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“Does anyone else see what I see?” Jason murmured to Rachael and Claudia as they entered another subdivision.
Rachael looked around, wondering what she was supposed to be looking for.
“I noticed it,” Claudia whispered back, crossing her arms almost protectively over her chest. “I thought maybe it was just a fluke at first, but now I definitely see it.”
Rachael scanned the area for any possible threats, finding none.
“What are you two talking . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she finally understood what Jason and Claudia meant. “Oh.”
They were on yet another beautifully maintained street where people sat relaxing on their porches drinking sodas, children played happily on well-manicured lawns. In stark contrast, a handful of workers were trimming some of the bushes along the sidewalk. As Rachael looked—really saw what was in front of her—she felt sick and stupid for not noticing it before.
While the happily playing children and lounging residents all wore clean, expensive looking clothes and looked like they’d just come from a hair salon, the workers were all clad in what looked like hand-me-downs, mainly jeans and plain T-shirts. None of their clothing was ragged, but the contrast
between workers and residents was easy to see if one paid attention.
Everyone on the council, everyone relaxing and enjoying the day . . . they were all white. All the people working in the gardens or cutting the trees or cleaning the City Hall was a person of color. Black, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern. All those lovely shades of brown skin doing the labor while the extremely white residents of town sipped their iced tea and flexed their toes in the green grass of well-manicured lawns.
Oh, this is bad. Rachael thought to herself, stomach roiling. Oh, this is very, very bad.
— 16 —
THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG
We spent more than two weeks trying to find Happy Valley. I scavenged a bunch of maps, but it wasn’t on any of them in the area Abigail said to look. Which told me there wasn’t actually a place called that, but was likely a development or gated community of that name. Likely a new build shortly before the dead rose. None of that helped. Would have been a snap with Google maps, but that ship sailed, caught fire, hit an iceberg and sank.
So I roved. Going where the road took me. Sometimes following instincts; sometimes following whim.
I found it by pure luck. I stopped for a night in what had once been a real estate office. Those are the kinds of businesses no one ever thinks to raid. No obvious stores of food, weapons, medical supplies or other things. No sign anyone had even slept there before me, except for animals. I killed some time sweeping out the manager’s office and beat the cushions of a leather couch to make sure I wasn’t going to lie down with bedbugs or lice. Then I made a fire in a metal trashcan and put a brace of fat rabbits over it to slow roast. While that filled the offices with a mouth-watering aroma, Baskerville and I prowled the rest of the suite of offices.
I found a file cabinet near the reception desk, bottom drawer crammed with boxes of power bars, two bags of Twizzlers, and several big bags of wrapped mints. I took all of that. Then I hit pure gold in a small breakroom. There were eight five-gallon bottles of spring water for the lobby cooler, and all the makings for coffee, including four pounds of bulk coffee already ground, and maybe six or seven hundred packs of Starbucks instant coffee, along with sealed bags of sugar packets and powdered creamer. I nearly wept.
So, I used another metal can to build a fire to boil some water and brewed some actual coffee. Nothing has ever tasted better in my whole life. I drank five cups. After a while my eyes were twitching and I was able to smell colors and taste sounds. Who cares?
I split the rabbits with Baskerville and after dinner I prowled the office again, hoping for more hidden goodies. There was no more food, but in the executive office, I found a handgun and a nearly full box of shells. It was a Springfield XDs 45 ACP. A small-frame gun, the kind useful for concealed carry. Decent stopping power but it’s for up close and personal defense, and it has a single stack magazine that holds only six rounds. I didn’t need another gun, but I took it anyway, because what I needed at that moment and what I might need later were vastly different things.
While I wandered the office, I thought about the cache of supplies I’d gotten here. If I could find a good-sized cart, like one of those big laundry hampers, all that spring water, the coffee and the gun might make a nice gift to bring to Happy Valley when I got there. Church would appreciate the gesture.
And that’s when the universe decided to get weird on me. Not nasty weird, which is the route it usually takes, but downright coincidental to the point of being weird.
I looked up from the gun I’d taken from the head honcho’s desk and there, on the desk, was a lease agreement for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse in Happy Valley.
I shit you not.
I set down the pistol and snatched up the lease, then went searching for a map. There were several and I matched the mailing address to the map and there it was. Maybe fifteen miles from where I stood. My heart pounded in my ears and I wanted to run for the door but did not. It was late, and there had been dead ones wandering around this little town. Morning was safer.
***
We left at first light.
There were only two of the dead in sight, both of them looking more confused and sad than scary. A teenage boy in sweatpants and Nike sneakers, and a bald older man wearing a hospital gown. Both of them had visible bites and were missing important pieces of meat. The fact that they were mostly intact was likely due to having been attacked by only one of the living dead. It takes a while to chew your way through healthy flesh. And for some reason I don’t understand, the zombies stop eating shortly after a person dies, and won’t take so much as a small nibble of their own kind. Maybe it has something to do with the way Lucifer 113 was bioengineered. The parasites needed sustenance, but the imperative of the design was to attack healthy hosts and spread the disease. Before Dr. Volker changed it, the base bioweapon had been designed to have an enemy population infect itself in as short a time as possible, leaving the physical assets of buildings and resources intact.
When I think about that I wonder if we actually deserve to survive, and that somewhere Charles Darwin is spinning in his grave. The flip side of survival of the fittest is extinction of those who maybe should go into history’s dust bin.
Cheery thought. Call me Mr. Sunshine.
The zombies weren’t a threat to me, but I killed them anyway because they might be a threat to someone else. There was a lot of good stuff in this area, and survivors should have a chance to use it. I found my cart, though. A big landscaper’s plastic bin that rolled on four low-pressure rubber tires. Good for hauling small trees with their root balls. Now it had as much bottled water as I could carry, and all of the damn coffee. And three paperback novels I found in the break room. One by James Moore, one by Christopher Golden, and one by Mary Sangiovanni. Horror novels, but hey . . . it was in keeping with the world around me.
We made a stop in a PetSmart and I loaded up with maybe a hundred pounds of canned dog food. I opened two of them for Baskerville and he was in doggy heaven. All of the bags of kibble had been torn open and devoured by rats and raccoons, but vermin still haven’t figured out how to work a pull-tab. Also found a six-pack of light beer, but . . . fuck it . . . the world may have ended but I still wasn’t that desperate. I left it in case a hipster had survived.
