I sit on the floor with Katherine's head in my lap.After a fairly long silence, James begins to talk. "What did you do before all this, Ash? Were you in college?""No. I was helping on my daddy's ranch," she says, not looking at him."Doing what?""Everything," she says, still looking at the floor. "He wanted me to know it all because he said you can’t lead people if you don't know how to do what they're doing better than they’re doing it. Plus my mom's been away for a long time and, when she's gone, daddy goes into work mode full time." After a silence she says, "what about you? What was it like before all this?""Yeah," I say, "and how did your dad make it through?""Why? Cause I'm ugly?" Harry says with a chuckle. The statement is actually ironic, because he is far from ugly. It’s just that his extra weight would be a target for the infected. I don't bother to respond to his question because I know he is being facetious."Dad escaped the apocalypse because he's a conspiracy theorist.""And who's laughing now?" says Harry over his shoulder."He and his chat room buddies saw this coming before mom started acting weird, so he hid in his workshop through the first stage of the plague, which drove mom crazy.""I told that woman this wasn't some new evolutionary thing, like the so called experts were saying on TV.
