Page 90 of Hollow Child

But for my parents, it had become more than a ranch. It was a Kingdom. They were the King and Queen, and my older brothers were the Princes, while I was the lone Princess.

Long before the virus came and the world collapsed, Elmyra knew to prepare for the End of Days. She had felt it coming, an intuition that shook her to the core. With her prescient knowledge, she prepared her children for what was to come. Whileother world leaders had pampered, spoiled offspring, Elmyra ensured that we were all out working the land and learning to survive without government interference.

My brothers Waylon, Kaleb, Wyatt, and Bly were all so much older than me. Elmyra had assumed that her days of bearing children were behind her when I arrived as a sickly baby girl. First, she questioned whether or not I would even survive, but when I did, she realized that I might be the one to take our family’s legacy beyond our wildest dreams. Our father prepared the boys to run the ranch, our mother prepared me to run the world.

I was born Mercy Zazel Loth, and I was eighteen when the virus hit. Our ranch was built to withstand the test of anything, but our employees were not. They were infected quickly, and with great foresight, Elmyra herded them into one of the buildings on the ranch, believing they would be useful later.

My brother Wyatt had always had a strong interest in science and anatomy, and he began experiments on the zombies to gain understanding. So desperate was he for more information, he deliberately infected Tabitha, his young wife and the mother of his toddler son. He had hoped that since they had a prior relationship, he would be able to reach her in her altered state.

Tabitha was the first member of our extended family that succumbed to the virus, but she was not the only one. Soon after, an accident led to Zeke’s infection, and Wyatt put him in the same empty horse stall where he stored Tabitha.

Over the course of the first year after the outbreak, both my brother Kaleb and my young nephew Colt were bitten by rogue zombies. They too were kept with all of the infected family members out in the barn.

Wyatt believed that the zombies could be tamed, and he enlisted Waylon and Bly to help him. Because of how Elmyra raised them on the ranch, they all had ample experiences with beekeeping and horse breaking, and zombie taming combined aspects of both.

Waylon and Bly considered the work to be too dangerous for me, as their younger sister, so I was not allowed out with them in the barns and fields when they were breaking the zombies. Wyatt wasn’t quite as protective of me, and he would talk about it with me sometimes, when the others weren’t around. That was how I learned that zombies were nothing more than a hive that could be controlled with pheromones and a strong hand.

Over time, my brothers did manage to turn some zombies into domestic guards. They were still bitey and obviously infectious, but they were not that much different than owning wolves or any other feral animal.

With the newfound livestock in tamed zombies, the ranch returned to a prosperous glory. Not as shiny or bright as it had once been, but the whole world had a tarnish to it now.

The barter culture that society had switched to after the virus made it more difficult to amass wealth in a traditional sense, but we had ammo long after everyone else ran out. We never went without a meal, and my brothers drank bourbon every night. Servants took care of our home and cooked our meals in exchange for food and board. With our zombies surrounding us, no one could harm us.

Our Kingdom was stronger than ever before.

My brother Wyatt spent the most time with the zombies, training and experimenting on them. As such, he had perfected safe ways to interact with them and make them easier to handle. A trick he foundmost helpful was to sew a person’s mouth shutbeforethey turned into a zombie.

It happened on accident at first. One of the servants had been bitten while feeding the zombies. Ordinarily, Wyatt or Bly would toss that servant in with our more particular zombies, the ones that required live prey to feed. But this time, Wyatt chained up the servant and sewed his mouth shut. He ripped out all his fingers and toenails, the same way he had done with his wife Tabitha after she had turned.

That servant ended up being the tamest of all the zombies. When my niece and nephews helped Elmyra pick produce in the garden, he would be there, carrying loads like a pack mule.

In the evenings, my brothers would retire to the den to drink bourbon and unwind. They never asked me to join, because Elmyra insisted that alcohol would diminish a lady’s greatness. Sometimes, though, I would eavesdrop from the next room, while they drank and laughed and discussed their work.

That was how I discovered that Wyatt’s wife Tabitha had become docile enough to continue her wifely duties. Waylon was repulsed, and Bly laughed uproariously. But I was entranced, hanging on Wyatt’s every word as he explained how he safely copulated with a zombie.

It all sounded relatively simple actually. He bound her hands and secured them to the wall in the barn where she lived, and he bent her over so she couldn’t bite or scratch him. Then he proceeded to have sex with Tabitha, the same way he had before. Although, he did joke that she was a more lively and enthusiastic partner now that she was undead.

Waylon, appalled and concerned, had asked the salient question. “Aren’t you worried about getting the virus? Or knocking her up with some freak zombie child?”

Wyatt, unbothered and proud of himself, replied, “I’ve been doing it for weeks without getting sick, and she can’t get pregnant.”

Waylon pressed, “How can you be so sure about the second point?”

Wyatt considered it a moment, and then decided, “I will rip out her uterus before I am with her next time, just to be safe.”

It was at that moment that my true destiny became completely clear, and I immediately set about making it happen.

In the mornings, I sometimes worked in the general store, selling goods to the neighbors and travelers who stopped by. There weren’t that many, but as the reputation of our Kingdom grew, so did the amount of our customers.

Unfortunately, most of them were unacceptable. Old men with missing teeth, grubby young men covered in scars and smelling of sweat and urine. None of them would work for what I needed, and I could not compromise on something as important as this.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of pining,hearrived in the early morning sunlight, walking up as I opened the store.

He was the most handsome man that I had ever seen, a truly remarkable human. He had hair of gold and eyes of emerald green and a smile that made the earth stand still. He smelled of cedar and fresh cut grass, and he told me that his name was Christopher in a melodic voice.

When I asked him to help haul in heavy milk cannisters from the barn, Christopher didn’t even hesitate before saying yes. He had a good heart, and I knew I had found the One.

In the dairy barn, Christopher put his back to me, and I hit him over the head. He collapsed in a heap,alive but unconscious, and I ran to find Wyatt.

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