Beth sighed. “Clare, baby, it’s not going to happen. You must be hours away. There are hollows all up and down my street. If I try to leave, I’ll die. If you try to reach me, you’ll die. And how can you expect me to handle that?”
Clare closed her eyes. She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “You’ve been in there for two weeks. How much longer can you handle it? People aren’t designed to survive isolation that long—”
“I’m not completely isolated.” A thudding noise came through the speakers, and Clare pictured Beth tapping her radio. “I have this. I’ve been listening to the world. Humanity isn’t dead yet. People are trying to rally.”
“Do they know what happened?”
“No. There are endless theories. But none that make much sense.” Beth exhaled again.
Whenever Beth stopped speaking, Clare could hear the faint scratching noise. It seemed to be growing louder.
“After our phone call was disconnected, the news station I was watching lasted another four hours. They stopped updating the maps of the quiet zones and instead started listing places they still had contact with. Isn’t that horrible? It was faster to list the surviving cities than the lost ones. After each name, they posted the time they had last spoken to someone there. Gradually, the times for some cities grew further and further away… and eventually, they were taken off the list. Towards the end, they were talking about entire countries being gone.” Her voice was pained.
Clare bent close to the radio as the distortion worsened.
“One of the newscasters said he needed to get a glass of water and almost ran off the stage. The other followed about a minute later. Finally, it was just an intern—this miserable, dead-eyed kid—reading off a list of names from a piece of paper. I think his supervisor had told him to do it, and he didn’t know any better. Everyone else had left. Trying to flee somewhere. Trying to reach their families. It was just this kid on national TV, doing his best not to cry as he faced a camera in an empty studio. Then the building’s lights went out. I could hear the kid screaming. I don’t know why. Just scared? Or had the hollows gotten into the building? I don’t know. But that was the last news broadcast. I still have the TV in my bunker, and when the generator worked, I turned it on a few times a day and tried to find some kind of life through it. Nothing.”
Clare stared at her hands. Bandages wove around one, protecting her wrist. “You said there were still people out there, though.”
“Yes. I catch them on the radio sometimes, talking to each other. Not the people I would have expected. No government. No military. From what I can figure out, those kinds of people are pretty much gone. Whatever happened started in large cities first. They were overrun before they even realised there was a problem… before they could even start evacuating…” She took a shuddering breath. “Some of the prepper types survived. People who lived out in the wilderness. People who had their own bunkers. But they’re dropping one by one, and I’m hearing fewer broadcasts each day. The preppers take too many risks. They try to push their luck, to venture outside, to fight back.”
“The preppers can’t be the only people out there. Are there any other survivors?”
“Mostly? People who are hiding. Do you understand what I’m saying, sweetheart? The heroes are dying. If you want to survive, don’t take risks. You have a good thing where you are now. Stay there. Weather it out. We might be able to meet up afterwards.”
“Afterwards?”
“It’s got to end at some point, somehow. That’s what people are saying. Either we find a way to kill them effectively, or they starve.”
Or humanity dies out. Clare tried not to follow that third option. “Are they capable of starving?”
“No one knows. They’re hard to kill. You can hurt them—cut them open, bash parts of their heads in, whatever—but they’ll just keep walking for days afterwards. One man talked about a hollow he caught in his barn. He chopped it in half at its waist, he said, and it just kept dragging itself along the ground. After three days, its spine had started to grow… well, he described it as little claws. It was sprouting crab-like legs out of its back and was using those to scuttle around faster. He killed it properly before it grew anything else.”
Clare remembered the hollows she’d seen. They were monstrous, contorted beyond what a person should ever have to endure. Skin grew. Bones grew. They broke out of their confines, and somehow, the creatures neither felt pain nor collapsed from infection.
Beth chuckled. “They make us humans look awfully fragile by comparison.”
“They sure do.”
“Here’s everything I know about them. They’re like animals. They’re hungry, but they still have some kind of survival instinct. They don’t like light or fire, and they’ll hide if they think you’re a threat. So if you ever get trapped, make a lot of noise and use light to chase them away. But they won’t stay away for long, so safety—somewhere they can’t get to—is always your first priority.”
They won’t stay away for long. Clare knew that firsthand from her time in the forest. The hunger was always pushing them. Eventually, it won over caution. They would never give up until they ate.
“They don’t fight each other,” Beth continued. “But they don’t work together, either, thank heaven. They’ll eat another hollow if it’s already dead, but they always prefer warm-blooded things. Humans or animals.”
“They can’t infect you, can they?” Clare tried not to stare at the bandages on her wrist.
“People say they can’t. It’s not like a virus. It’s… I have no idea. Some people say leaking radiation. That hundreds of nuclear bombs went off without anyone realising, and that’s what’s deforming us.”
“But radiation would kill you long before anything like this happened.”
“That’s what
