54

Stella

In the old church, I found Boden, Remy, Ripley, and the headless corpse of a gorilla, but I had not gone there looking for them.

Lazlo had stopped when we got to Emberwood so he could help someone, and I had gotten out then. There were zombies scattered on the roads around us, but before I even had a chance to say anything, the zombies stopped moving and fell silent.

My mouth tasted like cotton, and beneath the scent of death and fire, there was a cloud of something that hovered around me. I first noticed in the cab of the truck, when Lazlo had blasted the heat to help dry me off.

I'd asked him if he could smell anything, but Lazlo had only noticed the fishy odor of river water. But this was something else. Musky and pungent, like freshly tilled soil and the spray of a skunk.

As soon as a zombie came within a few meters of me, when they were close enough to breathe in the pheromones I had been emoting since I yelled for them to stop , they would straighten up and go still.

Lazlo called after me, asking where I was going, but I didn't reply because I knew I was safe.

I followed the voice inside my head that continued to yell help , and as I walked, the zombies stilled around me. But soon they even stilled far away from me, beyond the immediate range of my scent .

When a zombie stopped near me, I decided to have a closer look. A middle-aged man with long hair except on the left side where his scalp had been ripped down to the skull. He was staring right at me, but his glassy eyes were really looking through me.

I leaned in closer to him and breathed in deeply. His breath smelled of rotten meat, but around him, he had the cloud of musky and pungent that I recognized from radiating off me.

The other zombies seemed to not only respond to my pheromones, but also adopted it and began emitting it for themselves. They heard my message of stop , and they were repeating it and passing it along to each other.

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, she sniffed 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 who brought 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?"

"You are one of those kids from that horrible Loth family, aren't you?" Vaughn realized in disgust. "You're an abomination!"

"Superiority is never an abomination!" she snapped.

"None of that matters!" I shouted, because I was exhausted and I wanted this all to be over. "Remy came down here because she wants to have a word with you, and I came here because I want to take your son far away from here."

"You mean to hurt him?" Mercy clung to him.

"No, he's a child, and I wouldn't hurt a child," I promised her. "But the town is no place for zombies. It's not safe, and so I need to take him away."

"You want to help him?" Mercy asked in confusion.

"I do," I admitted. The air around him was pungent with his fear and sadness, and he was a small boy with wide curious eyes. "I can hear him calling for help because he doesn't belong here."

"I am not letting either of them out," Vaughn said.

"And I won't let you run off with him," Mercy insisted. "He is the Chosen One."

"I am going to leave, with or without the child, but if he stays behind, someone will kill him, along with you," I said. "Let him go with me."

"You aren't letting –" Wilder was arguing, his attention on me and Mercy, so he didn't notice Boden taking a swing at him.

In a matter of seconds, Boden knocked Wilder out and took his handgun. Then he bent down and took the jail keys off Wilder's belt.

"What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?" Vaughn asked, sounding hysterical. "You can't let a zombie loose!"

"I've just never really enjoyed killing children," Boden replied glibly. He held the gun in one hand and keys in the other, so he unlocked the door. When he opened it, he kept the gun aimed on Mercy.

"Chosen isn't like other zombies," Mercy persisted. "He needs me. He won't survive without his mother."

"I don't mind killing zombies of any size," Remy said. She was leaning against the bars, glaring at Mercy. "And I know what you did to my friend Harlow, so don't think that I have any pity in my heart for either you or your bastard offspring."

Mercy started crying then, and maybe I would've felt bad if I hadn't read what her family had done in her book. But I had, and right now, I couldn't feel anything, because if I did, it would only be at the agony of surviving without Max.

Mercy hugged her son, kissing the top of his head, and she told him, "I love you so much, Chosen. You're going to save the world whether I'm in it or not."

I held my hand out toward him, and as soon as Mercy let go, he walked over to me and took my hand. He never looked at his mother or acknowledged her in any way, but he did look up at me.

"Where are you going?" Boden asked as we walked by him.

"I'm taking him and all the zombies far, far away from people," I said, because truthfully, I hadn't thought farther than that.

"Why will they follow you? What are you?" Mercy asked. She stood up, and Boden cocked the gun.

"It doesn't honestly matter to you what her deal is because you're going to be dead in a few minutes," Remy said. "So let's just focus on the here and now."