Chapter One

 

 

I could not remember what day or week it was—all days seemed to be the same lately. I looked around the room, listening for the TV to see if it would broadcast anything. It hadn’t for some time now. Our electricity still worked, but we had been down on the payments, so I kept waiting for them to shut it off. We couldn’t pay for it; we had no money. It was just my two brothers and I—oh, I had a mother, but she did nothing but drink and take her ‘medicine’. Where she got them from, I don’t know.

She hadn’t always been like that. Once, when our family was together and our father lived with us, we were rather happy and our mother was the most affectionate woman of the block. But now she was not even a shadow of herself. She wasn’t even an empty shell. She was a mold, rotting in a corner of our house. When father left, she just gave up. She didn’t get up even though we tried to wake her from her stupor so we could eat—but now I provided for that. I provided everything for my brothers and myself; they were only five and three when our father left. They are now ten and eight and as responsible as two adults, excepting our mother who does nothing but wallow.

I washed the pans and looked out of the window. The weeds were growing high over the cinderblock wall again, and I knew I had to kill them again that night, but I thought about my mother. I have to admit I resented her. She was supposed to be taking care of us. I was only seven when our father left, and I had to become the mother. All we had were the clothes on our backs and our neighborhood house—that and our garden. If it were not for our garden we would not have survived.

Lately, however, there have been weeds.

The weeds came over the wall first, sprouting from downy spores that fell from the sky. I pulled them right out the ground when I saw them, even though they burned my hands and left them chapped for weeks. However, I could not let them destroy our only food source. We had used up all our canned food, and in those days we could sell the strawberries to the neighbors, and our cantaloupe. I made sure our pumpkins were the biggest around just so we could make some money for winter. Back then, Halloween was still practiced even though the electricity and the water had grown slim in the area. Of course, my brothers and I didn’t worry. Our home had an old well with a hand pump that still worked. It was the only thing left of the farmland that existed before our suburb was built. They had almost taken it out, but Dad paid them extra to leave it in. We got fresh water from the ground, and it came deep. Well water was free.

That was the only thing that was free.

The weeds also came into the other yards; I could see that when I used to walk from our home to school. Many of the children complained about them scratching their legs when they played in the yard. We never played on the school grounds after that except on the asphalt. Of course, back then the weeds were only a few feet tall. The weeds are now everywhere, including in the asphalt, and lately they have grown as tall as trees. Some even tried to climb over the wall into our garden, but I had kept that weed free at the expense of my hands. The school has since been closed.

I tried cutting the weeds back once, but they only grew faster if I did that. I tried burning them, but that didn’t help either. I found that if I tore at the weeds with my hands they stopped growing there, yet I always got hurt doing that. However, the best cure I found was dirty dishwater and old salty water from our boiled vegetables. I grinned grimly to myself, wiping the hair out of my eyes with my soapy chapped hands. Yes, I thought, I at last discovered the way to protect our garden. How I discovered this was on a day of utter frustration at ripping the weeds with my bleeding hands. I had finished cooking our boiled and salted potatoes. It was the best way to cook them since our oven died. I made a fire in a corner of our yard and cooked there. That’s when I found out the weeds liked fire. They were reaching for it like they wanted it. I got so mad I just threw the pot full of hot water at the plant. At the time, I expected the plant to grow wildly, like it always did when I burned it, but instead it shriveled and died. All the water was sucked up, but where the plant fell the ground became encrusted with salt. Since then I knew salty water killed the weeds.

The silver ring my grandmother gave me snagged on the stray hairs as I ran my fingers through my hair, and I pulled the dolphin fin that caught in my hair and released the tangles. I glanced at the ring in my hand and thought. The sea.

I sighed and gazed at the small fish bowl on our counter. That was our one luxury. We kept a fish. These days with water so scarce from public plumbing, our keeping a fish in a bowl was considered wasteful. But we were rich now; we used to sell water from our well to our neighbors when they came by. Our cash stash is pretty full. The neighbors don’t come anymore, but the well has not gone dry yet. The funny thing was, the money we got had only paid for food that we couldn’t grow—canned stuff and cases of salt. But then the stores stopped stocking so many foods about five months ago, and three months ago they started to close. The weed had encroached on the road and tore it up by then. The last time I walked to a grocery store, no one was there and all the windows were broken. These days all we have is our garden and our well.

A whine came to me from below. I glanced down at Brat, our golden retriever. I laughed to myself, remembering that people also thought we were selfish for keeping our dog, but Brat kept strangers out of our garden and from stealing our vegetables. Though everyone said we could eat our dog, I knew they just wanted to steal from us. Few people kept a garden now-a-days.

I bent over and scratched Brat’s head.

“Sorry, boy, only carrots today. Tom couldn’t catch a squirrel yesterday so we…” but I stopped and stiffened. I thought I heard a thumping sound, possibly hostile feet. We kept the weeds back as far as our front door, but the front yard was a briar patch like in Sleeping Beauty and I didn’t want to waste our saltwater on useless land. But that didn’t stop people from trying to break in to steal our food.

I picked up the nearest heavy pan.

“Who goes there?” I yelled, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

I clenched the pan in my hands, but Brat yipped excitedly at my side and leapt for the door.

“Brat!” I shouted.

However, the dog had better sense than I did. My brother Thomas stood in the doorway with two dead squirrels hanging by their feet from his hands. He had a triumphant grin on his face that countered the gaunt thinness that usually settled on his cheeks when he was sad. He was only ten, but he was fast and he was a hunter.

“I got two today, Sam,” he declared, placing them on the counter.

I grinned, gazing over them. “Big ones too,” I said, and then I looked around behind him. “Where is Jeremy?”

Tom rolled his eyes at me. “Jerk? He’s somewhere. He didn’t want to keep up so I left him.”

I grabbed Tom by his shirt and pulled him forward. “You left Jeremy? Thomas Calvin Carter! People might catch him and eat him!”

Tom pulled back and huffed. “Jerk’s faster. Besides, you can’t prove people are eating people now.”

I frowned and glared at him all the same. However, even Tom looked back and then soon stepped out the door to see if our little brother really was gone. The thing was, people had been vanishing lately and no one had said anything about it except that people were suddenly gone. Tom began to walk back to the yard. Just as he did, I heard a yell and a frightfully mischievous laugh. Jeremy came in dragging in another squirrel and a bag full of bird eggs. Tom followed him right after with a glare on his face, clenching his fists.

“I got Tummy good, didn’t I?” my youngest brother said, handing me both the squirrel and the eggs.

I rolled my eyes and said nothing. Jeremy had earned his nickname Jerk pretty well, and I didn’t care to step in their fight. Thomas had every right to be mad at Jeremy most of the time.

“You got Sam worried,” Tom said protectively.

That was the thing. Tom was protective of me, and I protected them. Jeremy was just along for the ride to provide entertainment, or that was how I saw it.

Jeremy lifted up his head indignantly, much like a conceited fifteen-year-old boy, though he was but eight, and he replied rather smugly, “Well I couldn’t follow you. I found a robins nest, and I wanted to get eggs for breakfast.”

I looked at the bag of eggs, and indeed it was a full nest—five eggs, nice speckled shells. It would be nice to eat a bit of protein that wasn’t squirrel. I just wished we had a chicken. Then we would have a regular farm with our tiny backyard garden.

“Thanks,” I said placing the eggs on the counter. I would have put them in the fridge years ago, but now I don’t. I store everything in a safe, hidden place in case of robbers.

We had been robbed once a few months ago. These five men, huge men, came from over the wall and stole our vegetables and the nuts Tom and Jerk had gathered. They tried to steal Brat, but Brat bit one man where it counts, and they have never been back. Even still, I worry that one day they will be back. Ours is the only garden in the neighborhood, and food has become scarce outside our walls.

My brothers bickered in the room, but I ignored it. When they get this way I just ignore them. I took one squirrel and skinned it. Then I skinned the next. I peered out the window at our garden wall. I don’t know if plants smell, but skinning always brought the weeds over the wall, almost as if they could smell the blood. I was trying a new prevention system though. I had sprinkled salt on the wall ledge and made a moat of salty earth. So far the salt moat seemed to work. I didn’t have time to waste boiled water on the weeds, and I wanted the meat and the broth. We smoked the meat—made squirrel jerky, but first we boiled them for the broth. That gave us double use for food. My brothers used to be picky about eating squirrels. But since food had become scarce, we have eaten nearly anything—all except for the weed, which we haven’t figured how to cook yet.

Turning around, I glanced at the both of them. Tom had hit Jerk on the head, and Jerk was trying to scratch Tom, calling him Tummy. It was the closest insult my brother could make up that matched Tom’s name, and it annoyed Tom enough that it worked.

“Which one of you will bring this potato to Mom?” I asked.

Both boys froze, still clenching each other, though this time in a certain sense of fear and dislike.

“Why bother? She hasn’t touched the last one or the carrot we gave her yesterday. Sam, I think she’s dead drunk,” Tom said.

I blinked. “Did you see her leave the house for more alcohol?”

He shook his head. “She hasn’t moved since yesterday.”

Jerk nodded, agreeing.

“Not at all?” I asked, gazing at them.

Both boys shook their heads solemnly.

I clenched the warm cooked potato in my hand and shivered. I gazed over to the room where our mother usually kept to. It was a dark smelly room. She never bothered to clean it, and I didn’t want to. It smelled worse than the bathroom, of crap and pee and throw-up. I hated going into it, so I usually made my brothers go and feed Mother.

“Go check for yourself,” Tom added pointing out of the kitchen.

I blinked again and nodded. She was our mother, and I had to find out why she wasn’t eating. Even when she was drunk she ate what we gave her. I still couldn’t figure where she got the liquor. I frowned, stepping across our living room, now our regular sleeping room since no one wanted to sleep alone near the outside walls anymore. The weed pressed against the walls, sometimes creaking as if they were trying to push the house down.

Our living room was dark. With the sun setting, our last light came through the kitchen door. We had covered our front windows with our bedroom doors and nailed them shut using the last of the nails from our father’s toolbox. It was great protection from strangers and the weed that had broken the glass. We filled the whole windowsill with salt water, so the weeds no longer tried to get in there. However this left the room dark, even in daytime.

I tiptoed across the room and entered the hallway. My brothers watched me from the kitchen door; it was the only lit room in the house. It had a window that opened onto the garden and was free of weeds.

It was only a few feet down the hall, her room. The door was usually closed to keep the smell out of the rest of the house, and the room was almost always dark. We had blocked her bedroom window for her with a closet door. The weeds encroached in on the room from outside early on, and it was the only way to keep them out.

I knocked on her door.

“Mom?” I said. I had not called her Mom in ages, but it came back just as it had been five years ago. However, I could not cry for her—not now.

“Mom?” I said again, knocking once more on the door.

Nothing.

I twisted the doorknob and pushed on the door. It creaked and squeaked. The ground behind it scratched against the door. That sick odor that merely leached out trough the cracks when the door was closed exploded into my face as soon as it was wide open. I gagged and coughed, stepping back.

Taking another second, I held my breath and stepped into the room.

The smell was unusually bad. It was possible that rats had come in the room and died there from suffocation, but I couldn’t tell in the darkness. Only the dim silhouette of the slumped figure of my mother was in the room. We had burned her bed for firewood months ago and only her filthy blankets and mattress remained. The dresser was gone as was the old cedar chest. The mirror leaned against the wall, cracked, and the shelf brackets were empty. We took them for last winter’s heating.

“Mom?” I said again, and gagged from the reek in the room.

She just sat there, slumped on her mattress like a rag doll.

I tiptoed over to her taking care not to step into any of her mess. Reaching the wall, I leaned down and nudged her shoulder.

“Mom, you have to eat.” I held out the potato.

She said nothing.

I shook her shoulder harder. Her head lolled to one side, but only from my shaking. It had been leaning the other way before. I scowled.

“Mom, even drunks have to eat. You can’t survive on liquor,” I said angrily.

I wanted to kick her. I wanted to hit her. I wanted her to do something, but her head just hung there. Not even a finger twitched.

I leaned over once again and hit her hanging head.

“Mom! Get up, you lazy…” But I stopped. She had done nothing, not even breathing in surprise or pain. Nothing.

My hand shook, but I reached down and pulled on the hair on her forehead, lifting her face up. She stared glassy at me. Her eyes were vacant, and looked like they had been that way for some time. I had seen that look on squirrels—dead squirrels.

I dropped her head. It fell back to her chest.

I would have stepped back from her body into a pile of her filth, but the stench of refuse and the reality of our life these last few years kept me to my senses. I stepped carefully back to a dry spot on the floor, stared at her once more, and peered at her chest, which did not move. I stared at her for I don’t know how long, but it must have been long because my brothers were standing at the doorway where they had left yesterday’s dinner and the dinner of the day before, still untouched.

I swallowed to clear the dryness in my throat.

She was dead.

I shook my head and shuddered. I was overcome again from the stench of the place and fled out of the room to where my brothers and Brat stood. Brat whined at the door. I glanced at him. He already knew. Animals did.

“Did you make Mom eat?” Jerk asked.

I clenched the potato in my hand and closed my eyes.

I heard Tom gasp. Then I heard our mother’s bedroom door slam closed. I didn’t open my eyes for a while, but I could tell that Tom knew and was talking to Jeremy, taking him back to the kitchen.

“Mom doesn’t want any dinner from us any more. She only wants to drink now,” he said.

I opened my eyes. Tears rolled down in rivulets. How dare she die! How dare she!

Brat whimpered at my heels.

I broke open the potato and handed him a piece.

 

Tom and I walled mother’s room closed with yard mud and old weed. It was easier than trying to drag her dead weight out through the crap in her room and find a part of the yard we were not already using for the garden. There was nothing else we could do that seemed halfway decent. We made Jerk clean the guts out of the squirrels for Brat to eat, saving some for tomorrow in case we could not find food for later. We tore up old towels and filthy useless rags to stuff the cracks in the door so the odor of the dead did not spread too far into the house. We finished it by barring the door with a mattress, nailing it up to the wall with old towels and nails and thumbtacks—anything we could find to keep it up. We didn’t want to waste firewood on the wall.

Tom pushed the last thumbtack into the wall and sat down. He looked at me once, like he was attempting to say something but trying to be delicate about it—something he was never really good at when it came to me.

“Do…do you think we ought to have a funeral service?” he said cautiously.

I scowled. “No.”

He frowned. “But, Sam, she was our mother. Don’t you think she deserves something at least?”

I didn’t want to look at him. I knew that if I did, I would cry, and I didn’t want to cry.

“What about Jeremy?” I said, not looking over at all.

Tom sighed. “Samantha, Jerk is going to figure it out. He’s not stupid.”

I frowned.

“We walled our mother into her room. He is going to notice,” Tom added.

I choked on a sob.

“I think you should tell him,” Tom continued. “He won’t listen to me.”

I nodded, standing up. When I looked up I saw Jerk already standing in the hallway, staring at us and at the wall we had created. I expected his eyes to be wide but they weren’t. He just stared in his usual blank way at us, and he gazed past to the mattress tacked into the wall by the towels. He let out a sigh and nodded.

“Good,” he said, “That will keep out the smell.”

Tom gaped, watching Jerk walk over to us, carrying a burnt stick from yesterday’s fire and shoving the charcoal end against the wall. He drew on the dirty white surface, making a cross of black ash. Under it he wrote R.I.P. MOM.

Perhaps he had always known. Jerk was like Brat—he had a way of knowing things. Kids were like that.

Tom took the burnt black stick from Jerk’s hands and wrote on the wall, too. His scratches were less large. He wrote her name and then our names. Afterward, he blackened his hands with the ash of the coal and rubbed it all over one of his hands. Then he put it on the wall, leaving his handprint.

Jerk took the stick back and copied Tom, blackening his hand and putting his smaller handprint on the wall. Then he handed the stick to me.

I held it for a second. It seemed natural now, our funeral rite. We showed we were the survivors by leaving our mark. I blackened my hand and added my handprint to the others.

“There,” said Jerk, “Now we can go eat dinner.”

He was right. Our mother was dead, and we would not survive if we stood here forever, moping, and did not eat, and that was all there was to it.

“I gutted the squirrels. Now you have to cook them, Sam,” Jerk added from the kitchen. He had run there rather fast.

Tom and I both left quickly, too. Neither of us wanted to linger in the hall near that door.

Chapter Two

 

 

 I often walked through the neighborhood in search of things. I didn’t scavenge exactly. I sort of looked around to see what others were doing against the weeds, that and I liked to see if any news came into town. The last news report we had advertised new housing on the ocean, something I wish we had been rich enough for or smart enough for. They gave scholarships for intelligent students, gifted families of scientists, and schoolteachers with a little money if they wanted to go, but I seemed to be the only one in the neighborhood that would have liked to have gone. But there was this secondary application I had applied for. It was a race. That was why I went into the city.

The race was advertised ages ago. They wanted young and healthy men and women, fully grown—that meant at least twelve years old—to apply for a race. It wasn’t just any race. It was a survival race. The competitors had to have survival skills and be willing to fight through a jungle to the sea. They also had to consent to medical procedures that would enhance their capabilities for the race. You had to be sponsored by a company or institution. And if you won, you got a great, yet still undisclosed, prize. I had applied for it nearly a year ago. It had several forms, and a woman had to give me a medical exam. I had to prove I was a fully-grown woman, which I had declared I became that last fall with the start of my period, but the woman only smirked at me and scribbled into her notepad.

It had been six months since I had applied, and the date of the race was coming up soon. Never had I wanted anything so bad. I wanted it, not only for myself, but also for my brothers. I had heard somewhere that the prize might be a free ticket to the ocean cities, all expenses paid. It could be something that would help us all. I had to get us out of the neighborhood before things got worse. The first step was to go into the city. It was in the city that the race was being set up.

Our garden was failing. The salt was killing our vegetables, and the squirrels were fewer and fewer. I never see my neighbors now. Since Mother died, no one had come by. Perhaps the smell of dead frightened them.

I had said to Tom the morning that I left, “If I don’t come back by Friday then that means that I am in the race, and I will win it for us.”

Tom had frowned slightly and nodded. “Alright, Sam. You win that race and bring us back some food and more salt—and some good soil for our garden.”

I had nodded and left them standing in the doorway.

“Take care of Jerk for me,” I said to Tom.

Jerk smirked and stepped forward with Brat. “Don’t worry Sam. I’ll take care of Tummy for you. He won’t starve, and no one will eat him.”

I had to laugh. Tom hit Jerk on the head.

“You win for us,” Tom said again.

I left, not looking back. I knew if I had looked back I would have cried.

It had been days since I had left them. It was several days of walking to the city. All the cars were gone from the weed-encroached street, except for a few that were turned over and rooted out by the weed. I usually slept in a thicket of trees; the weed left the trees alone, almost as if it were afraid of it. Tom had warned me days before, “If you are going to go soon, Sam, you had better wear my armor.” He meant his turtleneck with pieces of cardboard sewn onto it with yarn. He had made it when the weed started to grow these big spines.

The spines in the weed, Tom had told me, had a poison. He said that once when he and Brat and Jerk were looking for squirrels, Brat had been scratched by a weed and fell dead asleep. He and Jerk had to drag Brat home on one of their coats. I remember when they took Brat home. He was still breathing. After three hours he was fine and awake, though groggy.

“Sometimes the weed spits,” Tom had said.

What he meant was the spines sometimes filled with poison and exploded when something warm ran near it, spitting up the poison, throwing it. He found this out when Jerk tried to knock the spines off with rocks. The poison hit Jerk in the face. He fell after three seconds. Tom and Brat dragged Jerk home, and Jerk slept for five hours before waking, feeling awful. Both of my brothers left the weed alone after that and wore homemade armor.

I now wore his armor. He could make some new ones. We had plenty of Dad’s old coats in the front closet that we could use. I used an old ski pole as a walking stick as I tramped through the plants the last few days. I walked slowly. It seemed that the weed also spat at fast moving large objects, like dogs and cats. I saw cat bones and skulls along the way, and I almost was sure I saw a human skull, but none of the other bones. I supposed the animals must have eaten him. I was starting to get nervous, since I had yet to see another person since I left my home. I kept going, but slow.

The downtown city area wasn’t as far off as it seemed. I had walked it once before when the weed did not encroach on the road. It had taken me only one day. Now it was taking me longer. The weed was nearly impassible now, and I still had not seen one human.

When I climbed over my hundredth root of weed, which now stood taller than most of the houses. They had flowers swaying in the breeze at the top like huge red lilies, something new. I felt an immediate prick at my ankle when I set my foot down. A spine had scratched me. Right away my heart began to race. I knew what I had to do, but I did not see a tree in sight. Already I felt lightheaded, but I hurried faster over the weeds to the side of the road. No trees. None. It was a plain grassy lawn without even a bush. My head was feeling lighter, and I could hardly see now. Around me there was a blur of green of the weed, but I had to get out of it. Swaying above me I still saw the red/white lilies, some dipping low toward the ground as if wilted. I didn’t want to think of what the weed might also do with that lily. The spines were bad enough.

I ran to the front of the house, pounding on the front door, as my head swam.

“Let me in! Let me in!” I shouted.

No one answered it.

I could see the weed actually moving toward me, the lily head lowering as if sniffing for blood, just like the weed that crept over the wall every time I skinned a squirrel.

I pounded on the door harder, but no one came. I couldn’t see anything now. My eyes were closing even though I still fought to stay awake.

It was then that I nearly fell over, right into the lily that had opened up behind me as if to catch me, but I stopped myself. My fear woke me up. I stared at the gaping open lily behind me. It stank like acid. I stepped back angrily, Turning, I kicked door, right at the lock. It jerked, against my kicks, but I did it again three times before the door broke open. I fell into the entryway.

The entry was dim, as was the living room. I staggered across the floor halting with a heart-pounding stare at what I saw. Unlike our home, the weeds were inside, draped through the window and lying across the carpet like the bodies of several enormous pythons, trailing into nearly every room of the house, including up the stairs. I would have turned around to find another house to hide in, but the lily behind followed me into the house.

I hit it back with my ski rod, which wasn’t the smartest thing to do to a spitting plant. It spat back; only it missed me and hit the wall. It wasn’t a poison that hit the wall though. I heard it burn and sizzle. That seemed to bring me right awake, if only for a moment to run. The faster I ran, the quicker the lily found me and followed me. I had to hide in the bathroom—the first weed-free room in the house—and threw myself into the bathtub behind the porcelain, to make sure it had missed me.

I could hear the weed slithering around outside the door, but it passed and went down the hall. Once it had truly gone, I slowly got out, closed the bathroom door, and locked it. It didn’t know if the weed understood doorknobs or locks or anything. All I knew was that I felt safer inside a locked room. As it was, I fainted soon after. All my tension and fear was gone out of me and no longer was able to keep me awake.

 

I awoke, what I was sure, hours later. I had a horrible headache, but I expected that. My body also ached. I inspected the scratch from the spine. It was a gross shade of green and pussy. I pinched the puss bubble on my ankle and it popped, oozing that familiar sick smell. I wiped it off. We had to do this for Brat when he had been scratched, and he hated it, yipping and struggling to get out of Tom’s and my hands. But after we washed it, it was ok. I only wished I had some water here.

I turned the bathroom tap just to see if there was still some water left in the pipes, but there was nothing. Instead, I opened my rations and took out the water. I didn’t apply any water to the wound though; I drank it. There was no point in wasting drinking water on a scratch.

 

I began my journey again when I was sure I could walk without fainting. When I left the bathroom, I peeked to make sure the lily was gone. The long weed that was the lily stalk was still there, but I

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.12.2009
ISBN: 978-3-7396-0930-0

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