Chapter 4: Into the Fog

"Well, let's get on with it, man. We just run straight up the street, right?"

Dead Boy nods. "Straight shot up 16th. About half an hour. Then we'll be in the hills, above the fog."

Dead Boy and Soda stand in the underground landing of the 16th Street Mission subway station. Two sets of stairs on either side of the wide chamber lead up to the streets above. Other than a few low metal boxes built around homeless Frozen unlucky enough to have perished here—the station now their eternal tomb, the boxes their coffins—there isn't a single soul in the entire station.

A good sign after what they'd been through the last few hours.

After entering Powell station, they’d walked the length of the subway tunnels down past Civic Center to 16th Mission. This far south, the tunnels are less packed than around Embarcadero—Dead Boy and Soda have the luxury of living in the epicenter of the Crypts. But the tunnels here are also more squalid and dangerous. There are no extra rooms dug out of the earth to give people more space, for one thing. The boys were forced to trek directly through the living spaces of squatters and skirt around long lines of occupied train cars, keeping their heads down as suspicious occupants stared at them through the windows.

The lighting’s also much sparser in these far-flung subway lines. Camps near the Crypts stations benefit from rows of dim hanging light bulbs, but farther down the tunnels only oil lamps sputter. Dead Boy and Soda sometimes had to walk short portions of the way in near complete darkness, with only pinpricks of light in the distance to guide them straight toward the next shack—Dead Boy did have a flashlight at the ready, but was loathe to waste his only two batteries by turning it on unless he had to.

The stench down here’s something awful, too. It doesn't smell so nice in Embarcadero either, but at least they have a big enough community to delegate cleanup on a regular basis. Most of these hovels receive far less upkeep and there isn’t any running water. Though the boys buried their faces in their scarves, the putrid miasma still sucked in with every suffocating breath.

Many people stopped and interrogated the boys with distrustful prodding questions. Dead Boy took advantage of these opportunities to return the questioning with inquiry after Jamar, but always to no avail. Either they got the same information as before, or nothing at all. Still, although people tend to be quite suspicious in these southern tunnels, they respect runners and the boys were given safe passage.

Once they were held up at gunpoint by a big guy intent on stealing their bags, and were only saved by an angry woman stomping down the tunnel from the next hovel over. Farther on, the hovels had thinned to the point where they could walk for five or ten minutes before they met the next family—a much more dangerous proposition should someone try to rob them again. But nobody gave them any more trouble, and they eventually emerged from the tunnels at 16th Mission unharmed.

Soda had been down the tunnels quite a ways before, but never this far in his memory. He'd also been outside in the fog for short spells; he was found orphaned in the fog as a young child, in fact, and was taken in by the community. But since then, he’d never ventured much farther than downtown NBAZ, and he always stayed close to a Crypts entrance.

The fog isn't always dangerous, of course. Most places are only haunted by sleeping Frozen who are slow to wake. The problem's that you just never know. Much worse things can be lurking in the fog, and when you often can't see farther than a few yards or so, it's just not worth the risk.

Now that they're finally about to go out into the fog, Soda's full of nervous excitement. He longs to explore, to stretch his boundaries, to bring exciting stories back to his buddies, to gain respect. He's also very scared, but he steels his nerves and reminds himself that fear in times like these is just plain smart.

"Well, let's get on with it," Soda repeats, staring at the broken escalator with a confusing mixture of trepidation and impatience. The fog's misty down here, spilling down the stairwell like a slow-motion waterfall.

Dead Boy nods and climbs the escalator, leading his protégé up and out into a forgotten world where the dead merely sleep, winter never ceases, and nameless terrors lurk in unending banks of smoke like fear embodied in a dream.

###

Blurry whiteness begets snowy static begets pixelated form before Garden's eyes as she sits alone before the half-demolished third floor wall and stares deeply into the fog. The white mists grow and expand, encapsulating her vision, penetrating her senses until everything's totally white—all sound white noise, all feeling wiped clean, all smell and taste like a sweet dewdrop—purifying her entire being as if baptizing her in an aerial river and carrying her away on a cloud.

Still the fog spreads before her, pulling her vision impossibly close, deeper and deeper into the billowing substance of the insubstantial mist, until suddenly she perceives individual water droplets floating before her eyes, bobbing up and down in vast empty space like stars in the night sky that only topsiders like Garden can see. Larger and larger the fog looms before her, around her, within her, making her feel impossibly small, now bringing her before a single massive water drop upon the convex surface of which she sees a bowed reflection of … a woman wearing a red hat?

Garden shakes her head violently, bringing her awareness vaguely back to the room she's actually in, the pressure of the crate she's sitting upon, the musty, moldy tang attacking her mouth and nostrils. Yet still she sees this second vision, her sight blind to the room around her. She closes her eyes to drown out the extrasensory experience, but still she sees the water droplet, and now she can see a large old-fashioned cathedral on a dark city street floating behind the red-hatted lady like a picture on the wall.

Garden cries out and tightens her death grip on the crate, her fingernails gouging painfully into the ancient wood. She turns her head this way and that, wishing this madness would end, but the rest of her body feels frozen on the spot, numb and unresponsive to her wishes as if it belongs to someone else, and her vision stubbornly remains elsewhere, locked away in the inner reaches of the fog, staring in terror at this oblivious smiling stranger.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

After a few heartbeats that seem an eternity, Garden slowly remembers her mission, her purpose, her incredible obsession for a deeper understanding that'll help her make sense of this crazy world. She needs to find out what her dreams mean. And now … the fog's obviously showing her something, and she needs to find out what.

With a final whimpering moan of fatalist submission, Garden faces forward once again and opens her eyes. Her view zooms further forward in a sudden rush until, with a tactile whump and an audible splash, she's within the water droplet and standing inside the cityscape scene directly in front of the woman wearing the red hat.

Inside a fogless city scene. And it's snowing.

###

"The old church is up ahead," Dead Boy says. "Lots of Frozen around there."

Soda and Dead Boy have been hustling west up 16th Street for almost ten minutes. Long gone are the sheet-metal halls that once boxed in their world. The fog now swirls all around them. Empty buildings, busted cars, and icebound corpses loom through the murk. No longer does their path twist to and fro confined within tortuous corridors, leaving them free to now take a direct route straight up the street. But though they need to move quickly, the ground out here in the open is also icier and slipperier, forcing them to jog-walk with an unnaturally short halting stride.

When they first emerged from the Crypts, Soda had stopped to gaze at the first Frozen they passed, entranced by the changes that took place as it saw him, woke, and started to stir. The dead man's rimy eyes vacantly stared at Soda for a few passing moments, and then, ever so slowly, blinked with a second set of eyelids superimposed over its still-staring pupils. Its face and then its entire body started to shimmer and blur as its spirit slowly detached from the corpse that remained frozen to the ground, its amorphous head craning this way and that, bearing a pained expression of immense struggle and terrible hunger.

Dead Boy pulled Soda away from that first encounter, hurrying the two of them up the street away from the waking ice wraith. Many more Frozen saw them and started to wake as they passed by, but Dead Boy always urged his friend to keep moving, the faces of the dead blurring ever so slightly as they turned to watch the two living bodies pass before them. Frozen are usually slow to fully wake, and their wraiths only haunt their environs for a few hours before returning to their corporeal home, but it's still unwise to hang around and watch it happen.

As they passed Frozen after Frozen, Soda eventually realized that his friend never seemed to look directly at the corpses’ faces. Dead Boy just ignored them and kept moving forward, focused only on the fog ahead as if the X’s tattooed on his eyes were crosshairs he kept zeroed in on his target. Soda remarked on it, but Dead Boy only grunted and refused any further answer, leaving Soda in awkward silence.

Now, the two boys slow their pace as a larger crowd of humanoid forms loom through the dense fog in front of them. Dozens of rigid corpses are rising through the mist, filling the wide street. Many of them stand staring at the sky in terror, while others are kneeling on the icy ground with hands locked at their breasts deep in eternal prayer, like statues from a lost time.

Dead Boy stops for a moment to catch his breath, looking up into the blank canvas that replaces the sky. Still white means there's still light. Judging by the shade of the fog, the sun's probably still fairly high, too—they're making good time.

He claps his friend on the shoulder, points toward the throng of dead bodies standing in the street and tells him what to do, using the exact same words his own mentor spoke just half a year before.

###

"We go straight through them," Jamar said to him. "The Frozen are only thick like this in front of the church. Just keep moving, go fast, and we'll be fine."

Del Rey nodded, but the fear showed plain on his still as-yet un-tattooed face.

Jamar laughed, a long chortling rumble loud enough to wake all the Frozen on the block. Jamar was a large, thick-muscled 19-year-old with skin darker than anyone Del ever met. He customarily wore a scowl that scared off almost anyone who didn't know him. But his smiles were also genuinely disarming, and Del tended to eke more grins out of his close companion than anyone else from the Crypts.

"Just trust me," Jamar chuckled. "There's nothing to be scared about." With one arm slung around Del's shoulders and the other hoisting his big Louisville Slugger over his own shoulder, Jamar pushed Del forward into a slow trot toward the mob of icebound corpses. At first it seemed like only twenty or thirty, but the fog was thick and, as they neared the intersection, it became apparent that there must be hundreds more up ahead. All were slowly waking in the wispy writhing way that wraiths rise from slumber, following Jamar's loud outburst. But still, Jamar pushed Del steadily onward, straight into the crowd of Frozen.

As they entered the denser midst of the throng, Del whispered, "You ever had to fight this many at once?"

"Ha!" Jamar barked, clapping Del's back with a loud smack. Del trembled, incredulously staring all around them at the rousing wraiths.

But Jamar paid them no heed, only turning conspiratorially to his friend and saying with a wink, "One day, I will have to show you my superpower."

###

"Are we rolling? Okay, we're live."

The woman in the red hat stops talking and stands smiling silently at Garden. She's wearing a pristine navy-blue overcoat and long black boots. Big, fat snowflakes collect one by one on the red beret she wears perched atop perfectly curled locks of shiny blonde hair. Her face is impossibly pretty, Garden realizes, almost as if it's been painted on her head. Garden can't stop staring at her—this is beyond doubt the most beautiful person she's ever seen.

She's looking back at me, but doesn't actually see me. The woman's waiting, as if intently listening to somebody else speaking to her. In the street behind her, a thick crowd of people mill around the street in front of the old cathedral, marveling at the snow falling all around them. Many of the people are lost in reverent prayer, while others look incredibly anxious, as if something terrible is happening.

Then, the woman speaks again, her mouth blossoming into a wide, welcoming smile as she breaks the ominous news in a confident, steady voice.

"Yes, I am standing here in front of the Mission Delores Basilica in the heart of San Francisco. And as you can see, Fran, it is snowing. Now, San Francisco hasn't seen snow in nearly sixty years, and it's only September, so what we are witnessing right now is absolutely unprecedented weather. The snowstorm is showing no signs of abating, either, and is in fact spreading across central California at a steady rate.

"In response to this unnatural storm, a large crowd has gathered here at the old church to pray. Many people say they're fearful that it's the end of times. The cathedral itself is packed to the doors, with hundreds more overflowing out into the street.

"Now, we can confidently say that this is not the end of the world here, folks. Scientists have confirmed that the snow is actually being caused by a malfunction in SkyWeb, the global climate-control network that's been successfully reversing climate change these past five years. Officials at SkyWeb Corporation have announced that the bug is nearly patched and assured us that the weather should in fact return to normal within the next few hours.

"In the meantime, Mayor Delinksi has urged residents to keep their cars off the street because, as you can see, the snow is several feet deep in some places. But yes, rest assured it's absolutely safe to go for a walk outside and enjoy the snow, as there are no emergency measures in place other than snow removal. The sky may be falling, but this can also be seen as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a snowcone in San Francisco. Back to you, Fran."

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