Hollowland

by Amanda Hocking

  I crouched down on the ground, and Harlow did the same behind me. The zombies were too focused on the lion to notice us, so we could get around them without any problems. But the lion kept making that weird low growling sound, as if she was sad.

  “Stay here,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “What are you doing?” Harlow sounded scared, but I didn’t answer her.

  I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had to do something. Animals were immune to the virus, and the lion would be the first thing I’d helped in months that could actually live if I intervened. I could save her.

  If I left her chained to the truck, she would die. If I let her go, she might kill Harlow and me. But since somebody had chained her up in the first place, I assumed she was at least partially tame.

  When the lion spotted me, she stopped. Her tail twitched and one of her ears bent back, but she didn’t growl.

  Unfortunately, the zombies noticed me at the same time. A fat, dirty zombie started charging towards me. I could shoot him, but I was afraid a gunshot would startle the lion.

  I pulled my gun out, holding it by the muzzle. When the zombie got close enough, I swung it like a baseball bat. My shoulders jerked on impact, and it made a loud crack as the head smashed in.

  That one summer I spent playing T-ball had finally paid off.

  Another zombie charged towards me, but this one was much taller. I couldn’t knock his head off. I bent down and swung the gun across its ankles, taking his feet out from under him so he collapsed back on the ground. Before he could stand up, I ran to his head and slammed the butt of my gun down on his skull.

  Crushing a skull is not as easy as it sounds. The first blow stunned him, but I had to slam it down twice more before it finally smashed into his brain, and he stopped moving.

  Even though I knew they were zombies, that they weren’t people anymore, the sound of breaking bone always made me sick. The sight of their splattered blood on my clothes didn’t help either, but I didn’t even have time to worry about it before another one raced at me.

  I rammed the gun forward, using it like a sword to impale the zombie in the stomach. She’d had the virus for a while, so she’d started to decompose, and her body felt like Jell-O when I stabbed her with the gun.

  It wasn’t until then that I realized she was a kid. I hated kid zombies.

  She stopped moving, but only because the gun didn’t let her go farther forward. She reached her short, pudgy arms out at me, and I jerked back, taking the gun with me.

  I didn’t want to scare the lion, but I wasn’t about to do hand to hand combat with a rotting kid. I shot the zombie in the head, and she collapsed onto the ground.

  The gun blast startled the lion, and she moved back with her ears flattened. But it also startled the last zombie, which stood dangerously close to the lion. The lion pounced on his back and tore into his throat, killing him before I had a chance to aim.

  “Are they all dead?” Harlow called from behind me.

  “Yeah, I think so.” I looked around to be sure, but I couldn’t see any moving zombies

  The lion licked the blood off her lips and looked up at me. She was pretty damn vicious, but maybe that was just directed towards zombies. Harlow came up and stood next to me, both of us just watching the lion.

  “You’re gonna let her go.” Harlow might have been asking it, but it sounded more like a statement of fact.

  “I’m gonna try,” I nodded.

  “What if she rips your arm off?” Harlow asked, but she didn’t sound worried.

  “I don’t know. Shoot her, I guess,” I shrugged.

  I walked up closer to the lion but stayed out of range of her chain. Harlow crept behind me, staying a few steps back from where I stopped.

  A body inside the cab of the truck hadn’t even bloated up yet, the way bodies did when they sat in the sun all day. It didn’t look like it had been dead for very long.

  Another body lay a few feet from the truck, but still out of the range of the lion. It’d been torn apart, and it was safe to say that zombies had gotten it.

  “What happened?” Harlow asked.

  I looked around for the first time since we’d climbed over the hill. A highway ran about twenty or thirty feet on the other side of the truck, and relief rushed over me. We needed to find a highway if we wanted to find somewhere to camp out.

  “I think they were driving, and they went off the road, crashed. One of them died in the wreck, and the zombies got the other one. And for some reason, they had a lion chained up in the back.”

  “Do you think she’s tame?” Harlow asked.

  I eyed up the lion. Her ears were up, her eyes were wide, but her tail kept flicking back and forth. From my experience with house cats, that usually meant they were going to pounce on something.

  “Maybe. But I don’t know how tame lions can really be.” I took a careful step closer to the lion, and she didn’t move. “Take your gun out.”

  “You want me to shoot her?” Harlow asked nervously.

  “Not unless you have to.” I set my own gun on the ground. I didn’t want to scare her, but I didn’t want to be completely exposed.

  I took slow, deliberate steps towards the lion, and when I got to the edge of her reach, I waited a beat. I half-expected her to pounce, but she didn’t move. She just watched me.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to go and undo the chain from around her neck, so I headed towards the truck. I held my hands out in front of me and made sure I always faced her. In some part in the back of my mind, I was freaking out about how much of an idiot I was being.

  All I wanted to do was get to my brother, and I was risking my life trying to free a stupid cat.

  I got to the truck without her mauling me, but I found a new problem. The chain was looped through a hole in the truck, held in place with a giant lock in need of a key. I’d never tried shooting through a chain to break it, but I suspected that this one was too large.

  “Aw, hell.” I looked back at Harlow. She had the gun pointed at either the lion or me, I’m not sure which, and her hands were shaking. “Harlow, put down the gun.”

  “Are you sure?” Harlow asked, but she looked relieved. If we ever found extra bullets, I’d have to teach her how to shoot.

  “I need you to go into the cab of the truck and get the keys,” I said. “The chain is locked to the truck, and I need a key.”

  “But there’s a body in the truck,” Harlow grimaced.

  “There are bodies all over. Please just get the keys before the lion eats me.”

  “Why don’t we just leave her here?” She was tired, scared, and did not want to crawl around a decomposing corpse. “I mean, you left Sommer in the desert-”

  “Just get the damn keys, Harlow!” I snapped before she could finish her thought. I didn’t need to be reminded of all the people that I couldn’t save.

  When I shouted, the lion bent back her ears but didn’t move. Harlow opened the door to the cab of the truck, and flies swarmed out. She made a retching sound, and the lion growled. When she climbed inside the cab, she swore loudly.

  The lion started pacing, and I again reminded myself that I could die over this. I could die for no good reason at all.

  Harlow gasped and jumped out of the cab faster than I had ever seen her move before. She gagged and threw up in the sand. I looked away, but the lion watched with intense fascination, her tail still flicking wildly.

  “I have never smelled anything that bad in my entire life!”

  “Yeah, that really sucks. Toss me the keys please!” I shouted.

  Harlow spit a few times, pushing dirty tangles of hair back from her face, then stood up and threw the keys at me. They landed at my feet, and I picked them up.

  “What happens when you let her go?” Harlow asked between spitting on the ground.

  “What?” I asked, trying a key in the lock. It clicked open, and I almost shouted with happiness.

  “I mean, she’s not gonna be on a
chain. What if she wants to eat us?” Harlow asked as soon as I’d unlocked the lion.

  I stood there, debating on whether or not I should lock her up again, then shook my head and pulled it off.

  “She won’t eat us,” I decided. I pulled the chain free from the truck and tossed it on the ground. “There you go! You’re free! Go!”

  The lion stared at me. I don’t know what I expected her to do, but it wasn’t this. Her tail swung more slowly, but she wasn’t going anywhere. I waved my arms to shoo her along, but she just bent an ear back and looked around.

  I walked back to Harlow and picked up my gun. It was slick with zombie blood, so I wiped it off on my jeans. As soon as we got some place we could rest, I had to change these pants. They were disgusting.

  The lion kept staring at us, so I carried my gun as we walked towards the highway, in case she decided to pounce. We made it halfway to the road when the lion started walking in our direction. She wasn’t running, like she was chasing us, but she walked kind of fast.

  “Should we do something?” Harlow asked.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked back at the lion. “I feel like we should do something.”

  “She’s not doing anything.”

  “Yet,” Harlow amended.

  “Right. When she does something, we’ll react accordingly,” I said, as if I knew what that meant.

  The lion kept following us, getting closer as we walked along, but it didn’t feel like she was stalking us. Despite her size, she didn’t seem that old. She’d probably been raised in captivity and didn’t know how to be alone.

  Eventually, Harlow stopped being freaked out by it. The sun had gotten higher, and it beat down on us. She pulled her hair back into a loose bun, the way I always wore my long hair. I couldn’t defend myself when my hair was in the way. I had been wearing a button up shirt over a tank top, but I tied the shirt around my waist a long time ago.

  “I am so tired and thirsty and my feet are killing me,” Harlow said, but it was too weak to even be a whine.

  She trudged along, dragging her feet on the road. The lion walked a few feet to the side of her, and it didn’t even bother her anymore. She shoved her cardigan in her messenger bag, but one of the sleeves hung out, dragging on the ground.

  “We’ll get there soon,” I said.

  “Where?” Harlow asked.

  “There.” I nodded at a dark spot on the horizon. I had been seeing it for a while, but we were close enough now where I could be certain it was something.

  “What?” She perked up a bit and squinted in the distance. “Are those houses?”

  “I think it’s a town.”

  The sun was setting by the time we reached the new development on the edge of town. Several houses were in the middle of being built when construction stopped. Backhoes and equipment lay discarded in half-dug basements. Wooden skeletons of houses jutted out from rocks and sand.

  We went into the first finished-looking house we came to, but the inside had barely been completed. It didn’t even have fixtures yet. The next few houses were in a nearly identical state. I decided to venture past the newer construction until we saw a cul-de-sac that looked finished. We finally found a giant McMansion with all the signs of life, including blood on the open front door.

  I slowly pushed the door open. Pictures of smiling people hung on the wall in the entryway. I stepped in a bit more to find slightly mauled art deco furniture and blood splatters on the floor. Harlow pushed past me and darted inside.

  “Somebody lived here!” Harlow squealed

  “Harlow, wait! We don’t know if anything’s here!” I said but didn’t stop her. The blood looked old, and if we didn’t get something to drink soon, we were all in trouble.

  Harlow had already thrown open the fridge when I got to the kitchen. We needed bottled water. Tap water tended to be a hit or a miss and had the possibility of being contaminated.

  Harlow yanked out several bottles of Fiji water, and I grabbed one. They were warm, and the fridge reeked of spoiled food, but I didn’t care. I opened the bottle and drank from it greedily.

  We both finished a whole bottle of water before I realized that the lion had to be even thirstier than we were. She’d been following us around the development, and I heard her chain dragging as she wandered around the house.

  “Kitty, kitty!” I shouted, and Harlow gave me an odd look. “Here kitty, kitty! Ripley!”

  “Ripley?” Harlow furrowed her brow.

  “Yeah, I figured if she’s gonna be following us around, we ought to give her a name.”

  “But Ripley?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “She’s badass,” I shrugged. “You saw what she did to those zombies. So she needed a badass name. Like Sigourney Weaver in those Alien movies.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Harlow shook her head

  “The woman’s name was Ripley, and she killed everything,” I tried to explain. “She was the toughest chick I’ve ever seen.”

  “Alright. Whatever.” She was already wandering away. “I’m gonna go see if I can find anything else I need.”

  “Ripley!” I yelled again. “Here kitty kitty!”

  Harlow screamed and dropped her bottles of water as the lion ran past with the massive chain clattering behind her, and then dove on the marble kitchen island. It scared the hell out of me, too, but I tried not to show it. Ripley flicked her tail and stared down at me.

  “Stupid cat.” Harlow collected her water and headed off to scout out the rest of the house.

  I rummaged through the cupboards and found a metal baking bowl. I set it on the kitchen counter across from the island and started filling it with water.

  Ripley jumped from the island to the counter and began drinking before I’d finished. She started purring as she lapped it up, and I didn’t even know lions could purr.

  “Yeah, you like the name Ripley, don’t you?” She kept purring, and I nodded as if she’d actually agreed with me.

  While Ripley drank her water and Harlow explored the rest of the house, I went to the pantry to look for food. I found a couple cans of salmon, tuna, SPAM, and baked beans, and that was about it for things we could actually eat. A lot of stuff had gone bad or been broken.

  The whole house had been ransacked by something else, and by the random, bloody state of everything, I’d say it was a zombie.

  I set all the edible food on the counter and decided I needed to hit a bedroom for some new clothes. The clothes I was wearing were ratty and covered in blood, and the few extra I had in my messenger bag weren’t much better.

  I’d made it halfway up the grand, winding staircase in the foyer when I heard Ripley growling. Then there was a loud clatter, followed by a gun going off, and Harlow screaming.

  – 4 –

  I leapt over the banister, landing on the floor in a way that sent a searing pain through my ankle, but I ignored it and ran into the living room. Once I got there, I realized that the gunshot had come from the living room, but Harlow’s scream came from upstairs. She had screamed because she heard the gun.

  While I had been making my way upstairs, two guys had come in through the patio doors off the living room, and Ripley caught them. Her chain clattered, they got frightened, and from the bullet hole in the wall way, way above Ripley’s head, I assumed they were terrible shots.

  Ripley stood in the middle of the living room, looking pissed off and confused.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” I ran in front of Ripley, blocking her from hurting them and them from hurting her, and belatedly realized how dumb that was.

  I didn’t know if I could prevent Ripley from attacking anything, and she might lunge at me if she was scared. Two guys were here, and one of them held a gun, which was now pointed at me since I had stepped in front of it.

  I stood between a lion and a gunman, and both of them might kill me just for the hell of it.

  “What’s going on?” Harlow yelled from the top o
f the stairs.

  “Stay upstairs!” I shouted.

  “Put the gun down!” That was the gun-less young man, talking to his friend. He was the taller of the two, with sandy blond hair and reassuring gray eyes.

  “No way,” the gunman said. The hand holding the shotgun quivered, and black hair kept falling into his eyes, so he couldn’t even take aim properly. He gestured at Ripley with the gun. “Is that thing safe?”

  “She’s a lion, and uh, yeah, she is,” I said. I actually had no idea if she was, but I liked it better when I didn’t have a gun pointed at me, so I lied.

  “Just put down the gun,” his friend said, putting his hand on the barrel to gently push it down. He was the older of the two, and he seemed much calmer.

  “It’s a fricking lion!” The gunman completely lowered his weapon, but he was still freaked.

  Once I could clearly see his face, he looked incredibly familiar. I squinted, as if that would make me place him better. He was attractive, with dark eyes, and tattoos decorating both arms. He looked closer to my age, but I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from.

  “Well, it’s her lion!” His blond friend shook his head and took the gun away, smiling apologetically at me. “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to intrude. We didn’t know anyone still lived here.”

  “It’s okay,” I shrugged. “We’re intruding, too. They have some bottled water in the kitchen.”

  “Really? Oh my god.” Without further invitation, the former gunman dashed across the room, jumping over the couch on his race to the kitchen. I glanced back at Ripley to make sure that she didn’t decide he was food, and she watched him with her ears bent back.

  “Sorry about him,” the other guy said, nodding at his friend, who shouted happy expletives in the kitchen. “I’m Blue.”

  “What? You mean like your name is Blue?” I raised an eyebrow. “Like the color?”

  “My parents were hippies.”

  “I’m Remy.” I decided that I didn’t have much room to mock his name, and I gestured to the cat. “She’s Ripley, and Harlow is upstairs.”

  “Is it safe for me to come down?” Harlow asked, and I heard her walking down the steps.