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I went through town without any threat from the zombies, and I let the zombie child summon me toward the mayor’s office.

So when I opened the door and stepped inside the old church, I wasn’t expecting to find Boden or Remy. But I was still happy to see them.

“Stella!” Boden rushed over to me first. “What is going on? What are the zombies doing?”

“Something happened when I was infected,” I said, explaining as best I could make sense of it. “The baby helped me kill the virus, but it must have already changed things about me. My pheromones can communicate with their hive mind.”

“Can you send them away?” Boden asked.

“I don’t know. I wanted them to stop, so they have, but I haven’t really tried any other commands yet,” I said.

“Why did you come here?” Boden asked. “Why didn’t you stay at the river?”

“Because I wanted to help you, and because the zombie child is calling me, and I don’t know why,” I said, and then I realized something. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you with Max in the garage?”

Boden exhaled roughly, and I looked past him to Remy. She was covered in blood, mostly human red, and she looked like hell, even by survivalist standards. It was the emptiness in her eyes, like a light had gone out inside of her, that told me the terrible truth.

Yet I heard myself asking anyway, demanding really, “Where’s Max? Where is Max?!”

“I’m sorry,” was all Remy could say, and her voice sounded brittle and cracked.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but nothing could hold back the tears. Max was my other half, my best friend, my only love, my closest family until he had given me our daughter. I had no memory of life before him, and I had never imagined life without him.

When I tried to think of how I could go on without him, it was only blank nothingness.

“Stella.” Boden hugged me to him and kissed the top of my head. “I am so sorry. I love you so much, kiddo, and I’ll do everything I can to take care of you and Rafaella.”

“I know,” I said and pushed away from him. I wiped roughly at my eyes and swallowed down the pain that would consume me later. “But people are dying. We can mourn later, but now, I need to get the child and get the zombies out of here.”

“No, you should go with Lazlo,” Remy tried to insist. “We’ll take care of anything that’s left here.”

I shook my head and stepped over the dead gorilla as I walked toward the door to the basement. “The zombies won’t follow you, but they will follow me. I will lead them away from town.”

“Fine,” Remy said, but she grabbed my shoulder and stopped me. “Let me go down first. I don’t think it’s only zombies down there.”

She walked ahead of me, carrying her sledgehammer. When I walked past Ripley, shesniffed at me. The lion let out a confused, annoyed growl, and she gave me a strange look before jumping up to the choir balcony to lick her wounds.

Downstairs, like everywhere else, the power had been cut, but some kind of emergency lights bathed the room in a dim glow with a red hint from the warning lights under the windows.

At the bottom of the steps were two dead bodies. Young men in their early twenties that I didn’t recognize, not that their features were particularly visible given that they’d died by gunshot wounds to the face, neck, and chest. It had been a while since I had seen a gunshot wound, but it wasn’t something that was easily forgotten.

Blood was smeared all over the linoleum floor, with a trail leading back to where Mayor Vaughn Douglas was sitting slumped just outside one of the jail cells, leaning against the bars. I thought he was dead until he slowly turned his head to look at us as we descended down the stairs.

Standing next to him, his alderman Wilder was holding a handgun, and it was pointed directly at the two people in the cell across from them.

It was Mercy Loth, who I had seen untying the child zombie earlier, but now she was locked in the cell with him. She was sitting on a bench in the back, her arms wrapped protectively around the little boy. In the odd lighting, he almost didn’t look like a zombie at all.

“What in the world are you doing here?” Vaughn asked us, sounding weary.

“I think the real question is what are you doing hiding down here while your city is burning?” Remy asked him.

“I’m not the one who brought this nightmare down on us!” Vaughn yelled. He pointed toward Mercy, but he still didn’t get to his feet. “She’s the one whobrought them!”

“He’s gone mad, and he’s holding me and my son hostage,” Mercy said. “He’s sick, and he’s lost his mind.”

“But you did bring the zombies here, didn’t you?” I asked Mercy and stepped closer to the cell, putting my hands on the bars. “I found your book. I haven’t had a lot of time, but I did read enough to know that you farm the zombies, and that your son is a hybrid of a zombie and human.”

She sat up straighter, as if proud of those facts, and she smiled at me. “You know of the Wonderous Chosen One?”