With that cheerful thought at the front of my mind, I started trying to get my boots on. The process was complicated by the dogs, who thought attacking the laces was a fantastic game. The main difference between dogs that size and cats seems to be that cats, while crazy, are at least meant to be little, whereas the process of shrinking dogs seems to drive them insane. “At least we have that much in common,” I muttered, and stood, stretching for a final time before walking out of the room. I left the guest room door open. No point in depriving the bulldogs of a nice warm bed.

Alaric was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop, tapping industriously away. A half a pot of coffee sat in front of him, wafting the delicious smell of hot caffeine toward me as I entered. I stopped to sniff appreciatively. The sound got his attention; he looked up, nodded briefly, and looked back down again. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said. I grabbed a mug from the counter and poured myself a cup of hot black coffee. Morning is the only time I normally get coffee without complaining from my inner peanut gallery. If George wanted to sulk, maybe I could get a second cup in before going back to Coke.

A pang of guilt followed on the heels of the thought, although it wasn’t enough to stop me from taking a mouthful of throat-searing liquid. I’d rather have George than all the coffee in the world. Still, if focusing on self-caffeination distracted me from the question of her silence, it was worthwhile. Alaric kept typing as I sat down across from him, seeming to ignore me completely. I sipped my coffee. He typed. George didn’t say anything.

This went on for a few minutes before I ct blaed my throat and asked, “So what have I missed? Other than the sunrise and, apparently, breakfast?”

Alaric raised his head. “Maggie took Becks and the Doc into town to go grocery shopping. Something about us eating her out of house and home.”

The image of that particular trio tackling the Weed supermarket was fascinating. I paused for a moment to ponder it. I’ve seen pictures of pre-Rising grocery stores. They were weird, cramped things, with narrow aisles filled with milling consumers—and of course, when the zombies came, they turned into effective little death traps, full of places for the infected to hide. Even the sprinkler systems they used to run over the vegetables worked to spread the outbreak, since all it took was a few drops of blood getting into the water system and, bam, you were literally misting live infection throughout the produce aisle. It didn’t help that people kept freaking out and running for places where they could try to hole up until it was all over—like the nearest warehouse megastore. The body counts at Costco and Wal-Mart were nothing short of stratospheric.