Read Online All That I See - 02 by Shane Gregory - Free Book Online

inside,” I said.
    The house had been thoroughly looted. All of the food was gone , all of the guns, alcohol, bottled water, medicine—
    “Ugh,” Sara said coming out of one of the bedroom s . “They took all my underwear.”
    “The night vision goggles are gone,” I said.
    “What about the sunroom?”
    We both went into the glassed-in back porch, hopin g it had been ignored. It had not . The flats where we’ d started our seeds had been upended. Potting soil darkened the floor. I saw a tiny, wilted seedlin g laying on top of the dirt, it s bare roots exposed.
    “Dammit,” I said, squatting down and scraping up the dirt with the side of my hand.
    Sara knelt beside me.
    “Do you think we can save them?” she asked.
    “ So long as the seedlings aren’t broken and have stayed moist, they might be okay,” I replied. “ I wonder if they found the stash of seed packets.”
    “I’ll go check,” she said.
    She returned with a small cardboard box.
    “They didn’t take them,” she said. “They left the sweet potatoes, too.”
    I looked up and she was holding one of the shriveled sweet potatoes I’d found on the floor at Wal-Mart more than two weeks before. Of course, they made me think of Jen, but I didn’t mention it.
    “Good,” I said, relieved.
    Those seeds and sweet potatoes were going to be the beginning s of our garden. They and their progeny would provide us with fresh food while everyone else was fighting over old canned goods and stale crackers , but more than that, one day, they might be the only thing keeping us from starving to death. They w ere the most important items we had , and thankfully Wheeler and his bunch hadn’t been smart enough to take them.
    We returned as much of the dirt to the trays as we could. Six of the seedlings were still intact, however they were wilted. I couldn’t tell whether they were the peppers or tomatoes because they had not put on their second set of leaves yet.
    “Hopefully, some of the seeds that were slow to germinate are in that dirt somewhere,” I said, picking up one of the trays. “Let’s take them with us back to the stables.”
    Sara grabbed the other tray.
    “They left most of the books and magazines,” she said. “Do you want to get them?”
    “We should go,” I said. “We’ll come back for the m and the hay truck later.”
     
    We drove over to the high school but not via the bypass. That would have taken us by the fairgrounds, and I didn’t want to alert Wheeler’s group, even though there was a chance we’d run into them anyway if they were still in town . Instead, using t he map, we took back roads on the south side of town that would let us out west of the school and away from the fairgrounds.
    We drove onto the school grounds, past the stadium, then past the school itself, to the maintenance building in the back. It didn’t look much different than how I had left it; the fence was still down and collapsed over the front entrance. The ambulance and a pickup truck were still in the courtyard. Off to the side were three buses, and near them was the moving van I’d driven through their fence. I wondered if the stuff Sara and I had collected at Tractor Supply was still inside the truck. Originally , there had been five buses, but I had parked one around back and we had taken the other. Sara pulled around to access the gate . The bus I had parked by the rear entrance was gone.
    “What do you think?” Sara said, parking by the back door. “Do you think they left?”
    “Looks like it,” I said. “If they are inside, it might be best if they didn’t see me right away. You go knock on the door, and I’ll wait in the car.”
    She went up to the door, knocked, and waited. She looked back at me and shrugged. I got out holding the machete . I stuffed the .22 down the front of my pants and joined her. It was very quiet. If they had been inside, I thought we would have heard something. I kind of expected to hear some sound coming from the