Amanda Carter in the L.A.Z., life after zombies (27 page)

Chapter 46

T
here was no doubt in Amanda’s mind that there would be hell to pay with Sam’s parents when they got back to camp. She had assured Maryanne that she would keep Sam safe, and now they were racing with the empty cart farther into the store to grab a few more of what Amanda considered to be essential items, risking their lives in the process. There was no guarantee that they would make it out of here, not now that the store had begun to fill with smoke and the creepers would be soon to follow by the hundreds.

Amanda had skirted around the densely populated hub of town before, silently slinking by, noticing the sheer volume of creepers that had congregated in the center of the town. Now all of them and more had converged on the fire, and the fire was converging on them. Sam had no idea just how many there would be arriving here soon, and Amanda hoped that they were fast enough that she never had to see just how risky this move of theirs was.

The wheels on the cart clattered and rattled until they pulled to a screeching halt in the gardening aisle. Together they loaded eight bags of potting soil, vegetable seeds, a stack of empty five-gallon buckets, some fifty-foot hoses, and two new shovels with shiny orange plastic-covered handles.

The cart was heavy, and they both pushed it back, stopping long enough for Amanda to grab spools of chain, more rope, and barbed wire, along with two handsaws. This she dumped on top of their load, making it look like the Grinch’s sled that was overloaded with loot from an unsuspecting town.

Before they made it back to the truck, two more crispy creepers were set to intercept them.

Amanda instructed Sam to keep pushing the cart while she grabbed one of the shiny new shovels. She beat one of the creepers backward, sending it to the ground but merely momentarily incapacitating it, while she bashed the other one. Finally, before Sam could reach them with the heavily laden cart, she put her foot on the fallen one to keep it from getting up. It grabbed at her sweat soaked jean pant legs, scratching at the fabric, before she put its lights out permanently.

“Totally cool,” Sam said with awe as she pushed her weight into it, rolling the cart past them, while Amanda worked to wrench her legs free from the clawed fingers that still held onto the fabric.

For a moment, Amanda wondered what she must look like right now. She had spent months, sensibly, safely working her way around town, sneaking past creepers and raiders, avoiding contact with any of them unless absolutely necessary. And now, here she was throwing caution to the wind to pursue a passionate dream that they might be able to become a self-sustaining community way out there in that desolate desert and trying to accomplish it amidst the threat of fire and hordes of zombies. She wondered if and when it was time to give up a dream to seek higher ground or if she would just continue to madly pursue the impossible into oblivion and drag the girl there too?

She took a deep breath to try to steady herself in an attempt to regain her sensible sense of equilibrium. Immediately, she began to cough. The air was quickly turning gray, and Sam was gaining ground on her way back to the truck. She jogged to catch up, fighting the urge to continue coughing and hacking along the way.

Amanda caught up to the girl and threw her nonsizable weight into helping push the cart.

Unlike the other times, when she had had Sam neatly stack their haul into the back of the moving truck, they began to chuck the items from the cart into the truck. They worked quickly, synchronized, like they had worked together for years, instead of less than a day.

Before they had finished, three more creepers had found their way in. Sam took out the one that was actively ablaze, and Amanda handled the other two.

Embers from the fire floated past the entrance, carried by the high winds. Black smoke trickled past, mixed into the quickly graying air. The rush and roar of fire began to hit their ears. It sounded like a hungry ogre that was preparing to eat them.

Creepers had begun to congregate in the parking lot, shuffling around, bumping into each other, confused by the sheer volume of sound vibrations. Amanda knew that it wouldn’t take them long to steer themselves their way, and with every passing second, more creepers came to join the party. Some of them were alight with fire, and this ignited others that they came in contact with, until it looked like some warped version of a domino chain reaction.

“We have got to go, now!” Amanda said, shoving Sam toward the front of the truck, before reaching to roll down the door to the moving van.

She instantly wished that she had just left the back of the truck open, because the sound of the rolling door drew the attention of the quickly gathering horde of creepers.

Amanda ran toward Sam who was already shoving Red into the passenger seat of her truck.

“Throw it in reverse, and punch it. Take as many of them out as you can. When you’re completely clear of the store and the creepers, turn it around, and drive as far and as fast as you need to get away from here. I’ll be right behind you,” Amanda said breathlessly while noticing that the creepers were moving in on their location.

She waited to make sure that Sam had no problem finding the reverse gear before stepping over the fallen creeper bodies, which had already begun to pile up around their vehicles, to dash for her truck. The last thing she had wanted was for Sam, in her haste, to find the drive gear instead of reverse and slam into the back of her truck in the middle of such a crisis. Granted, had she not been pushing them so hard, they wouldn’t have landed in this predicament in the first place. But now there was nothing to be done about the situation, except to hope that Sam and the big rental truck were capable of clearing a path for them to have a way out before they, and all the supplies that they had worked so hard to collect, would be trapped.

Amanda’s truck fired up immediately, for which she was grateful, even though she hadn’t had much doubt that it wouldn’t. But there was always that little niggling feeling that would creep in at times like this, saying, “Are you sure the truck is going to start?”

She looked in her rearview mirror to see that Sam was doing the same thing. The girl was staring intently into the large side mirror of the truck that gave her a clear view of what was coming up behind them. Sam appeared to be clutching the steering wheel tightly and was either temporarily immobilized by fear, or she was waiting for something.

Amanda threw caution out the window and laid on her truck’s horn, hoping to snap Sam out of whatever she was finding to be so mesmerizing back there and kick the girl into action, because action was required. The rental truck was a nice, big size, but soon, it would not be big enough, strong enough, or be traveling with enough momentum to push its way out of this parking bay, and they would be trapped in the worst way imaginable by walls of hungry creepers. That event would soon be eclipsed by the arrival of the fire and they would be burnt to a crisp inside their vehicles, probably dying first from smoke inhalation.

Sam was looking in the mirror, shocked and terrified by what she saw. She had heard Amanda, Roy, and her father speak about the dangers of encountering the hordes in town; but she had always pictured it as being what she had already experienced when their house had been surrounded by creepers on the day that they were liberated and fled from town. This was so much more horrific that she became temporarily paralyzed.

For a moment, she no longer felt the extreme sensation of being alive and aware; she felt fear tearing at her muscles and causing them to shake. Her legs were shaking so badly that she doubted whether she could get her right foot to push down on the accelerator. Bile rose from the pit of her empty stomach, causing her to have to swallow it back down. She felt it burning at her esophagus even as her arms shook all the way down from her shoulders, until it reached her hands that felt melded to the steering wheel, as if she couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to tear them away if she had to.

The parking lot behind them was quickly filling with creepers, and fires had begun to spread from one to the other. Smoke was filling the air, depriving her of oxygen even within the closed off cab that she was sitting in. She wondered momentarily if she might not pass out. Red had stopped barking now that she was here, but he was continuing with a slow and rumbling growl that made the threat seem even more real than it looked. She knew now why her parents had been so dead set against her coming to town, why they had said it was far too dangerous. Killing the creepers had become to her a fun-filled sport that had helped to release some of her pent-up anxieties and give her a sense of empowerment. But there was nothing at all empowering about the perilous position that they were in now. She felt helpless to do anything about the approaching fire or the herd of undead as the bile rose again.

Sam heard the horn of Amanda’s truck, and her eyes quickly snapped away from the mirror. It was like the horn had acted like a shot of adrenaline in the vein. Without thinking about it, her right foot shot all the way down on the accelerator, and the back wheels of the truck screeched, spinning too quickly at first to gain traction. The smell of burnt rubber added to the smell of smoke and death, and then the truck lurched backward, so impossibly fast that Sam was thrown forward into the steering wheel. Red slid from the seat and hit the dash that was blasting cold air out at them, helping to make Sam feel like she had ice water for blood.

Red, uninjured, hunkered down on the floorboard with the expectation of a bumpy ride.

The truck, as if it were a wild horse with a mind of its own, bolted into and over the closest of the creepers that were directly behind it, bumping and thumping over them. Because Sam had as yet to let up on the accelerator, the truck continued pummeling backward, slamming into the thick of the horde in the parking lot, slowing its pace but not stopping it.

Red hugged the floorboard, legs splayed wide as the truck rocked and swayed. He was salivating and looked like he was soon to be sick. Sam could feel her butt being jolted up off of the seat, high enough for her head to bump the padded roof overhead before she would spring back into it. She kept a firm grip on the wheel, fearing that if she didn’t, it would be jerked away from her hands, resulting in the truck overturning on them. She had not had much backing practice, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if she had because nothing could have prepared her this type of a wild ride at high speed.

Amanda was shocked to see the rental truck shoot out of the loading bay amidst a squealing of tires and burnt rubber. She had been right about the big truck being perfectly capable of clearing a path for her to be able to drive out as long as she stayed close to Sam’s truck and could make it out before the throng of creepers closed ranks again. Unbelievably, the pavement no longer seemed to exist beneath her tires; there was nothing but creeper carcasses to pave the way, and she kept pace with Sam, hoping that the girl didn’t decide to suddenly brake unexpectedly, sending her truck headlong into the rental.

She had to speed up to get her much-smaller truck over a particularly rough patch, and she wished that she had thought to put her seat belt on as she was lurched up and down and side to side in her seat, with her foot twice slipping from the gas pedal because of her short legs. The massive pile of supplies that they had stashed in the extra cab bounced, and some of the items flew forward onto her and into the passenger seat.

Amidst the chaos of the ride, Amanda could see that Sam was fixing to clear the parking lot and still going fast. She felt her heart skip a beat as she thought of the girl making it past the difficult part, only to crash into one of the storefronts on the other side of the street and have the horde catch up to them as Amanda tried to get her out of that truck and into hers.

Over the course of the LAZ, she had always considered safety, but all that had changed today. Maybe it was the threat of the fire and all that it was consuming and what that would mean to them in the long run, or perhaps it was the bite that she had received, or a combination of both. But she was looking forward to getting out of this day alive and getting back home to try to reclaim her sense of balance because she had begun to feel unhinged.

Chapter 47

A
manda’s eyes were glued to the side mirror and the rental truck, willing Sam to slow and make the turn out into the street that would allow her to put the big truck in drive and take them down the main road far enough away from here that the horde would lose interest in trying to follow them.

Sam knew that she was going too fast to make the turn, not because of experience but out of instinct. She applied the brake some before yanking the wheel to the left, knowing that while she was driving in reverse, she needed to turn the wheel in the opposite direction of the way she intended to go; Roy had taught her that. The truck slowed a little and then bumped down off of the curb and heaved into a turn that caused the wheels on the left side of the truck to lift for a second while the tires on the right side screamed and burned into the asphalt.

For a second, Amanda thought the truck would flip. She slowed her truck, not wanting to become entangled with the big truck wreck that looked to be about to happen. But then the tires were all back on the ground. The big rental truck had halted suddenly, and then it was lurching forward and speeding away down the street.

“I didn’t know that Roy had taught you stunt driving, kid,” Amanda said aloud to nobody but herself, and then she punched the gas on her truck in an effort to catch Sam.

Amanda glanced in the rearview mirror to see that only a few creepers had meandered out into the street after them. The rest were being pulled by their interest in the fire, toward the home improvement store that was now being taken by the flames. Looking back, she needed no one to tell her how close that they had cut it to the point of no return. She was angry with herself for allowing Sam to have become caught up in such a foolish stunt as the one that they had just pulled off. If she really wanted to teach the kid how to stay alive, then she would have to do a better job than that.

Up ahead, Amanda could see the rental truck roll to a stop along the side of the road. The brake lights on the previously pristine truck were broken from the impact they had taken with the creepers. The truck itself was covered in blood and creeper body matter, making it look ghoulish, but the tires appeared to be functional, and there was nothing else to make Amanda feel as if it wouldn’t make the drive back out into the desert.

Amanda pulled up behind the truck and stopped, before quickly getting out. She wanted to check on Sam.

The girl had practically fallen out of the truck on weak and shaken legs, before dropping to all fours on the hot asphalt and heaving up the bile that had been regurgitating between her stomach and her mouth the entire drive away from the store.

Amanda ran to her and helped to get her to her feet once the vomiting had passed.

“Sorry, I threw up,” the girl said, sounding disoriented.

Sam brought her hand up to her forehead and then lifted her eyes to Amanda. She had begun to shake.

“It’s okay, you did good, Sam,” Amanda said. “You’re in shock, and that’s normal. You need some water.”

The girl nodded with what appeared to be some recognition of what Amanda had said, but she didn’t say anything, almost falling to her knees when Amanda tried to move her out of the street.

Amanda put Sam’s arm over her shoulders and wrapped her arm around the girl, slowly negotiating her toward the sidewalk, careful to look for signs of trouble in the area that they had so suddenly stopped in. She laid Sam down and propped the girl’s knees up, hoping to get some blood and oxygen to return to the girl’s brain before she could get any sicker.

Red came to Sam’s side and sat protectively, not holding any of that wild ride in the truck against the girl. He was an amazing animal, Amanda thought. He seemed as wise as a person that had lived through a great amount of experiences.

“Watch her, Red, I have to get us some water and some food,” Amanda said, and she could have sworn that he answered her with his eyes.

Knowing that Red would be sure to notify her of a problem, she felt free to jog to the truck and grab several bottles of water, a bag of beef jerky, and a can of peas that she could open with the can opener on her key chain. And then just before she slammed her door, she remembered to reach back in for Red’s water bowl.

“That was the coolest yet,” Sam whispered to her when she returned.

“What?” Amanda said, not knowing to what exactly the girl was referring or if maybe she was delirious.

“I know now why Mom and Dad didn’t want me going to town. But I don’t think I will ever do anything cooler than that again,” Sam said, and her lips looked to be gaining some color again.

Sam wanted Amanda to help her sit, and Amanda didn’t see any harm in it, considering that the girl looked to be responsive and had stopped shaking.

“Here, drink something,” Amanda said, shoving a water bottle toward her, hoping that the girl would not notice the little bit of shake that was in her own hand right now.

If Sam noticed the shake, she didn’t acknowledge it, and she took the bottle from Amanda and struggled a little with weak fingers to open it. Amanda was busy using the can opener to open the can of peas to get the girl started on something soft to eat before trying to hand her beef jerky. But Red, on the other hand, was looking expectantly at the jerky bag, as if willing it to open and spill out its contents all over the sidewalk.

“Hold out your hands,” Amanda said, setting the opened can of peas to the side.

They were both filthy, covered in soot and creeper grime. Even after sliding out of their gloves, their hands were filthy. Amanda used one of the water bottles to try to get their hands somewhat clean before eating, but it was a modest attempt that only took off the first layer of grime.

“Sorry, I don’t have a spoon,” Amanda said, handing the peas to the girl.

“Don’t worry, I’m an LAZ survivor. Trust me, I can deal,” she said, poking her fingers into the can to pinch at a couple of peas, while Amanda poured water for Red.

“Well, this is quite the place for a picnic,” Amanda said, watching trash blow down the gutter. Some of it was sticking to the muck on the truck, like it was a paper-mache project.

“I just feel lucky to be able to sit here and eat something. For a while back there, things were looking real bad,” Sam said, glancing back the direction that they had come from.

“You can say that again, only don’t actually say it again please,” Amanda said while tearing open the jerky bag and tossing a couple of pieces to Red, before popping one in her mouth.

“I know that you’re worried about me, you know, because I like to jump in there, and all,” Sam said. “But I don’t want you to worry. After what I saw back at the store, I understand better what you guys are talking about and why you’re always so careful.”

“You do realize that what we did back there was stupid, and I never should have asked that of you,” Amanda said, feeling honestly riddled with guilt.

“We did what we had to, that’s what you always say. And don’t worry about it. It worked out okay. We were a good team, and I wouldn’t ever try anything like that unless it was absolutely necessary. I don’t have a death wish,” Sam said, sounding older than her fifteen years.

“But that’s just it,” Amanda said. “I’m not sure that we had to so much as I just really wanted to. It’s like I was blinded by that goal that I have for us.”

“Don’t go beating yourself up. I really don’t think we had a choice,” said Sam. “With the only town within a hundred miles burning down, what are we going to do without the ability to take care of ourselves in the future?”

“True,” Amanda said, knowing that the girl was right in some respects, but bothered by the way she had jeopardized the girl’s life.

“I don’t think I want to tell my parents about that,” Sam said, rolling her eyes.

“You tell your parents everything always, Sam, it’s important, especially in the LAZ.”

“They are going to lose it and say I can’t come anymore,” Sam said with a mouthful of jerky.

“Your parents are reasonable people, and they aren’t going to be mad at you. It’s me that will take the brunt of it, and I accept that,” Amanda said before finishing off the peas, except for a few that she hand-fed to Red.

“If you say so,” the girl said, pushing herself onto her feet. “I have to say that I have never been so scared in my life as I was back there, but I feel ready to go again. What’s next?”

You have to hand it to the resilience of youth
, Amanda thought, chucking the empty tin can and leaving the empty bottles to blow away.

“Ewww, look at the truck,” Sam said, apparently just noticing how covered in gore it was.

“Mine too, but you sure plowed the way for us to get out,” Amanda said. “I’m proud to call you my run partner.”

“Me too, or same, or whatever,” Sam said, digging the keys to her truck out of the pocket where she had hastily stuffed them before collapsing to her knees.

“Just so you know, I was scared too,” Amanda said. “Hopefully, we don’t ever have to get quite so close to the action again.”

“So you’ve pulled into the lead with twenty, and I have seventeen,” Sam said, eliciting a befuddled look from Amanda.

“What?”

“Creeper kills, you’re in the lead for today,” Sam said, apparently ready to be back to her old, new self.

“And what about the two dozen or so that you ran over with the truck back there?” Amanda said. “I think at this point, you’re standing out as the clear winner.”

“Oh,” Sam said, cocking her head, “I guess you’re right. That was pretty awesome when you think about it.”

“Yea, well, try not to think about it too much, okay?” Amanda said, going to look in the back of her truck to see if she had lost anything monumental out of the back when the truck had been bouncing over the bodies in the parking lot.

She had very tightly packed everything back here, and she could not, off-hand, identify anything that had fallen out. She was sure that the stuff in the back of the moving truck had taken quite the jostling, and there was the distinct possibility that some of what they had recovered had been damaged in the commotion.

“I’m going to open the back of this truck up and take a look,” Amanda said. “Things got pretty beat around. I’ll hand you a clean air filter if you feel comfortable enough changing out the old one. I’m sure that it’s pretty gunked up, and I’d like to make the trip without this truck breaking down on us.”

“Sure,” Sam said, with a shrug. “I watched you take the filters out at the rental lot. It’s easy, I can do it.”

“Keep your eyes and ears perked,” Amanda said, sliding the rolling door up and backing up because of the creeper parts that were raining down as it rolled up.

“Ewww,” Sam said, “the LAZ can be so not glamorous sometimes.”

“You can say that again,” Amanda said, pulling herself up and into the back of the truck.

She had not been wrong. The contents in the back had been tossed around. She could already see with her flashlight, that some of the solar panels had been damaged, but not as many as she would have thought. She was mostly concerned about the gas cans at this point, and she located them, still tied up tight together and upright with their lids tightly on. It was amazing that they had not lost several gallons of gas to a spill, but she was thankful. The rest of the tumbled mess seemed to be of no import, and she dug out an air filter and tossed it to Sam.

While the girl was changing the filter, she decided to reorganize the back as best she could in a hurry, because if all went according to plan, there was much more that she wanted to put in this truck before the day was done. She felt a little crazy for still clinging to her goals for the day, but like Sam had said, “You do what needs to be done.”