Nightmare City (6 page)

“I need to talk to you . . . ,” the woman said again, but already the static was closing over her voice as the fog had closed over her figure.

“What do you want?” Tom shouted, more desperately this time as he heard her fading. “Why didn’t you wait for me in the driveway? Why didn’t—”

But the phone beeped twice:
Connection lost
. She was gone.

Tom cried out in frustration.

“Tom . . . ,” Marie began to say. “Tom, listen to me. You have to listen—”

But before she could finish, another voice interrupted her.

“This is your mission! This is what I’ve been trying to tell you about all along . . . The Warrior . . . Do you remember the Warrior?”

Burt! It was his brother’s voice! It was coming from the basement again. What was happening here? What was going on?

Tom leapt up out of his chair. Marie jumped up, too, jumped up so quickly her chair fell over behind her, banging loudly against the floor.

“Tom,” she whispered. “Don’t . . .”

“That’s Burt,” he said. “Don’t you hear it? That’s Burt’s voice.”

“It’s not. It can’t be. You know that. Burt is dead,” said Marie.

“I heard him before. The same way. From down in the basement.”

“Tom, listen to me, do not go down there.”

Tom stood looking at her, uncertain. He licked his dry lips. He wanted to help her, to keep her safe. He wanted to do what she said. But it was Burt . . .

“Marie, I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Do you
know more than you’re telling me? Is there something you don’t want me to know?”

“All I know is that you have to go to the monastery,” she answered urgently. “
That’s
where the answers are. You have to find them. You can’t wait any longer. You have to go there now.”

But Tom could hear Burt shouting again: “This is what I tried to teach you. This is what you have to do . . .”

And then he said, “This is your mission, Tom.”

Tom started. Did Burt just call him by name? From the TV? How was that possible? He had to know—he had to find out—where the voice was coming from.

He looked helplessly at Marie. “I’ve got to look,” he said.

He turned away from her. He went to the basement door.

Marie called out behind him in a sharp tone of voice he’d never heard her use before. “Tom! Listen to me! Please! You don’t always have to know everything! You’ve got to stop this!”

He looked at her. He saw the fear and frustration flashing in her eyes, her bowed mouth twisting in a strange and ugly way. But it didn’t matter. He heard Burt downstairs.

“Remember the Warrior, Tom.”

He had to go. He pulled open the door.

Marie shouted at him: “Tom, I mean it! Don’t!”

Tom flipped the light switch. He left Marie in the kitchen and thundered quickly down the stairs.

He hit the basement floor and spun around the corner into the family room, moving fast. He saw the side of the television. He heard Burt’s voice coming from the speakers: “This is what you have to understand! This is what I have to get you to understand . . .”

His brother sounded so present, so real—so alive!—that it made Tom hurt inside to hear him. He missed his brother so much it was like a physical pain.

He needed to get around to the front of the TV. He needed to see Burt’s face, to see what he was doing on the video before the whole thing vanished again as it had earlier, before the voice went silent and Burt was gone.

He took a quick step forward.

“All along,” said Burt, “this was what I was trying . . .”

And then, sure enough, the voice stopped, mid-sentence. And the next moment there was another voice: “Dr. Cooper to the ER—stat!”

“No!” shouted Tom.

He hadn’t been fast enough. There was that stupid doctor show again!

And yes, there it was. As he got in front of the TV, he saw the same scene that had been on before.

The nurse was shouting, “Single GSW to the chest! Clear Trauma One.”

The doctors and nurses and aides were crowding around
the gurney, rolling the gurney frantically down the hospital hallway to the emergency operating room. The patient—the person lying wounded on the gurney—was obscured by the crush of bodies around him as they all hurtled together down the corridor shouting urgently to one another.

“How’s the pulse?”

“Sixty and falling fast!”

Exasperated, Tom’s eyes went heavenward and his shoulders slumped in defeat. The monsters in the fog. The images on TV. Marie telling him to leave everything behind and go to the monastery. What was happening? What was it all about?

He looked at the TV again. The scene had changed now. The doctors and nurses and aides had pushed the gurney around the corner into a trauma alcove. They were leaning over the patient on the gurney, preparing to lift him onto the operating table.

“On three,” said a doctor. “One, two, three!”

All together, as Tom watched, they hoisted the bloody form off the gurney and laid him on the table. When they were done, the cluster of people broke apart, each hurrying into a different corner of the little space, each turning to his own chore, wrangling his own piece of equipment. One nurse grabbed a tray of surgical instruments. A surgeon pulled on a sterile gown. Another nurse hooked up an oxygen tank. For
a moment, as they worked, the patient lay alone on the table with no one around him, no one blocking him from view, so that Tom could finally see him, see his face.

The sight was as shocking as anything he had seen this whole shocking day. Tom’s mouth fell open and the breath came out of him as quickly as if he had been punched. He stared unblinking at the TV, unable to believe what he was looking at, unable for a second or two even to comprehend it.

The patient on the gurney: It was Tom. It was Tom himself.

7.

T
he sight of himself on the TV screen, the sight of himself as a character in his mom’s favorite medical show, hit Tom so hard he actually took a step back. He went on staring, went on gaping, second after second as the scene unfolded. He watched as the patient—himself—lay on the table unconscious, his eyes closed. He saw with a growing nausea that his shirt was covered in blood, the stain spreading all the way from his collar to his belt buckle.

And now the nurses were cutting his clothes away with a knife. The place where the bullet had ripped into his body was exposed, his flesh gory and torn. A nurse was stuffing a tube into his throat—it made Tom gag just to watch it. Another nurse was jamming a needle into his arm—he practically felt the sting.

Then, most horrifying of all, a doctor, his face obscured behind a surgical mask, stepped forward and set a scalpel against his skin—Tom’s skin. They were going to cut him open on television right before his own eyes. Tom—standing there in the family room, staring at the TV—could almost feel the cold touch of the blade against him.

But all at once the scene went blank. The television turned itself off.

The sudden darkness on the screen snapped Tom’s trance. He shook himself as if he were waking up. Without thinking, he turned and found the remote on one of the chairs, lifted it, pointed it at the TV, and tried to turn the show on again. The prospect of watching himself cut open made him sick to his stomach, but he had to know what happened next, had to find out what all this meant.

Training his intense blue eyes on the TV screen by sheer force of will, he pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. Pressed it again—nothing. He tossed the remote back down onto the chair.

Think
, he told himself.
Figure it out. Finding answers is what you do. Find them!

But how could he? His own image on the TV. Burt calling him by name. Marie urging him to the burned-out retreat in the woods. Monsters in the fog. How could he put any of it together? How could he make sense out of any of it?

Marie
, he thought. She—or her father—was the only one who seemed to know anything. He had to get back to her, find out more. Why did he have to go to the monastery? She must know. She must know
something
she wasn’t telling him.

He raced back to the stairs, back up the stairs. He reached the top and pushed through the door into the kitchen. He stopped short on the threshold, staring.

Marie was gone.

The breakfast nook was empty. The kitchen was empty. Other than that, everything seemed to be exactly as he had left it. The chairs were in disarray. The one chair Marie had knocked over was still lying on the floor. Tom could even still smell a trace of Marie’s perfume lingering in the air. It was as if she’d only just now left the room.

“Marie?” he called out. “Marie!”

But there was no answer, and once again the house had that feeling of complete emptiness.

He stepped to the hallway and called again.

“Marie!”

But the hall was empty. He knew she was gone.

Tom felt the bizarre events of the day spinning through his mind, ideas spinning through his mind as if they were trying to put themselves into the right order, looking for the pattern in which they fit together.

It’s not a dream
, Marie had told him.
It’s not a hallucination. You’re not dead. You’re not mad. Go to the monastery. That’s where the answers are
.

What did she know? What was it she wasn’t saying?

His thoughts whirling, he turned back to the kitchen. And as he turned, his thoughts stopped.

Something was off. Different. His eyes went over the empty room. He had been wrong before. He had thought the kitchen was just the way he’d left it. But it wasn’t. Not exactly. Something had changed. But what? What was it?

He couldn’t tell. He stood still, looking the place over. There was the table, as before. The chairs in their skewed positions, the one fallen over. The sink, the cupboards, the door across the way that led into the dining room, the stove on the opposite wall—everything familiar, everything unchanged, a scene so normal that it made Tom ache for all the ordinary mornings when he would wake up and come downstairs to find his mom in here, making breakfast.

But something was definitely different. What was it?

His searching glance went from corner to corner. The cabinets, the basement door . . . back around to the table again, sitting empty there in the breakfast nook with the window behind it . . .

He stopped. That was it. The window.

The fog.

When he had come in here before, when he had first found Marie sitting at the table, he remembered he could see the backyard outside. There was mist out there, but it was thin. The scene was much clearer than it was out on the street, where the marine layer was so thick you could barely see a few feet in front of you.

Now, though, that had all changed. The fog had come in dense and close. It was pressed hard against the windowpanes. The glass was white, completely misted over, dripping with moisture. The backyard was now totally invisible.

Tom moved toward the window slowly. Fear and curiosity were warring within him—and the fear was winning. Up until now, he’d had the feeling that the house was somehow protected, somehow surrounded by a sort of safety zone that kept the fog—and the monsters in the fog—at bay.

But he saw now it wasn’t so. The fog was right up against the house, a wall of white, impenetrable.

Did that mean the monsters were also close?

Frightened as he was, he had to find out—had to. He
moved toward the breakfast nook. He edged around the table. He leaned in to the window, pressed his forehead against the cool glass, trying to peer out.

He could see nothing. Stillness. Fog, thick and swirling. Or wait . . . Was something there? Did something just move? Tom squinted, peering harder. Tendrils of fog turned and curled and the whiteness seemed to thin a little. The view began to clear.

A creature was staring back at him through the window, its sharp teeth bared, its cruel eyes gleaming.

Tom had only a second to react—only a second to step backward.

Then the window exploded as the creature lunged at him through the shattering glass.

8.

T
he creature burst through the window with an echoing screech that obliterated thought. It was a screech of ungodly hunger. It twisted the monster’s already hideous features into a fanged, snarling portrait of pure brutality.

Tom stumbled backward in terror, his arms pinwheeling. His side banged painfully into the edge of the breakfast table. The jolt knocked him off-balance and he went down
on one knee, grabbing hold of one of the chairs to break his fall. The creature—half inside the house and half out—strained and reached for him and screamed again, trying to clamber the rest of the way through the window to get at him. Tom saw the wicked, razor-sharp claws on its fingers stretched out toward him, inches away from his face.

Holding on to the chair, Tom quickly dragged himself to his feet. For a second, the monster withdrew its reaching hands and grabbed hold of the windowsill in order to propel itself inside. Completely ignoring the shards of glass that lanced into the flesh of its palms and arms, the beast started to climb in.

Tom lifted the chair with both hands. He brought it back over his shoulder. Swung it as hard as he could at the monster’s face.

One of the chair legs connected with the beast’s head. The thing gave an ugly grunt and tumbled backward out of the house, vanishing into the fog again.

But the fog was pouring into the kitchen like smoke. Tom knew it would be only moments before the monster tried to come in again.

And now he heard the sound of shattering glass in the living room.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

They were breaking in everywhere.

He dropped the chair. He rushed across the kitchen to the far door. He looked through—through the dining room—into the living room at the front of the house.

He thought he had been afraid before. He thought he had been afraid out in the fog when the creature had attacked him. That was nothing compared to this. Now the fear was like a raging fire inside him. It nearly burned his will away. It nearly left him weak and helpless.