Between Friends, page 13
“Oh, short for Patricia,” Julia said vaguely, passing the medallion over the fence.
Pet reached for it, but the Korean student stretched out a hand and took it instead. “Short for something, anyway,” she said, leaning on the fence again. “Thanks for that: sorry about the noise.”
Julia found that she had already almost forgotten about the noise. What had it been, a scream? A body hitting the fence? But no, it couldn’t have been either, because that liquid was rusty water, not blood.
“That’s all right,” she said. “What happened, anyway?”
“We had an unexpected, um, guest,” said Pet. “He’s gone now.”
Julia didn’t quite like the way she said it, but it was all right, because the liquid still trickling its way through her garden and right into the watermelon patch was only rusty water. Nothing to worry about.
Instead of asking the bothersome question about where the water was coming from, Julia found herself asking, “You studying somewhere around here? I’m in my third year of nursing: exams in two days.”
Pet seemed to think about that for a moment before she said, “I mean, yeah, I s’pose you could say I’m studying.”
“Exams?”
The Korean student said something soft and warning, then turned and went back to the house.
“Sorry, what?” Julia said.
“He says that it’s a full moon tonight, so you should be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Not a clue!” said Pet cheerfully, looking over her shoulder at the other student. “He says weird stuff sometimes. He explains stuff more than the other two, but he’s trying to be mysterious and cool at the moment, so who knows when he’ll unbend enough to explain himself. See you ’round: good luck on your exams!”
What had Pet known? wondered Julia now, coming out of her drowsy memories of yesterday evening to find that her tea was cold. More importantly, the watermelon vines were definitely closer to the house, and the same coils of veiny red that she had seen digging in across the surface of the watermelons themselves were corded around the vines themselves.
The vines which now, Julia saw in horror, had plucked the neighbour’s cat from the top of the fence where it had been stalking birds, and drawn it back into the watermelon patch. She made a vague, distraught protest and sprang to her feet, her cup of cold tea tumbling from her hands as she darted for the kitchen with one thought in her mind.
The gas-lighter was in the top drawer where it always was, and it lit when she pinched at the trigger with a shaking finger. Perfect. Julia turned and ran for the back door, snatching up the jerry-can of mower fuel as she ran through the hall, the gas-lighter in her other hand. She fairly leaped through the door and cleared the few patches of vines that coiled to trap unwary feet, dashing for the watermelon patch, but the next door neighbour’s cat was already dead, a sad, soggy little patch of fur to add to those already in the garden.
Julia stared down at it in a mix of nausea and rage, and threw a wild arc of petrol over the whole patch from her jerry-can. It was already far too late, or course: the vines uncoiled from around the cat as she watched, soiling the garden soil with blood. More importantly, those watermelon vines were already beginning to move toward her. Julia threw another smelly arc of petrol over the patch and laid a trail behind her as she swiftly made her way back toward the house, rage in her heart.
It was a bit of a wobbly trail over the parts where she had to jog and leap over vines, but it ran all the way to a foot from the patio stairs, and when she was done, Julia threw the still half-full jerry can back toward the watermelon patch. It sailed through the air and spluttered down within a few inches of the garden.
Close enough, thought Julia, and reached out a surprisingly steady hand with the firelighter. She heard the click as she squeezed the trigger, though she didn’t seem to remember actually squeezing it, and there was a faint breath of silence before everything from three feet and beyond went whoof! and exploded into a sheet of flame, hot and oxygen hungry in a way that seemed to draw the breath from her lungs.
She turned on her heels and ran for the house again, slamming the door behind her just as an explosion of vine and leaf and flying watermelon flashed by the kitchen and sun-room windows simultaneously; giant vines, monstrously larger than they had been a moment before, were slithering around the entire house.
No! How had the fire made the vines bigger? How?
Julia’s nerve broke. She ran for the front door, hoping desperately that she could make it through to the road before the vines got her, too. She tumbled through the door and almost collided with two people on her front patio as the watermelon vines stretched and reached for the road, scaring off a small terrier that had been sniffing at Julia’s mailbox.
She caught herself with a shriek, then uttered another wordless cry as a vine tried to wrap itself around the waist of the girl from next door. Pet. What was Pet doing here?
And why did she have a teapot?
Julia wasn’t left wondering for long: Pet threw the teapot at the closest watermelon, which was, ridiculously, just by the stairs, and the Korean student smacked the soaking watermelon smartly with a wooden broom.
The melon exploded in chunks of red, and the vine withdrew, sharp and urgent.
“Borrow a cup of sugar?” Pet asked breathlessly, as watermelon vines snaked around each other behind her to make a lattice around the patio.
Julia said wildly, “If you think I’m going to believe you just want sugar when there are watermelon vines trying to grab people off the streets and off my patio—!”
“Fair,” Pet said. “Well, you’d better invite us in, then. This is JinYeong, by the way.”
“Invite you—invite you in?” Julia stared at her. There was still a slight chance for a very quick person to make it to the street before the watermelons could shut in the whole place, and she didn’t want to miss it.
“Well, we’re gunna be sucked dry if you leave us out here, and I don’t reckon you wanna be left alone with vampiric watermelon, do you?”
Julia’s jaw dropped. By the time she had gathered herself, Pet was already edging past her, though JinYeong waited for her weak, “Come in, then,” before he stepped through the door. By way of a joke, she said, “What, I suppose you’re a vampire, too?”
“Yess,” he said, in a thoroughly satisfied way.
“What do you know about vampires?” asked Pet, in an accusatory sort of way.
“Well, you just said the watermelon are vampiric, and they’ve been feeding on the birds and—and the cats,” Julia told her, feeling sick and rather accusatory herself. “That was blood yesterday, wasn’t it?”
“Told you,” said Pet, with the grace to look faintly guilty. “We had an unwelcome guest. I didn’t know that it could cause trouble on a full-moon night, though: JinYeong explained this morning when we um, realised that something was going wrong. It would have been fine if it hadn’t been watermelons or pumpkins, mind you.”
“We have come to rescue you,” said JinYeong, as if he expected to be congratulated.
Julia looked him up and down, taking in the slender beauty of his figure, the impeccable style with which he was dressed, and the very carefully arranged hair.
“I think we should have made a run for it,” she said, chewing on her lip.
“Not much good doing that,” said Pet. “You’d just have vampiric watermelon overrunning the neighbourhood, and there go all the kids and animals.”
Julia hadn’t thought of the rest of the neighbourhood: she had thought only about escaping. Pet’s surprise made her feel guilty.
“I didn’t mean that I want people to die,” she said stiffly. “I just thought that—”
“Good grief, I’m not blaming you,” the other girl said. “No, this lot is our fault, anyway. We sorta seeped into your garden; it’s not like you knew anything about it. Running away is good sense in most situations, apparently. Oi—you got a really big kettle or something? I haven’t got me teapot anymore, and it was too small, anyway.”
“I’ve got—I’ve got an urn, if you want it? It’s for the uni, but—wait, why do you want an urn?”
She was talking to the air: Pet had already vanished into the kitchen. Julia might have followed her in there, but there was something very forbidding about the kitchen doorway that stopped her in her tracks. Instead, she turned an uneasy look on the vampire JinYeong.
“Is she—does she know what she’s doing? What is she doing?”
“I do not know,” said the vampire, with a look of dark amusement, “but it will be verrry enjoyable. It is always enjoyable.”
Julia shot him a distinctly uneasy look; she didn’t care for the relish in his voice when combined with the bloody look to his eyes. “Looks like you two know each other pretty well,” she said. She didn’t know her next door neighbours at all, and she rather regretted having to know them now, but she was curious.
“Yes,” said JinYeong. “I will marry her.”
“That hasn’t been decided!” yelled Pet, from the kitchen. “Don’t tell people we’re gunna get married! I haven’t even agreed to date you!”
“I am beautiful,” JinYeong said to Julia, with absolute certainty. “She will change her mind.”
“I don’t think she cares much about looks,” Julia said, without thinking about it. If Pet had cared about looks, there was a big, glorious white-haired bomb-shell next door as well: slightly on the older side, but Julia liked an older man. JinYeong was certainly beautiful, but he was on the slender side, despite the tautness to his frame that suggested he was both strong and muscled.
“Yes,” JinYeong said again, this time darkly. “It is very irritating.”
“You’re very irritating,” Pet retorted, emerging from the kitchen and wheeling in front of her an urn that was much larger than Julia remembered hers being.
No, she realised, with a buzzing in her ears; Pet wasn’t wheeling it in front of her, it was trotting in front of her on four little black legs that shouldn’t have been moving, let alone in a self-governing sort of way. And the urn, instead of being a small, metal thing of about two feet in height, was now a monstrous steel canister that puffed a small stream of steam behind it and towered over even JinYeong, who was the tallest in the room.
Julia sat down suddenly in the closest chair and then sprang hastily to her feet to avoid being burnt by the urn as it turned uncertainly around the room as if unsure whether or not it would stand on someone’s toes.
“Go on,” Pet said to it encouragingly.
The tea urn tapped its feet in a little, joyful circle before it evidently decided that yes, it had been given permission, and toddled toward the back door, tooting a bit of steam out from the bit of the lid that wasn’t quite sealed properly.
Gaping and not quite breathing properly, Julia said, “What did you do to my urn? And how?”
“It’s been wanting to move around for a while,” Pet said incomprehensibly. “I just encouraged it to be a bit bigger before it started moving around: it’s gunna spray some hot water at the watermelons for us.”
“How do you know?”
“It told me,” said Pet, and threw something at her. “Here, you’ll need this.”
Julia caught the item in a self-preserving kind of reflex, and found that she was holding a broom. “What?” she said weakly.
“Well, Athelas and Zero are out,” Pet explained, tossing another broom in JinYeong’s direction. “But JinYeong knows a bloke—well, a vampire, actually—from the Balkans, and it’s brooms.”
“What’s brooms?”
“Just go out and hit as hard as you can at any watermelons,” Pet said, her hand resting on the knob of the back door. The urn did a little dance in expectation. “With the brush end if you can manage. Try not to panic too much, but if you really have to, try to panic toward the watermelons, right? And only go for the ones that the urn has sprayed already.”
“Why?” asked Julia. “Why can’t I go for ones that haven’t been sprayed?”
“Because they will kill you,” said the vampire, turning a look of exasperation on her.
Julia wondered why she had thought his eyes were warm yesterday. “There’s no need to be rude,” she said resentfully, and followed Pet toward the door.
The vampire muttered something that she couldn’t understand, but Pet said soothingly to him over her shoulder, “All right, no need to get your knickers in a twist. I know you were only trying to answer the question: you just gotta work on your delivery. You lot ready?”
“Ready!” said the vampire, with a gleeful chuckle. “Open it!”
Julia didn’t have a chance to say that she wasn’t ready—wouldn’t ever be ready to go into battle against vampiric watermelons under cover of a far-too-large tea urn and armed with only a wooden broom—because the door was open and the vampire and the urn had vanished, and now Pet was turning to go, too.
One last, encouraging smile, and she was gone.
Julia gripped her broom handle with whitened fingers, and realised that Pet didn’t really expect her to come along. She had left her here, safe in the house, but with a weapon in case the watermelons got in.
She very nearly didn’t go out, either. A breath: then two, and three, and four, passed. And Julia knew then that if she didn’t go, she would never go. Never go, never be able to face the terrible unknown, never be worth the price of her education or her pride as a nurse. If she couldn’t do this, how could she ever hope to be a nurse?
“I don’t have time for this!” she said in despair. “I have exams!”
And she dashed out of the back door after Pet and JinYeong.
She caught her breath in terror when she tumbled down into the backyard from the patio stairs: above her, vast, serpent-like coils of vines writhed, around her burgeoning watermelon swelled, red and green and hungry, and seemed to lean toward her. She saw the quick figure of Pet smacking watermelons with the brush end of her broom; she heard the sickening crack as they split into bloody chunks. The urn, flashing silver and green in turns, spurted boiling water and steam, and closer by, JinYeong darted back toward Julia.
“Ignore the vines!” yelled Pet over the sinuous sound of vines writhing and the shriek of the urn. “Get the watermelons—bash the little beggars!”
Julia did as she was told, wildly, viciously, eyes slit almost shut, but she felt only the solid, painful reverberation of her broom ricocheting off tough watermelon without anything of the effect that Pet had had.
She stopped, almost panicking, and JinYeong fairly threw her sideways as a watermelon vine slashed out protectively. It hit him instead, and he went flying, but he seemed to be used to it because he flipped in the air, gracefully, and landed on his feet like a cat, smashing a watermelon that was too close to Julia for comfort.
“Be careful,” he said, pressing down on her head.
Julia dropped to her knees, obedient to that pressure, and a stream of boiling water spurted over her head. She rose when JinYeong did, battering steamed watermelon with the brush end of it, and by the time they had cleared that side of the house, there was a fresh lot of sluggish, parboiled watermelon to smash into bloody pulp while the hot, sweet scent of them hung in the air.
Her hands had seized up around the broom handle, and blisters had formed and burst long ago by the time Julia found that there were no more watermelons to smash. She spun in a shaky circle, her broom held aloft and trailing bloody watermelon, and JinYeong dodged and swore at her in Korean, brushing watermelon flesh from his lapels.
“Do not do that!” he snarled at her. “I am already untidy!”
“You can’t blame her for the watermelons being messy,” Pet said, turning in a far more considered circle than Julia had, her grey eyes running competently over the entire yard for signs of further danger. “Looks like that’s it, doesn’t it?”
“What if they come back?” asked Julia, breathing too heavily and ignoring JinYeong’s complaints.
“They won’t,” assured Pet. “You only got ’em this time because there was vampire blood and a full moon and watermelons. I mean, you can pull up the whole bed, but you don’t really need to.”
“My suit is messy,” said JinYeong severely.
“You got stuff in your hair, too,” Pet told him, removing chunks of watermelon flesh from his hair. He stood perfectly still for that, and even ducked his head to make it easier for her. He also stopped complaining, and when she was finished, Pet said brightly, “Right, that’s the lot. Reckon it’s about time for a cuppa, don’t you two?”
The tea urn tooted at her and trundled back toward the house, and Julia, still feeling charred and shattered and sick, said, “What?”
“Coffee,” the vampire said, grinning a far-too-toothy grin at her. “We have won. Now it is coffee time.”
“We almost died!” Julia called after them, entirely flabbergasted. “We almost died! What do you mean, it’s time for coffee!”
“Coffee tastes better after you’ve almost died,” Pet said exultantly. “You’ll see!”
* * *
“I should be studying,” Julia said helplessly. She had said the same thing about ten or fifteen times now, but she was as well aware as the other two evidently were, that she would by no means be able to do any such thing. Who could, after fighting off giant vampiric watermelon with boiling water and wooden brooms?
The coffee might taste better after you had almost died, but Julia had always liked tea better, anyway.
“Tests tomorrow,” said Pet, with a vaguely encouraging tone. “It’s bad timing, but we can fix that for you.”
“You keep saying that, but I don’t see how you can,” Julia said in despair, as someone knocked at her door. “Oh, what now? They haven’t come back, have they?”
“Nah, that’s more of our lot,” said Pet. “Athelas and Zero, I reckon. I texted ’em. They’re good at this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Inconvenient things,” JinYeong said to Julia, as Pet went to answer the door.
Julia might have taken offence at that, but she had the idea that he thought he was being helpful, so she tried to ignore the feeling that he was referring to her as one of those inconvenient things.
