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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.
