Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  Her eyes were big and round, examining our faces through the windshield. “Are you normal?” She yelled, the windshield glass muffling her voice.

  My breath quickened as I wondered what she meant. She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down to cover her hands as if she were cold. She looked to be only thirteen years old. Skinny and short and trying not to show her fear by standing as tall as possible in front of a giant RV with the sounds of the whole world falling apart surrounding her.

  I stood by the side door and opened it to a clear street, except for three figures mostly obscured by the fog further down the block.

  Dylan pushed open a side window and waved at the girl. “We’re your neighbors on Grove Street. Get in here.”

  She appeared, small and scared, like a rabbit. She dashed through the door, skidded on the granite floor, and fell onto the dining bench with a big, gulping breath.

  Dylan closed the window. “Get going, Stan. There are three coming our way.”

  “So how come she’s okay and not those three?” Jane demanded. “Or are we letting those three in too?”

  “Look at them and look at her,” I said. “Can’t you just tell?”

  They were close enough to make out details in the fog now. A brown-haired woman, dressed as if she had just gone to the mall. She wore cowboy boots and I watched as one of them caught on the asphalt and forced her to her knees. The two men seemed to be together. Like coworkers just getting off from a construction work site. All three had blank gazes when they opened their eyes, and all three cradled or cocked their heads as if enduring a great deal of pain.

  One of the men frothed saliva at the mouth. The woman’s muscles spasmed, interfering with her ability to walk in a straight line. They seemed drawn to Luna’s engine noise, or our voices, or I don’t know. Something about them looked so, disturbed, so angry. And they were making their way down the street fast, faster than I would have thought possible with their loping, crippled gaits.

  “Shut the door, Corrina,” Dylan said.

  “There’s got to be something we can do to help them. Something…”

  Dylan wrapped his hand over mine and pulled the door closed. Stan went through the roundabout again and we rumbled down the street.

  The shapes disappeared into the whiteness like vanishing ghosts.

  “Maybe once we can figure out what’s going on,” Dylan said, “but we can’t risk—”

  “I know,” I said, remembering Mr. Sidner. Were they part of some sick gang? They couldn’t all be from the mental health institution, especially since these three looked as if they had just walked off their jobs.

  The girl hunched over the bench,. Her sweatshirt failed to hide her trembling.

  “I’m Corrina,” I said. “This is Dylan, Stan, and Jane,” I pointed to each person in turn. “You’re safe here.”

  “I’m Maibe.” She pushed back her hood. “My name is Egyptian for grave because my mother died giving birth to me and my father sent me away to my uncle,” she said. “We just moved here, but the zombies killed him and now I’m alone.”

  All of us stared.

  “Oh wow, this is just great,” Jane said.

  Maibe rolled up the sleeves of her pink hoodie, and her arms were skinny things. Two gold-colored bangles clinked together on her left wrist. Her hoodie revealed dark, thick hair pulled back into a ponytail with a matching pink band.

  “Maibe,” I said. “These people are sick with something. Something mental, or on drugs, or…” I looked to Dylan for help.

  He sat across from her and carefully folded his hands onto the tabletop. He stared at Maibe for a second and then looked away. He always handled kids like this. He was careful not to make them anxious by invading their space. “Maibe,” he said quietly. “Sometime people are capable of horrible, monstrous things—”

  “No. That’s not what’s happening,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to contradict her. Dylan gave me a warning look.

  “Maibe,” Dylan said. “Did you see what happened to your uncle?”

  She nodded. “He went outside to scare off the zombies, but they killed him in our backyard.” She stared at the table and fiddled with her bracelets. She rubbed hard at her eyes. “I was scared. I didn’t think I would be. It’s not like that in the movies. I wasn’t ready, so I ran and hid behind that big flower bush in the front yard, that’s when I saw you all drive by.”

  “It’s okay, you’re safe here,” Dylan said.

  I could tell Maibe didn’t buy into his comfort. I didn’t. We were a long way from safe, but if we could escape the neighborhood, find a fire station, call the police, maybe we could get some answers at least. “Does anyone have a working phone?” I asked.

  “No good,” Stan yelled. “I tried a dozen times.”

  “We just need to try again,” Dylan said.

  “Phones are gone,” Maibe said. “My uncle and I have been watching…We just didn’t think it would spread so fast. We were planning to leave tomorrow. Thought we had plenty of time. The zombies only now got to us, but they took over most of downtown last night.”

  “If you don’t shut up with that crazy talk, I’ll throw you back out with the crazies,” Stan said. He didn’t bother turning around, but Jane did and the look on her face said she agreed with Stan.

  I didn’t understand how she could be so callous. “Jane.”

  She shook her head and turned away.

  “How do you know all this?” Dylan said.

  “My uncle listens…listened to the police scanners. It was bad all night.”

  “What was bad?” Dylan asked.

  “Fires and murders and stuff.”

  “Why are you calling them zombies?” He asked like he was talking to a butterfly.

  She shrugged and looked at Dylan with her huge brown eyes. Serious, in control of herself again. “What else would you call them?”

  “Sick,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jane said. “They’re trying to kill us. That’s what matters.”

  I tugged on Dylan’s arm. “Stay here,” I said to Maibe. I pulled Dylan into Stan’s little bedroom of love. That was the only way to describe the red satin sheets, incense holder, and the huge mirror hung on one wall. This room made my skin crawl, which was a pretty amazing accomplishment considering all that had happened.

  “This is nuts,” Dylan said.

  I could see our profiles in the mirror. Both of us looked paler than usual, though Dylan looked downright ghostly next to me. He always turned pale and red when he got scared, while I turned pale and yellow. I was shorter than Dylan and Jane, not short, just shorter. The top of my head hit the bottom of Dylan’s chin. I began tucking in my flyaway hairs as if the act might magically make everything normal again.

  Dylan laid his hand on my arm to make me stop.

  I sighed. “What should we do?”

  “Obviously the girl is in shock. We just have to be careful with her.”

  “She’s a kid who watched her uncle murdered. Why are Stan and Jane being so harsh?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned the knob to go back out, then drew me close to his chest so that I could feel the warmth of his body and the beat of his heart. “We need to get hold of the authorities and figure out what’s going on.”

  “There’s so many of them,” I said.

  “I know. Look, before we go back I want to tell you—”

  “I love you too—”

  “—You’ve got to be more careful.”

  Embarrassment flushed my cheeks and a spark of anger lit inside my chest.

  “Considering whether to help the intruder at our patio door, and then running after Mr. Sidner, and then thinking, for even a second, about helping those other three? You’re risking yourself for strangers trying to kill us.”

  “And what about Maibe?” I tried not to raise my voice.

  “I know, I know.” He brushed a strand of hair off my forehead. I imagined slapping his hand away.


  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t help people, but I watched you tackle that woman, and I saw what she had done to Mr. Sidner, and all I could think was that I was about to watch you die, and how…God, I’m not good at this.”

  The part of me that didn’t want to slap him wanted to kiss him and forget what was happening for a moment.

  But I let that moment pass too.

  He pulled me into him and wrapped his arms around me.

  “All right,” I said, my words muffled in his shirt. The smells of cotton and his skin enveloped me, comforted me. “I will.” But even as I said the words I remembered too many people who had stood on the sidelines of my life, unwilling to help when I needed it. I would not turn into one of those people.

  I felt the door open behind me, startling me with its whoosh of air. Dylan didn’t let go.

  Silence. Darkness. The smell of his shirt, the warm dampness of my breath.

  “We’re coming up on the fire station.” Jane’s voice.

  Dylan let go and I followed him back into the main part of the RV. The bay windows provided a stunning view. Thinning fog, moving shadows, smoke trails, broken glass.

  “Why are there no cars on the roads?” I said. But no one answered my question, if they even heard it. I thought I knew the answer anyway. This early in the morning on a foggy Saturday—the streets were usually empty. But surely others had tried to escape?

  Jane climbed back into the passenger seat. Dylan and Maibe crowded the driver’s seat. Stan turned the corner. I leaned with Luna’s sway and let out a moan.

  “I told you,” Maibe said.

  Stan rolled his window down and craned his head out for a better look. The air suddenly filled with the smell of burning plastics. A stench that made my eyes water and blurred my vision. The alarms grew louder, overlapping, grating on me. Booms sounded at random, some far away, some close by.

  I stepped forward, the floor slick underneath my shoes. The windshield was grimy and moisture gathered on it. I bent over to peer through. Someone had broken all the windows in the brick station. A person in firefighting gear hung out of a bottom level window, his suit halfway off and his head and torso…bloody. A red fire truck sat part of the way out of the garage, all tires flat. The fog amplified the low roar of Luna’s engine. The fire station alarm came through as a low buzzing underneath the shriek of the car alarms. Something like a shotgun fired. More shots.

  “How far away are those?” Jane asked.

  “Hard to say with the fog,” Dylan said.

  “Turn the radio on,” I said. “Try the radio. Stan, get us out of here. Please close the windows again.”

  “But where do we go?” Maibe said. “There won’t be any place safe.”

  Jane fiddled with the tuner buttons.

  Stan labored to reverse Luna down the street. “There’s a police station about a mile from here,” Stan said.

  “This neighborhood is already gone,” Dylan said. “Whatever’s happening is a lot bigger than a gang of sickos taking over a neighborhood.”

  “Maybe it is zombies,” Jane said.

  Smoke rose from a house down the street, its column of yellow infecting the fog around it. Ours was the only vehicle running, though from the several crashed cars we'd passed, we weren't the only ones who had tried to leave by vehicle.

  A large RV, with purple swirls, revving its engine. We were a target for whatever had been let loose here.

  “Why hasn’t the National Guard been called in?” Dylan asked. “Where are all the first responders?” He stared out a side window looking like he was memorizing every house, every street, every broken window, trying to x-ray vision what waited. “And where are the ones who did this? Where did they go?”

  Maibe turned and looked at me, wide-eyed. “Do you believe me yet?”

  My shoulders trembled. My knee ached from my falls. I felt about ready to yell at Maibe myself, and then the tuner picked up a signal.

  Chapter 3

  “…ARE REQUESTED TO VOLUNTARILY EVACUATE DUE TO MULTIPLE CIVIL EMERGENCY INCIDENTS. EVACUATION CENTER HAS BEEN SET UP ON CAL EXPO FAIRGROUNDS. RESIDENTS SHOULD TAKE PRECAUTIONS AGAINST LOOTERS. RESIDENTS OF SURROUNDING AREAS ARE REQUESTED TO REMAIN INDOORS. PREVENT OUTDOOR ACCESS TO YOUR RESIDENCE AND COVER ALL WINDOWS. BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED. CIVIL EMERGENCY MESSAGE. THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE IS TRANSMITTED AT THE REQUEST OF THE CALIFORNIA EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY. RESIDENTS OF SACRAMENTO CITY…”

  Before my gardening job I’d been a seasonal employee for the fairgrounds. They often assigned me to events near the horse track. I had sneaked onto the river bike trail that ran along it many a time while on a smoke break with coworkers when that had still seemed cool. The fairgrounds were a place for entertainment, for overpriced food, for horseracing, but I realized its concrete acres and tall, chain-link fencing could easily be put to other uses.

  “Try another station,” Dylan said.

  Jane obliged. The next station sent out the same Emergency Alert message.

  “That can’t be all of it?” I asked.

  “The government is probably doing this on purpose,” Maibe said. “They don’t want any stations to get on the air and say what’s really going on. That always happens in the zombie movies.”

  “Girl,” Stan said, this odd twist to his voice, like the word came from the back of his throat at the last second instead of a different, harsher word.

  “Maybe she’s right,” Jane said.

  “Stop it, Jane,” I said.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Jane turned an accusing stare at me. “They’re monsters, or they might as well be, so you tell me, Corrina—what’s going on here?”

  “It’s not zombies,” I said. “I would buy some sort of sickness, a version of rabies or maybe a poison.” I refused to flinch under her stare. If that’s where it needed to go, I could give it as good as she could dish it.

  A banging on the back froze Jane’s features into panic mode. Maibe yelped. A cold determination swept through me. My life had been filled with people banging on doors, ushering themselves in, invited or not. I had learned I could deal with whatever waited on the other side, though, admittedly, this situation was a little different than what I'd experienced in the past.

  “Luna is only parked,” Stan said.

  “Help us.” A muffled male voice.

  “Go. Just go,” Jane whispered. She placed the bat across her lap and squeezed it until her knuckles turned as white as her face.

  Stan’s hand hovered over the shifter and I wondered if we were really going to repeat this whole scene again. “We have to at least see if…” If what? If they slobbered? If they walked like cripples? If they wanted to kill us? Did I really want to open that door and check?

  But then the squeal of the door sounded anyways. I whirled around. Maibe.

  Faces peered into the crack of light.

  “Wait.” I raised my hand in a stopping motion, forgetting it held the knife. The blade clattered onto the floor.

  “It’s a family,” Maibe said. She threw the door wide. “Come on. Get inside.” She waved her hands as if to make them hurry.

  I retrieved the knife. Three adults and two children pushed into the space.

  “You’re the one who’s talking about zombies,” I said to Maibe, “and you let these people in like it’s no big deal?”

  “I…” Maibe looked away. “The bad ones can’t talk. That’s how you know the difference. They can’t say words anymore, just noises.”

  “Thank you,” the older man said. He looked to be in his early fifties. His hair was longer than I’d usually seen people in their fifties wear it. More an unkempt style that fell just past the top of his ears, like a hipster. His pants were torn at the knee and streaked with dirt. His hazel eyes examined each of us in turn. His dark eyebrows accentuated his stare. There was something odd about his skin, a weird webbing of lines and an ashy cast to his color.

  “I’m Christopher.” He waved toward the two women. “This
is Gracelyn and Mai. The kids are Samara and Joseph. We’re not family, but we are all neighbors. Sort of. I was visiting my sister when they came through our houses this morning. We’ve been hiding until we saw you drive by the first time. When you came back around, we took our chance.”

  Dylan motioned for everyone to sit down. Gracelyn tucked Joseph, who looked to be about five, into her lap. Samara was maybe eight years old and pressed herself into Mai. “How did you know we wouldn’t be like…whoever’s done this?” Dylan asked.

  “They’re like animals,” Christopher said. His eyes lost their focus, as if he were reliving a terrible moment. “They aren’t capable of doing something like driving an RV.” Christopher tilted his head. “How’d you know we would be all right?”

  “We didn’t,” Dylan said, “but Maibe here didn’t give us much of a choice.”

  “All right…listen up,” Stan yelled across the RV. “This is my place.” He swiveled his chair around. “Everybody better watch where he or she sits. I want Luna kept as clean as when you all walked in. You better watch those kids, too. You’ll have to pay for anything that gets broken.”

  I felt a small hand reach for mine. I looked down as Maibe’s pink arm intertwined itself with mine. “I’m sorry. I promise they’re not zombies,” she said. “I’ve watched all the movies. I know the signs. They’re still okay.”

  This kid was alone when she had watched her uncle brutally murdered. I pulled her close for a moment and caught Dylan’s eye.

  “Everything okay?” He asked.

  “No,” I said, smiling through the tears welling up in my eyes.

  “Okay. Now that everyone knows Luna’s rules, we have a problem. Luna’s been in storage. We need gas if we’re going to make it to Cal Expo,” Stan said.

  “May we use the bathroom?” Mai asked, Samara still pressed into her side.

  “Absolutely not,” Stan said. “I haven’t had the septic tank checked in awhile. You can wait to go once we stop for gas.”

  I was about to protest, but when Mai returned her focus to the top of Samara’s head without argument, I let the matter drop for the moment.