“Right. I had spent a bunch of time up in the mountains around the Tahoe area and I figured maybe with the terrain, the plague hadn’t hit so hard. Well, I got to Tahoe all right, but one look around had me running for the hills again. Seems like a lot of people had the same idea and one of them was infected. The whole slaughter had started again and I barely managed to escape the zombies by climbing the expert slope on Heavenly. The zombies weren’t great climbers and I got ahead of them pretty quickly. Last I looked, there were dozens of people trying to escape the undead by swimming out into the lake. Trouble is, the lake is cold, and I am sure most died of hypothermia while the ghouls waited at the edge.

“On top of Heavenly is a lodge and I stayed there for a time while the world died around me. The place had been abandoned and I was able to break into their food stores and live for nearly six months. By that time, the weather was turning and it was getting pretty cold at night, so I started to venture out. The first person I encountered was a zombie. But it was cold enough that he couldn’t chase me and was moving so slow that I was able to take a large branch and knock him down the mountain. By the time he reached the bottom he was in about six pieces.”

I smiled at the description and imagined a Z cartwheeling down the mountainside with limbs flying off and leaving a grisly trail of smashed-up zombie chunks.

Simon continued. “About the time my food ran out, winter was starting to hit the mountains pretty hard. I figured I needed to move on and do it quickly before the passes were closed. I took one of the maintenance trucks that had been left up at the resort and started my way down the mountain. I was hoping to get into Carson Valley and maybe find a decent place to hole up for the winter. There wasn’t a large population in that area and I thought that I could winter there and then move on. On the way down the mountain I passed several cars that had reanimated people inside them and more than one family car was covered in blood as a sick family member came back and ate his relatives.