Pretty Dead City The constant light was starting to get on his nerves. He suppressed an urge to shake his fist at the sky and curse it.
He stopped and looked up. He looked around. He could see them walking towards him, four blurry smudges of pale colour in the chilly haze. He looked up again. The sky was uniformly pale grey. It didn't look like an overcast day; it was more like a membrane spread over the entire world. Like they were caught inside an egg, swimming around in the egg white.
He did shake his fist, then, and intoned, "Damn them! Damn them all to hell!"
His voice didn't echo, even though the tall buildings should have caught it and thrown it back to him over and over again.
"So," he said, conversationally, to a lamppost. "Conventional physics don't apply. Good to know."
It sucked to know, though. A whole lot of things sucked right now. He shook his fist once more at the dumb sky and resumed walking. He tried singing a little under his breath. I don't know where I'm going, only God knows where I've been... But the air seemed to suck the life out of the tune, and it sounded flat and hollow to him.
He heard something, suddenly, something like faint whispers rolling in on stagnant air. He spun around and saw that they were jumping up and down and waving at him. They were yelling, he thought.
He walked towards them and then he saw the shadows again. Not just one fat man now, but many. Hordes of them. He was walking in a crowd of diaphanous ghosts. He stopped and stared and they were everywhere. They were walking through him. He backed away from them and hit the display window of the store behind him. A woman in a short summer dress stepped right into him to peer through the window. He felt her. He felt a faint whisper of warmth and a tingling and then he was running, smacking into people as he ran, flinching and passing right through them, and they kept coming. His skin crawled and he ran until his breath was a creaky wheeze and his lungs hurt and his eyes were tearing up.
Then he really smacked into someone, someone who didn't just evaporate into warm, misty tingles. Solid muscle and bone and they went down together.
His mind stopped screaming at him for a second and he blinked away the tears and noticed that he was lying in the middle of the street, on top of JC. Then there were hands on him, gentle hands helping him up, and Justin said, "Chris, dude, are you okay?"
"Yeah," he said and looked around. Justin held on to his arm as if he thought he was going to go running off again. "Freaked the fuck out, though."
"You were running like a headless chicken," Lance said. "What was that about?"
Chris looked down at JC, who was sitting on the ground with his arms around his knees. Joey was sitting next to him. JC looked up. Chris met his eyes.
"Sorry," he said, and he didn't just mean the running tackle.
The shadows were gone again and they settled down on the metal chairs outside a little café.
"I don't think they're dead," JC said slowly. He was rubbing his shoulder and wincing a little. Chris tried to decide whether he was doing it subconsciously or on purpose just to make Chris feel bad. He couldn't quite see JC being that manipulative, but a lot of things seemed to have changed.
"They're ghosts," Justin said. "I walked right through them. It's like a whole town full of ghosts."
Chris thought he saw the reflection of a young man walking past in the window and snapped his head around, but the street was empty and still.
"No," JC was saying, "I think...I think we're the ghosts."
"Are we dead?" Joey asked. "Is that what you're saying?"
They all looked at Chris, then. "What did you do?" JC asked. "Just tell us."
But he couldn't tell them. He'd just picked a page and mumbled the words because they sounded good and angry. Reciting mumbo-jumbo from some cheap second-hand hobby spell book shouldn't open portals to other dimensions.
"Who says it was me, anyway," he muttered.
They were tired again. It seemed like they'd moved forward exactly one block, but they were exhausted. There were no more ghosts. They sat in the uncomfortable chairs until Chris couldn't bear it anymore and got up and paced for a while. After a while, Justin joined him in the pacing.
"Chris," Justin said when they were on their sixteenth lap.
"What?" Chris said.
"Stop."
He stopped. Justin stopped next to him. They were just across the street from the other guys, but again it looked like half a mile.
"What?" Chris said again. Justin had dug his hands into his jean pockets and was swaying lightly to and fro, like a tree in a light breeze. Chris recognised it as Justin's thinking pose. In the soft, scattered light, Justin looked pale and ethereal; Chris let himself think saint before he mentally scoffed and added, hardly.
It still looked a little like Justin had a halo; a faint shimmering around him.
"Look, I know what you were doing. You were just fucking around, but it was...you found it, somehow."
He looked into Justin's softly shining face and wondered why he hadn't been casting love spells over him instead.
"I guess I did," he said. "I don't know what it is, though."
He'd picked JC because JC was an easy target. JC was lonely and sad sometimes. JC needed to be cheered up. Justin was off limits and JC wasn't.
He hoped that last one wasn't actually the real reason. He looked back across the street and saw that JC was sitting alone now. Joey and Lance were looking through the window into the café, their heads close together. Chris thought they might have been holding hands. They looked like small children peering into a candy store.
JC turned his head and stared back at Chris.
"I didn't mean it," he told Justin. "Not that way, at least."
"I know," Justin said, and his voice was warm and gentle. Justin always believed in Chris.
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