Silence in the Shadows

by Darcy Coates

  No. No. She can’t leave. It’s not safe out there. It’s too cold. There’s no food. I can’t lose her again— Clare hit the foyer at an angle that jarred her leg. She didn’t slow down, though, but dragged the gown’s lapels tighter around herself as she crossed to the front door.

  Its hinges groaned as she dragged it open. Cold air assaulted her. Snow lay across the ground in patches, thin enough that flecks of raw earth were still visible underneath. Boot prints marred it. Clare stumbled onto the steps leading into the courtyard, squinting against the moon-dappled field.

  Something was moving away from Winterbourne, weaving lithely as it loped towards the distant trees. Clare’s voice caught, and she pulled in a ragged breath as she began running after her sister. “Beth! Beth, wait!”

  The figure stopped just long enough to send Clare a piercing look, then Beth kept on her course. She had a significant lead and was already halfway to the forest’s edge.

  “Beth!” Clare slipped on the frozen earth as she lengthened her strides, but refused to slow. The icy air stung her face and hands. Her loose hair fluttered behind her, snatched up by a fierce wind.

  Beth’s lead was increasing. As fast as Clare could run, she was no match for her sister. She would be at the forest’s edge before Clare could catch up, and once she was among the trees, she would be lost forever.

  “Beth! No!”

  Clare was winded. Her limbs, pulled from sleep just minutes before, were heavy. Her lungs burned, and each time Clare breathed out, a plume of mist billowed away from her. Beth was at the forest. Clare staggered to a halt, gasping, her face stinging as tears coursed down it. “No. Beth. Please.”

  Beth turned towards her a final time, poised between two of the massive pines. Her back was straight, her head held high. She pressed a bony hand against her chest, over her heart, and then extended it towards Clare.

  “I love you, too,” Clare whispered. The wind snatched away the words, but she thought Beth still sensed them. Beth turned to the trees, beautiful and wild, her muscles rippling. In the space of a heartbeat, she was gone.

  Clare squeezed her lips together, fighting to hold a moan inside. She wrapped her arms across her torso and buckled over, loss searing her insides.

  Candlelight spread across the ground ahead of her. Then a hand, hesitant and gentle, touched her back. Dorran was beside her, his own gown put on as haphazardly as Clare’s, his hair tousled in the brisk wind, a lantern held to light their steps.

  “She left,” Clare managed, not quite believing it.

  Deep sadness was reflected in Dorran’s eyes. He held his arms towards her, and Clare accepted the hug, burying her face into his shirt.

  “I think…” Dorran hesitated, his hands running over her back. “I don’t think she wanted to leave you. But she needed to.”

  Wasn’t I enough for her? Was she lonely? Did she think she was a burden? She wasn’t. She never would have been.

  Dorran’s chin rested on top of Clare’s head. He spoke softly. “Once, while we were on the road, you told me how you had moved out of your sister’s house. You loved her. She loved you. And it hurt the both of you to be separated. But… you needed to be separate.”

  Clare drew a shaking breath. She lifted her head just enough to see the forest’s edge in the distance. “Because as long as I lived with Beth, I would never be able to grow.”

  “I think she wants to grow now,” Dorran murmured.

  She opened her mouth to argue then closed it again. Objections swirled through her head, deafening. It’s dangerous out there. What if she’s hurt? What if I never see her again?

  Those were the same fears Beth had been plagued by when Clare bought her own house.

  This is different. This isn’t like buying a house in a different suburb. This is real.

  And Beth was strong—stronger, perhaps, than Clare or Dorran. She had survived the stillness, had fought against the new nature being forced upon her, and half mindless, had still returned to protect Clare when she needed it. Now Beth believed her greatest chance at a full life came from throwing herself into the wilderness. She would struggle, but she would also grow.

  Clare didn’t like it. But she didn’t have to. She just had to trust in Beth. She held on to Dorran’s arm as the two of them turned back to Winterbourne, leaving the forest behind.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Days passed, and sometimes Clare and Dorran were kept so busy that they barely had time to speak to each other, let alone relax together.

  Dorran, as always, never complained, but she could tell something was weighing on him. When he finally opened up to her, it was with a quiet voice, late at night, when they were so surrounded by darkness that she could barely see his features. “I am worried.”

  It was five weeks after the stillness’s end. They lay in their bed of blankets beside the fire. Clare was nestled against Dorran, her head on his shoulder, one of his arms wrapped around her back. His fingers played across her skin in small, intricate patterns.

  She’d been half asleep. That might have been deliberate, she realised. Dorran wanted to talk to her, but he hadn’t been able to work up the courage until he thought she wouldn’t hear.

  She ran her hand under his shirt and rested it against his warm skin, so that he could feel her presence. “What about?”

  The silence lasted for a long time. She could feel Dorran swallow, her fingers rising and falling with each breath. Then he said, “This isn’t the life I wanted you to have.”

  “We’re alive. We’re safe. That’s plenty for me.” It was something Clare had been telling herself ever since the stillness ended, on days when her muscles were sore from work, when she wanted to sigh at the sight of more zucchini and tomatoes for lunch, or when she missed being able to walk any distance without the cold consuming her. She had everything she’d been desperate for during the stillness: a house she could live in. Dorran was with her. They didn’t have to fear starvation, and there were no longer hands scrabbling at the doors or windows.

  His head tilted towards her. Firelight caught on his hair and the edge of his face, and although she couldn’t see his expression, she could hear the slow, seeping anxiety in his voice. “You need more than the garden can give. Protein and fats. More nutrition and less work.”

  Keeping Winterbourne running had been easier in the first few weeks after the stillness, when relief outweighed almost everything else. But as more time passed, Clare began to think about the future. And what had once been everything she had hoped for suddenly didn’t seem to be enough.

  Dorran swallowed again. “You are lonely, as well.”

  “I have you.”

  “But you need more than just one person.”

  “No.” She buried her face against him. “You’re my family. As long as I have you…”

  She trailed off, not sure how to finish that sentence. This time, the silence lasted until it ached at Clare’s bones. She had been trying as hard as she could not to think about what they were lacking. She hadn’t wanted to be ungrateful. Now, she realised, that had been a mistake.

  It had put the burden of their future entirely on Dorran’s shoulders and left him responsible for solving it. He didn’t like to talk about his fears. He had probably been stewing on this for weeks, afraid to say anything and unable to share his worries about what the future likely held.

  As Clare finally let herself go down that path, she could see how bleak their choices really were. They had to re-establish contact with the outside world somehow. If they didn’t, they faced a lifetime in Winterbourne, slowly running out of every resource, malnourished, never again hearing another human’s voice.

  This is the fear Dorran has been living with. He didn’t need her to blindly trust him. He needed her help. Clare bit her lip. “Is there anything in the shed that could be used for transport?”

  “I am afraid not. I looked, but there are not even enough parts for a partial motor.” His fingers continued to move in slow patterns.
“I could walk out of the forest. I would try to either find someone who can help, or find a car that still runs and bring it back here.”

  Clare closed her eyes. Even if he could find a car that ran, fuel would be worth more than gold in this post-stillness world. And any easily available fuel supplies would likely have already been looted.

  “I would have wanted us to leave together.” Dorran’s voice was so quiet that she could barely hear it through the wind whipping about the house. “That was always our promise. That we would stay together.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that would mean sacrificing the garden, which is a risk I am struggling to commit to.”

  “Beth might come back, too. I’d want to make sure someone was here, just in case.”

  “Which means you would need to stay here while I looked for transport. If the journey went well, I might be gone for as little as a week. But… I worry, then, too. What if something happened to me?”

  She would stay at Winterbourne, but she couldn’t keep up with the work of two people. Once the furnace room ran out of wood, she wouldn’t be strong enough to chop and transport enough logs out of the forest to keep it running. The garden would die with no heat. She would either starve or die of hypothermia. It was a bleak future.

  And there were so many ways an excursion outside could go wrong. They didn’t know what state the world had turned into. Humanity could be trying to piece itself back together… or it could have devolved into a dog-eat-dog world, where bands of survivors would kill any vulnerable soul they crossed.

  Even if the humans Dorran encountered weren’t hostile, there were a dozen other ways he could be lost. A broken ankle would be a death sentence. If the temperature dropped drastically, he could die of exposure. If he couldn’t find water, he might succumb to dehydration. And it was a long walk from the forest to any sort of habitation.

  Clare couldn’t stand it any longer. She rolled away from Dorran, her pulse pounding, feeling sick. She stood and crossed to the window. Moonlight caught on the snow flurries, turning them into something ethereal. She blinked, furious, fear gripping her more tightly than it had since the stillness’s end.

  Dorran followed her. His arms wrapped around her, warm and solid, shielding her against the chilled night air.

  “I am sorry,” he whispered as he kissed the top of her head. “I did not mean to frighten you.”

  Clare wanted to say, “Promise you will never leave,” but she swallowed the words. If they stayed in Winterbourne, they were condemning themselves to a poor, and likely short, life. It was an impossible, maddening scenario.

  “What will we do?”

  She hadn’t meant to ask that question—if Dorran had an answer for it, he would have told her already—but it slipped out before she could stop it.

  He rested his chin on the top of her head, his sigh ruffling her hair. “We will keep thinking, my darling. We will find a way out.”

  They stayed by the window until Clare’s shivers were bad enough that she let Dorran coax her back to bed. He held her tightly that night. Clare couldn’t sleep for a long time, and even though Dorran didn’t speak again, she thought he might still be awake, too.

  I can’t let him go alone. We can’t both leave. And we can’t spend the rest of our lives in Winterbourne. It is an impossible choice.

  Clare’s sleep was broken. Her nightmares had abated since the stillness’s end, but they returned with a vengeance that night. She saw herself back on the bus, clinging to the seats as the vehicle rocked dangerously. They were going wildly fast, racing through a forest, the trees creating a blur as they passed on either side.

  She called to Dorran, who was driving, asking him to slow down, trying to tell him that it wasn’t safe. He turned around in his seat to smile at her, and she saw the blood running over his chin as his life dripped out of him.

  Clare jolted awake, breathing heavily. The sky was on the earliest edge of brightening: not yet light enough to see clearly, but no longer the deep black of night. There was at least another hour before she and Dorran needed to rise.

  The dream had been vivid, even down to the purr of the bus’s engine. Clare reached for Dorran to reassure herself. She didn’t need to go far; he was still at her side, one arm halfway draped across her, head tilted back as he slept. Clare pressed her hand against his chest. She could feel his heartbeat through his shirt.

  Another noise disturbed the early morning. A slow rumble, the same noise that had come through into her dream. Clare’s pulse pumped, a punch of shock ripping through the tiredness.

  She was really hearing an engine.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  “Dorran!” Clare grabbed his shoulder, urgently shaking him awake. He startled and rolled over, a reflexive movement that shielded Clare. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Listen.” Dorran’s face was barely inches from her, and she could see his wide eyes in the faint light. She gave him a second to hear the rumble. “That’s an engine.”

  He took a sharp breath, his eyebrows rising. “Yes. Yes—quickly.”

  The bedsheets and quilts scattered as Dorran cast them aside. He grasped his dressing gown and pulled it on as he crossed to the door in two steps. Clare was close behind, struggling into her boots, her own gown dragged in one hand as Dorran slammed the bedroom door open.

  An engine. Someone found us. The hope coalesced in Clare’s throat as a painful lump. She ran alongside Dorran, the dressing gown streaming behind her. Cold air bit at her skin, sucking her breath out of her in thin gasps, but there was no room for hesitation.

  They had no way to guess how long the visitors might stay. They could have been searching for a specific location or hunting for animals. Confronted by what looked like an abandoned house, they could very well turn around and return to the forest. And, if they left, they would take Clare and Dorran’s chance of escape with them.

  Dorran bounded down the stairs three at a time. His feet were bare, but that didn’t seem to slow him as he skidded into the foyer. He threw a look over his shoulder, checking Clare was still with him, as he reached for the door.

  She was only a few steps behind him. The door ground open, straining over the ice that had attempted to freeze it shut. The snowfall that day was nearly a foot deep, and fresh flakes drifted through the air, obscuring the view. The scorched bus was half buried under the snow. Beyond that, she thought she saw another shape. Something large. Something that could have been a van.

  Spare boots stood by the door, and Dorran breathlessly pulled a pair on while Clare wrapped the gown around herself. Then he took her hand. A kaleidoscope of emotions played through his eyes. She felt all of them echoed inside of herself, confusing and overwhelming.

  Rescue. A threat. Humans. Strangers.

  Her nerves hummed, filling her with a sudden fear of moving forward. They didn’t know what the strangers wanted. She imagined herself and Dorran being gunned down as they descended the steps. Beth’s words played through her mind: There aren’t many kind people left in this world.

  They could lock the doors, hide, and defend their fortress. It would be safer. But grasping for safety wasn’t how they would build a future. The only way they could survive in this world was if they learned to trust. She trusted Dorran. He had trusted Beth, even after what she had done to him. Now, they would have to trust their lives to the strangers in the van.

  Dorran’s hand tightened over hers. They stepped out together, their boots sinking deep into the snow. They took the stairs cautiously, fighting for purchase in the treacherous snow. The van became clearer with every step. It was an old model, but recently painted black. Windows had been boarded over, much like their own bus. That meant it had been in use during the stillness.

  Survivors. They can be unreliable. This time, it was Ezra’s voice in her head. It would be a gamble of whether they would help me, or whether they would shoot me dead, loot the place, and run.

  Her mouth was dry. Her hold on Dorran’s
hand must have been painful, but he didn’t try to stop her. They reached the courtyard, where shrubs formed mounds in the snow. The burnt-out bus lay like a skeleton on their yard. They passed it, moving closer to the van, its details growing clearer with each step. She didn’t recognise it. The front windows were tinted. Clare couldn’t see inside.

  Please, be kind.

  Then the door slammed open. A figure appeared in the opening, a slightly too-small sweater straining over his muscles, his beard catching snowflakes as they drifted past. His expression was nearly wild: bulging eyes, lips pulled back from his teeth. It would have frightened Clare if the face hadn’t been so familiar.

  “You’re alive!” Johann bellowed. He slapped the side of the van then leapt out, his legs sinking into the snow. “Damn it, I knew you’d be okay!”

  The Evandale scientist began jogging towards them, arms swinging furiously as he waded through the snow. Clare gasped in delight, Dorran’s shocked laughter in her ear, then the pair of them were racing forward to meet Johann. He grabbed them with an arm each and pulled them into a bear hug. Scratchy beard scraped over Clare’s forehead, and her nose was filled with the smell of his leather jacket and floral shampoo.

  For a moment, Clare couldn’t hear anything except their shocked, delighted laughter and Johann’s repeated, “Hey, hey, you’re all right!” Then he released them, grinning, his face turning pink from the exertion and the cold.

  “You found us!” Dorran beamed, one hand on Johann’s shoulder. “How?”

  “Hah! You were pretty secretive about where you were going.” Johann winked. “But I stopped by a place called West Hope a few days back and shared a bottle of scotch with this old fellow who lived there. We got talking and figured out we had a mutual acquaintance in the form of yourselves, and sometime around two in the morning, he might have let slip where to find you. But he made me swear not to tell on him. I guess neither of us are any good with secrets.”

  Clare shook her head, wondering. “That was a lucky encounter.”