Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

He knew that heaviness was slowing him down, making him weak. He knew he had to fight against it.

Despair is not an option .

He gritted his teeth. Pushed himself on, racing headlong down the hall.

There they were: the double doors that led to the fields in back. There were no windows here, so he couldn’t check the conditions outside. He didn’t know what he was about to find. He didn’t know what he was charging into. But he had to try it.

He flung himself against the doors. Hit the bar of the doors with his shoulder and shoved it open, tumbling after it out of the school, into the back fields.

He tumbled into a tempest. The storm out here was raging full blast, the power of it almost unbelievable. The sky was flashing continuously. The thunder cracked and muttered and rolled. The wind lashed at his face and the rain pounded him.

But there was no fog. There were no malevolents. Through the streaming gray downpour, he could see across the playing fields to the horizon.

He headed in that direction—he tried to, anyway. He got three steps, and then the wind strengthened even more, hammering against him without ceasing. He fought forward another step, but the wind was overpowering. The rain whipped his face painfully. He had to raise his arm to protect his eyes.

As he stood there, trying to battle the wind, there was a flash of lightning and a blast of thunder so loud it deafened him. He felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, shake so hard he was afraid it would open up and swallow him. He had never felt a storm like this—it seemed beyond the bounds of nature.

For a moment, the noise trembled lower, but it seemed to Tom it wasn’t fading but only gathering for some greater blast.

And then it came. A crackling flash of lightning like no lightning there had ever been, a supernatural explosion of radiance that blinded him and a crash of thunder that swallowed every other sound. The wind grew even stronger. The rain fell even harder. It seemed he was being spun and lifted and carried away by a whipping whirlpool of light and sound and air and pain. It was as if the chaos in his heart had overflowed into the chaos around him and the chaos around him had engulfed all the world.

Everything turned gray as the tempest overwhelmed him. There was nothing left anywhere except the storm.

The rain fell steadily. Drenched and weary, Tom trudged up a steep two-lane road. He moved in the shadows of overhanging oak and eucalyptus trees, the cold downpour dripping on him from their leaves.

He looked around, bewildered. It was strange—very strange: he couldn’t remember how he had gotten here. He had stepped out of the school into a raging storm—he remembered that. And he remembered the wind and the lightning and thunder—the incredible intensity of them. But then… ? There was nothing after that. He was just suddenly here. It was as if there had been some weird skip in the video of his life, a missing transition.

And now? He wasn’t sure. Something felt wrong. Something felt different and strange. He couldn’t quite tell what it was, but he sensed he had entered a new phase of this nightmare.

He trudged on beneath the dripping trees, nearing the top of the hill. From there, he would be able to look down onto the main street of town, Route 190. There would be a little strip of stores, gas stations, and restaurants. The freeway to the right, and the ocean beyond. The high hills to the left, dotted with houses.

A few yards from the crest, Tom stopped. He had heard something. A sort of steady whoosh and whisper. He realized he had been hearing it for some time, but he hadn’t noticed it before because it blended in with the background and because… well, because it was so normal. He was used to hearing it every day.

It was the sound of cars on the freeway.

Tom’s lips parted in surprise as he realized this. This was what he’d been missing all this time—all this time he’d been in this bizarre coma-world. The noise of freeway traffic, the songs of birds, the presence of other people. The normal sounds and movements of life. Had they all come back now? What did it mean?

He started walking again, faster, covering the last few yards to the peak of the hill.

He stopped at the crest and looked down into the center of town. A feeling of wonder and hope spread through him. Sure enough, there were cars passing on the freeway down there, just as there usually were. There were cars on 190, too. Cars pausing at the stoplight, moving on when the light turned green. Cars pulling into the diagonal spaces outside the shops and restaurants. Cars stopping at the pump for gas. Just like always.

Another movement caught Tom’s attention and he turned and saw, to his amazement, an actual pedestrian, a sure-enough ordinary normal human being, big as life. It was a woman with a shopping bag coming out of the Easy Mart at the Shell station, heading for her parked SUV. Tom stared at her with wonder, as if she were an angel descended from heaven. And then…

Then Tom lifted his eyes and he saw the Pacific. What a wonderful sight it was! The ocean was dark and churning under the gray sky, its waves rising to meet the rain, its whitecaps snapping at the clouds. But the best part was: there was no fog, no marine layer. In fact, now that he thought about it, there was no sign of fog anywhere. No malevolents.

Did that mean he had finally escaped them? Was he getting better? Was he going to live and regain consciousness?

His excitement rose as he started down the hill.

He entered the heart of Springland. He passed the Greenhouse Restaurant on his left. He could see people through the windows of the green clapboard building: more ordinary people sitting at the tables in there eating and talking. He could see people through the window of the antique shop, too. And more people pulling into the Shell station in their cars. It was as if he had returned to the land of the living after a long journey through a barren nightmare.

Just as he reached the corner, a tall, weathered ranchhand came out of the hardware store and moved past Tom toward a black pickup parked at the curb. Tom smiled a greeting at the man, eager to talk to someone, to anyone.

“Hey. How goes it?” Tom said.

The ranchhand took no notice of him. He walked past Tom as if he weren’t there. Got into his truck. Drove away.

Tom sighed. He had wanted so much to hear another human voice, a real, normal human voice. After the ranchhand was gone, he stood on the corner for a second, looking around for someone else to talk to. But there was no one nearby. The rain continued to drench him. His soaked, clammy clothes clung to him uncomfortably. He had to move on. He had to get to 47 Pinewood Lane. The Pinewood Apartments. That’s why he was here. To find Karen Lee, the woman in the white blouse. To hear what it was she so desperately wanted to tell him. The truth he could not remember.

The building called Pinewood Apartments was the only high-rise in town. Tom could see it from here: a white six-story building embedded precariously in the slope of the hills above him, with balconies on every floor overlooking the freeway and the sea.

Tom started toward it, up the road through the rain.

Then suddenly he was standing outside the building. Again, he couldn’t remember how he had gotten here. He had begun walking and then there was a kind of fritz —like static or something—and suddenly he was just here, looking in through the glass doors that led to the building’s lobby. Very freaky. Very strange.

He shook his head, like a dog shaking off water. He was tired, that’s all. Zoning out. He ran his fingers through his hair, combing out the rain. Once he found Karen Lee, things would start to make more sense. Just tired , he told himself again.