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“Do you think Stella is still in there?” Max pushed past us and went over to her side. “Stella?”

Ripley kept rubbing her giant head against Stella, and Max took her hand and squeezed it.

Her eyelids fluttered, and she mumbled, “Ripley,stop.”

“Stella?” Max repeated excitedly. “Stella, are you there?”

“Max?” Her eyes opened, and they werehereyes, not the glassy rabid ones of a zombie. “Am I still alive?”

He laughed with tears streaming down his face. “Yeah, you are.”

“What’s happening?” Boden asked.

“I don’t know,” Jovie said, sounding as stunned as I felt. “I’m just a midwife, and I have never seen anyone come back from the brink of being a zombie.”

28

Stella

Waking up felt like coming back in my body. It was strange because I didn’t know where I had been, but I knew I had been gone.

I had these moments of clarity, where I could see Max’s face and feel Ripley’s fur on my skin, but then I would slip away again, like disappearing under water.

I couldn’t tell for how long this went on, the limbo between awake and asleep, between human and zombie, but eventually, my fever broke. When I opened my eyes, the world made sense. The buzzing in the back of my head was gone, and I could hear my own thoughts again.

My room was bathed in pinks and purples of a setting sun, and the last thing I clearly remembered before that, it had been night, so I lost at least a day to the limbo. Max was on the floor, asleep with Ripley as his pillow, and Boden was sitting in the chair, absently flipping through one of my books.

He lifted his eyes and immediately broke out in a grin when he saw that I was awake. “Good evening, Stella.”

“Hello,” I said, and my voice cracked from being so dry. “Can I have some water?”

“Yeah, absolutely.” He set down the book and grabbed a glass of water with ice chips from my bedside table. He helped me sit up to drink, because Iwas still weak, and my big belly made it difficult.

“Thank you,” I said when I drank my fill.

“No problem.” He sat down at the edge of the bed, and he brushed the hair from my forehead. “How are you feeling?”

“Much better. How is the baby doing?”

“Good, by all the metrics that Jovie can measure,” he said, but I had known, because I could feel them moving around inside me. “Their heart sounds strong, just like yours.”

“What happened?” I asked. “How come I’m not a zombie?”

“We don’t really know yet,” he admitted with a soft laugh. “But we’re so damn happy.”

“Stella?” Max asked, sounding both excited and groggy, and he hurried to get up to see me better. “You’re awake, really awake.”

“Yeah, I’m me again,” I agreed happily.

Jovie was summoned by Max’s exuberance, and she set about making sure that I was okay. She asked me a few questions, checking my cognition, and I aced that part. Then she did a few medical tests – shining lights in my eyes, checking reflexes, listening to my heart, and taking my blood pressure.

Once she finished her exam, everyone was crowded around my bed to see the miracle of my recovery. Max and Ripley never left, but Boden had stepped outside to wait with Remy and Serg in the other room until she called them back in afterwards.

“The lyssavirus seems to be inactive in you at this time,” Jovie said once she finished. “But we still have to get your other pregnancy related conditions under control.”

“That’s excellent news, doc, and don’t take this question as me complaining, but what the hell happened?” Boden asked, with Remy and Serg flanking him on either side.

“My formal education is actually in midwifery. I’m not a doctor or a scientist, and even if I was, I don’t have the equipment or the support staff to properly research all that I’d need to,” Jovie answered, sounding almost weary. She was sitting on the chair beside me, one leg crossed over the other, wearing a modest summer dress. “So you will have to take everything I say with a very large helping of salt, because frankly, we’ll never fully understand what happened here.”