The author says, “After I finish a novel, I’m usually struck by a sort of separation anxiety. So much mental effort is put into worldbuilding and getting to know the characters. So what I usually do is write a few short stories set in the world of the novel I’ve just finished. ‘Dating in Dead World’ was a part of that process.” He adds, “Right before I left for my first date, my dad gave me the only bit of parental sex education I ever received. He said, ‘Remember this, you will be held personally accountable for everything that happens to that girl from the moment she leaves her front door to the moment she walks back in it. Conduct yourself accordingly.’ It wasn’t until after I’d written this story that I realized I was channeling that advice. I guess it took.”
Heather Ashcroft told me to come to the main entrance of her father’s compound. She said the guards there would know my name; they’d be expecting me.
They were expecting me all right.
Four of them had their machine guns trained on me while a voice on a PA speaker barked orders.
“Turn off your motorcycle and dismount.” The voice was clear, sharp, professional.
I did what I was told.
“Step forward. Stand on the red square.”
I did that too.
“Stand still for the dogs.”
Three big black German shepherds were led out of the guard shack and began circling me, sniffing me. Cadaver dogs, trained to sniff out necrotic tissue. No surprise there. Even the smaller compounds use them, and the one I was about to enter was no minor league operation. Dave Ashcroft controls the largest baronage in South Texas, and his security is top notch.
“I’m Andrew Hudson,” I said. “I’m here to see Heather Ashcroft. We’re going out on—”
Somebody called off the dogs and two of the guards came forward. One of them used the barrel of his weapon to point me towards a table next to the guard shack.
“Stand on that green square. Face the table.”
“You fellas sure put a guy through a lot of trouble for a first date,” I said. I gave him a winning grin. He wasn’t impressed.
“Move,” he said.
He asked me what weapons I was carrying and I told him.
“Put them in there,” he said, and pointed to a red plastic box on the corner of the table.
“I’m gonna get those back, right?”
He ran a metal detector over my body, taking extra care to get up inside the flaps of my denim jacket, under my hair, up into my crotch.
A guard field-stripped my weapons.
“I am gonna get those back, right?”
“When you come out,” he said. “Nobody’s allowed to be armed around Mr. Ashcroft.”
“But I’m not here to see Mr. Ashcroft,” I said. “I’m taking his daughter out for a date.”
He rattled a smaller box. “Ammunition, too.”
I unloaded my pockets. There was no need to tell him about the extra magazines in my bike’s saddle bags. They were already searching those.
He looked me over again, and I could tell by his face that he didn’t see anything but a street urchin from the Zone. “Get in that Jeep over there,” he said. “We’ll drive you into the compound.”
Several machine guns turned my way.
I shrugged and got in.
I hadn’t been allowed within the inner perimeter fence on my earlier visits, so what I saw when I did finally get inside took my breath away. Outside the compound, downtown San Antonio was an endless sprawl of vacant, crumbling buildings, lath visible in the walls, no doors in the doorways, every window broken. Everywhere you turned there were ruins and fire damage and rivers of garbage spilling out into the streets. It’s been sixteen years since the Fall and the streets are still full of zombies. But inside Ashcroft’s compound, life looked like it was starting to make a comeback. He controlled most of the medicines, weapons and fuel that South Texas needed, and it had made him rich enough to carve his own private paradise out of fifteen square blocks of hell.
Sitting in the back of the Jeep, I rode down what had once been Alamo Street and tried not to look like a barefoot barbarian gawking at the wonders of Rome. Ashcroft had preserved a few of the main roads from the old days, and he left a few of the old buildings intact, but he had changed a lot more than he left alone.
Off to my left was what had once been Hemisphere Park. It was farmland now. Beyond that was a huge field where cattle grazed, their backs dappled with the golden copper hues of the setting sun. Men on horseback patrolled the edges of the fields, rifles resting on their shoulders.