I watched skeptically as he hoisted her onto his back. Lazlo was muscular, but he wasn’t a big guy. Admittedly, Harlow couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, if that.

With a surprising level of ease, he lifted her onto his back, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. I hadn’t seen her look quite that happy ever before, and I doubted I would again.

Harlow was too content to say anything, so she lapsed into silence as we walked. Ripley stayed behind, napping in the brush, but she’d catch up eventually. She always did.

I was afraid that Vega would continue with her sermon, so I tried to make small talk. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it, but Lia picked up my slack. She talked amicably with Blue and Lazlo about everything under the sun, and that was okay with me.

The flat landscape gave way to soft hills, and the desert was getting increasingly greener. It was still early in the afternoon when we found a small brown A-frame sitting right off the road. We could see a few more houses in the distance, meaning that we were probably getting close to a town.

I didn’t really want to camp here, since it was still too early to stop for the day, but it might have supplies we could use. We didn’t know what was inside, so I suggested that Lazlo and the girls wait outside while Blue and I went inside to raid the place.

Harlow didn’t care what we did as long as she didn’t have to walk anymore, and she plopped on the front lawn the instant we stopped. Vega went a few feet away to kneel and pray, while Lazlo and Lia stayed close by the house, keeping an eye out for roving zombies.

The smell hit me the instant I pushed open the front door. The stench inside the house had become too familiar – rotting food and death. Blood splattered the walls, and a human arm lay on the floor in the front room. The arm looked like it had been there a while, and I couldn’t hear any zombie groans.

I went into the house further, and that’s when things got weird.

At first, the place seemed trashed in the way everything did after zombies tore through it. But then I got the impression it was more than random ransacking. In the kitchen, all the cupboards had been opened, so only perishables were left.

A raccoon lay dead under the table, but it hadn’t been mauled by zombies. It’d taken a bullet to the head, and not that long ago, based on the total lack of maggots.

“People were here,” Blue said.

“Pretty recently too,” I nodded.

“That’s a good thing… right?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. I looked out the window, where Lia laughed at something and Harlow plucked at a flower in the overgrown lawn. “This place has been gutted, though. We should move on.”

“We’re not that far from a town anyway,” Blue said. He moved towards the door, but I stayed put, surveying the carnage. “What?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

Something about the state of the house gave me a bad vibe, but I couldn’t place it. Zombies had trashed it, and other survivors had gotten supplies. That wasn’t any different from what we did.

They had killed a raccoon, but that wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s not what I would’ve done, but I didn’t always make the best decisions.

“We might be getting close to the quarantine.” Blue tried to alleviate my anxiety. “Maybe soldiers were here.”

“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t think so, at least not the part about soldiers doing this. “Come on. Let’s go.”

We went to the front door, and I stopped short. When we had come in, we hadn’t looked at the back of the door, but I did now. Someone had scrawled Helter Skelter across it, using thick, poisonous zombie blood as ink.

A chill ran down my spine. I didn’t understand the message, but someone thought it was a good idea to play with infected blood. That was never good.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s a song by the Beatles.” Blue paled. “And in the Charles Manson murders, after they brutally murdered people, they wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ on the refrigerator in blood.”

“Somebody’s emulating Charles Manson?” I asked as the knot tightened in my stomach.

“No,” Blue said unconvincingly. “They probably did it as a joke.”

“Real funny.”

Blue didn’t want to stand around and talk about it anymore, and I followed him outside. Lazlo asked how it went, and I told him the house was empty. Blue and I failed to mention the note on the door or anything about people being here already. There was no point in freaking them out.

Lazlo stopped carrying Harlow, but she didn’t seem to mind. The clustering houses of a town was up ahead, and she perked up at the sight of them. Her pace quickened so much, I had to tell her to slow down. I didn’t want anybody in front of me, not when I didn’t know what lie ahead.

Before we even reached the city limits, we could see it was in shambles. Garbage was everywhere, the lighter things blowing around in the wind. It smelled rank, like rotten banana peels and sour milk.

A burnt shell of a car sat in the middle of the road. A zombie head was mounted on the front, like a hood ornament. It’s swollen, greenish tongue hung limply from its mouth.

“This is what the outside world is like?” Lia asked. Her ashen skin blanched further, and she gaped at the mess around her.

While the rest of the world had been falling apart, she had been hiding in a basement. This was her first time seeing exactly what had become of everything

“This is worse than anywhere I’ve seen.” Lazlo’s expression mirrored hers. Like Lia, he had been spared from most of this, but to me, it looked about par for the course.

Ripley made guttural sounds and moved in closer to us, but we’d all moved closer together, walking in a slow moving lump.

The town had been disassembled. Siding had been ripped from houses. Blood and dismembered bodies littered the streets. A pile had been set on fire on a front lawn. It had been burning too long for me to tell what it was, but it smelled of hair and tires. A dog gnawed on a carcass too disfigured to be recognizable, but it took off when it saw Ripley.

I pulled my gun out, and Blue did the same. When Harlow saw us draw our weapons, she made a frightened whimper.

I didn’t like that she didn’t have a gun or anyway to defend herself, that none of us did except for Blue and me, but we didn’t have enough weapons. I would’ve given Harlow or Lazlo mine, but I could do more good with a gun than they could.