EIGHTEEN
***
Jason stood in the doorway to his house, trying one last time to reach someone on his cell phone. He had tried to call the mayor of Rising, Doc Peabody, Hatty's house, and a few others. All had yielded the same result: no dial tone, no ringing, just that loud screeching.
Finally he put the phone away, and grabbed one of the walkie-talkies he kept in the house for emergencies. "This is Sheriff Meeks of Rising," he said on one of the channels. "Anyone on the horn tonight?"
No answer. He tried several other channels as well, but all yielded the same result: nothing but white noise.
On the last attempt, one of those strange, ghostly shadows whipped by him. As it did, the screeching sound that had been his only response on the walkie-talkie increased, startling him. Between the shadow's sudden appearance and the increased noise, he almost dropped the walkie-talkie. But then the shadow passed, and the white noise returned to its previous level.
He put the walkie-talkie away, tacitly admitting defeat, at least inasmuch as trying to reach anyone this way was concerned.
Slowly, however, he became aware of a new sound. Thin, ghostly, it took him a moment to realize where it was coming from and what it was. The sound wafted up from the town below, a shrill chorus that almost rattled his teeth in spite of its low volume. He couldn't place the noise at first, then slowly became aware of what it was, and felt his skin crawl.
Screaming. It was screaming. The entire town was screaming.
This, he realized on some subconscious level, was what an entire town sounded like when it was being murdered.
He acted instinctively, rushing into his house and grabbing his service Beretta from the desk where he kept it, then getting into his truck and peeling away down his loose-gravel driveway. The sound of the gravel under his tires usually yielded a sense of comfort and nostalgia: the sound of coming home and going to work, the sound of a well-ordered world with, thankfully, no more surprises left.
Today, however, on this day of macabre surprises, the noise gave no comfort. Instead the sound was grim and gruesome. It sounded like the crunching of small bones.
Jason sped toward the town, toward the wall of death-sounds that was growing still louder as he approached its source. He could barely see anything through the fog, strange shapes loomed everywhere around, ghost shapes with horns and weird eyes, strange and insubstantial.
The sounds continued, drowning him in a tide of horror and noise, making it impossible for him to think, to concentrate, to...
"Shit!" He screamed and cranked the wheel to one side as a new shape emerged from the white fog. He could tell in an instant that this was a different kind of thing than the specters that had surrounded him in the mist: this was something tangible, something real. It was a human, a fellow traveler in this wasteland of whiteness.
He almost hit the person, but barely managed to avoid the passerby. He screeched to a halt, opened his door, and leaned out.
The person was Lenore. She hadn't even noticed how close to death she had come at his hands, running in a blank terror, already disappearing into the mist.
Jason felt a strange mix of terror and relief. The relief was because this was the first time he was seeing someone real in hours. The terror was because she was so quickly disappearing in the mist, threatening to leave him alone again, rendering him once more solitary in this fearful place of screaming and shadow.
He ran after her without thinking, keeping her barely in his view, shouting her name as they ran through the mist. She didn't respond, just kept running, and when he at last caught up to her and reached out and grabbed her arm, she resisted violently, screaming a banshee wail of terror and battering at him with closed fists.
"Lenore, Lenore!" he yelled. "It's me, it's Sheriff Meeks!"
She opened her eyes wide in sudden comprehension and he saw recognition dawn in her visage. Then her eyes widened still further and she pointed behind him. "Look out!" she screamed.
Jason whipped around and saw what she had been afraid of: a stranger, a man that he had never seen before, running after her - after them both - with a wicked grin and a huge, drawn knife.
Jason had only a microsecond to react. He drew his gun, the first time he had done so in the line of duty, the first time he had drawn a weapon with the intent to use it since that night, since the night he had lost his family, lost his life. "Stop," he shouted in a calm, low tone to the man.
The man did not listen or did not hear. "Stop!" Jason shouted louder, but the thug only had eyes for Lenore.
Jason pulled the trigger. Once, twice, a quick double-tap that he knew would be a death sentence at this range.
The man went down, falling into a soft cushion of mist and disappearing into the fog that swirled around them and pooled at their feet like thin white mud.
Jason turned back to Lenore. The teacher's eyes were still wide, in shock. He had barely a moment to register the fact that she was no longer dressed in her habitual gray outfit. Her almost nun-like clothing had been replaced by an outfit that would have been suitable to a teenager or a young woman who was going out dancing or to sow a little good-natured destruction in the big city.
She was, he realized, not beautiful as he had previously thought. Lenore was, in fact, utterly stunning.
Before he could completely process that, however, she collapsed into his arms with a sob. "What's going on, Lenore?" he asked gently, and stroked her hair. The movement was reflexive, the motion of a family man who had had his share of experience comforting someone in a loving manner. But even as he did it, he realized how close she was, how she felt against him.
He pushed away those thoughts, trying to keep focused on what was going on around them. "What happened?" he asked. "Who was that man?"
"I...I don't know," answered Lenore. But Jason had been a cop for too long to accept that answer. He could tell from her tone and from the way she turned her head as she spoke that she was lying. Lenore knew that man.
He drew the obvious, unfortunate conclusion from her outfit. Surprising, but he had seen far stranger in his years as a police officer. "He was with you?" Jason asked in a low, calm tone.
The violence of Lenore's response surprised him, and probably surprised her as well. "No!" she shouted vehemently, pushing him away as though it had been him who had chased her with a drawn knife. She stared at him dazedly, as though through a veil of shock that prevented her from fully processing what had happened. "I was alone. In my house. Just looked up, and there he was. Out of nowhere." She repeated that last in a low, horrified tone. "Out of nowhere."
"And then?" Jason said encouragingly.
"Ran," she answered. "Ran into the house, deep into the house. Ran for hours, it seemed like hours, it could have been hours, couldn't it?"
The shock he had seen in her eyes was now covering her entirely, rendering her almost catatonic as she whispered "hours" over and over. Jason shook her gently, trying to keep her stable and with him mentally. "It's okay," he whispered. "It's okay now, he's gone, I got him."
At this, Lenore drew suddenly back to reality, looking at him with eyes that were crystalline and clear in their understanding. "He's not gone," she said.
"He is," said Jason. "Believe me, he is."
"Not gone," she said stubbornly.
Jason sighed. Might as well do this now, he thought.
"Come on," he said, and took her to where the body lay. He could see it only as a dark outline in the mist, unmoving. Dead.
At first Lenore didn't want to come, but he had to check and he didn't want to leave her alone in the fog where she would run off and get lost or worse, so he half-dragged her with him. They came to the body, and Jason waved the fog away like smoke, clearing a thin layer and revealing...
"Holy shit," he whispered, and felt his knees go weak.
It was no thug there on the ground, no potential rapist with a knife.
It was someone he recognized from visits to the high school for career day, from time at the football games, from seeing around town.
It was Sarah West. The cheerleader was laying where the thug had been only a moment before. No bullet wounds, thank God, he did not know what he would have done had it turned out that he had shot an innocent child, but there was no disputing the fact that the girl was very dead. Her sightless eyes stared up at him, shrunken back in a face that was blue and swollen.
He saw a dark stain around her, and thought at first that it was blood, then realized that it was simply the sidewalk, but somehow it was saturated with water all around her.
He touched her neck, feeling without hope for a pulse. As he had expected, there was nothing. But he did not expect her to be dripping wet. He touched her, and her clothing squished, water-saturated. When he touched her throat, her mouth drooped slackly, and water poured out. She was completely full of water, inside and out.
"Is she..." began Lenore in a hitching voice.
"Dead," Jason said dazedly. "Drowned, it looks like."
"That's impossible," said Lenore. "Sarah wouldn't have gone anywhere she could have drowned. She was terrified of the water." The teacher gulped, then added, "And the nearest place she could have drowned is the lake, ten miles away."
Jason nodded. "I know," he said. "But that doesn't change the fact that she's drowned." He paused, then realized something. Something that frightened him more than anything else had on this strange night: "It's quiet," he whispered.
The screaming that had been an underlying stream of sound through all the last minutes had dwindled and then stopped. Dead silence billowed like the mist all around them.
"What's happening?" asked Lenore in a hushed voice. And as she did, another one of the eerie shadows passed close by. Jason and Lenore backed away, and saw the thing lean over Sarah's body. The shadow was joined by several others, and as they congregated Sarah's body started to...fade. Suddenly it was shadow as well, no more substantial than any of the other fog-wraiths that milled about in the thick mist.
In only a few moments Sarah West was gone. Dead and disappeared.
The shadows dissipated. Moved away like hyenas after finishing off the last traces of a kill.
Lenore sobbed, and Jason pulled her away with him, leading her backwards until they bumped into something hard and unyielding: his truck. He helped Lenore into the passenger side, then got in the driver's side and put the vehicle in gear.
He accelerated slowly, not wanting to hit any buildings - or anything else - in the fog, but knowing at the same time that they had to keep moving, keep driving, stay alive. Life was movement, he reasoned at an animal level, so as long as they were moving they couldn't be dead, as he almost suspected they were.
A huge shadow suddenly loomed before them, bigger than any of the wraiths had been, and Jason gave a small cry in anticipatory fear before he realized that it was not some new unworldly threat, but rather something much more mundane: he had almost driven through the front of a house.
The house glowed dimly, its lights all on like hazy fog lamps. Jason hesitated for a moment, then got out of the truck, motioning for Lenore to follow him. "Come on," he said quietly, and drew his gun.
"Wait, no!" she said.
"Safety in numbers," he responded.
"What if there are no numbers?" she demanded. "What if everyone in there is dead...or worse?"
"Then I have to find that out, too," he answered, and pointed to the Sheriff's star that was pinned to his shirt. "It's my job. But I don't want to leave you out here alone, so please...."
They entered the house together, going through the door that was - surprisingly - unlocked. Jason quickly recognized the home as belonging to Jack and Dot Powell, a retired couple that had lived in Rising all their lives. He and Lenore went room to room through the place, and he felt tension rising in him like a living beast as they called for the Powells.
No answer. Food was half-eaten on the table, and a pan simmered on the stove. Jason turned off the flame, and realized that the clock built into the oven-top was blurred. He shook his head as though to clear it, but the numbers did not grow clearer. They remained strange and impossible to discern.
The house was empty. The inhabitants had left mid-meal. Left, or been taken.
"No one here," he said at last.
"What now?" asked Lenore. He was grateful to hear how calm she seemed. Whatever happened to her earlier, it had clearly shaken her, but she was just as clearly determined not to let it rule her or divert her from the task of survival. Jason almost smiled at her, feeling a pull within him as the attraction he had already felt toward her deepened in small increments.
"There are five more houses on this street," he answered.
Lenore gulped, but did not complain or whine. Instead, she merely said, "We look?"
Jason nodded. "We look."
And they did. But at each house, they saw only more of the same: half-eaten food, blurred digital clocks. At one house there was a poker game, the hands still splayed out in front of empty chairs. At another they found black crayon notes. "Fear." "It's started." "Crak in the dam."
No one was anywhere. They did not speak during their search, as though they were traipsing through a cemetery at midnight and were too frightened to talk; perhaps that was close to the truth.
They returned to Jason's truck and clambered back inside. "What now?" asked Lenore again.
"Sheriff's station," answered Jason.
"Why there?" said Lenore.
"Because I know it. Because there are weapons there. But mostly," he said, pulling slowly into the fog-bound street, "because I can't think of anything better to do."
They didn't drive long before seeing something strange: a bright glow in the road before them. "What is that?" asked Jason, more to himself than anything. Still, Lenore answered.
"Football stadium?"
"No, the lights are too low," he said.
"Then what is it?"
Jason peered into the mist, trying to will it apart. Then, slowly, he realized what the light must be, and smiled. Lenore saw him and repeated, "What is it?"
"It's Hatty," said Jason, and gunned the engine forward.
***