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great outdoors.
    “What’s funny?”
    “Nothing.” If I told him, I was sure he’d piss all over my tiny
inch of mirth. I was convinced I would have to carefully guard any
bit of joy I could find, or Trevor might overtake it like the kudzu
outside.
    After breakfast, Trevor washed the dishes then lowered the drawbridge
so I could get out of the castle. He didn’t follow me. After I took
care of bear business , I wandered the park.
    Kudzu crept over everything. Statuary was broken with a stone limb
here, a random nose there. Strong storms had come through, I could
tell from the slant of things, the uprooted bushes and smaller trees,
and the way they leaned. I took a closer look at the trees. With the
Kudzu and humidity, definitely the south. But there were a few palms
as well.
    I bent to take a handful of dirt in a spot where the sidewalk had
broken apart. The texture was a bit sandy. Could we be near an ocean?
Not near enough to smell the salt, but hurricanes definitely could
have blown through.
    If storms had blown through, how long ago? It must have been before
the world ended unless we had the luckiest set of solar panels in the
world. And how long had it taken for the well water to be okay again?
If it even had been harmed. I wasn’t sure about that. I grasped for
information just outside my supposed specialty to no avail. What I
wouldn’t give for an Internet connection and more information right
about now.
    Trevor hadn’t exactly been the most forthcoming tour guide. Hell, I
didn’t even know what he’d done for a living before the solar
flares.
    As I moved farther from the castle, I could see shop windows had been
broken, and on the main strip at least some looting had taken place.
It was easy enough to see the bare walls and shelves through the
gaping holes in the glass.
    Maybe the drawbridge of the castle had been up when they came, and it
hadn’t been worth it to try to scale the walls. Maybe that was how
Trevor and I had found such a livable environment amongst these
modern ruins.
    On one wall near an arcade, with what looked like a fortune teller’s
tent, someone had spray painted something about the fortune teller
being dead and her services no longer being needed. It sounded like
song lyrics. I was sure it was song lyrics. I strained to try to pick
out a memory of the song in my head, a melody, more lyrics, anything,
but everything was a blank. Maybe it was just clever, if not morbid,
graffiti. Just because it rhymed, didn’t make it a song. Maybe it
was some kind of street poetry.
    Many of the rides already showed signs of rust. A few of them looked
as if they’d been beaten with baseball bats—some hopeless youth
taking out aggression at the world for not staying the way it was
supposed to, maybe? I wished they’d left the bats so I could take a
few swings. It would have been cathartic.
    A wooden cut out of a man welcoming people to the park had been
painted over so that he looked like a monster—a ghoul or a vampire
or a zombie. It was hard to tell which one they had been going for.
Covering the sign in black spray paint were the words: “Abandon all
hope.”
    What a cheery place to live. Somehow I couldn’t imagine any version
of myself that could have ever been excited about this. And if I had
been, God, how bad had my living conditions been before we found this
place?
    As I reached the end of Main Street, the park began to branch into
different themed areas. On my right was a giant vampire head, his
mouth wide open to form a door. Guests were meant to walk right in
between those huge fangs to get to... above his head was a sign that
once lit up with individual letters. It said “unhouse”. A large F
was on the ground near a cluster of wildflowers that grew in
abundance throughout the park.
    Not my kind of fun. Or “un” as the kids were calling it now.
    Just past the fun house, haunted house, and creepy clown-themed rides
and stores, were the kiddie rides. The chickens started