Page 9 of Hollow Valley
“We arrived before the fire, and they’re rebuilding now,” Boden clarified.“Calling it New Emberwood with Nova Boone Durante working as mayor.“
“We’ve been living on a riverboat,” I added, since Murphy didn’t seem to believe us.
“Ariverboat?”Bianka sounded impressed.“That sounds mighty quaint.”
“It used to be a hotel, so it has lots of rooms, and it’s been really nice for us,” I went on.It wasn’t until Boden gave me a look from the corner of his eye that I realized I had maybe divulged too much to these strangers.
He cleared his throat and corrected course with, “We have a community of over fifty people with a decent size armory, and it is nice and secure floating in the middle of the river.”He’dslightlyexaggerated our resources and security to make the Barbarabelle seem like less of an easy target.
“Wow.A floating hotel soundswaymore glamorous than how we lived back in the quarantine in Vancouver,” Leandro said, and he looked over to Ryder, as if to commiserate.“Remember when we were living in that boys’ wing?We didn’t even have a window.They had this concrete quad in the center, and there was a chain link fence over the top, so nothing could get in, and we only got to spendtwohours a day out there.”He paused then to hold up two fingers to accentuate his point.“The only view was the bricks around us and the gray sky overhead through that chain link filter.I swear, that sky was gray for the whole year.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Ryder replied, sounding much less inclined for a trip down memory lane than Leandro was.
Other than Cole, Ryder was the only one still standing, though he was leaning against the fireplace.It was so hard for me to keep from staring at him, but I knew it would be rude and weird so I did my best to look away.
It wasn’t that Ryder was good-looking, although he was also very good-looking.His silken hair was the color of maple sugar, and his mouth was pouty enough to seem brooding.His eyes weren’t quite smoldering (though I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, because I had only read about it in books) but there was an intensity in the silvery hazel.
Mostly, it was so surreal to see him, standing here in the house that still held the pictures –
– and at that very moment I noticed none of the family pictures were displayed anymore.
When we’d been living here, we had moved some of them, taking them off the mantle and storing them away in closets.But we’d left the ones hanging on the wall, in large part because we had nothing to replace them with and the walls would look barren without them.
Now they were all gone.Every single photo that had contained a member of the Tremblay family appeared to be removed, with only blank walls and rectangles in the dust left behind.
“Why’d you take all the pictures down?”I blurted out, and when Ryder looked sharply at me, shame washed over me, and I sunk lower in the couch.
“Nobody needs reminders about what isn’t here anymore,” he replied simply.
Leandro cleared his throat, and in a much lighter tone asked, “If you were all living the dream on a riverboat, why’d you come back here?”
“They claim they’re looking for someone,” Murphy answered for us.
“Wearelooking for someone,” I corrected her.“She’s part of our family.Her name is Remy King.She’s about five and a half feet tall, long dark hair, and she’s in her late twenties.She’s travelling with a mule and a lion.”
“Whoa, she travels with alion?”Leandro asked with a laugh.“Why didn’t you lead with that?How did she end up with a lion?”
“She found her on the side of the road,” Boden relayed the story that Remy had given to him.“She was chained to the back of the truck, so her best guess was that someone had a lion as a pet.”
“Wow.A pet lion.”Leandro let out a low whistle.“How does she do with zombies?”
“She eats them,” I said, and Leandro laughed, seemingly thrilled by that answer.
“Rye, can you believe this?”Leandro asked, grinning over at Ryder.
“That does explain all the claw marks in the garage and the bannisters.”Murphy motioned to where the wooden railing up the second floor had been clawed and chewed on by Ripley over the years.
“We thought maybe a super strong zombie must’ve done it,” Bianka explained.“My guess was that gorilla zombie we heard rumors about.”
“Told you that was crazy,” Cole said, speaking for the first time since we’d been introduced.
I glanced over at Boden, but neither of us said anything.We’d both seen the zombie gorilla.The lyssavirus genotype-8 infected all the great apes, from humans through gorillas and chimpanzees.Apparently, someone had gotten the bright idea to take one of the hundreds of captive gorillas from a zoo or other institution, and they had infected it with the virus, turning it into a hulking monster of a zombie.
Fortunately, the gorilla zombie hadn’t survived the fall of Emberwood, so there was no need to prove its existence to the strangers in the room with us.Especially since we couldn’t prove it, and they already seemed dubious of us.We needed to give them reasons to trust us, not doubt us even more.
“What about you all?”Boden asked.“Where do you come from?”
“You mean before the zombies went and mucked everything up?”Bianka asked.“I was born in Bushwick, not that I remember much of it since I was only nine when we went into the first quarantine zone.My mom knew that the whole NYC area would be bonkers, so she took us up to Canada, and we actually ended up in the Quebec QZ for a while.Parler de l’apocalypse et des zombies sonne mieux en français, je dois l’admettre.”