by Darcy Coates
Chapter Twenty
Clare choked as she tried to breathe. She squeezed the wheel so tightly that she was afraid she might break it as the car rocketed down the Banksy Forest road. She was sliding onto the other lane, and as she corrected it, the passenger door slammed closed.
She glanced at her mirrors. The car’s taillights washed a sheen of red over the road. The hollows were scuttling after them, heads bobbing, limbs twisting, but they disappeared from view within seconds.
Dorran was tangled in the passenger seat, his arm braced on the cup holders, his long legs against the door. He reached up and wrenched off the mask. His face was sheet white and wet with sweat. “We did it.” He sounded surprised at himself.
“We did.” Clare hated how badly her voice shook. She let the car slow until it was only coasting, then she pulled off her own mask. They shared an unsteady smile, then Clare pressed her sleeve across her eyes to clear the moisture off them. “You were amazing.”
“And you were clever to think of the horn. Thank you.” Slowly, he adjusted himself, sitting up in the seat. Bright blood glistened over his glove and sleeve.
Clare’s smile vanished. “Your hand—”
“It’s not bad.” He wrestled out of his outer jacket, wrapped it around the cuts, then pressed on it to stem the flow. If any colour had remained in his face, he lost it then, eyes closed and a muscle in his jaw twitching.
They came to a halt, engine still purring, as Clare turned to dig through the backseat. Her unsteady hands fumbled the items as she sorted through them. “Hang on, we have the first aid kit. I can—”
“I will take care of this.” His voice was surprisingly calm. “Please, for a moment, could we keep driving? I want to be out of this forest.”
Clare found the first aid kit. She didn’t trust herself to speak, but placed it at Dorran’s side, then turned back to the road. The car’s headlights glowed across the trees and the still-wet asphalt. In between the sparkling drops of water were several pairs of eyes. She swallowed and pressed on the accelerator.
Dorran leaned back in the seat, eyes closed and fabric wrapped tightly around his arm. It had to be hurting him, but his face was calm.
Clare kept her speed steady. She wanted to be out of the smothering trees, but she also knew she needed to be careful. Another crash, or even becoming caught in a pothole or snagged on a fallen branch, could be fatal. Especially as the distance between them and Winterbourne, their only safe haven, grew.
As far as Clare could tell, they were the first people to drive along the road since the world had collapsed. The endless storms and melting snows had left debris. Clare drove over the smaller branches carefully. Several larger branches lay to the side of the road, and she coaxed the car around them. Twice, streams of water flowed over their path. Water sprayed in graceful arcs outside their windows, but the car held together.
The headlights picked up a shape in the road, and Clare slowed again. A thick branch blocked their path.
Dorran opened his eyes as the car eased to a halt. “Stay here.”
“No.” She pushed him back into his seat. “You’re hurt. This one is mine.”
“I—”
“No arguments. Sit tight.”
She opened her door, motor still running, and slipped outside. Her boots splashed in the water trickling across the road. Her legs were damp from the saturated car seat, and as a wind nipped around her, gooseflesh rose over her skin. Clare strode through the coiling mist, her ears searching for noise. Faint dripping noises were the only respite from the forest’s eerie silence. She grasped the branch’s ragged end and pulled.
She’d left her door open, and a sickly yellow light flooded through the car. It washed over Dorran, painting shadows across his face and reflecting off his eyes. He sat forward in his seat, alert, his good hand resting on the door handle. Clare shot him a smile that was more confident than she felt.
Behind her, a twig snapped. Dorran’s eyes tightened. Her heart thundered as she dragged the branch to the side, moving it just far enough for the car to slip around, then dashed back to the car. She leapt inside and slammed the door, heart hammering and hands shaking as she released the handbrake and let the car roll forward. “There. No problem.”
Dorran slowly relaxed back. His head turned as they passed the branch, and Clare followed his eyes to see a mangled child creeping out of the forest’s edge. It used its arms to drag itself forward, a multitude of bones springing from its twisted legs like roots on a fallen tree. Its jaw worked furiously, spilling froth, as it crawled through the debris in their wake.
Just how many of them are there?
She kept her focus on the road as they passed through Banksy Forest. She’d driven the path countless times before, but everything looked different that day. She recognised some of the bends, but it felt as though the world had aged a decade in the past few weeks.
Then up ahead, a circle of natural light broke through the gloom. The car coasted out of the forest’s boundary. As the pines receded behind them, the landscape was taken over by gentle, rolling hills and sparse trees.
She drove on until the forest was nothing but a band of darkness in the rearview mirror, then asked, “Do you think it’s safe to stop for a moment?”
“Yes, it should be.” He tilted his head. “Is something—”
She put the car in park then clambered over the divider to reach Dorran. She kissed his lips, his throat, his forehead, every part of him she could reach. He was salty from the drying sweat but she didn’t care. She thought she could hold him and kiss him for the rest of her life and never do anything else.
Dorran began to laugh in between kissing her back. “Oh, Clare.”
“I’m so glad you’re still here.” She ran her hands through his hair, pushing it away from his face. “Back there—the hollows—”
“Shh.” She could feel him smiling against her neck. “You don’t need to worry; I will not be leaving you.”
She kissed him a final time, lingering over his lips, not wanting to pull away. When she did, she opened the first aid kit between them and sifted through the contents. “Let me have a look at your hand.”
“It will be fine. Time is pressing; you should keep driving.”
She frowned as she pulled a bottle out of the kit and tried to read the label. “No, this is important. Are these the painkillers?”
He nodded, and Clare tipped two of the tablets out and balanced them on the dashboard. She then kicked open her door and rounded the car to find water and a cup.
The water cartons, sheltered inside the boot, were still full of ice. Enough had melted that she could pour out a cup for Dorran, which she brought to him. He swallowed the tablets and washed them down. “Thank you. That will be fine for now.”
Clare climbed back into her seat and shuffled around to face him. “Not yet. Let me see it.”
His good hand rested protectively over the swaddled wrist, and Clare had to lift her eyebrows before he removed it. She picked at the edges of the jacket, and Dorran flinched as she peeled the fabric away from his wrist. Moving carefully, she tugged the bloodied sleeve up his arm to get it clear of the wound. The bite seemed to have landed half on skin, half on the glove. She could see punctures from molars, already filling with blood again.
“Is it okay if I take the glove off?”
He did it himself, moving faster than Clare would have, and clenched his jaw as the leather dragged over damaged skin. Clare brushed stray hair out of her face and bent lower to check the damage. Four teeth had punctured the skin, and they had sunk in deeply. Red bruising showed where the rest of the jaw had failed to cut through the glove.
“Okay.” She blinked furiously, trying to keep her emotions in check as she struggled to grasp what needed to be done. “Uh, they need to be cleaned, right? And… and stitches…”
“Not for these.” He draped the jacket over them. “Stitches are good for pulling skin together when the inside of the cuts are clean. The
se are not, and stitches will only trap dirt inside. Better to let them scab over and heal that way.”
“Right. Okay. So…”
Dorran’s healthy hand landed over hers as she riffled through the kit. His eyes were tight, but he smiled at her. “I know this is worrying you, but I am fully able to treat it. What about a compromise? You drive, and I’ll patch myself up during the trip.”
“Will you be able to?” She bit her lip. “I mean, if the car is jostling you—”
“That will be fine. Besides, we have limited daylight hours. I would feel happier with the road passing beneath us.”
“Okay.” She gave him a final, reluctant glance then shuffled back to face the road and started the car. The engine ticked over without catching, and a stab of terror hit Clare. She turned the key a second time and it rumbled to life. Gravel crunched under the wheels as they rolled forward. She exhaled, and Dorran echoed the sound beside her.
“I did my best to repair the car,” he said. “I hope it will last the trip. But the job was… well, temporary, to put it lightly.”
“As long as it gets us to Beth’s. She has her own car; we can drive it home.” The road outside the forest was straight and clear of debris, and Clare pushed the hatchback to go faster. The driver’s door had been damaged by hollows during the initial crash, and air whistled through a gap between the window and the roof. The faster Clare drove, the higher the whistle became. A rattling noise joined it. Clare eased off the accelerator.
As he’d promised, Dorran cleaned his cuts. He worked with his usual efficiency, swabs and antiseptic dabbing across the marks. Fresh sweat beaded over his forehead, and he took sharp, jagged inhales, but was otherwise silent. Clare couldn’t stop glancing at him. The jacket he’d used to wrap his wrist was drenched with blood, and the cuts seemed deep. She didn’t know enough about first aid to guess how serious they were, and it was hard to trust Dorran’s self-diagnosis when he incessantly downplayed any injury he got. But she didn’t think he would be so calm if the same bite had landed on her.
The empty fields were a relief after the forest. Long grass, brown and ragged after its imprisonment in ice, shivered in the wind. There were trees—thin, straggly ones with kinked trunks and sparse branches—but they were infrequent. The area was sometimes used for cattle grazing, though Clare couldn’t see any trace of cows that day. In the far distance, so small that it barely registered as a smear of grey halfway up a hill, was a farmstead. Clare wondered whether its occupants might have found their way into the forest. She could have very well looked the land’s owner in the face and not known it.
The road carried on through the countryside for a while. The turnoff to Marnie’s property was half an hour ahead, and Clare’s stomach tightened at the thought. They would be passing the exit, though, and driving on until the rural road merged onto the freeway that took her to Beth’s.
Less than four hours now. You made it this far. Keep your eyes on the road. Less than four hours, and you’ll know what happened to her. One way or another.
Chapter Twenty-One
Air created a faint, breathless whistle as it whipped over the damaged door. They were driving fast, but Clare wanted to go faster. Any time she increased the speed, the rattle returned, and she didn’t trust it enough to live with it. For the time, the car was moderating their speed.
Dorran snapped the first aid kit closed. She peeked at his bitten hand. He’d wrapped bandages around the cut, looping it over his thumb like a half glove. A hint of pink tinged the white wrappings. She hoped it would be enough.
“Where did you put the radio?” Dorran asked.
“Uh… it’s back there. I can’t remember where exactly. Why?”
Instead of replying, he turned to reach into the back seat. Clare slowed as Dorran braced his elbow on the back of her chair and used his good hand to sift through the supplies. It only took a few seconds for him to return, the black radio and a small leather pouch clutched to his chest.
“Be careful with your wrist,” she said.
He smiled as he opened the pouch and took out a small screwdriver. A moment later, the radio’s back popped off. He placed the machine on the dashboard and bent over it, screwdriver tip probing as he looked through the nest of cables.
“Do you think you can fix it?”
“Perhaps. I can try.”
Clare swallowed. If they could get in contact with Beth, they might be able to breathe a little more easily for the rest of the drive. They would at least know whether she was safe or not. How long she thought the air would last. Whether they needed to hurry. Whether they could afford to be cautious. Whether she’s still alive.
Dorran made a satisfied noise at the back of his throat, and a soft click echoed from the radio. “Do you have the batteries?”
“Yeah.” She fished them out of her pocket.
Dorran fed them into their slot then pressed a button to turn on the radio. Deafening white noise blasted through the car, and Clare flinched, squeezing her eyes closed as though that might save her eardrums. The noise faded to a low crackle as Dorran turned down the volume.
“It was just a bad connection.” He reattached the back then placed the radio onto the dashboard facing Clare. “Would you like to try calling her?”
One eye on the road, Clare checked the settings to ensure it was on Beth’s frequency. Then she activated the microphone. “Beth? It’s me. Clare. Can you hear me?”
Static answered. Clare flexed her grip on the wheel as the seconds stretched out.
“We’re coming to get you, Beth. Less than four hours. Please, if you’re there, answer me.”
The white noise was like nails on a chalkboard to Clare’s nerves. The longer she listened, the worse the anxious ache in her chest grew. It was climbing into her throat, choking her.
“I can’t hear you, but if you’re there, wait for us. We’re not far off now. And… and wear a mask, if you can find one or make one. The hollows can’t recognise you if they can’t see skin. Okay?”
Hissing and popping was interspersed with nothing. Clare’s eyes burned. She pressed the button to end her side of the communication but couldn’t bring herself to turn off the radio entirely.
Dorran nudged the volume down until it was barely audible. They sat in silence for a moment, then he said, “Your sister kept her radio off except when she tried to speak with you. She may still be there.”
“Yes.” She smiled so fiercely that her cheeks ached but felt dangerously close to hyperventilating. “You’re right. Maybe she just can’t hear me.”
The car’s engine rattled again as Clare pushed it too hard, and she forced herself to slow down. She was glad Dorran didn’t try to talk. He let her drive in peace as they listened to the faint white noise.
Sickly clouds shifted across a steel-grey sky. A dark smear hovered at the horizon, and as they drew closer, it began to resolve into roofs and trees.
Clare knew the town. She drove through it every time she visited Beth. The closest shop, the one everyone passed on the outskirts of the community, had a bright-yellow billboard painted on the wall facing the road, advertising fish and chips. The eatery was at least two decades old, and the sign hadn’t been changed in all of that time. A smattering of graffiti tags marked the paint, and the colour had worn down in the sun. Clare had always promised herself that one day she would stop there and see what fish and chips tasted like from a shop that seemingly lived in a different generation. She’d never gotten around to it.
The town appeared to be empty. Clare slowed as she neared its outskirts and leaned over the wheel to watch the wide sidewalks and empty windows. Houses were mixed among stores in a haphazard arrangement. Land in that area was cheap, so the buildings all had an excess of space around them, usually filled with weeds or plain dirt. She’d always thought the town was cute, but now it left her feeling cold and queasy.
Power had gone out a long time before, and every window was black. Several doors hung open. A café still h
ad its daily specials sign propped outside, half spilling into the road, but the chalk had run from the snow, and she could barely make out the promise of eggplant lasagne. Clare could only imagine that the lasagne was still inside, sitting on a kitchen bench, slowly rotting as it waited for customers who would never come.
It felt strange to see life suspended in that way. People had woken up on that last morning with nothing in their minds except getting through another day. The café’s cook would have come in early to prepare the lasagne. He might have doted over it, cooking something he knew would make the regular customers happy. Or maybe he’d rushed through the prep, cutting the eggplant slices too thick and not caring that the sauce was too watery. It was the last thing he would ever cook. Clare wondered whether he would he have prepared it differently if he had known.
Something moved down a side street. Clare kept the car at a steady, cautious speed but watched the shape. A skeletal figure hunched over a drain at the end of the road twisted to stare at them with bulbous eyes.
There are hollows here too.
It made sense. If there had been humans, there would be hollows. As they moved deeper through the town, deformed creatures appeared in the open doorways, attracted by the motor’s rumble and curious about a potential meal. Several tried to follow the car, clambering awkwardly on too-long limbs or scuttling on all fours. Clare watched them in her rearview mirror and increased her speed to outpace them.
They approached a petrol station at the edge of town. Clare licked her lips. “Did you put all of the fuel into the tank?”
“Yes. All of it.”
The indicator on her dashboard was half full. That would get them to Beth’s. It probably wouldn’t be enough to take them home, though. She wondered if there was any way to get petrol out of the station without power to pump it up from the wells.
It was a moot question, either way. A pack of hollows were still following them, and shimmering eyes glittered from the shadows around the pumps. There was no room to stop.