All That I See - 02 (8 page)

She sighed again, “I’m tired, and I’m worried.”

“Don’t worry about the Somervilles,” I said. “They’ve proven they can take care of themselves.”

We pulled
into four more driveways
on Tucker Road
before I thought we found what we were looking for. It was a ranch-style house with a small yellow and black sign in the yard that said PRICE REDUCED * FORECLOSURE * BANK OWNED. There were six long metal brackets
attached to the roof.

“I’ll bet this is it,” I said. “The solar panels were probably mounted on those brackets.”

She put the car in park and rested her head against the back of the seat, staring at the
roof of the house
.

“
It must have been a while since Judy was out here,” she said. “This was a wasted trip. Now we have to try the high school, and I was hoping we could avoid that.”

“Yeah,” I said, “They’re not going to be very welcoming. I’m sorry; it’s my fault.”

Sara looked like she was going to say something, but just shook her head instead.

“What?” I said.

She
acted hesitant, like she was trying to decide whether she should talk
, but then just came out with it.

“It
keeps coming back to J
en,” Sara said. “I don’t mean any disrespect
, but I just can’t seem to get a break from that woman.”

The mention of Jen’s name ca
u
sed a sharp twinge inside me.

“What do you mean?” I said

“Yeah, it’s your fault we’re unwelcome at the high school,” she continued, “but it was all because of Jen.
The Somervilles are missing now, because they went out looking for a new place where you wouldn’
t be reminded of Jen. When you were sick, you kept calling me by her name and—“

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’
t know. I had a fever;
I must have said a lot of crazy stuff.”

“—if all that weren’t bad enough, she’s still out there somewhere.”

“
Oh
,” I said.
I had no idea how to respond to that.

We both got quiet and stared out the windshield. The only sound was the idling engine.

“I’m sorry” she said finally, “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m…I’m sorry.”

She put the car in reverse and backed out into the road.

CHAPTER 9

The drive
into Clayfield was quiet and tense. The
infected
were everywhere outside. We
were aware of them the way one might be aware of a thunderstorm
while safe and dry i
nside of a shelter—the phenomenon
was out there and
kind of scary, but now so commonplace that it could be tuned out.

I thought we’d go directly to the Grace County High School, but instead Sara drove us
to the house in which we had
been living before our run-in with Corndog and Wheeler. The front wooden fence was a splintered mess where they’d rammed through.

“Better park on the street,” I said softly
, breaking the silence
. “We don’t want to risk damaging our tires driving over that debris.”

She parked and we got out. We stood by the car for a few seconds listening and looking around. Other than birds and the occasional distant howl of one of the undead, it was quiet.
The trees on the street had been leafing out for more than a week, and since the rain, they were a
vibrant, almost unnatural,
green.
Sara checked her weapon to make sure it was ready and we proceeded
along the wooden fence
toward the house.

The
hay truck
w
as
still parked in the driveway
, but the bus was gone
.
There
were
a lot of clothes and other items we’d collected from Wal-Mart scattered
around on the ground outside.
They’d stolen the bulk of our supplies
and discarded the rest
. I doubted we’d find much left inside the house.

Sara bent over and peeled
up a pair of jeans that had been trampled into the mud.

“
It doesn’t look good,
” she said.

“No.”

“They left the cistern tank and some of the heavy stuff on the hay truck,” she said, dropping the jeans.

“Let’s go inside,” I said.

The house had been thoroughly looted. All of the food was gone
, all of the guns, alcohol, bottled water, medicine—

“Ugh,” Sara said coming out of
one of the
bedroom
s
. “They took all my underwear.”

“The night vision goggles are gone,” I said.

“What about the sunroom?”

We both went into the glassed-in back porch, hopin
g it had been ignored. It had not
. The flats where we’
d started our
seeds had been upended. Potting soil darkened the floor.
I saw a tiny, wilted seedlin
g laying on top of the dirt, it
s bare roots exposed.

“Dammit,” I said, squatting down and scraping up the dirt with the side of my hand.

Sara knelt beside me.

“Do you think we can save them?” she asked.

“
So long as the seedlings aren’t broken and have stayed moist, they might be okay,” I replied. “
I wonder if they found the
stash of seed packets.”

“I’ll go check,” she said.

She returned with a small cardboard box.

“They didn’t take them,” she said. “They left the sweet potatoes, too.”

I looked up and she was holding one of the shriveled sweet potatoes I’d found on the floor at Wal-Mart more than two weeks before. Of course, they made me think of Jen, but I didn’t mention it.

“Good,”
I said, relieved.

Those seeds and sweet potatoes were going to be the beginning
s
of our garden. They and their progeny
would
provide us with fresh food while everyone else was fighting over old canned goods
and stale crackers
, but more than that, one day, they might be the only thing keeping us from starving to death.
They w
ere the most important items we had
,
and thankfully Wheeler and his bunch
hadn’t been smart enough to take them.

We returned as much of the dirt to the trays
as
we could. Six of the seedlings were still intact, however they were wilted. I couldn’t tell whether they were the peppers or tomatoes because they had not put on their second set of leaves yet.

“Hopefully, some of the seeds that were slow to germinate are in that dirt somewhere,” I said, picking up one of the trays. “Let’s take them with us back to the stables.”

Sara grabbed the other tray.

“They left most of the books and magazines,” she said. “Do you want to get them?”

“We should go,” I said. “We’ll come back for the
m and
the
hay truck later.”

We drove over to the high school but not via the bypass. That would have taken us by the fairgrounds, and I didn’t want
to
alert Wheeler’s group, even though there was a chance we’d run into them anyway
if they were still in town
. Instead, using t
he map,
we took back roads on the south side of town that would let us out west of the school and away from the fairgrounds.

We drove onto the school grounds, past the stadium, then past the school itself, to the maintenance building in the back. It didn’t look much different than how I had left it; the fence was still down and collapsed over the front entrance.
The ambulance and a pickup truck were still in the courtyard.
Off to the side were
three buses, and near them was the moving van I’d driven through their fence. I wondered if the stuff Sara and I had collected at Tractor Supply was still inside the truck. Originally
,
there had been five buses, but I had parked one around back and we had taken the other.
Sara pulled around to access the gate
. The bus I had parked by the rear entrance was gone.

“What do you
think?” Sara said, parking by
the back door. “Do you think they left?”

“Looks like it,” I said. “If they are inside, it might be best if they didn’t see me right away. You go knock on the door, and I’ll wait in the car.”

She went up to the door, knocked, and waited. She looked back at me and shrugged. I got out
holding the machete
. I stuffed the .22 down the front of my pants
and joined her.
It was very quiet. If they had been inside, I thought we would have heard something. I kind of expected to hear some sound coming from the fairgrounds which was less than a mile away, but I did not. The door was unlocked, and we went inside.

The place had been abandoned. All of the co
ts and other supplies were gone from the large bus garage. The only indication that it had been inhabited was several bags of trash piled along the far wall. I tried the switch by the door, but the lights did not come on.

“I wonder if the generators are
not working or just turned off
,” I said.

Sara
walked through the garage to the break room in the
front of the building, and I followed her. The large county map that had been on the wall was missing. The office was to our left and the door was shut.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she said.

I put my arm around her and gave her a quick hug, because she looked like she needed it. She let me.

“Let’s go back to the stables,” I said. “Maybe they’ll be back by now.”

There was a sound from the office
, like something
bumping against the wall. Sara looked at me. I went over to the door and put my ear to it.

“Hello?” I said.

There was movement inside
—a brief scraping sound and another thump. I looked over to Sara and she nodded, lifting her rifle. I tried the knob.

“It’s locked,” I said.

“”Hello in there!” Sara said loudly. “Are you able to unlock the door?”

There was a long, slow scratching sound that
started
at the top of the door and
dragged down to the
floor.

“I think we have our answer,” I said. “Let’s go back to the stables.”

“But who do you think is in there?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied.  “They’re obviously infected.”

“But what if it’s Judy and Nicholas?”

“It’s not,” I said. “Even if they got infected, it would be a little early for them to turn. They’ve only been gone since yesterday.”

She lowered her weapon and nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t satisfied with that answer.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know who is in there?” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “For all we know, it’s standing room only in there. Do you really want to open that door?”

“Schrodinger’s Cat,” Sara said.

“What about it?” I said.

“You said ‘curiosity killed the cat,’” she replied. “I was just remembering that
Schrodinger’s Cat thing from
science c
l
ass
. Until we open the door and look, we don’t know what we’ll find. Until we open the door and know for sure, there is a possibility that the Somervilles are in there.”

I sighed, “Okay. Let’s find something in the garage to
bust down the door.

We found a large, rolling jack along one of the walls in the garage and wheeled it into the break room. I was still feeling weak, so Sara was going to have to do all the physical work. She gave me her rifle, and I stood in the doorway to the garage and break room and aimed it at the entrance to the office. Sara pulled the jack back to the far end of the break room, and then jacked it up so that the long, metal lift arms were about waist high. Then she ran toward the office door pushing the jack in front of her.

Rather than knocking it open, the lift punched through the hollow, wooden door. I could hear a lot of movement inside of the office. Sara
jerked on the jack and it came free. She pulled it back to the other side of the room for another run. There was a narrow, horizontal hole in the middle of the door that was about a foot long. It was large enough that I thought I could stick my hand in and unlock the door. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to do that.