What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) by Delany Beaumont Read Free Book Online Page A

enough for her to say, “But you are, aren’t you?”
    I look at her. Her face is calm and open now. The tears have left deep grooves that score the dirt on her cheeks. I look at her greasy, straw-colored hair, long and unruly and in tangled clumps.
    Maybe she’ll let me try to comb it.
    I haven’t seen her like this since Larkin left us. She looks younger, vulnerable, needy.
    She trusted us. She was abandoned, left to die alone, and she found me, then Larkin. She believed we would always be together.
    “I can’t lie to you. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” My voice is shaky. I want to speak encouraging words, I want to inspire them, but my mind is blank. Stace has wandered into the room and takes a seat on the bed with the rest of us. “Just stay with me a little longer, all of you.” It’s the only thing I can come up with. I close my eyes and then I feel Emily’s arms around my shoulders, hugging me tight.
Three
    In a grocery store not far off the highway I hear voices. I’m by myself, foraging for food. The store is nearly barren. Glass litters the floor. The entire place smells rotten. I try to stay as far as I can from the meat and fish counters, from the dairy aisle.
    Here on the outskirts of Raintree, everything has been ransacked, everything good, everything useful taken. I think about the sickened people fleeing, trying to grab what they could even though they must have known they only had a short time to live.
    I’ve left Emily in charge back at the motel. We’ve stayed there for two nights now. I wanted to leave sooner but Stace is sick, her nose running and forehead hot to the touch. CJ and Terry continue to pick on each other. They’re shoving each other around one minute, then playing quietly with their plastic soldiers the next. This store was too far away to have brought them with me, on the opposite side of the highway. I’ve left them unprotected.
    We’re hungry, constantly, unbearably hungry. The packages of convenience store food we’ve found are mostly candy or frosted pastry. The cakes and bars and bite-sized pieces are stale and mushy, furry with mold. After scraping the worst of it off, the edible bits are delicious for a few moments of luxurious chewing but soon make our empty stomachs clench, then heave. It’s hard to keep anything down. The sugar we absorb makes us shake.
    There she is.
    It’s a whisper, followed by the crunch of glass on the linoleum floor. I whip around and see a shape flit past the end of the aisle I’m standing in. I have a broken jar of peanut butter in my hand, some of which looks good enough to eat. I’m so hungry that I’ve been staring at it, hypnotized, fighting the desire to pick out the shards of glass, scrape off the pale green fuzz coating the top of the jar and stick my fingers deep inside the rest of it, filling my mouth with the creamy paste. But I know I should bring it back to the others.
    The voice. There she is. Someone else nearby.
    I stand frozen like a deer, listening. There’s no other sound, no indication of movement. It’s not until I’ve taken the time to set the jar of peanut butter carefully back on the barren steel shelving that I bother to look down to where I expect to see my rifle. That’s when I realize I’ve left it behind somewhere. I’ve gotten careless.
    I don’t feel panicked or scared. The situation feels oddly dreamlike, like I have little control over anything that is going to happen no matter what I try to do. I hurry to the end of the aisle opposite to where I heard the voice, toward the back of the store, trying to avoid crunching anything, making any noise, although I’m sure someone’s watching me.
    At the back, leaning against an empty bread rack, I find the rifle just where I left it. I grab it and retrace my steps, easing my way to the front of the store, less concerned about making noise now. I kick the lid of a jar unintentionally and hear it clang off the base of the steel