The Scavengers (After The Apocalypse Book #1)

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.