WIP Wednesday - On the Edge of Nowhere: Fruit That Should be Forbidden

 

Cover Image: Erin Dameron-Hill Graphics

Eat or be eaten...which would you choose?

* * * *

Yes. Gina could run and take the fruit in her hands with her. Except now that she had it, she was seized by the urge to eat it immediately.

A boy and the second teenage girl shifted. They put themselves between her and the door.

“Don’t leave without a taste,” the teenager said.

“You won’t believe how good it is,” the boy insisted.

It was at Gina’s lips, the skin smooth. The sweet citrus aroma was thick in her nostrils. Her stomach spasmed, begging to be filled.

“Gina—” Mattie started.

Gina bit.

A scream pierced her ears, and violent pain sliced through her head. Her teeth had closed on the fruit, and she ripped a piece out as she thrust it from herself.

She noted several things at once. The warm, meaty taste that filled her mouth instead of the cool, juicy fruit she’d expected. The pink mass within pulsed. Thick red liquid gushed and poured from the fruit, more like blood than juice. And last, the shrieks—those of a hysterical infant—issued from the hole she’d torn into the skin.

Her stomach heaved despite having become a hollow cavity. She expelled the horrific mouthful and dropped the fruit. Eager hands grabbed it, took it away. Gina retched and spit in the effort to rid herself of the disgusting taste.

“That won’t do,” someone said. “She didn’t swallow any.”

Mattie yelled. “Let me go!”

Gina straightened from her hunched position. Biting Boy and his victim, along with one of the other boys, had taken Mattie down to the ground and held her there. Straddling her, Biting Boy sank his teeth into the fruit he’d snatched from Gina. He chewed and red dribbled from his mouth. He broke off a piece and shoved it at Mattie’s face.

The other three pickers closed in on Gina and blocked her view of her friend. The biggest girl yanked another fruit from the tree.

“One swallow, and you’ll love it,” she said. “You’ll never be hungry again. Not in your belly and not in your head. The fruit fills you with goodness. With knowledge.”

Gina ached to take it from her, to bury her teeth in its pulsating innards. She had swallowed a small amount of the juice (blood, her mind whispered), and the craving for it doubled. Yet her horror edged out the need clamoring for her to feast, along with a vague understanding that if she did, the fruit would do worse than kill her.

She tried to dodge the middle-school boy, desperate to get to Mattie, whose muffled squeals barely registered over the screams of the fruit. The boy drove his shoulder into Gina’s stomach and knocked her breathless to the ground. In an instant, she was pinned.

The girl his age straddled her and pressed the shrieking fruit to her face. A bite had already been excised. Gina stared at the terrible flesh within, then at the girl, whose face she’d seen before. A face blank with death, tossed from a wheelbarrow to a pile of corpses…

“Eat. You know you want to. Do it.”

Gina ached to feast, though the thing’s flesh throbbed against her lips. She twisted and fought and bit her lips together to keep the foulness out.

The children holding her cursed. The girl who sat on her set the fruit aside. She used her fingers in an attempt to pry Gina’s lips apart. When she succeeded, Gina bit her until she bled.

“We need help!” one of her assailants yelled. “Since she’s had a taste, give up the other one. Let the tree have her. It hasn’t fed in a while.”

Gina gasped. She remembered the gnashing holes in the trunk, dozens of lipless mouths.

There were yells. Mattie jolted across her field of vision, as if she’d been flung. A tremendous ripping sound overwhelmed the squalling fruit. The ground shook. Mattie staggered. Her arms pinwheeled, and she fought to keep her balance.

A massive serpent tore out of ground, brown and dripping dirt. Its tapered end had no eyes Gina could discern, but it pointed straight at Mattie. It darted too fast to be followed. An instant later, it had wrapped around her to pin her arms and legs so she couldn’t struggle. Mattie shrieked as the root—not a snake, but a root of the tree—moved in the direction they’d come from. It ripped itself out of the earth as it went.

“You eat of the tree or it eats you,” the girl straddling Gina smirked. She watched Mattie being carried off and bit the screaming fruit. She spoke through the mass in her mouth. “It’s better to be the eater.”

* * * *

Those who step inside Hungry House never return. But when the abandoned house on the edge of town is ready to feed, it won’t be denied. 

Inquisitive Gina and her impulsive best friend Mattie know better than to enter the abandoned Victorian. The mansion on the edge of Nowhere, Georgia, has a reputation for ‘eating’ those who dare to step inside. Yet when another friend and her younger brother disappear after last being seen heading toward Hungry House, Gina and Mattie have no choice but to follow.

Inside, they find every door is a gateway to a new nightmare. Even death is no escape—it only sends the unlucky trespassers back to the start of Hungry House’s gauntlet. Their only hope is to survive long enough to confront the house’s mistress, an inhuman being whose lust for vengeance is as immortal as she.

Releasing October 25. Pre-order now: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords.

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