. Just because we had some sort of heart-to-heart doesn’t suddenly make us best friends—”
“But we’re not enemies either,” Corrina said. “Right?”
I took a while to answer because I really needed to think about it. It was time to get my priorities straight. Who was the enemy here? Was I really going to blame Corrina for stuff that was outside her control? I had better things to do with my time than let her get to me. That’s what Leaf would have said. “Yeah. We’re not enemies or anything, just don’t mess up bad enough to test it.”
“No promises.”
“Bitch.”
“Right back at ya.”
We stared at each other for a moment, testing these new waters. It was uncomfortable, but I guess I’d get used to it eventually.
“Let’s go find the others,” Corrina said.
She held out a hand to help me up. I let her help me, and I only judged her for it a little bit.
Chapter 15
Sometimes being a runaway sucks.
Most of the time actually.
But it sure beats the hell out of going back to what I ran away from. No one will ever convince me otherwise and you’re a terrible person for even trying, so stop.
I’ve written down everything like how I remembered it. That may not have been what happened to everyone else, but it’s what happened to me as I saw it.
Anyways, I wanted to get all that down because I don’t know what will happen next and I wanted someone to know I wasn’t just some dumb runaway too stuck up or damaged or stupid to figure out I should have gone back to my grandmother or my mom and dad. I made the right choice, my choice, to run away. I will always be proud of taking control of my own destiny. I want everyone to know that.
“They can’t last much longer up there without water,” Corrina said.
I put down the pen I’d stolen from the classroom before we’d left. “I know,” I said in a subdued voice. We were on the roof of a house far enough away from the high school not to attract notice—yet.
Three days. It had been three days since Corrina and I had woken up surrounded by flies and dead bodies. We’d walked out of that courtyard but hadn’t gone far.
The stink had given it away.
Corrina and I had followed the smell to the far end of the high school campus. The river and the bike trail were at our backs. The sun had burned off the fog, but not the chemical filled smoke from all the fires. The sky was a dull brown, the sun like a runny egg yolk.
“How many are there now?” I asked, looking back down at the binder paper I’d also swiped from the classroom.
“A few hundred. And more trickling in every hour or so.” She was talking about the Vs and how they milled around, lost in their dementia.
The rest of our group was surrounded on the roof of one of the classroom buildings. They were all alive. I think both Corrina and I counted every five minutes, just to make sure it was true. They were all still alive. Even Kern and Laurel.
“Message them again. See if Maibe is still puking her guts out,” Corrina said.
I took out a little pocket mirror and flashed a Morse code message to Ano. He flashed back an answer.
“She’s better,” I said. “Sort of. Throwing up every couple of hours instead of multiple times an hour. Though he says the bite looks like its getting infected.”
“She probably can’t throw up anymore, not without more water.” Corrina walked the roof line until she stood at the edge closest to the high school. The tops of trees blocked a portion of the V crowd, but there were plenty in plain sight. “I just don’t get what drew them all here. Why all of a sudden? Why now?”
“Maybe our battle made too much noise. All the windows we broke.”
“But none of us had guns and we were inside a classroom inside a courtyard.”
“But they’re really sensitive to noise,” I said, irritation pricking my neck. I didn’t necessarily think my hypothesis was all that good either, but she didn’t have to dismiss it so quickly.
“But not THAT sensitive.”
“Okay. So what do you think happened?”
Corrina returned to my side and sat cross-legged on the shingles. I folded the papers and stuck them in my jacket.
“I don’t know.”
“Look,” I said. “More of them are waking up. Me and Spencer and the others, we were some of the earliest people in the city to get infected. It happened weeks before you got bit and you were probably one of the first regular people it happened to. So now, everyone else is waking up from the fevers either as a V, a Faint, or a Feeb.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Well,” I said, feeling exasperated. “What the hell does it matter why, only that it is, and they’re going to die if we don’t fix this?”
Corrina pushed her thick hair off her face. It was like an unkempt mane of a lion that had been dragged through a puddle of mud and twigs. I knew I must look about the same although I always kept my hair short but shaggy around my ears to pass sometimes as a boy.
“You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right!” I exploded.
“Quiet.”
I wanted to slap her but fumed in silence instead. Of course she was right too. Now was not the time to raise my voice.
“We should create a diversion,” I said, thinking about the crazy stunt Maibe had pulled at the van. She could have died, but it had worked. “Make some noise. Attract them away so the others can climb down and go for the bike trail.”
“But with what? And won’t that just get us stuck somewhere and then they’ll have to return the favor?”
“Not if we’re smart,” I said. “We figure out a distraction and an escape route. More than one escape route. An escape route for the escape route.”
She chewed on her lower lip and looked across the gap again, at the roof that held Dylan, a guy still recovering from the memory-fevers and still way too hot to have ended up with someone like Corrina.
“I have an idea,” she said.
Chapter 16
So the plan was this: find something battery-powered to make noise close to the Vs and draw their attention away from the building. I would bike across the high school campus with the noise into the multi-purpose room. The Vs would follow me into the building. I would exit through the side doors, barring them behind me. Corrina would wait until they were all inside and then lock the entrance doors behind them. The Vs would be trapped and then we could help everyone down from the building and make our way back to the bike trail and get the hell out of town.
It didn’t sound like the greatest plan in the world, but we couldn’t think of anything better.
“Ready?” Corrina said.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. I straddled my bike and checked the bungee cord that held a battery-operated music player in place. It had taken us scavenging through four houses to find a cordless device with actual speakers instead of an iPod or other earbud player. The chains we planned to lock the doors with had been easy to find in the first garage we’d hit. The locks were a
little harder, but we were ready nonetheless.
Corrina took off around the corner of the building, chains and padlock in hand.
I pushed the ON button and cranked up the boombox volume. I’d tested it once already, in the house, to make sure this 90s tech still worked at all, but I held my breath all the same.
The CD spun up.
Suddenly Lady Gaga blared, the instruments starting low and then quickly rising in volume and fullness. I straddled the bike and pedaled toward the crowd of Vs milling around the building. I dared look up for a second and saw six faces peering down at me from the roof’s edge.
A mild wind started blowing against my back, carrying the sound better to the crowd.
Finally one V stopped fidgeting, cocked his head, and then turned to face me.
A lump rose in my throat. My mind screamed to turn around now, but one V’s attention was not enough.
I pedaled to within a football field’s length of the crowd. A few more turned their heads, then went back to bumping into one another.
“Hey!” I squeaked. I gulped down a deep breath and forced the next yell from my belly. “Hey! Over here!”
Now a half dozen Vs turned. I kept pedaling to them. Now only fifty yards away. I needed more.
Suddenly one began sprinting. Sprinting with a limp, but eating up distance all the same. I wasted precious seconds to make sure others followed his lead, and then I fishtailed the bicycle around. The boombox shifted, slipping halfway out of the bungee cord tie, dangling over my back wheel.
I straightened the bike but did not reach for the player. The lead Vs were only yards away now. In spite of the music, they were so close I could hear their hard breathing, the slaps of their shoes, those that still wore shoes, the grunt of pain from one of them, the smell of ripe body odor and urine and worse. In spite of my injured leg, I put all my weight into the downstroke and stood up for more momentum. I rode in a straight line to the open multi door and hoped the player would stay attached long enough to make it into the building.
I almost flew over the handlebars as the bike slowed. I screamed, pumped the pedals again. The bike moved slowly but did not fall over. A V had latched onto the player, pulling the player off my bike, but the cord was still attached, acting like an anchor.
Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4) Page 37
