Home > Silence in the Shadows (Black Winter #4)

Silence in the Shadows (Black Winter #4)
Author: Darcy Coates


Chapter One

 

 

“Your time to shine, map reader. Where to?”

The bus’s engine rumbled underneath Clare’s feet. Dorran sat in the driver’s seat next to her. He smiled, his dark eyes warm. Behind them, the Evandale Research Centre’s metal fence rattled in the chill morning air, and ahead, hundreds of kilometres of road separated them from Winterbourne Hall.

Clare held the map tightly, tracing the edges of the worn pages. “We’re about three days from Winterbourne, barring any unforeseen delays.”

“Will we be following the path we arrived on?”

“Only for a few minutes. After then, we’ll be on new terrain.” Clare could visualise the path in her mind. “It will mean going through the mountains, but it will save us at least two days of driving.”

Forests cloaked the narrow dirt road ahead of them. Mist coiled along the ground, weaving through the exposed roots and playing tricks on Clare’s eyes. Hollow ones were likely waiting in the trees, watching. As Dorran put the bus into gear and eased them forward, doubts crowded Clare.

Maybe we really should have stayed in Evandale. Maybe we could have made it work.

She swallowed and re-focussed on the road ahead. They had a purpose: save Winterbourne, if that was possible. Behind them, the Evandale researchers were doing everything they could to reverse the effects of the thanites and destroy the hollow ones. If that turned out to be impossible, humanity would need safe locations to consolidate and survive. And Clare didn’t know of a location more defensible than Winterbourne.

They just had to get there—and that meant going through the mountains, which Clare wasn’t looking forward to.

The last time I saw Beth, she was travelling towards the mountains. Clare blinked furiously to clear her mind. Her final moments with her sister had been traumatic. Beth, corrupted and ravenous, had nearly killed Dorran. She would have if Clare hadn’t intervened. Clare still had scratches on her throat from that final encounter.

She glanced at Dorran. Like her, he was developing a map of scars across his body. The latest set ran across his arms and shoulders. He’d earned them while saving Niall, Evandale’s doctor, from a swarm of the monsters, and the following hours had been so tense that he’d never bothered to bandage them. They had already scabbed over. Soon, even those red marks would begin to fade: a gift from the thanites, almost as though they were apologising for the destruction they had wrought on the rest of humanity.

Clare was surprised to realise Dorran seemed happy. The emotion stayed reserved, but something bright sparkled in his eyes, and the corners of his mouth had lifted a fraction. Finding the good mood infectious, Clare couldn’t suppress a smile of her own. “What are you thinking about?”

“Oh?” He chuckled, his dark eyes crinkling as he met her gaze. “I can’t hide anything from you, can I?”

“No better than I can hide things from you.”

Dorran turned the wheel, carrying them out of the forest and through the small town of Evandale. “It isn’t much. Just that they didn’t think I was strange.”

“The Evandale research team?”

“Yes.” Twisted figures moved through open doorways and broken windows, but they didn’t seem to bother Dorran as he drove deftly through the town. “I never told them about my family or my upbringing, and they didn’t guess. They… didn’t guess.”

He repeated that last phrase as though still coming to terms with it. Clare’s heart ached. After all this time, he still thought he wouldn’t belong in the regular world.

She reached over to take his hand. He let it drop from the wheel so that he could hold hers, their arms resting in the space between their seats as they passed beyond Evandale’s boundaries and returned to the empty rural roads.

“I thought that they would,” Dorran said. “They would hear it in my voice or realise that I didn’t know how to use their television or talk about something I had never heard of before. And I certainly gave them enough opportunities to notice something was wrong. But they didn’t.”

“They couldn’t notice something was wrong,” Clare said. “Because there’s nothing wrong with you.”

A hint of laughter slipped into his voice. “Then you are overlooking many, many flaws.”

“I’m serious. Everyone in that bunker was weird in their own way. Probably everyone left in the world has some oddness about them, including me. Your brand of weirdness is no worse than theirs.”

He made a noise in the back of his throat, and although he stayed quiet, his thumb traced over the back of her hand in small, sweet patterns.

Clare didn’t try to press the point. He was happy. He’d spent most of a week in the bunker without its occupants suspecting his upbringing hadn’t matched theirs. And even though Clare didn’t think that was surprising—or that it would have mattered if they had known—she kept that to herself. It was a victory to Dorran, and she wanted him to enjoy it.

The drive through the rural roads was easy. Clare and Dorran talked occasionally, and the pale sunlight began to look beautiful as it shimmered off lifeless trees and sparse farmhouses. Clare mixed bowls of dried fruit and instant porridge for their lunch.

As the sun passed its zenith and began to descend, the gentle hills and scrubby patches of trees around them transitioned into rocky forest. The road narrowed and became harder to navigate. Dorran leaned forward, fingers light on the wheel but eyes keen as he watched the road.

The abandoned cars became fewer, then vanished entirely when the road climbed into the mountains. Clare wouldn’t need to use it for another hour, but she maintained her hold on the map, rubbing her thumb across its corner until her skin was raw.

There are no cars because almost no one lived here. With no one living here, there weren’t enough thanites to transform anyone travelling through the area. They would have kept driving, oblivious, until they reached the nearest town.

Similarly, Clare herself had been oblivious. If she hadn’t crashed inside the forest surrounding Winterbourne, she very likely wouldn’t have survived. She couldn’t stop her mind from crafting a picture of her probable fate. She would have seen the thanites’ effects upon leaving the forest, but with nowhere to take shelter, she wouldn’t have been able to stop. She likely would have continued on her path, trying to reach Beth’s house, only to become trapped on the freeway, along with so many other unfortunate souls. She wondered how long she would have stayed inside her car while the transformed creatures scrambled over it, whether she would have succumbed to dehydration, or whether desperation would have forced her to open her door.

She had turned clammy. The trees surrounding them grew tall and dense. The branches overlapped the road, plunging the bus into shade. With the sun smothered by the perpetual smog, it felt more like twilight than afternoon.

Just because there had been no humans in the mountains to be transformed into hollows didn’t mean the roads were safe. The creatures travelled, sometimes long distances, in search of food. They liked dark, cool areas… just like the thick trees provided. Clare’s attention flicked towards every trace of motion—a bobbing branch, a falling leaf, or a shadow that might have held eyes. Dorran no longer drove with leisurely patience, but kept a steady pace. Hollows would be attracted to the noise of the engine. The faster they passed through the region, the safer they would be.

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