Chapter Twenty-Three TESNI
TWENTY-THREE
TESNI
The moment the code comes through the radio, I take the scarf out of the bag, then bury the plastic under the blankets on the roof.
It’s too noisy, the crinkle of a plastic bag, and it might wake the others as we sneak out.
I wake Emily, force her to down the rest of the energy drink, then abandon watch duty.
Past the nurse’s station, we dip through the double swing doors that open to a long corridor. Neither of us turn on our lights—not yet, not as we tread through the corridor to the stairwell at the end, then down to the bottom floor.
With each soft step, I drag the scented scarf along the walls. It’s only when we’re slipping out of the stairwell and into the lobby of the hospital that Emily flicks on her torch.
Her voice is a whisper, “Why do you have that?”
I pause at the steel-framed doors and smear the scarf around the glass. “The scarf? She has something of mine, too. And yours.”
A pair of socks Bee stole from Em’s bag.
Emily’s boots thud too loud on the hard floor. “Why?”
Out the corner of my eye, I see her light bobbing for the door at the end of the lobby. The guns are tucked under her arm, one semi-automatic rifle, one shotgun.
“In case one of our scents are picked up by a stray—we can redirect them.”
Emily leans her hip into the push-bar, but doesn’t open the door just yet. “Where are we going?”
I stuff the scarf into the chrome bin. “A brewery, up north.”
“A brewery?” The wrinkled doubt on her face is predictable. Emily hasn’t been on in the ‘in’ with our meet-points. “How far away is it?”
The look I throw her is grim. “About a five-hour walk. The energy drink makes more sense now, yeah?”
“Why so far away? Can’t she meet us here, or at least closer—in the city?”
Oh my god, please stop with the questions.
If I have to deal with this the whole way, I’ll throw myself into the path of a stray.
“Bee’s got a head-start. It’ll cost her too much time to round back for us.” I don’t share the particulars, because, “We don’t have time for this. Let’s go.”
With that, I jerk my chin, and it’s enough for Emily to push her weight into the door. It’s silent as it opens, but heavy, and her boots press into the flooring for a moment before there’s a gap large enough for us to squeeze through.
I steal the shotgun into my gloved grip before I slip through the gap. I take point, and Emily flicks her torch off to shadow me.
The chill of the outside is without its earlier winds. More settled now. But as we trek the streets, the folded map in my pocket for easy access, it isn’t relief that follows us from the lack of winds lashing at us. There’s a silence to it, an uneasy, unsettled feeling creeping over us.
Too quiet.
Too still.
I don’t hear the calls of birds, the distant moans of deer, the groans of cold buildings.
Often, in the quieter moments, the calls of still-surviving nature can be heard. Sure, it’s selective, like I’ve only ever seen one moth in all this time in the blackout, and it flew into Ramona’s face.
I haven’t seen worms or mosquitos since the blackout. But I’ve seen bees and bears and even butterflies, and stampedes of horses, whether wild from the beginning or wild now.
I’ve seen so much still out there.
I wonder about it sometimes.
In the quiet moments where we tuck ourselves away in some hiding spot, and everyone sleeps around me, I hang onto thought, to consciousness, and I let myself wonder if somehow the sun is still shining far above us, if the rays are filtering through the thick blackness and touching the earth, or the darkness itself is changing the world, changing the plants and the animals and the earth, like a rapid evolution, and nature survives it.
How else are there trees still standing, animals still out there, flowers in the warmer seasons?
But then there’s that cactus.
I’ll never get that cactus out of my mind. It was before the dark fae marched down that road, and Ramona was still alive, we were camped out in remote Cali, a barren space, no abandoned houses around, no ransacked shops, with a view in every angle.
I snuck off to find a bit of privacy. A girl’s gotta go, and periods don’t stop in the blackout.
I had my torch with me, and when I squatted behind a bush, and the faint light glossed over a little bunch of cacti, I froze. For a while, I just squatted there, staring at this one cactus, bang in the middle of the other two.
The other two were normal.
Green, prickly.
Just what anyone would picture when thinking of a cactus.
But the other…
The one that stood taller that the two flanking it, looked bloated somehow, as though it’d eaten a hearty meal that pulsed in its belly, pulse, pulse, pulse—but if that was the part that froze, then the part of the cactus that sent me running back to the camp was that it was black.
Pure, inky black. Glistening, liquid-like.
The nettles were a dark hue of poisonous purple, no other way to say it, really. I was looking at a cactus that had no business looking the way it did.
I’ve mulled that over for months and months. I come to the same understanding each time. It’s not a deformity.
It’s evolution.
We, the people, are adapting to the dark. But the earth is evolving into it. We survive in it, the earth is changing, thriving—and in time, this will be a world we don’t recognise.
Any humans surviving out there, the ones that maybe, just maybe, might escape the blazes and the swords of the dark fae, what sort of world will their survival be in?
A place they don’t know.
A place that isn’t for us.
The dark warriors aren’t just invading our world. They aren’t just taking it. They are changing it.
It’s an understanding that sways in my gut.
Even now, I feel that hollow, carved sway of anxiety in me as I hike the road, the snow crunching beneath my boots, Emily at my heels, my light washing over the rusted remains of a highway; I felt it all the times we stopped for the night, or what we think is night, because we are tired, and I am meant to find sleep as easily as the others do; I feel it even when Bee makes me promises I’m not so sure she can deliver, because at the end of it, who are we to stand against them?
That anxiety has lived in me since the blackout first came—and it hasn’t gone anywhere, not for a moment. I get no relief from it.
No matter how I might look from the outside, my stomach is a constant storm at sea. It is a plague that crawls up my insides, over my tense shoulders, even tingles in my fingers.
At some point, that breaks a person, right?
If it wasn’t for Bee…
If it wasn’t for Bee, I wouldn’t be walking in silence with Emily for hours—
Until we’re far up the highway, and Emily stops to slump against an abandoned car.
Folded over, she rubs her legs, up and down, up and down. “How much longer?”
“Sore or cold?”
She huffs the word in a cloud of mist. “Both.”
I reach down for the CB latched onto my belt. The edge of my thumb flicks the speaker button.
Bee’s voice is an instant relief. “You ok? How far out are you?”
I spread the map out on the hood of the car.
Emily shoves herself up to perch on the edge. “We passed that,” she says and taps her gloved finger on the church landmark.
I nod because I know.
I’ve been tracking everything we passed to this point, every street sign, every sign towering over the highway, and the highway checkpoints.
“We’re passed the university,” I speak into the radio, a more accurate position than the church an hour back. “Looks like we’ll be coming up on the lake soon—yeah, the Woodsdale turn off.”
“You stayed on the highway too long,” Bee tells me. “You’re headed to the west side of the lake. Get off at the next turn and walk the east side up the lake. I’m passing it now.”
I stayed on the highway because the earlier turns were impassable, all rubble and debris from armies been and gone. But I only say, “How far are you from the brewery?”
“Maybe a half-hour.”
Emily folds her arms around herself. “How long until we get there?”
The corners of my mouth tuck into my cheeks. “Another hour.”
And some minutes more, probably.
That’s the length of the lake.
Highway or not, an hour to walk the length of it, then more to reach the brewery through the holiday park.
Before Emily can plead her case, the predictable ‘can we just stop here for a rest, I only need a lie-down, we can hide out in one of these cars’, I fold the map and give her a steady stare. “Let’s go.”
Her face tightens.
“We’ll rest at the brewery.”
With a huff, she slips off the edge of the car. Her boots thud on landing.
And we do as Bee suggested, veer off the highway at the next turn, then cut left when we can, and start up the lake.
It gives me solace that she’s on this path, far ahead, sure, but straight through the dark.
The radio stays on between us, but with the faint crackling, neither of us are reaching out in the silence, until that static softens with Bee’s voice, “I’m coming up on something. Caravans, I think.”
“You mean RVs?” Emily says.
I ignore her and bring the radio to my cold lips. “The holiday park.” Bee must be closing in on the end of the lake. “Go through the park and follow the dirt road to the right—it’ll lead you to the brewery.”
The pause that comes is thick.
The radio is solid in my grip, weighty, and I hold it to my face as we trek. Nothing but trees on our right, frozen water to our left—and silence from the radio.
I press my thumb to the speaker button. “Bee? Did you hear me?”
Silence.
“Bee? Do you read me?”
Heartbeats pass, one, two, three, then—
“Is that you?” Bee’s voice is a pitched whisper through the radio.
Emily throws a frown at me, walking at my side now, but my stare is aimed only at the CB. “Is what me?”
Bee’s uneasy voice breaks through the static. “How far up the lake are you?”
I shake my head. But that’s pointless, since she can’t see me. “We’re not even halfway up the lake.”
Emily huffs.
I ignore it.
“You’re not—” Bee’s voice falters for a beat, then returns in a hushed panic, “Someone’s here.”
My heart sinks, the beats thumping in my gut.
Before I can press the speaker button again, Bee’s panicked whisper returns, “Someone’s running—I can hear them. They’re coming up the trail. That’s not you?”
One word is quick to growl out from my gritted teeth, “Run.”