Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4) Page 14

  “I thought it was only for overnight?”

  “Yes, well,” she hummed a couple of notes to herself and then looked sideways at me once we stepped into her backyard. “There was a water problem in Golden Estates and they dropped everything to go deal with that. And so here we are.” She fluttered her hands at the sky.

  We loved to gossip about Golden Estates, but Leiko was waiting for the starters. “So what’s the deal?” I saw about a dozen starts of wilted kale, wilted lettuce, and a single pathetic blueberry plant covered in yellow leaves.

  “I haven’t watered in two days. I managed to put by enough for me to drink, but that’s it.” She laughed. “I’m staying back all these feet so you can’t smell me.”

  I smiled and said, “Ms. Roche, you always smell like a butterfly and you know it.”

  She giggled and then fingered the blueberry, sending a leaf twirling to the ground. “The blueberry is bad off. Most should bounce back once you get them to the garden. Not sure the blueberry’s going to make it, but, well…” She shrugged her shoulders.

  I rummaged in my purse. I shook an almost empty bottle over the blueberry plant to release the last few drops. The heat seemed to laugh at my misting attempt.

  “Let’s get ‘em in my car.” We loaded up the plants and a wheelbarrow, and I waved as I drove off with my precious cargo.

  The community garden was two miles away, but the first half-mile crawled, and then brought me to a standstill. Lights flashed far in the distance. I turned left onto an empty side street—the alternate route would triple the distance, but who knew how long the accident might hold things up. I sent out a hopeful thought that no one was seriously injured.

  I turned the radio up and hummed along. Several miles later, I stopped at a light to turn left. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel and glanced back at the plants. This intersection always took forever. Whenever I stopped I swore the car’s temperature increased by ten degrees.

  My detour had taken me past city limits and into a section of vacant lots turning back into country. Two out of the four corners were cracked cement and starthistle. The other two corners were graveled dirt.

  Plenty of cars broke the speed limit racing through the intersection. Lunch hour. A bicyclist in bright blue clothes and matching helmet crossed before the light turned. “He’s got the right idea,” I said to the plants. Soon it would be too hot to bike, but he seemed better off than me right now.

  The light changed and I pressed the gas. My car rumbled to life, and then coughed, and then died. I sent out a frantic wish for enough momentum to reach the curb, but my car halted in what seemed like the exact middle of the intersection. I tried to restart. Nothing. The car didn’t whimper, but I did.

  The light changed, cars inched past, and then picked up speed. A black BMW made a lane change that almost forced a red truck into my front fender.

  I opened the driver’s side door and tried to ignore the irritation rolling toward me like heat waves. I took a deep breath, held the air in my lungs, and pushed the car with all my strength.

  The car moved like a ton of rock. It didn’t budge.

  I tried again, moved the car an inch, but then the grade of the street moved it back two inches. Sweat streaked down my face, arms, inside my clothes. I wiped my hands on my jeans and repositioned. “C’mon. You can do this.”

  I lunged into the push. I grunted. The car moved an inch and then another inch and then a few more. I was doing it! I was also headed into oncoming traffic, but I dared not lose momentum by trying to steer.

  “Grab the wheel!”

  I startled and lost my grip, but the car continued moving without my touch. The blue bicyclist was pushing at the back of my car. His bike lay in the street behind us.

  “Just get in and steer it,” the biker shouted. “Make sure this coffin doesn’t jump the curb!”

  I hopped into the driver’s seat, steered, and the car rolled onto the shoulder. I hit the brake, regretful that I was ending all that had gone into moving this stupid hunk of metal.

  “Thank you so much,” I said, jumping out of the car, ready to heap him with compliments. “It just stopped—”

  “Hold up,” he said. “Let me get my bike.”

  He jogged back to the intersection, ignored the lights, the Don’t Walk sign, and stopped traffic like he had a god-given right to it. He reached his bike. I heard him swear. He gave the finger to a honking car, and came back through the intersection. The bicycle’s wheel wobbled like badly tossed pizza dough. “Goddamn,” he said every few seconds and kicked out once at the passenger side door of a car that refused to let him pass. The car paused, and I thought I might witness some sort of road rage incident, but the biker’s fury must have given the driver second thoughts. The car sped off.

  When he reached the shoulder, he flipped the bike onto the seat and handlebars, and began fiddling with the wheel.

  I didn’t know anything about bikes, except that a wobbly wheel wasn’t good.

  “They tacoed the damn thing,” he said without looking up. “I just retuned the spokes. What a mess.”

  “Umm,” I cleared my throat. “Thank you for helping me, and I’m sorry about your bike. I—maybe I could help buy you a new one, as a thank you?” I could probably scrounge together fifty dollars. Maybe pay my rent a little late, forgo the seed donation money this month.

  He kept his head bent over the wheel. “The hub has lost some teeth. The wheels alone cost me $350 to build and the hub is ruined, that’s another hundred bucks.”

  My head began to swim. “I…”

  He looked up. Dark eyebrows and a shaving shadow framed sunburned skin and piercing blue eyes. “Not your fault,” he said.

  “But…”

  He returned his gaze to the wheel hub and then back to me. I drowned in multiple waves of embarrassment.

  “You didn’t happen to notice the license plate of the car that did this?” He asked.

  “I…” God, why couldn’t I finish a sentence or even put two words together? Maybe it was situational stress, the adrenaline lessening, the embarrassment rising again, the monumental mechanic’s bill waiting for me in the near future.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “I’ll help out,” I said. “I have maybe fifty bucks at home. I could at least help you get a new hubber thing.”

  He laughed. His facial features relaxed. “Hub,” he said. “Wheel hub. And really, it’s not your fault. I should have left it on the corner sidewalk, not in the intersection, but you looked so alone out there with all those cars honking at you.” He shook his head and spun his back wheel, but the wobble caught on the frame and stopped the movement halfway through a rotation.

  I remembered the plants. “Oh!” I said and ran to open the back of the Pathfinder. The plants looked much worse. The blueberry had all but given up. “Do you have any water?” I removed the wheelbarrow and pulled over the plant containers for closer inspection.

  “Uh, yeah.” He handed me the sports bottle from his bike.

  I unscrewed the cap and portioned water out for the blueberry. I drained half the bottle and then finished it off on four other starts. The rest were goners. “I was on my way to the community garden on 7th street and…” I trailed off as I saw the look on his face.

  He stared at his empty water bottle. “Did you know,” he said in a strangled voice, “that there isn’t any potable water around here for at least another two miles?”

  I dropped the offending bottle to my side. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Did you know today’s going to break a hundred degrees?”

  I laughed, the sound choking a bit in my throat. “I did know that.”

  After a long pause, he said, “It must be important to get these plants back to the garden alive.”

  “Oh, it is,” I said, and then rushed into a long explanation of each plant’s history, genetic value, the mission of the garden, the blueberry’s varietal uniqueness.

  He laughed and
held up a hand for me to stop. “Save your energy,” he said. “I believe you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, breathless at the warmth of his laugh. I wiped the sweat from my forehead.

  “You’ve got some dirt.” He moved closer and brushed his hand along my face. He pushed back a strand of my hair. Our eyes caught and held.

  He stepped back. “Sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “That was…I should be saying sorry.” I brushed my face again with my hand and froze. “I totally didn’t mean to do that.” I could have slapped myself. I turned my back to him, took the edge of my shirt, and furiously cleaned my face with it. When I turned back, he had set the wheelbarrow upright on the street and was filling it with the plants.

  “Since the plants can’t stay here, but the car looks like it won’t be going anywhere for awhile, I’ll walk the wheelbarrow if you walk my bike. There’s a bus stop about a mile away. No water, but the driver on this route should be cool about the wheelbarrow and he’ll get us to water.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said. “Nobody stopped to help but you. And now your bike is ruined because of me.”

  “True,” he said seriously. “All true.” And then he smiled. “The bus will let us off in front of a grocery store. Treat me to a bottle of ice cold water…and a date.”

  “I…yes, yeah. Okay.” I unsuccessfully hid a smile. “I’d love to.”

  He handed his bike over, and then closed the back of the Pathfinder. I didn’t bother locking the piece of junk. It’d make things easier if someone stole it.

  The wheel made it difficult to steer the bike, but I was determined to get the hang of it. Soon the shoulder gave way to hard-packed dirt wide enough for us to walk side by side.

  “I’m Corrina,” I said.

  “Dylan,” he said. He hummed a song melody, and then sang the words.

  “Yeah, my dad was a Bob Dylan fan.” I searched for something else to say. “I’m glad I met you.”

  He shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you mean that, considering the circumstances?”

  A little put off, I lost control of the bike and the front tire bumped into the side of the wheelbarrow. I steadied it and said, “Obviously I didn’t want my car to die like that, and using your water for the plants was—”

  He busted up laughing.

  After a moment I joined in. “Thanks,” I said between breaths. “I really appreciate a person who can laugh at me when I’m in trouble.”

  “With you. Technically, you’re laughing, so I’m laughing, with you, at all your troubles.” He pointed to one of the plants. “So what kind of blueberry is this one again?”

  “Well.” I touched the bare skin of his arm, feeling warmth, sweat, electricity. I pushed his arm so that his pointing finger moved a foot to the right. “First, this one’s the blueberry.”

  I babbled and I woke to my own noises. Christopher pressed against me, and I rushed back into a coma full of memories. I was next to my dying mother’s bedside. I was tied up in the army surplus store. I was listening to Maibe sob in the darkness. I was sitting next to Dylan. He was telling me how much he loved all my ideas: how beautiful I could make drying on a clothesline sound, how romantically I described a weed garden in every front yard, how inspiring I was when I talked about people trading in their gym memberships for bicycle-powered washing machines. But he knew me well enough to understand it was partly about fear, about not relying on others because maybe they couldn’t be relied on. People always died, people always left.

  Suddenly I was drinking water from a cup. I woke enough to eat the MRE that Christopher pressed into my hand. My body felt weak from sickness and dehydration. I realized he’d tied me up again.

  “Sometimes the memory-rush is too strong,” he said. “It can make you do things. Hurt people. You were walking around. This is safer.”

  “Where’s Jane. What did you do to her?”

  “She’s gone.”

  Chapter 9

  “Did you kill her?” I couldn’t generate much emotion at the thought. Not that I didn’t care.

  Even with what she and Dylan had done, she didn't deserve to die. But my head ached and my limbs were dead weights and my chest hurt and the memories had wrung out my emotions. I didn’t have the energy to care about much of anything.

  “She left, Corrina. And I didn’t do anything to her. She got out of the ropes before I could infect her. The memory-rush…She made it through the barricade and was out the door. That was over two weeks ago…I think.”

  It was too much information to digest at once. Two weeks? Jane gone? Was he even telling the truth? “She wouldn’t have abandoned us without trying to help,” I said with conviction. Jane was many things, but she had never been a coward.

  “That’s what happened.”

  “You’ve done something to her.” I strained against the bonds and pushed myself up a few inches to look at her sleeping place, but it was empty. The floor was bare of any blankets, bare of anything that gave the impression Jane had slept there. “And there’s no way it’s been two weeks. You are a liar.”

  “I think it’s been about two weeks,” Christopher said. “It could be longer. It…it’s hard to keep track.” He began talking about his wife, his kids, his job. He smelled my hair. He went to Maibe. She tossed about on the cement floor, but she did not open her eyes. He lifted her shirt. His hands hovered over her chest. Her nipples were two red dots on a flat surface.

  “Get away from her!” My tongue felt thick in my mouth.

  He sprang away from Maibe and he looked at me and he brushed imaginary cobwebs from his eyes. “I’m sorry. I…I…My child was sick and I had to rub menthol.”

  “Cover her up,” I said, and I fought the constriction of my throat. We lay helpless, locked in by ropes, bound up by sickness, possessed by a man gone crazy.

  He pulled Maibe’s shirt down, scuttled across the room, and pressed against the wall. “I’m sorry.” He did look sorry. He looked horrified. He rocked on his heels and stared unseeing into the air.

  I woke up and found him next to me. He cradled me, and disgust shuddered through me, but I did not pull away. I pressed my body against his, and I encouraged him to stay by me. He stayed by me, and he did not go near Maibe, and I wished for the fever, but this time it did not come.

  Christopher only slept pressed against me, and I spent those next few hours thinking about how far away Dylan was, how if he hadn’t stopped to help push my car out of the way we never would have met. How I might never reach him, and if I did, it might not matter anymore.

  Christopher woke and loosened the bonds enough to allow me to stretch. He loosened Maibe’s rope as well. He went into the back room, mumbling about foraging supplies.

  I searched Maibe for injury—her bedraggled hair and smudged hoodie, her cross-legged position on the cement. There was nothing.

  Relieved, my attention turned to the cold, how it seeped into my legs, deep into my bones.

  “He’s turning us,” Maibe said. “We’re becoming zombies.”

  I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say. He had made us sick with something deadly, something that had torn apart the whole city and taken Dylan away. Maibe’s explanation made as much sense as Christopher’s. And it didn’t matter what the truth was, it mattered that it was here and it had infected Christopher, and now—but I forced my thoughts away from this. My wounded hand throbbed and I pretended Christopher had only wounded me. A flesh wound, nothing deeper, nothing more profound. Please.

  The fever rose up in me again—a slight tick in my calf muscle, a sluggishness in my blood, a thickness in my throat and brain, a sense of floating through multiple dimensions.

  An image of Dylan from when we first met appeared next to Maibe’s right shoulder. He wore the biking shorts and held the blue helmet the way he had just before the car had crushed his bicycle. He flickered and disappeared, and then my mother hobbled to the bathroom door
in the robe she never took off during those last weeks. I closed my eyes, but her image remained. I opened them and she disappeared to be replaced with Jane, high school Jane.

  I heard a whimper and did not know whether it came from me or Maibe. With painful effort, I ignored the illusions for the moment and focused on Maibe’s flushed cheeks. The fever was ready to rage up in us again. I wondered how bad the memory-rush would get this time around, how long it would last, how much time we would lose.

  “I was sleeping on a piece of glass,” Maibe said. “I’m trying to cut through the rope, but I’m so weak, and then I go to sleep.”

  She turned her wrist to show me her progress. She had such a long way to go. If the fever hit her like it hit me, her muscles were weak and hard to control.

  Christopher came back carrying another water bottle and some rags. “Just a few more days, and then it will get easier to manage,” he said.

  Maibe turned her wrist away and closed her hand around the glass.

  “Christopher,” I croaked, trying to focus his attention on me. He came quickly to my side. His breath still smelled of sour, rotting food and I wondered if that was part of the infection, and whether it would become a part of me as well, and whether I would ever leave that smell behind.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. Shh.” He brushed the hair off my forehead and allowed his fingertips to touch my collarbone. He looked at me with a mixture of love and lust and madness.

  I was determined to keep his focus on me instead of Maibe. “Hold me? I can feel the fever rising and I’m scared.”

  He paused, squeezed the water bottles, and then set them down. “Of course.”

  “Maibe,” I said. The fever rushed up and fuzzed over my eyes. Christopher lay down beside me. He curled his arm around my waist. “Close your eyes and go to sleep.” I could not see well enough to tell whether she listened. I tensed my stomach muscles to keep them from flinching at his touch. “Stay with me, Christopher.”