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.