by Darcy Coates
Clare glanced up at Dorran. He met her gaze. His expression was placid. She recognised it—he’d worn the same face when she first arrived at Winterbourne. At the time, he’d seemed distant and cold. But now she knew better. He wasn’t calm—the opposite. He had no idea what to do or say when confronted with a stranger, and to compensate, his every movement and expression became guarded.
Clare took a slow breath to calm her heart. She had lost Beth. But Helexis Tower hadn’t been entirely a false hope. They were safe—at least for that moment. She made her tongue move. “Were you waiting for someone?”
“Well, no. I mean, I was. But not someone specific.” He bounced on his feet, his brown eyes switching between Clare and Dorran. “Anyone. Just someone who would hear me and brave the city. I knew it was a big risk. Not a lot of people would be prepared to try it. That’s why I had the loudspeakers and floodlight hooked up and ready. If I’d known you were coming, they would have been running sooner. I only realised you were out there when the hollows started screaming. Lucky I didn’t take a nap, huh? I guess you heard my message?”
Clare frowned. “Your message?”
“To know to come to the tower? Or were you in the city for another reason?”
“Um.” Another glance at Dorran. “Actually, we read the address. It had been scratched into a bunker wall. We had no idea what we would find here.”
He chuckled. “Unorthodox. But hey, it worked, I guess? You came here, and that’s all I’d hoped for.”
A low, soft chattering noise came from behind Clare. She flinched and swivelled. At the same time, Dorran put a hand out and swept Clare behind himself. The room remained empty.
“It’s okay! Don’t worry!” The man lowered his voice and extended both hands, palm out, as though trying to pacify them. “They’re outside. They can’t get in. At least, they haven’t so far.”
Dorran slowly relaxed his guard. The scratching sounded closer than it was. Clare would have thought having covers over the windows would be comforting, but in reality, it left her feeling unsettled. She hated not being able to see the hollows. How many there were. How close they were. The chattering was growing louder. She suspected most of the dispersed creatures were returning now that the radio and spotlight were off.
“I’m sorry, I’m doing a really awful job as a host, aren’t I?” The man broke into a nervous chuckle. “I’m Peter. Dr Peter Wiesner.”
Clare finally pulled her eyes away from the shrouded windows. “Doctor?”
“One of the theoretical ones. Not a medical doctor, I’m afraid.”
“Oh. Uh, I’m Clare. And this is Dorran.”
“Pleasure to meet you.” Peter loped forward, hand outstretched, and shook Clare’s then Dorran’s. His fingers were warm and shaking. From nerves or excitement, Clare wasn’t sure. “Look at you; you’re drenched. You must be freezing. And probably exhausted and hungry too. Let’s go upstairs. It’s going to be a lot more peaceful than down here. And I can get you some dry clothes. Nothing glamorous, but it’ll be better than what you have.”
Clare gave Dorran a final glance, checking he was happy to travel deeper into the tower. He was already watching her, waiting for her decision. He sent her a small smile, and Clare returned it. Peter was already moving towards the reception desk, so they followed.
“Hey, Peter…” Clare wrapped her arms around her chest as they crossed the vast, sparsely decorated foyer. “What is this place?”
Peter stopped beside the reception, where he’d set up his laptop. He took a moment to power it down then slowly turned to face them, fingers knit, smile unsteady. “Well… it used to house a lot of businesses. It was a bit of a hub. But it holds a special significance for the current state of the world. I guess you’d call it ground zero.”
Clare faltered. “You mean…”
“Yeah. It all originated here. The stillness, the monsters…” Peter took a breath and pulled a smile back onto his face with obvious effort. “I’ll tell you everything. But let’s get you somewhere safe and warm first. Follow me.”
Chapter Forty-Three
As Peter picked up the laptop, a loud, screeching wail echoed from outside the building. The front door rattled, and Peter tucked the laptop under one arm. “You don’t need to worry. The tower’s secure. Well, relatively. There are some hollows inside, but they’re all locked in rooms. Those guys on the street don’t ever leave, but when you get to the upper floors, you can’t really hear them much anymore.”
Peter stopped beside one of the security gates and pulled an ID card suspended from a lanyard from under his jacket. He swiped it over the reader, which beeped and flashed green. The gates swept back, and Peter ushered them through before they closed again.
“You have power?” Clare asked.
“A generator. I’ve been restricting what it feeds juice to. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t turn off the security system, so it’s been leeching power. The elevators are out of service, though, so we need to take the stairs. Sorry.” His smile was apologetic. “You’ve probably already done a lot of walking today. Do you think you could manage another twelve floors?”
“Just as long as we’re not being chased,” Clare said.
Peter laughed. “I like your spirit.”
Dorran ran his fingertips across the marble walls as they started climbing. The stairwell was wide and elegant, an echo of the foyer. Every second landing opened into a new corridor with its own set of doors, each with a little plaque set beside it.
“Best to stay away from rooms you don’t know,” Peter said. “Some of them contain hollows. You can usually tell which ones because of the noise, but sometimes they’re silent, and that can be an unpleasant surprise. I’ve locked all of their doors, though.”
Clare gave a slow nod. She was feeling faintly dizzy, and not because of the stairs.
Is he telling the truth? Is this where the stillness spread from? She tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry. She already knew the disease wasn’t infectious—if it was, she would have felt its effects weeks before—but she still felt itchy just touching the bronze railing.
She’d listened to all of the wild theories being bantered across the radio, but Clare had never believed she would find out the cause of the world’s destruction. It had felt like something that was meant to be abstruse. Like black matter; it was a concept that wasn’t ever supposed to be in the hands of average people.
Though… in this stillness, is anyone average? We all survived the end of the world. We’re all remarkable in some way or another.
A hundred questions crammed themselves into her brain, but strangely, she was reluctant to pull any of them out. The idea of knowing more about the disease was frightening. She dreaded what the answers might mean for humanity’s future.
As they passed the fourth floor, she began to shiver. Outside had been cold, but inside the building was worse. It didn’t have heating and still clung to the chill from the snows. The exercise kept her core warm but didn’t do much for her numb fingers.
The higher she climbed, the more she began to dislike the tower. It was too clinical, bordering on hostile. In some ways, it felt like Winterbourne’s opposite. Winterbourne had never been welcoming, but it had held an excess of hostile emotions and passions. Helexis held none.
“Here we are!” Peter skipped as he came off the twelfth floor’s landing. He nodded to the passageway ahead of them. “I’ve been living here. We have food and water, and the heater’s running. It’s not exactly homely, but, uh, I hope you’ll make yourselves at home, anyway.”
Clare read the plaque by the stairs as she passed it. Aspect Laboratories. “You said you were a doctor?”
“I have a doctorate in molecular sciences. My dissertation caught the attention of Aspect—the company that owns this part of the tower—and I was given a grant to explore surgical advancements for eighteen months. Basically, they gave me office space, equipment, and money to live off. In return, they owned part of anything
I created here and would theoretically make bank if I developed anything impressive.” He laughed.
Clare felt faintly nauseated. She forced the words out. “Did your team…?”
“The stillness? No. I wasn’t involved in it.” He stopped beside a thick metal door and rested his hand on it. “But I know how it happened. It’s a long story. Let’s get you dry and fed first, all right?”
Clare nodded mutely.
The ID badge came out again, and Peter swiped over the black box beside the handle. After a quiet beep and a green light, Peter shoved open the door and stood back for them to enter. “Well, here we are. The closest thing I have to home now.”
The room was larger than Clare had expected. It wrapped along that half of the tower in a rectangular shape, with close to twenty windows overlooking the city. Most of the blinds had been closed or angled so that light could come in but the occupants couldn’t look out. She could guess why. Spending weeks staring down at the mass of hollows surrounding him would be a poor way to live.
Furniture had been arranged in the area haphazardly. Desks were propped against walls or standing free in the room’s centre. Most held dead laptops, stacks of binders, and reams of notepaper. A jumble of mismatched couches were arranged into a circle near a kitchenette against the back wall. Bookcases had been stacked anywhere there was room. Most held textbooks and hefty nonfiction titles, but Clare was surprised to see an odd assortment of fiction novels and board games mixed into them. Evidence that the room had been lived in was everywhere. Jackets and scarves hung over the backs of chairs. A pillow had been unceremoniously stuffed between a computer monitor and the painted brick wall. Chip packets and candy wrappers—the kind she expected to come out of vending machines—lay across the floor.
“Sorry,” Peter mumbled as he kicked an empty chip packet under a desk. “Bit messy…”
Clare tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear. “It’s not what I expected. For a lab, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah, this is just our work area. The actual labs are in the floor above us. It’s much more, eh, official up there. This is just where we developed our ideas. Or came to relax.” Peter opened a cupboard near the door. “Aspect was pretty accommodating. They believed that the best ideas came from environments with no boundaries, so they let us get away with a lot. There are bathrooms and showers on the opposite side of the hallway, along with bunks for anyone who needed to spend the night here. Intended for time-sensitive projects, but of course, a few of us were lazy enough to just live here.”
Inside the cupboard was a medley of clothes. On one side were lab coats and white singlets. On the other were what Clare could only imagine were lost-and-found items, including scarves and rain jackets. She glimpsed a man-sized purple onesie with rabbit ears. Peter quickly shoved it aside and dug through the lab coats. “All right… this should fit you, I think.” He tossed a singlet and coat into Clare’s arms then squinted up at Dorran. “Big guy, aren’t you? Try this. It’ll probably fit. Tell me if it doesn’t.”
Dorran wordlessly accepted the clothes.
Peter ducked past them and dug through the stacks of paper on one of the desks. “We weren’t supposed to leave these lying around, but people did. Never thought I’d be grateful for lousy standards, eh?”
He held out two of the lanyards. Clare took the one offered to her. It displayed the photo of a plump red-haired man named Michael Billings. She glanced at Dorran’s. His was from Pauline Rosch.
“Bathrooms are this way.” Peter pulled open the door and pointed to the signs on the opposite side of the hall. “There are showers if you want. Towels in the cupboards. We don’t have any hollows on this floor, so you don’t need to worry about that. I’ll go foraging for some food. Just let yourself back in when you’re ready.”
Without waiting for a response, he turned to the stairs and began jogging down, his bronze hair bouncing with each step. Clare watched him disappear, the lab coat draped over one arm and the ID badge clasped tightly in the other. She glanced at Dorran and lowered her voice. “He’s a bit of a whirlwind, isn’t he?”
Dorran looked exhausted. He glanced down at the clothes he held. “I’m not that big.”
Behind them were two doors: one for the women’s bathroom and one for the men’s. Clare nodded to the nearest door, the women’s. “Can we stick together? I don’t really want to be alone in this place.”
“Yes. Please.”
The door beeped as Clare used her badge to let them in. The bathroom was spacious bordering on excessive, with a shower larger than the one in Clare’s old home, a double vanity unit, and a vase holding fake and slightly dusty flowers. Clare put her clothes on the sink then went digging through the cupboards for towels.
“Are you okay?” Dorran leaned his hip against the sink’s edge, his dark eyes following Clare’s movements.
“Yeah.” It was a lie, but she felt compelled to cling to it. In reality, Clare’s insides were in turmoil, tied up so tightly that she felt like she might be sick. She’d installed so much hope into the tower—hope about what it might hold and what it might mean—that the reality felt like a punch to the stomach. There was no colony of survivors. Just one man. No forming resistance. Just a monolithic tomb. No Beth. No hope.
Dorran lifted Clare’s hand and tenderly kissed its back. Then he pulled her closer and wrapped her in a hug.
“I know I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.” She mumbled the words into his wet jacket, not even sure if he could understand her. “Of course Beth didn’t make it here. I just…”
“I know. It still hurts.”
Clare blinked burning tears back. She refused to let them fall. Dorran needed her to be strong. But now that she had time to collect her thoughts, they were turning in a dark direction. The tower was surrounded. “Dorran… how are we going to leave?” She closed her eyes. “Can we leave?”
He didn’t immediately answer. All Clare could hear were the faint hum of the lights and the irregular drip of water hitting the tile floor. Then he exhaled. “I do not have any answers. But don’t give up hope. We are safe for the moment. We can rest. And if this man is to be trusted, we will know more soon. I do not think he wanted company here simply because he was lonely. There must be some greater purpose. Hold on to hope, my darling.”
Clare nodded. Dorran pulled back just far enough to kiss her lips. It was soft and lingering, and for those few seconds, Clare let herself fall into the sense of security he gave her. She and Dorran separated reluctantly and turned to getting dry.
They faced away from each other as they rushed to undress and get into the new clothes. That floor felt warmer than the ground level, but Clare was still shivering by the time she tied off her new crisp white pants. She pulled the lab coat over the singlet and glanced at herself in the mirror. If she’d had a pair of glasses and her hair had been dry and tied back, she would have looked like she’d stepped out of a pharmaceutical ad.
Dorran buttoned his own coat. He pulled off the impression better than Clare did, with his dark hair swept back and his heavy brows. He flashed her a tired smile and picked up their wet clothes.
Clare collected their waterlogged boots. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Barefoot, they left the bathroom. Clare used her badge to let them back into the main office area.
Peter stood by the circle of comfy seats and waved as he saw them. “You can hang those clothes anywhere to let them dry. Then come on over. We have a radiation heater. And the finest food that Level Four’s vending machines could supply.”
Despite the stress and exhaustion, Clare managed a chuckle. There was something infectious about Peter’s enthusiasm. She helped Dorran drape their old clothes over the backs of chairs and spare corners of desks. As she approached the couches, Clare felt the heat rolling off an old heater and stretched her hands towards it. The coffee table in the middle of the circle held a stack of food—including, to her delight, four apples.
Peter saw her
staring, picked one up, and tossed it to her. “They’re a little old and going mushy, but still good. You’ve probably been living off long-life food, right?”
Clare nodded as she clasped the apple in both hands and took a bite. It had lost most of its crispness. She didn’t care. It was food and hadn’t come out of a tin or a bottle. She thought she could eat a dozen of them without stopping.
Peter tossed a second apple to Dorran then dropped into one of the seats, pulling his legs up under himself. Dorran turned the apple over in his hands but didn’t try to eat. He chose a double seat a little separated from Peter, and Clare took her place beside him. The radiation heater was close enough that she could stretch out her legs and warm her toes. She finished the apple in seconds.
“There’s a bin just behind you,” Peter said, pointing over her shoulder. “We’ve got to be careful with waste. No garbage man to take out the trash, no cleaners to come through and sanitise the place… I don’t know how long I might be living here. I’ve got to be careful not to turn it into a toxic wasteland. All it would take is a minor rat infestation, and life could become very unpleasant.”
“Right.” Clare threw her core into the bin then took a tissue from the table to dry her fingers. “I guess that’s the kind of thing we need to think about these days.”
“Exactly. It’s amazing how busy my days can become with mundane tasks I took for granted before. I keep all of the trash locked in one room on a different floor. My work area has to stay hygienic.”
Clare glanced behind them, where chip packets were still littered between the desks.
“Hah! All right, except for that.” Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “In my defence, it’s not mine. I can’t bring myself to clean up my co-workers’ areas. I lived with those people for the last year, and now, their clutter is one of the few parts of them I have left. I could have this room spotless… clear off the laptops and discarded jackets and trash… but that would be like erasing them from existence. And I can’t make myself do it. Not just yet.” He continued to smile, but his lips twitched.
