Germination (Feast of Weeds Book 1): A Novella

Chapter 4

"Shed."

"You last saw them at a shed?"

"Here."

"At a shed here at the train station?"

I nodded.

"How long ago?"

I shook my head even though it made the tent spin.

"You don't know. Okay, that makes sense. The virus distorts perception of time. How many have you infected?"

I tried to think back, only my friends, all my friends, all our dreams for the future. "Six. All of them." A tear slipped down my cheek, but I couldn't wipe it away with my hands strapped down. It stayed there for all the world to see, to know, to despise.

She counted out the vials and separated them from the box.

The other suit returned and she filled him in. He rested a glove on her bare shoulder for a moment.

"You will need to decontaminate that now," she said.

He returned to the far side of the tent and spoke again into the radio. The responding voice, crackling with static, was recognizable. Officer Hanley.

A keening noise started, and then I realized it came from me, from my throat. I thrashed in the chair, raising my hips and stomach, lurching like a caterpillar rising from a leaf, but the straps kept me in place even as the moon suit jumped back into the folds of the tent.

Someone outside yelled, and then there were footsteps. I settled back into the chair, my tantrum doing nothing. Moon suit shouted everything was fine, it was fine, stay away, and then the steps went away.

"I promise you this will save your friends. They will be getting the same treatment as me," she said. But something else hitched in her voice and told me that whatever this treatment did, it wasn't much better than death.

She wavered on her feet, as if swaying to slow music. She pressed her hand to the back of her forehead and closed her eyes. "It works so quickly, so damn quickly."

She opened her eyes and looked at me, as if trying to read whether there was anything human left inside of me. I thought there was, but not much, not enough.

She grabbed a needle, emptied a vial into it, plunged the liquid into my IV, then did this a second and a third time.

"What are you doing?" he said. "We are losing control over this thing. We can't waste our resources."

"It probably won't work," she said, not really answering him, I think, but more answering the question in my eyes. "It hasn't yet worked this long after, but I had to try..." The needle and vials fell out of her hands and she swayed again, this time with her eyes closed, as if she had fallen asleep standing up. Moon suit caught her just as she went down, softening her fall to the ground. He laid her out carefully and then jumped back and checked over his suit as if it were covered with red fire ants.

When he could not find a tear or hole, his hands came to rest at his sides. He heaved deep breaths, almost sobbing, but there was no sound except for the rustling of his clothes and the low, soft hiss of his air tank.

I closed my eyes and swam in a sea of red. Metal dinged against metal, steps sounded, a plastic tent flap rustled.

I opened my eyes and saw he was gone and had taken the tray of vials with him.

She sat up and crawled a few feet away, her hands and knees dragging in the dirt like she had weights tied to them.

"What's happening?" she asked.