by Darcy Coates
Their footsteps reverberated on the marble steps. Clare wondered how high they had to climb. A stitch was developing in her side. Beneath the footsteps, she thought she could hear wailing, banging noises. The hollows. But not from the ground floor. Hollows trapped in rooms.
They passed another landing, and Clare saw what looked like a row of offices. Each of the doors had a frosted glass pane set in them. A blurred face pressed against one. She didn’t have time to stop and watch; they were already turning onto the next flight of stairs.
Peter stopped, bent over, hand pressed to the wall as he sucked in whooping breaths. “Brains… over brawn… should’ve done… more gym.”
“Are you okay?”
His smile was strained. “Not far now.” Then he set off again, still gasping, his face turning red.
Clare’s own feet made a drumming rhythm that conflicted with Peter’s. Dorran’s movements were nearly silent. She could barely see him, but she could feel him, never more than an arm’s length away. The idea of the hollows getting inside the tower weighed heavily as her mind generated visions of what that might entail. With no other exits, the tower would become a coffin built of stone and metal.
Peter skidded as he turned onto another landing and caught himself on the wall. Clare prepared to turn the corner and keep climbing, but there were no more stairs. An immense blast of light came through the windows on either side of them. Clare had the sense that they were so high that the storm was no longer above them, but surrounding them.
Peter shoved the torch into Clare’s hands and wheezed in painful gasps as he fumbled to open the narrow metal door. She stepped to the side, pointing the torch to help him see. Lightning came again, and Clare was too slow to close her eyes against it. For a few seconds, all she could see was a web of harsh white tattooed across her retinas. As she blinked, the swirling shadows from the tower’s upper room returned to her. The lock clicked, and Peter shoved the door open. The room held a medley of machinery Clare couldn’t name.
“Here, please,” Peter gasped.
Clare jogged after him and directed her torch where he pointed. A hulking, cylindrical shape—the generator, Clare guessed—took up part of the wall. Peter wrenched a lid up to reveal a blank dashboard. He pressed a button, pulled a switch, then stepped back.
Clare glanced around, expectant. In the torch’s light, she could make out bulbs in the ceiling. They stayed dead. The machine was quiet. The only noises came from the wind screaming against the tower’s walls, the muffled drum of rain, and the near-constant, bone-shaking thunder.
“Come on, come on.” Peter returned to the machine, pushed the button, and flipped the switch again. Sweat trickled around his wide eyes.
Clare felt the knots in her stomach tighten. The hollows haven’t figured out how to open the doors yet. They weren’t smart enough. But not all of them are mindless. All it would take is one of the clever ones to be in the crowd, to realise the power had gone out…
Peter looked at her, and she could see her own thoughts reflected in his eyes. The dead generator was a ticking bomb.
Chapter Forty-Seven
“Maybe… maybe something came loose inside it…” Peter pulled off a second cover, exposing more of the machine’s insides. He ran his hands across the tangle of wires and pistons inside, wiggling wires, searching for any kind of weakness. Clare did her best to keep her torch focussed on his work. His hands were shaking.
“Your fuse is gone.” Dorran, unfazed, stepped past Clare and gently tapped one of the little glass cylinders near the control panel. “Do you have a replacement?”
Peter blinked at him then began nodding. “Yeah, yeah, there should be replacements somewhere over here—”
Dorran followed him to the back wall. Plastic trays were attached to an alcove above a bench. They began opening them and searching the contents.
“Bring the light over, please?” Peter waved Clare forward. He and Dorran were working on opposite ends of the bench, so Clare scoped around for the best angle. She found a chair, dragged it forward, and stood on it, so that her light washed down over their heads.
Something heavy banged below them, and Clare flinched. She tried to tell herself it was just one of the trapped hollows. The ground floor was so far below that even if the hollows had broken in, she wouldn’t know for several more minutes. The thought wasn’t at all comforting.
“Found it.” Dorran pushed away from the bench and jogged to the machine.
Clare leapt off her seat and followed. He worked quickly. The old fuse popped out, and the new one slid into its place in seconds. Then he pressed the button and pulled the switch, like Peter had done just minutes before. The machine made a choking, gurgling noise, then a deep, steady hum rose. Lights blinked on above them. Clare let her head sag, eyes closed in relief.
“Wow.” Peter swiped the back of his hand across his forehead, his grin falling back into place. “You’re a useful guy to have around, huh?”
Dorran made a non-committal noise. He slipped his hands into his coat pockets and stepped behind Clare, a discreet message that he was passing the conversation back over to her.
She turned off the torch and handed it back to Peter. “Is there any way to make sure the doors stayed secure? Beyond, uh, waiting to see if anything comes up the stairs?”
“I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear there is.” Peter placed the torch on a bench and crossed to the wall. Eight little green lights shone from a display. “These babies reckon we’re safe. They monitor the locks. If any of the windows were open, they would have turned red.”
Clare nodded, relieved. Now that the urgency was gone, she was starting to feel shaky. “You said the generator went out twice before. Is it likely to do it again?”
“Uh…” Peter grimaced as he dragged his fingers through his hair. “Maybe. The storm definitely isn’t good for it. But I mean, as long as the hollows don’t figure out what they need to do…”
The silence hung for a moment. The maintenance room didn’t have any windows, but Clare could still feel the thunder shaking the building.
Peter worked his jaw, seemingly trying to balance what he said next. “On your way here, did either of you encounter any hollows that seemed… more than the others?”
“Yeah. Smart ones.”
“Good. You already know about them.” He folded his arms, rocking lightly as he stared at the generator. “I didn’t want to fearmonger. As long as it’s only the dumb hollows outside, I don’t think we’re in too much danger. They just push and beat their fists. But the smart ones are what I’m really frightened about. They won’t be able to do much to get inside if the locks are in place. But if they see the power go out… or if they figure out how the locks work…”
Clare shivered. “I’ve only seen a couple of them. Are they common?”
“No idea. There would have been a lot in the beginning. But now?” Peter slowly lowered the lids on the generator, running his fingers over the metal. “I know where they came from, at least. The thanites work better with some blood types than others. People with AB-positive blood transform faster and usually have more pronounced mutations. On the other hand, people with AB-negative blood mutate more slowly and usually retain most of their mental functions.”
Clare frowned as she tried to remember her own blood type. She was fairly sure it was A-positive. “AB-negative… that’s the rarest, isn’t it?”
“One of the rarest. It still accounts for something close to five hundred million worldwide, though.”
“That’s…”
“Insane, isn’t it? To think there might be so many of them out there.” Peter shook his head. “But there aren’t. Not anymore. Losing mental function turned out to be a vital element for the hollows to survive this long. Imagine you started to turn, and you were aware of it. Your bones were splitting, your skin was tearing, your body was stretching. You’re constantly hungry, but the only food that appeals is warm, wet flesh. Meanwhile, your friends and family—everyone you love
d—are gone, replaced by monsters. What would you do?”
Clare blinked. Her eyes burned. Dorran rested a hand, warm and steady, on her back. “I… I…”
“At that point, the only solution for a lot of them would be death.” Peter’s shrug was sad. “Put a stop to it before it grows worse. I don’t think very many of those millions are left now. For some, they realised what the future would hold and killed themselves before they had to suffer any more of it. Others went insane from the horror of what was happening to their bodies… or were insane to begin with.”
Clare glanced up at Dorran. His expression was stony. He didn’t seem to want Peter to know about his mother, so Clare kept quiet, as well.
“They’re the most dangerous of the hollows,” Peter said. “Smart enough to problem solve, but also mostly crazy. I don’t know how many are in the city. I doubt they’d be crawling around the outside of the tower—they’d realise the futility. But they might be in the houses or towers surrounding us, watching. And if they see the lights go out and realise the power failed…”
Clare glared at the generator. It was a large machine made of metal, heavy and solid. But in an odd way, it also seemed horribly fragile. It had failed before. It was likely to fail again. And maybe next time, it wouldn’t be fixable.
“Come on.” Peter’s smile reappeared, though it looked less steady than it had before. “Crisis over. Let’s get back downstairs, where it’s warm and comfortable and where we’ll feel a bit safer behind some locked doors. You two must be tired.”
As they left the room, Clare looked towards the window. She couldn’t see the clouds in the darkness, but she could imagine them. Thick, rolling, black. The lightning seemed to be coming more often. The rain refused to lighten. “Did the thanites do anything to the weather?”
“They did. Good guess.” Peter locked the maintenance room behind them then beckoned them towards the stairs. “They’re part machine, part biological. When they were activated—when the code passed between them—it created a tiny reaction similar to an EMP. Insignificant in small quantities. Remember, until then, the thanites were only tested in a lab. I guess Ezra had no way of telling what would happen when they were unleashed en masse. With billions of those reactions per square kilometre, the results were devastating. Phones went out. Cameras, cars, planes. Anything that relied on a computer to function was suddenly dead. And it affected the weather. In most areas, temperatures plummeted. There were sudden snowstorms even in milder regions.”
Clare’s memory of driving towards her sister’s was still clear. One moment, it had been a brisk but sunny morning. The next, she’d entered a snowstorm. Her phone had died. She’d seen a car off the side of the road, its doors open. The realisation of how close she’d come to the activated thanites was painful. She’d probably been spared by only a few minutes. Then Clare imagined breathing in the invisible machines, and her throat closed up again. She pressed her eyes shut and waited for the reflex to pass.
It’s psychological. You were never bothered by the thanites before you knew about them.
“Clare?” Dorran hesitated at her side, one hand held towards her.
She tried to relax her face. “I’m fine.”
Peter was nearly half a flight of stairs ahead of them. Clare quickened her pace. As they followed the twisting stairs back down to the twelfth floor, they passed the immense set of metal doors blocking the labs.
Clare said, “You didn’t finish your story.”
“Didn’t I?” Peter twisted to look back at her.
“After the stillness. After you realised the thanites had spread—what happened to Ezra?”
“Ah.” Peter’s mouth twitched down. “He didn’t… stay long. One of our co-workers kept a gun in the office… for what reason, I don’t know, but like I said, this place was full of eccentrics. We all knew where he kept it. And while I was trying to contact news stations and spread warnings, Ezra found the gun and used it on himself. I guess this world he’d created wasn’t one he wanted to live in.”
“You’ve been alone since then?”
He nodded briefly, and for a second, Clare saw a hint of despair in his eyes. Then he blinked quickly, and the familiar cheerfulness was back in place. “I had the radio. I listened to other people, trying to get data on the situation out there. And I put out my own signal, asking for help.”
“So that’s why you were expecting someone.” Clare frowned. “It’s been nearly a month. I’m surprised we’re the only people who made it here. Have you spoken to any of the other broadcasters?”
They had reached the hallway to their offices. Peter pulled out his ID tag and unlocked the door. “Well, I didn’t want just anyone to hear me. So I disguised my transmission. Remember the signal that played while you were trying to get to the tower? That’s mine.”
“What? The station that plays second-long clips of noise? I thought it was nonsense.”
He laughed as he held open the door for them. “It mostly is! But once every four minutes, I include part of the address. Helexis Tower, Floor Twelve, Inner City. Spoken a syllable at a time. You would have to listen to the station for a while to realise those clips are connected.”
Clare had hated the station. It unnerved her. But she’d had company and security with Dorran at Winterbourne. She imagined her sister’s situation. Beth had been trapped in the bunker with nothing except her radio. Alone, despairing, unable to find any other signal, she might have listened to the station as her only source of human contact. She might have caught the hidden message. And blind in the dark, she might have scored the words into the metal walls.
“Oh,” Clare moaned. Her mind was threatening to spiral, so she pulled it back with some effort. “What…”
Peter reached forward, looking concerned. “Uh, maybe eat some more of the chocolate. Or what about some water? The chairs are over here.”
“No. I’m fine. I just…” She shook her head. “Why did you broadcast it like that? Why not just… tell people?”
Peter settled into his chair, though he still looked concerned. “Caution. To survive the thanites, you needed to be somewhere painfully lonely or in an airtight environment.”
Airtight. That’s why Beth was safe in her bunker, despite living in the suburbs. The room had its own air-filtration system.
“That means an eclectic mix of people made it through the stillness,” Peter continued. “Some were just normal folks who happened to be on a camping trip or were in the right place at the right time. Others lived in seclusion, homesteads that were off the grid or so remote that they had to drive hours to reach a town. Those kinds of people are a mixed bag. On one hand, they can be a little intense. On the other hand, they are really good at surviving on their own, in the way the city people aren’t.”
Clare nodded. Without Dorran, she didn’t know how long she might have survived. He was adaptable and skilled in a way she never would be.
“Then there’s a third group of people. The paranoid ones. The ones who had bunkers, airtight panic rooms, or gas masks, and thought to use them.” He shook his head. “They’re surviving better than the city people, since they were actually prepared. But they’re also the most dangerous group out there. They’re more likely to have guns and to use them. I was frightened of inviting those kinds into the tower. It would be a gamble of whether they would help me or whether they would shoot me dead, loot the place, and run.”
“I guess I can understand that.” Clare glanced up at Dorran for confirmation. His expression was unreadable. “But if it was such a risk, why did you send out the signal at all? If you wanted company, couldn’t you have listened to the broadcasts and travelled to meet one of the survivors?”
“Not quite. I need to stay at the tower.” His grin widened. “I didn’t call you here because I was lonely. I called you because I need help. I’m working on a cure.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Clare’s heart lurched. “A cure?”
“Ezra’s resear
ch is all still here. The development details, the code, everything. Now, it’s not my field of research, but… I’m trying to unravel it.” Peter nodded towards the only computer that was turned on. “And I’m making progress. It’s slow. But I’m getting there.”
“Do you think you can reverse the mutations?”
“No. Not that, I’m afraid. Once the stem cells are activated—once stuff has grown—there’s no reversing it. Or restoring the brain. What I’m trying to do is find a way to kill them.”
“Oh.” Clare tried not to be disappointed. Of course curing the hollows had to be impossible. They had changed too much to hope to bring them back. But the idea of killing them was difficult when they still carried hints of the humans they had once been.
“People are dying in masses every single day.” Peter’s voice caught, and he cleared his throat. “The ones who were travelling when the stillness happened are faring the worst. They were unprepared and don’t have the skills to survive on their own. But the preppers are struggling too. They’re taking too many risks. Some of them are treating this like a live-action fighting game, and their luck eventually, inevitably runs out. The group best equipped to survive right now are the ones who lived outside civilisation; the homesteaders. But they’re starting to vanish too. The hollows are wandering. Every night, they travel farther, looking for more food. Not even the most remote locations are safe anymore.”
Clare chewed her lip. “I used to hear people on the radio. I’d tune in every day to listen to what they’d found and seen. But there are fewer and fewer of them all the time.”
“Poor souls. You saw how many hollows were outside the tower, right? That’s because of my own station. Hollows are attracted to radio broadcasts. The thanites are receptive to the signals—it was how they were activated. Any time a survivor talks through their radio, they’re basically calling to any hollows within a twenty-mile radius.”
Dorran muttered something under his breath. Clare felt cold. She squeezed her hands together until the knuckles bulged.
