The wilderness closed in on her now, though, and awe was tainted with fear.
She moved down from the hilltop into another dip in the landscape and crossed a stream, lifting the hem of her shapeless dress and gasping at the water’s coldness. On the opposite bank she paused, and thought she heard footsteps.
Holly inhaled sharply and held her breath. She looked around, but could see no one, nothing. Animal, she thought, but that brought no comfort at all. It could be anything.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Holly?’ she whispered, but nothing replied, nothing ran at her.
She continued across an open area of hillside, noticing a dense woodland that began thirty metres down the slope from her. She was certain she remembered this from her journey here, but back then it had not felt so threatening. Now she sensed things among the trees, things that smelled like old stale clothes thrown out.
Just spooked, she thought. And as she tried convincing herself of that, she saw them.
Several figures came out of the shadows, little more than shadows themselves. It took only moments to see what they were, and Holly cried out in fear, firing the bolt already loaded into the crossbow. It whispered uselessly away into the darkness. They shuffled uphill towards her, and she was glad that the poor light hid their features.
She sprinted to put distance between herself and the stumbling furies. She didn’t know whether they could run, had no idea if they could track her by her scent. She knew nothing about them and her fear was like a cold rock in her stomach. She had a growing certainty that she was going to die in this older, deader world.
Seeing the furies made her more aware of shadows across the hillside where there should be none, movement that might or might not be plants shifting in the breeze. She paused for a moment and tried to reload the crossbow — there was a rack of six bolts on its underside — but dropped the bolt and cried out as her finger caught in the mechanism. She picked up the bolt and ran on.
It was difficult for Holly to admit that she was lost. Everywhere she saw views that she might have seen when they’d brought her here. But when she followed a gurgling stream in the hope that it might be the one running past the breach, and found herself among ruins, she could no longer deny the truth.
At first she was not quite sure what she was seeing. The mounds were uneven, the plant growth thick. But then she saw an obvious wall on her left, its upper few feet camouflaged with a few lone ivy tendrils, its blocks square and even.
Holly tried to place where she was in relation to her own world — if the hillside had been similar to that location on her Earth, then these ruins should not be here. But she and Drake had failed to pinpoint precisely where the two worlds’ realities had parted and become differing possibilities, and this could be anywhere.
She moved on, because she still sensed the worst dangers were creeping up on her from behind.
It must once have been a small town at least, because the deeper in she went, the more regularly spaced the ruins became. There were house-sized buildings with roofs stripped away and few walls remaining upright, larger structures with sparse steel ribs stark against the sky, and a set of sharp curves that froze her to the spot. Rusted, one of them missing its upper portion, their shape and design seemed unmistakable, and she had always known them as the Golden Arches.
‘McDonald’s?’ she whispered, almost laughing. ‘Fucking McDonald’s!’ But Holly could not pause to wonder. All around her there was movement in the shadows.
She plunged ahead, following what had once been a road. Now was just a clearer pathway between ruins, turning slowly to the left and heading uphill to the shoulder of a narrow valley. For a moment it seemed familiar, and she was struck with a peculiar sense of deja vu, a disconcerting feeling that she was not doing any of this of her own volition. She had walked this way before.
Holly tripped, staggered forward, found her balance, and then tripped again. She dropped the crossbow and put out her hands, cushioning her fall against a wall. She gasped and breathed deeply a few times, trying to calm her galloping heart. And then whatever was moving made itself heard.
Nails against stone, bone against brick. And the ground around her feet shifted.
Fuck fuck fuck — she pushed herself upright and snatched up the crossbow. Something bumped against her shoe. She staggered back a few steps and watched a figure rising, arms splayed against the wall, bony fingers clawing at the ivy-covered brickwork.
Holly knew that she should run but something held her there. A sick fascination at the sight before her. A terror at the old, dry smell released to the moonlight. A sense of unreality at what she saw standing, because now there was more than one. The ivy-clad wall seemed to shiver as the plant stalks were tugged and ripped by many hands, and the shadowy heap along its base resolved itself into terrible shapes. They pushed themselves up through a covering of trailing plants, and their stale stench was mixed with the tang of turned earth. They must have been there for a very long time.
They sense me, Holly thought. And at last that gave her the impetus to run. The old dead town around her rustled as undead things shifted. She clasped the crossbow nervously, conscious that it had only six bolts. Flight, not fight, was her only hope.
As she fled the ruined settlement her lungs burned and her legs ached, but she could never stop running. Every backward glance revealed that she was being followed. She sensed other shadows stirring around her: a wet shape rising from a cold stream here; three small figures crawling from the space beneath a fallen tree there. And while none of them appeared to move quickly, their direction was relentless — up, and towards her.
Holly ran uphill, and as she began to believe that she’d taken entirely the wrong direction and was lost in this place that she had named Gaia she passed a pile of fallen masonry that looked familiar. The first time she’d been here she had been traumatised by her journey through the breach, her senses mangled by memory, the sweat of fear slick on her cool skin and the sight of the blood-drenched Melinda still imprinted on her mind’s eye. Now she looked around and realised the extent of the ruins she had stumbled across. What she had taken to be rock formations were actually leaning walls, clothed in creeping plants, and the stark angles of a bare tree were in fact rusted ribs from a building’s corroded metal roof. Allowing herself a moment’s pause, Holly approached the slumped building where she had rested once before and recognised the place where she had sat. Looking closer at the Exit sign carved in stone, she wondered briefly who had once walked beneath it.
The breach lay downhill from here, in the next valley. The infection was already loose in her Coldbrook, and she had to weigh that knowledge against the risk of leading the pursuing furies through.
In the end, her survival instinct won out.
Down in the valley, the site of the breach was sheltered from the wash of moonlight by the hillside. Yet there was a glow down there, nestled in the shadows like a smudge on her sight. But to the left and right Holly’s night vision picked out a worrying detail — two silhouettes, upright, motionless against the breach’s impossible light.
The idea of being almost home drove her on.
As she made her way down the hillside, she made sure that the crossbow was ready.
Every sense alert, her breath shallow and fast, blood pumping with adrenalin, Holly moved as fast as she dared down to the valley floor. She followed the stream, pausing to glance around after every few steps. I’m going to shoot someone through the head, she thought, but they were no longer ‘someone’. These were little more than remnants, Godless and a travesty against nature. Once they might have had a life, but their stories had come to an end before she was born in a universe far away.