Thicker Than Blood (Thicker Than Blood #1)(51)
My hair was filthy and greasy, because washing it without shampoo just wasn’t cutting it, so I piled it on top of my head in a messy partially braided bun. But even so, I still felt awful, itchy from dried sweat and the healthy coating of dirt that covered us all. I was in desperate need of a good, long soak with at least a sliver of soap. We all were.
“There were infected all over the place!” Alex shouted, slamming the driver’s side door shut. “Who knows how many more were inside.”
“That’s just great,” Evelyn snapped, her hands on her hips. “And now we’re who knows how many miles away from anywhere else! With nothing but…but…” She spun around, gesturing to the endless stretch of golden wheat surrounding us on both sides. “But grass!”
“Wheat,” I corrected her tersely, annoyed with both her and Alex, and their nonstop bickering.
“What?” she demanded. “Who cares what it is. Jesus, Lei!”
I shrugged. “You should care.”
“Why?” she demanded, practically shouting the word at me.
“Because,” I shouted back, feeling my temper rising. “We can eat it, Eve!”
This seemed to give her pause, and slowly the anger drained from her features. “We can?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes. We can eat the berries. We need to soak them first, but after that they’ll be edible.”
“How do you know that?” Evelyn asked. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously at me, as if I’d purposely kept this wheat-berry secret from her for our entire friendship for some nefarious purpose, and my just now revealing this wicked knowledge meant I must have more secrets, maybe bigger, badder ones, secrets that could possibly change the course of the entire world.
I snarled my answer. “I used to read, remember? Books? You remember them?”
“FUCK!” Alex suddenly bellowed, startling me. Silent now, Evelyn and I watched as his fist took a nosedive onto the hood of the truck. “Fuck!” he shouted again, and again went his fist.
“Fucking great,” Evelyn spat. Spinning around, she gave us her back.
I glanced between them both. At Evelyn, who was basically pouting in a metaphorical corner, and Alex who was throwing an adult-sized temper tantrum, taking it out on our only means of transportation. Out of gas or not, the thing still ran.
I took a deep, not-so-calming breath, full of hot air and truck fumes, which only served to further agitate me. Turning, I squinted down the highway, looking for anything at all, some form of shelter where we could rest and regain our bearings, maybe have some blessed privacy from one another. Yet, there was nothing. An endless stretch of nothing.
Sighing, I took a step toward the wheat, the golden stalks at least four feet high, nearly reaching my chest, and ran my hand over the top of their soft and silky stems. It would take ten, maybe twelve hours to soak them, but then they’d be edible. And something was always better than nothing.
I gritted my teeth, my hand suddenly clenching around one of the stalks. Crumpling the grains in my fist, I wondered how many times I would have to tell myself that, to try to convince myself of it before I actually began to believe it.
How much more surviving for the moment would we be forced to endure? Would it ever let up? Was there anywhere safe to go? Was there anything left at all?
As I was standing there, angry at the world and feeling sorry for myself, something touched the toe of my sneaker, and a low growl erupted from within the thick of the wheat stalks.
Seeing the bony, blackened fingers reaching for me, the dirty, nearly skinless arm parting through the wheat, I jumped backward, a scream forming on my lips. But the scream never came.
The infected was little more than a skeleton, really. Most of the skin on its face was missing, along with one eye, and it was using the earth to pull itself toward me. As its fingertips found purchase in the ground and it came slithering into view, I realized that it no longer had any legs, or even much of a torso left. Where its rib cage ended there was little that remained, only leathery ribbons of hanging flesh and dried-up entrails.
As it came for me, I continued backing away. Every inch it gained, I afforded myself a foot of distance, all the while staring down it, feeling scared, but something more than just fear. The raw sensation returned to me, the impression that my insides, my emotions, had all been sandpapered, rubbed clean of their protective coating and left open, exposed and bleeding.
Anger, pure and unadulterated rage began to well within me, making me feel too small for my body, my skin suddenly too tight, and feeling close to bursting. I just knew I couldn’t take another setback, stomach another letdown before I was going to explode. Because this couldn’t be all that was left, just this rot and decay, this abomination of what once was, all this…all this…godforsaken—because yes, if there was a God, he had surely forsaken us all— nothing.
Nothing. There was nothing left. Just me and Evelyn and Alex, searching for something we would never find, and this thing, this nightmarish monster creeping out of a beautiful wheat field, intent only on one thing. To destroy, destroy, destroy.
What did it matter anymore? What did any of it matter? How much longer before there was no more food to be found, before any and all shelters crumbled to dust? How much longer did we have before we too succumbed to the death of this world?
My scream, the one waiting on the tip of my tongue, finally bubbled free. A garbled and meaty-sounding explosion of anguish and suffering—and most of all rage—ripped its way up through my lungs, singeing and searing whatever it touched, and was sent soaring into the world.