America The Dead Book Two: The Road To Somewhere by Lindsey Rivers Read Free Book Online

wider tires and the heavy duty suspension parts
they had used for the other trucks.
    They had also installed two winches on this
one, front and back.
    “ We'll use it to pull out any of
the other trucks that get stuck, whether in front of or behind us,”
Bob said.
    They had wandered over to look over the
Hummers, and Tom had gone with Jeff to show him where the tires
were stored. Jeff had found the tires he had wanted immediately,
and Tom had helped him to get them back to the garage.
    Mike had left to locate Kate and the others.
He'd finally found them, over their heads in boxes, in a large
storage building attached to the rear of one of the chain
stores.
    “ Looking for flour,” Kate told
him. She turned and pointed at three large boxes resting on the
concrete floor. Those are one pound bags boxed and untouched. All
the twenty five pound bags we found are wet or eaten into, or
both.” She shrugged, leaned towards him and gave him a quick kiss.
He looked injured.
    “ Baby,” she said. He looked
around. They were momentarily hidden in the stacks. He pulled her
to him and kissed her harder.
    “ Bad, Mike,” Kate said, pulling
him closer to return the kiss.
    “ You
guys ,” Patty said coming around the corner
of a stack of boxes. She smiled though.
    Kate giggled and Mike rolled his eyes. “Okay...
flour,” he said and began looking in earnest.
    ~
    An hour more of searching located two more
boxes of the one pound bags, a palette of twenty five pound bags
full of rat burrowed holes, and several cases of peanut
butter.
    David and Ronnie had loaded up two large
rolling carts, and they were all helping to pull them out through
the main store and into the parking lot. The peanut butter, the
salvageable flour, several cases of vegetables and canned meats,
several different kinds of energy bars, along with dozens of cases
of sports drinks filled the carts.
    “ No bottled water at all,” Patty
said.
    “ I know,” Kate said. “And we have
a lot, but it's not like we can turn a tap and get
more.”
    Everyone murmured agreement or nodded their
heads. There were cases upon cases of sports drinks and vitamin
water, and they had taken several cases of those, but they found no
bottled water at all. As they were pulling the carts back, they ran
into the men from the garage coming back from a stream that ran
behind the garage area back along the wood line.
    The water was ice cold, but everyone liked to
stay clean, and it was amazing, Mike thought, what you could get
used to when there was no alternative.
    “ I do miss hot showers,” Bob said.
“I think a new Nation will have to find a way to do hot showers.”
Everybody laughed.
    “ I'll be up later,” Kate told
Mike. She'd simply picked up new clothes while they were in the
store, as had Patty and Arlene.
    As they headed down towards the wood line,
Annie, who had stayed behind to help Tim pick up the garage, called
out to them to wait for her. She caught up and joined them walking
down the trail to the small stream.
    The men had picked up their own clothes and
headed to a spot around a small bend in the stream, out of sight of
the women.
    ~
    Lilly and Jessica had cleaned up a few more of
the motel rooms, including a double with adjoining doors to keep
the children together. They had heated water and bathed the
children in one of the bathtubs. Getting the water up from the
stream had seemed as though it would be the hardest part, but Tim
and Annie, testing out one of the lifted Suburbans, had taken them
down with several large water containers, helped them fill them,
then drove them back up in style.
    The kids loved riding in the Suburban. It was
just another game to play.
    They had not even given them too hard a time
about taking a bath. Jessica took over watching the freshly
scrubbed children while Lilly left to go down to the creek to get
herself cleaned up.
    Sandy and Susan were coming up the path as
Lilly was going down.
    “ Cold?” she asked. The day had
warmed up.