Chapter 2
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.