When I think about that I wonder if we actually deserve to survive, and that somewhere Charles Darwin is spinning in his grave. The flip side of survival of the fittest is extinction of those who maybe should go into history’s dust bin.

Cheery thought. Call me Mr. Sunshine.

The zombies weren’t a threat to me, but I killed them anyway because they might be a threat to someone else. There was a lot of good stuff in this area, and survivors should have a chance to use it. I found my cart, though. A big landscaper’s plastic bin that rolled on four low-pressure rubber tires. Good for hauling small trees with their root balls. Now it had as much bottled water as I could carry, and all of the damn coffee. And three paperback novels I found in the break room. One by James Moore, one by Christopher Golden, and one by Mary Sangiovanni. Horror novels, but hey . . . it was in keeping with the world around me.

We made a stop in a PetSmart and I loaded up with maybe a hundred pounds of canned dog food. I opened two of them for Baskerville and he was in doggy heaven. All of the bags of kibble had been torn open and devoured by rats and raccoons, but vermin still haven’t figured out how to work a pull-tab. Also found a six-pack of light beer, but . . . fuck it . . . the world may have ended but I still wasn’t that desperate. I left it in case a hipster had survived.

We headed west, going out of the small town and through farmland. According to the map, Happy Valley was not actually in a valley, which was one of the reasons it had been hard for me to locate. It was on a hill that backed up against a pretty steep mountain. There was a small river that came down from the mountain bringing snow melt, and the gated community was surrounded by a very dense and very deep section of protected land. No public roads passed it, and the only ways into it were two small private roads. One was a service road that wound around to the back corner and might as well have had “tradesman’s entrance” painted on it. The other was a crushed shell road that was probably quite lovely once upon a time. Pink shells, lined with decorative stones. But it was not easy to find because someone had gone to great lengths to plant a bunch of fast-growing weeds and shrubs in front of the entrance, and over the last six months it had all grown wild. The decorative rocks had all been pushed aside and the shell gravel raked away. I found traces of it, enough to know what it had been.

“Someone’s being very careful,” I said aloud. A squirrel dropped an acorn on me. Not sure how to interpret that.