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“Yes,” he said, and he fired a bolt right into her head.

She collapsed to the ground, finally at peace. I couldn’t fault my brother for being more merciful than I was.

Max came over to me with Ripley trailing at his feet and a backpack on his shoulders. “I grabbed diapers, bottles, food and Stella’s books. Oh, and some more knives and bolts for the bow. Do you think we’ll ever come back here?"

“It’s probably safe to assume that we won’t,” I said. I grabbed my sledgehammer off the ground and handed it to Max.

“You still want me to carry this?” he asked.

“I like it. Now let’s hurry and get back before they leave without us.”

“How is Minnie doing?” he asked, quirking aneyebrow at my new backpack. She was secure, but she was confused and bleating up a storm.

“We don’t have any chance of being sneaky with her, but she’ll hold.”

Max bent over and picked up the bike, and we both climbed on it, me pedaling and Max on the handlebars. Ripley looked at us with uncertainty and concern, but once I got going, she started running alongside as we sped through the streets. She even helped keep our immediate pathway free of zombies.

“I’m sorry I never taught you how to ride a bike,” I told Max as we weaved through the blood and gore and corpses that littered the roads the closer we got to the garage.

“Maybe we’ll find a bike when we get where we’re going,” Max said. “I ought to learn how so I can teach Fae someday.”

“Whenever we get somewhere safe with a road, I’ll be sure to teach you and Stella both how,” I promised.

48

Stella

Nova and the wolves returned first. She’d used old pallets to help them scale the walls, and they all came into the second story window. The wolves had green zombie blood on their muzzles, but I hadn’t needed to see the color to know who it belonged to. It smelled of the virus and urgency and hunger.

I sat on the counter, a wall of tools and potential weapons tacked up behind me, and my daughter was in my arms. She was fussing a little, but not much anymore. The howl of zombies were less shocking to her, and the screams of the other townspeople were growing less frequent as most of them died. Sitting beside me because someone had set her there was Lazlo and Nova’s young daughter Sage. She clung onto my dress and sucked her thumb.

The wolves hadn’t been the only thing that Nova brought back with her. She had found others along the way, survivors who didn’t appear to be bitten. Another ten or so of them, and the garage already felt cramped before they arrived.

I had the strongest urge to run. It was an electric feel in my legs, insisting that I should not be sitting and that I needed to run. But there was nowhere to go, so I held onto Fae, and I chewed on the inside of my cheek until I drew blood.

“What are we waiting for?” someone asked. “Don’t we have the keys? We should go before the zombies find a way in.”

“We’re waiting for the others to return,” Lazlo said. He had found the keys to the truck, and he still held them in his hand while he pet the wolves. “We can’t leave until everyone returns because zombies will come in when we open the garage.”

“How is this even going to work?” Samara asked. “There’s already two dozen people here, not even counting those giant dogs. We can’t all fit in one truck and a couple of ATVs.”

The room was quiet as everyone around was doing the same math. All the people and animals already inside this garage would not be able to escape in a single trip, and Max, Remy, and Ripley weren’t even back yet.

“We don’t know where we’re going anyway,” Eden said. She had been one of the survivors that Nova had found, and the hem of her dress was singed from fire and red from blood.

“The boat,” Serg said, almost to himself. He was leaning on the counter right beside me, and I barely even heard him. Then he straightened up and cleared his throat. “There’s a steamboat on the river. The S. S. Barbarabelle. It’s right below the waterfall, has plenty of rooms, and zombies can’t swim.”

“Too bad nobody knows how to drive it now that my dad is dead,” Samara reminded us bitterly.

“No, he taught me how,” Serg said. “I could drive it again, and I bet Boden could, too.”

“Are you saying that there is a working boat that we could escape on?” Lazlo asked, sounding excited.

“That’s great, but it doesn’t explain how we’ll all get out,” Castor said.

“We’ll split up,” Boden decided. “The kids will go first, and those that stay behind will hide up in the loft. We’ll close the door after they leave, and we’llbe stuck facing off the zombies that make it in, but we’ll be ready, and we’ll have the high ground.”

“Someone will have to drive the truck back to get the rest of us,” Eden pointed out.