Amanda Carter in the L.A.Z., life after zombies (28 page)

Chapter 48

“
D
one,” Sam said, walking up just as Amanda was rolling down the door. “Wish we could drive this thing through the car wash.”

“Keep dreaming,” Amanda said, finding herself able to laugh.

“What’s next?” the girl asked, as if she were full of energy already.

“Well, we weren’t able to grab any wood from the store for obvious reasons,” Amanda said, glancing up and down the street at the storefronts.

“And?”

“There’s a lot of wood here,” she said, indicating the boarded-up windows on some of the stores.

In fact, during the looting, people had torn down some of the plywood panels and two-by-fours, and they were lying along the sidewalk up and down the street.

“I see,” Sam said. “Let’s do it.”

Ash had begun to fall on them here at this location, and it would only be a matter of time before the fire would catch them here too, along with all the creepers that it attracted. The ash served as a reminder to them that they needed to hurry.

They gathered up all the useable pieces of wood that had littered the scene and then used the crowbar to pull off some more pieces that were still attached to some of the buildings, until they had a decent pile to put into the truck.

Red watched them from his shaded position under the truck, looking at them as if they were crazy. Because in his mind, after all they had been through, it was definitely nap time. He yawned and then gave up watching them work and closed his eyes to sleep.

“I think Red’s got the right idea, and we’re just crazy,” Sam said, regaining her sense of humor. “Is this going to be enough wood?”

“No, but we’ll come across more along the way before the day is out, and whatever we find, we’ll just have to make do with.”

Sam nodded.

They didn’t bother to search any of the buildings along this route because they had all been extensively looted early on. A time-intensive, meticulous search would most likely have produced something of use to them, but time had stopped being their friend when the fire had started, and Amanda knew that there were more important uses for their time that would offer bigger and quicker rewards for them. And so she determined that they would be moving on.

Amanda had to reorganize the front of her truck because of all the things that had spilled over from the extra cab during the bumpy ride. While she was doing that, Sam came to collect the guitar. She wanted it to ride with her.

“You’ll follow me,” Amanda said.

Amanda fired up her truck and pulled out, looking back to make sure that Sam was indeed following her. She had another store in mind that was essential toward fulfilling her agenda. But she wanted to make sure that she didn’t lose her perspective again and put them in any unnecessary danger, like she had back at the home improvement store.

They rolled up on the farm and tractor supply store without seeing a single person or creeper along the way. The town was once again giving off the impression that it was deserted, but she knew that wasn’t true. It might be that all the living people, other than themselves, had fled town, but the creepers were coming eventually.

Amanda stopped before entering the store’s parking lot because something seemed off about the look of the place but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what was giving her that impression. She left her truck running and reached for the binoculars. Though she could see no movement, she quickly figured out why the place had been giving off warning alarms.

The store windows were shattered, but that had happened a lot during the looting and would not in and of itself speak of danger, but she could see a lot of shiny brass bullet casings littering both the parking lot and parts of the store, along with what looked like fresh blood and bullet holes in the walls. This, she considered, was most likely the place that the shoot-out that they had heard earlier in the day had taken place. But the question was, “Where was everybody now?”

She needed to get in there if this long-term plan of her was to work, but again, she didn’t want them risking their lives to do it. She bit her bottom lip and continued scanning the area with the binoculars. With so many bullets, there must have been bodies, but she could only see a couple of creeper bodies that looked like they weren’t freshly fallen. She had to ask herself if this was a trap.

Amanda tossed the binoculars onto the pile of stuff on the passenger seat and began to slowly roll into the lot, choosing to drive all the way around the back of the store to take a better look. She had known this store well from the LBZ days because they carried a lot of essential items for people like her that had chosen to live for periods of time in the way out part of the desert. Because of her knowledge of the place, she knew that she would be able to roll around the back and complete a loop back out to the front if they needed to jet out of here in a hurry.

As she drove slowly along, she could clearly see all the signs of a recent gun battle. It was entirely possible that the two bands of raiders had clashed right here only a couple of hours ago in a territory dispute that had been caused by the fire. It was also very likely that all the raiders had left, giving the town up for lost because they had recognized that the fire had no intentions of stopping before it had engulfed most if not all the town.

In the back, four human bodies were stacked. They were fresh corpses, all with gunshots. She looked away. Even being accustomed to how things were now, it was still difficult to see sights like that. She was sorry that she would be exposing Sam to that, but it was the world that they lived in now, and hiding it from the girl wasn’t going to protect her anymore.

Amanda rolled to a stop after deciding that there was no one around anymore. They would be partially hidden from view back here, and that would give them a chance to try to load up what they needed without being seen, if someone were to drive by.

“Is it safe to get out?” Sam asked.

The girl had rolled her window down and was glancing in the direction of the stacked bodies.

“Yep, looks like whatever happened here is finished,” Amanda said.

“Is this where that gun fight happened?” Sam asked, climbing down and letting Red jump out.

“I think the odds of that being true are good,” Amanda said.

“What do we need from here?” Sam asked while Red warily sniffed around, his hackles up.

“There is a lot that we could use from here, but we’ll have to see what’s left. I’m sure that the raiders already looted it.”

Sam followed Amanda, who had taken her .22 out, just in case, into the store.

The large bullet holes in the blood-smeared walls were much more real to her up close than they had seemed when looking at them through the binoculars. She stepped over some debris that had been blown off of the shelves by some type of large caliber weapon, probably an automatic.

There were a couple of collapsible army green cots, still set up on the store floor, with clothes piled on and around them, along with some empty food and water containers. This made Amanda feel like somebody might be coming back for some of this stuff.

“People were living here?” Sam asked.

“Looks like,” Amanda said, being sure to check around each aisle to be sure that no one was waiting for them.

“Do you think that they’re coming back?”

“Maybe.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better about this,” Sam said, glancing around at the chaos in the store.

“Me neither, so let’s just grab what we need and hightail it out of here,” Amanda said, finally feeling like she could slide the .22 behind her back.

Red seemed to concur that they were alone for now.

The shelves still contained some items, and Amanda glanced over all of them carefully before grabbing another small water pump that they could hook into the truck battery. The one they had been using still worked, but it was old and wouldn’t stay working forever. They could really use this one as a backup.

The store had carried at least a dozen of them, but there were only two left, so she grabbed both of them.

“See that little generator on wheels,” Amanda said, “can you roll that out of here?”

The store had also carried thirty or more different types of generators of all shapes, brands, and sizes. Amanda could only see two left, and she chose to take the smaller one because it would be easier to handle. They had a generator back at camp, but like the water pump, it wouldn’t work forever, and who knew when they would come across another one.

The only other thing that she could find inside the store that would be of some use to them were jumper cables for charging a battery from one car or truck to the other. The store had previously offered a lot by way of water filters and purifiers, batteries, solar panels, and the like, but all those items were gone now.

After loading up the water pumps, jumper cables, and generator, Amanda had Sam follow her over to where they stored new hundred-gallon tin drums for water that came with a faucet attached to make getting water out of them easy. They were essentially identical to the one that Amanda already carried around in the back of her truck. There were still a number of drums left so they worked on carrying, one by one, four of the tin ones and a smaller black plastic one over to the truck.

If the fire was going to cut off their ability to collect gasoline from town, then Amanda was determined to go back to camp heavily loaded with water, enough to last them for a month or so, if they used it sparingly. She hoped that would buy them some time to figure out what they were going to do about their water situation in the future.

Amanda had not bothered to check the specs out on the moving truck to know for sure just how much weight that it could carry, but she chose to assume that since it was used to move people’s furniture and stuff that it would hold some weight. She hoped so, because the amount of water that she wanted to bring back would be heavy, in addition to everything else that they had loaded in there.

They had to unload one of the drums when they discovered a bullet hole in it. They went back for another one, since there were still plenty of them left. And then Amanda had Sam help her with carrying a wooden tower back to the truck. These towers were made to hold a full water tank, and she could envision them being able to rig a shower up by standing underneath it and turning on the faucet. Of course, in order for them to feel comfortable using their water to shower, they would need a steady source of water close by to refill it from. But those were all problems that would need to be worked out. The important thing for now, Amanda thought, was that they would have what they needed to carry and store water.

“I don’t know about you, but this place is giving me the creeps, let’s get out of here,” Amanda said, jumping down from the truck, followed by Sam who hopped down beside her.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Sam said. “What’s next?”

“The store across the street is boarded up, and we could use that wood. Let’s drive over there and grab it,” Amanda said, sounding more enthusiastic than she felt.

The reality was that Amanda could feel the fatigue of the day in the muscles of her body as she walked back to her truck. Her left arm felt as if it were on fire too. Without the thin cotton over shirt, the sun had been beating onto the wound, compounding the pain that she would have been feeling from it anyway.

Plus, every time she got back in the cab of her truck, she was reminded of the gasoline spill because within the enclosed cab, the smell was strong. Her jeans had been rubbing all afternoon long against the chemical burn on the soft part of her skin between her thighs and around her buttocks, and she could tell without looking that the skin was raw and chapped.

Clearly, the adrenaline that had been pouring through her system at regular intervals and masking the pain had worn off. She could feel the weariness that the drop in high adrenaline levels always caused, but there was more going on than that. She could feel an aching through all her muscles that felt as if it were down to the bone, and it worried her to think that this was perhaps the feel of the infection setting into her system. If that were the case, then by tomorrow, she would invariably begin to run the fever that would end in her turning into one of the loathsome creatures that she despised. These days, that was everyone’s worst fear, of turning into a creeper. It was viewed as a fate much worse than death.

Amanda hoped that she was wrong about the cause of the aching in her body. For a moment, she thought that if she were just able to close her eyes and rest for a minute before continuing on, then she would feel much better. She closed her eyes and took a breath in, not even bothered this time by the smell of the fumes.

Sam was tapping at the window of her truck, and she jumped, startled, and then rolled the window down to find out what she needed.

“Is everything okay?” the girl asked.

“Yeah, why?” Amanda queried.

“Well, because we’ve been sitting here for almost ten minutes, and I thought that you wanted to get out of here.”

“We have?” Amanda asked, shaking her head to clear out the fog that she was feeling. “I must have closed my eyes for a minute or two, sorry.”

She slapped her cheek a couple of times and then reached for two water bottles, handing one to Sam.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Sam asked, eyeing her intently.

“Yeah, honey, I’m fine, just tired is all. I dozed off. It has been quite the day.”

“Okay,” Sam said, sounding as if she wasn’t entirely convinced. “Are we still headed across the street then?”

“Yep,” Amanda said, mustering a luster to her voice that she knew she did not feel.

Sam began walking back to the truck, slowly, before turning to look at Amanda again, as if she were lost in thought and might have another question. But then Amanda could see in the mirror that the girl turned back to her vehicle and hopped in.
That’s good
, Amanda thought,
because I’m not up to answering any more questions just
yet
.

Amanda pulled out around the looped parking lot and parked down an alley across the street.