Chapter 6
Stella
There were five of them in total living together in Ryder’s house. Three we had met – Ryder Tremblay, the tall Bianka Novak, and the stocky Murphy Parsons. The others were waiting for us in the living room.
They were two young men, looking to be about Ryder and Bianka’s age. Murphy appeared a bit older, but that could’ve just been her serious expression.
The first to greet us was Leandro Reyes. He got up from the couch, extending a hand and a crooked smile. His eyes were a dark russet, and his skin was a warm umber brown. He wore his hair in chin-length twist locs, and a bear claw hung on a leather strap around his neck.
The other was Cole Wagner. He was pale and lanky, with a pronounced overbite and nervous eyes.
As he stood, he kept his distance and stayed at the far side of the room in front of the wall of windows.
Other than a diffident nod of the head after Ryder made the introductions, Cole hadn’t really acknowledged us at all.
“So you used to live here?” Bianka asked. She sat in the plush sitting chair near the fireplace, her legs and long skirt draped over the arm of it, and she watched Boden and I with curious blue eyes.
“Yeah, we did,” I said. “For about seven years.”
“That’s so wild!” she exclaimed.
Murphy sat down on the other arm of the chair, putting a protective hand on Bianka’s shoulder. “Why did you leave? This place has everything.”
“We needed medical care,” Boden answered so I wouldn’t have to. “That’s the one thing that’s missing from way out here.”
“Well, that’s missing everywhere, isn’t it?” Murphy asked.
“We’d heard about medicine and a helpful community out in Emberwood, so that’s where we went,” Boden elaborated. “And it worked out for us, so we stayed on.”
“It worked out for you?” Murphy scowled and let out a skeptical laugh. “I heard that place burned to the ground.”
“We arrived before the fire, and they’re rebuilding now,” Boden clarified. “Calling it New Emberwood with Nova Boone Durante working as mayor. “
“We’ve been living on a riverboat,” I added, since Murphy didn’t seem to believe us.
“A riverboat?” Bianka sounded impressed. “That sounds mighty quaint.”
“It used to be a hotel, so it has lots of rooms, and it’s been really nice for us,” I went on. It wasn’t until Boden gave me a look from the corner of his eye that I realized I had maybe divulged too much to these strangers.
He cleared his throat and corrected course with, “We have a community of over fifty people with a decent size armory, and it is nice and secure floating in the middle of the river.” He’d slightly exaggerated our resources and security to make the Barbarabelle seem like less of an easy target.
“Wow. A floating hotel sounds way more glamorous than how we lived back in the quarantine in Vancouver,” Leandro said, and he looked over to Ryder, as if to commiserate.
“Remember when we were living in that boys’ wing?
We didn’t even have a window. They had this concrete quad in the center, and there was a chain link fence over the top, so nothing could get in, and we only got to spend two hours a day out there.
” He paused then to hold up two fingers to accentuate his point.
“The only view was the bricks around us and the gray sky overhead through that chain link filter. I swear, that sky was gray for the whole year.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Ryder replied, sounding much less inclined for a trip down memory lane than Leandro was.
Other than Cole, Ryder was the only one still standing, though he was leaning against the fireplace. It was so hard for me to keep from staring at him, but I knew it would be rude and weird so I did my best to look away.
It wasn’t that Ryder was good-looking, although he was also very good-looking.
His silken hair was the color of maple sugar, and his mouth was pouty enough to seem brooding.
His eyes weren’t quite smoldering (though I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, because I had only read about it in books) but there was an intensity in the silvery hazel.
Mostly, it was so surreal to see him, standing here in the house that still held the pictures –
– and at that very moment I noticed none of the family pictures were displayed anymore.
When we’d been living here, we had moved some of them, taking them off the mantle and storing them away in closets. But we’d left the ones hanging on the wall, in large part because we had nothing to replace them with and the walls would look barren without them.
Now they were all gone. Every single photo that had contained a member of the Tremblay family appeared to be removed, with only blank walls and rectangles in the dust left behind.
“Why’d you take all the pictures down?” I blurted out, and when Ryder looked sharply at me, shame washed over me, and I sunk lower in the couch.
“Nobody needs reminders about what isn’t here anymore,” he replied simply.
Leandro cleared his throat, and in a much lighter tone asked, “If you were all living the dream on a riverboat, why’d you come back here?”
“They claim they’re looking for someone,” Murphy answered for us.
“We are looking for someone,” I corrected her. “She’s part of our family. Her name is Remy King. She’s about five and a half feet tall, long dark hair, and she’s in her late twenties. She’s travelling with a mule and a lion.”
“Whoa, she travels with a lion?” Leandro asked with a laugh. “Why didn’t you lead with that? How did she end up with a lion?”
“She found her on the side of the road,” Boden relayed the story that Remy had given to him. “She was chained to the back of the truck, so her best guess was that someone had a lion as a pet.”
“Wow. A pet lion.” Leandro let out a low whistle. “How does she do with zombies?”
“She eats them,” I said, and Leandro laughed, seemingly thrilled by that answer.
“Rye, can you believe this?” Leandro asked, grinning over at Ryder.
“That does explain all the claw marks in the garage and the bannisters.” Murphy motioned to where the wooden railing up the second floor had been clawed and chewed on by Ripley over the years.
“We thought maybe a super strong zombie must’ve done it,” Bianka explained. “My guess was that gorilla zombie we heard rumors about.”
“Told you that was crazy,” Cole said, speaking for the first time since we’d been introduced.
I glanced over at Boden, but neither of us said anything.
We’d both seen the zombie gorilla. The lyssavirus genotype-8 infected all the great apes, from humans through gorillas and chimpanzees.
Apparently, someone had gotten the bright idea to take one of the hundreds of captive gorillas from a zoo or other institution, and they had infected it with the virus, turning it into a hulking monster of a zombie.
Fortunately, the gorilla zombie hadn’t survived the fall of Emberwood, so there was no need to prove its existence to the strangers in the room with us. Especially since we couldn’t prove it, and they already seemed dubious of us. We needed to give them reasons to trust us, not doubt us even more.
“What about you all?” Boden asked. “Where do you come from?”
“You mean before the zombies went and mucked everything up?” Bianka asked.
“I was born in Bushwick, not that I remember much of it since I was only nine when we went into the first quarantine zone. My mom knew that the whole NYC area would be bonkers, so she took us up to Canada, and we actually ended up in the Quebec QZ for a while. Parler de l’apocalypse et des zombies sonne mieux en francais, je dois l’admettre. ”
I gave her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, the only French I know is from an old lullaby.”
“And I only know some Spanish,” Boden added.
“Anyway, things in the quarantine got bad after a while,” Bianka went on. “Not enough food, violent guards, too many people. You know the drill, I’m sure.” She gave me a knowing weary smile, and I nodded like I did understand, but I didn’t really.
I had no real memory of my time before the Lakehouse, of life before Max, but I didn’t want to mention that now. I’d rather us bond over our shared histories than raise suspicion over our differences.
“A few of us travelled west, looking for something better,” Bianka continued.
“And along the way, I lost everyone. Including my mom.” Her expression darkened for a moment, but she forced a smile.
“Then Murphy found me wandering around the derelict streets of Vancouver, and xe’s been taken care of me ever since. ”
“Xe?” I echoed, confused by her word choice.
“Oh, yeah, Murphy’s an enby,” Bianka explained. “Like nonbinary instead of male or female. And instead of he/him or she/her, Murph uses xe/xer.”
“Thank you for the gender lesson,” Murphy said dryly.
“Well, I wanna make sure they understand, babe.” Bianka put her hand on top of Murphy’s. “And I know you don’t like explaining it, so I thought I’d get it out of the way.”
“Thanks for letting us know,” Boden said. “I don’t know if I’ve met someone like that before, but we have folks of all types living on the Barbarabelle.”
Our friend Edie was a transwoman, and she had been open about sharing her experiences with me.
I’d also read some things about sexuality and gender in the books in the Lakehouse (but honestly, not enough since I’d accidentally ended up pregnant at fourteen).
Nonbinary and other gender identities were something I was aware of, even if I hadn’t encountered much of it myself.
But then again, that could also be because I hadn’t encountered that many people at all.
“Ryder and I came up together in the boys’ wing,” Leandro said, continuing the conversation.
“They kept the kids separate there, and it was all binary. Boys in one wing, girls in another. And all the adults were kept away from all of us, parents included. We only got to see them for a few hours a week through these mesh windows, like we were prisoners. Make no mistake, that was not a fun place to grow up.”
“They tried to keep everyone as segregated as possible to stop the spread of the virus, but in too many of the safe zones, they took it too far,” Murphy said, xer tone both apologetic and justifying.
“Murph was in the reserve forces when the lockdowns started,” Bianka explained. “Xe helped set up some of the first quarantines and safe zones.”
“I was in the infantry, fresh out of boot camp when the virus reared its ugly head,” Boden said. “With the U.S. Army, I was a soldier, and I had to set up a few of those myself.”
“Later on, because I wanted to help, I ended up volunteering for the Cold Shore project,” Murphy said.
The name Cold Shore sounded an alarm in my head and brought me back to the fall of Emberwood. All of that death and destruction came directly at the hands of a vengeful woman named Mercy Loth. In the chaos of her attack, she’d accidentally left a book behind, and it ended up in my hands
One part manifesto and one part memoir, it was simply titled The Book of Mercy.
Mostly it contained the grandiose ramblings and depraved confessions of a delusional young woman, including how she came to conceive and birth multiple children with zombies.
But tucked into the pages were several folded-up letters and papers.
The letters were written by a man called Pyotr Popov, a scientist working for the Cold Shore Global Contingency. He didn’t define it explicitly, but it was clearly somewhere meant to survive the end of the world.
“You’re talking about the Cold Shore Global Contingency?” I asked.
“Yeah, they were supposed to save the world, and I wanted to help,” Murphy said with a wry smile. “But then it turned out to be more bullshit, just like everything else has been since the virus.”
Ryder scoffed. “It’s all been bullshit since long before the virus.”