As long as they were still driving towards Beth’s, there was hope. It was small, but it still existed, and it held the grief at bay like a crumbling dam. She could tell herself Beth was gone, but until she saw it with her own eyes, it didn’t feel like reality.
But she’s gone. Almost certainly. Almost guaranteed. Gone like the rest of them.
“Let me drive,” she said.
Dorran shot her a concerned glance. “Your shoulder is hurt.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’ve been driving for longer than you should. And anyway, I know the area around Beth’s house. I’ll be able to navigate it better.”
“Hm. All right. Take some more pain tablets first.”
They exchanged places quickly, out of the car and back in within thirty seconds. Clare reflexively pulled her seat belt into place as she settled in the driver’s seat. It was a habit she would have to forget, she told herself. In this new world, the risk of crashing was outweighed by the possibility of needing to escape the car in a hurry. Still, the strap looped over her shoulder and waist felt comforting.
Dorran was a solid presence at her side. His expression was placid, but the tension around his shoulders and back told her the approaching confrontation was pressing on him as much as it was on her.
The road stretched, straight as a ruler, with very little around it. Clare squinted as she tried to make out distant shapes through the haze. She imagined she could see the freeway to their left, then up ahead, structures that had to be buildings.
I made it, Beth. I came for you.
Chapter Thirty-One
They were approaching the suburb from a different direction to the way Clare used to drive, but as they drew closer, she began to recognise landmarks. A cell tower dominated the skyline even though the lights around its top were blank. In the far distance, she caught a shape through the fog that was too square to be a house. The water silo.
As they neared the suburb’s outskirts, indulgent farmhouses began to crop up. The sprawling, modern structures were a relief after nothing but sparse fields and bare wire fences. Clare thought she recognised some of the cross streets.
“Better to keep the speed up, I think.” Dorran still looked relaxed, but his voice was clipped. “They come out when they hear noise.”
“Right.” She saw a flicker of motion in her rearview mirror. Something with four arms peered through a topiary arrangement.
They left the straight rural road and continued on to a more formal street with gutters and sidewalks. The houses changed noticeably. They were cheaper than the rustic mansions and huddled on compact blocks of land. The last time Clare had seen them, they had appeared uniform but modern and neat.
The suburb occasionally saw snow in winter, and the gardens were designed to cope with it, but Clare guessed the snowstorms must have been as brutal to Beth’s suburb as it had been to Winterbourne. Gutters were littered with fallen branches. In some areas, the roads were still flooded, thanks to debris blocking the drains. Clare saw smashed windows everywhere she looked. They left her uneasy. The holes created access points to the houses, which meant ample nests for the hollows.
She didn’t want to linger, but the roads threw up obstacles that forced her to slow. Evidence of the last day, and the panic it caused, was everywhere. Cars had been driven up onto the sidewalks, hitting garden fences, or crumpled against streetlight posts. Others had been abandoned on the road, doors hanging open. Clare managed to get around one by rising up on the sidewalk herself, but then she had to put the car in reverse because a fallen oak blocked the road.
“It’s okay.” She spoke half to reassure Dorran and half to reassure herself as she twisted to watch the street behind them. “The streets all connect with one another. We shouldn’t get stuck.”
In the distance, through one of the broken windows, she thought she saw eyes glowing in the red backwash of her car’s lights. The monsters were keeping their distance, at least. Clare wondered if she and Dorran were the first humans they had seen since the stillness. Two spilled luggage cases lay outside an open door. Clothes tumbled over the path, still wet and beginning to rot, a reminder of how quickly the world had ceased.
How long did this area last after my phone disconnected? An hour? Maybe two? Long enough for people to try to escape.
Clare corrected the car’s path to take them down a clear street. Twilight caused the cookie-cutter houses and dying lawns to blend together, forcing her to squint to see. Clare made herself loosen her death grip on the steering wheel. Her palms were wet with sweat. Dorran’s pose was relaxed as he sat back in his seat, but his eyes were constantly moving below heavy eyebrows, and he ran his thumb over his lips.
Beth’s house was near the back of the development, in an area with larger plots of land and less-manicured gardens. When Clare had first seen it, she’d laughed. Beth’s home was surrounded by posh, expensive buildings, but she’d still chosen a house with a half-wild garden and irregular windows. Clare had said, “You can take the girl out of the country, but you—”
“Hush, you,” Beth had said, ushering Clare into the house. “I need my neighbours to think I’m a respectable suburban lady.”
But the non-conformist building helped Clare to see it while she was still two blocks away. A huge pine stood in the backyard, poking above the rooftops like a flag. She fixed on it, eyeing the dark pillar as she struggled through the choked streets to reach it.
Beth might have wanted to fit in with the Joneses living all around her, but when it came to her private back yard, she hadn’t been able to hide her true nature. She loved gardens, and not the sparse shrubs and succulents that were the staple around her. She grew flowers, vines, and trees with wild abandon, and the tame front yard hid a wonderland planted behind the house. The bunker wasn’t the only addition that would have raised eyebrows.
Clare slowed at an intersection, and butterflies clustered in her stomach. She knew the turn; she’d taken it a hundred times. The washed-out wooden fence to her left. The bank of rose bushes to her right. It felt almost as much like home as her own suburb.
“Okay,” Clare muttered, turning the wheel.
Everything was familiar, but at the same time, it had all changed. The lawns were dead. Branches had come down, and there was no one to remove them. The windows were all cold and empty in a way Clare had never seen before.
She passed the house owned by the woman with three huskies, but the kennels were quiet and empty. The dogs had to be dead. Eaten, probably by their owner. Nausea clenched her stomach. Dorran seemed to sense it; his hand rested on her shoulder, warm and comforting. Clare breathed deeply as she coasted past the house.
The children were missing from the yard they always seemed to congregate in. Three tricycles had been abandoned on the lawn. Clare wondered if they now made up part of the group that tormented Beth in her bunker. What would a toddler’s fists sound like beating against the metal door?
Clare forced her eyes to move farther along the street, towards the house she knew the best. It was darker and quieter than normal, perhaps a little more worn down than Beth would have let it become, but in some ways, it also looked unchanged. Clare had the sudden idea that she could climb the two steps to the wood door, hear her knocks echo through the rooms, and wait on the clatter of excited footsteps coming to let her in, just like she used to.