David awoke with a yawn, feeling vaguely disoriented for a moment. He was in bed, but everything was all wrong. He sat up, blinking, and the events of the past few nights slowly percolated back through his brain. He sighed, then shrugged and stretched. If anything he was even stiffer than he'd been the night before. The soft bed had been wonderful, but his legs were one mass of pain from the walking and climbing. He groaned softly

His stomach informed him that he hadn't eaten much lately, and it wasn't pleased with this. He pulled himself up out of bed and went to explore the house. He didn't have too much hope of finding food. Vampires were hardly likely to keep well-stocked larders, but it couldn't hurt to look.

The bedroom he was in was bare but clean. The rumpled bed and a small dresser were the only furniture there. The afternoon sunlight poured in through two large windows. He got up and ran his hand through his hair, feeling suddenly very grimy. "Ugh, I need a bath."

A closed door proved to lead to a bathroom. It appeared to have actual plumbing. David looked at the bathtub. "There's no way the water actually works," he muttered to himself, then shrugged and tried the tap. To his surprise a steady stream of clear water began to pour into the tub. He quickly plugged the tub, and turned the other handle, marked "hot," as well. Nobody in the city had hot water, it took too much energy to heat it, and he didn't expect to get hot water here either, but once again, to his surprise, when he put his hand in the stream, it was warm.

Well over half an hour later he emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his waist, feeling much cleaner and much more relaxed. The sun was still up, if only just barely, so he decided he might as well explore the rest of the house while he waited for Aidan to wake up.

The main room proved to be fairly unremarkable, sunlight streaming in through two windows flanking the front door illuminating mostly bare walls. The floor had a worn throw rug covering most of it. A bookshelf stood against one wall, holding a collection of battered books. A fireplace was empty even of ash, while above it a moth-eaten moose head stood guard, looking morose as only a moose can. Another door proved to lead into a small kitchen, or at least David assumed it was a kitchen, though the only really familiar thing there was a small table. The boxy thing he assumed was a stove looked nothing like the iron stoves he'd seen. A window let sunlight into the kitchen as well, but the room past that was dark, and seemed to be dug into the side of the mountain itself. The walls were concrete, and the plain cube of a chamber was full of dusty boxes and cans.

Curious, David inspected one stack of large cans. With surprise he realized they were full of food. Plain labels read things like "dried apples," "wheat" and "rice." The boxes proved to be filled with smaller cans, containing such items as "beef stew," "carrots," and "pickled beets," with faded pictures on the labels.

This must be old, old, old, he thought to himself. From before the collapse. I wonder if any of it is still good? I hope some of it is still good! He remembered carrots. He'd had real carrots a few times. They did well in the hydroponics, so even though they were far, far more expensive than the supposedly meat flavored "balanced protein" that was the usual fare of city dwellers, they weren't too terribly uncommon. He'd never had an apple though. Or real beef. Nobody could afford to keep cows, they ate too much, and there were no apple trees in the city. He'd had a plum once or twice, there were a few plum trees, and he'd had strawberries on rare, special occasions. They were a luxury, but the hydroponics grew a few of them. He wasn't even sure what a "beet" was, but the faded picture on the label looked interesting. Though the purple color reminded him of plums, and he couldn't imagine a pickled plum. Did beets taste anything like the cucumbers in regular pickles? He'd had pickles before, they were pretty good.

His mouth was watering. But he had no idea if fifty-year-old cans would be safe to open and eat. Nor any notion of how to open them, for that matter. So he turned away from the heap of ancient food and looked into the last room. It was another concrete cube, but some attempt had been made to soften it with throw rugs on the floor, and a painting hung on one wall. A small cabinet held a body object that David didn't recognize. A tilted draftsman's table sat in one corner, and a bed occupied the center of the room. Curled up in it was Aidan, blankets pulled up so that only the top of his head was visible, the rest of him a lump beneath the layers of fabric.

Leaving the vampire to sleep, David wandered back out into the front room. With nothing better to do, he paged idly through some of the books in the bookshelf. There were a few works of fiction, a couple of what seemed to be religious texts, a few obvious survivalist handbooks of various kinds, and a collection of books about things he'd never heard of, like "UFOs" and "Crop Circles."