But they couldn’t have been activated. That knowledge died with Ezra. No one else knows about the thanites. No one else knows how to switch them on.
She was hyperaware of every limb, every bone. Her tongue ran across her teeth, tasting the toxic bitterness. Were they always this sharp? Her fingers ached as she gripped the cannister too tightly. Were they always this long?
Clare leaned her masked forehead against the bus, fighting against the panic rising in her, as she waited for the second jug to empty. If she really was feeling the nanobots activating in her lungs, it was already too late to save any of them.
To her right, Dorran paced away from the bus, his head lifted as he looked towards the horizon. As he reached the nearest car, a sedan, he placed one foot onto the towbar and used it as a step to climb onto the boot. From there, he stepped onto the roof and removed his mask.
Does he feel it too? The jug was empty. Clare dropped it and fumbled for a new cannister without moving her eyes from Dorran.
“Clare. Beth!” He reached one hand behind himself to beckon to her. “Come here. It’s urgent.”
Chapter Eighteen
Clare abandoned the fuel cannisters beside the bus. Footsteps crunched through broken glass as Beth loped towards them. Frustration pulled her face into hard angles.
“I said no delays,” Beth hissed.
“He wouldn’t unless it was important.” Clare turned back to Dorran. Flecks of something small and pale were spiralling past him. Snow? Surely not. It’s nowhere near cold enough.
She used the trailer hitch to climb onto the boot, just like she’d seen Dorran do. He remained facing the horizon but offered her his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up to stand beside him.
At first glance, Clare thought she was staring into a vivid sunset. The dusty haze grew more saturated towards the skyline, until it became a streak of golden red.
The mask blurred Clare’s vision too badly to make out any details. She pulled it off and let it hang at her side.
The mask had dulled her vision but not entirely, she realised. The sky was blurred. The distant golden-red streak shimmered. She inhaled and tasted the toxic prickles in her lungs. “Is that…”
The car listed as Beth climbed up beside them. Her lips flattened into a line, and her eyebrows pulled together. “Fire.”
Not just fire. An inferno. Clare’s eyes watered as she followed the trail of colour across the horizon. It went for miles.
“How?” Her voice caught. “It’s been raining for days—”
“If a fire becomes hot enough, dampness ceases to be a hindrance.” Dorran’s voice was tense. “We had to be aware of this at Winterbourne, where we were surrounded by trees. If a fire grows out of control, it will consume anything in its path, old and fresh growth alike. Even a snow-capped forest can burn.”
“I bet we have other survivors to thank for this.” Beth’s lips peeled back into a grimace. “Someone came up with the bright idea to use fire to chase away the hollows. Purge them from your area by burning a town or burning a forest. Use accelerant to help it grow. Don’t stop to consider what will happen if it gets too big.”
“Oh,” Clare groaned. Off-white flakes spiralled past them. Soot, funnelled in their direction by a sharp breeze. Funnelling the fire towards them. Her palms were sweaty. “We—we need to go—”
“Yes.” Beth worked her jaw. “We need to get off the freeway.”
“Wait.” Dorran grabbed her arm before she could leap off the sedan. Beth glared at him, and he quickly let go of her. “Where does the road we were on lead? Right now, it’s parallel to the fire and surrounded by trees. If we stay on that course, we won’t have long before the blaze reaches us.”
“Can we take shelter inside the bus?” Clare asked.
Dorran shook his head. “The walls are too thin. A fire this large will be hot enough to make flammable material combust without even a spark.”
Hot enough to cook us inside the bus like bread in an oven.
Beth’s eyes flickered strangely in the faint orange glow. Clare thought she saw a trace of fear, but then it was buried under anger. “Damn it. Damn it! Dorran, take over refuelling. We can’t afford to run dry while we’re outmanoeuvring this thing. Clare, get the map.”
Dorran slid off the bus first, his boots thudding as he hit the concrete. Clare leapt off after him, and he caught her, swinging her around to set her down gently. “Go,” he whispered and pushed her towards the bus doors.
Her patience for masks was gone. As she leapt into the bus, Clare tossed it onto a seat. She scrambled for the map Beth had left on the dashboard then slipped back outside. She flipped through pages as she jogged to Beth, who held her position on the sedan, watching the skyline.
“The road goes on for maybe an hour before it reaches town…” Clare flipped another page as she clambered onto the boot then the roof. “But a town will burn just as easily as a forest, right?”
“Yeah. We need a barren field. Or a very large carpark. Just… any sort of large space without much flammable material. The fire will still travel through it, but it should pass quickly enough that we can survive it inside the bus.” Beth took one half of the map. They moved feverishly, paging through the patchwork greys and greens. Beth ground her teeth, and Clare repressed the impulse to lean away from the noise. It sounded too much like the hollow. More than she liked to think about.
“Damn it,” Beth muttered. “He’s right. The road we were on just keeps going straight for ages. There aren’t any offshoots.”
Clare turned to look along the freeway. From their elevated position, she could make out the jigsaw of tangled, abandoned cars stretching away for kilometres. “How far before the freeway has another turnoff?”
The sound of grinding teeth intensified. More pages flipped. Then Beth blew a breath out through her nostrils. “Twenty minutes at full speed.”
“That’s too far.” Soot landed on Clare’s neck. She flicked it off, imagining she could feel latent heat transferred out of it. The ribbon of golden light on the horizon looked larger than it had two minutes before.
Beth’s eyes moved from the skyline to the bus then to the freeway. Her tongue darted over her lips. “Maybe not.”
“What are you thinking?”
“The freeway carries us away from the fire. That in itself will buy us time. The bus is big enough and heavy enough to win a fight over most stationary vehicles. It can take a beating; I’ve already tested that. If we get some momentum behind us, we should be able to carve a path through this mess.”
Clare didn’t like the way the plan made her feel. Once they left the on-ramp they’d arrived through, there would be no chance to leave the freeway until the next exit. “If we get stuck…”
“We die,” Beth confirmed. “But if we get back onto the other road and don’t find a clearing in time, we die. If we stay where we are, we die. This way at least gives the possibility of a different outcome.” She turned the map back to an earlier page. “If we can make it to the next turnoff, we’re only ten minutes from farmland. All we need is a field big enough and barren enough to starve the fire of fuel, and we can outlast this thing.”
Clare turned towards the bus and saw Dorran waiting just a few paces away, his dark eyes narrowed against the soot. “Dorran—”
“I heard. And I agree. It is perhaps the least awful out of a bad set of choices.”
“All right. How are we looking for fuel?”
“The tank is full.”
Clare slid off the car roof and onto the boot, then she clambered to the ground while Dorran threw the empty fuel containers into the bus. Beth tucked the map under one arm and leapt from the sedan’s roof. Her movements had developed an animalistic litheness, and she loped towards the bus’s door without even pausing to catch her balance.
“Let’s go,” Beth called. “We have an inferno to outrun.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Seatbelts.” Beth jumped into the driver’s seat. The
door snapped shut as Clare and Dorran took the row of seats second from the front. Clare hoped they wouldn’t need it, but the row ahead of them would give them something to brace against if the drive was too rocky.
Clare’s hands shook, and it took two attempts to clip the seatbelt buckle. Dorran, at her side, was steady and silent except for his breathing, which came a little too quickly. Flecks of soot stuck in his dark hair. His eyes were still too bright, and Clare was glad she’d given him the antibiotic when she had the chance.
“Ready?” The engine roared to life. Beth’s hair shimmered in the overhead light, her eyes flashing as she put the bus into gear. “Hold on. We’re not stopping for anything.”
The floor vibrated under Clare’s feet as the bus lurched forward, its wheels fighting for traction on the broken glass and cracked concrete. The vehicle wasn’t designed to be driven like a race car, but that was what Beth asked of it, twisting the wheel to take advantage of a gap in the traffic.
The plan was to carve a path through brute force. That would only work if they could get enough momentum behind them. Clare grit her teeth, her knuckles white as she held her seat. They moved faster and faster, the engine rumbling as gears changed, the ground disappearing under them. A hatchback blocked their path less than ten meters away. Clare closed her eyes.
The impact shook her. The seatbelt bit into her lap. She opened her eyes just in time to see the hatchback spiralling away. It hadn’t just been pushed aside; it had been shovelled into the air, where it twisted, poised for a beautiful second before gravity pulled it back down. A small smile broke through the tightness around Beth’s lips, and the engine roared again as she pushed into the accelerator.
They hit a second car that had been hidden behind the hatchback. It had been at an angle and exploded away in a shower of broken glass and dust. The road was clear. The rumbling grew as they passed the speed limit and kept climbing.
Dorran’s hand brushed against hers. She fastened around it, and they held each other, damp with sweat. Her fingers ached from how tight the grip was, but she was terrified to let go.
A sedan skidded away and crumpled to a halt, wedged between two other cars. The road only stayed clear for a dozen meters; a sports car was propped across lanes, its driver door open, sunroof retracted. It looked light, but Clare still braced for the impact.
A bang was followed by the wail of bending metal. The sports car, too low to the ground to be lifted away by their plough, jammed against the bus’s front.
Their momentum was immense, and they pushed the sports car ahead of the bus like a toy. Its sleek blue-grey metal twisted, curving against the bus’s front. The wheels lasted all of four seconds then burst with deafening bangs. Sparks showered around the windshield. It was slowing them. Every foot drained their energy, sapping their speed, grinding them closer to an inevitable standstill.
“Come on, come on,” Beth growled. She flexed her grip on the wheel, her jaw working, hunched forward.
Then the sports car’s rear bumper clipped against a truck, and it twisted, the front wheels rising up to pirouette on its end. The scream of twisting metal ran along the bus’s side, and Clare knew their own transport wouldn’t have escaped unscathed. But they were free and back onto a clear stretch of road. Their speed began to rise again.
Clare realised she’d forgotten to breathe. She sucked in shallow, ragged gasps of air. It burned. She pressed a sleeve over her mouth to muffle her coughs.
The noise seemed to make Dorran realise how tightly he was holding her hand. He adjusted his grip, rubbing her fingers instead, a silent apology. She pressed in return. She didn’t care how hard he held; she needed it. Just as long as she didn’t feel alone.
Beth found an equilibrium in the road. Poised between lanes, with the white dotted line disappearing down the bus’s centre, she hit twice as many vehicles but met half the resistance. The cars sluiced to either side of the bus, no longer working as blockades but as bumpers.
Clare wished she could see the fire behind them—or even just know how far the orange glow had spread across the sky. With their windows blocked, her only choice was to watch the road ahead. It was gradually darkening. The air tasted worse. Flecks of ash landed on their windshield only to be buffeted away a second later.
The steady channel Beth had been following became broken. A wreck appeared ahead. Two cars had collided, covering the highway’s width, one vehicle rising up to become stuck on its partner. It was going to be another hard hit, Clare knew, but they were travelling too fast to turn aside. Her muscles tensed, every part of her body from her feet to her jaw preparing for the impact.
She saw the hollow a second before they hit. The car on top of the pile was occupied; its driver scrambled over the seats, screaming, eyes bulging. It had heard their approach and was excited.
They collided with the wreck, and Clare was slammed forward in her seat. The lower car spun in a half-circle. Its brakes had been engaged, and the tyres left black lines across the concrete. The top car impacted their windshield. Instead of rolling upwards to disappear over their heads, it fell down and jammed against the metal plough. It didn’t stay there for long. They hit another pickup truck, and the vehicle broke in two, splitting at the driver door’s seam in a shower of glass and debris.
The hollow one came free. It slammed into their windshield. Long fingers, eight on each hand, splayed over the glass as it tried to find purchase. It stared inside, not at Beth but at Clare and Dorran two rows behind. The jaw opened and the teeth scraped against the window.
Then the hollow disintegrated as they hit a campervan. The impact was brutal, jarring Clare and throwing her head forward so fast that she bit the inside of her mouth. She pressed her forearm against the row of seats ahead. Both her neck and head ached. When she looked up, the crawler was gone, save for a smear of thick liquids and a distended shape that she thought might be its lower jaw.
Beth simply turned on the windshield wipers. Soapy water sprayed over the mess as it smeared in thick, sickening streaks across the window. She kept the wipers on until the water reservoir was empty and the gore only blurred their view instead of obscuring it.
Clare’s heart felt like it was going to fracture from the stress. She trembled. Dorran was quiet, but she knew that didn’t mean he was calm.
A sign rose by the side of the road. Arrows indicated an upcoming turnoff.
“Two minutes.” Beth, breathless, was hard to hear over the rhythmic bangs and grinding metal. “We’re almost there.”
Please. Let it be enough. Clare thought she could feel the heat. The change in temperature was subtle enough that she could almost believe she was imagining it, except that she had the urge to take off her jacket. For the first time in weeks, she could no longer describe the air as chilled.
A motorbike disappeared underneath them, and Clare felt each distinct bump as it passed below their wheels. The cut on her lip filled her mouth with the astringent tang of blood. A headache throbbed, worsening with each jolt.
Then, up ahead, she caught sight of the turnoff. Clear white markers indicated where cars could form a new lane and merge out of the traffic. Her heart skipped.
A truck blocked the exit. A car had tried to cut in front of it, desperate to escape the freeway on the last normal day. The two had collided, tangling against the concrete railing, creating a barrier over their exit.
A faint choking noise came from Beth. She took her foot off the accelerator as she faced the exit. It was coming up on them blindingly fast. They would be at it in seconds, but they couldn’t slow down. Slowing would mean losing momentum at the risk of never gaining it again.
We can’t keep driving. There’s no time to get to another exit. But we can’t get past the truck without leaving the bus. And we can’t leave the bus if we want to survive. There’s no way. There’s no way—unless—
“The on-ramp!” Clare yelled.
Beth’s eyes flashed with understanding. She put pressure back on the accelerator
as a sedan spun out of their path. She rose up in her seat, leaning forward, as she searched the scene.
Only one road leads off the freeway. But there’ll be another chance. A road that leads on.
The on-ramp would be hard to see. It would come after the off-ramp funnelled cars towards the town; their first warning would be the appearance of a new lane. And if they wanted to use the on-ramp, they would have to be facing the opposite direction.
Can’t lose our speed. Can’t miss our one chance. No room for even a single mistake.
“There,” Dorran called.
A shoulder-height concrete wall bordered the road. A flash of red appeared over its top: the roof of a car. Clare craned her neck and saw where the concrete blockade tapered into nothing as the new lane merged onto the freeway. The area held clusters of cars. It was going to be tight.
“Brace!” Beth yanked the bus’s wheel. Clare grabbed the seat ahead of herself as gravity tried to drag her into the aisle. Dorran hit her shoulder with a gasp as the minibus rose onto the wheels on one side. The angle was too sharp; they were going to topple, but Clare had no breath left to make any noise. She tried to prepare herself for the stab of fractured glass, the wrenching pain of her belt tying her to the seat as the bus rolled, the impact of their luggage becoming projectiles—
The bus hit a campervan side-on. Beth had timed it impeccably. The campervan skidded away, rocking, but the impact had been enough to tilt the balance back into their favour. The bus crashed back onto the road with a bone-shaking bang. They were still moving, but now the bus’s rear was fishtailing behind them as their front turned towards the on-ramp.
The turn brought them around to face the fire. It was no longer a distant glow, ominous and unreadable. It now consumed the sky. Plumes of toxic black smoke spewed above them as trees and buildings alike were devoured. Flames of licking fire rose higher than the trees, higher than the houses, towering above everything in their path and painting the smoke orange for miles. The ash was no longer a dusting; it snowed.
Whispers in the Mist: Black Winter Book Three Page 14