Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  Something hit me in my stomach and snatched the rock out of my hand. I was pushed onto the ground, gasping for air. My wrist flared in pain.

  I flew back onto my feet, a cry in my heart. Why did they do it? They’d get bit and trapped and—

  Tabitha stood there, feet splayed in the dirt, knees bent as if ready to take a tackle. She swung my rock at the V and bashed him on the side of the head. He sunk his fingers and mouth into her shoulder. She screamed. He tore her skin. Blood sprayed into the air.

  She shouted for us to get on the other side of the fence. She grunted in pain. She hit at the V with the rock. The other Vs came through the trees.

  Ricker grabbed me around the waist and dragged me through the fence. Gabbi slid through and we were all on the other side now except for Tabitha.

  Tabitha fought off the first V and dove for the gap in the fence. The links grabbed at her shirt. Her shoulder was useless. She scrabbled halfway through and got stuck. The mud suctioned her to the ground. One V caught her leg and pulled her back. We each grabbed onto her and pulled. My feet slipped in the wetness and I struggled to get my footing back. My injured ankle made my leg give out. The fence shook, but stayed caught on her clothes and dug into her back. Two more Vs were closing in.

  Suddenly the V slipped in the mud and fell on his back. He lost his grip and we fell backwards. Tabitha shot under the fence and through the mud like a bullet. Her shoulder was bleeding, her hair was in tangles, there was no time to check her wounds.

  The Vs dove into the gap, wiggling through the space.

  As they came under, one by one, because that’s all the gap would allow—we did what we had to do. It was bloody. It was messy. It stunk, but we couldn’t stop until it was done.

  The silence after the fighting ended made my ears ring.

  Ricker, Gabbi, Alden, even Mary—we were all covered in a sludge made of gore and mud. My chest heaved while trying to take in enough oxygen.

  I looked for Tabitha. She had gotten bit by a V. She would be laying down somewhere. She would have fallen into the fevers like her son. Like Ano.

  I searched for her, but all I saw were the Vs we had to put down. Then I saw a figure sitting in the dirt, halfway up the slope that would take us to the road. Tabitha. Awake, holding her shoulder, calm—no fevers.

  “Come on,” Gabbi said. “We have to hurry before more show up.”

  When we got to the road, we were almost level with the tops of the trees. On one side of the road was the river. On the other side of the river the fields were black and smoking but no longer in flames. The fire had burned to the water but could not jump it. Flames still burned further down along the water’s edge. It was moving away from us now, though the smoke would blacken the sky for a long time.

  I looked back the way we had come. I saw how the river water must be finding little openings underneath the road to seep through to the other side. Various spots of darker brown mud dotted the edge where the road’s mound met the flat ground and led to the fence and the trees and the pile of dead bodies we had just left behind.

  Gabbi began to walk the road. Ricker and Alden followed. Mary followed them.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  Gabbi didn’t turn around. “Home.”

  Chapter 30

  “The cure is back there,” Tabitha said. “You can’t just leave it with them.”

  “There is no cure,” Alden said, speaking his first words since waking up. His voice sounded hoarse. Dark purple circled his eyes. His blond hair kept falling into his face. Tabitha stared at him like he was a snake that had just slithered onto the path.

  “We can’t go home,” I said.

  Alden and Gabbi turned to look at me. Now I felt like the snake. I stepped to the edge of the road. It went for miles in either direction. Below us was the water on one side and the facility on the other. The trees blocked a clear sight line, but the tops of the buildings were still visible. In there was the machine that made the cure possible. In there, Dr. Ferrad took a life for a life.

  Gabbi turned away from me. She kicked at a rock that flew off the road and disappeared into the water. “Maybe we just leave and don’t come back.”

  “Gabbi’s right,” Ricker said. “We run away. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re still alive when everyone else is dead.”

  “Don’t you understand?” I said. “There’s no running away from this. We’ll be no better than them if—”

  “We aren’t killing people for no reason,” Ricker said, anger flaring in his voice. He stood apart from us. We all stood apart from each other like we couldn’t bear being closer. “Don’t compare us to them. You know it’s nothing close. We have to watch out for ourselves. No one else is going to do it.”

  “The right thing to do—”

  “The right thing to do is survive,” Gabbi said.

  My thoughts swirled. They didn’t understand. I thought at least—

  “Alden? You get it, don’t you?”

  Alden stilled. He was bent over, his hands on his jeans. The fabric had torn at the knees and his skin was bloody underneath. Mud covered his clothes and face and hair, some of it drying into a lighter brown. We were all covered in drying mud. Gray ash covered his blond hair. The Feeb marks on his skin—the veins, the wrinkles, the dry texture—were almost all gone.

  “What are you saying?” Tabitha said. “You would destroy any chance—all the research, all the testing? What hope would Kern have? What hope would any of us have?”

  “And who would you choose to die so that you could be cured?” I said.

  Alden flinched as if my words were meant for him. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t the same. He had been forced. He hadn’t known what was happening.

  “Dr. Ferrad is trying to refine it, I’m sure.” Tabitha’s face was pale. “It requires a life now, but later—”

  “We need to wrap your shoulder,” Ricker said quietly.

  “Let her bleed!” Gabbi whirled around. Her eyes flashed and her body was rigid.

  Tabitha flinched.

  “This is your fault,” Gabbi said, taking out all her mixed up emotions on Tabitha. “Since the beginning, you’ve lied, you’ve planned, you’ve ruined—”

  “They’re the ones lying to you.” She held her shoulder at an angle like she was in a great deal of pain. Blood soaked through her shirt creating this huge wet patch of red. “We worked in the same building at the beginning. Soldier, doctor, manager. They never thought that highly of me—Dr. Ferrad and Sergeant Bennings. I represented paperwork, regulations, procedures. When my son and I got infected because of THEIR scientific negligence, that’s when we finally became interesting to them. They considered exterminating us to cover everything up.” Tabitha slumped to the ground. “Except your friend there got infected. Then she infected the rest of your group and they couldn’t contain it. So they went to Plan B—the camps.”

  As Tabitha talked she swayed almost in time to Mary’s rocking. Her words became breathy, like she couldn’t get her vocal cords to work right. I thought maybe she was about to fall into the fevers after all. She had lost a lot of blood. Even from here I could see the V bite had created a jagged wound that had torn her skin to shreds. It wasn’t the fevers we had to worry about with her but the blood loss.

  “We need to clean this,” Ricker said.

  The water was right there, but we had no containers.

  I looked at Gabbi so she would know it didn’t matter what she said back to me. “Gabbi, help us move her to the water.”

  Ricker and I lifted Tabitha to her feet. She swayed in my direction and suddenly her weight was all on me. I stumbled and fell to one knee. My ankle and wrist burned. My muscles ached. I didn’t have the strength to get us back up even as Ricker tried to pull her off. I wondered if maybe they were right. Maybe they were all right. We should run as far from this place as we could. We should go to whatever home remained with the time we had left.

  Gabbi stepped in and hooked Tabitha
’s shoulder over her neck. With the weight lifted I was able to stand and help them limp Tabitha down to the water.

  “Why did you let yourself get attacked.” Gabbi said this like it was an accusation, like Tabitha must have some terrible motive.

  I had learned a long time ago that Gabbi did and said things she later regretted. We couldn’t unlearn what the fevers revealed about one another, we could only protect it from each other as best we could. I knew Gabbi was trying.

  “If I die.” Tabitha took a step that twisted her shoulder. Her breath hitched. “If I die, promise me that you will help Kern.”

  Gabbi didn’t respond for the longest time. I thought maybe she wasn’t going to. Finally Gabbi nodded. “You know I will.”

  We stepped down the hill, slipping a few times. This forced out a cry of pain each time from Tabitha. Alden stayed on the road with Mary. There was so much infected blood on Tabitha after all and he was now uninfected.

  Ghosts appeared in place of Ricker, Gabbi, Tabitha. I knew they were ghosts this time because they appeared with this faint silver edge, like my eyes couldn’t quite bring them into focus.

  It was Jane and Corrina and Mark.

  Corrina had demanded I hand her a water bottle to help clean Mark’s wounds. I’d been uninfected then. We had just lost Dylan, though we didn’t know it was to Sergeant Bennings at the time. Mark was already a Feeb and the V bite he had suffered in the fight was throwing him back into the memory-fevers. Though we didn’t know any of that either.

  I stood at the river’s edge and watched the water slowly move by even as Corrina bent to wash Mark’s wound. I knew it was the ghost-memories overlapping with the present. Mark had looked so sick, so not right. Corrina and Jane had worked on him like that didn’t matter.

  I’d been so afraid. That fear struck me again now, making my heart pound so that it drowned out the sounds of water and Tabitha’s yelps of pain. I’d been grieving for my uncle. I watched him die under an onslaught of Vs, in the room where we would close the blinds and make popcorn that filled the air with delicious smells of butter and salt, in the room where we watched marathons of apocalypse and zombie movies.

  He would hook an arm around my shoulder during the scariest parts and say things like, “I guess our lives aren’t so bad. We’ve still got all our teeth,” or, “I give you permission to cut class if you ever see a bucket full of blood,” or, shaking his head at a particularly stupid move a character made, “You are so much smarter than them, Maibe. Life is tough, but you’re tougher.” He’d pop another movie in and we’d start again and whatever was bothering me would fade away for a little while because whatever it was, it wasn’t THAT bad, not compared to zombies.

  He had died saving me and I hadn’t stopped it. I had frozen behind the couch. We’d been watching Shaun of the Dead and laughing and laughing and the Vs had burst through. We knew it was coming. We had planned and prepared and been listening to the police scanner. We were leaving the next morning, but it hadn’t been soon enough.

  He died because I had frozen. He died because I was too scared to do what needed to be done. He had died and I missed him and all I wanted was to eat some popcorn with him again and just sit with him. I wanted to sit next to him on the couch and hear the faint buzz of the DVD player spinning up. My uncle would be alive and I would be taken care of and I would be loved.

  This terrible pain gnawed at my heart and made me want to sit cross-legged at the edge of the water and add my tears to the river. I wanted that feeling suddenly, the stone feeling. I wanted to feel like a Faint, just for a moment, if it meant the hurt over my uncle would stop for a little while. I wanted to become like the water that passed by, unconcerned with the fire and death and destruction around it. The water moved over the stones and soil like it always had. The water found ways around and through things like fences and gates. The water would make everything go away.

  A tree branch floated by. A section of leaves not touching the water smoldered with orange light.

  I did not turn into a stone.

  It had always come when I didn’t want it, and now that I begged my brain to bring it, there was nothing.

  Except.

  My uncle always believed I was the hero of my own story. He believed in me even when I hadn’t.

  I knew, I just knew, what my uncle would want me to do.

  Tabitha’s shoulder was cleaned as best as we could. Our clothes were soaked now, but it didn’t matter. The air was so hot, it would all dry soon enough.

  I stood up on the edge of the river. The mud squished under my shoes. The road held back the water. There was another road on the other side of the river, toward the fire, that held the water back from flooding the fields on that side.

  “We can’t run away anymore. We have to do the right thing, even if it brings the sky crashing down on us. Even if it destroys our only chance forever. Even if it means I do this alone.”

  I waved my bandaged hand back up the levee road, to the fence and trees.

  “I have to destroy that machine.”

  Chapter 31

  I feared they would leave.

  I could see the way Ricker and Gabbi looked at each other—this knowing expression that passed between them sometimes. I suspected it was their way of signaling when it was time to run before the cops caught them or worse.

  Alden looked out over the water like he wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard what I said. Tabitha’s eyebrows narrowed but then she masked it with a more neutral expression.

  We sat in a circle in the middle of the road.

  “What’s your plan?” Ricker said finally. His clothes were still soaked from the river water. Hair hung in his face and his eyes looked sunken into his skull. He had always been so thin. I couldn’t remember the last time we had eaten something.

  “I don’t have one yet,” I said, but that wasn’t completely true.

  “What do you expect us to do?” Tabitha said. “This is crazy.”

  “Maybe Tabitha’s right,” Alden said.

  “Shut up,” Gabbi said, always the one who believed in me, even if she could never admit it out loud. “Let her think.”

  I looked out over that blue water again. We had no guns. We had no vehicles. We were a bunch of kids. We could try to sneak back in, but my mind rejected that idea. We’d barely escaped once. The place was patrolled, the buildings were dark caves of cages and locked doors, people were on high alert after the fighting.

  Everything was still now, even the birds. The fire had driven all life away from it and left behind a stillness that only the sound of moving water broke. There was so much power in the water. The levee we stood on was already weak—the seeping mud on the other side was proof of that. The buildings, the cure, the fence, it all sat in a sort of bowl beneath us.

  “Ricker,” I said.

  He bowed his head waiting for my question. Maybe it was the way I said his name, my voice full of an emotion I was too afraid to name. Maybe it was the way I turned and looked at him until he looked back at me. Maybe it was the way we held each other’s gaze for an eternity. He couldn’t know what my question would be, but all the same, somehow he knew whatever it was would demand a lot from him. Maybe too much.

  I couldn’t look at him when I finally asked. I stared again at the water, seeing him out of the corner of my eye. “Could an explosion destroy this road enough to free the water?”

  Ricker’s skin was always pale. I swore it went even paler under the dried mud that coated him.

  Gabbi froze, her hands in mid-air, about to scratch her head.

  We didn’t talk about what anyone confessed during the memory-fevers. No matter what.

  I had just broken that pact again.

  Ricker’s cousin had been a lot older and into bad stuff. His cousin would get these jobs and Ricker would help. The last time, the people who’d hired them had them blow up a factory. Ricker had been fooling around with the leftover explosives. He was just a kid. He had accidentally killed his
cousin.

  His family couldn’t get over what he’d done—what he’d been doing. Neither could he. He ran away to the street and pretended none of it had ever happened.

  But the Feeb infection never let you forget.

  “Not much,” he said slowly. “It’s already breeching. That’s why water is seeping through.”

  Alden sucked in a breath.

  Ricker walked over to the edge like he was examining the road, except he stared unseeing at the water instead. “We wouldn’t need to destroy the whole road. Just get enough to punch a hole and weaken it. The water would do the rest.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Alden said. “Do you even know how to use explosives?”

  “He knows,” Gabbi said.

  Ricker flinched.

  “You could kill us all,” Alden said. “Even if it works, the water isn’t going to stop them. They’ll have time to escape.”

  “We’re not murderers,” I said.

  Alden flinched.

  “I’m not calling—” I couldn’t finish. “We need to destroy the machine.”

  “Dr. Ferrad will get out and this will start all over again,” Alden said. “Where are you even going to get what you need?”

  I felt the boom in my bones and my chest. The low rumble, the regular pattern of the explosions, the way it had filled the sky with sound to draw away the Vs. It was a memory-flash, different than a ghost-memory, different than the memory-fevers. So many symptoms, so many ways those symptoms tore apart your sanity. But this time, this time the symptoms brought a solution.

  I looked at Ricker. He knew what I was feeling and what I was remembering. That’s why it hurt so much.

  “We steal what we need from Sergeant Bennings.”

  The inky darkness sent shivers through me. If animals lurked somewhere nearby they could see us but we could not see them.