“I know.” Girard had taken a seat on a nearby tree stump and she was a little heartened to see he had one of the drinks, too. “But they are pretty effective for a short while.”
As they ate and drank, Girard pulled the radio phone out of his pack and tried it again, shaking his head in answer to Hallie’s silent question.
“Still no signal.” There was a note of concern in his voice that hadn’t been there earlier.
“Should we try climbing and see if that helps?” Hallie asked. The road had been relatively flat, winding through the trees, but she remembered seeing a lot of hills in the brief look she’d gotten from the helicopter.
“It’s probably the trees,” Girard said. He frowned for a moment. “From memory, the ground around the mainsettlement is more open, near the coast. That should give us a better chance to get through. Or it could still be the storm. It will still be between us and Daydawn.”
Hallie nodded, trying not to worry too much and finish her snack.
The protein bar was a good counter-point to the sticky sweetness of the drink. When she’d finished both, Hallie sat and breathed, feeling some life returning to her body. Enough that she was able to notice the smells and sounds around them. There were some winter berries growing not far away, the tart and sweet scent carrying clearly through the air. One of the nearby trees had a wound in its bark, sap seeping out, adding a bitter note. And then there were the unfamiliar scents of the damp earth, and faint smell of leaf rot from fallen leaves mixed in with the tangled undergrowth. She could hear a few birds calling. Perhaps individuals marking their territories or keeping touch with their fellows. There was a sigh of wind through the leaves high overhead, and the faint rustling of creatures in the undergrowth. All things that she wasn’t used to, but which felt safe and normal in this environment. If she’d had more energy, she would have wanted to get up and explore just for the sake of looking around. As it was, she was happy to sit still and draw in whatever she could from her stationary post.
Girard made a faint, choking sound and she looked over to find his face was pink, all the way to his ears.
“Are you alright?” Hallie asked, concerned.
“I just realised what I said earlier. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest you looked bad,” he said, clearly embarrassed.
“What? You said I looked worn out. That’s fair,” Hallie said, frowning. “I don’t see why that’s a problem?”
“You’re not offended?” he asked, as if amazed by the idea.
“No. It was honest,” Hallie said.
“You really are remarkable,” Girard said, colour fading and a smile pulling his mouth.
It was Hallie’s turn to blush. She could tell he was completely sincere. And as much as she liked him, and their time together, she was still not used to compliments. “I never know what to say when you say things like that,” she confessed.
“You don’t need to say anything,” Girard said, still smiling. “I like paying you compliments.”
And Hallie really didn’t know what to say to that. She ducked her head down, heat still in her face, but there were no answers on the ground between her feet. Like her environment, this relationship was new to her and she was still working out how to navigate all of it. She drew in a deep breath, feeling her body growing stiff and cold, and caught a trace of something in the air.
“What is it?” Girard asked, in quite a different voice, as her head came up and she started looking around.
“I’m not sure. I caught a scent. Something … dark.” Her nose wrinkled. “It’s too faint for me to get much more than that.”
Girard was on his feet, shrugging his pack back into place. Hallie copied him, trying not to grunt with effort. She saw Girard watching her closely and tried to look awake and alert, not wanting him to worry about her. She felt better than she had when they’d stopped walking, but was still tired. The pack settled back into place and she fastened the straps as she followed Girard back to the road.
“The road’s easiest to walk on, so we’ll stick to it for just now. Let me know if you sense anything else,” Girard said. She noticed that he had a hand on the holster of his gun and had deliberately placed himself in front of her as they started walking along the road again. She thought about objecting to that, but he was wearing body armour and knew how to use the gun. If they ran into trouble, he was better prepared for it than she was.
“I will,” she promised.
Chapter ten
Theyhadn’tgonemuchfurther when the trace in the air grew stronger.
“Ugh. I’m smelling burning. Smells like rubber. Absolutely foul. And a trace of rot,” Hallie said. “Something’s dead not that far away.”
“Off the road now,” Girard said, urgency in his voice.
Hallie followed him off the path into the undergrowth and then further away, into the denser forest. There wasn’t enough room for them to walk side by side, so she did her best to keep up with him. He wasn’t moving fast, but he was far more graceful and agile than she was in making his way between the trees, somehow managing not to get caught up in the lower branches or the tall grasses and ground-covering plants that filled every space between the trunks. He’d grown up with access to wild country like this, and it showed. Hallie had to watch every footfall, to make sure she wasn’t about to get her boots trappedin some trailing frond of sticky leaves or trip over an unexpected lump on the ground.
Her surroundings looked like chaos to her. There were giant trees with almost bare earth around their trunks, almost no light getting through their leaves high above. There were slightly smaller trees with grasses and shrubs growing around their base, some of the shrubs as tall as she was. There were odd openings in the tree cover overhead allowing denser ground plants and cover to grow. Everything merged and tangled together and it was amazing and confusing at the same time. If they hadn’t been working, Hallie would have wanted to stop and explore the different plants and trees she could see around them and follow the different scents she could catch from something sharp and citrus to something more mellow, like melting sugar. It was all fascinating and it took a great deal of willpower to keep focused on the task at hand.
As they walked, the smell of burning rubber grew stronger in Hallie’s nose along with the sweet and sickly note of decomposition. Something was definitely dead. Something large.
“Smells are getting stronger,” she told Girard.
