Nightrise

as if some unstoppable force had scythed through them and killed them all in the same instant. With a growing sense of horror, he stumbled to his feet and limped over to the nearest of them.
    They were all men, dressed in the same shades of brown and gray. Soldiers. He could see that now. But not modern ones, not like the soldiers he had seen on the TV news, waving and putting their thumbs up on their way to some faraway war.
    These men were wearing strange clothes: long jackets that came down to their knees and loose-fitting trousers. Some were hooded, the dark material sweeping around their heads and over their shoulders.
    They didn't seem to have any guns. Instead they'd been armed with swords and shields, but even these were like nothing he had ever seen before. The shields were small and round with a single spike sticking out so they could be used either for defense or to stab anyone who came close. The swords were different shapes, some straight, some curving, some with multiple blades. There were arrows all around but they were made of metal, not wood, and with some sort of black leaves taking the place of feathers.
    They had all been mutilated. Some were almost unrecognizable as human beings. As the smell of the freshly spilled blood rose in his nostrils, Jamie turned around and threw up, then staggered away, desperate to hide himself, to try to make sense of what he was seeing.
    He had woken up in front of a ruined building, perched on a hill. It loomed high above him, built out of red bricks and shaped like a giant thumb with a curving terrace where the nail should have been. There was a wooden door hanging off its hinges and, inside, a spiral staircase leading up from what had once been a circular entrance hall. The fortress — for that was surely what it was — had recently been set on fire. Parts of it were still smoldering and it was obvious that all the men in front of him had died trying to defend it.
    Still nauseous and disoriented, Jamie stumbled over some of the rubble until he reached the entrance, resting his hand against the door frame. He winced. The wood was too hot to touch. Rubbing his palm, he continued around the back of the building, away from the dead bodies. He found a patch of grass and sat down, forcing himself to keep control. His heart was beating twice as fast as it should have been.
    There was a foul taste in his mouth and his head was spinning. He wanted to be sick again but there was nothing left in his stomach.
    It was now that he realized he was no longer wearing his own clothes. Someone had redressed him in baggy pants and a coarsely woven, gray shirt that was buttoned up to the neck without a collar. There was a leather belt outside the shirt, above his waist. His feet were bare. He looked very much like all the dead men around him.
    Except he was alive.
    Or was he? It suddenly occurred to him that he might have been killed trying to escape from Silent Creek and this might be the result. Jamie had read bits of the Bible. He'd been to church a few times.
    Marcie had forced it all on him and Scott as part of their homeschooling. He knew about Heaven and Hell although he'd never believed in either of them. Now he wondered if maybe he'd been wrong.
    Maybe this was Hell. There were no flames and no devils with horns but hellish was exactly the word to describe where he was right now. This could be the place where bad people went after Judgment Day.
    But he knew it wasn't true.
    He reached behind him and tried to find the place where the bullet had entered his back. But there was no sign of any wound, and even as he moved he knew he wouldn't find one. He wasn't in pain. It was as if the gunshot had never happened.
    "I'm alive!" He whispered the words to himself as if hearing them could somehow prove them to be true.
    He turned his hands toward his face and flexed his fingers. They obeyed him. His stomach felt hollow and his throat was raw but otherwise he was fine.
    So if this wasn't a dream and he wasn't dead, could he be suffering some sort of hallucination? He'd seen that sort of thing on TV, in science fiction programs. A woman in a car accident hits her head and wakes up somewhere weird. She thinks it's real but in fact she's just imagining it and she's really in a coma in a hospital bed. That was more likely. Jamie lowered his hands and gazed around him again. The great tower did not look like a hallucination.
    But there was one way to make sure. He gritted his teeth,