Read Online The Scavengers by Gen Griffin - Free Book Online Page B

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