Stagger Bay by Pearce Hansen

crows and snakes and possums here too, as well as skunks and lots of mud. It was a little boy’s paradise and Sam always loved it. Tell the truth, I hadn’t minded it too much myself, being a big-city boy who’d never come closer to Wild Kingdom than on the picture tube of my TV.
    Frogs throbbed out their mating song, the shrill chorus seeming to mock me and my current situation. Once, with Sam, this had been one of my favorite places on earth. Now it seemed eldritch and menacing in the moonlight.
    Weakness overcame me and I sank to lie on my side in the mud at the edge of the water, staring into the dimness of that inhuman swamp. I closed my eye and fell asleep to the frogs’ malevolent piping and the rustlings of all the little swamp creatures going about their nocturnal business.

 
    Chapter 17
     
    I woke at dawn and the air was clammy; I was engulfed by a white fog that had risen off the swamp to hide the world in a numb blank swath. Despite the chill I was sweating.
    I was on fire; I had a fever, bad. To add to the fun the dope they’d been pumping into me at the hospital had worn off, and my missing eye was really kicking up a fuss; the pain was the worst I’d felt since it had been blown out my skull.
    I rose to hands and knees, swaying like a sickly dog as I coughed again and again, each cough a deep, gluey, rattling boom. I finally convulsed up a thick wad of chunky green phlegm, spat it onto the ground in front of me, and studied the gross little puddle clinically from a few inches above. I was in bad shape here.
    I got to my feet and commenced shambling slowly through the fog, the swamp water slopping up next to the muddy path I followed. Behind me the hospital bulked up to darken the haze. As long as I was headed away from it, I was going in the right direction.
    I hit a path leading uphill away from the marsh and turned that way, toiling up a slight incline that I wouldn’t have given a second thought to in better circumstances. Right then it felt like Mount Everest, and I found it harder and harder to breathe with every step. I felt like I was drowning with each labored rattling breath. My legs were rubbery stilts, stretching an infinite distance from my whirling head to the teetering ground below.
    At the top of the path was a sidewalk on an empty street. The fog was thinner here but it still prevented me from seeing more than maybe twenty-five yards in any direction.
    Memory failed me; my thoughts were less and less coherent. I had no idea where in Stagger Bay I was.
    At random, I turned left and continued slumping along. The further I got from the marsh the thinner the fog got, until it finally disappeared.
    I was on a wide street, brand new – an avenue, really. It looked out of place in this uninhabited corner. Both sides of the road were bulldozed and graded flat in preparation for construction, the lots all laid out. Surveyor’s stakes were everywhere, connected by string and fluttering with orange plastic ribbons. Cement sidewalks and curbs were poured and cured – inlets to what would be courts and cul-de-sacs broke the lonely curbing at architecturally appropriate intervals; concrete curves and spirals led off to ghost houses yet to be constructed.
    I passed a bulldozer and grader parked next to a prefab contractor’s hut on concrete blocks. The wide avenue teed into a pot-holed cross street leading to my left, into a lurking cluster of identical bungalows, all of them in need of a paint job.
    Now I recognized where I was: I’d stumbled my way straight to the Gardens. It was a jarring contrast between those run-down hovels and the pristine blank area I was passing through.
    This was the erstwhile home of a man I’d gotten murdered at the school. Wayne, I recalled the Chief saying – his name had been Wayne. I always figured that, at a minimum, you should at least remember the names of people who die because of you.

 
    Chapter 18
     
    I’d always felt calling this neighborhood the