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nuclear power plants, and he'd designed my escape route to avoid them by a 200 mile radius whenever possible. I was lucky he had. I never witnessed the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown, but I'd met hundreds who had. From what I knew, the majority of the eastern half of the United States was a desolate wasteland. I remember one old man, his face bulbous with tumors and his throat swollen to the point that his voice came out as a squeak, begging me to heed his warning. He said, "Watch for the red pines. When you see the red pines, run the other way."
    I didn't learn what he meant until many years later. One of my hobbies has become locating libraries in any town that I travel through. If a library is still standing, which fewer and fewer of them are, I stop and camp there while reading everything I have time for. During one of those stops I read about how radiation damages chlorophyll, causing pine trees to grow with red needles. The thought of that cancer laden old man warning me about the red trees still haunts me.
    Wyoming was thankfully free of any red pines, and was one of the few states that didn't have a single nuclear reactor in it. Unfortunately, it seemed to house a strain of the zombie virus that everyone assumed had died out. The original virus had a bad habit of rearing its ugly head in post-apocalyptic towns, but once mankind settled on a nomadic lifestyle, the virus seemed to disappear.
    I leaned down from the second floor and looked for any sign of the zombie. I could see his foot around the corner, in the kitchen. He was on his back and wasn't moving. "Hello." I spoke quickly and regretted it almost immediately. There was no need to hasten a discovery. It was only my own impetuousness that inspired me to call out. I knew that something had made a sound, but it could've been from a raider just as easily as our zombie experiment. Luckily, no one seemed to hear me.
    I checked my Glock and then grabbed my axe. My knife was still on the floor below since there was never any desperate need for me to risk retrieving it after the attack. It would be the first thing I grabbed once I got down.
    I lowered the rope slowly over the edge so the end didn't smack on the floor. The nylon creaked against the wood as I lowered myself down. I was as quiet as possible, and hadn't bothered putting on my boots in hopes that my socks would make less sound as I walked through the home.
    I was overjoyed to finally have my knife back. It was an essential part of my gear, and its absence had set me on edge for the past three days. I set my axe down, happy to be holding a weapon again rather than a tool, and prepared to move into the kitchen to check on the fallen corpse.
    It gasped and twitched as I turned the corner. The fucker was still alive.
    His stomach was twice the size it was three days ago, and the sores around his eyes had grown much worse. Flies buzzed around the zombie's mouth and I pressed my hand over my paper mask as the smell became overwhelming. The creature scratched at the floor and swiveled its hips as if trying to do everything in its power to come my way, but his body was beyond hope.
    Then I heard a muffled pop, as if one of the creature's bones had broken or an organ exploded, and suddenly his stomach deflated. He looked stunned and opened his mouth as if to speak, but only a hiss escaped. The release of air turned to a gurgle and then white foam rose up over his tongue and dripped off his lower lip. Something inside the zombie had burst, and his stomach's contents were pushing out of his throat. His head drooped to the side and his eyes stopped staring at me as he died for a second time. This confirmed my suspicion that he had succumbed to the same disease that caused the original outbreak.
    "Well fuck me."
    Now that the experiment was over, and the zombie was dead, it was safe to move to a new home. All I needed was a view of the road, and any of the houses on this street afforded me that. There was no good reason