The pounding grew steadily louder. Those strange echoing shrieks grew louder. And now there were other noises. A crack. A spatter.
Glass breaking. The windows were giving way.
Fear flowed into Tom like electricity, jolting him out of his weakness, jolting him out of his sorrowing daze.
He heard the Lying Man whisper in his mind:
I want for you what you want for yourself. Death. You want to die.
Was it true? He was so confused now, so unhappy, so incredibly weary of fighting his way through this nightmare, that he didn’t know what was true anymore or whom to trust. But he wanted to know. He still had that—that curiosity to know the truth that drove him on, that wouldn’t let him give up.
You want to die, the Lying Man insisted.
And Tom thought: No. No, I don’t. Not yet, at least.
He was still a reporter, after all. He couldn’t die before he learned the rest of the story.
He hesitated another moment. He heard the malevolents trying to break in upstairs. He thought of their poisonous claws, their ravenous teeth. He remembered the lanky man with blond hair who had been dragged away screaming into the fog. He had cut his wrists, Lisa said. He had given in to despair. He really had wanted to die.
That’s not me, Tom thought, fighting down the voice of the Lying Man. That’s not going to be me.
He gripped his bat tightly and started to run.
He dashed through the darkness of the halls. Whispers trailed past him like wind. Shadows dashed by on every side of him. Memories. The haunting memories he had wanted to leave behind. Pulling at him. Calling to him.
He reached the bottom of the stairway. Looked up into the dim, gray light above. Not much light—just the light leaking down the hall from the lobby windows—but enough to make his way by. The pounding up there continued. The shrieking continued. They would break through soon. He had to hurry.
He started up, taking the stairs two and three at a time.
It was not fast enough.
As he reached the top of the flight, he heard a tremendous shattering noise. He peered down the hall, through the shadows, into the brighter light of the lobby. He saw that two of the windows had already broken, their shards and splinters glittering on the floor in the gray light. Now, even as he watched, thunder crashed and lightning flickered and another window exploded and then another. The wind brought the rain lashing in through the openings. More lightning. More thunder. And then the fog tumbled into the corridor.
And the malevolents came with it.
Lit by the flickering blasts of light, the monsters climbed through the broken windows, fighting with one another to be the first in. They tore at one another’s rotting piebald flesh with their toxic claws. The jagged broken glass tore at them, too. They screamed—and their horrible screams were lost beneath the wild, raging thunder. But nothing slowed them down. Nothing stopped them. As the mist hissed into the school, as the wind-whipped rain drenched the glass-strewn floor, as the thunder and lightning rocked the school and lit the corridor, the malevolents tumbled through the windows, staggering across the hall, sniffing the air and eyeing the darkness, searching for their prey.
There was no chance of getting past them. No chance of fighting so many. Tom had to find another way out.
He turned and looked away from the lobby, down the other hall. At the rear of the school, there were doors leading onto the athletic fields. Maybe there was still a chance he could reach them before the fog surrounded the school entirely. He could cross the fields and climb the fence and make his way to town, to Pinewood Lane, to Karen Lee.
Panting, terrified, he left the lobby of monsters behind and took off down the hall to the back of the school at top speed. Yet, even now, even in his fear, he was aware of the heaviness and confusion inside him.
Look at yourself, Tom. Really look at yourself for a change. Look at your life. You’ve lost your brother. You’ve lost your friends. You’ve spent years pining for a girl who despises you . . .
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.