A few days later, I went out with my mom to a smaller river nearby, partly to collect some early strawberries from the fields there, but mostly just to take a break from the normal routine. Dad was going out with Roger to hunt, so my mom wanted to do something with me. We packed a picnic and headed out in the morning, not quite as early as the men, but still pretty early.

    We left our house on our bicycles and started pedaling south. We were going farther than Dad and I had the other day, so the bicycles were the best transportation. We had several cars in front of our house-most people did, since there were literally thousands of them just lying around, abandoned, and only a few hundred people in our community. Many had been wrecked when all the people had died, but most were still usable; almost all were at least salvageable for parts. But we only used them for important errands, as fuel was still at a premium, especially the real gasoline and diesel. I could remember when we began producing bio-diesel, but it still was unusable during the winter months, and we weren't able to divert enough of our food production to make the fuel in sufficient quantities. So for now, fuel was conserved, usually for driving the trucks that would gather more resources-tank trucks to gather fuel from faraway gas stations, or large flat-bed trucks if we were going to cut down trees for firewood and lumber.

    Mom and I went through the old part of the city, the part that Milton first cleared of zombies when I was too small to remember. All the streets here had been cleared of abandoned vehicles-mostly by just pushing them to the side, not actually taking them away-so bicycling was easy and pleasant here, though eerie, going past so many empty cars and buildings. The streets that weren't regularly used were being reclaimed by plants growing up through the pavement. Most of the buildings were tagged with warnings, as they were unstable and would probably have to be torn down and rebuilt before people could use them. If there were ever that many people again.

    We first went south because in our part of the settlement there wasn't a gate in the main security barrier. We lived in a part of the city where the people had built walls connecting a number of abandoned warehouses and other buildings, then boarded up the buildings, tagged all of them with warning signs to keep people away, and now the walls and buildings together acted as the northern border of the central city, the live zone. Guards patrolled this barrier regularly, several times a day.

    Beyond this was land, like the field Dad and I had gone to, and the one Mom and I were headed to now. Milton had cleared out the dead, and then a fence had been put around it, enclosing miles and miles of empty space that now served as our source of food-by farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering. These lands were sparsely populated, and the outer fence wasn't checked as often, so these weren't considered completely safe.

    Teams took turns going around it in circuits that took a couple days to complete. They often found small groups of the dead gathered, pushing against the fence, and they waited while Milton was called to round them up. They also sometimes found holes in the fence. Some of these were from burrowing animals, but some meant worse problems and dangers. Beyond the outer fence were only the dead, so far as any of us knew, and Milton was rounding up those close to our outer fence and was putting them in enclosures outside of our lands. We only went into these wild, dead areas in well-planned incursions to gather supplies, not pleasant outings on bicycles.

    Mom and I got to the main street and turned east. This took us past the museum, where life as we knew it started with a few people barricaded in against the dead. Although our limits were much wider than the few hundred square feet they had had, life was more or less the same as it had been, and a quantum leap away from the kind of life depicted in the museum exhibits. For us, the airplanes and satellites in the museum were as removed from our daily lives as the cave drawings of far older tribes; if anything, the last technological achievements of humanity were far more alien and mysterious than the bows and spears of some of the museum's dioramas and display cases. In a way, though, the museum was the center of our community, its touchstone with the past, and the symbol of its survival.

    We waved to some older people who were there, trimming the grass around the wall. Through the open gate I could see the helicopter on the ground among the big, abstract sculptures. The chopper was still maintained for emergencies, though its fuel was even rarer and more precious than regular gasoline.

    Just past the museum was one of the guarded gates out of the live zone. As in our part of town, the buildings on either side of the street were boarded up, and they formed part of the barricade. Across the street a brick wall had been built, connecting to the walls of the buildings on either side. The building to the right had been a warehouse with loading bays. To exit our city, one of the guards would open a loading bay on this side, and the people or vehicle would enter the building, then exit though another loading bay on the other side of the wall. It meant the wall could be made stronger and permanently anchored to the buildings and the pavement, rather than being a metal gate that had to be hinged or drawn back.

    A guard was on the roof of the one building, and another was on the street, holding the leash of a big dog, a Rottweiler, black and sullen-looking. The guards often used them when patrolling, and although the dog didn't make any aggressive move or bark, I still shivered a little at the sight of it. I'd always been afraid of dogs. Something about them seemed wrong, like they knew too much and too little at the same time. I didn't know how to express it, but I knew the effect they always had on me, as useful as they were.

    Both men smiled and greeted us. The whole arrangement was a necessary precaution, but it was hardly run like a military operation. Dad sometimes said it was more like a neighborhood watch. "Hi Sarah… Zoey," the man at the wall said. "Where you headed?"

    "The South Fork, past the bridge. We'll be back late in the afternoon," Mom answered.

    "Great." He wrote down our information on a clipboard, so if we didn't come back, someone would know to come looking for us. He eyed me warily and didn't ask how I was doing. His son, Max, was a year younger than me, but he'd been known to jump in and call me names back when I was Zombie Girl and some of the bigger kids were picking on me; I don't think he ever had the nerve to hit me, though it was hard to remember some of the times I was doubled-up or on the ground. That summer I was old enough that I wouldn't necessarily have begrudged him the pleasure: if it earned him points with the other kids and kept him from being picked on, if I was going to take a beating anyway, what did it matter if he had gotten some licks in? Maybe my pain would've at least served some small, good purpose.

    I wasn't sure if Mom and Dad had ever talked to Max's parents, so I wasn't totally sure what his dad's aloofness towards me meant. I always wondered how much the parents went along with their kids' ideas of who was a weird or undesirable member of the group. I mostly looked at my bike as he opened the door to the warehouse and escorted us through.

    "Have fun. Be careful," he said as he opened the other door to let us out.

    We got back on our bikes and pedaled away as the big door clattered closed behind us. I looked over my shoulder, back at the brick wall. There were eight small, dull-green rectangles on this side of the wall-four on the ground, and four on brick shelves built into the wall about five feet up. I couldn't read the writing from this distance, but I knew what it said on each of them-"FRONT TOWARD ENEMY." Claymores. Not the sword-though I'd seen one of those at the museum, and not even my dad was strong enough to run around swinging that as a weapon. These were M18A1 anti-personnel mines. One and a half pounds of C-4 and seven hundred tiny steel balls behind a plastic casing. They were set to be triggered by the roof guard, rather than with anything as dangerous and indiscriminate as tripwires-or what the manual termed "Victim Initiated Detonation." Apparently, in the old days, such mines were just left lying around, ready for a victim-like a child-to detonate them. Even with the mindless dead wandering around, I couldn't imagine being that callous and brutal. Dad, of course, had pointed all this out to me; he made me read the operations manuals for nearly every weapon we owned, and for many we didn't. As with learning to fight with sticks, my knowledge of lethal-or even just harmful-things extended far beyond what was only useful against the walking dead.

    Pedaling between the two buildings, for the next few seconds Mom and I would be in this gate's kill zone, or what the manual termed "the area of optimal lethality and coverage." If everything-and I mean absolutely everything-fell apart and there was a real horde of thousands bearing down on us, the guards were supposed to try and lure them into this area between the two buildings and in front of the wall, rather than let them bang away on the softer targets of the building walls, which even undead hands could probably break through pretty easily at this point, given the inevitable rust and rot from twelve years of lowered maintenance. Considering how the dead herded together, this would pack a few hundred walking bodies into a rectangular area that would then have thousands of little steel balls flying through the length of it at very high velocity. No guaranteeing how many would hit heads, but definitely some, and enough of the rest would just ruin someone's day, as my dad would put it. I was proud to know all this, and glad to have it here, just in case, but I was also really glad when Mom and I cleared the edge of the buildings and were in a land of less lethal constructions and more living sights.

    The roads out here weren't completely cleared of wrecks, so we slowly weaved between them as we pedaled down the road. Plants grew up through the pavement everywhere. The decaying suburbs and industrial parks around the perimeter of the city trailed off into farmland and countryside, dotted with partly collapsed hulks of buildings being reclaimed by the land. Some of the fields here were cultivated, corn mostly, with some wheat and a little bit of cotton, and some fields were left to grow as grass for livestock. On the right the rows of an orchard stood out. The grass between the trees had been kept down, and there were even rows of smaller trees, planted recently to replace the old ones as they gave out. Butterflies and moths flittered everywhere, and a few cows and sheep grazed in one field, but we didn't see or hear any people.

    My mom looked back at me and smiled. She was always so busy at home, I knew she liked going out like this. She didn't even have her hair in a ponytail, and it cascaded, unfettered, behind her in the breeze. Such a concession to being carefree always meant she was feeling happy. Even with a few streaks of grey, she still had the most beautiful brown hair, especially compared to my dull, black locks, which neither curled nor shone like hers. I was glad she was looking so happy.

    We turned left down a road, and after a little ways we came to a bridge across a small river. The bridge had collapsed into the water, and logs had been washed down in successive floods to accumulate around the partially sunken, crisscrossing bands of metal. We turned right to follow a smaller road alongside the river. For a while we were under trees, which felt nice, as the rest of the ride had been under the warm, early summer sun. Then we came out from under the canopy into an overgrown parking lot by the river. The river at this point was backed up behind a small dam, over which it spilled; on the opposite side of the river you could see the remains of a run and a mill building that had used the falling water for power.

    We parked our bikes and looked around. There was a line of trees next to the water, but otherwise the area was open on this side of the river. There were the remains of a small building at the far end of the parking lot, and you could still see the metal frames for swings and slides sticking up out of the grass. There were some picnic tables made out of concrete under the trees, and we put our stuff on one. I had my jacket and I draped it over the concrete bench; the HK 9mm was in one pocket and the magazine was in the other. Mom didn't know about that yet, but out here especially I knew to have it nearby.

    We took the two cloth sacks we had brought and started looking for strawberries. We'd been to this field before, so we knew there were lots here, and we weren't disappointed. Oddly, strawberries were one of the things every old-timer swore was better in the old days, even though food in general was something which many found to be superior now. Older people would go on about how much better milk tasted now, or how much bigger and juicier blackberries or corn were now, but apparently human agricultural science had found one of its few victories with the strawberry; I thought it was strange that that was the best they'd been able to do, but I was also sure allowances had to be made for the faultiness and selectivity and wishfulness of people's memories. Either way, the small, bright red berries seemed fine to me, as tart and firm as they were. But long before we had exhausted the supply to be picked, we had worn out our backs; strawberries are one of the worst things to pick, since you're either doubled over, or on your knees the whole time. We grimaced, then laughed as we stood up and went back to the picnic table to rest and have lunch.

    Mom and I ate some of the berries we'd picked as we got out our lunch-crumbly bread and hard-boiled eggs again. We'd brought our own water, as the river could be muddy this time of year, and there were enough animals out here that giardia was always a worry, especially with runoff into bigger streams like this river. We ate in the shade and listened to the water cascade over the dam.

    "It used to take just a few minutes to get here by car when I was little," Mom said. She could get wistful, too, like Mr. Caine, but now she seemed mostly happy as she ran her hand over the gritty top of the picnic table. "We'd have picnics here when I was little, with my parents. And when I was bigger, like in high school, this is where you'd go when you wanted to be alone, you know, with other kids."

    "With boys?" I mostly wondered about them to myself, but since she'd brought it up, I thought maybe I could get some more information on the mysterious other half of humanity.

    She blushed, but not as much as I thought she might. "Well, yes. Things were different back then."

    "Boys were different?"

    She smiled. "Um, no. I'm afraid boys will never change much. But yes, when I was a little bigger than you, sometimes I'd like to be alone with a boy."

    "What did you do then? Did you, you know, kiss? Was that different back then?"

    She looked a little shocked, but she also smiled. "Zoey! And what do you know about kissing boys?"

    Now it was my turn to blush, and with my skin, which I was convinced was so gross and ugly, I knew the florid pink showed a lot more and a lot less attractively on me than it had on my mom. "Just, you know, kids talk about it, that you're supposed to do it."

    She watched me as she nodded and chewed slowly. "Well, yes, when I was your age, and a little bigger, people would talk about kissing all the time, how important it was that you do it. So I guess that part isn't very different. And people talk a lot about things they know very little about, Zoey. I think that's the same now, too. You shouldn't ever do something just because people are talking about how you're supposed to."

    "I know, Mom."

    "I know you do. You'll be fine. Those little shits-pardon my French, but they still make me so upset-all beat you up when you were little. I don't think anytime soon you'll be doing anything for them because they tell you that you're ‘supposed' to."

    I smiled, not at the real content of what she was saying, but at the funny expression about French; I wondered if there was anyone left anywhere who still spoke French. I doubted it.

    "But anyway, what I meant is how different it was when we'd come here to be alone, because when you left town back then, this was about the first place you'd come to where there weren't many people. The whole way out here there were restaurants and gas stations and houses and you'd see people and cars everywhere; and just now we came all the way out and didn't see anyone. And back then, there'd have been a bunch of people even way out here, especially in the summer. If we were here back then, the parking lot would be full. There'd be hundreds of people here, more than we have in our whole community."

    I nodded. I was more interested in boys, but I hardly wanted to press the point, and she had put some of my questions into perspective. "It doesn't sound so nice, when you talk about it that way."

    "Hmm, I suppose not-not to someone who's not used to those kinds of crowds. But it was nice, in a way. Like when all different people were having picnics-my gosh, the things you'd hear and see and smell. I would walk around while my parents fixed lunch, and I could go walk all around here for several minutes without hearing any English, just all kinds of other languages. And the food-I mean, we'd have sandwiches, and some other people would have other regular stuff like hamburgers, but I'd also smell curry and lamb and chili and all kinds of spices I didn't know, things I'd never expect to see at a picnic. I remember Indian women in their colorful saris, and one time, over on the other side of the parking lot, I saw a whole crowd of maybe thirty people, all facing the same way. I thought they were posing for a group photo. Then they all fell to their knees at the same time. They were Muslims, and it was time for their prayers. I sometimes wonder if there are any Indians or Muslims left anywhere. Do you ever think of that?"

    I nodded. In school, Mom taught us Spanish, and Mr. Caine did the best he could to teach French-though he admitted it wasn't what he was good at; I often wondered how many other languages were now gone forever, every last speaker of them reduced to mute undeath. But most of the time, speculating about what might have happened to other people made little sense when we were busy enough here.

    She shook her head. "I hope there are. I miss all those wonderful differences between people. It's just that life is so plain now." She smiled and ruffled my hair with her hand. "Except you. You're as fancy and beautiful as anything I ever need."

    I frowned and pouted. That summer I could be insufferable, which I half-realized even at the time. "Stop it, Mom. My hair and my skin and everything looks funny. I wish I looked different. And I know after the vows, I'll look even worse."

    "No, you stop it. We just talked about not listening to what stupid kids say who don't know anything."

    There was a moist, slapping sound off to our right. We both turned. A wet sneaker had made the sound on a large, flat rock next to the river. The sneaker was on a foot, which belonged to about three-quarters of what had once been a man, sometime back before I was born. Now it was a shambling, slimy bag of clothes and flesh. And death. It had plenty of that, and was eager to share. It rose up as it brought its other foot out of the water and turned towards us. It grinned. Well, let's say it opened its mouth in a way that made me think it was very eager to get closer to us, though the normal, human feelings of joy or humor were long gone. It took another step, slowly but very deliberately and somewhat more dexterously than I'd been taught to expect.

    My mind went completely over to my training and the cold analysis of the situation. I scampered around to the other side of the table, where my jacket lay. Mom had jumped almost as fast and was rummaging through the picnic basket. "Shit," she muttered, a little alarmed, but overall much more in control than I might have expected. "I know I put a.38 in here. Here it is!" She brought up a short-barreled revolver, not the standard four-inch barreled one I usually used. "The ammo is in my jacket pocket."

    "Don't worry, Mom."

    "We'll have to shoot it. We can't leave it wandering around this close to town, inside the outer fence. Milton is way out in the wilderness."

    "I know, Mom." I had the 9mm out and was sliding in the magazine. I racked the slide and chambered the first round, just as Mom slapped a handful of cartridges onto the table. By the time I turned and raised my weapon, the thing had taken another two steps; as I said, it was way faster than I liked, and I was glad we wouldn't have to load the revolver in this situation. Its right arm was gone, but otherwise it was in better shape than most, unless they'd been hiding in buildings and protected from the elements. This one still had some clothes and both its eyes and ears. When it grinned, I had seen that it still had most of its teeth. I made a note to ask Dad if maybe the water preserved them better, so we could plan accordingly. I squeezed the grip as I sighted. Then I squeezed the trigger as I exhaled.

    I placed my weapon on the table. Mom and I sat down, still looking over at the wet pile of clothes and flesh. "How'd it get here?" Mom asked quietly.

    I shrugged. That was not part of my training. I noticed my hands shook now.

    "Maybe it was pinned under water until it could tear its own arm off and get loose," Mom said. "Maybe it washed downstream with the spring floods. I guess there's no telling." She looked at the 9mm on the table, then at me. "When did you get the gun?"

    "Dad gave it to me. Don't be mad."

    "I'm only a little mad you didn't tell me. I knew you'd need a gun of your own soon. You and your dad will pardon me if I wanted to put it off as long as possible."

    I got up, thinking of everything I'd been trained, remembering my duties. "You think we can burn it in the parking lot without starting a brush fire?"

    She shivered as she gathered our stuff. "I guess we have to."

    "Honor the dead. It's our duty."

    We dragged it over to the parking lot, so it could dry in the sun while we made a pile of grass and sticks. We placed the body on top, and I ignited the pyre with a knife and a piece of flint. We unfortunately could not stay upwind the whole time it burned, as we had to keep moving around to stomp out the little fires where sparks had blown off the conflagration. It was a smoky, nasty affair and it took much longer than either of us would have liked.

    When it was done and we left, I wondered whether we were supposed to honor the dead man by coming here more often to gather strawberries, or if, instead, we were to honor him by avoiding this place for anything as frivolous as gathering bright, little berries right by his burnt bones. Desecration and sanctification seemed so close in life. As I watched my mom's back, I also wasn't sure what she would say; she had somewhat surprised me with how calm she had been during the whole attack, how composed and resigned to what we had to do. And though I had some preference for the kind of honoring that would include berry-gathering, I couldn't tell if that was only because I liked strawberries. I would have to ask Milton about it, as I was unable to decide which was right. Perhaps both were. Perhaps neither.