Betty set an empty glass down in front of me. In one hand she held a liquor bottle halfway full of brown liquid. The other held a coffee pot full of black liquid.
“I don’t—”
“I know.” She filled the glass with half of each. “This one’s on the house. You look like you need it. It’s the least we can do after all you’ve done.”
Before I could protest she went to check on the card players. I stared at the glass. Nobody cared about age anymore when it came to drinking. Not with the whole world fallen apart and everyone having to grow up fast. Still it saddened me that it was so normal not to care about how things used to be. I was only sixteen after all.
I took a small sip of the drink and forced it down even as my nose felt lit on fire. She might as well have dumped rubbing alcohol into the coffee. But this was Betty and I couldn’t bear to offend her. I kept drinking it, even as the coffee turned bitter and a buzzing noise rose in my brain. Ano and Gabbi sometimes obliterated themselves with this stuff when they wanted to forget. Maybe what was good enough for them was good enough for me this afternoon.
Steps shuffled in the back. I set the drink down and turned. The players were helping the Feeb coming out of his memory-rush to get on his feet.
“Walk it off,” Bernice said.
The group made him do several circuits around the aisles. Once the light came back into his eyes and he seemed able to see things in the present again, the players led him to the counter. They took up the stools around me and suddenly the room seemed overfull.
I decided I didn’t want to finish the drink after all. I began to get up.
“You heard the rumors?” Nindal said in my direction.
Betty scowled at him while returning to her side of the counter. “Don’t talk about that here. No sense in stirring things up for a bunch of made-up hooey.”
“But the camps have been working on a cure since this all got started,” Bernice said, his shoulders hunched under Betty’s short harangue.
“So, what does that have to do with anything?” Betty said.
“It is possibly the truth,” Nindal said. The other Feebs took their turns chiming in.
“Dead is dead,” I said and the whole room stopped talking. Corrina’s ghost-memory appeared on the bar side next to Betty, looking exactly like she had when Anthony had said those words three years ago in the surplus store—when we’d been running scared and not yet infected.
“What you talking about?” Bernice said.
“We’ve been turned and there’s no going back. There’s never been a movie that had a way to go back once you’ve been turned.” I wanted to use the word zombie. It was on the tip of my tongue and I could see it in the air between us and it was so obvious I didn’t understand how they could be blind to it, but they were, and if I said it, they’d stop listening altogether.
“You do not know,” Nindal said. His dark slashes of eyebrows drew down and almost met between his eyes. “You cannot say one way or the other if there is this cure. You cannot.”
“There’s no going back,” I said. “There’s no undoing it.”
The door squeaked open and boots stamped the floor. “It’s real enough. I met a Feeb who’s been cured.”
All heads swiveled to the door, even Betty’s. I couldn’t help but look myself. A Feeb, no doubt, with his telltale lines and ash and a light bruising around the neck. Not one I recognized. Not someone I had helped rescue. Someone who had been rescued after I’d locked myself away.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“That’s Leon,” Betty said. “You just get back? You found something?”
He nodded. He was tall and lean and was maybe in his forties before the Feeb-skin took over. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid shirt, all he needed was a cowboy hat. As if on cue he brought out a dingy beige one from behind his back and held it down at his side.
“Did you ride in on a horse or something?” I said, and felt shocked at my words. It was something Gabbi would say, not me.
But the words were out there and he squinted a smile at me and said, “If you know where I can get one, I will next time.”
Everyone laughed. I flushed.
Betty wiped down an empty spot at the counter and poured a drink. “Your usual.”
“Thank you, Betty.” He sat on the stool next to me, set out a can of creamed corn in trade, then examined the drink before throwing it down his throat.
Bernice held up his hands. “Now, now. Don’t keep us waiting. You can’t drop a bomb like that and not speak another word.”
If I had been Corrina, I probably would have pressed him with my own questions. Gabbi would have probably started a fight over his lies. But I was neither one of them so I just waited with the rest for his answer.
Leon took his time. His arm was covered in coarse hair that obscured the worst aspects of the infection. He twisted his wrist this way and that, examining the dregs in the glass. There was a heat in the air that wasn’t there before. A certain tension like a string pulled taut. If he didn’t say something fast I didn’t know what that would set off.
He peered at them over the rim of the empty glass.
“Fill it for him, Betty.” Bernice plunked down three cigarettes.
We waited, holding our breath, as Betty poured the drink and swiped the cigarettes off the counter. Leon tilted the glass back and finished it in one go. “I said, I met someone cured of being a Feeb but he ran off. I can track him, but I need help. I’m going to find him again and make him tell me where to get a cure of my own. So who’s gonna help me?”
The store roared to life like he was a magician who’d done his final reveal. They surrounded Leon, pushing me aside like I’d become invisible—but that trick wasn’t what they wanted to see. Nindal ran out of the store, yelling over his shoulder that he was getting others to come along. Another one said they should let the whole town know and form a search party with supplies. Bernice wanted to leave right then, because who knew where the cured Feeb was headed or if he was in danger and they better get started. Their voices raised in pitch and intensity. Leon too, there was a shine in his eyes that spoke of a conviction that scared me more than a little bit. It was the kind of light I’d seen often enough in my aunt’s eyes before she worked herself up into the righteous indignation that came before a beating.
Their voices got louder. Two of them had now fallen into a memory-rush, but it was as if no one cared all of a sudden. They wandered the store, knocking over supplies and glass jars and then one of them punched the other. It was as if they’d turned invisible too because what mattered all of a sudden was the cure and finding it and everything else could go to hell.
I backed away until my shoulders hit a shelf of cans. I jumped, shock making my heart pound. Betty glanced my way and I saw the half-crazed look on her face and a certain slack to her jaw, but then she said, “You going?” And I knew that she was still barely all right, but I didn’t know for how much longer.
I shook my head. No, not in a million years. Never.
Dead was dead.
Chapter 5
I was outside. The street was dark.
How had the street gotten dark?
I crept along the edge of the building. The space in front of Betty’s had turned into this pool of figures with Leon at the head. They almost looked like a bunch of Vs moving around.
This was why I didn’t leave my hotel room anymore.
Dozens of them were outside Betty’s and it was almost dark. The shouts, the slap of running feet, a sense that people were looking for trouble. I didn’t understand. It was summer, the days were long, I had gone into Betty’s during the late afternoon.
A panicked feeling climbed into my throat. I had lost time again. I had been—
No. I told myself to stop. My Faints needed me. Ricker would be wondering where I was.
Instead of dreading the stairs and the door and his face, I was eager for it now. I would rise above this terrible energy. I would
climb three stories and the crowd’s shouts would fade until they stopped altogether, and even if Molly rolled out of her bed on purpose, tonight it would be okay, I would gladly put her back again.
I hurried down the street, away from the crowd. They were fools, going after the cure because someone claimed he heard someone else claim he had struck gold. A small voice in my head wondered if maybe there could be a real cure after all. I shut that thought down. We’d saved so many people and they didn’t listen to us anymore. They didn’t care what a bunch of kids had to say about things, even if we had rescued them.
I stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, at the part where I was supposed to cross over to the hotel. The chorus of shouts continued on one end, faint, but like a humming that threatened to grow and consume everything in its way. There was quiet on the other side, except for a lone cricket. The darkness would only deepen. I could smell smoke from someone’s wood stove. Since the sun was gone so was the heat. Temperatures dropped fast this high in the foothills. My skin prickled into goosebumps.
There was a rustling noise, opposite from the crowd. I snapped my attention to it knowing even as I did that the darkness would keep me from seeing anything. The town always posted sentries and there were only two ways in and out, both guarded. But that didn’t keep my skin from crawling like someone watched me. I had felt that way often in my aunt’s house, before she had died and I had been sent to live with my uncle here in America. Her breath had always smelled like sardines because she loved them, claiming they made her glow and kept her skin young. She was old, but still beautiful, so maybe she was right about that.
I shook my head like a dog shaking off water. Stop it.
I hopped from one foot to the other and started talking out loud, anything to push my aunt to where she belonged, somewhere far back in my brain where she couldn’t come out again. “This is ridiculous. Don’t just stand around here hallucinating. Cross the stupid street and go home.” The memories began to disintegrate. “There, see? You DO know better.”
I crossed the road, the starlight just bright enough for me to avoid the potholes and mounds of weeds that cracked the asphalt. I jumped onto the boarded sidewalk and reached for the stair railing.
A hand came out of the darkness and covered mine, pinching it to the railing.
“Ow,” I said and tried to pull it away. The darkness didn’t reveal much, other than the shadow was taller than me. The hand was rough but small. “What do you want?” Had a Faint escaped? Had a V gotten inside after all?
A hint of honey hit my nose. Jen Huey liked honey. After we’d rescued her, I helped her go through every empty house in town. She’d taken their honey bears and lined them all up on a counter. At first Gabbi had thought she’d gone crazy, but then Jen explained—Faints responded to sweet things better than to anything else. Plus, she liked a dab of it on her breakfast every morning. She thought it made more of her memory-rushes into good ones.
She’d come from Camp Pacific and they’d done something to her. It had addled her brain just a little more than most of us other Feebs. Still, it had been in a sweet way, like the honey.
“Jen, is that you?”
The hand twitched at the name.
“Jen, how’s it going at the hospital? Corrina always says you’re the best with all the Faints. They just seem to calm down and listen when you’re around.”
“You had no right to do that, you know. No right at all.” Her voice dripped with venom, stinging, harsh, cutting me through the chest. It was Jen, even though it barely sounded like her. My skin burned as she twisted my hand in her grip.
“Jen, whatever you’re remembering…it’s me, it’s Maibe. I saved you, remember? I helped you collect honey from all the houses and we lined them all up together and—”
She stepped closer and the sugar smell became stronger. Something shined on her cheek, like she had wiped honey on her face. Her eyes were black pits. Her upper body seemed almost detached from the arm and hand that trapped mine.
“Jen, you need to move around and snap yourself out of this.” Whatever was happening to Jen, it couldn’t be a memory-rush, those mostly stopped you in your tracks while you relived the memory. She must have gotten bitten by a V somehow and sent back into the memory-fevers. The fevers were dangerous, you reenacted things, which was why we always tied each other down when we went through them. It protected everyone else from you.
But if she’d been injured by a V, that meant a V had gotten into town.
Her arm began to shake, making mine tremble. I thought it might mean she was coming back to her senses and I tried to pull away again. Her other arm sprang out of the darkness and wrapped itself in my hair.
I was pulled to my knees. My scalp burned and tears sprang into my eyes from the pain.
“Jen,” I gasped. “Jen Huey. Please stop. I saved you, remember?” But she didn’t listen and a part of me was almost glad. It was painful and maybe I deserved the pain because I had saved her but I hadn’t saved the girl and her family. I couldn’t save myself.
“I know better now,” she said. “I didn’t know then, but now I know and I won’t let you hurt anyone else. I won’t…no, just try to call the police. Just you try—” She released my hand, but then a slap slammed across my cheek, jerking my head back, pulling my hair out.
I began sobbing. “Please stop. Please.” I balled my hand into a fist and tried to force back the vision of my aunt. I would not. I would not let her do this again.
She let go of my hair and I dropped to my knees. Blood dripped cold along my scalp. Hands closed around my throat.
“You will never touch anyone again,” she said.
My aunt’s face swam across my vision.
“I made that promise to myself,” she said.
My throat closed. I tried to scream, but nothing got past Jen’s iron grip. She held me up by my neck. Light began to flash in front of my eyes. My aunt’s face swirled, flattened, swirled back. I reached out and scratched and found her eye sockets and began to press. The burning in my lungs grew unstoppable, mountainous, all consuming. I pressed with all my remaining strength, not sure how much strength I really had left, not sorry that I would make my aunt pay, but sorry that I would die on the sidewalk and Jen would find me and never forgive herself.
Something popped under my right thumb, gushing wetness and heat.
She screamed and screamed and dropped her hands and I tumbled and suddenly my aunt’s face became Jen’s face again. I jumped to her side and caught her before she fell.
“Jen! Jen!” I pulled her back down the street. She was screaming. My muscles shook with her weight and my hands slipped along the slime that coated both of us. Corrina’s makeshift hospital was down this block, wasn’t it? I worked from memory because there was nothing to light the way except shadows.
“We’ll get you help, okay?" I gasped. "It’s going to be okay.” But I knew it wasn’t going to be okay. My mind replayed how her eye popped under my thumb and how she had been my aunt for a split second. I had been both glad and sickened by what I’d done—the choking, the burning in my scalp, the stream of liquid. Her screams. Jen’s horrible, terrible, haunting screams.
What had happened to her? What was happening to all of us?
Chapter 6
Corrina cleaned and wrapped Jen’s eye. When she was finished, Jen still hadn’t come back to herself, not completely. She whimpered and thrashed about, so we tied her at the hands and ankles to the bed frame. I didn’t speak a word while we worked. I couldn’t.
We searched Jen over for a fresh injury, but other than what I had done to her, and scars from old V bites, there was nothing to explain it.
“It could have been worse,” Corrina said quietly.
I almost choked. “Worse? It could have been worse than this?”
We stood over Jen’s bed, in the makeshift hospital that had once been a church. It was dark, but it was not quiet. Even though the night had cooled, the air felt suffocating. There was t
his smell of sweat, dirt, unwashed sheets, old wood, the vinegar-like disinfectant Corrina used. Jen whimpered in her bed, lost in a terrible memory, but she wasn’t alone. This was where we cared for the Faints and any sick Feebs. Two other beds were being used by Feebs. A dozen other beds held the town’s Faints. If it wasn’t for the ropes tying the Feebs down, they would have hurt themselves or others. Just like Jen had tried to do. Just like I had done.
“It’s not your fault,” Corrina said.
The spiked coffee Betty had served me sat on my tongue like a layer of bitter paste. It was too dark to see the expression on Corrina’s face, but I knew her well enough that I could guess. She would be feeling sorry for me. She would be worried and thinking about how to make me feel better. But Jen was the one lying there, missing an eye for the rest of her life. Because of me.
I stayed beside Jen until she came back to herself. Maybe only an hour had passed, maybe it had been longer. There was no way for me to tell anymore except that it was still dark outside.
Corrina told Jen what happened. Jen cried and apologized to me. A candle lit up her bandaged eye enough to show where blood was already soaking through. Jen drifted into sleep. I threw up on the floor.
I was there on my hands and knees, smelling the mess I’d made, tasting the acid that stung my throat. I should have never left my Faints. None of this would have happened if I’d just stayed away. That’s when I noticed a person standing next to me. The outline of thick jeans, a bucket resting against the knee. I looked up. Dylan held the bucket and a few rags.
“It’s okay,” Dylan said. “We know what it’s like. Go rest. I’ll take care of it.”
His words moved me into action. I would not make him clean up after me. I held out my hands for the cleaning supplies. He handed them over, but still went down on his knees to help me mop everything up. The wood floor snagged my clothing and forced splinters into my hands. The pain only made me scrub harder.
When we finished, I followed Dylan over to Corrina. He rested a hand on Corrina’s shoulder and she leaned into him for a moment. There was a whole row of candles on the table to light up what she worked with—glass containers, rubber tubing, bottles, strips of cloth, thick textbooks open to various pages, bowls filled with dark substances. Dylan handed me a glass of water and I used it to rinse out my mouth.
Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4) Page 53
