Hitting the gas harder, I sped off toward Alameda County, and home.
Prior to George’s death, the two of us lived with our adoptive parents in the genteel Berkeley house where we were raised, a former faculty residence sold by the university after the Rising. I went back there initially, and quickly found that I couldn’t take it. I could handle having George’s ghost in my head, but I couldn’t deal with the years of memory in those halls. More important, I couldn’t watching the Masons hover around looking for ways to capitalize on the death of their adopted daughter. We always knew what they were to us and what we were to them, but it took George dying to really make me realize how unhealthy it was. I moved out as soon as I could manage it, renting a crappy little apartment in downtown El Cerrito. I moved again six months later, after the site really started pulling in the bucks. Oakland this time, and one of the four apartments in the same building that we’d rented under the name of After the End Times. One apartment for the office; one apartment shared by Alaric and Dave, who spent half their time as best buddies and half their time as mortal enemies; one apartment open for visiting staffers who needed a place to crash.
One apartment for me and George, who didn’t take up any physical space but was so much a part of every room that sometimes I could fool myself into thinking she had just stepped out for some fresh air. That she’d be right back, if I were just willing to wait. If I were still seeing a psychiatrist, I’m sure I’d be getting lectured on how unhealthy my attitude is. Good thing I fired my shrink, huh?
Oakland’s a pretty awesome place to hang your hat, whether or not you’ve got a dead sister to deal with. Twenty-five years ago—roughly, I’m not big on math—Oakland was an urban battlefield. They had a gang problem in the early nineteen-eighties, but that cleared up, and they were fighting a different war by the time the Rising rolled around. Oakland had become the site of an ongoing conflict between the natives who’d lived there for generations and the forces of gentrification that really wanted a Starbucks on every corner and an iPod in every pocket. Then the zombies showed up, and gentrification lost.
More things we learned from the Rising: It’s hard to gentrify a city that’s on fire.
The new folks turned tail and ran for the hills—the ones who lived long enough, anyway. But the people who’d grown up in Oakland knew the lay of the land, and they knew what it meant to fight for what’s yours. Maybe they didn’t have the advantages some of the richer cities started out with, but they had a lot of places they could hole up, and they had a lot of guns. Maybe most important of all, thanks to that gang violence I mentioned earlier, they had a lot of people who actually knew how to use the guns.
Oakland’s inner city fared better than almost any other heavily populated spot on the West Coast. When the dust of the Rising settled, the city was battered, bruised, and still standing—no small accomplishment for a city that most of the emergency services had already written off as impossible to save. It’s still a proud, heavily armed community today.
It’s about fifty miles from Birds Landing to Oakland, and the safest route is even longer. Thankfully, having a journalist’s license means never having to explain why you didn’t want to take the safe way. I hit the first of the checkpoint entrances to I-80 after about twenty miles on the rocky, poorly maintained California back roads. According to pre-Rising records, the checkpoints used to be called toll booths, and they actually accepted currency, rather than automatically deducting usage fees from your bank account. Also, they didn’t have armed guards or require a clean blood test for passage. Road trips must have been pretty boring before the zombies came.
Despite the ongoing decrease in personal travel—the number of miles logg the average American goes down every year, with many people telecommuting and ordering their groceries delivered so that they’ll never even need to leave their homes—we still need freeways for things like truckers and journalists. I-80 is actually fairly well-maintained, assuming you like your roads with concrete walls and fences all around them. Most accidents are fatal, not because of the other cars but because spinning out and hitting one of those walls doesn’t leave much of a margin for recovery. It also doesn’t leave much of a margin for reanimation. That’s probably the point.