After The Fires Went Out: Coyote (Book One of the Post-Apocalyptic Adventure Series) by Regan Wolfrom Read Free Book Online Page B

tomorrow.
    But there are definitely a lot of guys who do things differently, with a heavy duty garbage bag in one hand and a crowbar in the other, wanting to make every place they visit look like the tent cities of San Diego.
    All it would have taken was one visit by the worst kind of scavenger to make Lady Minto what it is today. There are holes in walls that serve no discernible purpose; someone just wanted to waste a little time and energy busting through drywall and so they did.
    But I had hope for the nursing home; people may have torn through the emergency room nurses’ station and the pharmacy, but there was always a chance that they hadn’t bothered with the old folk’s portion, thinking that they had no need for pills to help them pee or build up their bone density.
    Maybe I’d get lucky.
    I found a set of wood cabinets behind a desk; it looked more like a pantry than a nurses’ station. The lock on it hadn’t been broken.
    Most of the locks I’ve picked are wafer locks, the cheapest of the cheap and the ones you get in most houses and offices. I’ve got a small set of lockpicks on my belt that lets me open a wafer lock in around ten seconds. But the cabinet was secured with something stronger, a heavy-duty tubular locks on each drawer; I didn’t have anything to pick that.
    I needed to take a page from the scumbag scavengers. I needed the right tools for the job.
    I jogged back toward the emergency ward. I could see the truck in the distance.
    I couldn’t see Graham.
    I picked up the pace, sprinting toward the truck, jumping over the occasional two-foot pile of debris along the hallway. I ran out to the parking lot and looked around for any sign of him.
    Pauline was still there, but Graham wasn’t.
    I shouted out a few swear words as I realized that he’d fucked off somewhere. It was a bad time for Graham to start acting like an idiot.
    The truck was unlocked; I grabbed the sledgehammer and the crowbar. I made my way back to the old folks’ wing and the locked cabinet, and then I started busting it up, smashing in from the side of the cabinet and jamming the drawers out from the inside. It took some time and a buttload of pushing, but eventually I’d popped each lock and launched each drawer open.
    I emptied the drawers one after the other, throwing dozens of boxes and bottles and packets onto the counter. It made sense to take them all; most would come in handy eventually. If I do this job of mine well enough, there will even be a day when Fiona is old and crotchety.
    I didn’t want to wait until I got home; I needed to know if there were any heart pills there.
    Behind all of the the anti-depressants and sleeping pills I found a bottle of Laneradine. I felt my whole body seize up. It wasn’t very full but it didn’t feel empty. It took me way too long to figure out the childproof cap, my fingers trembling as I pushed and turned.
    There were only three left. Three more days of happy heart health. Three more days to live.
    I kept looking through the rest of the drugs. They’d be useful, someday, maybe... I could think of plenty of good reasons to stick a few sleeping pills in Matt’s morning coffee.
    I made my way back toward the truck with my pack filled with drugs, probably moving more slowly than I should have considering that we still had car batteries to collect. But it was hard to stay focused on the task when I’d just discovered the mother lode but ended up with just three more days of heart pills.
    That wasn’t worth much.
     

    Graham still wasn’t back when I got to the parking lot. I gave him a call on the handheld.
    “Where the hell are you?” I asked.
    “I’m looking for car batteries,” Graham replied. “Looks like we might be too late. Over.”
    He was planning on carrying how many twenty-pound car batteries back to the parking lot?
    “What’s your location?” I asked.
    “Just south of the elementary school. Over.”
    “Wait there. Don’t move, alright?”
    I climbed