01 The Hermitage

Everyone has their own paradise. Mine was on a south-facing slope in Northern California, what you kids call Norcali these days, at the end of a narrow access road, that branched from a secondary road, which didn't join any kind of state highway for over ten miles. It was a single story house, with a car port and an unbroken expanse of roof entirely covered in solar panels. Near the house was an expanse of growth that looked wild, but in fact kept me well fed with little effort.

The inside of the house was comfortable. The solar roof and storage battery gave me enough of a power budget to keep a few lights on, run the refrigerator, and sometimes cook a meal on the induction stove if I wasn't too demanding. The bed was soft, and the roof didn't leak.

Judging from the professional decor and general lack of character when I first arrived, the place had been purchased as a vacation home and then rented out through an online service. Nearly the first thing I did was gather up all the papier-mâché "vases" and gigantic artificial flowers, prints of inoffensive, unchallenging artwork and a mountain of extraneous pillows sporting huge, gaudy tassels. All that junk went into a bonfire one cloudy day and was never seen again. I left the photographs in one room untouched: landscapes of windblown trees and desert wildflowers in bloom, underwater scenes of coral reefs and sea anemone, mounted in plain but expensive archival frames. They were the sole evidence that a real person with real interests had ever visited long enough to leave a genuine mark on the place.

You couldn't see the house from a distance, not unless you climbed the hills in the area and looked right at it, because the orchard shielded it. It was an easy place for the eye to ignore, a mass of confused growth similar to the occasional copse of trees that dot the region, tallest in the center, tapering down at its edges to lower and smaller plants until the predominant grasses took over. But if you looked beyond the ground cover, the creepers, the smaller trees, and the odd flowering vine, there was a precise array of fruit trees inside the wild mass, holding it all up and sheltering the layers of garden underneath.

The orchard grew dozens of kinds of fruit. There were some apples and pears but the bulk were stone fruit, including a breed of avocado that was so massive, a single fruit would make a bowl of guacamole. The orchard had belonged to the house's only neighbor, but deeds and property lines didn't mean anything then and I had taken it over. I pruned the trees and left the branches where they fell, then planted beneath them such things as would grow in partial shade and mostly unattended, everything I could think of really. The initial effort was months of exhausting work, a way to bury my pain in hard labor, but in the months and years after I could observe how it grew and make small experimental adjustments. In the summer of my third year there, I could hardly walk the garden's narrow pathways without having to clear my way with a machete first.

Meals were foraged during my morning walks through the garden. I stepped on any plants I didn't want, or took off their heads before they could seed, and left alone those I wanted to encourage. Depending on the time of year, I could take cabbage and kale, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, garlic, kiwi and other gooseberries, strawberries, plums, apples, peaches, pears, cherries, melons, cucumbers, squash, and more. For herbs I had thyme, verbena, basil, and rosemary among others. Any fruit I didn't pick was left on the ground to ferment and rot. All that mash on the ground, and all the edible greens, attracted wildlife. I shot deer and pigs with a bow, enough to teach them the area was dangerous, and stored the meat in my freezer. If I had a complaint it was the utter lack of bread, and I always had more squash than I wanted.

There is sound theory behind my apparently lackluster gardening. What I did there wasn't random. But as this is a story mainly about zombies, and not a story about agroforestry or syntropic agriculture, I will spare you. My point here is that it took little ongoing effort to feed myself, aside from some extra effort at planting time and whenever I wanted to lay in some of the harvest. In spite of that advantage, I dedicated time each year to tour the nearby countryside and plant little caches of edibles. A stand of potatoes here, squashes there, cabbages or brassicas, tomatillos, amaranth and plenty of onions and garlic (which grow like weeds), whatever I thought might thrive without direction. In case of a disaster, I planned to have food nearby.

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In my opinion, no paradise is complete without access to a beach. In the Before years everyone wanted a house on the beach, but it turns out the beaches in Norcali are colder than you would like, too cold by half during winter if your power budget is thin and you don't like chopping wood all day. So my paradise wasn't on the beach but near it. I could make the short climb to the crest of my hill and look down at the sunset and vast Pacific horizons, watch the clouds billow up from the infinite sky and, when there was a storm coming, rush at the land. From there I could take one of the flexible, durable sheets of plastic I kept stocked there and sled down the grassy hill at insane speed, careening among the gulleys and hillocks, teeth clenched against the jarring ride, until I hit the bottom where the mountain splayed out into a nearly flat expanse of long grasses and my sled would loose direction as it slowed then tipped me over, limbs locked together so I could roll like a log until the stalks and the bushes caught me.

It took an investment of an entire autumn to shape that sluice of earth, most of it spent moving rocks, and it was my one source of real excitement and the fastest way to reach the shore. Sometimes I would go too fast or lean the wrong way and my plastic sled would jump out of the prepared track and toss me in the air to land on unprepared ground, usually hard, and often with minor injuries. The helmet I wore for these adventures showed scars and signs of all the brain damage that could have been. On days when the solitude wore on me I would make the trip twice or even three times, until I had to limp painfully home to collapse into bed.

There was a slower route to the beach, a packed earth trail, a remnant of Before, that wound between my mountain and the neighboring one. It was a fine walk through a gulley crowded with tall trees full of birds who made all kinds of riot in the daytime, then down into brambles of blackberry, and then suddenly I would emerge with the hills at my back and the last stretch of sunlit grasses lay in front. The path meandered along the contours of the plain, finally leading me to the barrier of scrubby dunes that defended the beach from the not-beach. That was my "private" shore. A few miles south was a large bay and a sizable town, but I avoided the more public beach on account the "public" were all zombies.

For salvage I had the nearby hamlet at the other end of my access road. There were a few dozen buildings there, mostly homes, but also a "main street" with ten storefronts and a single intersection. There was a grocer and a little hardware store for the locals, but the rest were aimed at tourists and passers-by on their way to the ocean who wanted sweets, or postcards, or fresh oysters grilled in their shells and served with a local white wine, all at a price cheaper than the bay town. There was also a traditional white church with a steeple. I don't know how big its congregation was but it also held the community's library and was the source of my daily reading material.

There were billboards along the road between my hamlet and the bay town, advertisements for a much bigger church. They said things like, "When life hurts, come to church," and, "The congregation that cares about you," and, "Feeling alone? Get off your phone! Come to church!" I painted over all those billboards in white and wrote new signs in careful black letters: directions to the nearby towns and cities, and their approximate distances.

Once in a while, maybe four times in three years, a group of survivors would come through and search the hamlet for salvage. On those occasions I would lie down and watch them through binoculars to judge if I should stay or if I should run. At least one group saw my helpful directions for what they were: an invitation to leave there and go anywhere else. They climbed the church's steeple and got a good, long look at the area. Their scouts, also armed with binoculars, passed right over my position as they inspected the surroundings, and similarly passed over my tangled garden as being too wild to be worth their notice. From the church's position my house was well-hidden behind the scenery and they never suspected it was there. In the absence of any decent salvage there was nothing to be gained by sticking around, and even that group moved on.

All in all, it was an excellent place to wait out the final days of the human race. The zombie organism had won the contest of the fittest, and the rest of us were just zombies-in-waiting. Survival had been reduced to a function of luck, a throw of the dice you made every day in deciding where to go, or if you should stay, whether you should hunt or forage, if you should meet new people or hide from them. There were too many unknowns to ever make sure decisions.

In the absence of certainty you could load the dice with preparation, disciple, and skill. You could load them pretty heavily in fact, but no matter how careful you were, or wise, or prepared, sooner or later everything went to shit.