Hollow Child, page 1
Hollow Child
Amanda Hocking
HockingBooks.com
Copyright © 2024 Amanda Hocking
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
www.HockingBooks.com
To my new co-writer Quigley Ponderosa, who spent more time distracting me with purrs and cuddles than actually helping
“I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”
T. S. Eliot
Other Books by Amanda Hocking
The Hollows
Hollowland
Hollowmen
Hollow Stars
Hollowland: Redux
Hollowmen: Redux
Hollow Stars: Redux
Into the Hollow Dark (Short Story)
Into the Hollow Horde (Short Story)
Into the Hollow Years (Short Story)
The Hollows: A Graphic Novel
My Blood Approves Saga
My Blood Approves
Fate
Flutter
Wisdom
Swear
Letters to Elise (Prequel Novella)
Little Tree (Short Story)
My Blood Approves: Complete Saga (eBook Bundle)
Seven Fallen Hearts
Virtue
Tristitia
A Hungry Heart (Short Story)
Superbia (Coming Soon)
Trylle Saga
Switched
Torn
Ascend
Frostfire
Ice Kissed
Crystal Kingdom
The King’s Games (Short Story)
The Lost City
The Morning Flower
The Ever After
Watersong Saga
Wake
Lullaby
Tidal
Elegy
Forgotten Lyrics (Short Story)
Standalone Novels
Freeks
Bestow the Darkness
1
Remy
Every time I killed a zombie, I hoped that it would be my last, and that after nearly ten torturous years, the zombie plague that had taken over the world would finally be gone. But with each new spring, when the snow melted enough, a fresh crop of zombies would head north.
The lyssavirus genotype-8 was ceaseless, an unending and infinitely patient monster far worse than the creatures it created. Once infected with the virus, the host could never find a natural death, never again know a moment of clear thought, and never feel anything beyond the ceaseless hunger. They became hollow husks of humans, little more than living dead, following a lone instinct to consume human flesh and blood.
The zombies I encountered were not angry or sad or anything at all. They were nothingness, a vacuum for all that was good in this world.
But I had also learned to accept that they were part of this life. Another mutated branch in our vast ecosystem. They were something to be avoided and dealt with when necessary, like a rabbit tearing up a garden or a wildfire approaching through the forest.
The journey between my lakehouse and the old farmhouse was a long one to travel by foot, but it had already grown familiar. Over the past two years, I had gone on it a half-dozen times. Since I only travelled in the warmer months, the Canadian landscape didn’t change that much from one summer to the next.
It also helped that Ripley knew the way. The last half-day of the trek always went by quickly because she was so excited about getting there, she would pick up her pace. The lioness had been my companion since I had found her eight years ago, chained up outside the ruins of Las Vegas.
According to an old encyclopedia abandoned with the lakehouse, Ripley was likely an African lioness. Their lifespan was typically sixteen years in the wild, and twenty in captivity. I didn’t really know what her life with me counted as. She slept in the garage, but the side door was always open, so she could roam without fences and hunt freely. We shared our food with her, and she spent the long winters curled up inside the main house more often than she was outside.
As she had aged, Ripley slowed down some, and she had definitely mellowed, seeming to prefer naps by the fireplace over stalking prey most days. Although, she did still love giving chase whenever a zombie happened across our path. She hated them more than I did.
I did know that we both had a good life. An astonishingly good life, considering we survived a zombie apocalypse. I could never be anything other than grateful for all that I had and the people who shared my home with me, those that I considered my family.
We lived in an isolated lakehouse, with only the very rare friendly visitor passing through. Meaning that most days, it was only the same five people and one lion trapped in the same four walls or on the acreage around the house. During the harsh days of winter, when long nights and frigid temperatures made it unsafe for us to venture out, it could feel suffocating at times.
Even then, I knew I was still so lucky, because it was a large house with books and games, weapons and fishing poles. It was a virtual paradise compared to so many other places I had been, with space to breathe and feel safe.
All of that gratitude didn’t change the fact that after a long winter, I was looking forward to the week I spent away from my family. It had started as a simple hunting trip with Ripley two summers ago, looking for the game that her presences scared off for around the lakehouse.
And then I had found Lazlo Durante setting up camp in an abandoned farmhouse. We had spent time together in the earlier days of the apocalypse, and we’d gotten split up so we ended up going years without seeing one another.
Lazlo had established himself on a homestead with his family, but it was nearly on the other side of the province. I lived on the edge of the Coast Mountains, but Lazlo and his family were over 150 kilometers away, nearing the border between British Columbia and Alberta. We had some old maps and an atlas, and we tried to do the best we could at making sense of where things were located.
We had also found calendars and aligned ours so we could make plans to meet up two or three times a year. That way we could exchange food and information, without risking the full hike between our respective homes. Even with meeting at the old farmhouse, roughly in the middle, the round trip through the forest and over the river took a week.
That meant that we had to keep the visits few and far between, but it was hard to complain after we had spent nearly six years apart in radio silence. This was definitely preferred.
I remember the first time I saw him at the old farmhouse two years ago.
He was completely the same, and entirely different. His dark eyes, his welcoming smile, the tattoos that decorated his forearms beneath his sleeves – those were all the same. His thick beard, the noticeable limp in his leg, the lines around his eyes, the silver streak at his temple ¬ those were all the proof that so much time had passed between us.
“Hi,” he said, breaking the silence first.
“Hi.”
“Have you been walking long? Do you want to sit?” He motioned to the stained, tattered couch.
I nodded because my legs felt unusually weak, and I collapsed back onto it. “This isn’t your place, is it?”
“No.” He hobbled over and sat down on the other side of the couch. “I have a place to the east of here.”
“Mine’s back to the west. Ripley and I are on a hunting trip.”
“Yeah. Me, too. I’ve been foraging, hunting, scavenging, gathering all I can for winter.” He leaned forward, his elbows rested on his legs, and he smirked at me. “Holy fuck, Remy King, how have you been?”
All through the night, we chatted and caught up on our lives and how they’d been different. He lived on a homestead with his partner Nova, and they had a young daughter together. Lazlo had found Harlow alive, and she and her girlfriend lived with them, too. They had built a good life for themselves, just one that was far away from the where I had built my life with my family.
Our time together had been painfully brief, but it left an indelible mark on my life. After the talking, we both woke up in the morning at the old farmhouse, and we packed up our things to go.
“It was really great seeing you, Laz,” I said as I headed for the door.
“You, too, Remy. Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah. You, too.” I forced a smile at him, and then I turned away.
My hand had just touched the doorknob when he said, “Wait.”
His hand was suddenly on my back, and when I faced him, he pulled me into his arms. His mouth crashed against mine, and I held him to me. Our lips never parted, and it wasn’t a kiss of passion or romance, but something else. Something like friendship, like love, like need.
And then we parted, both of us breathing roughly, and I didn’t brave looking in his eyes.
“Goodbye, Lazlo,” I said, and when I reached for the door this time, he didn’t stop me.
And that was how our planned visits had begun. We had seen each other a handful of times since, and there was never any other physical contact. It wasn’t about that. We were old friends connecting again.
Ripley and I were finally close enough that I could see the roof of the old farmhouse through the branches filled with bright green buds of early spring. It was in a clearing, but the grass around it was already growing high.
Lazlo usually arrived first, since he travel led on a mule, so I was often greeted by the smell of a fire and something cooking. Today, there was no fire, but Ripley raced on ahead.
We hadn’t been there since the fall, but when the lion ran at the front door, it opened easily. I followed her, and the house was in slightly worse disarray than how we had left it.
I liked keeping Ripley in the house with the door shut, because Lazlo and I usually kept my lion and his mule apart. They got on well when they interacted, like the lion sensed that he was a friend and not food, but I had also seen her take down a full-grown elk before, so I wasn’t about to push my luck.
I set about doing all the things that Lazlo usually did before I arrived. First was gathering up wood for the woodburning stove, so the outdoor chores were finished before nightfall. Next I swept up the dust and debris that made its way into the house over the winter. I aired out the few belongings we kept stored here in the small closet: blankets, a pot to cook in, several candles, a cribbage board with cards, and a few tools. Some of it we had brought from our respective homes, and others we had found in the old farmhouse and cleaned them up.
By the time it was dark, I realized that Lazlo wouldn’t make it here today. He would be bedding down for the night, so the very earliest he would arrive would be tomorrow.
That’s what I told myself when I lay on my bedroll and stared up at the water damaged ceiling as the lion snored beside me.
After a night of fitful sleeping, Lazlo and his mule didn’t arrive in the morning. Or the afternoon. Or the evening. In fact, I saw no sign of either of them over the next two days.
Ordinarily, I would only stay at the farmhouse for three nights. With the roundtrip, I would be gone for a total of ten days, and it was difficult packing and carrying enough provisions to last me that long for a ninety-kilometer hike.
On the fourth night, I ate the jerky I had brought to trade for Lazlo’s raspberry preserves and hazelnuts, and I played solitaire until I passed out.
In the morning, Ripley and I ventured just slightly to the east, checking to be sure Lazlo wasn’t stuck somewhere nearby with a broken leg. Ripley kept sniffing around, but she never pursued anything, and eventually, we had to go turn and head west, back toward the lakehouse.
Before I left the old farmhouse, I tacked a note up onto the closet door, telling Lazlo that I would be back in two months’ time, and that I hoped all was well with him.
There was nothing more to say, nothing more to be done, and so I turned and headed on the long journey back home with Ripley by my side.
2
Stella
The biggest tree at the edge of the lake was my favorite place to spend warm afternoons. According to The Big Book of Arbory in the library of our lakehouse, it was a weeping willow (Salix babylonica). They were non-native to our land, but it seemed to be thriving anyway. The long, drooping branches were covered in verdant leaves, and the trunk grew thicker with each year.
The lake behind our house didn’t have a name, at least not one that we could ever find. According to the old photobooks and papers we’d found, the house had belonged to a family called the Tremblays. A mom and dad, a boy and girl. Erin the nurse who loved birdwatching and kayaking, Mitchell the dentist was an avid hunter with a thirst for knowledge, Ryder a boy of ten with an affinity for fishing and games, and Avalyn a girl of eight who had so many stuffed animals and books of pressed flowers. They were outdoorsy folk, at least here at their vacation home on the lake they affectionately referred to as “Tremblay Lake” in their scrapbooks.
The house was immaculate and fully stocked when we found it eight years ago, so I don’t think the family had been here since B.Z. – Before Zombies. I liked to believe they found somewhere else safe, somewhere too far away to ever get back here. But safe and together, growing up and finding their way in the world. Ryder would be almost twenty now, and Avalyn would be sixteen, the same as Max.
When we had first moved into this house, and I had taken over Avalyn’s pastel infused bedroom, I had worried about the Tremblays coming back and kicking us out, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I would wake up in the night, after nightmares of a zombie Avalyn chasing me out of her room, and I would run across the hall to sleep in Max’s bed with him.
Eventually, I realized that the Tremblays were never coming back. And even if they did, we had a guard-lion, so we would be fine.
After that, I became fascinated by Ryder and Avalyn, trying to learn everything about their picturesque lives and happy family from the belongings they had left behind. It wasn’t much, but I’d never known any kids, outside of Max.
Truthfully, I didn’t remember much about my life before Max. I told him I was seven when we met, and I had to have spent those earlier years doing something. I must have had parents and a family of some kind.
But the only family I ever knew was Max, Ripley, Boden, Remy, and Serg. And to a certain extent, I suppose I considered Ryder and Avalyn to be family too. I slept in their beds and made my dresses quilted from remnants of their too small clothes and curtains. I played with their toys, and I read their books. I lived the lives they would’ve if they had been here.
I spent too many hours reading the Little House series, Anne of Green Gables, and Wind in the Willows that had belonged to Avalyn’s mother, Erin, back from before she was a Tremblay, and still wrote her name in big blocky letters. But my favorite was Boxcar Children. I liked to read it over and over again, under the weeping willow watching the clear water of Tremblay Lake.
On particularly hot days, Ripley loved to swim around in the lake, but it was still early spring, so the water was too cold. The lion wasn’t here anyway. She was gone with Remy on their hunting trips where they visited an old friend. It was nice, because she always came back in a good mood with tasty preserves and cheeses we didn’t have here.
Max and Boden were out fishing, where the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and kokanee (Oncorhynchus nerka) were plentiful and fat. They often brought in trout weighing ten pounds, and Boden claimed there were giant white sturgeons (Acipenser transmontanus) living in the depths of the blue glacial waters of the lake. He claimed to have snagged one once, but it was too big to haul in and the line snapped. Max believes him, but I think one of us would have seen it by now if we had a literal dinosaur in our lake.
That’s why they were out there, absently fishing, but mostly making sure that there aren’t any zombies or bears around. When Remy and Ripley were gone, the boys were always on edge.
Boden was something of the patriarch in our little clan. He had been a soldier in the U.S. military until the zombies took over the military base and quarantine zone. He was twenty-nine and taller than anybody else here. His hair was blond when it was long but looked darker when he shaved it, like he did last week. He loved to read in the evenings by the fireplace and go fishing in the morning with Max. For as long as I could remember, he shared a bedroom with Remy, and he’d been helping take care of us.
Max was Remy’s younger brother, and he looked a lot like her. They both had thick eyelashes, observant gray eyes, and dark brown hair. Max was taller than Remy since his growth spurt last summer. With his smattering of freckles, easy smile, and wiry frame, he was deceptively strong. Most impressively, though, he was more thoughtful and kinder than anyone else who survived the zombies.
Boden was standing at the edge of the lake, wearing waders and a threadbare flannel shirt. Max stood on the shore in old boots held together with tanned deer hides, and his tee shirt was too small and snug across his chest. It was too chilly to be dressed so light, but he insisted he preferred it with the feel of the sun on his skin.
There was a splash in the water, so I looked up from my book and called down to them, “Are you getting any bites?”
“The fish just don’t seem interested today,” Boden replied.
“Remy should be back soon, hopefully with something good,” Max said, the way he had been frequently commenting for the past couple days.
His sister was late coming back from her trip, and he was nervous. I wasn’t, because I knew that Remy would make it back. She always did.
Despite the chill in the air, I was starting to feel hot. The fabric of the sweaterdress I’d made from remnants of Avalyn’s old sweaters wasn’t even that thick. Sweat prickled on my forehead, and my mouth felt dry.
