While Church spoke, Dahlia looked around. Happy Valley looked like something out of a brochure for an upscale real estate brokerage. There were streets lined with lush trees, and houses that, though cookie-cutter, were individually beautiful. Two and three stories, with lots of gables and stained-glass dormers and fancy brickwork.

It was weirdly orderly to her, because everywhere she’d been since the catastrophe had been changed in one way or another. Whole cities, towns, and villages had been the scenes of slaughter and conflict where bullet holes pocked all the walls and doors, where cars stood in awkward positions in the roads or smashed into one another, or were left where they’d died when the EMPs fired. Bloodstains were everywhere, and you could barely walk without stepping in a patch of dried gore or on spent shell casings. Some towns were wholly given over to the living dead, with the gray people randomly wandering the streets or standing like grotesquely vigilant tombstones near the places where they died. Other towns belonged only to ghosts and to the animals that had come searching for food. A few had become armed forts where desperate groups of survivors struggled day-to-day for enough to eat and a safe piece of ground on which to sleep. There was nowhere in the world of living people that remained unchanged because the world itself had irrevocably changed. How could anything not reflect that?

Except here, in Happy Valley, there was no sign of that catastrophe.

The lawns were green and trimmed, the hedges sculpted to geometric perfection, the trees shady and lovely, the streets clean, the pavement swept. None of the houses were burned shells; there was no sign of violence of any kind. The residents were even well-dressed and well-groomed, with clean nails and expensive haircuts and fine jewelry.

That’s what Dahlia saw first. It was so compelling an image that she felt momentarily displaced, disconnected from her own understanding of reality. How could this be here? Even with the walls and the protective geography, how could the end of the world not have touched Happy Valley?

She heard Church and Van Sloane talking. Heard them discuss the defenses, the threat, the coming fight, and it seemed unreal. Like that belonged in a much different story than this.

And then . . .

As if the universe was tired of its joke and wanted to hurt with a cruel punch line, she looked past the obvious and saw a bit deeper. A young man stood on the lawn of one of the closest houses. Not in the center of the lawn, not like he owned the place, but to one side, standing partly obscured by a hedge. By, in fact, the hedge he had been working on, a pair of clippers in his hands. He was a black man, much thinner than the other residents, dressed in grass-stained jeans and a plain T-shirt.