The Mist

By A.L. Cline

The ancient land of Batu is on the verge of extinction. Its villagers have been driven to the top of  frozen Mt. Hau to escape the evil shroud that is stealing the souls of their children. Bohai, the teenage shaman, knows his people's only hope lie with three teenage friends living 1000 years in the future, each one struggling to fit into their modern world. Follow the fantastical journey of Sam, Mackenzie and Lucas as they travel back in time and find within themselves strength and courage they never knew existed. This is a tale of myth, monsters and magic. If you liked the Wizard of Oz and Alice Through the Looking Glass, you're sure to like this little novel.

Excerpt

"The mist that fell over the land of Batu wasn't cool, nor soft, nor light.  It wasn't gentle or ephemeral, evaporating with the rising sun.  It was heavy, hot and dark.  Oh so very dark.  It didn't drop gently into the valley.  It crept and crawled and clawed its way up the mountainside, engulfing plants, enveloping animals and entrapping people.  And when children wandered in its way, it slithered down their throats and into their hearts and stole their very souls, leaving only shells.  Breathing, motionless shells.  Dead yet still alive.  And the parents still tended to the children's silent, empty bodies.  And the anguished, agonized bodiless souls of their young cried out every night, trapped in that evil shroud.  There was no way around it. No way through it.  No way to stop it."

Excerpt

"A huge, emaciated monster emerged from the earth like a skeleton escaping a disinterred grave.  With its ashen grey desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones, it was the complexion of death.  Its maw was filled with hideous needle-like teeth.  One enormous red eye was pushed back deep in its socket.  The creature had long limbs that ended in razor-like talons.  It had fed on its own lips, leaving them tattered and bloody, and its unclean flesh reeked with the stench of corruption."

• Language: English
• Publisher: A.L. Cline
• Release date: May 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386962915

Book preview

Chapter 1

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Coach Wilson had Sam’s face-mask in his huge, meat hook hands and was bouncing his head up and down like a bobblehead doll.  Can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit.  Right Sam? he said.  I’m glad your dad wasn't around to see that.  Take a seat on the bench, you wimp, he added, then smacked Sam so hard on the side of his helmet that his ears rang.

He was right.  Even though Sam was bigger and faster, he had deliberately avoided tackling Hamilton Junior High's tailback.  He was afraid.  Seemed like Sam had always been that way, afraid.  Worse yet, his mother had witnessed the public flogging and reported it to the board of education.  Sam just wanted to crawl into a hole and hide until the entire thing blew over, but it took on a life of its own, ending with Coach Wilson being forced to apologize in front of the whole team.  That's the way things went after Sam’s dad died: from bad to worse.

Sam lived on Cherry Way in Brackston, along the Monongahela River.  Brackston was once a beautiful, thriving town.  That is until the steel mill closed. Afterward, most everyone lost their jobs, including Sam’s dad, and things just started falling apart.  Sam never saw a thriving town.  What he saw were boarded-up homes and failing businesses.  Along Washington Ave. there were still a few shops doing okay.  Angelo's Pizza was busy most days; so was the Mobile station, but if you were from out of town, there was no place to stay in Brackston.  The roof on the old Gramercy Hotel on First Street had caved in, and the only guests left were a family of feral cats who were out every night chasing the rats that congregated behind McDonald's.  Half the stores in the shopping mall on Talbot had been closed for years, and there was no movie theatre in town.  If you needed new sneakers or wanted to see a show, you had to drive to Edgewood twenty miles north.

It was just the three of them now, Sam, his mother, and Wiley, a sweet, dumb beagle they picked up from the animal shelter.

Sam’s mom worked as a cashier at Shop & Stop.  She couldn't afford the mortgage and had been trying to sell the house for a year.  It needed a ton of work. There were no offers.  His dad's death was sudden.  They called it a brain aneurysm; that’s when a bulge in an artery in your brain burst like a balloon.  Most times you don’t even know anything’s wrong, then puff.  Anyway, he might as well have been run over by a truck.  He lingered a week in a coma, then he was gone.  At the time, Sam still wasn't sure how he felt about it; he grieved, of course, but they were never truly close.  He always thought he was a disappointment to his dad, a failure, not the chip off the old block his father expected.  Before starting at the mill, Jack Whitaker was a Marine, a decorated Vietnam Vet and a high school football star.  Sam was a nerd and not even a good one; he wasn't studious or particularly smart.  His father might have settled for that.  What Sam was, was awkward and socially inept.  Still, he wished he could have made his dad proud at least once, and most of all, he wished he had gotten the chance to say goodbye.

Back then, Sam had only two friends, Mackenzie and Lucas.  The kids at school called Mackenzie, Sticks, because she was so thin, maybe 80 pounds soaking wet. Maybe less. She hated the name, so Sam just called her Mack.  They’d been friends since third grade.  She lived with her mom, dad and three brothers in a big house up on Brackston Hill.   Her father, Jason Eliot, owned most of the real estate in town worth owning.  He was a soft-spoken, gentle man who indulged and adored Mack.  And she loved him back, but she worshipped her mother.  Sam disliked the lady: a sharp-edged, wiry woman with cold, disapproving eyes.  He only saw her kiss Mack once after Mack won the sixth-grade spelling bee.  It was a careless peck on the cheek, followed by a halfhearted hug.  And he hated the way she constantly nagged: always sending Mack back upstairs to change her clothes or redo her hair. The more her mom harped, the more Mack tried to please, until one day, she simply gave up.  That's when Mack pretty much stopped eating.

After that, she became a target for the mean girls. You could almost see why: when you first met her you thought: wow, that girl’s a walking broomstick; she's all edges and angles; her clothes don't fit; her hairs like straw; man, she's a real mess.  But when you got up close and took a personal look, you could see she was pretty, real pretty.  Take her eyes: most times they were blue, but sometimes, without warning, they would flash cat green on account of the tiny emerald specks in them.  And it wasn’t just her eyes; her mouth was full and pink, and her nose was a perfect triangle that sat right in the middle of a perfectly oval face.

Sam met his other friend Lucas Starling the year they started junior high school. Sam was failing chemistry, and without him asking, Lucas offered to help.  Lucas was black, which was hard enough in their mostly white high school, but he was also poor.  He was a foster kid who had bounced from family to family until the Sanders took him in.  They were kind and caring, and he fit well with them.  The Sanders lived in a part of town called, The Bottom, surrounded by vacant houses and the massive, rusting hulk of the abandoned steel mill.  There were seven people in the Sanders’ small house. They should have moved, but Mr. and Mrs. Sanders were not about to leave the home that had been in their family for generations.

At school, they named Lucas, Dumbass, because it took him so long to get his words out.  Only he wasn't dumb at all. In fact, he was the smartest kid Sam knew.  Sure, it took him a while to work things out in his head and another spell to turn his thoughts to words, but when he finally got them out, he was always right.  Lucas had this way of shining a different light on things, finding the answer when everyone else was stumped, but no one ever gave him a chance. They'd asked him something, and when he didn't answer right off, they'd call him Dumbass and walk away.

__________

It had been a week since Sam quit the football team.  He couldn't face the backlash over the Coach Wilson thing, but he figured he’d moped around long enough, so he called Mack and Lucas and asked them over. When they got to his house, they couldn't decide what to do, then Lucas said he'd found this abandoned warehouse down by the mill that had all this crazy stuff inside, and they should check it out.

Sounds like a plan, Sam said.  And since we have to pass through town anyway, we can stop at Angelo's for a slice."

Mack wasn't keen on the Angelo's part, but she was always ready for something new, and the warehouse got her juices going.

Yeah, I'm in, Lucas said. I've got a nice roast beef sandwich in my backpack, but I'll save that for later.  Lucas never was one to turn down a slice of pizza.

So, you finally came to your senses and quit the team, Mack said.  You should have done it a long time ago. Those guys can be real asses.

Well, some of them aren't so bad, Sam said. But your right. There are more than a few jerks on the team.

Yeah, Lucas chimed in.  And I hate to break the news to you, but you really weren't much of a D-Back anyway. If you know what I mean.

Thanks pal, Sam said. But, I do know what you mean.

As they got into town, Sam spied Jack Temple and Steve Wright, the quarterback and left tackle of the football team, standing in front of Angelo's with three other players.  Jack was tall, good looking and an all-around athlete. Steve was a