I lay in bed alone for the first time since I went back in time. I was trying to get a nap in before dinner, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. I knew that right now was one of the only times that I could gather supplies and save people from the flood. My eyes pop open, and I crawl out of bed. “Ugh… It sucks being the good guy sometimes…”

It was just one of those days. I already went outside, got soaked, and decided I was done for the day, but I had a prickling feeling in the back of my head that I needed to do more. If I did nothing, I would still be fine, but the people I could have helped were going to need help the first week, or they wouldn’t need help anymore, because they’d most likely be dead.

The boat and motor I used gave me access to a speed that almost no other survivors could reach. I wanted to check on the animal farm, but now that I thought about it… He lived on a hill, a hill that was most likely dozens of feet submerged underwater… Still, they could be nearby if the animals floated to the surface. Some might be alive, but even if they weren’t, they’d still be an incredible food source.

Animals tended to stay dead after they died. Some could become zombies, but they were far less likely to than humans. If an animal were killed by a zombie, it’d have a much higher chance of becoming a zombie animal. They’d have drowned long before zombies showed up. Zombies did attack corpses, they mainly focused on living creatures to spread their virus further.

It turned out we were near the highest elevation point in Pennsylvania, going any direction ten miles, and you could be completely underwater unless your house was built on a hill. Most coastal cities were completely gone, only people living in the upper levels of buildings were left alive, and that was if their building wasn’t destroyed by the flood. My original estimate that only ten percent died in the flood was dramatically lower than where it actually was.

I hadn’t suffered the first time around, so I didn’t really think of how bad it was for everyone else. In just a few days, millions of people died, and over the next few weeks, millions more would. I stopped my motor because I thought I heard something. Sitting in silence for a minute and not hearing anything, I’m about to start it up again before I hear it. The sounds of a dog barking.

If I didn’t have enhanced senses, I never would have heard it over the sound of the motor running. It was off to the side of the path I was going as well, I wouldn’t have gone passed it. I head in that direction, and my heart sinks as I see the dog. It was standing on something that kept only the top half of its body out of the water. It had stayed awake for two days already, halfway submerged in the salt water.

The muffled barks were the last dregs of the energy it could produce. It was chained to a doghouse that it was standing on. The people who owned the dog and all the neighbors didn’t want to risk their own lives(or were dead) venturing out into the water to save it. I loaded it into the truck, and it didn’t even shake the water off itself before it passed out from exhaustion. It’s breathing ragged and choppy, it was a coin toss on whether it would live or die. Taking off my coat, I rubbed off the salt water before hugging it to my body.

The water was thankfully warm enough, it was cool but not chilling to soak in, it wasn’t until the record-breaking blizzard did you needed to worry about freezing to death. Still, being in the water for that long seeped all the warmth from the German Shepard. I headed to the farm, hoping to find some living animals, but was met with corpses floating on the surface. My heart sank at the sight, I should have warned the farmer when I was here to leave. The water completely covered the house, and only the weather vane was visible from the barn. The trip back was in silence as I loaded up four rafts full of dead cows, and I slowly made my way back.

I tried to justify it in my head. He would have died the first time around, and so would the animals. The animal corpses would have gone through the entire flood, rotting on the surface before anyone would have gotten to them. All the animals I bought from him were saved from this fate, so… Why didn’t I warn him? I could have saved his life, no, it would have made sense to save someone who knew how to take care of animals… And I just forgot, I didn’t think of what his living halfway down a hill meant.

It was a complete oversight, and I let an extremely valuable asset, someone who could save lives in the future because he knew how to raise animals and farm, die just because I didn’t think about where the water would be when it evened out. It sucked but… I had to move on. It was a mistake I couldn’t regret because there were still so many other people to save. I still had to check on the duck farmer, he was on the opposite end of this valley, and thankfully at the top of the hill instead of halfway down it.

He raised ducks and goats, but also had an orchard with many different fruit trees growing, and he made a living having people pick their own fruit baskets. I was going to see if he wanted to sell me some fruit trees or trade me for these cow corpses. It wasn’t worth fighting over trees whose roots would start rotting in a few weeks. The man had lucked out, and I wouldn’t consider him a farmer.

He inherited the business. I knew his parents from going apple-picking near Halloween, and he was lazy and selling off all his parents' assets as he made terrible business decisions over and over again. The four or five businesses his family owned had been whittled down to the fruit and animal ones, and that was only because no one had offered him a good enough price for them.

If the apocalypse didn’t happen he would sell them, waste the money betting on crypto, and spend the rest of his life saying how unfair the world was when all he had to do was stay in his lane and rake in the money his father’s businesses would have made him with no effort at all. Some people could be given the world, and they’d still ask for more. He reminded me of Dudley Dursley from Harry Potter.

I was half tempted to just steal from him. If he were lucky and managed to save some of his trees, by having another source of food, people could go to. If he were killed and someone took over, I wouldn’t care too much. The water was only waist-high over here. I made my way to his door. Knocking… And knocking again… Knocking even louder… This fucker wasn’t even here.

Ducks, goats, and an orchard would have gone a long way to keep people fed, and the person who should be here taking care of it, attempting to save his final asset, but he fled. Who knew where he was? I only knew that without him here, I was taking everything that wasn’t bolted down. I did a quick scan before I started and paused again. The dog I saved was a powered, I really got to check every time I came across someone new, but it wasn’t instinctively built into me to do that yet.

I gave the dog a core and didn’t notice any changes, so I went back to looting. He had dozens of ducks I loaded up on. A few died, but most survived; the same went with the goats. The raised duck house(Coop?) and beds even higher let them reach outside the water, and the goats in the barn were up on the bales of hay left behind by their owner. They’d all have died by the end of the month, but now I've got even more animals to take care of. I bowed to these animals. Who knew how many lives their milk and meat would save? With months of hay, I could keep them fed until it was time to slaughter them.