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

— 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?