“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.

Most of the housing was on the other side of the river, off to my right-small cottages, comfortable and clean, a few children playing in a garden under an old woman’s watchful eye.

But the crown jewel in Ashcroft’s compound was the Fairmount Hotel. He’d turned the ancient four-story building into his private domain. It was flanked on one side by the ruins of the Spanish village of La Villita, the crumbling adobe buildings converted into horse stables. In front of the hotel was a Spanish-style garden fed by a large, circular stone fountain. A fork of the San Antonio River curled around the rear of the hotel, supplying fresh water for the whole compound.

As we pulled to a stop in front of the hotel I said, “Looks like you guys have got room for what, about five, six hundred people here?”

“Do yourself a favor,” one of the guards told me, “and don’t ask no questions. You ain’t gonna be here long enough to worry about it. Now get out of the Jeep.”

A few minutes later I was standing in what had once been the hotel’s lobby, waiting on Heather, checking the smell of my breath in my palm. I’d cleaned up as best I could, but that wasn’t saying much. When you live in the Zone, in the rubble between the compounds, it shows. A lump of coal is still a lump of coal, no matter how much you polish it.

I didn’t bother to make small talk with the guard off in the corner, watching me.

Eventually, Heather came down the stairs. I watched her descend, my mouth watering. She was wearing a short denim skirt that showed about a mile of bare leg and a tight black camisole that got my Adam’s apple pumping in my throat. Her eyes were gray as smoke, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail that made her jaw and throat seem delicate as spun glass.

And she was wearing makeup. You never see that anymore. Her lips were so red they actually shined. I couldn’t look away, and I’m just glad I didn’t start drooling.

She dismissed the guard with a wave.

“Hey,” she said to me.

I tried to speak, but my throat had gone dry. “Hey,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips. God, how they shined. “You look great,” I managed to say.

She blushed.

“They didn’t give you any trouble at the gate, did they?”

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe a little. No big deal.”

“You sure?”

“Really,” I said. “No big deal.”

She smiled. “My dad wants to see you before we go. You don’t mind, do you?”

Mano a Mano with Big Dave Ashcroft. Christ, I thought. “I guess I don’t get to say no, do I?”

“Um, not really.”

I watched golden rays of light scatter from her hair and said, “Sure, why not?”

She led me back to her father’s office.

“Daddy,” she said, “this is the boy I told you about.”

Dave Ashcroft wasn’t the giant I was expecting to meet. You hear stories about these guys, growing up in the Zone, and they’re like gods, reshaping the world in their own image. You expect them to be six and a half feet tall, neck like a beer keg, arms like a gorilla’s. But Dave Ashcroft, he was just a normal looking guy in a white work shirt and khaki slacks, a donut of gray hair around the back of his head.

He didn’t offer to shake my hand. He pointed me to a chair opposite his desk and ordered me to sit without saying a word.

“What kind of name is Andrew Hudson?”

“It’s just a name, sir.”

“Yeah, but I know it from somewhere.”

“My dad, probably.”

“Who was your dad?”

“Eddie Hudson. He was a cop in the old days.”

He perked up. “You mean the one who wrote that book about the Fall?”

“That’s right.” I get that bit about my dad from some of the old-timers. Dad wrote a book about the first night of the outbreak, about how he had to fight his way across the city to get to my mom and me. But his book only covered that first night. He left off at a point when it looked like we were actually going to contain the zombie outbreak. Well, he was wrong, obviously, and sometimes the old-timers who remember my dad’s book look at me and I think maybe they’re remembering what it was like back then, back when it seemed we might win this thing. I think, at least for some of them, the memories make them angry, resentful, like they blame people like my dad for the naiveté that allowed the Second Wave to happen. But there are others who recognize my dad and they tune out, they become distant, like they’ve gotten over the anger and now they’re dealing with something else.

Big Dave Ashcroft-he was one of the ones who just get distant.

“What happened to your dad?” he asked.

“He and mom died in the Second Wave, sir.”

“You would have been what, about six when that happened?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did they turn?”

“Mom did. Dad got swarmed trying to stop a bunch of them from breaking into our house. Mom got bit, but she managed to stash me in a hall closet before she turned.”

“And you’ve been on your own ever since, living off the streets?”