Frenzy (The Frenzy Series Book 1) (2 page)

Through the meager harvest and canning season in late summer, he helped in the garden without complaint, often for hours on end. He began to beg Father to let him join the rotation early, wanting to practice his archery skills in real life. His goal was to take down several bucks or a large bear to garner enough meat to give every family a healthy portion.

Ford also helped our neighbors with their gardens and chores, especially the elderly and infirm. While his few friends giggled about girls and ran around town, Ford kept his head down, and his tenaciousness didn’t go unnoticed. Just last week, the Elders announced his apprenticeship working with the Colony’s livestock. It was an important position in our community. What livestock we were able to breed were all we had to sustain us, should things get epically worse. And things, it seemed, were heading in that direction at a rapid clip.

I was glad I didn’t see him this morning. Hearing the growling of his empty stomach was driving me crazy. It didn’t bother me when my own howled and cramped, but Ford was still young. He was my baby brother, and younger siblings should never go hungry. Mercedes whispered through the wall vent more than once that she could hear my stomach rumbling from the other side of the wall that separated our beds. Her powerful voice would later fade, heavy with the despair we all felt but could do nothing about.

I eased the door closed behind me and stepped outside. Fog hung thickly in the air, a damp, silken blanket that covered the black earth underfoot. My leather boots sank into the mud with each step. It had been too dry during the spring and early summer, but late summer and fall was unseasonably wet, causing the river to swell and flood out of its banks. Our house was one of the closest to the water, so it was one of the first to flood. We were one of the first families to lose the majority of the crops we’d spent so much time tending. Everything planted in the front yard was lost, which meant we would only have the back yard gardens’ bounty to last us through the season and to provide food throughout the winter.

Trudging toward the rapids on leaden legs, I mentally prepared myself for the ceremony. It had been exactly one week since Mercedes left on the hunt with four other people. There were two men, one woman, one teenage girl, and Mercedes. The others returned without her, telling a horrific tale—a nightmare we all lived. She had been bitten by an Infected. The others in her party couldn’t risk helping her, even when she screamed and clawed into the black mud beneath her. They ran and didn’t look back, thankful to make it back to the crossing themselves, heaving for breath and thankful they’d made it. Why they weren’t accompanied by a night-walker was beyond me. It was part of the treaty, and until that night, the treaty had never been broken.

The sound of rushing water over smoothed rocks pulled me from imagining my sister’s fall. To most people it was a soothing sound, but to me, it was an awful reminder that Mercedes would never cross those rapids again. The smell of rich earth and fresh water mixed with the crisp leaves that blanketed the ground everywhere, leaving the branches above bare and cold. Like macabre fingers clawing toward the sun, they stretched toward the North Star that peered down from the lightening morning sky.

Surprisingly, Father was already waiting at the calm pool beneath the nearby waterfall. It wasn’t the largest fall along this river, but it was wide. The pool beneath the spilling water was pristine and calmed the ripples that the fall pushed outward. It was one of nature’s juxtapositions. Rage met temperance. Ferocity met timidity. Life met death.

All of those lost from and mourned by the Colony were honored here in this pool, so it seemed that Mercedes’ farewell was even more fittingly held here. It was the spot that we swam in as children, and where we bathed to rid ourselves of the dark, miry earth before Mother had a fit. It was her favorite place, where she would come to think, and where Noah had stolen her first kiss. Noah – the boy she’d loved since childhood, the boy who had grown into a man – the man she planned to marry this winter.

Standing alone near the water’s edge, I watched the swirling torrent just beneath the falls and let the rush of the water fill my ears. A waterfall of my own flowed steadily down my cheeks, spilling onto my dress drop by drop. Fresh. It smelled so fresh here. None of the Infected were across the bank, because their rot wasn’t present. Her rot wasn’t present.

The Colony considered her dead, but the truth was far worse. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t really alive, either. Mercedes was Infected now, and would begin to decay. Her pearly white teeth would yellow and chip off as she gnawed on blood and bone, sometimes animal, sometimes human, but always anything she could grab hold of. Her golden hair would thin, falling out in great clumps. I’d heard rumors from expeditions that chunks of hair littered the briary woods. Her skin would mottle and her muscles would weaken. She would remain a walking skeleton, her only concern her next meal, only barely surviving until something bigger came along that she couldn’t escape. Then,
she
would become the meal.

And if she ever were to catch a human, ever bite a human, she would infect them and spread her curse to another. The most humane thing, the Elders said, was to find the Infected and eliminate them. But the Colony was in survival mode now. Winter had just begun. The gardens were mostly barren, and though we stored what food we could spare our stomachs during the spring, summer and fall, there wouldn’t be enough to keep everyone from going hungry over the coming cold months. The priority would be hunting for meat that everyone would share, but that wouldn’t be quite enough for anyone. However, the meat would keep us alive until the last snow fell and we could begin planting again.

Feet shuffled in the tall grass behind me. Every resident, unless ill or physically handicapped, was expected to attend the farewell ceremonies. Most wanted to attend, to pay their respects, or so they claimed. In reality they wanted to gossip, to ferret out their fears of the Infected that lay just beyond the river. Fortunately, farewells didn’t happen that often. We’d only had three this year until now, and those three colonists died of natural causes.

Mercedes was the fourth. Oh, how Mother wailed when she learned of Mercedes’ fall. She cursed and screamed and questioned why it couldn’t have happened to me or to Ford. Then she raised her hands toward the heavens, called us liars, and demanded that we leave her house and not return. Ford didn’t outwardly flinch at her words, and I wouldn’t allow myself to. Not anymore. Instead, we came here, to the river.

Ever the peace-keeper, Father scolded her and called for the physician to give her a tincture to calm her nerves. He made excuses for her behavior and apologized on her behalf, though Ford and I both knew she wasn’t the tiniest bit sorry for her actions or the poisonous words that poured so easily from her mouth. I wished there was a remedy for bitchy. Mother desperately needed that.

To Father, Ford, and me, Mercedes wasn’t dead. She was living, and though it was a half-life we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies (not even upon Mother), she was still alive. I took solace in that. Somehow, the knowledge that she was fighting to survive despite the infection was more comforting than covering her corpse with six feet of heavy, ebony soil. She was on this side of the grave, even if just barely. Even if only temporary.

Someone had to find a cure at some point. If she could just hold on. . .

As the trio of Elders, clad in white robes that draped from their bent bodies, stepped toward the water, I backed away. Too close now to discreetly bury myself in the midst of the gathered crowd, a sea of black and white cotton, I stopped and listened. I watched the flowing water, refusing to give credence to the words of old men who had no idea what it felt like to lose a family member to the Infected, who sought no cure and saw no hope in the future.

Survival was a necessity, not a way of life. They’d given up, and so had everyone else.

I couldn’t allow myself to listen to their propaganda. I listened for Mercedes and I heard her laughter in my mind, in the memories that she still lived on in. She would stay vibrant and healthy there until I died. I wished I could transfer them to someone else so I could to keep her alive forever.

Once the old men were finished taking turns speaking about Mercedes, whom they knew very little about because they never cared to get to know her while she lived amongst them, the residents, friends, and acquaintances formed a line to the river. Each stepped forward to utter a prayer for her. Some threw dried flowers into the dark water. Stiffened petals and stems gathered on the surface, some overlapping the others until they became heavy and sank together to the river bed. All two-hundred thirty-seven residents prayed that my sister would die swiftly. That was what they prayed for: mercy. But my thoughts were unmerciful and it was eating away at me slowly. I was the only one who asked her to hang on, who willed her to keep trying, to live, for me.

It was selfish. I was selfish.

But I didn’t care. I couldn’t bring myself to wish for death, however merciful, to find someone I loved.

I knew that I should stand with Ford, but he was lost somewhere in the crowd. Mother and Father were, too. They didn’t need me and I didn’t need them either. It had been a long time since I fit in with my family, if I ever did. Now, none of it mattered anyway.

Small crowds of people lingered, chit-chatting merrily about how much food they were able to preserve, of all the fall crops they pulled from the earth in the past month, their predictions for the winter snows, and how they were thankful that the night-dwellers weren’t able to attend farewell ceremonies. When the treaty was made, there was talk of a wall being erected to separate them from us. No physical wall was built, but a wall stood nonetheless; invisible, dividing the two creatures. No human crossed the barrier into their section of the Colony, and no night-dweller crossed unless it was to take part in the rotation.

My father caught hold of my elbow as I walked toward home. Carson Grant sighed and raked a hand through his graying hair. “Your mother wishes to speak to you before you go.”

I sighed heavily. Of course she did.

“Okay.” My teeth were clamped together so tightly, I thought they might splinter.

“I—” he stopped his words abruptly. My eyes urged him to complete the thought, but he clamped his mouth closed and nodded in the direction of our home. When he released my elbow, I walked away, my boots sinking deeper into the miry clay. I would rather walk for a thousand days through this mess than be forced to look into my mother’s face today.

Our house was two stories of once-white, aluminum siding, with old furniture stuffed into every corner of every room, and a rusting metal roof that sounded like the tinkling of wind chimes when rain hit it. When Mother and Father were first married, they chose this house together. Not all houses had been claimed back then, and it took several generations to build the population to the paltry number the Elders so often boasted about. At one time, a family had filled the walls with love. Mother removed that warmth, that love, which hung upon the walls in the form of memories, of family portraits and finger-paintings. She gutted the house, throwing out anything that wasn’t useful, ordering Father to set it on fire. And he did.

I wish I could have seen what ‘happy’ looked like before the flames devoured it. The old Victorian house had a long porch on the front with paint that was chipping and peeling, revealing withered posts and boards. It was like seeing the skeleton of an unhappy thing.

Mother was waiting on the porch for me, arms crossed over her chest, mouth and brows pulled into tight knots. “You took your time and wasted mine.”