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Dead Walk in the Fog
Her boots scuffed loudly on the asphalt. The sound seemed to echo against the muffled blanket of fog smothered over Amity Park’s streets. There were no car headlights and no movement even though the sun should have been shining somewhere up there beyond the layers of shriveling silence.
Sam shivered and pulled her jacket closer. She needed to get out of the street. She felt blind and exposed at the same time. Who knew what their visitors were waiting for— or how long this peace would last, but it had been silent since yesterday evening and she needed to know if she was right. Perhaps it was all a trick, perhaps the real enemy was just playing her, baiting her like a mouse. She was answering to such an obvious trap.
But she had to know.
The Nasty Burger sign fizzed above her. The chunk burned out of it yesterday had left exposed wires that sparked unhappily in the heavy air. Pinpricks of light snapping in the muzzy half light.
She entered the diner. Bells jingled above her in the door. A woman who’d been dead five years smiled at her over the counter. She was weak and whispy for Amity’s usual standard of ghostly invader, but there was no denying Sam had seen that same smile in a tiny photo on the newspaper’s obituary page.
The ghost seemed content as she catered to a handful of whisps keeping to the corners like blue shadows throughout the diner. They were absences of sound, going through the motions of puttering over nonexistent orders, and utterly unconcerned with her, so Sam had no more excuse to keep from turning and seeing who was waiting for her in the booth. She already knew anyway.
Danny Fenton was a spot of life in the mournful ghost and fog shrouded diner. His legs were stretched out into the walkspace, knees visible through ripped jeans. And he smiled up at her with that puppydog-cheeky grin that cut oh so familiarly. “Hey, Sam! It’s been way too long.”
Sam couldn’t move. Her feet were braced on the linoleum floor like she was about to fall over. No matter how she looked at it, it was true. Danny was human. Alive. Or as close as he got to it.
She could see the rosyness in his cheeks, the circles under his eyes, the solidity of his body on the padded seat. He’d lost weight since she’d last seen him. His face was slimmer, almost gaunt, there was a new flatness to his dull blue eyes. He was dressed in clean clothes and decent shoes, but his hair was uncombed and clumped like crow feathers in the clammy air.
“I always knew you were still alive,” Sam said with despair. Her shoulders slumped and she slid into the seat opposite him. “They said it was impossible.”
He laughed at that. “Come on, Sam, I’m harder to kill than a cat. You know this.” He leaned forward and reached out long blunt fingers for her fisted hand. “I’m glad you came, I really thought I wouldn’t get a chance to see you again before it was all over.”
The statement was so easy for him, so nonchalant, but what was going to be over? Sam gritted her teeth and hissed trying to snatch her hand away, but Danny didn’t let go.
Easily he turned her wrist over and hiked her sleeve up. He took in the muddy stain that was already seeping through the bandages around her inner arm. Eyelashes lowered, head tilted, there was no concern in his manner. Curious would be a stretch. The familiar face, totally uncaring.
Sam pressed her lips together in an iron line. She knew her nostrils were flaring. She snatched her arm back. This Danny she could believe could throw Tucker through a roof.
“That’s from Paulina’s great aunt, believe it or not. I always knew they were a family of biters.”
Danny laughed and sat back in his seat. “Oh my word, you haven’t changed at all, have you Sam.”
“I’d like to know why you’ve changed.”
Danny just smiled and shook his head.
“Then tell me why you’re doing this.”
“Easy, because they don’t want me to.”
“They?”
Danny winked at her and put his fingers pinched in a circle around his open eye. “They’re probably watching us right now, you should smile.”
Before she could think her hand flew toward Danny’s face. He caught it easily, ignoring her clawing black fingernails as though she hadn’t just tried to slap him.
“What’s wrong with you,” Sam yelled. “I wish I could stuff that attitude back down your smug face. It’s long past the time when we could make jokes and have cheerful reunions.”
She growled, “If they don’t want you to be doing this, maybe they’re the good guys. Maybe you should try listening for a change.” Her voice almost choked off, but she dragged the anger back and stared him down with every teaspoon of vitriol in her body. “I don’t understand. You were out there, all this time. Maybe we could have helped you. Why didn’t you come back?”
Danny stilled. The eyes locked onto hers were venomous, like a starving, caged animal. Sam felt a shiver crawl up her spine. The wispy, half formed ghosts in the diner all began to whisper, a muted hush of fear. Sam shook it away. “Stop that.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew.” Danny lounged back against the booth, apparently once more at ease. “I’ve had my hands full. Been busy. In any case they are not the sort of heroes you’d appreciate. They don’t like humanity, they’re just upset I’m bringing our two worlds closer. If they had their way they would shut the doors so tight even new formed whisps couldn’t squeeze their way through. It would be disastrous, of course, but that doesn’t change their feelings.” Danny finished with another cheeky grin and said the next almost as an aside. “What I’m doing is almost nearly as bad for the balance, but they can’t deny the right of the conqueror. That’s the one thing they can’t deny.”
“Why are they messing with you if they hate humans so bad, and what do you mean you’ve been busy? Please Danny, tell me you need help, tell me someone is holding something to your head. This is nonsense. Maybe, even now we—” Sam bit her tongue hard enough her eyes welled up. “I don’t know if I can forgive you for this.”
Danny laughed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sam, I truly am.”
“You don’t look sorry.”
He shrugged. “I refuse to let the rest of my eternity be existence as a mute puppet.” He smiled at her. “I am glad to see you, Sam.”
She clenched her fists, knowing the wetness in her eyes was a bad sign and refusing it. “I wish I could say the same.”
“Has it really been so bad?”
She hated that knowing smile. Before he’d used it when he knew the answer to a puzzle before she did, or when he and Tucker had gotten into some kind of trouble without her that he knew she wasn’t going to like.
“I’d have thought Amity would be happy to see everyone again.”
Sam turned to stare out the window. Fog still hung pearlescent over the parking lot. A bush planted just outside the window made eerie shapes against the white world. Shadows moved somewhere out there, some too big to be the ghosts of people. Fog often made the world look alien, but as these new shapes gathered in front of the shadows of buildings, trees, and road signs Sam couldn’t say what they were. When the fog cleared she knew they wouldn’t be met with familiar faces anymore. These were meant to be monsters.
“The fog will clear soon.” Danny seemed to follow the direction of her thoughts. “Then we’ll have a real night parade in the daytime for all my new subjects to see.”
Sam stood abruptly, anger blacking out her vision. “Don’t you care at all about what you’re doing? How dare you invade the human world just out of spite.”
He shrugged. “They’ll all come to my world eventually anyway.”
“Is that what you told Tucker when you dropped him through a roof?”
“Actually, yes. He tried to reason with me, you know. But if he doesn’t agree with me here, then he’ll agree on the other side.” He tilted his head. “You aren’t going to try to reason with me, are you, Sam?”
She shook her head mutely.
“Good because I thought this was a rather nice chat, almost reminded me of old times. Before you go, there was someone I wanted you to meet.”
Danny nodded his head behind her and Sam spun. The bells over the door jangled as it swung open, apparently no one outside, but she had known better than that for a long time. The man became visible as he stepped through the door. He shook off his old fashioned shoes and looked up friendlily to meet her gaze. Just as though he might be anyone's grandpa out for a walk for some fresh air.
He wasn’t of course, he was Sam’s grandpa. She’d seen the photos of him before he cracked his head open falling down the stairs.
His eyes crinkled when he saw her and she could almost not notice how his feet didn’t quite touch the ground when he walked or how distant his eyes, as though he were nearly asleep. He smiled when he saw her. A million stories her grandmother had told her drifted through her mind.
“You look just like my Ida,” he said in a warm voice crackly from his cigars. “You go by Sam now, don’t you. Danny’s told about some of the things I missed.” He chuckled dreamily. “You’ve become quite a handful for those two, huh? Just like we used to be in our younger days.”
He reached out to touch her but Sam stepped back. She glanced at Danny. “You never play fair,” she spat.
He had his head in his hands, watching with an almost pleasant, sleepy expression. “Why should I? Life doesn’t either.” He turned toward her grandfather. “If you want her to join our parade, now’s as good a time as ever.”
It was like a switch had been hit, her grandfather lunged for her throat. Sam fell back, avoiding his icy touch, she wasn’t so naive not to have expected it. She dove into a booth, catching up the salt shaker. She uncapped it and sprayed it in an arc. These whisps were weak enough that a little purification could put a serious damper on their spirits.
Her grandfather moaned, covering his face as his form distorted like a cloud of mist. Danny just watched amused from his booth. She clutched the salt shaker in her palm and pointed the bird at him, her teeth gritted together. She didn’t bother looking his way again.
Sam darted across the aisle and vaulted over the counter, spraying more salt when the cashier started coming after her. She hurried through the deserted kitchen. It was growing colder, cold enough to raise goosebumps on her arms under her jacket. She hesitated when she saw a dinged up door labeled staff. With a glance behind her she eased it open.
The staff room was cramped, with a single greasy table and some seats clustered around the outlets. Sam was more interested in the lockers built along one wall. The third one down had Valerie’s name tag. Someone had graffitied an angry face under the ‘V’.
Sam didn’t waste time, she drew back and smashed her steel toed boot into the flimsy metal. It bent all askew and another kick was enough for her to bend down and rip it away from the lock.
The shades were coming again, drifting in through the door like lost lambs, her grandfather at the front.
Sam reached into the locker, spilling out lunch box, uniform, beauty bag, giant ecto-gun. Good old Valerie, predictable as ever. Sam levelled the gun at the approaching ghosts but her arm trembled when her grandfather came into the sights.
She cursed and pulled the trigger. The wisp shuffling in beside him was blasted into obliteration. It almost felt like overkill.
“You suck, Danny,” she screamed as loud as she could. She scrambled to her feet and then up onto the breakroom table, scattering phone chargers and one half eaten sandwich. She fired shots whenever the ghosts got too close, splattering them into whaling smoke and fire. The whisps weren’t made of much, but there were enough dead crowding into the breakroom that she would soon be overwhelmed even if she never ran out of ammo. There was always another long dead face to replace the ones she disintegrated. And there was her grandfather, still at the fore, still drifting toward her, single minded.
There was a tiny window up above her. Cursing, she jiggled open the latch, and, still cursing, pulled herschel up through the narrow opening. She hung there for a moment, window frame biting into her stomach, legs kicking, and then tumbled out into the alleyway, back into the fog.
She had to catch her breath there, panting with hands on knees, but not for long before she forced herself to keep moving. Ghosts could walk through walls after all.
She sprinted across the drive through, straight into a wall of prickly bushes. Ahead was an alleyway full of unmarked doors. She sprinted down it, boots ringing loudly on the wet pavement. She took the next turn randomly and then climbed over an old rusted fence, anything to get as far away from the Nasty Burger and the ghostly army as possible. The best thing she could do was lose herself.
Danny leaned against the mouth of the alley. Sam’s stumbling steps slowed as she neared, uncertain whether he would attack her or not. He never met her angry eyes though, just stared off into the fog.
“It’ll clear soon. You’re gonna love it.”
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he muttered, almost too quiet for her to hear.
Sam’s boot stomped down on an aluminum can . It crunched satisfyingly flat. She kicked it aside, it went skidding into a corner. “For what, killing us all? Sending in our loved ones to do the job.”
He chuckled. “Of course not, we’ve all missed you too much. It’s why we exist after all, all the regrets, and rage, and sorrow, and yearning. You can’t just bury that.” He tilted his head back against the bricks, heavy eyes distant as the fog. “To be dead is to miss the living, same with being alive. We’re all just spinning in an endless vortex around the things we’re bound to lose.” He shook his head then. A self deprecating smile spread across his face and he rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought it would be okay if I disappeared. It wasn’t like I had much of a future anyway. But then I hit my limit. I couldn’t be the self sacrificing hero in the end.”
He sighed then and dragged his hand over his face, pushing his hair back. “The edge of his lip twitched with a smile. “No, I’m sorry for still being me, for still loving you.”
Utter dread boiled in Sam’s stomach. She felt so utterly cold, as though frost had invaded her bones making her shoulders shake. “Danny,” she said, wrath and hurt and sorrow all mixing in a leaden weight that pounded her voice down into a whisper. “We wanted you back so badly.”
“See? You can’t let go either.” With that, and that sardonic grin, Danny pushed off the wall and walked out into the fog, his footsteps so humanly solid.
Sam ran after him but soon he was just a dark smudge in the road. With a flash of electric green he was gone.
Sam stopped, heart hammering.
A solemn bell tolled somewhere out in the white endlessness.
It sounded again. A deep rolling voice of bass. It’s call was unending through the city. She felt her own heart answer it, a groaning percussion.
A third time the bell sounded and then the air cracked with green lightning, splitting Amity’s skies with unworldly fluorescence. Sam screamed and crouched in the road, her arms over her head, but she was drowned out by the tongues of many trumpets. They clammored together, a jaunty, grotesque tune.
The fog collapsed all in one moment like a curtain being pulled away. Sam blinked down at the bright yellow stripes on the asphalt. She was still almost deaf from the noisome trumpets. Slowly, she stood.
Folks who had barricaded themselves inside from the fog tentatively peered out of windows with white faces.
The first to march down the streets were the skeletons. Lit from within by eerie light, they cavorted and chittered their teeth, slapping each other on the backs– or rather, shoulder plates. Their laughter was gangrenous. Streamers, stars, and poppers shot into the air.
Sam scrambled out of the road. She tripped on the curb and scraped the heels of her hands raw on the sidewalk. She scuttled back into the shadow of an abandoned car. They never even bothered to glance her way.
Then came the stranger shapes. Beheaded spirits flew like comets overhead, eyes staring like peeled back ping pong balls, blued and blackened skin sloughing away with their speed. Millipedes clad in overlapping full plate armor crawled over themselves, each other, and made looping knots over the gleeful parade. A slow, mindless, and methodical rejoicing all their own.
Wailing women with silver hair gave way to furred monsters with icy breath and two dragons plodded solemnly to the music. Ghost blobs flooded overhead like lanterns.
In a huddle on the sidewalk, Sam wanted to cover her eyes, but the noise alone was inescapable. She kept them open, watching the strange beings dredged from the depths of the ghost zone parade past as a victorious army.
A goblin with one eye leapt up, rattling a bag of something that clattered even over the trumpets. A fish, its scales of deepest blue, larger than a car floated past, its red eyes flat and round. A ribcage moved along with the procession, its rounded, worn away bones like pillars. It took Sam a moment to realize they belonged to a full skeleton. So immense it had to crawl along the streets, its spine a tent over the revelers. Its white skull bobbed over the buildings like an immense swinging balloon.
She saw a few familiar faces in the procession. Ember, her fiery hair wild among the band. Walker, leading dancing corpses dressed in stripes and jangling chains to the music. Johnny and Kitty doing tricks with his shadow. There may have been more but it was impossible to see everything among the throng.
Then, finally came the wisps. They were pressed so close together they rolled as one mass, a solid, sticky fog bank. Faces of average people you’d see every day, all who had walked these same Amity Park streets. Their expressions were vague, all devoid of color. The uncontrollable music deadened, pressure rising in Sam’s ears as they plodded ever onward.
She saw Valerie’s mom. She saw an older kid she knew who’d jumped off a roof. She saw her grandfather.
Ectoplasmic lights played among the fog. Sam bit into the meat of her thumb, frozen, unable to look away, but it was unbearable too.
The skeleton of an age old leviathan served as a float of sorts. Dead people piled up the sides as insubstantial and cloying as thunder.
Jack Fenton stood on a fin, his size lifting him head and shoulders above the other shades. HIs orange jumpsuit had been dulled but some shadow of his boisterous energy still clung to him in the way his hand gripped the bleached bones although he didn’t need to and how wide his grin was stretched in his face. Next to him, Jazz was a thin and sorrowful whisper. Her hair dripped in long strands over her face.
Searching the clustered wisps on the float, Sam finally spotted the leeched yellow of Tucker’s sweater. His easy slouch was just the same as always.
Of course he needed to keep them close.
There was no music now, only the impending pressure of a lightning storm thundering in her ears.
He sat above them on the leviathan’s eye ridge. As ghostly now as he had been human before. A furred cloak, as dark as the void of night rippled behind him. His eyes glowed as bright as stars, white hair drifting in an invisible breeze. Ectoplasm dripped down his cheeks.
Danny’s chest had been hollowed out until his ribs were visible like royal buttons and filigree. Ectoplasm oozed in his dark interiors.
The blackened iron crown hung in spikes around his throat, imbued with too much gravity. The ring of rage shown brilliantly on his hand where it rested on the hilt of a gnarled black sword. The spiked chains threaded between the bones of his forearms seemed like they should have weighed just as much but they floated in his wake, the link on each end shattered into jagged cruel looking pieces.
Sam felt tears pooling in her eyes. They rolled down her face, no matter how she tried to stop them.
Danny’s face was distant with a controlled nobility. Maybe it was a countenance a king might wear but it was utterly insane on Danny.
The procession passed, the King not looking to either side. She watched his back depart through bursts of sparking ectoplasm and raucous celebration. Not her Danny, not hers at all.
Sam sank as though all of her strings had been cut. She pressed her forehead to the asphalt all silent with the pressure building from the inside. The parade cast dancing shadows over her.
“Sam,” came a ghostly echo behind her.
She shot up, hand clasped over her heart, mind spiked with panic.
There was Danny, standing over her with his new royal trappings and new distance in his face.
She stared at him, her throat raw and swallowing. She was blubbering, and pathetic, and so, so mad.
“Oh, go away. The dead are supposed to stay dead. You decided to leave, so stay that way and leave the rest of us alone.”
He held out his hand, eyes as empty as though she were a stranger.
She screamed, wishing she could tear him away with her hate alone.
“There’s a space left for you.”
Danny wrapped his hand around her wrist. She slapped his hand away and raised the ecto-gun she’d stolen from the locker. It was shaking, she realized it was her hands that could barely hold onto the gun. Before she could wrap her frozen fingers around the trigger, bony hands grabbed her from behind. She was dragged backward.
“Your mom will recover,” Sam shrieked. “Valerie will hunt you down. They’ll both skewer you on a stick.” The ecto-gun was pried out of her hand. She kicked hard, her steel toed boot hitting a loose rattling jaw. “You should have died all the way in that portal, then I’d never have had to see your disgusting face again.”
She put an elbow backward, snapping a collarbone. Sam wrenched herself out of the skeleton’s grip. She fell to her knees, coughing, surrounded by rollicking shadows.
She stumbled to her feet. She had to get out, had to run as far and as fast away as she could. When she turned all she could see was parading ghosts jostling shoulder to shoulder. She lurched forward and was nearly trampled by a creature with six legs. A sparking ball of ectoplasm went wheezing by her face to explode up above the parade, showering them with glinting green sparks. An even more deafening cheer went up. It was impossible to go against the tide so Sam was rushed along by it, bounced and pushed along by blythe, uncaring spirits.
Cold numbness crept over her as surely as if she’d been immersed in an icy river. Her mouth tasted bitter now, not just salty. Sam collapsed in the road, her legs leaden. She waited for one of the ghosts passing all around her to decide to consume her whole.
None of them did. It was like she was a rock in the stream of their gladness. They ignored her, perhaps they liked the taste of her despair better that way.
Danny was suddenly there standing over her. He altered the very gravity around him. He leaned down to her, sword tip dragging a score into the ground as though he’d forgotten it. Although the ghostly green shapes continued all around them, reaching right up to the sky, it was suddenly very quiet there on the road in that small space between them, all else washed out and immaterial.
“Many have tried to put out this existence.” His face was so close to hers. Although his eyes shone as brightly as twin stars, pooling and spinning like the portal he’d known so completely, their expression was dull and disinterested. “Tried so many times.”
He pressed the barrel of the ecto-gun into her hands.
“I wouldn’t mind if it was you.”
Shaking, her teeth chattering, Sam gripped the gun with both hands. Slowly, she raised it, pressing the muzzle into his chest right above where his heart still beat sluggishly.
She managed a sickly grin. “If you’re suddenly feeling guilt it’s a little late for it.”
Danny just sighed and leaned into the gun impatiently. “Don’t be stupid, Sam. It was you and me that made the first attempt anyway. It’s fitting. The Immortal Realms runs on irony. So, Sam, lay to rest the abomination that’s haunting you.”
“Danny, please.”
The gun fell out of her nerveless trembling fingers. She slumped forward, pressing her cheek against his stomach, wrapping her arms tight around him, his ribs felt as fragile as a seed pod.
“I just want you back.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Just as much as things had changed, things stayed the same. Sam started her car up every morning, her hands aching from the cold, her boots loud on the asphalt when everything else was quiet.
Sam’s job at the Skulk and Lurk was just as desolate, no one but her to wander through the empty shelves. When the mournful bell rang in the bookshop’s door, she looked up with as fake a smile as ever. The whisps who wandered in had just about as much of an idea of what they wanted as they had when they possessed a pulse.
Sometimes they chose a book. Sometimes they remembered the idea of commerce. Whatever they dropped on the desk in front of the cash register she accepted. It usually evaporated like mist in a wind anyway.
When the green tinged sky dimmed outside the black curtained windows, Sam locked the shop up. The old shopkeeper hovered over her shoulder with dim eyes and blurry edges. Often the streets were apparently empty as she made the cold walk back to her car, frost crunching under her footsteps when she cut across a garden bed. Not always.
Today, she was just so utterly sick of it, right down to her stomach, she stopped with her hand on the door handle. She briefly rested her forehead against the frozen window. She despised it. The car, the ground under her feet, the organ still pumping blood through her body. If she could have, she would have denied even the air, cold and cracking her lips through the chapstick that she’d picked up unpaid for from under the uncaring, blind eyes of a gas station cashier.
She left the car on the side of the road. It wasn’t like she needed to worry about anyone stealing it. She clutched her coat tight around her and waded through snow, frozen bushes, and past lost, slack jawed wisps.
Sam wandered through the park. There was a little grandma sitting out in the cold on a bench. Sam didn’t see her until she was walking through her skinny, liver spotted legs. Sam apologized quickly, but it wasn’t in time to interrupt the grandma’s vague, off topic murmurings about a lost cat. Sam backed away, delivering her final regrets before hurrying away. When the trees cleared from above her she cut across the road to a silently glowing vending machine.
She knew the Red Huntress was still out there, there were still humans, alive, just not here. She wasn’t so sure about Maddie Fenton. He never gloated to Sam, so news that came outside her little, quiet Amity Park was scarce.
Sam slammed her boot into the side of the machine until the first orange fizzy drink came crashing down, followed by a sprite and a diet coke. Nothing salty but that was fine. Sam bent to collect her prizes. A wisp in a police uniform drifted past. Sam scoffed, cracking the sprite open.
“Do I get one?”
She looked up into weeping green eyes and smiling mouth. “Depends, Are you still keeping me here another day? Alone?”
“You’re surrounded by company, Sam.” Danny leaned back, his legs crossed on top of the vending machine. “Can I have the orange soda?”
Sam considered the off brand orange soda. She shook it as hard as she could, and then gave it a spin for luck before she held it out to him.
“Wow, thanks so much.” Danny reached down to take it out of her hands but he didn’t open it.
Sam drank her sprite, staring up at the sky as diamond pin pricks erupted out of the pea soup sky. Nowadays no matter how thick the cloud cover, the stars broke through. They lit the dim clouds with blooms of purple and indigo. Alight even through the undersides of their monolithic vastness.
Somehow the stars had grown more visible under Danny’s reign. It made sense. It was fitting knowing him. Sam had never known them so vivid before, but they remained as unreachable as ever.
The clouds were heavy now but it never rained, never burst with new life, just gathered in shrouds over Amity in freezing waves of fog that made street lights hazy and misted her car’s windshield.
When it was quiet like this, she could almost pretend they were back in her long ago memories. Those shadowy wisps sauntering down the avenue breathed and had substance more than vague, rote obsessions they’d never let go of. Danny sat above her, Tucker was at home being force fed broccoli by his mom. Just the two of them had often spent nights like this, wandering the empty Amity streets, looking for ghosts. She, to keep him company and him to listen. She and Danny had always had that in common, neither of them ever really wanted to go home.
That Danny had never left.
“I’ll never forgive you.”
He cocked his head and stared down at her with unblinking, acidic irises. “Is that why you won’t kill me? Some sort of vengeance?”
She looked up at him, so laid back it made her hate him. “But you’d stop visiting if I did that,” she said, poisonously sweetly. “Keep asking. Maybe when this place eventually drives me crazy and I start seeing alive people I’ll be able to do it.”
Danny finally opened the orange soda. It hissed and splurted foam over his hands. He groaned and held it out so it dripped into the weeds around the base of the machine. “Do you really think you’d be any happier surrounded by humanity? Amity is a much calmer place now. Whatever your opinions you must admit it’s much easier being dead.”
“Don’t tell me that again,” Sam whispered.
“Well I have plenty other things to tell you that you’ll enjoy hearing just as much.”
Danny stood and stepped off the vending machine, he drifted down ahead of her casting a green light on the sidewalk.
“Tucker and Jazz send their love by the way.”
“Really, is that what they said? Or are you speaking through them again? Is it even true? How could you do this to people you love?” The soda was too sweet and syrupy in her mouth. Unceremoniously, she dumped it into a drain in the road. She followed him, hands knotting in her coat. “How dare you. How dare you steal them and haunt me when you left us so easily.”
He shrugged, turning lazily in the air to face her. “I missed you.”
“Yeah, then you should have stayed in the first place,” Sam shouted after him. She threw her empty soda bottle at him. It only bounced off and skittered off into a gutter.
Danny’s glow dispersed in the fog as he gained distance on her. She could let him wander off without her, but he always came back. Her apparition in this empty Amity Park already full of ghosts.
“We could have helped you,” Sam whispered to no one. “Why did you do it?”
And she followed him, spellbound by his presence as inevitably as a moon unable to escape orbit.
She would follow him into the fog, perhaps for the rest of her life.
She’d always follow.
Sam’s boots were loud on the asphalt in the fog. She’d find him. She’d find out why.