Thicker Than Blood (Thicker Than Blood #1)(115)

Rolling myself out of bed, I moved quickly to stand by her side. Like she’d said, there were two shambling around the exterior of the Jeep, wildly turning their heads back and forth and reaching for nothing. Off in the distance, near a thick stand of trees, I noticed more movement.

“There’s three,” I said, pointing. “Dammit.”

“That’s a deer, Lei,” Evelyn said, narrowing her gaze. And just as she said it, both of the infected noticed the movement. With a growl, they went stumbling off after the deer. It leaped out from behind the tree that had been hiding it and took off running, the infected still following.

“Well,” Evelyn said as she turned to me, a smirk on her face. “That solves that.”

“What if there are more?” I asked, worried that our arrival here might have disturbed an entire town of infected that we’d somehow missed on our drive through.

“There are going to be infected everywhere,” she said. “It’s unavoidable. And this is too good of a place to pass up. I think all that really matters is how well we can fortify it.”

She pursed her lips together, wincing as the movement pulled on her stitches. Reaching up to touch them, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Let’s go check out the town some more, see what can be salvaged. Finding a drugstore would be great…some painkillers, antibiotics…” She touched her stitches again, grimacing. “Before this gets infected.”

? ? ?

The town was quiet. Aside from the water rushing through the nearby gorge, the chirping of small birds, and the sound of our feet as we walked down the center of the road, there was nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. We passed by several lodges, and a lot of vacant lots in between. On the main drag there was little else to be found—a bookstore, a movie theatre, a five-and-dime type shop, a shoe store, and a small department store.

When we didn’t find a pharmacy, I gestured to the grocery store we’d passed only minutes ago, and Evelyn made a face. “I could smell that place from across the street,” she said. “Ten to one, it’s crawling with bugs and rats.”

“But they probably had a pharmacy.” I shrugged. “It’s worth a shot, right?”

“Yeah.” She made another face. “I’ll just hold my nose, I guess.”

Surprisingly, the grocery store wasn’t filled with rotting food. Everything had long since rotted, and what hadn’t been looted had simply petrified. The smell that remained, though, having probably permeated the walls and floors and everything within reach, was downright awful. Worse than awful. Even holding our noses, I could still taste the stench in the back of my throat.

Side by side, our weapons drawn, we walked cautiously down the dark, empty aisles, the floors covered with sleeping bags, suitcases, even tents.

“We could take some of this stuff,” Evelyn suggested quietly. “The clothing, at least.”

Grimacing, I shook my head. “I’d rather check the store one block over than try and wash the smell out of these. God, what happened here? Was the entire town camped out here? Where did they all go?”

“Nowhere good, I’m guessing,” Evelyn said darkly, kicking a tattered sleeping bag over, revealing a dark stain on the tile beneath it. It was that moment that I noticed the bloody handprints. They were nearly indistinguishable amongst the dirt and dust and stains left from the rotted food, but once I noticed them, it seemed to be all I could see. Handprints, splatters, drag marks, places where blood had pooled heavily.

A sharp tap-tap sound had us spinning around, raising our guns, only to find a raccoon standing at the end of the aisle. It stared at us in the dark of the supermarket as all three of us froze in place, its eyes appearing to emit an eerie yellow glow.

“Shoo!” Evelyn shouted, kicking the sleeping bag and startling the creature. It made a whoop-whoop noise before skittering backward and disappearing.

“Pharmacy,” I said, gesturing with my gun to a sign still hanging from the ceiling. “Though, all things considered…” I looked around at the many makeshift beds. “I’m not holding out much hope there’s anything left.”

We continued on, passing by more personal belongings, a row of knocked-over shelving, until we reached the far end of the building where a long countertop fitted with Plexiglas windows was labeled Pharmacy. Finding them securely locked, we peered inside. The small room seemed pretty well picked over, but there were still plenty of bottles lining the bottom shelves, along with baskets full of unopened pharmacy bags that remained untouched beneath the cash register.

“What I wouldn’t give for one of those to be aspirin,” Evelyn whispered, smiling at me. “Fuck antibiotics, I just want some pain relief.”

“I think the door to get in is in the back,” I said, nodding toward two large rubber doors helpfully marked Employees Only.

“Great,” Evelyn muttered, rolling her eyes. “Just what I want to do, go traipsing through some scary dark storage room.”

We stared at each other a moment, as if silently deciding how to proceed. The seconds ticked by while I waited for Evelyn to make up her mind, and I knew the moment she had. Squaring her shoulders, she sniffed imperiously. “If we’re going to survive out here, we’re going to have to stop being afraid. I’m not afraid. Are you afraid, Lei?”

I was terrified, but it was a different kind of fear than I’d grown accustomed to. It was an adrenaline-pumping, heart-racing sort of fear that didn’t so much cripple me as it gave me strength. It wasn’t the fear that I was going to die, it was born from the thought of dying. I wanted to live, I wanted to keep going, I wanted to be strong. And in order to do any of that, I had to be terrified; any less was going to get me or Evelyn killed.