to the stupid fog, someone could be standing ten feet away, and I wouldn’t have seen them.
I swallowed hard as my neck hair rose, and I was overcome with the same feeling of wrongness I’d felt when I’d started down that alley.
“It’s your imagination,” I reminded myself out loud.
A wisp of wind suddenly swirled through the fog, strong enough to roll one of the outlying plastic bottles back into the rest of the trash.
There shouldn’t have been any wind. Wind and fog don’t go together. And yet, another gust tugged on the edge of my coat as it blew past, swirling into the trash can and emptying the rest of its contents onto the sidewalk and the grassy hillside.
I blinked, knowing it was impossible for wind to act like that. And yet the visual evidence was right there in front of me. Three crushed aluminum cans. More food wrappers. A torn Ace bandage. A broken pencil. An apple core, brown and disgusting, along with desiccated orange peels and a half-eaten banana black with rot.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, my inner alarm screamed.
The wind kept gusting, first into my face, then from behind me, then swirling, and with each gust the trash moved—but didn’t blow away.
A shape started to emerge from the trash. A head. A torso. Two arms, two legs.
Not possible.
I stood frozen and staring, trying to convince myself I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. It was just darkness and fog and the memory of what had happened in that alley working together to make my mind play tricks on me. I willed the shape to go away, to become just a random pile of trash. I wanted to be able to laugh at myself for making something out of nothing.
And then the man-shaped pile of trash sat up, and I no longer cared if I was imagining things or having a nightmare or just hallucinating. Clutching the straps of my backpack close to me to keep it from thumping my back, I turned tail and ran into the fog, away from … whatever that was.
My pulse was pounding in my ears, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the strange rustling and clanking noises behind me. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed a shadowy, fog-blurred figure loping toward me in a ground-eating stride. I faced front and put on more speed, my breath coming in frantic gasps while my mind revolted at the impossibility of what was happening.
This can’t be real, I told myself, but I kept running anyway, because it sure as hell felt real.
The school’s iron gates loomed in the fog ahead of me, and I sprinted for them. I still heard the rustling and clacking, but it didn’t seem to be as close as before. I wasn’t about to pause and check it out.
I made it through the gates but felt no temptation to slow down. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run faster, even though my legs were burning and I couldn’t seem to get a full breath into my lungs. I would be safe if I could make it to the train platform, where there were other people around.
A car drove by, and the fog was probably so thick the driver didn’t even see me. Which meant crossing the street without a careful look both ways was probably dangerous, but nothing was going to slow my legs down. I was relieved to make it across the street without becoming roadkill, but that relief was short-lived.
A figure suddenly appeared in the fog right in front of me. I screamed and tried to dodge around, but I was going too fast. I crashed into someone, who made a startled-sounding grunt and fell backward onto the sidewalk with me on top.
CHAPTER SIX
I was so panicked by what I’d seen—what I thought I’d seen—that my first assumption was that the trash creature had somehow gotten in front of me and cut me off. I lurched to my feet, expecting an attack, but my brain finally kicked in and saw that the figure lying on the pavement in front of me was not made of trash.
He looked to be around my age, maybe a little older. He propped himself up on his elbows on the pavement, blinking startlingly green eyes and shaking his head as if groggy. I’d crashed into him really hard. I was going to have bruises from the impact tomorrow, but he’d probably gotten the worst of it, since I’d ended up