Chapter 5
Stella
“What are you doing on my property?” the young man demanded.
The door had opened wider, and he’d moved out into the sunlight to take better aim at us with the crossbow. Boden stepped in front of me right away, shielding my body with his own, and he held his hands palm out.
“We’re only looking for a friend of ours,” Boden answered calmly and clearly. “We lived in this house up until a couple years ago, and we thought she might’ve come back here.”
“You’re the ones that boarded it up and raided the pantries and made a mess of things?” he asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t say we made a mess of things, but we were living there,” Boden replied. “We tried to take care of the house the best we could. But if our friend’s not here, we’ll just be on our way. We didn’t mean to cause you any trouble.”
I peered around Boden at the young man in the doorway to our former home. He had lowered the crossbow slightly, enough that I could get a look at him.
His eyes were narrowed at us, and his sandy brown hair was tousled across his forehead. He was lean with fair skin and appeared to be about twenty years old. While I could tell that he was handsome, that wasn’t really what caught me about him. His face was so… familiar.
“If you don’t want any trouble, you ought to turn around and get out of here,” the young man directed.
“No problem,” Boden said, and he took a step backward, almost bumping into me. “Come on, Stella.”
“But did you see her?” I asked, not wanting to give up and turn around when we’d come this far. I stepped out from behind Boden so the young man would know I was talking to him. “Has she been through here?”
“In the past nine months I’ve been here, we haven’t had a single uninfected visitor,” he answered unequivocally. “I don’t know where your friend went, but she hasn’t been here.”
A disappointed lump formed in my throat, but I swallowed it down.
“Where is she then?” I asked, but I don’t know if I was asking the man with the crossbow, or Boden, or the universe.
“We’ll figure it out somewhere else,” Boden said, and he was trying to usher me back down the driveway.
I relented because there was apparently nothing for us here anymore. As we started to go, the man in the doorway lowered his crossbow completely, and when I looked back over my shoulder at him, I finally realized why he looked so familiar.
“Ryder?” I asked in surprise and dismay. “Ryder Tremblay?”
Now it was his turn to look at me with confusion and disbelief. “How… how do you know my name?”
“We lived in your house!” I was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling I couldn’t quite place. It felt almost as if a character from a book had come to life – someone I had only known from pictures and stories standing right before me in flesh and blood.
My disappointment about Remy’s absence was quickly overcome by my newfound giddy excitement. One of the Tremblays was right here in front of me.
I had spent so much time wondering and imagining about what their life had been like, about who they had been.
I pictured sun drenched summers on the lake, and cozy winters by the fireplace.
It wasn’t so different from my life at the Lakehouse.
Except they didn’t live with the threat of zombies, starvation, or lack of medical care.
And then, as my excitement grew, I started toward the house. “Is Avalyn here? Are your parents? I’d love to meet them.”
“Stella.” Boden grabbed my arm to keep me from rushing at Ryder – who was, by all accounts, an armed stranger.
“No,” Ryder said, sounding flat, but his weapon remained lowered.
Another voice came from in the house, asking, “What is going on out there?”
A moment later, a stocky brunette appeared beside him. Her hair was chin length, and her black tank top revealed muscular, scarred arms. She was shorter than Ryder, and unarmed, but she was more intimidating somehow.
“Who are these people and what do they want?” she demanded to know, keeping her serious eyes locked on me and Boden.
“We used to live here,” I repeated.
“Oh, were you the ones that left all the jars of cloudberry jam behind in the cabinets?” the woman asked.
I nodded vigorously. “Yeah, we used to can it every summer. It was the best way to stretch the harvest.”
“Well, you abandoned them, so we ate them all,” she replied. “But I suppose it’s even since you helped yourself to Ryder’s things.”
“That sounds more than fair,” Boden agreed. His hand remained on my arm, as if he was afraid I would bolt into the house if he let go of me. “We didn’t realize that anyone would be coming back, since the house had been abandoned for so long.”
“We were at our house in Vancouver when the virus broke out, and we ended up in a quarantine zone for a long time,” Ryder explained. “And then it took me even longer to get here and find the place again. It’s a lot harder doing it on foot, especially when I hadn’t been here since I was ten.”
“Your parents aren’t with you?” I asked.
Ryder’s expression darkened. “No. I’m the only one left of my family.”
“What is going on? Why are you all standing out there talking?” Another voice in the background, and another young woman appeared.
She looked to be my age, and her black hair nearly reached the knees of her long legs.
She was wearing a t-shirt of Max’s paired with a skirt I had made from old curtains – both things we’d left behind when we left the Lakehouse because there had only been so much that we could carry.
“Bianka, I told you to stay back until we cleared it,” the shorter brunette chastised her.
“Well, I figured since you’re chatting it up that it was cleared,” the taller woman – Bianka, apparently – replied. Then she looked over to us. “Are you gonna kill us or rob us?”
“No, we don’t mean you any harm,” Boden said quickly.
The short brunette rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath.
“What are you doing here then? Do you need help or something?” Bianka asked.
“They said they’re looking for someone,” Ryder answered for us.
“You been walking a lot? You look tired and dirty.” Bianka eyed us up with her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you come in and rest up? You could tell us about your missing person.”
“That would be great,” I replied before Boden had a chance to decline the offer. These people seemed nice enough, especially Ryder, and I wanted to find out if maybe they’d seen Remy.
“Bianka,” the brunette said in her low husky voice. “We’ve talked about this. We can’t invite strangers into our house.”
“Oh, come on, babe,” Bianka retorted, shrugging off the brunette’s concerns. “We haven’t talked to anyone in a while. I wanna find out what else is out there, and these two might know. Besides, we oughtta help people when we can. Pay it forward, that kinda thing.”
Ryder stepped to the side and opened the door wider, ignoring the brunette’s protests. “Come on in, meet the rest of us, and we can have a chat.”
By Boden’s hesitant expression, I knew that he didn’t want to, likely because he didn’t trust the situation. But Bianka was welcoming us in, and I didn’t want to leave here without anything. We’d come so far. So I went inside the home that had once been mine.