Denver, Colorado

[As we had arranged, I meet with Cody Snider at one of the numerous parks that have sprung up in the rebuilt Denver since the end of the war. One of the first things to strike me about him is how he seems to naturally default to being cheerful, and as we walk through the streets to perform various errands of his, Cody regularly exchanges greetings with the people around us.]

Did you know that there was a standing invitation for survivors to enter the safe zone set up in the United States during the war? Chances are that you've never thought about it, probably because it's so obvious. Well, of course they'd let people in, so long as they're not infected with the zombie plague! But do you know how many men, women, and children actually made it to the 'border' and were let in? And that's a genuine question this time.

No, I'm afraid I don't know.

A little over three hundred people were let in during the entire seven years of war before the military started reclaiming the US, and most of that was just in the month or so following the establishment of the safe zone. It just never seemed to occur to anyone that it might be a good idea to try to get inside! The focus was always on survival, which I commend, but I was and still am astonished by how many survivors I've spoken with that never thought of trying to get into the safe zone on their own before the war ended. For me, though, it was my sole purpose.

When the Great Panic began, do you want to know where I was living? New York City. And sorry about all the rhetorical questions, I'll try to cut those out. [Laughs.] I'd been living in New York for several years at that point because I was pretty young and it seemed like it would be an adventure, but my family was still living in Los Angeles and I had to find them, to be sure that the zombies hadn't gotten to them.

One of the hardest parts about trying to get from New York to the Rocky Mountains in the middle of a zombie apocalypse was just getting the whole thing started – New York City was so densely populated, and once people started to panic and the zombies began their rapid spread, it all became chaos. As luck would have it, I had previously wanted to take a trip to LA so I could visit my family, and the mysterious rumors about African Rabies were enough to scare my young self into wanting to run along home! I was actually one of the first people to get out of the city because of that, but still, when hordes of desperate people start a mass exodus and aren't all that far behind you . . . [Shivers.] I was in plenty of danger, regardless of my head start.

It didn't help that everyone around me was a stranger. Being by myself turned out to be a benefit later on, but before I'd figured that out and was still in the midst of such a large group of people like that, the risk of either getting mugged, shot, or eaten by zombies was enormous. Remember the chaos I mentioned earlier? Yeah, firefights would break out spontaneously between people right outside the city, fighting over supplies, and it wouldn't be long before the undead were all over them! I understand that when someone is trying to steal your food, water, blankets, and so on in that kind of a situation, you've gotta stand up and fight for it, but what about the other people, the ones who started it? They can't wait until everyone is away from the undead before picking a very loud fight? No one was thinking straight. I spent maybe a day, a day and a half travelling with everyone else before deciding that I was going on my own from then on, whether there was safety in numbers or not.

[Here, we step inside a post office and wait in line for several minutes so Cody can buy a sheet of stamps and send a letter.]

Even considering the danger of fights breaking out, wouldn't it have been safer to stay in a large group of people?

Depends. In that situation, in a caravan of probably more than a thousand New Yorkers, no, it wasn't. At least, not for me – I didn't have particularly noteworthy social skills, I didn't know anyone there, at least that I saw, and there weren't any important jobs that I knew how to fill that weren't already taken.

Which isn't to say that I didn't think myself crazy after several days of travelling on my own. Even if you're not particularly well liked, if you're in a group of survivors and a pack of zombies is heading your way, everyone pitches in either to kill them all or to get away. Obviously, when you're alone, you have to handle any Zs you stumble across by yourself. It didn't take long for me to learn that stealth is key, and by the time I finished my journey, I was really good at sneaking around. The other thing I got to be really good at was legging it during the times that stealth didn't work out so well! Usually what I'd do if a pack of Zs was after me, at least if there was a building nearby, was to trap them inside. If I had enough of a head start, I'd duck inside and check for a second exit, and if there was one, I'd wait for all the Zs to catch up before escaping through it, and then blocking the door with something. After that I'd run around to the front again and take off in that direction, because I didn't know what the zombies that I'd temporarily trapped would do when they got free. If they just started walking in the direction they were facing, and I had gone the same way and was sleeping at night when they stumbled across me . . . I don't know if that was even possible or not, but I wasn't taking chances.

Although that technique did work most of the time, if there weren't any buildings nearby, and there usually weren't, or if there was only one way in and out, I'd be forced to out-run the whole group. If I hadn't been so malnourished and sleep-deprived, I would've been in the best shape of my entire life by the end of my journey! [Grins.] There was, however, one other way that I avoided the undead during my trip, and that was with Luna's help.

[Cody's eyes light up bright as he reminisces about his old friend, and he begins to gesture more as he talks.]

She was a German Shepherd, and absolutely the most amazing dog I've ever had the honor to know. She was relatively young, of that I'm certain, but besides that, I have no idea where she came from or what her history was. I found her around St. Louis, I think, while I was hunting for food. Well, not hunting. Looking, I was looking for food. She was the one hunting, and when I found her, she was eating a rat, or something like that. She was just about dead from starvation, too, the poor thing.

I've always liked dogs, you see, which was why I gave Luna some of the food that I had with me. I was confident in my ability to make do with what I had for a bit longer, and hopefully I'd stumble across one of the glorious houses in the middle of nowhere that had yet to be found by anyone else, which means lots of food! Anyway, after I fed her just a little bit, she really warmed up to me and started dogging my steps. [Laughs.] Personally, I didn't have any problem with it, so long as she didn't attract the undead's attention to us - ha! She definitely didn't do that!

[We stop briefly at a stand in order to buy some fried fish, which we eat as we walk along. Cody continues his story in between each bite.]

It had been such a long time since I'd had a living creature for companionship, I guess I got a little distracted and was reaching down to give her a pat on the side when we turned this corner in the street and ran right into maybe, oh, a hundred Zs? Just as I was about to start running, she took off right into the middle of the pack, weaving between their legs as she went, so I just stayed real quiet and made sure that I was out of sight. I could hardly believe my luck when the whole pack started following Luna, and after they were all gone I started making my way out of the city.

Once I'd gotten back to the countryside and slowed down, I remembered about Luna, and I started feeling disappointed that she was gone. A couple minutes went by, and then, all of a sudden, she trots right up beside me without a scratch on 'er, but panting hard enough that it's a miracle she didn't asphyxiate! That was how she got the name Luna. I started calling her a loon, like a lunatic, because of her crazy stunt back there, and then after a few days, by which point I'd already became very, extremely attached, I decided to officially name her Luna. I still mostly called her Loon, though!

She really deserved being called a lunatic, too. That thing she did, where she'd run right through a pack of zombies to lure them off before finding me again, became our routine for whenever we happened to run into a group of Zs.

What happened to her?

[The light quickly leaves Cody's eyes.] After she'd been with me for four months, we went through a really rough period when there just wasn't enough food to keep even me relatively well-fed, much less her as well. Ever since she'd joined me, food had been more of a challenge, but towards the end of that time . . . In order for me to survive . . . [He looks down at his feet briefly before sniffing nonchalantly and looking back at me evenly, voice flat.] I couldn't keep her with me.

What about after that?

I just kept going. "Keep calm and carry on," that sort of thing. The sad part is that I found one of those houses loaded down with food, like I mentioned earlier, just a day or two after Luna and I, uh, parted ways. As devastating as that was though, realizing that I had given up so much when we might have been able to hold on for a little longer, it gave me a good break. I was able to rest for a couple of days, get some good food in me, and then pack whatever I could carry and keep going.

How much food was really salvageable from houses like that?

It depends on the house, of course, but some of them had quite a bit. Towards the beginning of my journey, you could eat everything in them, but as time went by, more and more of the food started to go bad, so my diet was probably ninety-five percent canned foods by the end. Learning to ration was really key to the whole thing, though. Anyone can decide to only eat small amounts of food every day, not to say that it's easy, but it took a while to really pick up on where the line was between not eating enough, and eating more than what I reasonably should be, given the situation.

I always did prefer finding my food from the occasional house in the countryside or RVs along the road than from big cities, though. Even if there was generally more to be found in the cities, it was a lot more dangerous and gave me the creeps. If I couldn't see at least fifty feet in every direction at any given time, I automatically became nervous.

How long were you travelling for?

From start to finish, about seven and a half years. Sounds ridiculous, right? I was the one who actually did it, and sometimes even I have trouble believing it took that long, too. That is, however, the best that I can figure. I left right at the beginning of the Great Panic, and I crossed paths with the military as they were sweeping across the US, cleansing it of the undead, in Denver, which took place roughly seven and a half years after the start of the war.

I was by no means the greatest traveler, though. I got lost a lot, sometimes I had to stop for quite a while whenever I was injured, and it's not like I was so full of energy that I could keep a constant pace skipping along the road. Going alone means that you've gotta spend almost as much time looking over your shoulder as you do looking ahead, which doesn't exactly speed things along.

Wouldn't driving a car have made the trip go faster?

I'm sure it would have, greatly, but I never did use one after leaving the caravan of New Yorkers that I was in early on, and for lots of reasons. The biggest one was that roads made me nervous, although not as much as the big cities did, granted. Besides, any road or highway that would have been particularly useful to me were already packed full of cars. It would have been hard enough to find a path through all of them even if that's all I had to deal with, but there were also a lot of out-of-sight zombies that could easily turn into a swarm and put an end to my journey.

A couple other reasons I never used a car were because of the noise that they made, and I've already said that stealth was really key to my survival most of the time, and also their unreliability. A car can break down. You can run out of gas. A tire can burst. It's just another thing to maintain and worry about. The extra storage potential was a huge draw towards trying to drive, as was having a very, very mobile shelter with you at all times, but I ended up deciding to travel light and remain aware instead. I did sometimes ride a bicycle, though, but whenever my backpack would get too heavy after finding a bunch of food or other supplies, I'd usually ditch it. I didn't want to crash from being too top-heavy, after all.

What about other survivors – did you ever see any of them?

Sure, every once in a while, but I mostly tried to avoid them. One thing I learned really early on was that if you came across a stronghold of survivors walled-in against the undead, don't ask for shelter for a couple days. If they don't try to kill you upon approach and then happen to feel kind enough to let you in and believe that you aren't infected, they won't want to let you go. They all think: "sure, it's another mouth to feed, but casualties are high and we can always use another worker."

I got stuck in one of those places for a while, and it was several months before they felt confident enough that I wasn't going to run away if they let me out from under their watch and I was allowed to go scavenge food. Up until then I was doing things like repairing homes, working maintenance on firearms, or sometimes standing watch around the perimeter, but I was always being watched myself, too. Man, when they let me out, I didn't even think once about going back, but just went right on my way. They probably figured the undead got me, or something like that. [Laughs.]

It was strange, though, being so disconnected from the world. I realize that I wasn't exactly alone in that feeling, but, as I've learned afterwards, some groups of survivors actually got into contact with the safe zone via radio and received information and airdrops full of supplies. Me? I didn't know anything about anything until I got rescued after over seven years of the zombie apocalypse. No one knew what was going on during the Great Panic, and I'd never learned what was happening since then, so I got the whole shebang in one sitting: everything about the undead nearly conquering the world, the massive government changes, the military push to reclaim the US that was going on at the time, everything. I had always despised history classes in school, but after I had recovered enough to think about things beside sleep, food, and safety, I became a research machine. I wanted to know everything that I'd missed, not because I found it so enjoyable, but because I felt like it was my duty. I don't know. I did get to experience some things right along with the rest of the American people, though, like the Bakersfield Conflict memorial. At first I felt like it was just another thing I'd missed, but no one else really knew about it either, so that mollified me somewhat.

But researching what I didn't know about did give me something to do and it kept me occupied while they located where my family had gotten to and arranged for me to be transferred there as well. Everyone had made it, thankfully, but of course DeStRes had put them to work and they'd been relocated.

[At this point, we enter a small grocery store and Cody begins gathering a variety of items. I notice that he doesn't seem to be taking any canned foods.]

You've said several different things referring to the end of your journey. What exactly did happen?

It's not really all that exciting. I was right at the end of another period without very much food when I came across a city, which, as I found out later, is the very same Denver that you and I are currently standing in, and I figured it'd be a good place to try to find some food. However, after travelling for such a long time and having as little sleep as I did, as well as being constantly stressed, I got sloppy. I happened to gain the attention of ten or twenty zombies, nothing I hadn't handled a thousand times before, but I wasn't thinking straight and bolted right into the first building I thought was convenient, intending to pull the little trick I told you about earlier and escape through the back door before running away in the other direction.

The problem was, I had forgotten to check for a back door, and there wasn't one. So there I was, trapped in a little grocery store, about to be eaten by the creatures I'd outwitted and outran for so long, when all of a sudden, a bullet whizzes through the head of the closest Z, followed by another bullet, and another, and pretty soon they were all down for the count. Turns out that the military had arrived just in time, and I think I tried to hug the guys who'd saved me, but I got a gun shoved in my face and a stern warning that until I was definitely not carrying the zombie infection, I'd need to give everyone some space and be kept under an armed guard. [Laughs.] I didn't care! I was just so glad to be saved, finally. They had me sit around for a couple weeks before deciding I was healthy and shipping me over to where my family was. Honestly, the whole thing's a bit of a blur.

Do you mind if I ask two final questions?

No, go ahead.

After the war had ended, why did you decide to settle down in Denver?

Good memories. No, not really, ha! I guess it was partly because I was rescued here, but it was mostly because it just felt right. I would have died here, and a part of me thinks: "hey, maybe I should die here someday." Also, it's a nice place. I like it. [Grins.] What was your second question?

Is this the same grocery store as where you were cornered by the zombies and-

And almost died? Yes, yes it is. Don't ask why I still shop here, though, because you'll be disappointed by the answer.

[Contrary to his words, however, Cody leans towards me and whispers conspiratorially.]

This place has got the best prices in all of Denver!

A/N: Hope you enjoyed it! If you're confused about the reference to the Bakersfield Conflict, that's because it's from my other World War Z story, rather than canon. In the original book, there usually seems to be a reference to the previous interview, so it feels like they all build on each other, and I just couldn't resist doing it myself. ;) Thanks for reading!