"Do you believe in an afterlife, Louis?"
He looked up from his assault rifle magazine that he had been half-heartedly cleaning out before they set off into the heart of Riverside.
"I do," he told the nineteen year old who was staring forlornly out the upstairs window into the graveyard they'd just passed through. The mangled corpse of a Smoker who had, only moments before, been a coherent (albeit insane) human being who denied them entry into the safehouse lay just feet from her. She kept throwing uncomfortable glances at the body before returning her gaze to the graveyard.
"Like a heaven and hell kind of thing?" Francis opened his mouth to make a smart-ass remark, but Bill silenced him with a swat to the back of the head and a threatening glare.
"No, not really," Louis told her, understanding the need for reassurance in a time like this. She had delivered the fatal shot to the Smoker on the floor-a clean rifle round through the head. "But I do think we go somewhere after we die…somewhere good." He hoped his mother was there now.
"What about angels? Do you believe in them?"
Louis rose to his feet and joined her at the window. The church's spotlight highlighted the statue of a weeping angel, bent low over a grave covered in a tangle of roots.
"I believe that you're a good person, Zoey."
She nodded, biting her lip hard and closing her eyes. Her breath hitched as she inhaled sharply. A single tear escaped her shut eyelids and ran down her pretty face. Louis wanted desperately to wipe it away. Instead, he laid a hand on her shoulder. She grabbed onto his index finger and squeezed it.
"I'm okay," she said. "I'm okay. Come on, I bet I can kill more zombies than you."
"Oh, pssh, please," Louis retorted, glad to see Zoey return to her normal demeanor.
He let her get the first three Infected they spotted, regardless.