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.”