Into the Real

  Dedication

  For Gracie King & Griffin Schumow

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 1.3

  Chapter 1.2

  Chapter 1.1

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Z Brewer

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  24

  The Rippers were out again. I could tell because of a victim’s screams echoing through the air. The piercing cries turned into gurgling, followed by moist chewing sounds. Teeth ripping flesh away. Lips slurping skin and muscle and hair into their hungry mouths. All because somebody had left their shelter a little too early. Rippers were nocturnal. Everyone knew that. Stay indoors at night. Wait until day before stepping outside. They were simple rules to follow and key to survival in Brume.

  The sounds were nothing new to me. In fact, they’d become an alarm clock of sorts. A chomping, chewing, swallowing alarm clock. But that’s Brume for ya. If you couldn’t run or didn’t hide, it would chew you up and sp—well, actually, it wouldn’t spit you out at all. It would swallow you. Bite by bite. Chunk by chunk.

  Good morning, Quinn. Try not to get eaten today.

  I lay in place for a while, listening to the irrefutable symphony of mayhem outside, staring at a ceiling and walls that I couldn’t remember, wondering where I’d slept. After some time, I withdrew the map from my bag and scanned it, looking for any clue as to where I was. It was hard to keep track of where I found rest every night, because I had to keep moving, keep changing things up, if I didn’t want something terrible to happen to me. I often ended up finding shelter just in time, ducking into a house and going straight for the best hiding place. The map helped me keep my bearings. It also helped me keep my sanity. It was jarring to wake in a new place almost every morning, and it always took me a moment to shake off the fog clouding my memory.

  I traced my finger around the borders of Brume. The town hadn’t always been such a living nightmare. There had once been family picnics in the park and neighbors waving hello to one another. But that was before. Now those things were all but a memory. Now things were shit.

  Maybe I was shit too.

  Stretching and shaking my thoughts away, I sat up, careful not to make much movement so I wouldn’t attract anything lurking outside the window. The sky was a gray haze, but it was day once again. Still early, judging by the few rays of light pushing through the clouds. I’d slept the whole night through—a rarity. Despite the rotting roof and warped floorboards, the house had felt welcoming, even comforting. If I willed myself, even for a moment, I could almost imagine that it was my home. But my home was long gone—burned to the ground. Not by monsters, either. No, some of the worst atrocities in Brume were committed by the other humans. Other survivors. Now home was anywhere I could find a moment’s rest. Now home was me.

  I stood and strapped my leather pouch to my thigh, ready to begin my morning rounds.

  If I was lucky, the roaming gangs wouldn’t be out for hours. They tended to party pretty late, getting drunk on whatever was left in the old liquor store or the cabinets of the houses they’d raided that day. Some of them were even brewing their own booze now. That might explain the bodies I’d found slumped out on the porch when I snuck in here last night. They’d had no cuts or bite marks that I could see. They weren’t elderly and didn’t look sick. They were rather young and simply . . . still. Forever still. Broken glass lay on the doormat, as if they’d dropped bottles on their way out. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. But the quiet of morning brought a clarity with it, and now I was pretty sure those two had accidentally poisoned themselves to death by drinking bathtub gin. I imagined so many of the gang members drank booze just to forget about the horrors of life in Brume, and these two wouldn’t be the first to have died from it. Stupid. But then, my assumption of their stupidity was based mostly on the fact that they were members of a gang—Lloyd’s, considering the X-shaped scar on each of their left cheeks. Lloyd liked his followers well marked. He reveled in the glory of being the leader of a group—even if that group was a bunch of mindless clones, intent on pleasing him enough to go on surviving. Maybe I’d never thought the gang members were all that intelligent because they were followers, and I was anything but a follower.

  If you swore allegiance to Lloyd or any of the other gang leaders, you didn’t have to worry so much about food or clothing or even safety. But I’d be damned before I sold my soul for an apple or a heavy jacket. The only thing that had ever tempted me was the promise of sage. It was the most valuable thing you could find or trade in Brume. The only thing known to mask human scent from the Rippers. Rumor had it that a couple of the gang leaders had bags of the stuff. But not even sage was worth selling my soul.

  A woman’s scream filtered in from the distance, but it wasn’t followed by any chewing sounds, so I was willing to bet it was a Screamer. I’d never seen one—those who did generally didn’t live to talk about the experience. But rumor had it they were large and birdlike, with bony, translucent wings. With their patchy gray coloring, they blended perfectly with the clouds as they flew above Brume. Their calls were the screams of their victims, mimicked perfectly, bait to draw other people to them. Nasty things. I hoped I’d never run into one. So far, so good.

  My stomach rumbled its argument that we should find something to eat, but I pushed down the hunger. There were more important things on my plate to be dealt with first. I grabbed my bat from the floor by the dusty mattress I’d slept on. It was comforting, the sensation of that bat in my hand. The wood was worn where I gripped it. I’d had it for a long time now, and it bore the bloodstains to prove it. This bat had saved my life on several occasions. If it were human, it might have been my friend. I didn’t have many of those. If I was honest, I had just the one. Lia. But she was loyal, protective, kind, and generous, which made her much more valuable than the bat.

  The floorboards creaked beneath my feet as I moved to the bedroom door, pausing to listen to whatever could be on the other side of it. Ready to swing at anything that might come at me, I threw the door open, but the hall was empty, the house still. The hammering of my heart in my ears quieted until it was once again the solid, familiar thumping in my chest that reminded me on the regular that I’d survived another moment in Brume. Some days it seemed like Brume was too terrible to be real.

  Moving through the house, I stayed alert but managed to keep any paranoia at bay. A steady hand and a clear head were key to staying alive in Brume—something I’d learned after facing down my first Ripper alone, when I’d pretty much failed at both. My fingers had trembled. My thoughts had been a messy jumble. It was a wonder I’d survived the encounter.

  It was a wonder I was still surviving now.

  Decaying floral wallpaper covered every room in the house, as if the owners had tried to bring inside the beauty of an outside world that no longer existed. Now Brume was what it was: ugly, dangerous, and primal. According to Lia, daydreaming about anything else was a waste of time and thought.
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  I wondered if having a worldview like that made her lonely.

  The air around me carried a chill that raised goose bumps on my skin. The house creaked and groaned. My daily task stretched out before me like an endless desert—the promise-filled whisper of hope the only thing driving me forward. If I ever lost that spark of hope . . . well . . . I might as well pay the Rippers a visit and be done with it already.

  Shut up, Quinn. Just shut up.

  The smell of the lake filled my nose when I stepped out the front door. The familiar musty scent always stirred up memories from my past. Countless fishing trips with my dad. Swimming in its coolness with my brother. Skipping stones with my mom. But among those reflections was always that day. I hated thinking about it, but it lurked there, just below the surface of my recollection. The day hope became a fragile thing.

  Without explanation, my dad had piled my mom, Kai, and me into a small rowboat with him, two boxes of food, and four sleeping bags. He’d paddled us as far as he could, the whole time without a word to my brother or me. But we knew what he was doing. He hadn’t been able to find a way out of town on the roads or in the fields, but maybe on the other side of the water . . .

  The air had grown colder the farther away from land we got, and my mom wrapped her arms around me and pulled me close to her. Maybe she did it to keep me warm. Maybe she did it to calm us both in the midst of the strange and dangerous trip. Strange, because my father had begun to wonder if all the crazy theories of the townsfolk might have weight to them, and he was running out of ideas on how to disprove them. Dangerous, because fog had rolled out over the water, and the Unseen Hands were said to lurk both in darkness and in fog.

  My father’s eyes had focused on the horizon, and my eyes had locked on his expression. A determined, maybe worried, crease lined his brow. He didn’t speak a word. None of us did. Mom told me not to look as she wept into my hair, but I dared a peek to find what might lie beyond the lake.

  We must have gotten turned around somehow, because ahead of us was the same dock we’d left. It was the fog, Dad said. We’d just gotten turned around in the fog. Gripping the paddles, he maneuvered the boat around again and headed straight for the other side of the water. The fog grew so thick that I could barely see Kai’s face. When it finally thinned, I saw something ahead of us. Something familiar.

  “Goddammit!” Dad had yelled, confirming my fears. We’d come around again to the dock once more. How had we gotten turned around like that twice? Was that possible? My dad might not have been a sailor, but he could certainly maneuver a boat in a single direction.

  Dad ignored Mom’s urging to stop, bringing the boat around again and paddling faster than he had before. Determination drove each stroke. Mom didn’t seem to notice how tightly she was clutching me to her chest. Water splashed at every lunge of the paddles. Drops of it dotted my skin. The paddles hitting the water were the only sound besides my father’s frustrated breathing. The boat inched forward, into the thick gloom.

  After what seemed like forever, Dad’s face dropped. With a shaking voice, he said that we were docking. We were going home. It was the first time I could recall hearing fear in my father’s voice or seeing defeat in his eyes. It was as if the small shred of hope that he’d been clinging to had evaporated into the fog. That sound—that image—frightened me far more than any of the strange creatures that were only rumored to be lurking around town back then. Prior to that moment, my dad had clung to hope with a determination that kept the entire family certain of survival, of escape. But he was different after that. He changed forever that day. We all did.

  Once more, I tucked the memory back in that part of my mind where I stored all the ugly things that I’d seen. I focused my mind on the present, where it needed to be if I wanted to survive. The fog permeating Brume was thin compared to most days, but it was still thick enough to hang over every bit of it—the mailboxes, the streetlamps, the rusting vehicles, the everything. Every day in Brume brought with it the oppressive feeling of loneliness. I missed my family. I missed my mother.

  She was a wise woman, caring and tender. She’d never questioned it when I came to her at thirteen years old and told her that I was genderqueer. Of course, I didn’t know the word for it then. I just knew that I was fluid when it came to being male or female. I just knew that sometimes I was one or the other, sometimes both, sometimes neither. I just knew I was different from my family. And Mom said that made me special.

  The movement of a bright orange ladybug with tiny black spots brought me back to the present. It landed on my bloodstained bat, and I watched it crawl along for three inches or so before it flew off again. Mom would have liked that.

  Well. Maybe not the blood so much.

  Despite the fact that the air was heavy with moisture, it wasn’t raining, which meant it was a good bet that I’d find Lia outside somewhere—probably on the north end of town, since she’d stuck to the south the day before. We usually met up once a day, often spending nights together as well. But sometimes, whenever she got that look in her eye—the one that told me she was thinking about what happened to her mom—she needed to be alone, and I respected that. But together or not, we kept moving, kept changing up our routines. The Rippers had a keen sense of smell and pretty good memories. Like sage, changing locations was another tool to keep them one step behind us. We moved to avoid the gangs as well. And if we avoided darkness, we had a solid chance at dodging the Unseen Hands. As for the Screamers . . . we had no idea if moving about, using sage, or staying in the light helped keep them at bay. Defense was all just a guessing game when it came to Screamers.

  I stepped off the porch and waved a quick hello to Mr. Thompson and Mr. Johnson, who were making their way down the street, eyes darting from one shadow to the next for any sign of danger. They were some of the few remaining adults. The darkness of Brume had taken the majority of the grown-ups first, but now anybody was fair game to its incessant hunger. Lia theorized that being older just slowed a person down and thereby shortened their lifespan, but I wasn’t convinced. Did anyone really know why Brume had changed from a normal town to the living nightmare it was now?

  I sure as hell didn’t.

  My footfalls were as soft as I could manage as I moved down the sidewalk, but it was impossible to be completely silent. I kept a keen eye on my surroundings, including the sky, watching for danger, ready to defend myself at a moment’s notice. As I crossed to the next block, I looked at the neighborhood around me—really looked—trying to find the good that Mom had always been able to see and was quick to point out. What leaves remained on the trees were dark green and glistening with morning dew. A small vine had curled its way up the post of a mailbox ahead. If it managed to survive, it would be something to see. Flora didn’t have much luck lasting in the unrelenting gloom. Such things required sunshine, and we were lucky if we got a glimpse of that big fiery ball in the sky two, maybe three times in a year. Certainly not enough to inspire hope in most of the residents here. But I had hope. I gripped it like a lifeline, holding on to my belief that Brume was either escapable or could be restored. I just had to figure out how.

  I thought about the vine for the next three blocks, until I reached the eastern edge of town, where the old hardware store stood. At one point, there had been more street to follow beyond the stop sign there, more sidewalk to walk. But now both the sidewalks and street ended beneath a thick wall of fog. The fog was at its densest here—white smoky gloom that curled around my limbs as I approached the place where the pavement ended and impossible questions began. With my breath locked inside my lungs, I peered into the nothingness. I couldn’t make out anything on the other side of the haze. I listened but didn’t hear anything within or beyond the fog.

  Breathing deep, I moved forward into the dense murk, as I’d done the day before. And the day before that. Lia called my excursions futile. Though I’d never admit it to her, I was beginning to worry that she might be right. But I couldn’t stop trying. Maybe
I had a bit of my dad in me. Or maybe I was picking up where he’d left off in my memory because, on some level, I blamed myself for what happened to him.

  The mist kissed my skin with small droplets of moisture. The gray all around me was disorienting, but I kept my steps straight and sure, determined to escape the madness into which we’d all been plunged. The only sounds within the cloud of fog were my steps on the pavement and my breath as I inhaled and exhaled.

  My heart rate picked up at the sight of something ahead of me, blanketed by the thick fume. “Please,” I whispered to myself. “Please let it be something new.”

  A building came into view. Then another. For a moment, I felt a surge of joy. But my elation crashed down on the pavement at my feet when I recognized the houses as the ones I’d passed not two minutes before.

  Free of the fog, I looked back and sighed. I refused to be defeated. Even the sturdiest of walls had weak spots. It was just a matter of finding the weak spot in this wall as well, I was certain.

  With a steady hand, I marked the spot on my map with an X and tried not to focus too much on all the red dots around it that had been X-ed out. There had to be another way. There had to be something else I could try in order to ensure I was moving through the fog in a straight li—

  I snapped my gaze to the hardware store. My footfalls slapped on the ground as I took off in a near sprint to the front door. My hair whipped back from my forehead. I pulled the door open, but barely noticed the heft of it in my hand. My focus was on one thing. An object, a plan, that might help me cross the gloom. Three aisles in, I found what I was looking for.

  I slung the hundred-foot extension cord over my shoulder, grabbed a roll of duct tape, and hurried back to where I’d entered the wall of fog before. A stop sign marked that part of the street. On top of it were two street signs. One read Taylor Drive. The other was Oaks Avenue.

  Once I’d tied one end of the cord around my waist and the other around the signpost, I wrapped each knot in several layers of duct tape, just to be sure they’d hold. The extension cord was stronger than rope, and duct tape was a pain in the ass to rip through, so the likelihood it would break was small. My only concern was that a hundred feet might not be enough to find anything beyond the thickness of the wall. But I had to try.