Nick looked out into the darkness beyond the flashing lights and intermittent buzz of police radios. He looked back at me, and whatever he saw in my face, he believed. With something like resolve, he picked up his microphone and turned his head hard to the left, then hard to the right. I heard a small cracking noise.
He shifted his shoulders. He fixed his eyes on a spot on the other side of the street. “You need distracting bullshit? All right. Watch this.”
Nick raised the microphone like a banner and yelled, “Bobby! Bobby! Holy shit, Bobby, check that out!”
Bobby must have been his camera guy tonight, because an overburdened fellow carrying a camera the size of a small suitcase lurched to attention.
“This way!” Nick shouted, and took off running towards nothing in particular. “Hey you! Stop right there!”
What followed looked like the media version of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Every information-greedy reporter—horrified at the prospect of being second to the story—immediately leapt into a gallop, tearing after Nick, who was following his microphone as if it were a divining rod.
All the police paused what they were doing and stared; then a few began to make an uncertain chase.
Through the chaos, I sought out Benny and Dana. Our eyes connected. We weren’t going to get a better chance. So we took it.
Off past the cars, and around the nearest ambulance, and into the grass we charged—finally meeting up together in the midst of the first open field. Behind us a couple of people called out, but whether they were talking about us or whatever Nick was doing, I didn’t know and I didn’t look to find out.
“How do we get back to the Tower from here?” Benny panted, fumbling for his flashlight switch as he ran. We were getting far enough from the headlights and flashing siren lights that we were starting to have a hard time seeing.
“Where’s the road?” Dana asked.
“We should hit it at any minute,” I said, hoping I remembered correctly. “If we follow the road, there’ll be, um, there’ll be a turnoff to the right. But not for a while.”
The fog was rising around us, coming in close up against us. It was not the perfect dense blanket it had been during our last rampage through the park, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t be blinding within an hour. Since Benny had the least-detectable light, Dana and I let him take the lead. We fell into a flight pattern behind him, slowing to a jog as we all began to wear out.
The grass whipped at our legs, and sometimes our thighs, and occasionally it slapped us around the middle. It was too tall to even wade through—it felt like swimming through a tide of reeds or a very dry swamp.
“Slow down.” Dana was the first to suggest it. “Jesus, slow down. I can’t keep this up. I can’t, I can’t.” Her sentiment petered out, but we got the gist anyway. I knew she hadn’t been sleeping, and she was older than us besides.
“Right,” Benny agreed, but then he abruptly went facedown and hands-down with a cracking clatter.
“Benny!” I tripped over him, but caught myself before I stepped on his hands. He’d fallen over the edge of the road, at the startling hard place where the pavement strip began and the ocean of grass ended.
“I’m okay! I’m okay!”
“What was that sound? What the hell did you break?” Dana asked, dropping to her knees beside him out of concern or exhaustion.
“Nothing—it was the light. It’s okay though.” He retrieved it and knocked it against the road. “See? Army surplus, remember? You could run over this thing with a truck. Ow. My hands.”
“Let me see,” I said, taking the one that wasn’t holding the light. “Let me look.”
I flipped on my own light and aimed it at his hands, where raw, red scrapes marred the bottom of his palms and one set of knuckles.
“Ow,” he complained, pulling away from me and wiping the ooze on his pants. “It’s okay. I’m okay. A little Bactine and I’ll be good as new. And hey, look—I found the road.”
“That you did, my lad. Well done.”
“How far do you think it is to the Tower from here?”
“Not far,” I mumbled. It had to be the better part of a mile still, if not farther. “But I bet we can use the regular light for a while. I don’t think we’re within shouting distance of it yet.”
Dana didn’t say anything to contradict me, though she must have known better. “Does it strike anyone as strange how quiet it is?”I helped Benny up, and the three of us stood together on the road, looking back towards the front of the park. Every few seconds, a siren would burp to life, and then be cut off. It looked very far away. “Maybe. Shouldn’t those guys be over by the Tower? Why camp out at the entrance? That’s not where the action is.”
“That’s the idea,” Dana said. “The cops wouldn’t let the news crews get any closer than that. There must be more cops around back. Even if we could’ve gotten the car out, we never would’ve gotten much closer anyway. That’s not what I meant by ‘quiet,’ though. This place was crawling with ghosts just the other night. There were more dead people wandering around than you could shake a stick at. Where are they now?”
“We can talk about this and walk at the same time,” Benny griped. “One of those reporters said the hostage situation was contained. They said he was holed up in the Tower. And you said we’re not within shouting distance. So come on. Let’s go already.”
He was right, so we started off along the road.
Dana didn’t let the subject drop, though. “Do you think it’s Green Eyes? Do you think he came back already? How long would it take him to get here? And how would he get here—would he walk? Teleport? Something like that?”
“I doubt he hitchhiked,” I said, following the bouncing light of my metallic purple torch. “But you’re right; it’s awfully quiet. Maybe he beat us back.”
“How?” Benny asked.
“Who knows? How does he do anything?”
“Magic,” Dana grumbled.
“Well, at least the fog’s not as bad as it was the other night,” I said, trying to pretend there was a bright side. “We must have visibility of…of at least a quarter of a mile.”
“Yeah, that’s great. Once we get within a quarter mile of the Tower, we’ll be in good shape.” Dana was the only one without a light, so she held back behind us.
Benny unscrewed the lens from his light, giving us a big white source of illumination, at least for the time being. He stuck the lens into his back pocket. “How do you think it happened? Do you think Jamie’s okay? I mean, if he wasn’t, they couldn’t call it a hostage situation, right? If he was dead, they’d just call it a standoff.”
“That sounds good to me,” I replied, trying not to worry about everyone at once. Benny, and his bleeding hands. Dana, and her soft gasping that leaked out with every step. Jamie, and some homicidal maniac with a gun.
Sometimes Jamie drove me up a wall, but he could be a pretty good friend when he wanted to, too. I was the one who’d gotten him into this whole thing, and it was my responsibility to get him out. If I hadn’t talked him into coming out with me the first time, that jackass Nick Alders would never have offered him three hundred bucks to revisit the scene.
If anything happened to Jamie, it was all my fault.
Or mostly my fault. It would be Nick’s fault too, a little—that smarmy, tidy-haired bastard with the unnaturally white smile and the foul mouth when the camera was turned off. Even if we all survived this, I might renege on that promise not to kick the crap out of him.
Or maybe I’d only promised not to kill him?
I found it hard to think out on the battlefield. I knew that there were ley lines crossing to and fro all over it; and even though I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, I knew it had something to do with energy, or vibes, or something like that. But the whole place was distracting. The fields seemed to swallow things up, and the woods around them promised secrets, and baited themselves like traps.
“It feels different now,” I said, clomping along beside Benny and in front of Dana. “It wasn’t always like this.”
“Like what?” Dana asked, but I thought maybe she was only making conversation. The world was so silent, and so dark, and so hard to see through the fog caulked in the spaces between us. It was better to talk, and pretend that all was normal and well.
“Like…when I was a kid, when I came here, I thought it was boring. It didn’t feel like anything—just a park. It was just some nice place that got mowed from time to time, and where old people came to have picnics. Thousands and thousands of people died here, but it was quiet.”
“It was, once?” Dana shuffled along, her shoes kicking gravel at my ankles. “By the time I got here, it was crawling with unhappiness. It was restless, and uncomfortable.”
“By the time you got here, Green Eyes had left. But listen.” And that wasn’t the right verb command, but it was as close as I could do. “Do you sense that? It’s different now. It isn’t restless. It isn’t uncomfortable, like it wants help or assistance, or understanding. But it’s something.”
“It’s awake.” Benny breathed it out before Dana or I could, and I was impressed—but unnerved. If even he was picking up on the psychic ambience, it must be damn near overwhelming. “But where—where is everyone? Where did all the ghosts go?”
No one knew, and no one responded.
I got distracted by a fork in the road and used it to change the subject. “We turn off here, don’t we?”
“No, not yet.” Dana flipped a couple of fingers up and forward. “It’s the next one. We’re not even up to the Dyer’s place yet.”
At the very distant edge of my hearing, I caught a short, sweet buzz. It fluttered and faded, in and out, like the sound of a fly throwing itself against a window. I knew that sound. And even though Dana and Benny didn’t appear to have noticed it, I reacted to it.