Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

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.

He 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. Back through the clammy, roiling cloud. Back toward his house—back toward where he hoped his house was, anyway. He looked over his shoulder as he ran and saw the three shambling figures still behind him, still visible, but fading somewhat as he outpaced them, as they clumped after him slowly and he ran away as fast as he could.

He faced forward, plunging blindly through the shifting white. And now a noise of fear escaped him. Up ahead of him, he saw yet another figure—no, two more figures—two more men or whatever they were shambling toward him slowly from the other end of the street. They were moving slant-wise, moving to cut him off from his own driveway, he thought, to intercept him before he could reach his house.

Tom changed course, cutting to his left, hoping against hope that his driveway really was where he thought it was. If he was right, he would beat the—the things—the creatures—whatever they were—he would beat them to the driveway and get to his house before they could get to him.

Through the cold, thickening, sickening clouds of panicked terror inside him, there suddenly came a laser-thin ray of hope. The fog was thinning. The edge of his driveway was dimly visible. He was heading in the right direction!

The shadows up ahead were still some distance away. The shadows behind him… He glanced back over his shoulder again. He could barely see them now. Yes! He was going to make it!

With new determination, he faced forward.

And one of the things was standing right beside him. It made an unholy sound and lunged at him out of the fog.

He hadn’t seen it there until that instant. He hadn’t noticed it creeping toward him from the right. Now, without warning, it was suddenly almost on top of him, mere yards away, its silhouette boldly clear behind the thinning curtain of mist. As Tom broke from the thickest depths of the fog into the clearer area at the bottom of his driveway, the thing let out that bizarre noise—a hollow, self-echoing shriek—and reached out to grab him.

Tom twisted his shoulder to avoid its grasp. A weirdly gnarled hand with long claws swept past him. For a single second, the creature’s face emerged from the fog.

Tom only caught a glimpse of it, but that one glimpse made the terror in him blaze like an icy fire. The thing was not what he feared. It was not some human being who had turned into a zombie. It was not a human being at all.

The face Tom saw—or thought he saw—it flashed by him too quickly for him to be certain—was the face of a beast unlike any he had ever seen before. Its skin was ash-gray, darkened by patches of sickly red. Its semihuman features were strangely elongated, as if its head had been stretched top to bottom. Strands of greasy hair were strung across its mottled pate. Its nose was like a pit. Its cheeks were deeply sunken. Its mouth gaped open, the sharp teeth gleaming within. It would have almost seemed the face of a dead and rotting thing except that the eyes were sparkling with an eager, living cruelty.

It made that noise again. That horrible, somehow hungry noise. As its swiping claws missed Tom’s shoulder, its hideous features came within inches of him. Tom cried out gruffly in disgust. Then the creature stumbled past him and staggered clumsily back into the depths of the fog, fading from sight.

The beast would surely turn around and try again, but Tom did not wait around to watch. He didn’t slow down at all. He just kept running. A few more steps and he broke out of the mist. He felt the damp grip of the stuff release him as his front yard and his house came into view not far ahead. He raced wildly up the driveway, his sneakers slapping the pavement. He had a sense that the creatures were still after him, that they were shambling toward him from every side. But he didn’t look, he didn’t dare. He just kept running.

A few more strides to his front door. He was there, his hand on the knob. Now he was pulling the door open. Now he hurled himself inside. Now, at last, he slammed and locked the door behind him.

Panting, gasping, heaving in each rasping breath, he peered out the sidelight to see if the beasts were going to come after him. But no. There was nothing there now, nothing visible, anyway. He could see the driveway clear down to the end. The mist was as it was before, thick all around the edges of the lawn, but hanging back from his house itself as if the house and front lawn were in some kind of protective bubble.

Tom had a momentary, terrifying thought. What if—while he was out there—what if some of those things had gotten inside the house? What if one of them was creeping down the hall behind him, reaching out for his neck right now?

He spun around and stared at his own home wide-eyed. He listened, straining with every particle of himself to hear anything, anything moving, approaching.

And a voice came to him from down the hall: “Tom? Tom? Are you there?”

Tom’s heart seized in his chest. The voice was coming from the kitchen.

“Tom?”

For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was too stunned to answer.

“Tom? Can you hear me?”

He knew that voice. Of course he did. He would know it anywhere.

“Tom?” she called to him again.

And with a wild rush of relief, Tom called back to her, “Marie!”

Was it only three weeks ago? It was. Tom had come out of his last class of the day—American History—and he knew at once that his life had changed forever. The latest issue of the Sentinel had come out. Lisa, the editor, had used her study period to put the dead-tree edition in the racks that stood at the hallway corners. Students were already standing around holding copies of the paper in their hands or reading the digital version on their tablets. Staring at the front page. Gaping at the story on the front page:

Sources: Tiger Champs Used Drugs. By Tom Harding

It was a shattering revelation. The Tiger team of three years ago—the team that had, against all odds and expectations, won the Open Division and claimed the state championship, the team that had made the school so proud—had cheated. Several of the linemen had illegally used anabolic steroids, the dangerous prescription drugs that made you bigger and stronger in the short term, even as they damaged your long-term health.

As Tom walked down the hall, the kids reading the paper looked up. They looked at him. Their faces darkened. They watched him pass with their eyes narrowed and their lips pressed together with rage. One guy—Mitchell Smith, a Tigers lineman—purposely slammed his shoulder into Tom’s shoulder as he walked by, making Tom grunt in pain and reel back a step. No one protested the attack. No one said a word.