“I said good morning.”
She forced herself up to sit and squint her eyes open. Beth sat on the other side of the revived fire. She was leaning her back against a cannister of fuel and had both legs stretched ahead of herself, crossed at the ankles. The jacket and scarf were back in place. So were the parts that made her Beth—the quirked eyebrows, the wry humour around her mouth, the spark of humanity in her eyes.
“Hey,” Clare managed. Memories from the previous night filtered back to her in drips. Beth’s voice. Beth’s appearance. They were unnatural enough to feel like a dream. She swallowed, felt how dry her throat still was, and looked around for water.
“Here.” Beth tossed a bottle to her.
Clare caught it clumsily and mumbled her thanks.
“All good. Drink that, then we can get back onto the bus and on the road to Evandale. We lost time, but I’ve been reading the map, and if we keep breaks to a minimum, we’ll be there by four this afternoon without a problem.”
“Oh… okay… great.” Clare was still half asleep. She drank to buy herself a moment to think and frowned at the way her fingers left black prints across the bottle’s label. She was filthy. All of Dorran’s work on her hair the previous day had gone to waste, her clothes barely looked like their original colours, and the dust continued to burn her airways. Beth might not notice the effects, but if Clare was struggling, it had to be even worse for Dorran. He had a persistent cough that frightened her. And the box of antibiotics was empty.
Beth drummed her fingertips on the fuel cannister under her arm. “Ready to go? I’ll drive so you can finish waking up on the road.”
“No. Actually. Hold on a moment.” Clare put the bottle aside. “We need breakfast. I’m starving. And we can’t drive straight to Evandale; we need to look for antibiotics first. The next dose is due by eleven.”
“Damn it,” Beth muttered. “Food. Medicine. Sleep. You’re both really needy, you know that, right?”
“I’m glad your newfound powers didn’t make you disdainful towards your mortal colleagues,” Dorran said. He sat up beside Clare, bleary, eyes narrowed against the invasive sun.
“You look awful,” Beth noted.
“Thank you. I truly appreciate it.”
Beth took a deep breath and let it out in an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. Okay. We can afford some delays. Food first, since we have the fire to warm it. Then we’ll try to figure out where in the hell we’re going to find antibiotics.”
“Thanks.” Clare, relieved, rolled onto her feet. She dusted her hands on her jeans, realised it only made matters worse, and resignedly turned towards the bus’s food compartment.
What time is it? His next dose is due by eleven. That gives us two, maybe three hours?
She found a pot large enough to cook for all three of them and squinted into the distance as she carried it to the fire. The farmhouse she’d seen the previous day was gone. A stack of charcoal and blackened bricks marked its location. Beyond that, she could barely make out the town’s roofline through the hazy smoke.
Will anything in town have survived the fire? If Beth’s right, it should be clear of hollows, but that doesn’t help much if the houses are all gone.
“Hey. Clare. Turn your brain on, please.”
She startled and realised she’d been staring at the empty pot as it heated over the fire. She gave Beth a tight-lipped smile as she returned to the bus’s side compartment and dug out more water and a cardboard box of instant food. The cardboard had become warped from the heat and had probably been no more than a few minutes from catching fire. It was another reminder of how close they had come to losing everything, and Clare chewed on the inside of her cheek as she shut the hatch.
The bus itself looked significantly worse. The smoke had darkened it by several shades until it appeared a deep, dirty grey. The plyboard over the windows was badly singed. The damage they’d sustained between entering the freeway and escaping the ditch was hard to see under the discolouration, but Clare knew it had to be extensive.
But we’re alive. As she carried packets of just-add-water-and-heat pasta meals back to the group, she tried to remind herself of everything she had and how grateful she was for it. They were alive. They were still together.
Beth shook out and folded the blankets. She wanted to be back on the road and wasn’t trying to hide it. As Clare cooked the food, she remembered a throwaway comment Beth had made about the ash making her uncomfortable. The hollows had to be hard-wired to dread fire; that was probably why it had been lit in the first place. A town—or even a lone human—had seen a chance to drive the monsters back. Maybe they’d been edged in on all sides, too desperate to see or care about the consequences. It could have even been an accident—a campfire someone hadn’t put out, a generator sparking an electrical fire, or a lightning strike.
So much destruction. So much lost. There were no firefighters to keep the flames contained. No infrastructure to even pump water out to slow it. The inferno could have swallowed hundreds of miles of land before it hit natural barriers like mountains or rivers.
The region would probably be barren for a long time to come. Not because the ground was bad—the ash would feed future generations of plants—but because the houses were gone. That meant there was no food, no clothes, and no fuel for desperate travellers. Beth’s bus was stocked with supplies. Clare tried to imagine what they would do if it weren’t. She imagined driving through the desolation, searching for just enough sustenance to stay alive, while the fuel needle inched closer to empty.
“I swear, Clare—”
“Sorry, sorry.” The pot of pasta was steaming. Clare found a rag to protect her hands as she divided the meal into bowls. Beth took hers, not noticing that the dish was hot enough to scorch her fingers, and swallowed mouthfuls in between attempts to force the dirty blankets into the bus’s hatch.
“We could leave those,” Clare suggested. “I don’t know if even three rounds through a washing machine could save them, and we have enough spares—”
“They’re flammable enough to be useful to light fires.” Beth used her boot to squash the package into a narrow gap then slammed the hatch closed over them. “You’re right that we’re not hurting for bedding material right now, but we might need the fuel. A storm’s coming.”
Clare looked towards the sky. Except for the blanketing layer of smoke, it seemed clear. The sun was brighter than it had been for days. She turned slowly and finally noticed the bank of darkness growing over the smouldering remains of the forest.
“Another?” Clare glared at the clouds as she blew on a spoonful of her breakfast. “I was really hoping we could have at least one or two clear days.”
Beth rubbed at the back of her neck. “Honestly, I won’t mind so much if it washes some of this ash away.”
“I would have to agree.” Dorran leaned his back against the bus. His voice was raw, and his expression was weary. She knew his sleep hadn’t been as restful as he needed. “The landscape is depressing.”
Clare couldn’t see anything but shades of grey and black on every horizon. She’d done her best to keep ash out of their breakfast, but she could still taste it with every bite. The sooner they moved out of the fire’s destruction, the easier it would be for all of them.
But even that wasn’t their first priority. “Beth, you said you had a chance to check the map earlier, right?”
“Yep. Spent a few hours going over it while I waited for you to wake up.”
“Where’s the closest place that has a reasonable chance of antibiotics?”
“Huh.” Beth tilted her head back, working her jaw. “I guess a lot of that depends on how far the fire will have spread. But… let’s try that town over there first.”
“You sure?” Clare examined the distant roofline. Faint smoke rose from the jagged edges.
“Yup. I didn’t go into it last night, but I skirted around the edge. Parts were still burning, but I have the feeling some areas might have been shelte
red from the flames. We need to travel in that direction, anyway, so we might as well stop by.”
Dorran tilted his head. “You made it that far on foot?”
“I had six hours to burn. That was enough time to scope out the town and the major roads nearby.” She shrugged. “I was still back well before dawn.”
Clare had trouble estimating the distance to the town with the cloud of smog disguising landmarks, but she was fairly certain it was farther than she could get in a night. Beth must have jogged the entire way.
It was somewhere to start, though. Beth’s judgement hadn’t led them astray before, so Clare was prepared to trust it then. If the town was entirely burnt out, they would just keep travelling until they found one that wasn’t.
They finished their meal in silence. With water limited for the foreseeable future, they couldn’t afford any to wash up and instead dropped the dirty bowls and pot into a bag to worry about later. Beth then led the way back into the bus. After watching the world around them transform into something unrecognisable, Clare felt surprised by how little the bus’s insides had changed. A thin powdering of the ash lay across the floor, and the space was dimmer thanks to a dirty windshield, but everything else had been preserved like a shrine. She and Dorran took their seats near the driver’s compartment. Some of the tension that had been hovering around Beth faded as she slid in behind the wheel.
The engine clicked over for an agonizing second, then it caught. Beth pulled a lever to spray soapy water over the windshields. She’d used the entire reservoir the previous day, and only a spritz came out. The wipers grated over the grime, smearing it into streaks, but Beth evidently thought the narrow bands of visibility were enough, and she pulled the bus onto the road.
Thunder disturbed the unnatural stillness. It crackled behind them, seeming to emerge from the forest like some abhorrent child of the scorching fire. Clare was grateful the windows were blocked. It kept her eyes on the one thing that mattered: the distant remains of the town.
Chapter Twenty-Four
They had been on the road for less than twenty minutes when the first spot of rain hit the windshield. It was so large and dark that, for a second, Clare thought they must have hit an insect. Then a second drop came down, and a third, and within a minute, the downpour was so loud that Clare couldn’t hear anything else.
Black water washed over the window. Beth put the wipers on their highest speed but still had to slow to a trundle as they struggled to see the road. Clare waited for the window to clear as the rain washed the soot away, but it didn’t. Not only was the bus dirty, she realised, but so was the rain. It was catching the smoke still suspended in the air and bringing it down in a deluge.
The bus jolted as Beth misjudged the road’s direction and nearly ran into the ditch. Dorran turned aside as another coughing fit hit him.
“Maybe we should stop and wait it out.” Clare yelled to be heard over the rain. “It’s too heavy—”
“I doubt it’s going to improve anytime soon.” Beth tapped the accelerator again, and their speed inched up.
Clare clenched her fists in her lap. The headache was breaking through the painkillers’ numbing effect. She would have argued, except they couldn’t afford to delay much longer. They were rapidly approaching the twelve-hour mark for the antibiotics. She wanted to trust her sister, but at the same time, she couldn’t tell whether Beth was acting in their best interests or out of a desire to escape the fields of ash.
Dorran’s coughs subsided. He’d wrapped one arm around his chest as though he needed to hold his ribs in place. A quiet, panicked voice in the back of Clare’s head asked what would happen if the antibiotics didn’t work, if Dorran was sick with something worse.
Then we keep driving. Evandale is less than a day away. They’re a medical research station; surely they’ll know how to help. Her eyes ached. She blinked furiously to clear them.
The rain continued, furious and unrelenting, as they passed a sign welcoming them to town. Black water washed across the road in streams and sprayed behind them as the bus’s wheels sliced through it. Clare struggled to make out the structures surrounding them. Everywhere she looked carried a crushing sense of desolation. Burnt-out cars clung close to the skeletal remains of houses. The trees that once would have provided shade for the roads were scorched black and reduced to stumps. It was hard for Clare to imagine anything in the town could have survived.
Their crawling speed slowed even further as Beth tried to navigate the streets. Neither of the headlights worked, and she had to rely on the bus’s internal lights to wash out of the windshield, combined with frequent bursts of lightning. More than the usual array of debris blocked their path. Along with abandoned vehicles and fallen trees, there were entire sections of collapsed houses. The drains were already overflowing, choked beyond capacity as they regurgitated the dark water across the streets. It was a nightmare maze of invisible hazards. And yet, Beth kept driving.
Clare jammed her hands under her legs to stop herself from picking at her nails in anxiety. She could barely think over the rain’s drumming and the unending crackle of thunder. In the distorted shadows of the overhead lights, Beth’s face held an unsettling intensity that did not welcome interruption. Her eyes scanned the road and buildings with quick flicks, her nostrils flaring whenever she saw something she didn’t like. Occasionally, her tongue darted out to taste her cracked, ash-blackened lips.
The lightning hurt Clare’s eyes. At her side, Dorran pressed his arm over his mouth as the coughing renewed. A panic had risen through Clare so gradually that she didn’t realise how strong it was until it had her tightly in its grip, squeezing the breath out of her lungs and pulsing in time with her headache.
Then Beth said, “Ha.”
The world ahead was a sickening dance of shadows and ceaseless rain. Burnt-out apartments clustered to their left. To their right was some kind of large structure, seeming unreal amongst the mist.
Beth turned the bus towards the larger building. They rocked in their seats as they ran over speedbumps. A stretch of clear ground appeared to their right, intercepted by small metal shapes and towering, dead floodlights. A parking lot. Clare fought through the migraine to make out the building to their left. It was too big to be a home. Benches and pots of dead plants were clustered around pillars on a sidewalk. Beyond that, she saw a set of large glass doors. The image clicked into place. Beth had found a shopping centre.
The bus lurched again. Beth swung the wheel, a crooked smile lighting her face as she pressed the accelerator. The engine roared, loud enough to compete with the rain, and Clare barely had time to gasp as they raced towards the mall’s entrance.
Broken glass and twisted metal showered around them. Dorran threw his arm across Clare’s chest to keep her from being jolted out of her seat. Clare bit down on a whine as the motion sparked pain behind her eyes. Wet tyres squealed on tile as the bus scraped to a halt.
Slowly, cautiously, Clare opened her eyes. The rain and thunder were muffled. The wipers were no longer battling the downpour, and with a deft flick of her hand, Beth turned them off.
“Good, good,” Beth murmured. Her eyes flashed in the low light, and Clare had the impression she could see a lot better than her human companions. The bus’s overhead lights went out, and the engine faded as she turned it off. “This will do nicely.”
“Beth?” Clare’s legs shook as she tried to rise. “I can’t see anything.”
“Mm. Hang on. We have a torch here somewhere.”
Clare felt, more than saw, Beth pass her. Bags rustled, and a moment later, cold metal was placed into Clare’s hand.
“Come on. I want to look around.” Beth sounded breathless with excitement. The bus’s door creaked as it opened.
“Beth, wait.” Clare felt around the torch, searching for its button. It clicked but didn’t turn on. Clare bit her lip and shook it. The bulb flickered then faded again. Thunder cracked, shivering through the air and settling in her bones. She co
uld no longer hear Beth’s footsteps.
Clare held her hand out, searching. “Dorran?”
“I’m here.” He found her fingers in the dark and squeezed them. Keeping Dorran close, Clare began to feel her way along the bus’s length, towards the door. She could hear her own ragged breaths. She could hear her shoes scraping over the fine layer of ash on the bus’s aisle. She could hear the cascading rain, punctuated by rolling thunder.
She couldn’t hear Beth. Nor could she hear any other sign of life outside the bus. But that didn’t mean they were alone.
Clare stopped at the top step, lungs aching and throat tight. A burst of lightning washed through the shopping centre’s skylights. For that second, the mall was illuminated in a viciously cold light. Faces stared at her. Wide eyes, dead eyes, pale lips. Darkness swallowed them again.
A cry choked in Clare’s throat. She hit the torch on her thigh. The bulb flickered then held. She raised it, panning light over the dirt-scuffed floor and over the scattered contents of a women’s clothing store.
Five mannequins faced them. Four stood; one lay on the floor, its head twisted around to face its back in an agonizing contortion. Their clothes hung askew. One was missing an arm.
Dorran murmured something indistinct, and his hand twitched. Clare’s mouth was too dry to make any sound. Moving slowly, she stepped out of the bus. Dorran followed reluctantly.
The torch flickered again. Clare slapped it and only let herself breathe when the light settled back to its dull glow. She directed the torch back to the mannequins. A wild part of her mind insisted their heads had turned a fraction in those brief seconds of darkness.
“Beth?” Her voice cracked. She kept her back to the bus as she let the torch’s light coast across the scene. The shopping centre didn’t seem large, but it was two stories. Dirty glass railings ran around the second floor’s walkways. An escalator stood a few meters ahead of their bus, and Clare was silently grateful Beth had braked when she did. They had destroyed the front doors, though, along with what looked like a kiosk display of bags. Broken glass and merchandise marked their trajectory.
Whispers in the Mist: Black Winter Book Three Page 17