3

Remy

When I woke in the morning, half a day's walk from home, Ripley was already gone. We had stayed in the back of an old Dodge Caravan that had long been left to rot on the side of the road. Other than clearing out some human bones slumped over the steering wheel, it had been a decent place to camp out.

However, Ripley had made it clear that she didn't want to stop last night. She kept pacing outside the van while I was cleaning it out, and I had to really coax her in with my last bit of jerky. She had likely wanted to keep walking through the night since we were so close to the lakehouse. That was just not something I could do, especially not when it was dark and I heard zombies in the distance.

The lioness had left me sometime in the night, taking her body heat with her, so I awoke shivering as brave mice explored my bedroll. It was barely dawn, but I couldn't sleep with the rodents crawling about, and I had wanted to get to the lakehouse almost as badly as Ripley.

The whole hike back home, I had a ball of dread hardening in my stomach. Lazlo hadn't shown up, and I didn't know how to reach him or find his homestead. With the distance and the lack of clear direction, it was not a trip I could make lightly. Especially not when I had no way of knowing the reason for his absence. He could have moved, died, or even become a zombie.

I walked as quickly as I could, hoping that I would feel better when I was home and talked it all over with Boden.

But when I saw the lakehouse – the spacious log cabin on top of a hill next to a lake – in the mid-afternoon sun, my unease didn't lessen. As I walked up the long gravel driveway, half-overgrown with grass, no one came out to greet me. Usually, at least Max or Stella would hurry out to me after I had been gone for a while, and more often than not, Boden or Serg would join them.

But today, there was no one. Not even Ripley.

When I finally made it to the house, I opened the front door to murmuring voices in the living room. Boden and Serg were standing beside the couch, and Stella was curled up with Ripley on it. Max sat on the arm of the couch near her head, looking down at her.

Stella noticed me first, her eyes brightening at the sight of me, but her cheeks were flushed, and her wild auburn hair stuck to her forehead. "Remy!"

"Thank god," Serg said under his breath when he looked at me, and the worry in his eyes was alarming.

Boden came over and pulled me into his arms and kissed my temple, his stubble tickling my skin. "Fuck, Rem, I've missed you." Then he pulled away so we were eye to eye when he said, "Stella passed out two days ago, and she has been throwing up on and off for a week."

"What?" I brushed past Boden to go to Stella. In her oversized sweaterdress with the big cat curled up with her, she looked so small and frail.

"I feel better in the evenings, and I only passed out that one time." Stella tried to minimize her illness with a weak, unconvincing smile.

"Come on, kiddo, even the damn cat knows you're sick," Boden said in an exasperated tone .

"She just missed me," Stella argued, running her fingers through Ripley's thick fur.

The lioness had taken to Stella and Max as soon as she met them. Maybe because they had been so young, and Ripley had never had cubs of her own or even been around another lion in years. At any rate, she had always been especially fond of the kids, gentle and more affectionate with them than she was with me.

But she didn't usually race ahead of me to smother Stella on the couch, which made me worry that the lion could sense or smell something I couldn't.

"So what's going on?" I asked Stella. "Did you eat anything strange?"

She glared up at me with her pale gray eyes. "You know I would never do that."

To her credit, Stella had become the family expert on foraging and botany, thanks to the extensive library in the lakehouse. She read everything she could, studying them for hours, and she knew better than any of us what was edible and what wasn't.

"You've been throwing up and fainted. Have you had any other symptoms?" I asked.

"I've already gone through this a dozen times," she complained.

On the coffee table, there were stacks of medical books, encyclopedias, and even the first aid kit. Boden had some medic training in the military, but that was it. We had no other ways to diagnose or treat Stella.

"She's been throwing up, mostly in the morning, but she's also been tired and gets the chills sometimes," Max supplied, since Stella didn't seem to want to explain it again.

"Tired, chills, vomiting," I muttered to myself, trying to think of what it could be. "And no one else is sick "

Serg shook his head. "We've all been feeling pretty good, actually."

I glanced down at Ripley nuzzling against Stella's stomach, and the words morning sickness floated in my head. I looked at Stella, and my heart dropped.

"Everyone out," I snapped. "I need to talk to Stella alone."

"What? Why?" Max asked in dismay.

" Out !" I shouted because I didn't have the fortitude to explain just then.

The boys grumbled as they left, but they did leave, so I didn't care. I sat down at the edge of the coffee table, and my stomach rolled as I leaned forward and took the hand of the girl that I had helped raise for the past eight years.

"Stella," I began carefully, "have you missed your period lately?"

Two years ago, when she had first started menstruating, it had given us all a scare. I hadn't had my period in years, since some overzealous doctor had taken my uterus, and it was something that I just didn't think about anymore. There were usually more important survival issues to contend with anyway.

Ever resourceful, Stella had found instructions on how to make simple sanitary pads in the survival books, and since then, she'd essentially handled her menses on her own.

"It's been a little while, but the books say that irregular periods are normal in teenage girls," she said with an indifferent shrug.

I took a fortifying breath, then asked, "Do you know how babies are made?"

"Are you talking about sex?" she asked.

"Yeah. I am. Have you ever had sex?"

"No." She shook her head. "I'm too young. So we only made love."

It felt like the ground had fallen out from underneath me, and I could only stammer, "With wh-who?"

"Max," Stella replied, like it would be obvious, and a rush of relief and horror washed over me.

Relief because it wasn't with Boden or Serg. I hadn't wanted to believe it could be them, but the world had shown me that all kinds were capable of the worst depravities if the opportunity presented itself.

Horror because Max and Stella were having a baby with limited medicine and plenty of zombies. Not to mention they were children I had tried to raise as siblings, and they were still very much children . Max was only sixteen, and Stella was even younger at nearly fifteen.

"What's the difference between sex and making love?" I asked.

She squirmed, embarrassed and uncomfortable about the conversation topic. "You know. The girl bends over and the boy is behind her, like the rabbits do it. And making love is the other way, with the girl and the boy facing each other."

I sighed and said, "Stella, I think you may be pregnant."

"But I never had sex!" Stella protested. "I knew we weren't ready for a baby yet."

"What you described are two different positions, but they're both sex," I explained as evenly as I could. "Both are a form of procreation. But we can discuss the birds and the bees later."

"What do the birds and the bees have to do with anything?" Stella asked, confused on top of shocked.

"I don't know honestly," I admitted. "Right now, I think we should bring the others in, and we're gonna have to have some awkward conversations."