Zero Trilogy (Book 2): Day One Read Online Free Page B

experiences with looters and vandals had taught Elle to stay away from abandoned rest stops. The general store in the valley with Sienna and Bob had been a freak thing. She hadn’t been thinking straight. She’d been starving and dehydrated. She blamed it on that.
    Blame it on anything you want
, she told herself.
It was
still
stupid
.
    So Elle stood on the edge of a massive truck stop. How many idiotic gas stations was she going to have to look at now that Day Zero had destroyed the world? This one was unusually large. There were six rows of pumps and an oversized red barn, the general store. The windows had been broken out. The entire store had already been looted.
    That’s when she saw the star.
It was gold, five-pointed and sloppy. It was spray painted on the ground, obnoxious. The color was bright, though. It was fresh. Very fresh. Elle bent down and touched it.
    I don’t believe it
, she thought.
They were marking their trail.
    The yellow stars were the breadcrumbs and Elle was the bird.
    She stood up. Had there been other stars that she had missed along the way, zoned out and glued to the monotony of putting one foot in front of the other? No. She would have noticed. She had been looking for a clue. Something.
    Well. At least she knew Sienna had been telling the truth.
    She
was
headed in the right direction.
    Elle walked to the back of the barn gas station store. She stopped dead in her tracks. It was a graveyard. The plot was riddled with dozens of old graves, covered haphazardly with piles of dirt. Someone had made a crude wooden cross and forced it into the ground.
    It was silent. Very, very silent.
    Elle grabbed the side of the red barn. There was so much death here. Yet someone had gone to all the trouble to give the people who had died in this place a grave. Who would do that? Not the Slavers. Not Omega.
    Maybe there was a militia in the area. A
real
militia.
    A school bus sat behind the plot of dirt. It was streaked with dried blood. Windows were shattered and there were rows of bullet holes riddled throughout the side, making the name of the school illegible.
    Elle shuddered.
    She walked closer to the bus, taking each step with caution. The driver door was hanging open, broken. It had been forced. Elle took a step into the bus. She pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth,climbing up. She stopped at the front of the aisle. The seats were empty. There were no children, no bodies. Elle sighed, relieved. She walked down the aisle. There were random notebooks and pencils – even a computer tablet with a shattered screen. In the last row, she sat down.
    For a split second, she imagined herself on a bus in Hollywood, on her way to Beverly Hills High School. Not that Elle’s mother would have
ever
allowed Elle to ride a bus – they’d had a private driver for that – but still. The image was normal. Something from the old world.
    Something glinted out of the corner of Elle’s eye. She tensed and drew back. And then she laughed aloud. A pair of cheap aviator sunglasses lay on the floor.
    She grinned and put them on.
    How fortuitous. She walked out of the bus, back into the sunlight. The sunglasses were a little bent, but she didn’t care.
Ask and you shall receive
. That’s what her mother had always said.
    A toy-hauler trailer lay on its side beyond the bus, hidden behind a concrete garbage building. Thetruck itself was painted black, unmarked. The windshield on the truck hauling the trailer had been smashed open. It looked like it had been lying there since the EMP. Elle walked around the rear of the trailer. The rolling door had been forced open by someone, leaving a gaping hole. It looked dark inside. Elle squinted and walked closer, peering into the maw of the trailer. There were tires and mechanical parts. It smelled of old rubber and WD-40 inside.
    Elle climbed into the trailer. It was cool, but she could clearly see the outline of boxes and tools. It looked like someone had rifled through the entire