Read Online More Than This by Patrick Ness - Free Book Online Page B

ground to come back for later.
    He wipes the sweat from his brow and takes another drink of water. Nothing has moved down the High Street. The glass from where he broke into the outdoor store is still lying there, glinting in the sun. The bats have flown off to who knows where. It’s all just weeds and silence.
    Lots and lots and lots of silence.
    He feels it again. A strangeness. A threat. Something not right with this place beyond all that’s so obviously wrong.
    He thinks again about the prison. It sits out there, unseen, like it’s waiting for him. A huge, heavy thing, almost like it has a gravity all its own, almost like it’s pulling at him to –
    Maybe he’ll take the food back to the house now.
    Yeah, maybe that’s what he’ll do.
    He grows more and more tired as he pushes the cart back down the main road, unreasonably so, like he’s getting over being really sick. By the time he makes it to the sinkhole – the fox and her kits long gone – he feels like he’s run a marathon and has to stop and take in more water.
    He turns down his own street. The cart grows heavier as he approaches his front path, and as much as he doesn’t feel like he should just leave it on the sidewalk, he’s too tired to bring it all in just now. He takes his backpack, the torch, and a couple cans of food and heads into the house.
    The door swings open again under his touch, and he holds up the torch, halfheartedly ready to swing it should he meet anyone who needs clobbering. The hallway is still shadowy, and the light from the torch guides his way in. As he heads down the hall, he thinks he might just heat up some custard next, if it’s still good in these cans. He hasn’t had custard since –
    He freezes.
    The torch has caught the stairs. It’s the first time he’s properly looked at them, the first time a proper
light
has been on them, and he sees –
    Footprints.
    In the dust coming down the stairs.
    He’s not alone. There’s somebody else here.
    He backs up so quickly his new pack catches the door, shutting it behind him, and for a moment he panics at being trapped inside with whoever it is. He scrambles around and gets the door open, running back down the front steps, dropping the cans of custard, looking behind him to ward off whoever might be there –
    He stops by the shopping cart, panting heavily, holding the torch out like a club, shaking with adrenaline, ready to fight.
    But there’s no one.
    No one comes running out after him. No one attacks him. No sound at all from inside the house.
    “Hey!” he calls. “I know you’re in there!” He grips the torch even tighter. “Who’s there? Who is it?”
    And again, nothing.
    Well, of course, there’s nothing. Because even if there was someone, why would they identify themselves?
    Seth looks up and down the street, heart pounding, wondering what to do. All the terraced houses, with their doors shut and their curtains pulled. Maybe
every
house was hiding someone. Maybe this place wasn’t empty after all. Maybe they were just waiting for him to –
    He stops. Waiting for him to
what
?
    This road, these houses. You couldn’t have a world with people in it and have this much stuff undisturbed. You just couldn’t. There were no other tracks in the dirt, no plants broken, no paths cleared. People had to go out, and if they didn’t, they had to have stuff brought to them.
    And nobody but Seth has come down this street for a very long time.
    He looks back at his front door, still open from where he fled.
    He waits. And waits.
    Nothing changes. No sounds, no movement, not even any animals. Just the bright-blue sky and plenty of sunshine to make a mockery of his fear. Eventually, he starts to calm down. All that was true is still true. Even in his day or two (or whatever) here, he’s seen nothing, not one thing to indicate anyone else.
    Not yet, anyway.
    But still he waits.
    Until finally, the adrenaline starts to fade and his exhaustion returns. He
has
to lie down,