I stopped. I turned myself in a circle, sweeping the fields with my light. Dana and Benny hesitated when they saw they’d lost me.
“Sentry?”
“What are you doing?” Benny wanted to know, and he swung his light around to follow mine, even though it wasn’t showing anything but endless curtains of patchy white fog.
“Sentry?” I called again. “He’s here. I hear him. That noise. You know—the static sound. I hear it. He’s nearby. Sentry!”
“Stop yelling, he’ll hear us!” Benny begged, but I moved away from him, still searching the fields and the trees with my limited fistful of light.
“I want him to hear us.”
“What about the guy who’s got Jamie? You want him to hear you too? Or do you think we’re still out of shouting distance?” He looked so worried that I let my wrist droop and quit calling.
“He might help us. He might—” But I couldn’t think of a good way to end the thought, so I quit talking. Besides, the fizzing air was drawing itself close up around us, and if my companions couldn’t hear it yet, they would hear it soon enough.
The mist around us was quickening too, as if it also heard the approaching and familiar hum, and it gathered itself up to meet the source. It did not congeal so hard that we couldn’t see through it, though, or around it. It appeared to be flowing, and not hardening into something so impenetrable that we couldn’t pass through.
A wind kicked up, steady and pulsing, helping to push the pale tendrils of damp air along.
“What’s going on?” It was a useless question, but Benny asked it anyway. We were all wondering. We were all speculating. And we were all going to find out, one way or another. “What’s happening? Do you see any ghosts yet? Is that what this is?”
“No,” I told him. I saw no shapes, no personalities, no movement that could not be accounted for by the swirl of the low, damp cloud. But I could hear that noise, and it kept me on guard. It kept me looking, even when squinting showed me nothing at all.
“Where are you?” I asked, but no one answered me.
“Hey, look,” Dana said, and she meant that we should look at the fields and the road, back the way we came. “Does that look weird to you at all? The way it’s so clear? It was hazy when we went through it not ten minutes ago.”
She was right. The fog that billowed and burst past us in fleeting ribbons was not merely gathering, it was slipping. Pouring. It emptied itself from the distant stretches of grass and woods, and it charged on towards the back of the park. It was as if someone had released a sink plug and the fog was being drawn down the drain. It leaked past us in a fluffy gray gushing that parted around us as though we were rocks in a stream.
“It’s going towards the Tower, isn’t it?” I watched it bleed away, into a tighter cloud as its collective density increased. “We’ve got to follow it.”
So we did.
We began to run again, directly into the maelstrom; and the less we could see, the more we tried to tell ourselves that we were headed the right way. And the whiter the night became, the louder the static became—until even Dana and Benny could no longer pretend it didn’t reach their ears.
Our feet skidded off the edge of the road back into gravel and grass, and we almost tumbled over each other trying to stop. The déjà vu was nearly painful; we were back into the near-perfect blindness that had held us prisoner before.
It made us stiff, and nervous. It made us afraid.
But we were in the literal thick of it, and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t see to move forward, and there could be no retreat. We drew close together. Dana reached for my hand. I took hers and squeezed it, and with my other—the one that held the light, too—I took Benny’s free hand.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“Listen,” I told him. And I snapped off my light.
He did the same. We stood in the pale black spot beside the road, and we clung to one another. And then, we were not alone.
Here. And there. And to our left. To the right.
Behind us, and past us. The night became sentient, and it began to move. Shadows were rising up, out of the ground. They were moving out from behind trees. They were falling into step, into patterns, into rows, and into waves. The dead came up in a tide of determined faces, and they marched.
“Sentry,” I said, “you’re doing this, aren’t you?”
Bring it, bring it all. It will cover us.
He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to them. And they brought it—every tendril, and every white breath. The fog came with them, every bit of it. They wore it like clothing, they pulled it along, they drew it out, and they dragged it after themselves deeper into the park.
Some of the shades still wore their uniforms, and here and there I saw the larger shape of a horse. One came very close to me; it stomped and stepped past, its eyes flashing a strange silver light as it glanced down to look at me.
Follow.
I didn’t know who said it, if it was Green Eyes or if it was one of the ghosts, but the word was perfect, and I understood every letter.
Follow. It will hide you, too.
Dana heard it also, and she tugged at my hand. I couldn’t tell if Benny could see or hear anything at all, but he didn’t fight when I began to tow him after me. In this way, blind but attentive, afraid but resolute, we joined the stoic ranks of the walking dead.
Every one of them stared straight ahead, and every one stepped in flawless time. We fell into step too, only later noticing the drums. At least two, or more—maybe three or four. The acoustics on the fields were broken, and the echoes were cast back by the trees; but there were definitely drums.
We are coming.
“Hang in there, Jamie,” Benny whispered, and again the spirit army reassured me, We are coming.
The ghosts led us back onto the paved road, and guided us up to the turn that would take us to the Tower. Before long we began to see the first flickering glints of blue and red lights, and we heard a man with a megaphone speaking with a tinny timbre, directing his voice up, up to the top of Wilder Tower.
Soon we could make out headlights, too—and darkly uniformed shapes walking back and forth, detectable only by their motion on the other side of the cloud.
It will cover us, a chorus of breathless voices believed, and the voices were right.
The fog settled hard over the Tower and the clearing that surrounded it. It smothered the stone benches, and draped itself across the trash cans, the historical markers, and maps that talked when their buttons were pressed.
A carefully contained panic settled just as thoroughly over the police, parked in the lot down by the foot of the Tower. I knew they were only there to help. I knew they were struggling to protect my friend. But I wanted them to leave. This conflict was not theirs.
They withdrew when the fog hit them; they grew confused and nervous when it doused them with air that was visually as thick as paint. Everyone knows about the fog, but not everyone has been gulped down by it. Not everyone has been caught in it, and knows how suffocating the air becomes when it fills your mouth and clogs your ears.
We came closer—close enough to hear a muffled commotion coming from somewhere above us. I thought I caught Jamie’s voice, unintelligible, but complaining. A lower, slower one argued back.
“That’s him.” Benny confirmed my suspicion.
“What the hell is that weird noise?” someone down by the parking lot asked, and then I knew that Green Eyes must be close, if even the cops were hearing the signature sign of his presence.
A crunching implosion of metal slammed through the pseudo-silence, and the piercing wail of a siren screamed out. A flat popping coughed out too, and then a second one. At first I didn’t know what the second set of noises were, but then I heard a grating squeal and knew that they were blown tires.
“What’s going on over there, anyway?” Dana demanded under her breath, but it was impossible to tell.
Around us the posthumous militia massed, side by side—some in the remains of battered blue, or grungy gray. I saw several women in bulky skirts, and four black men standing in a row. And the harder I looked, the more I saw. There were dozens. No, hundreds.
I turned around, looking behind us.
Thousands.
All eyes were on the Tower.
Down in the parking lot, havoc was coming to a boil. Another thunderous crash and a second agitated siren joined the first. Glass and plastic cracked and caved. Headlights that appeared as small white orbs went dim.
“I don’t know what you’re doing down there, but you stop it! You stop it or I’ll kill him!”
This was the first time I’d ever distinctly heard him speak, the lumbering shooter who’d terrorized us twice—the man who had killed poor Tripp, and who had wounded several others. His voice was heavy, like it came from a big man; and it was sticky with overpronounced vowels.
I closed my eyes because it made little difference in the fog, except that I heard things better, or I thought I did. From those two sentences I extracted everything I could—I discerned that he was white, and a middle-aged adult. He was a local guy too, that much was obvious; but the twang on his letters didn’t have the smoothness of a city’s polish.
In the parking lot, three sirens chimed and at least that many sets of blue and white lights churned their beams through the fog. I could see them, but just barely—they were weak pulses of light and color pounding against the air, like punches thrown underwater.
Someone was calling out, “Hold your fire!” over and over again, calming the officers with force of will. It was a frightened voice, but one that commanded desperate authority.
“Hold your fire!”
They obeyed, even as they retreated to regroup.
Then the white air parted—curling and recoiling as if it were expelling something violently in a cough. It expelled the Sentry.
He strode forward through the gap, impossibly tall and unnervingly wide. His eyes blazed with fury and aggression, and more than that too—though I wouldn’t have known what to call it.
