Page 5 of Hollow Valley

“No, I’ll be okay.Iknowshe’s safe with Edie and Harlow on the boat,” I insisted despite the desperate urge inside me to do the contrary.“I can’t … I don’t understand how Remy could just… leave… usall.”

Boden was quiet for a long minute, breathing heavily as he stared up at the shadows of the cobwebbed ceiling above us.“I suppose it’s the same as it is for you.She knew that we’d be safe without her, and she thought… she must’ve thought her reasons were worth it.”

“Do you think she’s at the Lakehouse?”I asked.

“I don’t know where else she would go.If she were running off to die, she wouldn’t have brought Ripley or the mule along to die with her.”

When I finally managed to drift off, my sleep wasn’t exactly restful.Most nights, I dreamt of Max and of my hunger, but tonight they were filled with zombies.In my nightmares, I stood at the edge of the pit, watching the burnt corpses reanimate and climb up the edges.Their fingers of blackened bones outstretched toward me.

And in the center of it all, unharmed and unmoving, was the child Chosen, but he wasn’t alone.Beside him, Fae stood and held his hand.They both stared at me with wide eyes glowing in the flames.I screamed for them, promising that I would save them, but even as I did, the zombies escaped the pit and grabbed onto me.

“Stella!”Boden’s frantic yelling woke me.

I sat up, half-asleep and disoriented as I tried to make sense of my surroundings.The shed we camped in was completely dark, other than the very early morning dull blue glow that came in through the cracked door.

Shelves clattered to the floor behind me, and Boden let out a frustrated grunt.The death rattle of the zombie – their wheezing breath and ravenous groans – was silenced by the sound of a machete blade slicing through rotten flesh and gelatinous bone.

I scrambled to my feet and threw open the door, letting in as much of the dim light as I could.It also gave the zombies an obvious way to escape.

“Alright, time to go!”I shouted and clapped my hands together.In my mind, I focused all my thoughts on simple directives:Go.Get away.Leave.

“I think it’s just me now,” Boden replied, sounding winded.He stepped over the fresh bodies on the floor, and he came into the light, so I could see the blood splattered across his shirt and arms.“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.Are you?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.None of this is my blood.”

“You didn’t have to kill them.I could’ve taken care of them,” I said, meaning I could’ve sent them away.

“Then they would’ve been somebody else’s problem later on,” he reasoned and turned his back to me.He crouched down over his bedroll and got his lantern going, dousing the room in an amber glow, then he pulled out an old towel to clean himself off as best as he could.

“Besides, there wasn’t any time,” he went on.“I woke up to the two of them creeping in through the door, and I took care of them before anybody else got hurt.”

Whenever possible, I tried to repel the zombies instead of killing them.If I was on land, I kept the thoughts “Stay away, stay back, keep moving”running in the back of my head.I don’t know how it worked exactly, but as the command coursed through my body, a powerful scent would emanate from me.

Well, itseemedpowerful to me and the zombies, anyway, but no one else around ever noticed it.The scent would vary based on the command or the intensity of my thoughts, but the one that always stilled nearby zombies was a musty, earthy cloud.It smelled of dirt under my fingernails and burnt garlic, and it tasted like cotton in my mouth.

I took a slow breath, trying to shake off the adrenaline and fear.The amber glow from the lantern cast long, wavering shadows across the shed’s battered walls, making everything feel fragile.

Despite everything, we’d survived another night, and dawn would come soon enough.Boden and I started packing up, so we would move on, leaving behind the mine and its haunted shadows.

4

Stella

As the days went on, our journey somehow became both easier and harder.My body ached most of the time, which served as a decent distraction, but I incessantly worried about Fae, about what was happening back on the Barbarabelle, about whether we’d ever even find Remy.

We hadn’t seen any sign of her, but I don’t know that we’d really expected to, either.If she’d gone to the Lakehouse, she likely took the same path we did – following the Staulo River south until it curved around the canyon of spires, and then head slightly west through the forest.

But Remy would’ve been through here at the beginning of winter, and now we were already in May, with spring fully underway.Everything was lush and green, growing fast to make the most of the relatively short growing season, and so much of the former civilization had been reclaimed by nature.

“How overgrown do you think the Lakehouse will be?”I asked Boden as we passed an abandoned house that had nearly been consumed by fireweed, thimbleberry, and a particularly thorny climbing wild rose, orChamaenerion angustifolium,Rubus parviflorus, andRosa nutkanarespectively.

“Nowhere nearthatbad,” he answered, sounding a little defensive.He’d always taken pride in the care of our home.“We did our best to keep it up while we were there.Shoring the roof, patching up holes, keeping the plants from growing into the cracks and crevices.But nothing we did was perfect, either.Plus, it’s not like roofs and siding were made to last forever.It’ll definitely have some damage, but hopefully we boarded it up enough to keep the worst of the elements out.”

“I wonder if my room is the way I left it,” I said, then something occurred to me.“Is it stillmyroom?I mean, since we left?”

“I suppose it depends on how you look at it,” Boden replied thoughtfully.“The last people who had their names on the title of the house – ”