She licked her lips when she saw the zombie and sniffed the air. It’d been awhile since she’d eaten, since there weren’t many zombies up here. I think I saw her eating a squirrel once, but I couldn’t say for sure.

“Go ahead. Eat up.” I waved her on, and then I turned to go back in the house.

Max was up, and he’d already gotten the fishing poles out. He and Serg were excitedly talking about their plans to catch impossibly large fish.

“If you’re going fishing, be on the watch for zombies,” I said as I walked by them. “I just saw one in the backyard.”

“Really?” Serg and Max asked in unison.

“Yeah, really.” I gave Serg a meaningful look. “You be careful if you take my brother outside.”

“Wait. What?” Boden asked.

He’d gotten out of bed in the time I’d been outside collecting water and wrestling with the zombie. He sat on the couch with Stella curled up underneath one of his arms. From where I stood, I couldn’t see, but I imagined that he had a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go open on his lap. That’d been Stella’s favorite book since she’d found it here, and she had us read it to her ten times a day.

“There was a zombie outside.” I walked around the couch and flopped down next to him. “I got it, but I ruined your shirt.”

“It’s okay. You liked the shirt more than I did anyway.” He closed the book on his lap and turned away from Stella a bit to check me out. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I settled down next to him and sighed. “I guess I should be grateful that it took the zombies this long to find us out here. It’s been warming up, and we knew they’d start coming.”

“We did,” Boden agreed. “So what do you want to do? Should we go?”

“No.” I shook my head fiercely. “This is our home now.”

“You sure?” Boden asked.

“Yes,” I nodded. “There can’t be that many zombies around here anyway. And summer only lasts a few months before it gets cold again. We can hold off zombies for that long.”

“Okay.” He grinned, then leaned over and kissed my temple.

He opened the book back up, and I rested my head on his shoulder and listened to him reading to Stella. For the first time in so long, I felt like I finally had a home, a family. And I wasn’t going anywhere.