Rising Fears (15 page)

He clutched at her, holding her hand like it was a life preserver. And in a way, he supposed it was. Hatty had been his main reason for living for so long, his main connection to humanity, and now she was gone, her ruined face staring up at him in a macabre facsimile of the person she had once been. So he held to Lenore, drawing her close to him, holding her for warmth, for life. She stiffened at first, then relaxed and returned his embrace and the two of them held one another, survivors in the shipwreck that Rising had become, bounced and tossed with the waves of horror that had enveloped the place.

"What now?" Lenore asked, pressing herself into his chest.

Jason was silent for a time, still grappling with the loss of the old woman, of his oldest friend. Finally, though, he found his voice and said, "We go. Out of Rising. As fast as we can."

He could tell from Lenore's relieved sigh that she was happy to hear this, but his respect for her grew in the next moment when she showed she was not just concerned with saving her own skin. "What about the rest of the town?" she asked. "Shouldn't we help them?"

"I think," he replied, looking out the window. The mist was still there, the dark shadows still writhed like nightmares and he was sure that it was only a matter of time before they came for Hatty as they had come for Sarah West. "I think they're all dead," he finally finished, giving voice at last to the fear that had plagued him since arriving at the abandoned station.

"I think they're all dead."

***

***

They drove slowly, crawling along through the darkness that surrounded the town. The mist still seemed to glow with an otherworldly light, but the illumination neither warmed Lenore nor made her feel any safer. On the contrary, it reminded her that whatever was happening, it was happening in a place grown suddenly alien and strange, a place where light shed no light and where shadows took corpses in the mist.

"Can't we go any faster?" she asked Sheriff Meeks. He frowned, and she noted that even when he frowned, his eyes were kind and alert. He was something she had heard of but never expected to find: a good man.

"Not unless you want to find out what paint feels like, splashed all over the side of some building."

He maintained their slow pace, but suddenly something loomed before them. A sign. "See ya! Town of Rising says Goodbye and invites you to return to the Friendliest Little Place on Earth."

The mist seemed to die down a bit as they passed the sign, and Lenore felt hope bloom inside her breast. "We're through," she breathed. "We made it."

"Here's hoping," the sheriff responded, but she could tell from his clenched jaw and white knuckles that he didn't believe it. Either that or he
did
believe it, and was worried that their escape would be snatched away from them instantly.

He hit the gas, accelerating a bit as the mist thinned. But Lenore soon saw that whatever was happening, it wasn't over. The mist kicked up again, thickening around them. She saw the sheriff grind his teeth in anger and perhaps despair.

But he didn't decelerate. Indeed, she saw his foot plunge down on the accelerator and felt the truck lurch forward even as visibility disappeared.

"Shouldn't you slow down?" asked Lenore. Sheriff Meeks didn't answer, his gaze riveted on the road ahead. "Sheriff?" she tried again. "You're scaring me."

Still no answer. The truck moved faster and faster, the tachometer redlining as the sheriff pushed the truck to its limits in a clear attempt to rip them free of the town and its evil influences.

Then she screamed as a woman suddenly stepped out into the road in front of them; screamed again in the next instant as she saw the woman's face. It was only half there, destroyed by what looked like a bullet wound.

"Elizabeth!" screamed the sheriff in a voice steeped in despair and fear. He cranked the wheel to one side in order to avoid hitting this stranger, this walking corpse, and Lenore felt the world crumble in on her as the truck hit a rut, bounced, and then slammed into something with bone-crushing force. She heard a loud "pop" and knew it must be the vertebrae shattering inside her neck and back, and then she slammed forward into something unyielding, and the darkness claimed her as its own.

***

She awoke, though she could not say whether seconds or hours had passed. She looked in front of her and saw a pillow from her bed.

No, that wasn't right. She wasn't in bed.

She shook her head to clear it of the fog that gripped her, and realized in a moment that what she had taken to be a pillow was in fact an air bag. The popping she had heard must have been the sound of the explosives that ringed the safety device going off, allowing it to escape its hiding spot in the dashboard of the truck and inflate at the speed of sound, saving her from crashing into the windshield of the truck; probably saving her life.

Where was Sheriff Meeks? she wondered, and felt her stomach drop at the prospect of being alone. Especially since being alone meant that she would be lost in this thick fog, with the possibility of running into
him
again, of running into the man who had caused her so much pain and grief.

The thought of him made her break out in a cold sweat, and she could feel her respiration increase as she started to panic. She almost had a heart attack then, as the door tore open with a shriek of twisted metal!

But it was only Sheriff Meeks. "So sorry," he said. "So sorry. I just...I just...." He didn't finish the thought, but took a knife from his belt and stabbed her air bag. It ripped open and a blast of warm air hit her in the face, but in a second the air bag hung like afterbirth from the dashboard and she had enough room to remove her safety belt and get out of the truck.

Moving was painful; she was sure she had bruised some ribs in the crash. But she made no murmur of complaint. She could see that the sheriff was grappling with something terrible right now, something that must have to do with that dead woman they had seen - Elizabeth, he had called her.

But there was no time to ask him what had just happened, what it was he knew that she didn't. Because in that instant she saw where they were.

"Jesus," whispered the sheriff. And she didn't get the feeling that he was swearing, more that he was uttering a short prayer. Nor could she blame him when she saw what they had crashed into.

It was the general store. They had smashed halfway through the plate glass window at the front of the store and then must have careened into a load-bearing wall with a thick steel core, because the front of the truck had crumpled and they had stopped moving fast enough for the air bags to go off.

"This is impossible," said the sheriff as he looked at the front of the store. "We were outside of town. We were outside of town, so how could we crash into the general store on Main Street?"

"Well," said Lenore, trying to muster enough courage to speak without crying. "We're not outside town anymore."

"No," agreed the sheriff. "We're right back where we started from."

"Guess whatever is doing this doesn't want us to leave," she said. Then she shouted and pointed into the store.

The sheriff stepped gingerly through the broken window and into the store. She followed him a moment later, walking into the bright store and staring at what had made her shout.

It was Ox. He was laying facedown on the tile floor next to a small footstool. Blood pooled all around, and the floor had shattered around him in a crazed fashion, spider cracks running through the tile and allowing her to see that even the concrete below the tile had been smashed.

Sheriff Meeks leaned down next to Ox and touched the big man's neck. He yelped as he did so, and pulled his fingers back as though he had been burnt. "What is it?" asked Lenore.

Lenore noted then that the body looked strange: lacking shape, somehow, like it was a bag and not a human being made of muscle and bone.

She reached out a trembling finger to touch the big man's arm. Her fingers sunk in like she was touching putty, and she too yelped and pulled her fingers back - but not until they had slid into his body up to the knuckles.

"Where are his bones?" she asked, aware that she was sounding for all the world like one of her third-graders and not caring in the least.

The sheriff didn't seem to mind, either. He just stood up and looked over the store. The aisles were full of debris, she saw: items knocked off shelves, plaster dust everywhere, even some tiles from the ceiling were strewn about. It was as though an earthquake had struck the store, and somehow she knew that the destruction was not the result of their crashing into the place.

The sheriff looked back at the big man then. "Like he fell," he murmured.

The lights went out then, flickering once and then plunging them both into darkness. Mist curled in over the broken window, crawling into the general store like a living being.

Dread filled her belly. She knew he was going to say that, but it tore her apart inside nonetheless. "Can't we stay here?" she pleaded.

The sheriff looked at her with a concerned expression, and she could tell he was weighing his words carefully, trying to spare her any unnecessary pain. "We can't," he finally said. "If we stay here, then we're just going to end up dead like everyone else. We have to find out what's happening and try to stop it." He held out a hand to Lenore.

She hesitated. Then took his hand.

He helped her over the dangerous shards of glass that still clung like witch's teeth to the windowpane of the general store, and then kept on holding her hand for a moment.

In spite of their predicament, in spite of all the danger, in spite of everything that had happened that night, she felt warmth bloom where he touched her. It spread up her arm and into her chest, touching her heart and making it beat faster for a wonderful moment.

Then he let go, and she thought she saw something - was it guilt? - flash across his face.

"Come on," he said gruffly. "We have a town to investigate."

***

Hours later she was on the verge of falling over from exhaustion, and they had found nothing useful. Just empty house after empty house. Half-eaten meals, clocks that were strangely out of focus and impossible to read, dim screams sounding all around them...and the shadows. The phantoms in the mist that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Never touching them, always moving too fast to be followed. Not always, but often when a shadow passed, the sheriff's walkie-talkie would blast out a high-pitched whistle, and he joked in a low voice that at least they had an early warning system.

She did not laugh. The shadows were too frightening to laugh about, with their horned heads and glassy eyes.

They stepped out of one last house, and she bent over to rub her aching calves, wishing she had some other footwear than the heels. She had toyed with the idea of taking some other clothes from one of the houses, but immediately discarded it: she would not steal from the dead. Nor was she about to go back to her own house; not with what had just happened there. She only felt safe next to the sheriff, and so she would brave the blisters that the heels gave her, knowing that to have no footwear in this mist could prove dangerous since they could barely see the ground ahead of them. She thought about what her feet would look like if she had stepped out of the sheriff's truck without shoes when they were surrounded by broken glass at the general store, and shuddered.

The mist surrounded them as always, and Lenore whispered, "What now?" The sheriff held up his hand, motioning her to silence. "What is it?" she said after a long moment.

The mist was thick, but she realized that the shadows were nowhere to be seen, either. As though they had done their work and gone. "We're all alone," she whispered in a frightened voice. Somehow, the silence was as terrifying - if not more so - as the screams had been.

The mist billowed around her and the sheriff - around her and
Jason
, she corrected herself. "It's not over," she whispered again.

Then a deep, dark voice, a voice that had been to Hell and taught the devil about fear, sliced out of the mist. "No," said the voice. "For you, it's just beginning."

Lenore felt herself turn inside out.

It was
him
.

***

***

Jason didn't know who the man was, but knew that he had already killed him once tonight. And of all the things that had happened, of all the phantasms and ghosts that this misty night had brought, somehow the man that stood before him was the most impossible of the sights. Lenore screamed, and Jason pulled his gun out and shot without thinking, as sure in his gut that the man before them was evil as he was that she was good.