“Oh, there’s plenty, believe me. You just got to know where to look. What I’m saying is something’s different. Something’s changed. In the last sixty months, we’ve run two supply lines from Kerrville, one up as far as Hutchinson, Kansas, another through New Mexico into Colorado. What we’ve seen is that you tend to find them in clusters now. They’re burrowing deeper, too, using mines, caves, places like that mountain you found. They’re sometimes packed in there so tightly you’d need a crowbar to pry them apart. The cities are still crawling, with all the empty buildings, but there’s plenty of open countryside where you could go for days without seeing one.”

“What about Kerrville? Why is that safe?”

The general frowned. “Well, it isn’t. Not a hundred percent. Most of Texas is pretty bad, actually. Laredo is no place you’d ever want to go, or Dallas. Houston, what’s left of it, is like a goddamn bloodsucker swamp. The place is so polluted with petrochemicals I don’t know how they survive there, but they do. San Antonio and Austin were both pretty much leveled in the first war, El Paso, too. Fucking federal government, trying to burn the dracs out. That’s what led to the Declaration, along about the same time California split off.”

“Split off?” Peter asked.

Vorhees nodded. “From the Union. Declared its independence. The California thing was a real bloodbath, pretty much open warfare for a while, like there wasn’t anything else to worry about. But Texas got lost in the shuffle. Maybe the federals just didn’t want to fight on two fronts. The governor seized all military assets, which wasn’t hard, since the Army by then was in total free fall, everything coming apart. They moved the capital to Kerrville and dug in. Walled it off, like your Colony, but the difference is, we had oil, and lots of it. Down near Freeport, there’s about five hundred million barrels sitting in underground salt domes, the old Strategic Petroleum Reserve. You got oil, you got power. You got power, you got lights. We’ve got over thirty thousand souls inside the walls, plus another fifty thousand acres under irrigation and a fortified supply line running to a working refinery on the coast.”

“The coast,” Peter repeated. The word felt heavy in his mouth. “You mean the ocean?”

“The Gulf of Mexico, anyway.” Vorhees shrugged. “Calling it the ocean would be polite. It’s pretty much a chemical slick. All those offshore platforms still pumping the crap out, plus the discharge from New Orleans. Ocean currents pushed a lot of debris in through there, too. Tankers, cargo ships, you name it. In places you can practically walk across it without getting your feet wet.”

“But you could still leave from there,” Peter tendered. “If you had a boat.”