Nightmare City Read Online Free Page B

her, no sign of anyone, no sign—he finally noticed—of anything at all.
    He stopped, breathless. He stood, panting. He looked around him. Even in the cold damp of the fog, he felt himself begin to sweat.
    He couldn’t see anything now—nothing but the fog. He turned around in a full circle. The white mist was so thick it erased every detail from sight. He could make out a few inches of pavement around his feet and that was it. Still, he insisted to himself, still—how could that woman have gotten away from him? How could she have vanished like that, walking so slowly when he was running so fast?
    “Hello?” he shouted—really loudly this time. “Hello? Where’d you go? Where are you?”
    He listened, and finally—finally!—a noise answered him: a shuffling footstep.
    He spun round to face the sound. There she was!
    He could see her figure in the mist, not far away, just a shadow of a shadow really. But now, instead of fading from him, she seemed to be getting closer, the outline of her growing darker, more distinct.
    “I’m over here . . . ,” he began to shout to her, but even as the words passed his lips, his voice faded away to nothing.
    Because now he realized: it wasn’t her. That figure moving toward him. It wasn’t the woman in the white blouse at all. It was someone else.
    It was something else.
    Tom narrowed his eyes and strained to see through the murk. The figure came toward him slowly, slowly growing clearer with every step. He could tell it wasn’t the woman in the white blouse by the way it was moving. Instead of her slow but certain and steady pace, this figure had a sort of shambling limp. Its shoulders seemed hunched. Its arms hung and swung.
    Tom almost called out again, but some instinct stopped him. He licked his lips. They were suddenly dry as dust.
    He heard another sound and turned to his left. Therewas another figure moving toward him from where the Staffords’ hedges were supposed to be. Another shambling, limping shadow coming slowly toward him out of the fog.
    And then another footstep to his right. And Tom turned and saw yet another shadow limping its way out of the mist from where the Colliers’ lawn must’ve been.
    Whatever they were, they were all around him.
    Tom began to feel as clammy inside as the fog on his skin. The fear that swirled up out of the core of him was, in fact, like an inner fog. It filled his brain. It clouded his mind. He remembered that moment earlier in the day when he had come down the drive to get the newspaper, when he had looked into the swirling mist and had the bizarre thought that something was moving in there, that something was coming slowly toward him, shuffling slowly toward him. And now it was true. The figure he saw in front of him right now—the figures he saw to his left and right—they were shuffling toward him: slowly, relentlessly, and with that strange, hobbled, inhuman gait.
    For another second, his reporter’s curiosity pinned Tom to the spot.
    What are they? What are they?
    Then even his curiosity was overwhelmed by his terror—and he turned and ran.

5.
    H e ran without thinking. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried. He was in pure panic mode now and just had to get back into the safety of his house. Back where he could think, back where he could clear his brain and return to some semblance of common sense and reality. Because this wasn’t reality, this couldn’t be reality, this was like . . .
    Like a zombie apocalypse!
    Yes! That’s what it reminded him of exactly. Like one of those movies where the hero goes to sleep one night and wakes up to find that everyone on earth has died and come back as shambling, brain-eating, flesh-devouring monsters. And the fact that things like that didn’t happen in real life was not reassuring—not reassuring at all—because he was just too frightened in that moment to care. He was too frightened even to think about anything but getting out of that fog and fast.
    So he ran.