Page 32 of Hollow Child

“You need your strength. You should eat,” he pressed. The flames flickering across his face amplified the worry in his gray eyes.

“I need my sleep,” I insisted. “We’re going to Emberwood tomorrow, and I’ll make it until then.”

“Okay. Get some rest.” He leaned over and kissedmy forehead. “I love you.” Then he bent down and kissed my belly. “I love you, too, little one.”

“We love you, too,” I murmured and closed my eyes again.

Thanks to the baby sitting on my bladder, I woke up plenty of times to pee. Mostly, everyone else was asleep through the night, except for whoever was keeping watch. First Remy, then Boden, followed by Serg, and lastly, Lillian. Ripley lay just outside of the cave, sleeping under the stars.

Once when I woke up, Samara was crying softly while Castor rubbed her back. The next time I got up for a bathroom break, Serg was having a nightmare, and Boden was waking him and comforting him. The time after that, Polly was tossing and turning, so I asked if she needed anything, and she just snapped at me to leave her alone.

The final time I woke up, and I crept outside to do my business in a nearby bush, the sky was showing the first hint of the approaching dawn. Lillian was tending the fire, and she gave me a tired smile as I went by her on my way back to my bed between Max and Polly.

When I had left, I’d thought that Polly was asleep, but now she was moving around, almost as if she was writhing.

“Polly?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

Suddenly, she lifted her head and glared at me with feral, bloodshot eyes. “No!” Polly snarled.

“Oh, no, you’re a zombie,” I realized, and she dove at me. I swung at her with my walking stick, and she fell backward against the wall of the cave.

“What are you doing?” Castor yelled in dismay.

“She’s a fucking zombie!” Remy shouted, and she was up and racing across the cave with Lillian’s axe in hand.

Everything after that happened so quickly. Maxgrabbed me and pulled me back out of the way. Castor tried to stop Remy, but Boden grabbed him and held him back. Remy went at Polly with the axe, hitting her three times with a slick, wet whacking sound, and I threw up in my mouth.

“What did you do?” Castor was howling as Polly’s body lay on the ground twitching.

Remy bent over and pulled up Polly’s pant leg, revealing a festering bite wound on her ankle. Then Remy straightened up and glared at Castor with his sister’s blood splattered on her face.

“She must’ve been bitten on the boat,” Remy said. “Did you know about that? Did you help her hide it and put us all in danger?”

“No! I didn’t know!” Castor collapsed to his knees after Boden released him. "I didn’t know. I just thought she was sick.”

Remy dropped the axe and wiped the blood off her face with the sleeve of her shirt. “Sorry. But it had to be done. She wasn’t your sister anymore.”

19

Remy

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and our long stretch of warm, sunny days was coming to an end. All the while that we had been walking, the weather had been near perfect, so it wasn’t surprising that our luck had finally turned. And holy shit, how it turned.

The cave echoed with the sounds of people crying and screaming, but my focus was on the mangled body slumped at my feet. Three jagged axe wounds split open her forehead, her cheek, and just above her left ear. Her blood pouring out all over my bare feet was still red, instead of the green it would have eventually become. Her face was contorted in a final, permanent expression of rabid anger and hunger, but it still looked like it belonged to Polly.

“Remy?” Max asked, and I wondered dimly how long I had been staring down at the body since the outburst.

“It’s going to rain, and everybody is awake. We should get going, so maybe we can stay ahead of the weather for a little while,” I said. “Put on any rain gear if you have it.”

“Are you okay?” Boden asked, and he moved closer to me, peering down at me with concern.

“Yeah. I’m fine. I just don’t want to waste any more time today.” I brushed past him to the mouth of the cave, and I gave Lillian her axe back. “I need to get washed up.”

The river wasn’t too far, and it was light enough that I could see the way. I knew that there could be bears or zombies or even a rabid raccoon, but I couldn’t force myself to care in that moment. All that mattered was getting Polly’s blood off me.

It wasn’t even about a possible infection. I was immune to the zombie virus, and that fact had been proven again and again when I had been held as a lab rat at the government quarantine.

“Normally, when the virus is exposed to blood in a petri dish, it rushes toward it,” Dr. Daniels had explained to me once, about what he’d discovered while I was being experimented on. “But with you, it only interacted with your blood when it accidentally came in contact with it.

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