Surprisingly easily.

Your short career as a car thief comes to an early and spectacularly successful end. You break into two of the houses with intact garages and briefly ransack them for useful items, turning up a few odds and ends that you stuff into a small bag that you brought with you for this kind of loot. Items like toothpaste, a few small caches of painkillers and antibiotics, several disposable razors and razor cartridges, a handful of assorted batteries, a decent quality pocket flashlight... innumerable small treasures. Your eyes widen when you open one bathroom mirrored cabinet and see a 20-pack of Trojan condoms, well within their expiry date. Those definitely go in the bag. Most of the items in the garages are however no use to you. Plenty of things that could be, in some rare circumstances, but which arent worth taking up space in your limited capacity.

Each of the houses has a stink of ****: a factor that you'll have to continue to get used to. You avoid the bedrooms, where you're likely to encounter the actual corpses. Even with some of the early anatomy training that you'd undergone in your pre-med career, you are still not inured to being in the presence of ****. Currently it still reminds you of being **** to watch your parents die from the plague, and the horrific ordeal of having to drag them into the yard and dig graves for them. You respectfully leave those spaces alone, shutting doors where possible, and leaving your neighbors in their unconventional tombs.

The third house you check has an unpretentious silver Dodge SUV style vehicle in the garage, gleaming in the half light from the narrow windows. It looks to be pretty new, and in excellent condition. You look through the rest of the garage and find an additional treasure trove: two 8 gallon cans, full of gas.

Well that was easy.

But next you need to find the keys. The garage door fortunately can be opened from the inside without needing to unlock it first, so that's simplified. Starting to thread back into the house, you check the obvious places for car keys. Kitchen worktops, hall tables, coat pockets in the closet. You find one set first, which is for a different car, but it's only another ten minutes of rummaging before you find the right keys in one of the kitchen drawers. Kind of a strange place, you think, but maybe if its kept in the garage it was only driven rarely. Also in the drawer is multipack of match boxes - very useful. Those go in the bag, along with a few extra tins of food that the family here evidently died before getting the chance to eat.

Back in the garage, you unlock the car with the keys and inspect it. You realise that the battery may be a problem, and try turning the ignition. Nothing. You curse in frustration, sitting in the driver seat with your head in your hands, trying to think.

If the owner was careful enough to keep spare cans of gas, maybe they thought about flat batteries too? You search along the shelves but you can't find a spare that escaped your notice before. Finally, almost in desperation, you pop the hood and have a look at the engine.

And immediately you mentally slap yourself for not thinking of it. The battery leads are unconnected. Smart. You connect the terminals, and try the key again, rewarded this time with a throaty hum as the engine kicks into life. The dashboard fuel indicator is almost full. This has really been a stroke of luck.

You exit the car and haul the fuel cans into the trunk before preparing to head back to your house to collect Todd and your gear.