Nightmare City

by Klavan, Andrew

  He’d lost his sense of direction. He wasn’t sure where he was. He wasn’t sure which way to go. But the monsters were closing in to the left of him, so he turned to the right, made his way around the fender of the car, and headed into the white murk.

  The fog embraced him. Moving blindly, he half ran, half staggered forward. Guessing the direction, he tried to angle his way back to the road. He got it right. A few steps and he stumbled over the curb—nearly tripped, nearly went down, but was then running over the open asphalt with the mist drifting by his face.

  He felt afraid. Worse than afraid. He felt hopeless. The fog was everywhere. The creatures were everywhere. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t see where he was going. How could he ever expect to escape?

  The voice of the Lying Man played in his head.

  I’m waiting for you wherever you go. Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive. Me and all my friends. You can’t get away from us.

  Maybe he was right, Tom thought. Maybe going to the school was a mistake. Or maybe the Lying Man was just trying to scare him, to keep him away from the place where his memory was, where the truth was.

  Yes, Tom thought. Yes, that was it. The Lying Man would say anything to keep him from finding out the truth, to keep him from . . .

  His thoughts were cut off by a high, hollow, echoing shriek as a malevolent lunged out of the fog, reaching for him.

  Tom screamed and twisted away. He felt the thing’s claws slice through his sleeve and nick his shoulder. He felt darkness swim up through his mind at the poisonous contact. He staggered back, nauseous, unsteady. The malevolent recovered its balance, turned, preparing to lunge again. Tom braced himself. He grabbed the Warrior bat in both hands. He pulled it back over his shoulders.

  With another awful shriek, the malevolent rushed at him again, its distorted features careering toward him out of the fog.

  Tom swung with all his might, swung for the fences.

  The bat connected—but it wasn’t a good hit. The creature was too close. It jammed him. The thinner midsection of the bat struck the beast on the arm. The impact wasn’t solid enough to knock it down. But the thing did stagger a few steps to the side. That gave Tom the chance to dance away from it, stepping back quickly out of its reach.

  He almost bumped into the malevolent right behind him. Fortunately, the thing let out an eager, hungry shriek and Tom heard it. He spun around—just in time—the beast was nearly on him. It was lurching forward, its eyes gleaming, its dagger-like claws extended toward his face.

  There was no time for Tom to bring the bat around again, so he jabbed with the head of it. It hit the malevolent in the throat. The creature gagged, and a nauseating green slime came out of its mouth as it tumbled over, clutching at its own neck. It fell to the pavement, writhing and choking and spitting.

  Tom didn’t pause to watch. He knew the first beast was coming after him. He turned—and there it was, nearly on top of him. And here came the others, an army of hulking shadows limping toward him out of the swirling white.

  The closest creature gave a high-pitched snarl, its sunken nostrils flaring at the scent of him, its eyes bright with hunger.

  Tom heard Lisa’s voice as if she were whispering into his ear: The doctors say if they lose you again, if your heart stops beating again, they doubt they’ll be able to revive you. They doubt you’ll be strong enough to make it back.

  He didn’t hesitate. He cocked the bat again and swung full force. There was a sickening thud as he made home-run contact with the nearest creature’s head.

  What happened next was too disgusting to describe. Even the howl the creature made was so awful that Tom, hearing it, felt as if his blood had turned to ice. In the next second, what was left of the malevolent was writhing at Tom’s feet, transforming, smoking, boiling and bubbling into a hideous goo.

  Tom took one second to gape at the mess where the creature had been. But that was all the time he had. The rest of them were closing in fast; the one in the lead was so near that Tom could see its burning eyes and the white flash of its sharp teeth.

  He turned. He saw the other monster—the one he’d hit in the throat—lying in his path. It was also starting to smoke and melt, its substance bubbling and dissolving into the pavement.

  Tom took a long step and leapt over the thing where it lay.

  He ran.

  19.

  He ran—and the mist surrounded him. It chilled him and turned his sweat cold and clammy. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see two feet ahead of himself. With each step he expected one of the beasts to loom suddenly out of the whiteness in front of him. Now and then, as he raced on blindly, he caught a glimpse of the things hunched and skulking in the depths of the white. They were keeping pace with him, tracking him, waiting for him to get tired, waiting for him to stop and rest so they could close in for the kill.

  And he was getting tired. He was already out of breath. His legs were beginning to ache. His lungs were burning. His speed was beginning to dwindle away. He couldn’t keep this pace up much longer. He needed to rest.

  He dared to take a look back over his shoulder now. Nothing but whiteness. He looked forward. Whiteness. He glanced to the right and the left. White and white. Maybe he’d lost them. Maybe he could pause for just a moment . . .

  He slowed to a jog. He slowed to a walk. Almost at once, he heard a bizarre, echoing squeal right behind him. He spun to look, panting.

  “Oh no,” he whispered.

  The fog was suddenly full of them. So many. A whole army, it looked like. Close and moving in. He could hear the harsh snorts of their breathing. He could hear the whisper of their shuffling footsteps. He could see them slumping closer and closer, their forms becoming clearer and clearer as they moved in on him step by slow step.

  Just then he heard something new. A soft whisper. A gentle rattling noise above his head.

  It was the wind. Now he could feel it. The wind was lifting, stirring the leaves on the trees. The fog began to move and shift with the current of it. Tom began to hope: maybe . . .

  He looked around. Yes, there, in the direction he’d been running: the mist was growing thinner.

  The wind continued to blow. The mist continued to disperse. Slowly, something new was becoming visible in the whiteness.

  What was it? He wasn’t sure at first. Just a cluster of strange shapes and shadows. He couldn’t figure out what they were. But there was no time to think about it. The malevolents were closing in, dozens of them. Another few seconds and they’d be on him. They’d tear him to pieces. He had to go toward where the fog was parting.

  Even with death so near, he had to force his weary legs to move. Ignoring the ache of his muscles, ignoring the burning sensation in his lungs, he started running again.

  The wind grew stronger. The fog tumbled dizzyingly around him, leaving him disoriented, off-balance. Still, he managed to stumble toward those bizarre shapes in front of him. They started to become clearer. Now he began to see them through the mist. Was it possible they were . . . ? Yes . . .

  Tom felt the hope swell inside him. With his last reserves of energy, he put on an extra burst of speed. The fog continued to thin around him as the wind grew stronger. He ran—and finally, the great mass of mist parted, parted as if a pair of huge hands had seized it on either side and pulled it open like curtains. The edges of white drew apart, threads and tendrils lingering between them. And then even the tendrils blew away and the scene was revealed.

  He was in the playground. He had stumbled into the playground of the lower school. It was a sandy pit filled with equipment and structures. Those weird shapes he’d seen—they were the climbing frame, the slide, the crawling tube, the seesaw, and the carousel. Once the fog was peeled away from them, their colorful plastic shapes weren’t strange to him at all. He passed this playground on the way to school every day. He knew it well. He’d played here as a little kid.

  Quickly, Tom looked around. T
he wind had blown the fog back from the edges of the sandpit. It was as if an invisible barrier was holding the mist at bay. Tom could still see the monsters in the whiteness behind him. He could still hear them shuffling and grunting. But they couldn’t come any closer. They couldn’t breach the fog to enter the clearer playground. They drifted back and forth in the mist in hungry frustration.

  He was safe. For the moment.

  Exhausted, gasping for breath, weak with relief, Tom felt his knees go wobbly under him. The Warrior bat dropped from his trembling fingers, making a metallic sound as it hit the sand. He staggered and had to grab hold of the climbing frame’s post to keep himself up. His eyes lifted and he saw—he almost couldn’t believe it—he saw the sky! The blue sky made pale by the last thin layer of mist. Could it be that the fog was clearing?

  It was. He leaned on the frame and peered off into the distance. The wind continued to stir and the fog continued to blow away from before him.

  And now, like a magic city emerging from the clouds, a welcome and familiar scene appeared. A grassy hill. A winding asphalt path along the top of the slope. And at the peak: the school, his school, Springland High.

  He was almost there!

  Tom would never have thought he could be so glad to see the place. The school was not exactly a crystal fairytale palace to look at. Just a sprawling one-story structure of brick, metal, and glass. It was a building Tom came to almost every day. He had become so used to the sight of it that he hardly noticed it at all most of the time. If you had asked him, he would have had to think for a minute before he could say what it looked like. But he noticed it now, all right. He saw it clearly. And what it looked like to him was a refuge, a place to hide, a place to get away from the army of murderous creatures behind him and begin to find the answers he so desperately needed. The woman in the white blouse. The address he’d scribbled down and left in the office of the Sentinel. The path back into his memory and the secret of what was keeping him in this coma, so close to death.

  He had to get up that hill. He had to hurry, too. He did not know how long the wind would continue blowing, how long the fog would hold off.

  He pushed wearily away from the climbing frame until he was standing on his own. He looked back into the mist out of which he’d come.

  The malevolents were still there, still milling along the edges of the marine layer. They snarled and pawed at the churning whiteness as if hoping to break through into the clear. But they couldn’t do it.

  Tom turned away from them, turned back toward the school. The wind continued to blow, making a path for him through the mist, a clear path up the hill. He took a step toward it.

  Remember the Warrior.

  Right. He’d nearly forgotten. He bent down and picked the baseball bat up out of the sand. Then, gripping the Warrior in one hand, he started moving. He trudged over the playground sand to the edge of the grass. He started up the hill.

  It was slow going. His legs were so tired from running. He was still out of breath. Even this small climb was an effort. His shoulders slumped, the bat bumping over the sod behind him, he trudged upward.

  He was just about halfway to the top when there was a new noise. A dark rumble inside the rising rush of the wind. Thunder. Tom felt a fresh twinge of anxiety. The last time it had started to rain, the monsters had gotten him. He couldn’t let that happen again.

  He paused. The cold air rushed over him. He could feel the storm coming. He looked back down the hill. The pillowy whiteness of the fog was on the move again. It was beginning to roil with the wind. It was starting to roll forward, over the edges of the playground where Tom had just been. Even as he stood there watching, the climbing frame began to fade and grow dim, then the seesaw . . .

  The fog was coming after him. And with the fog came the malevolents. Tom could see them moving into the playground, limping amid the equipment, searching for him.

  Another low rumble of thunder. No time to waste. He faced forward again, up the hill, toward the school. But before he started moving, he saw something that made him pull up short. Something inside the school. Something alive.

  There was a long line of windows in the front of the school. They were tall, the panes starting just off the ground and rising to about shoulder height. The lights were off inside the building and the windows were dark. But as Tom looked, he was almost sure he saw a slow movement behind the unlit glass.

  Where are you headed now? To your school? I’ll be right there when you arrive.

  Tom shuddered at the memory of the Lying Man’s promise—or was it a threat? Were the Lying Man and the creatures he controlled already ahead of him? Were they already waiting for him inside the building?

  He swallowed. He glanced back over his shoulder. The wind continued to blow and the fog continued rolling toward him up the hill. Already, most of the playground equipment had disappeared in the whiteness. Already, the first of the malevolents were limping toward the bottom of the slope.

  Tom had no choice. He had come this far. There was nowhere to go but forward.

  He began to climb the hill again. He neared the school slowly. He reached the path at the top of the slope. Just as he did, another movement at one of the school’s windows caught his eye.

  This time it was unmistakable. A figure was emerging from the darkness inside the school. It was approaching the window.

  The thunder rolled. The wind blew. The fog rolled toward him up the hill.

  The figure inside the school became clearer—and even more clear. It pressed itself against the glass and looked out at him.

  “Gordon?” said Tom out loud—but his voice was lost in a fresh rumble of thunder.

  It was. It was Gordon. The Tigers football star stood for a moment, pressed to the window. He peered out at Tom with a strangely empty expression on his face. Slowly, he lifted his hand in greeting.

  But before Tom could respond, the thunder rolled again like dark laughter. There was a first flash of lightning. And Gordon drew back into the darkness of the school’s interior and vanished like a ghost.

  INTERLUDE THREE

  There came a nightmare day. A Wednesday afternoon. The last class period but one. For Tom, that meant PE. He and ten other guys doing gymnastics, climbing ropes in the gym, working on the horse and the beams and the mats and so on. When the class was over, the guys headed into the locker room. They showered. They got back into their street clothes. Tom was standing in front of his locker, buttoning his shirt, when he felt that something was wrong.

  He looked up. Looked around him. Where was everyone? Somehow, while he was concentrating on getting dressed, all the other guys had quietly slipped out of the locker room. The place was empty. He was alone.

  Alone—and then not alone. The locker room door opened and three guys came in. Not just any three guys. Three Tigers. Big Tigers, too—jumbo size—from the defensive line: Matt Halliwell, Hank Thatcher, and Dub Simpson.

  As Tom stood staring, they moved in on him. They stood around him in a semicircle. Tom’s back was against his gym locker. There was nowhere for him to run.

  Tom’s fingers were still fiddling with the last button on his shirt. He didn’t even have his sneakers back on yet. He was in his socks. He realized this must’ve been part of some kind of plan: the other guys slipping out, leaving him alone; the three football players converging on him. His mind raced, trying to think of an escape strategy. He came up with nothing. He felt just about as helpless as it was possible to feel. If these guys wanted to rough him up, he was going to get majorly roughed.

  Matt Halliwell spoke first. Broad-shouldered, fat-faced, flat-faced, with black hair so short it looked like iron filings standing up on top of a magnet. He put a finger the size of a sausage against Tom’s chest. Poked him hard.

  “Nice story you wrote about us, wimp,” he said.

  Dub Simpson, shaped like a cinder block and about as smart as a cinder block, shoved Tom’s shoulder with his open palm.

  “What’d you
have to do that for?” he said.

  Tom’s eyes flashed from Matt to Dub—and then to Hank Thatcher. Hank looked away, frowning. What a weird situation this was! Hank was one of the sources for Tom’s story. Hank had been a benchwarmer on the championship team three years before. He had seen the players taking drugs himself. He had pictures of them and e-mails from them proving it. He had met Tom in a parking garage one dark night. Handed the evidence over in a rolled-up manila envelope. But he had given Tom that information on the condition of anonymity. Tom had promised never to reveal his name. And now Hank, to protect his secret from his teammates, was joining with the others in taking vengeance on him—and Tom was bound by his promise to keep his mouth shut about it. If this was irony, then irony stank.

  “You should’ve kept your stupid opinions to yourself,” said Matt, poking him in the chest again.

  “Nobody asked you what you thought,” said Dub.

  “It’s not what I thought,” Tom said. He figured, well, if he was going to get a beat-down, he wasn’t going to whine about it. He was going to say his piece at least, while he still had his teeth. “It has nothing to do with my opinions. You think I don’t like the team? I love the team. My brother played on the team. I didn’t want to write this story. I had to. Because it was true.”

  Dub somehow wasn’t interested in hearing about the responsibilities of the press. “They say they may take our championship away,” he complained, sticking out his jaw angrily.

  Yeah, because you didn’t earn it fairly! Tom thought. But he didn’t say that out loud. No sense pushing things too far. What he did say was, “Well, look, man, I’m really sorry, but like I said, I’m a news guy, I have to . . .”

  “Sorry?” And this time Matt poked him so hard it made him step back into his locker with a clang. “What good does sorry do us now? You’re supposed to be loyal to the school, man! You’re supposed to stand with the team.”