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I smiled, and it was a genuine smile. Not forced. Not a wince. “Yes,” I said, “it really does. May I ask what that code phrase is?”
She hesitated. “Look, Joe, I feel that you’re a good man. You could have done us harm if you wanted to, but instead you brought us food.”
“But . . . that’s not enough for you to want to share certain details,” I said. “No problem, I get it. Who knows, maybe I’d even be able to figure it out. Church would want to use a phrase that’s easy to remember. Something simple but unique, and unexpected, given the circumstances.”
She cut me a look. “I could give you a hint, if you like. Because if you did guess, then it would tell me something.”
“Worth a try,” I said. Baskerville was standing on the road watching something, but it proved to be an owl who moved from one tree to another. I let Abigail work out the risk/reward thing on her own.
“Okay,” she said. “A hint. Something vague. Maybe too vague, because it’s a literary reference.”
“Hit me.”
“Leonard Pine.”
I actually burst out laughing. “I knew it!”
We stopped and she studied me as I laughed. A real laugh, even more real than my smile. It wasn’t that it was all that funny, but it was proof. Real proof that we were talking about Mr. Church. No doubt at all.
I said, “Vanilla wafers. That’s the code phrase, or something like it.”
She gasped. “You do know him. And extra points for understanding the reference.”
It was an old joke. I was always a huge fan of the novels of Joe Lansdale featuring a couple of down-on-their-luck private detectives, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Hap and Leonard never had a good day that couldn’t go south on them, but no matter how weird things got, they always won out in the end. Hap was a white liberal, Leonard was a black conservative, but they were the best of friends and walked through hell together. One element in the books was that Leonard was absolutely addicted to vanilla wafers. It was a mania with him, worse than a junkie hooked on crack. And it was a love shared by Mr. Church, who always had a box of Nilla wafers close at hand. Even the first time I met him, when he interviewed me under deeply weird circumstances for inclusion in his black ops organization, the Department of Military Sciences, he had a plate of vanilla wafers. And Oreos for me. I can’t stand fucking vanilla wafers.
But at that moment I’d have eaten a six-course dinner of nothing but vanilla wafers.
“Where is he?” I begged. “Please, I need to find him. I need to talk to him.”
Her smile faltered. “I . . . I don’t actually know. It’s been weeks since I saw him last.” She named a small town a hundred miles north and explained where Church had been camped, and how he was camped. A big travel trailer pulling a good-sized storage pod filled with supplies. “I doubt he’ll still be there, though. He said he was looking for a place a few travelers had told him about. A gated community with a good wall that had never been overrun. I got the impression he wanted to see if it could be established as a town where he could send other refugee groups like mine. We couldn’t wait, though, because of Sandra and her baby on the way.”
“Where was this community?” I asked. “What do you know about it?”
“It had a name that seems so weird now, under the circumstances, I mean,” she said. “Happy Valley.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that does seem a little weird.”
Abigail looked into my eyes and then around at the dark forest. “The world has become weird, though. Weird and big and dark and scary.”
“We’re still alive, though. You and your people. Church and the people he’s helping. Whoever’s down in Asheville. We’re not going to die out like some species on the edge of natural extinction. Somehow we’ll win this world back from the dead.”
In the cold starlight I saw a mix of emotions in her eyes. Some hope and some humor, some tolerance and some despair. Sadness, too, because any conversation about survival carries with it the memory of who has not survived. Seeing her pain, knowing it was tied to that kind of memory, made my own inner eye look at the empty places in my life. It twisted a knife with practiced, delicate precision.
We walked back to the camp, and she told me where she thought Happy Valley might be. Then we went to our bedrolls. Baskerville spooned with me for warmth. The night passed. In the morning I went my way and they went theirs. I hugged Abigail and told her that I hoped we’d see each other again. She said that would be nice.
We both knew that we wouldn’t. But lies are cheap and they sound good.
— 14 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
Life became strange for Dahlia. Surreal. That was the word, she decided. That said it all.
She had always loved that word. Before. It had been a vocabulary word in tenth grade, and she liked the description in one of the dictionaries she read. Perception marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream. That was fun, though she understood at the time that “irrational” did not necessari
ly mean “bad.” It meant that it made no logical sense. That seemed to apply to a lot of things in her world. The whole concept of physical beauty—a lucky happenstance of genetics—being the yardstick by which people were judged made no sense at all. That was irrational. She was so much smarter than pretty much all of the “in crowd,” the preps, the whatevers. Dahlia had been one of the smartest kids in her class, but because she’d always been fat the others discounted her intelligence. Waistlines mattered more than IQ or GPA. Which was nuts. That was surreal in a bad way. The fact that she knew that her brains would matter ten times more when they all graduated was another kind of surreal. Her ability to dive into literary worlds and become lost in them as if what lay between the pages was more real than anything in school . . . yeah, that was surreal. It was an escape hatch that kept her sane and made her smile when nothing else did.
Then the world came to an end and the rules changed. A lot of the pretty kids got eaten. Those that still had enough meat on the bone to reanimate were now pretty fucking ugly. And their clothes looked like shit. How embarrassing to be wearing last year’s fashions forever? That made Dahlia smile, even now. Even though it was petty and a little catty. It was also surreal, though. In a different way, and not entirely in a bad way. Not for her. While everyone she knew at school was dying, she’d come more fully alive. She’d become the leader of a roving band of survivors carving out their place in a post-apocalyptic world mostly populated by zombies. Actual zombies.
