Again, his grey eyes darted from her to the bus. “Are you alone?”
“I have a friend. But he’s hurt. Unconscious.”
“I don’t have medicine either,” the man said, a note of warning entering his voice.
“That’s okay. I don’t want any. I just need the bus to run.”
He shot a final, wary glance at the bus then turned off his engine. He twisted to look over his shoulder and whispered something into the back seat. Clare followed his gaze and saw his two girls huddled there. The younger one still had a bandage over her eye. Their faces were more serious than she’d ever seen a child look before.
Then the car’s locks clicked, and the man stepped out. He shut his door and locked it behind himself, squinting in the pale sunlight. “No promises. But let me take a look.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The strange man bent over the engine, but he was only giving it part of his attention. His eyes kept skipping from the bus’s open door, to Clare’s hands, to the field surrounding them.
He was on the watch for danger. She couldn’t blame him. If someone wanted to plan an ambush, a broken bus with boarded-over windows would be a great way to lure in unsuspecting victims and a perfect way to hide. He was taking a big risk in helping her. One Clare didn’t know if she could have taken if their places were exchanged.
“I remember this bus,” he said as he picked through the bag of tools she’d left beside the engine. “We passed it a couple of days ago. Someone else was driving.”
“That was my sister.” Clare swallowed. She knew the truth probably wouldn’t be taken well, so she opted for a lie by omission. “She’s gone now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He lifted his head. “Your water line was crushed. I think I can repair it. Get into the driver’s seat and try the engine when I signal.”
Clare leapt into the bus. Hope thrummed through her. The man’s car was visible through the cracked windshield. Two pinched faces pressed against its window as they watched their father.
The man waved to her. Clare turned the key. The engine spluttered then rumbled as it came to life.
Clare keeled over the wheel, relief and gratitude overwhelming her. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
The man shut the hatch over the engine and stepped back, wiping his hands on his pants. “You should be all right now. Good luck out there.”
“Wait. Before you go.” Clare looked over her shoulder, towards the compartments holding more supplies than she could use in a month. “Um. Do you need anything? Food, clothes?”
“We’re all right for that.” He was already striding back to his car. Clare knew how he must feel. Every minute away from his children was like dancing with danger.
“Painkillers?” she offered.
The man hesitated. His eyes drifted to his car’s window, towards his daughter and her bandages. “We’ve been looking for some of those.”
Clare opened her bag of medicine as she climbed out of the bus. She gave the man two boxes of the painkillers. He accepted them with a small nod and a smile. As he moved back to his car, he called, “Owen, by the way.”
“Clare,” she replied, raising her hand in farewell. “Thank you again. Good luck.”
“And to you.”
His engine started. Seconds later, he’d executed a U-turn, and the car was fading away from her, disappearing into the distance.
As Clare climbed back into the driver’s seat, she felt as though the block of ice freezing her insides had melted a little. Beth had been wrong. She’d been wrong. There was still goodness in the world. It just took some looking to find it.
The engine purred beneath her as Clare pulled the bus back onto the road. She hadn’t asked Owen where he was planning to go, and he hadn’t asked about her destination. She hoped he would be all right, though. She hoped he would find a good home for his family.
The breakdown had slowed her but not as much as she’d feared. She pushed the bus back up to speed. The road was hypnotic. Every time she started feeling herself drifting away, she took another mouthful of the coffee concoction. By mid-afternoon, it was giving her palpitations. She’d missed the previous night’s dinner and that morning’s breakfast. Clare reluctantly pulled over to scrounge some food then hurriedly chewed through two granola bars.
While she was eating, she checked on Dorran. He was unsettlingly still. She held her hand over his mouth, and every muscle in her body locked up. There was no gentle rush of air.
“No. No. Come on, Dorran.” She grabbed his shoulder. His chest rose. It was shallow and ragged, but he was still breathing.
“Please, hang on.” She kissed his forehead. She wanted to be able to sit with him and watch over him, but she needed to keep the bus moving. Reluctantly, she stepped away and retook her seat.
That fright gave her enough adrenaline to keep her alert for the following hour. She couldn’t stop herself from watching Dorran through the rearview mirror. The back of the bus was too dark to see him clearly enough to tell if he was still breathing. She couldn’t stop herself from looking, though. Every time she tried to focus on the road, her eyes drifted back towards the mirror.
Occasionally, she thought she saw shapes moving through the trees on either side of the road. By that point, she thought there was a good chance they were delusions. The coffee-induced palpitations were growing worse. She kept drinking the concoction, though. It was the only way she could stay awake.
A crossroad appeared in the distance, intersecting their dirt trail. Clare knew it from studying the map, and a smile grew. A signpost stood on the crossroad’s corner, old metal pointing in each direction. The one to the right read Evandale.
Clare took the turn. The shadows were stretching long. Before the stillness, house lights would have been flickering to life like beacons in the distance. Clare no longer needed the coffee. Hope coursed through her veins, pushing her to drive faster, as she sped into the town that she’d staked their lives on.
She’d thought it would be a small town based on how few streets were shown on the map. She was right. Like many of the settlements they had passed through, a strip mall ran down the main road. It held the staples: a general store, two cafés, a petrol station, a post office, a pub, two knickknack shops, and a clothing store. It was a place for locals to run errands and for travellers to stop on their journey. Any more serious business—including cheaper grocery shopping and specialty retail—would need to happen at the larger town half an hour away.
Clare leaned over the wheel, squinting through the streaky gore, dust, and the crack marring her window. She read each shop sign as she passed it. None of them were remotely close to a research institute. The strip mall ended quickly, then she was back amongst houses, and before she could blink, she’d passed through Evandale and come out the other side.
She slowed the bus, pulled a U-turn, and re-entered the town. This time, she drove more slowly, examining every building she passed. Three side streets branched out at odd intervals, and she took them all one at a time. They led to more residential areas. A park. A club. A hall that advertised children’s activities on Fridays and church on Sundays.
Doubt started to creep in. Clare ran through her memories of the time she’d spent with Ezra and everything he’d said about Evandale. That hadn’t been much. Initially, when he was pretending to be Peter, he’d said he’d heard that the Evandale Research Institute was still running and that he intended to send the USB there to double-check his work.
A lie, Beth’s voice whispered. He never intended for the USB to leave the tower. He picked a town name at random and claimed there was an institute there to give his story more credibility. Evandale has nothing. Nothing except shops and houses and hollow ones.
The streets were rife with them. The emaciated bodies slunk between buildings, mouths gaping open and eyes glinting as they followed the bus. Clare tried not to watch them as she turned down another back road, scanning the homes. Some had signs for small busines
ses hung out the front. Counselling. Landscaping. Painting classes. Nothing remotely like she was looking for.
Ezra had talked about Evandale a second time, when he’d run his experiments on Dorran. Clare had asked him to give her the USB and let them leave so that they could take it to the institute. His reaction had been so aggressively visceral that she turned the bus around and drove through the same backroads a second time.
He was desperately insistent that Evandale wouldn’t get his research. He wouldn’t have reacted like that if it were a fake institute in a made-up town. The centre has to be real.
Her eyes were stinging. She turned down the same road for a third time, her shoulders aching, her mind buzzing, the shadows lengthening. Each pass through the town drew more of the hollows out of hiding. One of them launched itself at the bus. It bounced off the metal, unable to find purchase, and crept backwards, hissing.
The sun was close to setting. Once it was down, the hollow ones would grow bolder. She needed to find the institute or get out of the town before then.
Where is it? Ezra couldn’t have lied. The look on his face, the way he spat those words…
She was back on the main street. A sign caught her eyes. Old and covered with dust, it hung at an angle after a misjudged parking job had bent its pole. She slammed on the brakes, heart pounding.
The sign had been so inconspicuous that Clare had driven past it three times. Now, she read the words printed on the faded blue metal: Whitmore Street. And in small letters below that: Evandale Research Institute.
“Yes,” Clare whispered, swinging the bus around to follow the road.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The sign pointed down one of the major crossroads that ran through Evandale and linked it to the next town twenty minutes away. Clare cruised, trying to ignore the creatures flitting around her as she scanned the houses. She’d examined them all before; none of them showed any signs of being more than a regular dwelling. Within a minute, the town had ended, and she was back into the patchy, marshy forests that filled the area between the two towns.
The research institute exists. The sign proves that. But, then, where is it?
She prepared to turn the bus around then stopped herself. With the towns spread so far apart, it was possible the institute bore the town’s name even if it was a good stretch outside of its bounds. She continued following the road.
The trees grew thicker until they had completely blocked out the fading light. Then a gap appeared in the foliage to her left. Most of the roads Clare had passed over that day had been unsealed, but this one seemed no more than a hiking trail cut through the trees. It was wide enough to carry the bus, though. Clare bit her lip as she turned onto it.
The road twisted, the trees dense enough to obscure out the ground ahead, before it opened into a clearing. A fence at least twelve feet high rose ahead of Clare. She leaned forward in her seat and saw the top of the fence had been modified with slabs of metal, all fixed at an angle to make the structure impossible to climb over from the outside.
Straight ahead, the fence held a gate. Thick metal chains ran through holes in the doors, locking them together. Clare waited, hoping the bus’s engine would draw someone’s attention, but when the gate remained closed, she turned the bus off and went to search their supplies. Tucked behind the clothes and towels was a set of shears. Clare took them and climbed down from the bus.
The clearing was surprisingly serene. In the distance, a bird chattered. The trees still had their leaves, and a cold, sharp wind rattled them. The gate creaked as the gusts pulled on it.
Clare approached the chains and clamped the shears around one link. Her muscles were drained. She had to close her eyes and brace herself before wrenching on the shears as hard as she could.
The metal snapped. Clare fastened the shears around the other side of the link and sliced through it, then she dropped the shears and unwound the metal. Once the chain was discarded, she put her shoulder against the metal and pushed.
The door clearly hadn’t been opened in a long time. Dirt and leaves had built up over the runners, jamming it, and Clare had to lean her shoulder against the structure as it scraped open in patches. Once it was wide enough to drive the bus through, she stood back, breathing heavily, and surveyed the space beyond.
A concrete building stood ahead. It looked tiny, only large enough for one or two rooms, and it had no windows. A wide garage door covered the front wall. Near that was a small stand with a button, like the ones they used outside paid parking stations.
The rest of the ground was bare. Weeds grew unchecked, large enough to tell Clare the lawn had been neglected for months.
Ezra said he thought the scientists in Evandale had survived the stillness. But he didn’t know. They didn’t try to communication through radios. There was no way to be sure.
Clare looked behind herself. The bird’s chattering had fallen silent. She suddenly had the gut-churning sense that she wasn’t alone and that leaving her back exposed was a very bad idea. Moving quickly and keeping her eyes scanning the forest, Clare jumped into the bus, started the engine, and eased it through the open gate.
She parked in front of the garage door then left the bus again. The open gate invited danger; Clare jogged to reach it. Leaves crunched in the forest somewhere to her right as Clare fixed her hands in the metal. She lurched back, hauling with all of her strength to scrape it closed. It ground into place, and she found the chain she’d cut on the ground and threaded it back through the holes. There was no way to lock it, but at least, from a distance, the structure would look undisturbed.
Clare returned to the building. There were no handles to open the garage door. She tried squirming her fingers underneath the metal shutter, but the gap wasn’t large enough. She rounded the building. It was shaped in a rectangle, made all of concrete and devoid of any other doors or windows. Even the roof was flat. Her loop around brought her back to the metal pole she’d parked beside. It held a red button above a small speaker and what looked like a camera. Clare wet her lips and pressed the button.
Static crackled through the speaker. Clare waited. The sun was nearing the horizon, and the wind was cold. She was ready to drop. The caffeine had left her shaking uncontrollably.
Maybe Ezra was wrong. Maybe they all died in the stillness. Maybe this institute was abandoned even before the stillness. The weeds have been given free rein. The sign in the town was old and neglected. Maybe no one has worked here in a long time.
Clare looked back at the bus. At least, if no one answered, the fence would keep any hollows out. They should be safe to sleep there that night.
But I can’t sleep. Not with Dorran as bad as he is. I’ve travelled too far to give up.
She pressed the button again. Like before, there was a second of static then silence. Clare let her head drop. She wanted to cry, but she had no energy left for it. So much time, so much energy, so much risk, to get to Evandale. She’d lost Beth. She was going to lose Dorran. All because she’d trusted in a madman and his USB.
Clare felt into her pocket for the small metal stick and clutched it. The code was useless if no one knew how to read it. Beth had been right. She’d been too eager to grab at anything that felt like hope. And now they had all paid for it.
Wait… Clare’s eyes opened. She looked back towards the fence. The metal fastened at its top, angled to stop anything from climbing over the walls, hadn’t rusted like the rest of the fence. The reinforcements were recent. They had been built after the stillness, specifically to keep hollows out.
Her breath caught. She looked back at the box. Static crackled every time she pressed the button. That meant it had power, which in turn meant a generator was running. And that meant someone was inside, keeping the institute lit.
They’re ignoring me. Hoping I’ll think the place is dead. Hoping I’ll go away. Well, that’s not happening.
She pressed the button again and held it, knowing a buzzer would probably be sounding inside t
he building. She didn’t know how the speaker worked—whether it needed to be switched on from the other side or whether they could hear her. She tried anyway. “Please. I need to speak with you. It’s urgent. I have important information about the stillness.”
There was still no reply. Clare started pressing the buzzer in Morse code. Three dots, three dashes, then another three dots, spelling out SOS.
You can talk to me, or you can live with my racket for the rest of the night. Her throat burned. Her muscles ached. More than anything, she just wanted to slide to the ground, close her eyes, and escape the world for a few hours. But Dorran needed her. She hung onto the box, mashing its button as the sun dipped past the horizon and insects began to sing.
Then a woman’s voice, tinny through the speakers, yelled, “Enough!”
Clare inhaled sharply. She took her finger off the button.
“I don’t know what you expect to find here, but you’re wasting your time. We have armed guards who will open fire if you do not vacate immediately.”
Clare almost smiled. The threat of violence didn’t hold any horror for her. She leaned close, staring into the camera, and held up the USB. She knew she had a limited chance to barter for what she wanted. What she needed. “I have information about how the stillness was started. And I have a way to destroy the hollow ones.”
The voice was silent. Clare knew the woman was still there, though. She could hear her breathing. Then she said, “Leave it outside the door.”
“I’m not giving it to you.” Clare’s voice took on a desperate edge that she hadn’t intended. “I want to trade.”
Again, the voice was silent. When it spoke, it was hedged with hostility. “For what?”
“My friend is dying.” Clare’s hand shook. Her voice shook. Her mind felt like it was shaking, too, rattling with fear, frustration, and desperation. “I need you to save him.”
Whispers in the Mist: Black Winter Book Three Page 24