One apartment for me and George, who didn’t take up any physical space but was so much a part of every room that sometimes I could fool myself into thinking she had just stepped out for some fresh air. That she’d be right back, if I were just willing to wait. If I were still seeing a psychiatrist, I’m sure I’d be getting lectured on how unhealthy my attitude is. Good thing I fired my shrink, huh?

Oakland’s a pretty awesome place to hang your hat, whether or not you’ve got a dead sister to deal with. Twenty-five years ago—roughly, I’m not big on math—Oakland was an urban battlefield. They had a gang problem in the early nineteen-eighties, but that cleared up, and they were fighting a different war by the time the Rising rolled around. Oakland had become the site of an ongoing conflict between the natives who’d lived there for generations and the forces of gentrification that really wanted a Starbucks on every corner and an iPod in every pocket. Then the zombies showed up, and gentrification lost.

More things we learned from the Rising: It’s hard to gentrify a city that’s on fire.

The new folks turned tail and ran for the hills—the ones who lived long enough, anyway. But the people who’d grown up in Oakland knew the lay of the land, and they knew what it meant to fight for what’s yours. Maybe they didn’t have the advantages some of the richer cities started out with, but they had a lot of places they could hole up, and they had a lot of guns. Maybe most important of all, thanks to that gang violence I mentioned earlier, they had a lot of people who actually knew how to use the guns.

Oakland’s inner city fared better than almost any other heavily populated spot on the West Coast. When the dust of the Rising settled, the city was battered, bruised, and still standing—no small accomplishment for a city that most of the emergency services had already written off as impossible to save. It’s still a proud, heavily armed community today.

It’s about fifty miles from Birds Landing to Oakland, and the safest route is even longer. Thankfully, having a journalist’s license means never having to explain why you didn’t want to take the safe way. I hit the first of the checkpoint entrances to I-80 after about twenty miles on the rocky, poorly maintained California back roads. According to pre-Rising records, the checkpoints used to be called toll booths, and they actually accepted currency, rather than automatically deducting usage fees from your bank account. Also, they didn’t have armed guards or require a clean blood test for passage. Road trips must have been pretty boring before the zombies came.