Amanda Carter in the L.A.Z., life after zombies (22 page)

Amanda had arrived at the solar panels, allowing Sam to keep watch, while she eyed them quizzically, deciding the best strategy to use to get them off.

Chapter 38

“
N
ow, can we go get the other truck?” asked Sam, sounding exasperated as she watched Amanda stack the last of the panels.

She had been growing increasingly impatient as Amanda worked. To her, it seemed as if it had taken Amanda half the day to get the panels loosened and stacked, while in actuality, it had only taken her about forty-minutes—which was still a long time in this type of baking sun.

Soot from the fire had begun to rain down on them, and as soon as Amanda had finished unhooking and stacking the panels, she grabbed the binoculars and climbed upon the rooftop of the truck to take a look at what part of town the fire was busy gobbling up. They had both been moderately certain that they had run out of time because of the raining ash, but the fire was still nowhere close to them for their safety, and Amanda determined that they would proceed with the plan to raid as much from the town as they could before it would inevitably be consumed.

Amanda hopped down from the top of the truck, and Sam slid down the windshield with a little yelp of joy. It was amazing to Amanda that how even in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, kids could still find things to make fun.

“No, we aren’t going for the truck just yet,” said Amanda, feeling weary of answering the same question repeatedly.

“We don’t have any more room to put stuff,” Sam said irritably.

Sam figured that it would be just her luck that the fire would take out every available truck in town before she would ever get to drive one all on her own, and she was in a foul mood over it. The heat wasn’t helping the matter. Amanda tossed her a bottle of water and then began working on a bottle herself.

“Yuck, I’m so sick of warm water,” Sam said, but she opened it anyway.

“I’m so sick of kids complaining about stuff,” Amanda said, feeling like she was about to join Sam’s foul mood club.

“Sorry,” said Sam. “I just really want to drive something all on my own. I’ve practiced, and with the fire, I feel like I’ll never get the chance.”

“If all goes well, Roy will have us drinking cold water soon, and you’ll be driving your very own truck out of here,” Amanda said, making an effort to sound jovial.

“You said that you picked it out already. So what color is it?” Sam asked, feeling excited about it all over again.

“Um, it’s kind of, well, two-tone,” Amanda said, not wanting to tell the girl exactly what kind of vehicle it was. She had a feeling that Sam would not think it was a cool truck, but that was just too bad because it is what they needed.

She knew that she shouldn’t be anticipating a fight where none had transpired, but she thought that she knew Sam well enough by now to anticipate her reaction ahead of time.

“So if we’re not going to get the truck now, then what are we going to do?” Sam asked, managing to not make the question sound too irritatingly redundant.

“Since the last house we were in hadn’t been touched since the event, I’m hoping that there are a couple more houses around here too that we can collect from. I know that it seems like there isn’t any room left in the truck, but you would be surprised at what we can tuck away in here. The truck that I want is farther away from the fire, and these houses are closer. I really don’t want to lose this chance while we have it here, just in case we can’t make it back for whatever reason. And it’s not just the fire that concerns me. Somewhere out there are a whole lot of raiders that are going to be all riled up,” Amanda said, feeling winded after such a long speech.

Sam tilted her head for a moment while she considered this and then nodded, seeming satisfied for the time being.

“Well,” she said, “which one’s next?”

“We’ll hop back in the truck and fire up the air conditioning. The backyard that we just came from is like this one, and I’ll be able to roll the truck around to it to tuck it away from prying eyes and make it easier for us to load it, should we find anything,” Amanda said, as she slid back into the driver’s seat.

The truck was hot, driving her already-warm body temperature upward into the triple digits. “I don’t really have a fever already,” she told herself, “it’s just the heat.” She had been trying hard to forget the possibility that she was infected, but she just couldn’t seem to keep it from creeping in from time to time.

“You’re really red,” Sam said, not making it any easier for her.

“So are you,” Amanda said, sounding snappy about it.

“Okay, okay,” said Sam, “simmer down already, I was just saying is all.”

“Sorry,” Amanda said, firing up the truck and cringing at the first blast of hot air that hit her. “We’ll all be feeling a lot better real soon.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re not the one with an eighty-pound hairy wolf on your lap.”

“Sorry,” she said again, “things will be a little tight in here for a bit.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Pass me those barbeque chips, will you,” Amanda said, eyeing the bag on the passenger side of the dash.

At least
, she considered as the first wave of cool air washed over her,
I can cross a few things off of my bucket list, like eat barbeque chips while sitting in an air-conditioned
truck
.

“What’s so funny?” Sam asked, seeing the expression on Amanda’s face as she handed over the chip bag.

“Nothing,” Amanda said dismissively while shoving her hand into the bag.

Sam did the same, and they both munched loudly on the savory treat as Amanda backed the truck out of this yard and pulled into the adjoining yard where she had neatly stacked the solar panels. For some reason, they both seemed to be in agreement that the chips tasted better if they stuck wads of them in their mouths and smacked on them, open-mouthed. That was one good thing about the LAZ, Amanda considered, no one really cared anymore about things like eating etiquette. People these days were just happy to have something to eat.

Amanda hadn’t failed to check the street when they were moving the truck, and she had been relieved to see that all was quiet. The few creepers that had been drawn to the noise of Red’s barking had paled in comparison to how things would have been had they not had the fire to distract them.

“There’s one in the house,” Sam said to Amanda as they were getting out of the truck.

“Very good,” Amanda said. “So you noticed the one clawing at the side dining room window as we drove past it?”

“Yep, it’s like you said, I need to be more observant of my surroundings,” Sam said, with obvious pride.

The truck was parked alongside the swimming pool that held the creepers, and the sound of their arrival had stirred them up, but they still could not escape, as this pool had no shallow end with stairs. The entire pool was probably about eight feet deep and used to have a step-in ladder, but time had worn it out, and it was useless. It had probably been useless for years before the infection had ever begun. The previous occupants of the home had allowed their pool to become run-down, and the house looked much the same; it existed in a state of disrepair. Paint had peeled and hung in ribbons off of the side of the house. Several of the rain gutters had torn free from their brackets and were either drooping off of the eaves or hanging off of the walls. Amanda knew that whatever she would find in this house would not be as neat and tidily organized as the last house had been. Maybe it was the heat, but she found herself dreading going in.

The sound of crashing glass startled all of them, and they swiveled their heads around toward the direction that the noise had come from.

“Odds are good that it just busted out the window,” Amanda said, speaking of the creeper they had seen beating at the glass of the windowpane on their way by.

“I got this,” Sam said confidently. Much to Amanda’s surprise, she had already begun to move toward it.

Not knowing what they might find, Amanda hustled to catch up to the girl.

“Be careful, Sam,” she said, feeling her lungs burning from the heat and ash in the air.

To Amanda’s relief, there was only a single creeper that had busted through the window, a man that had been elderly. He was caught by the shards of broken glass on the bottom half of the windowpane. His torso was hanging upside down, while his legs were still stuck inside the house. The creeper clawed at the dirt, trying to move the remainder of the way out of the window, but to no avail.

Sam swung, trapping the creepers head between the metal of the bat and the wall of the paint-peeling house, and then he was no more.

Amanda made sure to look past this creeper as Sam was taking care of it to be sure that nothing else was going to lounge out at them, but there was nothing, and the neighborhood grew quiet again except for the relentless howling of the wind.

“That’s four,” Sam said and then took the time to readjust the bandana because it had slipped down under her chin in the activity. “I wonder if I can beat your count today before we’re done in town,” the girl said a little breathlessly, with her eyes shining at the prospect.

“I hope not,” Amanda said. “The last thing I want is for your mother to hear that I sent you out to kill more of them than me.”

“I think that she’ll be proud of me,” Sam said, suddenly going back to sounding like a petulant child.

Amanda couldn’t remember being quite this moody when she had been a teen; but then again it was all a matter of perspective, she considered.

“What are we waiting for?” Sam said, clearly still experiencing her adrenaline rush. She marched back to the truck, with Red close at her heels.

“I love the enthusiasm,” Amanda said, knowing that it had been a much different experience coming into town with Sam that it had ever been with Roy or Jason.

Roy and Jason both were cautious and moved slow, not liking a single second of the trip, except for the ride home, and even then, the men seemed to be anxious to get back to camp. Jason was by far more cautious than Roy and much more hesitant to fight, not that he was a coward but rather that he had never been athletically inclined and didn’t trust his abilities. His daughter, however, had inherited a lot of guts as well as the physical abilities to match. Amanda imagined that, should the girl live long enough, she would become a real force to be reckoned with.

“Don’t expect this place to look like the last one,” Amanda said, moving to the back door and trying the handle.

Just as she had figured, the door was locked, but she pried it open easily with the crow bar from the truck.

“The guy looked old,” Sam said, waiting behind Amanda. “He probably couldn’t keep up with stuff around here.”

Stale air wafted out from the kitchen, but the smell wasn’t anything as bad as the house next door. Creepers were smelly, but that wasn’t anything in comparison with the dead.

“Ahhh, look out,” Amanda squealed, seeing a small, quick-moving something approach.

It was a scrawny, pathetic-looking cat that ran out of the house and in between Amanda’s legs out into the backyard. Red growled and zeroed in on it, but it was too quick and had run across the yard and hopped onto the fence, using its claws to climb the last bit of it, and then it was gone.

Red looked to them apologetically, as if he felt remiss at not having been able to catch it before it took off.

“Whoa! That was crazy,” Sam said, staring after it. “How do you suppose it survived all this time locked in a house with that creeper?”

Amanda poked her head inside and surveyed the kitchen, with a partial view of the dining room that moved into the living room. The layout of this house seemed to be identical to the neighbors, but that is where the similarity ended. There were no apparent threats, and the house was quiet. Her heart was still beating rapidly from the brush with the cat.

“I guess the cat was faster than the creeper, lived on mice or rats, or maybe some of this disgusting takeout food that’s littered all over the place. I imagine that there was a toilet or a leaky faucet for water, but that’s one hell of a way to survive. It doesn’t surprise me that the cat wanted out of here,” Amanda said, kicking her way through some of the takeout containers that had spilled onto the kitchen floor.

“Well, it’s in for a big surprise out in this world. It’s sad that it escaped only to find that things won’t be much different out there,” Sam said, closing the back door and leaving Red to guard outside, same as before. “Except out there, there’s more than one creeper.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a cat,” Sam said.

“Just don’t tell Red that,” Amanda said as she picked her way through the trash on the counters, looking for anything useful. “I can’t imagine that he’d be too keen on the idea.”

“
Keen
,” Sam repeated, “that’s a funny word that old people use.”

“Who are you calling old?” Amanda said, trying to make it sound like she was terribly offended by the comment in order to razz the girl.

“I meant older,” Sam said. “Would you look at this place, it’s like a mess.”

“It isn’t like a mess, it is a mess,” Amanda commented. “I don’t think it’s raiders that did this either.”

“I don’t think he was much into cooking,” Sam said, stating the obvious.

Dishes did litter the sink, piled to the brim on both sides of the double sink, and several dirty greasy frying pans rested on the stovetop. The cat had most likely spilled some of the food containers onto the floor in an effort to get what he or she could out of them that were still edible.

“He didn’t do much cooking anyway,” Amanda said, nodding to the stove.

Like the previous kitchen, this one also had the long, thin cupboard doors on it, and Amanda started there.

“Don’t worry, I know that we haven’t cleared the house yet,” Sam said. “I’m on lookout. Maybe I can make it five or six,” she said, excitedly seeming to have forgotten that one of those things had gotten a hold of Amanda earlier and that it wasn’t just fun and games.

Amanda didn’t bother correcting the girl, deciding to save her energy on more useful projects that weren’t in vain.

There was an opened plastic jar of peanut butter that Amanda pushed to the side, for fear that it might be contaminated. She spied two smaller unopened jars, one crunchy and one smooth, which she dumped into her sack. There was a full sealed box of a popular cheese-flavored cracker, and this she collected too. And that is all that was on the top shelf, so she moved down to the next one.