Gabe shot me a sidelong glance and deliberately stopped scratching his beard. The whole face-scratching thing is something that my overgrown friend does when he is agonizing over a decision.

 

“You want those supplies as much as I do.” Gabriel said.

 

“True, but do you think we can get there with the river like this?” I replied. “It gets pretty shallow in places, and I don’t want to have to walk back here through miles of forest if we lose the canoe.”

 

“I’ve gone farther downstream when the river was lower.”

 

“Right, but it’s been over two years since there was anyone around to keep the waterways clear. Who knows what kind of junk is waiting under the water where we can’t see it?”

 

Gabriel’s scowl deepened. He had already considered that, and it did not bring him any closer to making a decision.

 

 “Well, what do you think we should do? Do you want to chance it, or do you just want to go ahead and leave for Colorado?” He said.

 

I crossed my hands over my walking stick and rested my chin on my knuckles as I stared across the river. The trees around us, and over on the far bank, were still brown, bare and lifeless. We should have seen brightly colored little green leaves budding along the tips of branches by now, but the long, cold nuclear winter was reluctant to loosen its grip.

 

“More than anything else, I want caffeine,” I said, smiling, “but we also need medical supplies. I don’t fancy the thought of going all the way to Colorado without a plentiful supply of antibiotics and painkillers.”

 

Gabe nodded and adjusted the rifle sling on his shoulder. “Well that settles it. We’ll take a couple of days to get ready, and then we go.” 

 

Gabe turned and trudged back up the steep embankment, stepping carefully along the narrow walkway of rough-carved terraces topped with cracked and broken flagstones. The sun washed the valley in brilliant golden light, but it did little to warm the chill mountain air. It was early May, and the daily temperatures were still hovering around the mid-forties. Normally it should have been hot, humid, and miserable by this time of year. The thought renewed my irritation at the Middle Eastern countries that decided to make a bad situation worse by launching nuclear weapons at one another whilst the dead rose up and devoured the world. As if things were not bad enough without a cloud of radioactive crud filtering out the sun’s warmth.

 

The two of us huffed and puffed our way up the ridge to the south, and then began the three-mile hike back to our mountaintop cabin. The weight of my pack and rifle felt familiar and comfortable, where once they had been an annoyance. I had grown used to walking long distances, to constantly scanning my surroundings for signs of the undead, and to never letting my eyes rest on the same spot for too long.

 

We reached the top of the ridge and followed the path south along the crests of hills that were once part of the Appalachian Trail. The bleached white bones of several corpses littered the ground along the way, most of them the remains of undead that either Gabe or I had put down over the last couple of years. In the days since I first drove my old grey Tundra up the mountain, we had spent a great deal of effort keeping the area around our home clear of the undead. Regular patrols and constant vigilance were a necessity. The long winter months that were just beginning to wane had made things both easier, and harder. The freezing temperatures immobilized the dead, making them easy targets and all but eliminating their constant threat, but it made virtually every other aspect of life in the high country brutally difficult. Now that it was warming up, we had to deal with both the cold and the walkers. As if we didn’t have enough problems.

 

 “Movement.” Gabriel said, breaking my reverie.