The Scavengers (2 page)

Drake pressed one finger against my lips. The pressure he applied wasn't exactly gentle. “Hush Pilar. I'm about to make you an offer that I won't make twice. Are you listening to me?”

I nodded. His skin tasted strange against my lips.

“I want you to become a Scavenger.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. A lump appeared instantly in my throat but I swallowed it. “I've heard the waiting list is three years long.”

“The waiting list is three years long for people who want to be Scavengers. It's a little different when I'm the one doing the wanting. We're leaving the Cube for our next hunt in two days. I want you with us.”

“You're asking me to join the Scavengers.” My hands started to shake and my knees quivered. Being asked to join the Scavengers was unheard of. “I don't have any training,” I whispered.

“I'll teach you everything,” Drake replied.

“When do we leave?” I asked.

It has been 28 years, 14 weeks and 9 days since a virus turned more than half the world's human population into flesh eating zombies.

Between the people who were turned into zombies and those who were eaten by the zombies, more than 95 percent of the population died within 6 months of the initial infection. Those who survived holed up wherever they could find safety.

My parents had found safety in the Cube. According to my father, the building had originally been intended as a prison for extremely violent offenders. Construction hadn't quite been finished when the Cube had been re-purposed as housing for survivors. Life inside the Cube is just as restrictive as you would imagine life in a maximum security prison would be, but we are safe.

Mom and Dad have always told me the sacrifices we made to live in the Cube were worth it because we were safe.

It’s been 13 days, 12 hours and 42 minutes since my parents disappeared without a trace from our apartment inside the Cube.

In two hours, I was going to leave the Cube for the very first time in my life. My hands refused to stop shaking as I ran my fingers against the laces on my father's old hunting boots. The soles were cracked and the leather incredibly frail. The laces had been knotted together in the places where they have worn through and the gray-white cord in the center is showing on the outside. The boots are easily 3 sizes too big for me, but I'm going to have to make do. You can't get new boots inside the Cube. There's no leather for the uppers. There's no rubber to make the soles out of.

If I'm lucky I'll be able to find a newer pair that fit me better on the hunting trip. If I'm unlucky, I'll trip on the stupid things and get eaten by a zombie.

It’s the luck of the draw.

Shame I've never been real lucky.

I was so nervous that I'd already thrown up all the spoonfuls of my nasty little refried bean and cheese breakfast. The beans tasted better on the way up then they did going down. Probably because they were moving at a faster rate of speed.

“I'm glad you decided to join us.” Drake's voice echoed through the early morning darkness from behind me. I turned around and forced myself to smile at him. His golden eyes almost matched the dark amber pendant he wears chained around his throat. His chest, legs and arms ripple with muscle under a fitted black jacket and seamless black pants. His boots are beautiful shiny black leather, polished and free of the wear and tear that plagues almost everything in the Cube.

Drake has always been beautiful and I suppose he always will be, but I no longer stop and stare whenever I catch sight of him. I stopped openly drooling after Drake when Julie died. Turns out the frivolous amusement of unrequited love isn't nearly as much fun when you have no one at all to share your obsession with.

“I like your boots,” I told him. It seemed rude not to reply when he spoke to me but the truth was I didn't have any idea what to say to the boy who I'd spent hundreds of hours holding fantasy conversations with inside my own head.

“The Scavengers always have the best things,” Drake pointed out calmly. “Of course, we're also the most likely to die.”

“Is it worth it?” I hadn't meant to ask the question but the words spilled out of my lips on their own.

“Dying?” Drake asked.

“Being a Scavenger.”

“I've got a waiting list with three hundred and fifty names on it. That means there are at least 350 other people in the Cube right now who would be willing to take your place here today if you don't want it. Must be worth something.” Drake pulled a heavy knife off his belt and began polishing the blade with the hem of his t-shirt.

“I didn't ask how long the waiting list was,” I clarified. “I asked you if you think it’s worth it. If you went back in time and you had to do it all over again, would you become a Scavenger?”

Drake hesitated for a brief second and then shrugged. “I'd rather be a Scavenger than a sheep.”

“A sheep?” I asked, confused.

“Sheeple,” Conner said as he strode into the room. He was dressed head to toe in worn out leather and carrying a heavy backpack slung over his right shoulder. A gun, strictly forbidden by the Powers That Be, was proudly displayed on his hip.

“Sheeple?”

“That's what we call-.”

“No, we don't.” Drake made a slicing gesture at Conner's throat. “We don't.”

Conner laughed harshly. “I do.”

“You don't either.”

Conner leered down at me. “We're the Scavengers. Everyone too scared to go out and fend for themselves in the big bad world-.”

“Sheeple,” I said. “Sheep people.”

“We don't really call them that,” Drake snapped. I looked up into his gorgeous golden eyes and realized he was lying.

“It's okay. I get it.” I swallowed the taste of burned out beans on my tongue and hoped my voice came out as steady as it sounded in my head.

Conner laughed and thumped me hard on the shoulder. My knees nearly buckled. “It's okay, Drake. She gets it.”

Drake raised one of his beautiful, perfectly arched eyebrows at me and shot me a look that could only be described as skeptical. I knew what he was seeing: a stocky girl with little muscle tone, olive colored skin, frizzy hair and sunken brown eyes with deep, dark circles underneath. My clothes had been my Dad's and they were all about 4 sizes too big for me. My own clothes simply weren't suited for leaving the Cube. I'd treated too many newly initiated Scavengers for frostbite and incurable infections during my years in the hospital ward.

“Seven out of ten cadets die within their first three hunting trips,” Drake informed me of a fact I already knew. “Nine out of ten die within the first year. It's not too late for you to run away.”

“I don't run away.” I tried my best to ignore the churning in my stomach. Throwing up stomach acid on Drake Bledsoe's boots wouldn't earn me any bonus points.

“Everyone runs away when shit gets real enough,” Conner said with a shake of his head. “Hell, we're running away right now. I am anyways. How about you, Kennedy?”

A slender boy with spiky red hair and too many freckles had just come through the door. He was wearing a baggy dark green military style jacket and rumpled jeans. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes for the last three weeks. “How about what?”

“You running away?” Conner asked.

“From the Cube?” Kennedy tossed his own backpack through the open door of the armor plated school bus that they used to carry supplies during their hunts. “Hell yes. I hate it in here. It’s so stuffy. Too many people in here. I can't breathe air that someone else just exhaled.”

Conner and Drake both laughed. For the first time wondered if maybe I was in the right place after all. “I always feel like I'm choking,” I whispered.

Kennedy looked directly at me for the first time. His eyes were bright blue and slanted. “Everybody always feels like they're choking in the Cube. If I weren't a Scavenger, I'd have clawed my way through the walls after the Brickyard burned.”

“Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage,” Conner hummed the words.

Without thinking about it, I touched the outside of the jacket pocket to confirm my secret weapon was still safely secured against my skin. I could feel the cool metal barrel through the coarse fabric and I smiled.

Dad's secret was now my secret. It was also my truth. The Powers That Be could lie through their teeth about how my parents must have escaped the Cube in search of a better life but I wasn't about to buy their story. If Dad had left the Cube on his own, he would have taken his gun with him.

He wouldn't have left me behind either.

“I'm ready to go,” I told them.

“Us too,” Conner said. “We can leave just as soon as Shayla drags her slutty ass out of bed and-”

“Who are you calling a slut, you whore?” A female voice demanded as the door opened one more time. Shayla Coppervox strode into the room like she owned it. Her long cherry streaked hair hung almost to her hips and her neck was thick with chains and gemstones. The jewelry almost made her look like she was wearing an actual shirt when in reality she had a gray silken scarf tied across her chest so that it just barely covered her breasts. Her entire midriff was exposed down to the waistband of her very low-rise and skintight blue jeans. Dark brown thigh high boots overlapped the jeans.

“At least I don't bring my toys on hunts with us,” Conner snapped back. He gestured to the tall, slender boy with blonde hair was following closely at Shayla's heels. His black jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt were practical but lacked the quality seen in the other Scavenger's wardrobe choices. He appeared to be lugging both his bags and Shayla's.

I couldn't remember seeing him at any of the recent ceremonies where the Scavenger's bounties were displayed for the citizens of the Cube. He had to be new to the Scavengers, though judging by the sword on his hip, I was assuming this wasn't his first hunt.

“Your loss,” Shayla told Conner as she blew him a kiss. She focused her attention on Drake. “Time to go?”

“Almost. Waiting on one more,” Drake said.

“Tell me it’s not that whiny, worthless little blonde again,” Shayla said.

“Cya Gree,” Drake said.

“We need to cut that one loose, Drake.” Conner had taken Shayla's bags from the blonde boy. He began loading them onto the bus. “She can't fight. She can't run. She isn't strong enough to carry no supplies. She's weak.”

“Shush,” Kennedy said. He pointed down the hallway. “She's coming.”

“I don't care if she hears me,” Conner said as an almost impossibly petite girl entered the room.

I hated to admit that I could see why Conner thought this girl was weak. She was under five feet tall and built so slightly that she would likely always have the physique of a young girl rather than a mature woman. Her white-blonde hair was chopped short just above her jaw line. Her t-shirt was a shockingly bright lime green compared to the dark browns and blacks that all the other Scavengers were wearing. It even had sparkles sewn into the fabric. Her pants were purple with fabric so thin that it might as well have been see-thru. Her shoes were impractical silk slippers with no sole. I couldn't see any weapons on her person, but I hoped she'd tucked them in the bejeweled lilac purse she'd opted to carry instead of a backpack or duffel bag.

“Hi,” Cya said.

“You're late,” Conner snapped at her.

She blinked at him and then narrowed her pretty blue eyes. “No, I'm not. We're not scheduled to leave until 8 am. It's only 6:23 now.”

“Everyone else was ready to leave 20 minutes ago,” Drake said mildly.

“Our schedules say we leave at 8,” Cya repeated.

“I say we leave now,” Conner said.

“Not arguing,” Kennedy agreed.

I took a deep breath and nodded when Drake looked over at me.

Drake bared his teeth in a false impression of a smile. “Time to go hunting.”

The bus had heavy bars welded over the busted glass windows and frayed blue vinyl seats. The engine coughed and hacked as the bus rumbled through the heavy garage door and into the brickyard. I focused my attention on the other Scavengers in hopes of not seeing the scorched black earth and scalded, crumbling wall that made up the outer wall of Cube.

Up until last year, the brickyard had been my favorite part of the Cube. I loved going outside into the bright sunlight and sitting in the warm air watching people walk, talk and play in the long field of dirt that surrounded the Cube.

The Powers That Be had welded the door between the Brickyard and Cube closed after the fire. We weren't allowed to go outside anymore. It was too dangerous.

As the ancient bus rumbled into the sun I involuntarily took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I had missed the feeling of the sun on my skin so badly since the fire. I could taste the fall air on my tongue. I had crisp, fresh, moist air in my lungs for the first time in a year and a half. It was ecstasy.

“Feels good, doesn't it?”

I opened my eyes to see that the blonde haired boy who had been trailing after Shayla earlier was now sitting in the seat behind me. He grinned from ear to ear as he took deep, gulping breaths of the fresh air.

“It almost makes it worth signing my life away to the Scavengers,” I admitted with a guilty smile.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I think they make it out to be worse than it is,” he told me. “Last time we went out we were outside the Cube four days and never even saw a single zombie.”

“Really?” I had a hard time believing that. Mom always told me you could hardly take two steps outside the Cube without getting snapped at by a zombie. I'd expected the bus to get mobbed with rotting flesh the moment it passed through the heavy gates.

The quiet, cracked asphalt road and surrounding trees were a bit of a letdown in comparison to the monstrous images that had kept me awake all of the previous night.

“Really,” the boy confirmed. “I'm Jeb Moon, by the way.” He held out one hand and I shook it.

“Pilar Augustus,” I introduced myself. You would think that you wouldn't meet a whole lot of strangers when you'd grown up in a giant concrete box that no one ever left, but the opposite was true. The Cube was severely overcrowded. My Dad had always told me that the Cube had been built to house roughly 3,000 people. It was currently occupied by approximately 7,674 people. Over 4,000 too many for the facility to hold comfortably.

Certain groups of individuals, like the Scavengers or the Powers That Be, were celebrities. Everyone else was just someone you had to elbow out of your way on food distribution day.

I still couldn't remember if I had seen Jeb on stage with the rest of the Scavengers during the last assembly. Not that it really mattered if he'd been there or not. I did remember the feeling of my Mom's fingers squeezing all the blood out of mine as a truck load of canned goods were brought into the cafeteria. The Scavengers had delivered 3,492 cans, to be exact. It seemed like a lot of food but it hadn't been nearly as much as we'd needed. 3,492 cans of refried beans and creamed corn didn't do much to feed 7,674 people long term.

Dad said it was only a matter of time before we ran out of food inside the Cube. He'd been very vocal in trying to draw attention to what he saw as a serious problem with the way the Powers That Be were handling our ever worsening food shortage.

Dad had said we, the citizens of the Cube, could not survive another 30 years on increasingly rancid and mushy canned goods. He said it was impractical and unrealistic of the Powers That Be not to have figured out another way to feed the masses by now, especially since no new canned goods had been manufactured since the apocalypse.

Dad had been loudly critical of the decision to close off the brickyard and discontinue the vegetable garden after the fire. Granted, the meager crop of veggies that had been coaxed out of the less than fertile soil hadn't been nearly enough to feed everyone but it had been something. When I was a little girl there had been animals as well, livestock like chicken and cows, but a bad storm had come up and caused a food shortage. The animals had all been eaten.

The fire that had destroyed the brickyard and killed 356 people had started when the generator used to power the boiler that sanitized our contaminated water had suffered some kind of electrical malfunction and exploded. Julie, my best friend since before I could walk, had died because the boiler exploded.

“What kind of weapon did you bring?” Jeb's question brought me back to reality.

I frowned and debated whether or not to reveal my big secret. Guns were illegal in the Cube. All firearms had been confiscated by the Powers That Be as people entered the Cube all those years ago. I didn't know how Dad had gotten the .45 caliber revolver into the Cube and quite frankly, I didn't care. I was just glad to have it.

Admitting I had the gun might impress Drake. Or it might inspire him to confiscate it as his own. Weapons were incredibly valuable. It was a lesson I'd taken a harsh reminder about during the last few days. Making my decision, I gestured to the large, wobbly, rusted machete I had strapped to my hip.

“Not too bad,” Jeb nodded at the machete. “I have a sword. Blades work fine on zombies as long as they are sharp. Is it sharp?”

“Sharp enough.” I had made sure of that much when I'd traded half my parents’ belongings for the blade. I cringed when I thought about how the housing commission had wasted exactly no time in kicking me out of apartment E3976 after I had reported my parents missing. The apartment was all I had ever known. It was also zoned for two to four residents. When Mom and Dad had disappeared the housing commission had given me 4 days to pack up their belongings and move into the single woman’s dorms. I now had a small bunk bed and a single locker to house all of my belongings until I got married and had children of my own. Assuming I didn't die during this hunt.

I touched the barrel of the gun through the coat again. It offered cold comfort as the bus coughed and choked its way into the woods and left the Cube behind in the distance.

“It's my second hunt,” Jeb confided. “The first one was pretty boring, if you want to know the truth. I'm kind of hoping we'll see some action this time. You ever been outside the Cube before?”

“No,” I said. “I work, I guess worked, in the hospital ward.”

“Oh. Damn. That sucks.”

“I didn't mind it until after the brickyard burned,” I confessed. “I wanted a new job after the fire.”

“I guess you found one, huh?” Jeb gestured to the bus.

“I guess I did.” I honestly hadn't thought about joining the Scavengers that way, but it was the truth. Assuming I could make it as a Scavenger for a few years, I'd never had to see the inside of the hospital ward again except as a patient.

“Alright, listen up.” Drake stood up in the middle of the front seat of the bus. “I'm thinking this is going to be a simple trip. There's a decent sized neighborhood in Johnesville and...What?”

Kennedy turned his attentions away from the road in ahead. He released his grip on the steering wheel so he could thump a gauge on the dashboard of the bus with his right hand. “We don't have the gas, boss.”

Drake turned to glare at Kennedy. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that unless you think you can get some fuel from somewhere, this bus doesn't have enough juice to get much past Titusburg.”

“That's not going to work,” Shayla said. She turned to Kennedy. “We have to get past Johnesville or we're wasting our time. There has to be a gas station somewhere nearby.”

“We've already raided all the gas stations between here and Butcher Hill.”

“Then go past Butcher Hill.”

“We can't. That's...not possible.” Drake cast a glance towards where Jeb and I were sitting. I could tell there was something else he wanted to say but for some reason he didn't seem willing to say it. Instead he put one of his elegant fingers against Shayla's lips and shook his head. “It's not a good idea.”

“We need more cans.” Jeb seemed to have missed out on the subtly of the conversation.

“We can't haul cans without the bus.” Conner was stretched lazily across one of the bus seats. His booted feet hung out into the aisle.

“I'm tired of hauling cans,” Shayla said. “We can't keep doing this forever. It's bullshit that they sent us out again this soon. We only just got back last week.”

“We got sent back out because our last hunt was a failure,” Cya chimed in unexpectedly from the very back of the bus. “Our job is to bring home more canned goods to the people back in the Cube. They'll starve without them. Not that you seem to give two shits.”

“Canned goods heavy and they taste revolting,” Shayla shot her a nasty look. “All we found on our last hunt was refried beans, broths and cranberry sauce. No one wants to eat that crap.”

“We need those cans to survive,” Cya argued. “I still don't understand why we didn't bring everything we found back with us after the last hunt.”

Drake frowned at Cya. “It’s like I tried to explain to you at the time, we keep a few things back just in case we don't find anything the next trip. The Powers That Be expect us to be successful every hunt. Sometimes the hunts suck and we don't find much, like what happened last time. When our luck goes south we go back to the storehouse and get a few thousand junk cans just to shut everyone up back at the Cube.”

“The Cube goes through more than 3000 cans a day.”

“Why not just keep your emergency stash at the Cube?” Jeb asked.

“Because the Powers That Be...” Kennedy cursed loudly as the bus let out a loud cough and began to slow.

“What the hell?” Drake demanded. “I thought you said we had enough gas to get to Titusburg.”

“We do. Gas isn't our problem.” Kennedy was glaring at the hood of the bus as the 50 year old vehicle lurched to a stop and smoke began to pour out of the engine compartment.

“Fuck,” said Conner as he stood up.

“That smoke is going to attract zombies.” Shayla narrowed her eyes at Drake. “You better get this thing fixed ASAP.”

“Be easier to work on the engine if you weren't in my way.” Drake pushed Shayla away from him none-too-gently as he and Conner pried open the door of the bus and stepped out onto the open road.

“Should we try to help them?” I asked Jeb. He shrugged his shoulders.

“I don't know anything about motors,” he told me.

“One of you needs to get up on the roof and keep a look out for zombies,” Conner interrupted us.

“On the roof?” I repeated.

Jeb gestured to an area above our heads. I could see an emergency trap door leading onto the top of the bus. “You want to go or should I?”

If I had been braver I would have offered to go, but the fact of the matter is that I still wasn't sure I'd done the right thing when I'd said yes to Drake's offer to become a Scavenger. Now that I was out of the Cube and facing the very real possibility of running into a live zombie, I was terrified of my own shadow.

“You can go,” I told Jeb.

“I'll go,” said Cya. She stood up and shoved her way past us to the trap door. I had time to notice once again that she was wearing the type of thin, easily torn clothes that I had opted to leave back in my drawer at the Cube. I got a good look at the bits of colored glass that had been glued to her worthless shoes as she stood on the seat, pushed the trap door out and scurried onto the roof.