Page 11 of Hollow Child

“I kept the kids alive for all these years and…” I scowled because I couldn’t even say it aloud. I couldn’t even imagine it.

“Remy, you haven’t kept them alive,” Boden said gently, and I glared over at him. “I know you did your damnedest, but life is so much more than me and you. It’s entropy. It’s chaos that brought the zombies, it’s chaos that brought us together, and it’s chaos that’s throwing us back in the wilderness again.”

He stepped toward me, and when I didn’t move, he closed the distance between us. He slipped one hand around my waist, and the other brushed the hair back from my face.

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t love our life here, or that I’m not sad and scared about leaving the lakehouse,” he said. “But it does mean that even if everything goes sideways, it’s not your fault or mine or even Stella’s or Max’s. Life is chaos, the way it always has been, the way it always will be.”

I lowered my head and rested my forehead against his chest, and he wrapped his arms around me.

“What happened at the farmhouse?” Boden asked.

“Nothing. Nobody had been there since I was last there a couple months ago. So I turned around and came home.” I winced at the last word. “Are we crazy for leaving our home behind?”

“No. We’ll make a home wherever we land,” he promised. “Me and you, Serg, the kids, and the cat.”

It took four days for us to be ready to go, much to my chagrin. Only four days to pack up all that we could carry and board up the house, in the hopes that it might still be here if we returned in the future.

Even in the best of situations – we make it to Emberwood and Stella safely delivers a healthy baby – we couldn’t travel for months, not with a newborn. Winter came early in Canada, and we wouldn’t betrekking through that, newborn or not. I didn’t even go to the farmhouse to visit Lazlo during the winter, and that was about half the distance away from the lakehouse.

The soonest we would return would be next spring, and that was assuming that everything turned out right.

“Since we’re heading out, do you want to go over it again?” Serg asked as we waited in the driveway while Boden finished boarding the front door shut.

I pulled out the map that Lazlo had sketched for me, using an old atlas as a reference. There he’d marked the path to Emberwood in the north. It seemed simple enough. We’d have to cross through a canyon so we could meet up with the Staulo River and follow that north until hitting a waterfall. Just above that was the settlement of Emberwood.

8

Stella

I know that I was born somewhere else, somewhere south of here and warmer, to a woman I couldn’t remember. But the only place I ever really recalled living was the house on Tremblay Lake and the surrounding forests.

Boden and Remy walked in front of us, leading the way, but I was content to trail behind and admire all the things I hadn’t seen before.

Before we’d left the lakehouse, Serg had made me a walking stick from a twisting branch of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis). It was already going to be difficult for me to walk long distances because of my pregnancy-induced lethargy, and of course, the infant themselves, floating above my pelvis and growing stronger everyday as they kicked my internal organs.

When the pain got bad, I would recite the common name and scientific name in my head of everything I saw. It was something I had been doing since I was little whenever I was sick or too scared. It helped distract me from the fear and pain.

The hike started good, but by mid-day, when we met the dilapidated old highway, everything hurt, and I was struggling to keep my grimaces to myself.

The green forests that I was most familiar with gave way to a dramatic change in landscape. The towering rocky spires and sand dunes looked more like they belonged in a desert than the Canadianwilderness. I had read about them in my books back at the lakehouse, where they described how they were formed by water and glaciers, and I’d even seen a few pictures.

None of that had prepared me for seeing them in real life. It had only been trees and the lake for so long that it was literally like stepping into another world.

A canyon cut between the spires and dunes, and that was easiest for me to handle with my walking stick, so Max, Boden, and I stuck to it. Remy and Serg headed to a higher, trickier path on the top of the outcroppings so they could have a better view of the area as we passed through.

On the walls of the sand dunes, pictographs were etched in faded black and red. Some were handprints, with long fingers stretched out, and others were animals. An angry bear was gnashing sharp fangs at a cervid with antlers, like a deer or an elk.

“Did the zombies draw these?” Max asked.

“No,” Boden answered with an amused smile. “These were here long before that, likely by the humans that first lived here.”

“I read about these in a book. They’re thought to be a thousand years old,” I said. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach their handprints, and I put mine on top of it. Mine seemed so tiny in comparison.

Something about it made me think back to Avalyn’s room and the crayon drawings she’d hidden on the walls of her closet. Just little marks letting the world know what she had seen or felt. A reminder that she had been there.

“So people lived here for a thousand years, and then the zombies drove them out,” Max mused.

“No, we’re still here,” Boden countered.

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