Chapter 19
Stella
In the night, on my bedroll on the floor with my daughter snuggled up beside me, I drifted off into a dark heavy sleep. For once, I went to bed with my appetite satiated, so I hoped for a dreamless slumber.
Instead, I was treated to gauzy dreams of chasing Max through a field of wildflowers, but no matter how fast I ran, I could never quite catch him.
I awoke in the pre-dawn blue glow with a longing in my chest so painful, I could barely breathe. But when I did inhale, my nostrils were filled with the cloying, pungent odor that I had come to know too well: Fae had a dirty diaper.
Fortunately, it was contained inside her cloth diaper and pajamas, so the whole mess could be a lot worse. Still, it was something that needed to be dealt with immediately, if I didn’t want to wake up the entire cabin with the stench.
Fae didn’t stir as I scooped her up. Edie – who slept on her own bedroll on the other side of me – woke up as I was gathering what I needed to clean my daughter.
“Need a hand?” Edie whispered as she watched me.
“I’m heading down to the nearby creek to clean everything up,” I explained quietly. “But I wouldn’t mind the company.”
Edie nodded, gathering her sweater around her shoulders as she quietly slipped from her bedroll.
We tiptoed past the slow, steady breaths of the others.
Boden, Leandro, and Ryder were sprawled out in the living room with us, while Oakley, Sienna, and Juniper had taken the solitary bedroom, and the O’Hara brothers were in the small loft above it.
Edie and I made our way toward the creek, following the sound of the babbling water, and Fae was half-asleep in my arms. On the bank, I laid her down on a blanket, but when I changed her, she wasn’t quite as soiled as I expected.
Edie stayed on the banks with Fae, who promptly fell back to sleep, while I went to the water to clean her clothing. I knelt at the creek’s edge, letting the current carry away the grime as the first hints of soft orange sunrise glittered through the pine tree branches around us.
“So, what do you think of Ryder and Leandro?” Edie asked.
“What do you mean?” I glanced sharply over my shoulder at her, and then I saw a strange gleam in her eyes.
“I only mean that… they both seem nice, and I’ve seen the way you look at Ryder sometimes,” Edie said knowingly.
My cheeks reddened at the realization that anyone had noticed. It wasn’t something I meant to do, and whenever I had caught myself staring at Ryder, I’d always quickly averted my gaze.
I hesitated, scrubbing at the fabric. “I…don’t know what I feel, honestly. I thought I was going to be with Max forever, and I know it’s been years since he died, but it still seems too soon to think about anybody else like that.”
“Yeah, I get that.” Edie paused, tracing lines in the dirt with her finger.
She’d lost her boyfriend in the attack on Emberwood, so she truly did understand better than most. “I feel the same way about Alec.” Her voice wavered, but she steadied herself.
“Some days, I wake up and reach for him without thinking.”
There was a heavy silence between us, broken only by the burble of the creek, and I quietly admitted, “I dreamt about Max last night. I was chasing him, but I never could catch him.”
Edie nodded, a sad smile flickering on her lips. “Yeah, I’ve had that one, too.”
A sudden scream shattered the stillness, sharp as broken glass. We both froze, looking back toward our campsite, and then another cry followed.
Instinct took over, and I told Edie, “Stay here and keep Fae safe!” And without another word, I sprinted back through the trees to the cabin, dread clawing up my spine.
Through the clear plastic tarp that covered the gaping hole in the bedroom wall, I could see a swirl of shadows, and then blood splattered across it.
I darted toward the front door, and I threw it open in time to watch the chaos crashing down. Four zombies lay dead on the floor – one decapitated, two with arrows straight through their heads, and another with a fire poker in the eye.
Boden was standing with his bloody machete in his hand, and he rushed to me. “Are you okay? Where’s Fae?”
“She’s safe with Edie at the creek,” I asked. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he assured me, and he glanced back over his shoulder at the others.
Fergus and Dougal were up in the loft with a crossbow, and Alphie was standing in the corner still wielding a hearth shovel. Leandro knelt on the floor next to Ryder, checking out a scrape he had on his arm.
Behind them, the bedroom door was open and covered in bloody handprints – both human red and zombie green – and I could hear Juniper crying.
I breathed in deeply, and I realized that I could still smell it. The pungent odor I had initially assigned to my daughter lingered long after she was gone. Nauseatingly rotten meat and too sweet, fermented fruit finished with a sharp greenness, like fresh cut grass.
It hadn’t been Fae that I smelled but my own chemical communications. In my dreams, I’d been so overcome by longing that my body had released pheromones to summon zombies.
I had accidentally called them here.
“But everyone’s okay?” I asked weakly, and my gaze was fixed on the bedroom door with the bloody handprints. Some of them looked so small. Too small.
“No,” Boden replied sadly.
And then because I needed to see for myself, I brushed past him and stepped over the zombie corpses.
Before I even reached the doorway, I could see Oakley on the floor.
His hand outreaching toward nothing, his throat torn out, his eyes vacantly staring at the ceiling.
Another zombie lay on top of him, the back of its head bashed into a mushy green mess.
Juniper was still crying, but she wasn’t the only one alive in the room. Sienna sat in the corner of the bedroom, her young daughter on her lap, holding her tightly.
Juniper’s leg was bare beneath her sleepshirt, and the bright red crescent shape of a bite wound almost seemed to glow against her golden tan skin.
Sienna saw me noticing the wound, and her eyes welled with tears, but she didn’t say anything. She just rocked Juniper and held her close.
“Is it awful altogether?” Fergus asked from the loft.
I nodded. “Yeah, it is awful altogether.”
“The little lass is still with us, yeah?” Dougal asked. “I can hear her.”
“She’s been bitten,” Boden said, his voice behind my shoulder.
Juniper didn’t look up, though her sobs had faded into thin, shuddering breaths. Upstairs, Fergus released a string of expletives in his dismay, and Leandro asked if there was anything that we could do.
“I am so sorry,” I said in a voice so thick, I thought I would suffocate under it.
“I know,” Sienna said, but she didn’t, because she didn’t understand what I was apologizing for. She thought I was only saying it, because that’s what you say to someone who just brutally lost her husband and will very quickly lose her daughter.
But what I meant was that I am so sorry for summoning the monsters that tore apart your family and destroyed your life in a matter of seconds.
“What do you want me to do?” Boden asked her.
“Close the door and leave me with my family,” she answered.
Boden’s eyes went to the breeze ruffling the tarp over the window, where the zombies had broken in. This room wasn’t safe, and it held more than one corpse.
“Sienna, you weren’t bitten, were you?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter!” Sienna snapped, her gaze fierce and determined. “I want to be alone with my family!” She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, she sounded much calmer but far more beseeching, “Just leave me be.”
Boden tentatively put his hand on the door. “If you… if you live, you know where we’re going. You can meet us in Glacier Valley.”
She didn’t respond and instead turned her attention back on comforting her daughter.
“Goodbye, Sienna and Juniper,” I said as Boden closed the door, but neither of them replied.