The Scavengers (6 page)

“We're in Seth's turf.” I filled in the blanks in his sentence.

“Yeah. We're in Seth's turf. He and his people have already raided most of the houses and businesses in the valley. The only supplies that are left are the ones they don't want.”

“Oh my God.” The severity of our situation was easy to grasp with far reaching consequences.

“It’s not a good situation,” Drake confirmed.

“But, if they have all the canned goods, then why is Seth-? I mean, why does he look the way he does?”

Drake was quiet for several minutes before answering.

“There aren't enough cans,” he said finally.

“What?”

“You wanted to know why Seth is turning into a zombie. It’s because we're almost out of canned goods. Pretty soon no one is going to have a choice about whether or not they're going to eat contaminated food.”

I was struck speechless by Drake's admission. The implications of running out of canned goods were almost too much to take in. If I hadn't already seen Seth – that dead eye – I would have accused Drake of lying to me.

Drake kept right on talking. “You asked me about Ra-Shet earlier. Ra-Shet is a city a hundred or so miles from here. It’s supposed to be the only city within a thousand miles.”

“A city?” I was stunned by his revelations.

“Yeah.” Drake nodded. “A pretty big one.”

“But, I thought there weren't any cities left?” I asked. “I was always told that the Cube was the closest thing left to a city.”

“Maybe that was true when the Cube was first occupied, but it’s not true now. Ra-Shet is bigger than the Cube and it has a lot more people in it.”

“Do they have canned goods?”

“Not enough.” Drake's eyes searched mine, but I didn't know what he was hoping to see. “But they have more cans then we do.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Ra-Shet is struggling in a lot of the same ways the Cube is. There isn't enough food. Not enough supplies left over from before the apocalypse. The difference between Ra-Shet and the Cube is that the king of Ra-Shet is trying to promote growth and industry within the city. He's been working with his people to produce new goods, medicines and more food.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and struggled to understand all the information that he'd given me. “I guess I'm having a hard time figuring out where all of this leaves us.”

“What do you mean?”

“You just told me that if we can't find more canned goods, we're all going to be forced to eat food that will slowly turn us into zombies.”

“Right,” Drake nodded.

“You also told me that we're unlikely to find very many cans because Seth and his people have already taken them.”

“Now you're starting to understand.”

“I don't feel like I understand anything. What are we supposed to
do
to get more food?”

Drake shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a lot to take in, but what the Scavengers mostly do now is trade. We go back though the houses and stores looking for valuables that earlier searchers might not have thought to take. We trade anything we can find for more food.”

“You've actually been to the city?” I asked.

“Plenty of times. If we can't find parts for the bus tomorrow we're going to have to go to Ra-Shet to get them.”

“But if we don't have any cans to spare, then what would we trade for the parts?”

“The upper class in Ra-Shet have a thing for luxury items. They like jewelry, statues, and dishes, pretty much anything pretty or shiny enough to catch their attention.”

“And they'll actually give up their canned food for baubles?” I asked in disbelief.

Drake nodded his head. “If you have enough power in Ra-Shet, you don't have to worry about food.”

“That doesn't make sense.” I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts. My gut instinct was telling me that I was missing something and that Drake wasn't giving me the whole story, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what kind of information he might be leaving out.

“It will. Give the idea a little time to sink in,” Drake said.

The idea that there was an entire city nearby was shocking in and of itself. I wondered what it looked like. I wondered if everyone was crammed into tiny little apartments or if people had their own homes. I wondered if the king of Ra-Shet would kick you out of your house if you didn't meet an occupancy requirement.

Maybe I was wrong about Mom and Dad's disappearance. If Dad had known about a city nearby he would have left the Cube. He hated the Powers That Be. He thought they were idiots who made bad decisions for the people of the Cube. He'd never been shy about sharing those thoughts either.

Drake's arms went around my waist and suddenly all I could feel was the proximity of his skin to mine. His lips brushed against my neck. “You're taking this better than I thought you would,” he told me.

I sighed and leaned back against him. “Right now none of it seems real,” I admitted.

“How about this part?” He turned me around so that my eyes were even with his chin. He ducked his head down so that his lips were even with mine. “Does this feel real?” he asked as he kissed me.

It was raining when the sun came up. The weather was doing absolutely nothing to improve anyone's lousy mood. I was exhausted as I zipped my jacket up and wrestled my frizzy, tangled hair into a somewhat manageable braid that ran down the center of my back. I kept sneaking glances across the bus at Drake, wondering if he would be as affectionate this morning as he had been last night on the roof of the bus. So far, aside from a wink he'd shot me as he'd handed me half a can of creamed corn for breakfast, he was acting like last night had never happened.

I wished I could act like last night had never happened. Drake had been telling the truth when he'd said what he told me would change the way I viewed the world.

“We need to try to find a working radiator for our bus today,” Drake announced as I scraped the last of my cold, miserable meal off the walls of its corroded can. “I want to split up into groups of two. We have three experienced hunters and three newbies so I'm thinking we'll split up by experience. I'll take Pilar with me since this is her first time out of the Cube.”

“I'm not taking that girl,” Shayla announced loudly. She pointed to where Cya was huddled in a shivering lump against the side of the bus. Her thin, fragile clothes were providing her with no protection at all against the steady drizzle of rain. I'd assumed she would have brought a jacket in her bag, but if she had then she wasn't making any move to go get it and put it on.

“Me neither,” Kennedy said. “Don't even think about sticking me with her, Drake. I'll have to pull a radiator if I find one. I can't lug it and her back here. If I have to choose between carrying a radiator and carrying a recruit who can't carry her own weight, I'm fixing our bus.”

Cya let out a low moan as she tried to stand up. It was clear that she couldn't put any weight on her leg. “Just leave me here.”

Drake scowled. “No one gets to stay here. We have to go out on foot then we all have to go out on foot. No one gets special treatment in the Scavengers.”

“I can't-can't walk.” She pushed out her swollen, purple ankle so that we could all see it. She'd used a knife to cut the leg off of her thin pants. Her foot had swollen along with her ankle and her little shoe had been discarded.

“Too damn bad,” Drake said. “You're walking. We're all walking.”

“She's not walking with me,” Shayla reiterated.

“Or me.”

“Fine,” Drake snarled. “How do you two want to split up?”

“We have to stick to one experienced hunter and one newbie?”

“Yes.”

“Me and Jeb. Kennedy can take the other girl, Pilar.” Shayla stood up and crossed her arms over the front of the thick black shirt she was wearing. “You can take the cripple.”

“Fine,” Drake snapped even though his tone clearly said that it wasn't. “Let's get moving. The sooner we get a radiator, the sooner we can get on with our real hunt.”

With that decided, I now found myself trudging out into the wet, cold woods with Kennedy approximately an hour after the sun had come up. Kennedy wasn't talkative so I found myself with plenty of time to think about what Drake had told me the night before.

Canned food was gross. The older it got, the grosser it was. When I had worked in the hospital ward, we'd made a game of looking at the expiration dates on the cans we fed our patients. Whoever found the oldest can won the right to give it to the least pleasant patient we had. Some of the food was so disintegrated it was impossible to match the image on the wrapper with the contents. A lot of the cans didn't even have wrappers anymore, making guess the vegetable-meat-soup game another hospital ward favorite.

I wasn't in nearly as good of physical shape as Kennedy was and my poorly fitting gear wasn't helping. The too big boots were rubbing blisters on my heels by the time we came across our first abandoned house thirty minutes into the walk.

Kennedy was carrying a massive backpack and had insisted I do the same. He said that even if we didn't find anything that could be used to fix the bus, we might find something that had some trade value in Ra-Shet.

Drake had provided Jeb and Cya with the short explanation about Ra-Shet this morning during breakfast. He'd left out the part where eating any food that wasn't canned would turn you into a zombie. He hadn't mentioned Seth at all. I wondered if Kennedy and Shayla would be upset if they knew about Seth coming to the bus last night. I suspected they would.

The first house we searched was full of moldy clothing, sagging furniture and rats. The second house netted us a handful of canned green beans and Kennedy picked up a tool box he apparently thought was worth lugging the weight. The third and fourth houses yielded more of nothing. I was really starting to see what Drake had been talking about when he'd told me everything had already been picked over by scavengers. I got lucky on the fifth house though. There were faded pictures hanging throughout the hallways and living room walls. Most of them depicted three teenage girls with slanted green eyes and red hair. The oldest was a little wider around the middle than I was but both of the younger girls looked to be almost the same size as me.

I was halfway through raiding their closets when I heard a door open behind me. “Don't come in here, I found some clothes,” I called out, not wanting Kennedy to see me half-naked. I had my back to the door as I yanked my new jeans the rest of the way over my hips and hurriedly buttoned the fly.

Someone laughed from behind me and I froze with one foot half-way into a cowboy boot that was a whole lot closer to the right size than Dad's hunting boots had been.

I'd heard Kennedy laugh yesterday when he and Conner had been working on the engine. His laugh was a high pitched bray, not the low chuckle that had just come from the other side of the room.

My machete was laying on the bed, still attached to my belt. I knew there was no way I could reach it in time as I turned to face Seth.

He was leaning against the chest of drawers next to the bedroom door and watching me with an amused smirk on his face. In the dim light of the rainy morning I could see that his skin was too pale to be considered normal and his hair, except for where the scar cut into his skull, was blacker than night. I slid my hand into the pocket of my wet jacket, glad I hadn't gotten around to taking off the damp leather yet. The grip of the gun was comforting in my hand.

“How did you get in here?” I demanded as I yanked the gun out of my pocket and pointed the barrel at him.

Seth eyed the gun impassively. “Good morning to you too, little lamb.”

“Where's Kennedy?” I asked. “What did you do to him?”

“Kennedy? I didn't do anything to him. He's in the garage of a house three doors down from this one trying to figure out how to crank a motorcycle that doesn't have a carburetor on it,” Seth replied. He appeared completely unconcerned by the weapon, which made me even more concerned.

“He left me?” I jammed my foot down into the boot and it immediately tried to fold in half. I stumbled and nearly fell over. I would have hit the ground if Seth hadn't caught my arm and pulled me back up right.

“Kennedy likes motors better than he likes people.” His touch was surprisingly warm on my arm. I'd assumed he would feel as cold and dead as he looked. My heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest as I pulled away from him, trying my best to make sure I didn't accidentally look him in the eyes. I was staring at the floor as I took a hurried step backwards. My shin caught the edge of a small box I hadn't noticed sitting at the end of the bed and I lost my balance. I tried to grab the edge of the wall but the gun in my hand was too clunky. I missed and landed with a thump on the bed. On top of the machete.

“Ouch!” I yelped and jumped back up, dropping the gun in the process. The boot folded over for a second time and next thing I knew I was on my butt on the floor.

Seth started laughing again as he bent down and picked up the gun. He examined it for a moment and then gently laid it down on a small table that was next to the bed. He held out his hand to me. He had what my Dad called musician's hands. Long, slender fingers with short, neatly kept fingernails. Scars crisscrossed his knuckles and palms in all directions. There was a scar straight down the inside of his middle finger that looked like he'd run it down the tip of an extremely sharp blade.

I didn't want to touch him again so I ignored his hand. Instead I grabbed the edge of the box I had tripped over as I kicked off the offending boot and scooted my knees underneath me. A moment later I was on my feet again and oops, accidentally looking directly at Seth's disfigured jaw.

I could almost see his teeth from the outside of his skin through the quarter sized hole in the side of his face. The blank, mottled eye blinked at me once and then I forced myself to focus both of my eyes on his good eye before I lost my creamed corn all over his heavy duty black lace-up combat boots.

“You're a zombie,” I spoke without even realizing I'd said the words out loud.

“Am not.” Seth crossed his arms over his chest and very purposely scowled down at me.

“Are too,” I told him. Much to my surprise, his left eye, the blue one, wasn't all that scary to look at. There were little flecks of gold mixed in with the blue that surrounded his pupil. His lashes were far longer and darker than my own. Really too pretty for a boy. Especially one who was scaring the shit out of me.

“Am. Not.” He shook his head at me and suddenly I realized that he was
enjoying
scaring the shit out of me. There was something in his demeanor that was intimately familiar.

“Are. Too.” Maybe it was the way he kept cocking his head at me when I kept tripping over my own two feet. Or the causal way he was invading my personal space. Or maybe it was the smirk that just barely showed at the edge of his narrow lips that reminded me so much of my Dad when he was teasing me.

“Not.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. Jesus Christ did this monster really remind me of my Dad?

“You're missing a chunk of your face,” I pointed out as I forced myself to really look at Seth. To look at him without looking at him, screaming zombie and running away.

“Shit happens.” Seth shrugged his shoulders and smirked. “You just sat on a machete.”

“That wouldn't have happened if you hadn't snuck up on me.” I had been right last night. He wasn't nearly as muscular or as broad across the shoulders and chest as Drake was. He was lean almost to the point of too skinny under the nubby-textured long-sleeved cotton shirt he was wearing. The cross bow was absent from his wardrobe today but he still had the weapons belt slung low against his slim hips.

“How was I supposed to know you were running around in here naked?” he asked. I guessed he was easily over 6 feet tall and most of the height was in his legs. His hips were easily six inches above mine.

“You knew.”

“Not the naked part,” he said. “That was a lucky bonus. Nice underwear.”

“Ugh.” I was surprised to realize that at some point in the last three minutes I had quit being afraid of Seth. I was still wary of him and I definitely didn't like him much, but he wasn't going to hurt me or he already would have done it. He'd had all the opportunity in the world to kill me in between my dropping the gun and my less than graceful landing on the machete.

“Maybe we should start over,” he suggested, holding out his hand to me. “I'm Seth.”

“I know.” I glared down at the cowboy boot that had tripped me twice in less than ten minutes. I needed new boots but not at the expense of my life. If Seth had been a real zombie I would have been dead.

“I was being polite,” he clarified. “I didn't catch your name last night.”

“Maybe I'm not sure you need to know it.”

“Fine,” he eyed me for a moment. “If you won't tell me your name, I'll have to give you a new one.”

“Oh, this ought to be good.” I decided it was safe enough to turn my back on him as I headed back to the closet. The cowboy boots weren't going to work for me, but maybe I could find another pair of shoes that would. My toes were freezing after slogging through mud puddles in Dad's leaking boots all morning.

I could feel Seth's cold, dead eye on me as I pushed hangers of clothing out of the way of the shoe rack that hung next to the door.

“You look Hispanic,” Seth decided from behind me. I knew he was taking in my tan skin, short, stocky build and long brown hair.

“I am Hispanic. My Mom was from Mexico.” Some girl had really loved her high heels that was for sure. And it did me no good.

“You look like a Carolina,” he used the ethnic pronunciation.

“No,” I whispered, frozen in place with chills running down my spine and shoes forgotten. He'd said
Carolina
exactly the same way my Dad always had when he was teasing my Mom.

“No?” he asked.

“My name is Pilar,” I told him, shaken to the core as I turned back to face him. “Carolina is my Mom's name.”

“Oh.” I could tell by the sound of his voice he knew he'd said something wrong. The air was charged between us for a moment and then he broke the silence. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Pilar.”

“That's a lie,” I muttered.

“Is not.” Seth approached the closet and pulled out a pair of lace up boots I hadn't noticed because there was laundry kicked over beside them. “Try these,” he told me. “They're made well and they won't slip around like the ones you've been wearing.”