Chapter 3: Whispers in the Fog

The fog was alive.

That was Alex's first coherent thought as they stumbled through the white nothing, the twisted metal of the police station door still ringing in his ears. The mist didn't just obscure—it moved around them, flowing like water, pressing against their skin with an oily, unnatural warmth that made his flesh crawl.

"The car," he gasped, one hand stretched out in front of him, the other gripping the shotgun. "It's maybe thirty feet straight ahead."

Matt's breathing was ragged beside him, punctuated by small whimpers every time the fog shifted. "I can't see anything. I can't—oh God, what if they're right next to us? What if they're just waiting?"

Alex forced himself to keep moving forward, counting steps. His Honda should be directly ahead, wrapped around the light pole like a metal accordion. If they could just reach it, if the engine would still turn over...

Something brushed against his shoulder.

He spun, shotgun raised, but there was nothing—just more white fog swirling in patterns that hurt to look at. The mist seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, like a heartbeat made visible.

"Alex?" Matt's voice was farther away than it should have been.

"Here," Alex called back, but the fog swallowed his voice, making it sound distant and hollow. "Stay close. Keep talking so I know where you are."

"Okay, okay." Matt's voice was definitely to his left now, maybe ten feet away. "I'm here. I'm—Jesus, this stuff feels wrong. It's warm. Why is it warm?"

Alex had been wondering the same thing. The fog should have been cold, damp, normal. Instead, it felt like walking through body heat, as if the mist itself was exhaled breath from something immense and fever-sick.

His outstretched hand finally connected with twisted metal—the crumpled hood of his Honda. Relief flooded through him, followed immediately by dread as he felt along the damage. The entire front end was compressed, the engine block probably driven back into the passenger compartment.

"Found it," he called out. "But it's... it's worse than I thought."

Matt materialized out of the fog like a ghost, his face pale and streaked with sweat. "Can we drive it?"

Alex worked his way around to the driver's side, feeling for the door handle. The window was spider-webbed with cracks, but intact. When he pulled the handle, the door opened with a shriek of protesting metal.

"Get in," he said. "We'll find out."

The interior of the Honda was a disaster. The steering wheel was bent at an unnatural angle, the dashboard cracked and partially collapsed. But when Alex turned the key, still hanging in the ignition where he'd left it during his panicked flight, the engine coughed and turned over.

"It runs," Matt breathed, collapsing into the passenger seat. "Holy shit, it actually runs."

Alex tested the steering. The wheel fought him, but it turned. The headlights flickered on, creating two weak cones of illumination that penetrated maybe ten feet into the fog before being swallowed entirely.

"We're driving blind," he said, shifting into drive. "I'll go slow, try to stay on the road."

"Just get us out of here." Matt was checking his pistol, hands shaking as he counted the remaining ammunition. "Twenty miles to my sister's. We can do twenty miles."

Alex pressed the accelerator gently, and the Honda lurched forward with a grinding sound that suggested something important was dragging underneath. They moved through the fog at maybe fifteen miles per hour, the headlights revealing nothing but white nothing.

"Tell me about your sister," Alex said, as much to keep himself focused as to calm Matt down. "What's her place like?"

"Sarah." Matt's voice was steadier now, talking about family. "She's five years older than me. Lives in this little farmhouse she inherited from our grandmother. Middle of nowhere, but safe. Has to be safe." He paused. "She doesn't know about... about what happened at the bar."

"Tell me about the bar," Alex said quietly. "What you saw. We need to understand what we're dealing with."

Matt was quiet for so long that Alex thought he wouldn't answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.

"It was supposed to be David's birthday party. Just the usual group—me, David, Sarah from my art history class, Marcus from the dorm. We went to that dive bar on Fifth Street, the one with the pool tables in the back."

The Honda's engine coughed, and Alex tapped the brakes, listening to the fog as if it might give them directions.

"Everything was normal at first," Matt continued. "We were playing pool, having drinks, laughing about Professor Morrison's stupid assignment. Then Marcus went to use the bathroom. He was gone for maybe ten minutes, which wasn't weird—Marcus always took forever in bathrooms."

A shape loomed out of the fog ahead—a stop sign, tilted at a crazy angle. Alex turned the wheel gently to the right, hoping he was following the road and not driving into someone's front yard.

"When he came back, he looked... wrong. Pale, shaky, like he'd seen something terrible. He said there was someone in the bathroom asking for help, said they were hurt and couldn't get out of the stall. He wanted us to come help."

Matt's breathing was getting faster, and Alex could hear the edge of panic creeping back into his voice.

"Take your time," Alex said. "We need to know, but take your time."

"David went first. Always the hero, you know? He grabbed Marcus and headed for the bathroom. Then Sarah went after them—she'd had a thing for David since freshman year, always following him around. I stayed at the table like an idiot, finishing my beer and wondering why I felt so uneasy."

The Honda's headlights caught something ahead—a car, sideways across the road, driver's door hanging open. Alex slowed to a crawl, maneuvering around it. In the brief moment the headlights illuminated the vehicle's interior, he saw the driver's seat was covered in blood.

"That's when I heard David scream," Matt whispered. "Not just any scream—this sound like he was being torn apart. I ran toward the bathroom, but the door was locked from the inside. I could hear David calling for help, but his voice was... wrong. Too high, too desperate. Like someone doing a bad impression of him."

"You didn't go in?"

"I tried! I tried to break down the door, but it was solid wood, and I'm not exactly built for breaking things. Then I heard Sarah screaming too, and Marcus, but they were all talking at the same time, all begging for help in these horrible, wrong voices."

Matt was crying now, silent tears streaming down his face. "I could hear them moving around in there, but it sounded like... like dancing. Like they were dancing together. And then the voices stopped being theirs and started being mine."

Alex's hands tightened on the steering wheel. "What do you mean?"

"They started talking in my voice. Perfect imitations, saying things like 'Help me, I'm so scared' and 'Don't leave me alone.' I knew it was a trap. I knew whatever was in that bathroom wasn't my friends anymore. So I ran."

The fog ahead began to thin slightly, and Alex realized they were climbing a hill—probably the overpass that led to the highway. His spirits lifted for the first time in hours.

"You did the right thing," he said. "You survived."

"Did I?" Matt's voice was hollow. "Or did I just abandon them? Maybe if I'd tried harder, maybe if I'd—"

He stopped mid-sentence, staring out the windshield with an expression of absolute terror.

Alex looked up and felt his sanity take another step toward the edge.

The fog was clearing, revealing the night sky for the first time since they'd left the police station. But the sky was wrong—catastrophically, impossibly wrong.

Where there should have been stars, there were bodies.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Human figures suspended in mid-air by gossamer strings that caught the moonlight and threw it back in oily rainbows. They hung at different heights, some so close to the ground that their feet almost touched the treetops, others so high they were barely visible dots against the darkness.

All of them were moving—not swaying in the wind, but dancing. A slow, synchronized waltz performed by an army of marionettes, their limbs moving in perfect unison to music only they could hear.

"Oh my God," Matt breathed. "The whole city. The whole fucking city."

As Alex watched in horrified fascination, he began to make out details. A woman in a nurse's uniform, her white shoes pristine despite the hundred-foot drop beneath them. A man in a business suit, his briefcase still clutched in his dangling hand. A child—Jesus Christ, they had children too—in pajamas decorated with cartoon characters.

All of them had strings. All of them were smiling.

And all of them were looking down at the Honda.

"Drive," Matt whispered. "Drive, drive, DRIVE!"

Alex floored the accelerator, and the damaged Honda lurched forward with a metallic shriek that seemed impossibly loud in the terrible silence. Behind them, he could hear something else—a sound like wind chimes made of bones, like the whisper of silk against silk.

The strings were singing.

In the rearview mirror, Alex caught a glimpse of the dancing army beginning to descend, lowering toward the earth like spiders on webs. Their movements were still synchronized, still graceful, but now they had purpose beyond the dance.

They were coming down to collect their missing members.

"The highway," Alex gasped, fighting with the bent steering wheel as they crested the hill. "Once we reach the highway, we can outrun them. Cars are faster than—"

Something landed on the roof with a wet thud.

Matt screamed and raised his pistol toward the ceiling, but Alex grabbed his wrist.

"Don't shoot! You'll hit the gas tank, or ricochet into—"

The thing on the roof began moving, and Alex could hear fingernails scraping against metal as it tried to find purchase on the smooth surface. Then a face appeared upside-down outside the driver's side window—a young woman with blonde hair and empty, smiling eyes.

She spoke in Matt's voice: "Don't leave me out here alone. I'm so scared."

More impacts echoed from the roof and trunk as other marionettes landed on the moving car. The Honda's engine screamed in protest as Alex pushed it faster, the speedometer climbing past forty, fifty, sixty miles per hour on a road he couldn't see through fog he didn't understand.

"They're too fast," Matt sobbed. "They're too fucking fast."

Through the rear window, Alex could see the night sky filled with descending figures, their strings glittering like a web of stars. There had to be thousands of them now, maybe tens of thousands, all drawn by the sound and movement of the fleeing car.

The marionette outside the window pressed her face against the glass, her smile widening until it split her cheeks. When she spoke again, it was in Alex's mother's voice:

"Come home, sweetheart. Mommy's waiting for you to come home and dance."

Alex's vision blurred with rage and terror, but his hands remained steady on the wheel. Twenty miles to Matt's sister's house. Twenty miles to safety, if safety even existed anymore.

Behind them, the city sang its song of strings and stolen voices, and the night sky rained down the dancing dead.

The highway stretched ahead into the fog, and Alex drove toward whatever waited in the darkness, carrying the last free thoughts in a world that had learned to dance to someone else's tune.