by Chris Capps
As she walked past the theater, she caught sight of Melissa Novak. She was swathed in the cool thick fog, but standing completely silent in some sort of anticipation. The theater wasn't going to be open for a few hours. She was just standing there, staring straight ahead. For a moment, Tabitha considered calling out to the woman. Then she remembered the rumor that had passed through the front door a day prior. Was her husband really dead? People grieved strangely these days, kept it all in. They let it smolder, let the fire burn their insides. And Melissa was a particularly stoic woman. She turned her face slowly, staring out with bloodshot eyes as Tabitha walked past.
She kept watching long after that, staring into the whorls of curling fog and smoke the young waitress left in her wake. She was pretty, well proportioned. Melissa stared at the hips that swayed into the mist with a furrowed brow. And then she tilted her head back to the right, looking at the black poster behind glass with her name on it.
Co-starring Melissa Novak. Beyond those words, in the black felt behind glass she could see the sad face of an aging woman who had lost a husband. It wasn't that part that bothered her. It was that she would now be alone. Odd now. Odd, the moments she had felt comfortable alone. Melissa thought she smelled smoke, thought she could even hear a dull and distant wind carrying it. And yet as she stared into those cracked and bloodshot eyes, all she could think was what she whispered,
"Alone now."
In the reflection she saw four figures, each one glancing up at her before passing into the movie theater. The same face. The same face that had claimed her husband. They looked up, passing behind her, moving without a sound. She slowly turned, fear a thing that no longer existed in the alien realms of her mind. She turned and grabbed the last one by the shoulder, turning her and looking into her face.
They stared at one another, Molly and Melissa, not sharing a word between them for a moment. Molly looked into Melissa's eyes, taking up her hand and squeezing it gently, before leaning forward and whispering,
"Not you. Not yet."
"How old am I going to get?"
"Not much older," Molly said with a melancholic and gentle smile, "We'll come to you soon. Leave your front door unlocked tonight."
"I used to watch you when I was young. Just another girl lost in this world, wanting to build a simple life for herself. I don't think we talked too much, but I remember thinking then that I knew you. We were so alike. I wanted to be friends."
Molly held out her hand, letting the skin on the back of her fingers touch Melissa's face,
"Me too. It will be quick."
And she turned to walk into the vacant theater with the others. Inside she could hear the same voice four times talking, chattering quickly in something almost like a song. The wave of sound spilled from the darkened doorway of the theater, breaking into itself and compounding, chilling Melissa briefly before she broke from that scene and filled her ears with the sound of gravel crunching underfoot. She would go to Scratchy's diner one last time today. And then she would go home and lay in bed with the door unlocked.
Ahead she could see the Christmas-tree-blinking of a fire truck as it rushed past her down the street, awakening the siren the old truck used every time it was about to rush into danger, warning the rest of the town, rousing them from an uneasy sleep.
Something is burning. Wake up. Somewhere is on fire.
She traced footsteps all the way to Scratchy's diner where she stood outside the glass window and saw Tabitha working behind the counter. Her eyes couldn't help but notice the perfection of the simple girl that labored, cutting open tea bags and emptying them into a steel pot alongside wet coffee grounds. Pretty soon the firefighters would be back, flirting with Tabitha and recounting the spectacle of their daily excitement. Melissa pulled her hands from the window and walked past.
Maybe this morning she'd just take a long walk instead of coffee.
Tabitha noticed her leave, quickly hiding the spent tea bags and shuffling the empty paper husks into a trash can. She wiped damp hair back on her scalp, sweating against the thick steam in the boiling pot in front of her. Mornings like this were busy, sure. And with the fire truck running off into the distance, soon she'd have ten more customers demanding coffee and demanding it taste like actual coffee. Coffee she didn't have. Scratchy leered sideways from the griddle, flipping another pancake into a small stack beside him,
"Ten cups at least this morning, little lady."
She looked up from the pot out the window and spotted a patrol car. Not the Sherriff's. She caught sight of Deputy Jessica Myers in the driver's seat, her lips thin with worry as she drove, flipping on her lights.
"Better make that fifteen," Tabitha said with a sigh.
Jessica Myers was racing to the edge of town toward the smell of smoke. Turning on her siren at this hour would certainly earn her plenty of complaints later in the day, but she wasn't about to race through fog like this without taking every precaution. The lights from the fire truck ahead were quickly disappearing, fading in that thick white blanket all around them. She squinted her eyes, accelerating and peering as far as she could forward as she approached the theater.
Shapes. Shapes were darting in front of her. She had only a split second to react, and used the moment to clench her teeth and slam both feet on the brakes hard. The car skidded sideways, turned just to the left. Fighting all instinct to clench her eyes shut, she watched the car spin into one of the light posts, sending the figure sprawling back and knocking against the wall. It was a sickening sound the whole scene made. And then she felt her body slam forward toward the steering wheel, to be caught by her seatbelt at only the last moment.
Time took a moment to catch up to her. She was in that moment of impact, reliving it a dozen times in the blink of an eye. The hood of the car was no longer visible behind the now white and fractured windshield.
She gripped the steering wheel, struggling to unlatch the locking mechanism of the seatbelt. One of her eyes was shut now, closed instinctively against a thin trail leaking down her brow. Blood, she realized, raising her hand up and touching it with sizzling pain. She looked down at the steering wheel and couldn't see where her head had struck it. She didn't even remember it.
Breathing heavily to fight off a sudden wave of nausea, her mouth hung slack. She unlatched the seatbelt and opened the side door to the car, stepping out on uneasy legs and gripping the top of the patrol car's door. She looked at the scene in front of the car.
It had bent the light post backward heavily, sending the blue candle inside it splattering against the wall as if it had been made of thick waxy paint. The glass framed poster declaring the arrival of a new and spectacular play had broken, sending shards of glass in a wide arc around them. And there she was, with dead eyes staring into oblivion, leaning against the wall.
Molly Nayfack, or rather one of the many Molly Nayfacks. Jessica knelt down and touched the girl's throat with two fingers. Nope.
Jessica stood, stumbling once as she limped back to the car. She reached for her radio,
"Send ambulance," she said, her thoughts no longer whole, "Accident in front of theater. One dead, one injured."
A strange delirium was setting in. She looked into the fog again and saw three shapes, but didn't see the faces. They were blurry, like everything else - slowly walking toward her. She drew the gun from her hip, shaking her head, only partially aware of the terror now gripping her. They were all the same. All the same girl. They stopped as she held her gun up in loose fingers, resting it on the hood of the car, showing it to them. And they stepped back into the fog, hidden once again.
She leaned on the roof of the car, the hot engine spilling green oil onto the ground around them. The car door, still hanging open, trembled as she leaned heavily back into the driver's seat and leaned it back. The gun was resting on her lap, and her breathing was labored.
Across town, in the field that now burned unapologetically, six men lay on the ground staring into the morning sky beside
their fire truck. The flames had banished the fog, but the smoke it kicked up gave the sky a much darkened hue. Cairo's six firefighters lay next to one another, long drag marks pulled in the grass behind them as they stared open mouthed at nothing. Long lines were traced across their necks where thick blood was trailing, disappearing into black crumpled grass. A fly landed on the fire marshal's face, crawling down to the slit throat, before buzzing away.
In the woods nearby a girl was leaning against a tree, her eyes rolled back as the smell of the smoldering field reached her.
***
Two figures trekked across gravel, stumbling only occasionally as they moved, neither one saying a word for a very long time. Between them, set in steel was the road they followed - twin columns stretching deep into the woods and away from everything they knew. Molly looked uneasily all around her, staring at the trees that glowered over them, twisting and reaching in every direction. Felix was calm, if only for a moment, until he looked up ahead.
The two columns of steel, twisted and bent into the sky were still there, being pulled up and around like curls of frozen smoke, like before. He recalled the morning before all of this when he and Mike had driven out here on a routine check of the tracks. And here it was, still bent and unmoving, in the light wind that shuffled the trees overhead.
Molly noticed it too, walking up behind him and crossing her eyebrows close together in concern. They closed in, ever silent, and Felix once again wrapped his hand around one of the tracks, seeing if he could budge the thing with his hand. Not a chance.
Finally, as they stood, Felix looked across from him at Molly, who was running a finger up one of the sides of the track, pulling a thin layer of dust off the side onto her finger. She looked curiously back at him, shaking her head before speaking for the first time that morning,
"What happened?"
"We found it this way. Whole thing was pulled up, pulled apart one morning. That's when things started to go bad."
"Did they do this?" she asked.
"Yes," Felix said, "We found tracks, like the ones you leave behind. Those same shoes." He motioned with his thumb down at Molly's shoes, then looked back up at her, "Why would you do that?"
She smiled, as if confused at first, but quickly it drained from her face. In a moment of realization, she shook her head. Slowly at first, but it kept swaying back and forth as each new realization dawned on her. Her eyes were wet, filling quickly with tears that threatened to cascade down onto her soft cheeks.
"I..." is all she said. The rest was swallowed up, taken away from her. Her lip curled down as she looked at the track, once more shaking her head and continuing forward, "Let's keep going."
Felix hissed between his teeth, pulling the modestly filled camping backpack tighter by the straps around his shoulders,
"Jeez-us."
Ahead they could hear something. It was like talking, but confused, interrupting. A single voice was trickling into itself, interrupting sentences and backtracking in mass confusion. There were many voices, all of them belonging to the girl that spun around and stared at him with wet frightened eyes.
He took her by the hand, pulled her back from the tracks and they descended a short hill. The voices were growing louder, laughing ecstatically and crying out all at once. The mood of the procession above them was impossible to determine. Joy, terror, excitement - they all flowed freely with each disjointed word as they passed. It was like a prayer, a stream of consciousness, an alien poetry. Felix strained his ears to hear it, but could only pick out one word, repeated twice,
"Kiss-kiss."
The shadows on the tracks moved in a disjointed crowd, rushing back and forth and jostling the small rocks beneath them down the hill. At least twelve of them moved past, each speaking and interrupting - thoughts compounding thoughts.
And then they had passed, their howls rising in the morning sun into a single chorus before fading with distance. Felix rose, with the lost Molly moving to accompany him.
"All of them," she said, "All me."
"Not you," Felix said reassuringly, "Maybe you're different from them. There's some reason you're down here while they're all up there."
She clutched at his arm, biting her lip and holding herself close. She was scared. That much Felix could divine easily enough. They both rose, treading carefully back up to the tracks and stopping for a moment. Felix noticed his hand was shaking as he said,
"They were coming down the tracks toward town. These only lead to one other place."
"Would they be staying at the old mill?" she asked. Felix shrugged, his hands far out by his sides, "I was hoping you could tell me."
"Don't act like I know what they'd do," Molly said narrowing her eyes, "Believe it or not, I don't have much of an idea what these monsters are. If they were like me, they'd be doing something more normal, like sitting at Fred's Diner."
"It's called Scratchy's Diner now, and not everything you did was quite normal," Felix said as he continued down, "What about leaving town and wandering off to die?"
"That's not what happened," she said, "I needed to get away from town for a while. It could have happened to anybody."
"You were in trouble?" Felix asked.
"No," she said, "Not trouble. But I got claustrophobic. And I didn't want to go back. I just got the notion to start walking around. Exploring. I don't know what's happened since then."
"A lot," Felix said. Ahead a gentle bend in the tracks silenced them. As they approached it, their ears focused on every sound. Every out of place twig snap or flap of wings echoed and fed their apprehension. They scanned the air for voices, and heard none. Nothing but the sliding of rocks underfoot.
Soon they passed the bend, and relaxed. Felix continued, "Like we're older now. I don't know if we ever met before you disappeared."
She shook her head,
"I don't suppose we did."
With a gentle chuckle, Felix stopped and turned toward her, his hand extended,
"Well my name's Felix, Felix McCarthy."
For the first time he saw her smile. It was a strange, gentle smile. One not a stranger to humor, but shy all at once. She took his hand,
"Nice to meet you. I guess you know who I am. I'm Molly Nayfack. I can only hope we never met before."
"Fraid not," Felix said as he felt her hand in his. His smile weakened, but she didn't notice.
He couldn't get out of his mind the sound her head had made on the concrete the night of the meeting. And as they shook hands, something passed between them. It was an understanding. In all of this, out in the world by themselves, they realized they would have to depend on each other soon. For a moment the suspicion Felix had tried to reinforce in his mind waned. He felt as if he had known this girl for a long time. And Molly was struck too.
"It's noble what you're doing," she said, "I don't understand this, but I know it takes a good man to help protect a stranger like this."
"Yeah I guess it is pretty noble," Felix said, a genuine smile creeping up his face, "Soon we'll reach the lumber mill and everything will be fine."
"Yeah."
Yeah.
***
Mark Newmann was sitting at his radio, staring out into the ashen wall just beyond. In the drifting writhing mass of fog he slowly rose, scooting his chair back. Someone was outside, slogging around through that wasted sky, in the dewy mud. More. At the window now, he watched. The shapes were hunched, crowding past one another.
At least he didn't see the other ones, the incredibly tall two legged mosquitoes with trees for legs. He'd started seeing those shortly after he stopped drinking. Unrelated.
"She's gone," he said to himself, and returned to the desk staring at the half-empty bottle, "Did she say where she was going?"
He picked it up, staring into the half-inch of dull brown liquid resting at the bottom. It glided back and forth, whispering secrets to him. He took it to the sink and turned on the faucet. Slowly, delicately, he upturned the bottle and poured the content
s down the sink. Watching the spiral thin out and vanish into the black drain he said it. It was a name he'd been thinking about all morning. One syllable. Not a place, a person.
"Hades."
Hayds.
It was a name that burned into him. It burned like hate. It burned like whiskey in the throat. But Mark hadn't touched a drink in weeks now.
"It's time for Mr. Hades," Mark said turning and placing the empty bottle next to the others, each arranged on the kitchen table, uniformed like an army in formation. He looked up from the army back to the front door. She still wasn't here. Had she been home last night?
He walked to the door, eyes glaring into the peep hole shining from its center. He leaned in, looking out, but saw only the white. He reached over, pulling aside the curtains leading into the house, filling whole swathes of the room in shadow. Now deeply dimmed, obfuscated from the outside world, he quietly walked to the ash grey door leading down to the cellar.
"A lot," he said, "You've talked to a lot of them."
He opened the door, letting its gentle creak split the lonely silence of his house. Unexplained drafts of cool wind poured up, chilling him. Andrea hardly ever went down there anymore. Neither did Mark. Except when he was alone. With his thumb, he pressed hard on the old light switch, forcing it up into the on position. It clicked angrily, but let the solitary bulb come to life.
He crept cautiously down the wooden stairs, long streaks making crow shaped puppet shadows on the wall next to him. The basement was cool, damp. There was a smell like mold in the air. He stepped down, gazing into the melancholy hues of brick and mud as they clung to every beam and column.
The floor he stepped bare feet onto was soft, gritty, moist like a doused campfire. His toes pushed down into the cellar ground, tracing in long shuffling lines as he walked to a black tarp in the center of the room.
There were two women here. Young women. Molly.
He looked between them, standing at either end of the room, surprised. And yet nothing surprised Mark for very long anymore. Not when he was setting out to see Mr. Hades. They were silent, watching him as he smiled and wrapped his hand around one of the tarp's corners.
