Текст книги "The Mist"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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“Of course it is,” he snapped. His eyes ran over Jim, Myron, rested briefly on Ollie Weeks-who held his glance with calm impassivity-and at last came back to me. “It's what you locals probably call 'a real belly-buster. ' Right, David?”

“Brent... look—”

“No, you look!” His voice began to rise toward a courtroom shout. It earned very, very well, and several of the people who were wandering around, edgy and aimless, looked over to see what was going on. Norton jabbed his finger at me as he spoke. “It's a joke. It's a banana skin and I'm the guy that's supposed to slip on it. None of you people are exactly crazy about out-of-towners, am I right? You all pretty much stick together. The way it happened when I hauled you into court to get what was rightfully mine. You won that one, all right. Why not? Your father was the famous artist, and it's your town. I only pay, my taxes and spend my money here!” He was no longer performing, hectoring us with the trained courtroom shout; he was nearly screaming and on the verge of losing all control. Ollie Weeks turned and walked away, clutching his beer. Myron and his friend Jim were staring at Norton with frank amazement.

“Am I supposed to go back there and look at some ninety-eight-cent rubber-joke novelty while these two hicks stand around and laugh their apses off?”

“Hey, you want to watch who you're calling a hick,” Myron said.

“I'm glad that tree fell on your boathouse, if you want to know the truth. Glad.” Norton was grinning savagely at me. “Stove it in pretty well, didn't it? Fantastic. Now get out of my way.”

He tried to push past me. I grabbed him by the arm and threw him against the beer cooler. A woman cawed in surprise. Two six-packs of Bud fell over.

“You dig out your ears and listen, Brent. There are lives at stake here. My kid's is not the least of them. So you listen, or I swear I'll knock the shit out of you.”

“Go ahead,” Norton said, still grinning with a kind of insane palsied bravado. His eyes, bloodshot and wide, bulged from their sockets. “Show everyone how big and brave you are, beating up a man with a heart condition who is old enough to be your father.”

“Sock him anyway!” Jim exclaimed. “Fuck his heart condition. I don't even think a cheap New York shyster like him has got a heart.” “You keep out of it,” I said to Jim, and then put my face down to Norton's. I was kissing distance, if that had been what I had in mind. The cooler was off, but it was still radiating a chill. “Stop throwing up sand. You know damn well I'm telling the truth.”

“I know... no... such thing,” he panted.

“If it was another time and place, I'd let you get away with it. I don't care how scared you are, and I'm not keeping score. I'm scared, too. But I need you, goddammit! Does that get through? I need you!”

“Let me go!”

I grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Don't you understand anything? People are going to start leaving and walk right into that thing out there! For Christ's sake, don't you understand?”

“Let me go!”

“Not until you come back there with me and see for yourself.”

“I told you, no! It's all a trick, a joke, I'm not as stupid as you take me for—”

“Then I'll haul-you back there myself.”

I grabbed him by the shoulder and the scruff of his neck. The seam of his shirt under one arm tore with a soft purring sound. I dragged him toward the double doors. Norton let out a wretched scream. A knot of people, fifteen or eighteen, had gathered, but they kept their distance. None showed any signs of wanting to interfere.

“Help me!” Norton cried. His eyes bulged behind his glasses. His styled hair had gone awry again, sticking up in the same two little tufts behind his ears. People shuffled their feet and watched.

“What are you screaming for?” I said in his ear. “It's just a joke, right? That's why I took you to town when you asked

to come and why I trusted you to cross Billy in the parking lot because I had this handy fog all manufactured, I rented a

fog machine from Hollywood, it cost me fifteen thousand dollars and another eight thousand dollars to ship it, all so I

could play a joke on you. Stop bullshitting yourself and open your eyes!” “Let... me... go!” Norton bawled. We were almost at the doors.

“Here, here! What is this? What are you doing?” It was Brown. He bustled and elbowed his way through the crowd of watchers. “Make him let me go,” Norton said hoarsely. “He's crazy.” “No. He's not crazy. I wish he were, but he isn't.” That was Ollie, and I could have blessed him. He came around the aisle behind us and stood there facing Brown. Brown's eyes dropped to the beer Ollie was holding. “You're drinking!” he said, and his voice was surprised but not totally devoid of pleasure. “You'll lose your job for this.” “Come on, Bud,” I said, letting Norton go. “This is no ordinary situation.” “Regulations don't change,” Brown said smugly. “I'll see that the company hears of it. That's my responsibility.” Norton, meanwhile, had skittered away and stood at some distance, trying to straighten his shirt and smooth back his hair. His eyes darted between Brown and me nervously.

“Hey!” Ollie cried suddenly, raising his voice and producing a bass thunder I never would have suspected from this large but soft and unassuming man. “Hey! Everybody in the store! You want to come up back and hear this! It concerns all of you!” He looked at me levelly, ignoring Brown altogether. “Am I doing all right?”

“Fine. “

People began to gather. The original knot of spectators to my argument with Norton doubled, then trebled.

“There's something you all had better know—” Ollie began.

“You put that beer down right now,” Brown said.

“You shut up right now,” I said, and took a step toward him.

Brown took a compensatory step back. “I don't know what some of you think you are doing,” he said, “but I can tell you it's going to be reported to the Federal Foods Company! All of it! And I want you to understand-there may be charges!” His lips drew nervously back from his yellowed teeth, and I could feel sympathy for him. Just trying to cope; that was all he was doing. As Norton was by imposing a mental gag order on himself. Myron and Jim had tried by turning the whole thing into a macho charade-if the generator could be fixed, the mist would blow over. This was Brown's way. He was... Protecting the Store.

“Then you go ahead and take down the names,” I said. “But please don't talk.”

“I'll take down plenty of names,” he responded. “Yours will be head on the list, you... you bohemian.”

“Mr. David Drayton has got something to tell you,” Ollie said, “and I think you had better all listen up, in case you were planning ongoing home.”

So I told them what had happened, pretty much as I told Norton. There was some laughter at first, then a deepening uneasiness as I finished.

“It's a lie, you know,” Norton said. His voice tried for hard emphasis and overshot into stridency. This was the man I'd told first, hoping to enlist his credibility. What a balls-up. “Of course it's a lie,” Brown agreed. “It's lunacy. Where do you suppose those tentacles came from, Mr. Drayton?” “I don't know, and at this point, hat's not even a very important question. They're here. There's—” “I suspect they came out of a few of those beer cans. ~ That's what I suspect.” This got some appreciative laughter. ~ It was silenced by the strong, rusty-hinge voice of Mrs. Carmody.

“Death!” she cried, and those who had been laughing quickly sobered.

She marched into the center of the rough circle that had formed, her canary pants seeming to give off a light of their own, her huge purse swinging against one elephantine thigh. Her black eyes glanced arrogantly around, as sharp and balefully sparkling as a magpie's. Two good-looking girls of about sixteen with CAMP WOODLANDS written on the back of their white rayon shirts shrank away from her. “You listen but you don't hear! You hear but you don't believe! Which one of you wants to go outside and see for himself?” Her eyes swept them, and then fell on me. “And just what do you propose to do about it, Mr. David Drayton? What do you think you can do about it?” She grinned, skull-like above her canary outfit. “It's the end, I tell you. The end of everything. It's the Last Times. The moving finger has writ, not in fire, but in lines of mist. The earth has opened and spewed forth its abominations—” “Can't you make her shut up?” one of the teenage girls burst out. She was beginning to cry. “She's scaring me!”

“Are you scared, dearie?” Mrs. Carmody asked, and turned on her. “You aren't scared now, no. But when the foul creatures the Imp has loosed upon the face of the earth come for you—” “That's enough now, Mrs. Carmody,” Ollie said, taking her arm. “That's just fine.” “You let go of me! It's the end, I tell you! It's death! Death!” “It's a pile of shit,” a man in a fishing hat and glasses said disgustedly. “No, Sir,” Myron spoke up. “I know it sounds like something out of a dope-dream, but it's the flat-out truth. I saw it myself.

“I did, too,” Jim said.

“And me,” Ollie chipped in. He had succeeded in quieting Mrs. Carmody, at least for the time being. But she stood close by, clutching her big purse and grinning her crazy grin. No one wanted to stand too close to her-they muttered among themselves, not liking the corroboration. Several of them looked back at the big plate-glass windows in an uneasy, speculative way. I was glad to see it.

“Lies,” Norton said. “You people all lie each other up. That's all.”

“What you're suggesting is totally beyond belief,” Brown said.

“We don't have to stand here chewing it over,” I told him. “Come back into the storage area with me. Take a look. And a listen.”

“Customers are not allowed in the—”

“Bud,” Ollie said, “go with him. Let's settle this.”

“All right,” Brown said. “Mr. Drayton? Let's get this foolishness over with.”

We pushed through the double doors into the darkness.

The sound was unpleasant perhaps evil.

Brown felt it, too, for all his hardheaded Yankee manner; his hand clutched my arm immediately, his breath caught for a moment and then resumed more harshly.

It was a low whispering sound from the direction of the loading door-an almost caressing sound. I swept around gently with one foot and finally struck one of the flashlights. I bent down, got it, and turned it on. Brown's face was tightly drawn, and he hadn't even seen them-he was only hearing them. But I had seen, and I could imagine them twisting and climbing over the corrugated steel surface of the door like living vines. “What do you think now? Totally beyond belief?” Brown licked his lips and looked at the littered confusion of boxes and bags. “They did this?” “Some of it. Most of it. Come over here.” He came-reluctantly. I spotted the flashlight on the shriveled and curled section of tentacle, still lying by the push broom. Brown bent toward it. “Don't touch that,” I said. “It may still be alive.”

He straightened up quickly. I picked up the broom by the bristles and prodded the tentacle. The third or fourth poke caused it to unclench sluggishly and reveal two whole suckers and a ragged segment of a third. Then the fragment coiled again with muscular speed and lay still: Brown made a gagging, disgusted sound. “Seen enough?” “Yes,” he said. “Let's get out of here.”

We followed the bobbing light back to the double doors and pushed through them. All the faces turned toward us, and the hum of conversation died. Norton's face was like old cheese. Mrs. Carmody's black eyes glinted. Ollie was drinking beer; his face was still running with trickles of perspiration, although it had gotten rather chilly in the market. The two girls with CAMP WOODLANDS On their shirts were huddled together like young horses before a thunderstorm. Eyes. So many eyes. I could paint them, I thought with a chill. No faces, only eyes in the gloom. I could paint them but no one would believe they were real. Bud Brown folded his long-fingered hands primly in front of him. “People,” he said. “It appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”

VI. Further Discussion. Mrs. Carmody. Fortifications. What Happened to the Flat-Earth Society.

The next four hours passed in a kind of dream. These was a long and semihysterical discussion following Brown's confirmation, or maybe the discussion wasn't as long as it seemed; maybe it was just the grim necessity of people chewing over the same information, trying to see it from every possible point of view, working it the way a dog works a bone, trying to get at the marrow. It was a slow coming to belief. You can see the same thing at any New England town meeting in March.

There was the Flat-Earth Society, headed by Norton. They were a vocal minority of about ten who believed none of it. Norton pointed out over and over again that there were only four witnesses to the bag-boy being carried off by what he called the Tentacles from Planet X (it was good for a laugh the first time, but it wore thin quickly; Norton, in his increasing agitation, seemed not to notice). He added that he personally did not trust one of the four. He further pointed out that fifty percent of the witnesses were now hopelessly inebriated. That was unquestionably true. Jim and Myron LaFleur, with the entire beer cooler and wine rack at their disposal, were abysmally shitfaced. Considering what had happened to Norm, and their part in it, I didn't blame them. They would sober off all too soon.

Ollie continued to drink steadily, ignoring Brown's protests. After a while Brown gave up, contenting himself with an occasional baleful threat about the Company. He didn't seem to realize that Federal Foods, Inc., with its stores in Bridgeton, North Windham, and Portland, might not even exist anymore. For all we knew, the Eastern Seaboard might no longer exist. Ollie drank steadily, but didn't get drunk. He was sweating it out as rapidly as he could put it in.

At last, as the discussion with the Flat-Earthers was becoming acrimonious, Ollie spoke up. “If you don't believe it, Mr. Norton, that's fine. I'll tell you what to do. You go on out that front door and walk around to the back. There's a great big pile of returnable beer and soda bottles there. Norm and Buddy and I put them out this morning. You bring back a couple of those bottles so we know you really went back there. You do that and I'll personally take my shirt off and eat it.

Norton began to bluster.

Ollie cut him off in that same soft, even voice. “I tell you, you're not doing anything but damage talking the way you are. There's people here that want to go home and make sure their families are okay. My sister and her year-old daughter are at home in Naples right now. I'd like to check on them, sure. But if people start believing you and try to go home, what happened to Norm is going to happen to them.” He didn't convince Norton, but he convinced some of the leaners and fence sitters-it wasn't what he said so much as it was his eyes, his haunted eyes. I think Norton's sanity hinged on not being convinced, or that he thought it did. But he didn't take Ollie up on his offer to bring back a sampling of returnables from out back. None of them did. They weren't ready to go out, at least not yet. He and his little group of Flat-Earthers (reduced by one or two now) went as far away from the rest of us as they could get, over by the prepared meats case. One of them kicked my sleeping son in the leg as '-^, went past, waking him up.

I went over, and Billy clung to my neck. When I tried to put him down, he clung tighter and laid, “Don t do that, Daddy. Please.”

I found a shopping cart and put him in the baby seat. He looked very big in them. It would have been comical except for his pale face, the dark hair brushed across his forehead just above his eyebrows, his woeful eyes. He probably hadn't been up in the baby seat of the shopping cart for as long as two years. These little things slide by you, you don't realize at first, and when what has changed finally comes to you, it's always a nasty shock.

Meanwhile, with the Flat-Earthers having withdrawn, the argument had found another lightning rod-this time it was Mrs. Carmody, and understandably enough, she stood alone.

In the faded, dismal light she was witchlike in her blazing canary pants, her bright rayon blouse, her armloads of clacking junk jewelry-copper, tortoiseshell, adamantine-and her thyroidal purse. Her parchment face was grooved with strong vertical lines. Her frizzy gray hair was yanked flat with three horn combs and twisted in the back. Her mouth was a line of knotted rope.

There is no defense against the will of God. This has been coming. I have seen the signs. There are those here that I have told, but there are none so blind as those who will not see.” “Well, what are you saying? What are you proposing?” Mike Hatlen broke in impatiently. He was a town selectman, although he didn't look the part now, in his yachtsman's cap and Baggy-seated Bermudas. He was sipping at a beer; a great many men were doing it now. Bud Brown had given up protesting, but he was indeed taking names-keeping a rough tab on everyone he could.

“Proposing?” Mrs. Carmody echoed, wheeling toward Hatlen. “Proposing? Why, I am proposing that you prepare to meet your God, Michael Hatlen.” She gazed around at all of us. “Prepare to meet your God!”

“Prepare to meet shit,” Myron LaFleur said in a drunken snarl from the beer cooler. “Old woman, I believe your tongue must be hung in the middle so it can run on both ends. “

There was a rumble of agreement. Billy looked around nervously, and I slipped an arm around his shoulders.

“I'll have my say!” she cried. Her upper lip curled back, revealing snaggle teeth that were yellow with nicotine. I thought of the dusty stuffed animals in her shop, drinking eternally at the mirror that served as their creek. “Doubters will doubt to the end! Yet a monstrosity did drag that poor boy away! Things in the mist! Every abomination out of a bad dream! Eyeless freaks! Pallid horrors! Do you doubt? Then go on out! Go on out and say howdy-do!”

“Mrs. Carmody, you'll have to stop,” I said. “You're scaring my boy.”

The man with the little girl echoed the sentiment. She, all plump legs and scabby knees, had hidden her face against her father's stomach and put her hands over her ears. Big Bill wasn't crying, but he was close.

“There's only one chance,” Mrs. Carmody said.

“What's that, ma'am?” Mike Hatlen asked politely.

“A sacrifice,” Mrs. Carmody said-she seemed to grin in the gloom. “A blood sacrifice.”

Blood sacrifice-the words hung there, slowly turning. Even now, when I know beater, I tell myself that then what she meant was someone's pet dog-there were a couple of them trotting around the market in spite of the regulations against them. Even now I tell myself that. She looked like some crazed remnant of New England Puritanism in the gloom... but I suspect that something deeper and darker than mere Puritanism motivated her. Puritanism had its own dark grandfather, old Adam with bloody hands. She opened her mouth to say something more, and a small, neat man in red pants and a natty sport shirt struck her openhanded across the face. His hair was parted with ruler evenness on the left. He wore glasses. He also wore the unmistakable look of the summer tourist. “You shut up that bad talk,” he said softly and tonelessly.

Mrs. Carmody put her hand to her mouth and then held it out to us, a wordless accusation. There was blood on the palm. But her black eyes seemed to dance with mad glee. “You had it coming!” a woman cried out. “I would have done it myself!” “They'll get hold of you,” Mrs. Carmody said, showing us her bloody palm. The trickle of blood was now running down one of the wrinkles from her mouth to her chin like a droplet of rain down a gutter. “Not today, maybe. Tonight. Tonight when the dark comes. They'll come with the night and take someone else. With the night-they'll come. You'll hear them coming, creeping and crawling. And when they come, you'll beg for Mother Carmody to show you what to do. The man in the red pants raised his hand slowly. “You come on and hit me,” she whispered, and grinned her bloody grin at him. His hand wavered. “Hit me if you dare.” His hand dropped. Mrs. Carmody walked away by herself. Then Billy did begin to cry, hiding his face against me as the little girl had done with her father. “I want to go home,” he said. “I want to see my mommy.” I comforted him as best I could. Which probably wasn't very well.

The talk finally turned into less frightening and destructive channels. The plate-glass windows, the market's obvious weak point, were mentioned. Mike Hatlen asked what other entrances there were, and Ollie and Brown quickly ticked them off-two loading doors in addition to the one Norm had opened. The main IN/OUT doors. The window in the manager's office (thick, reinforced glass, securely locked). Talking about these things had a paradoxical effect. It made the danger seem more real but at the same time made us feel better. Even Billy felt it. He asked if he could go get a candy bar. I told him it would be all right so long as he didn't go near the big windows.

When he was out of earshot, a man near Mike Hatlen said, “Okay, what are we going to do about those windows? The old lady may be as crazy as a bedbug, but she could be right about something moving in after dark. “ “Maybe the fog will blow over by then,” a woman said. “Maybe,” the man said. “And maybe not.” “Any ideas?” I asked Bud and Ollie. “Hold on a sec,” the man near Hatlen said. “I'm Dan Miller. From. Lynn, Mass. You don't know me, no reason why you should, but I got a place on Highland Lake. Bought it just this year. Got held up for it, is more like it, but I had to have it.” There were a few chuckles. “Anyway, I saw a whole pile of fertilizer and lawn-food bags down there. Twenty-five-pound sacks, most of them. We could put them up like sandbags. Leave loopholes to look out through....”

Now more people were nodding and talking excitedly. I almost said something, then held it back. Miller was right. Putting those bags up could do no harm, and might do some good. But my mind went back to that tentacle squeezing the dog-food bag. I thought that one of tire bigger tentacles could probably do the same for a twenty-five-pound bag of Green Acres lawn food or Vigoro. But a sermon on that wouldn't get us out or improve anyone's mood.

People began to break up, talking about getting it done, and Miller yelled: “Hold it! Hold it! Let's thrash this out while we're all together!”

They came back, a loose congregation of fifty or sixty people in the corner formed by the beer cooler, the storage doors, and the left end of the meat case, where Mr. McVey always seems to put the things no one wants, like sweetbreads and Scotch eggs and sheep's brains and head cheese. Billy wove his way through them with a five-year-olds unconscious agility in a world of giants and held up a Hershey bar. “Want this, Daddy?”

“Thanks.” I took it. It tasted sweet and good.

“This is probably a stupid question,” Miller resumed, “but we ought to fill in the blanks. Anyone got any firearms?”

There was a pause. People looked around at each other and shrugged. An old man with grizzled white hair who introduced himself as Ambrose Cornell said he had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. “I'll try for it, if you want.”

Ollie said, “Right now I don't think that would be a good idea, Mr. Cornell. “

Cornell grunted. “Right now, neither do I, son. But I thought I ought to make the offer.”

“Well, I didn't really think so,” Dan Miller said. “But I thought—”

“Wait, hold it a minute,” a woman said. It was the lady in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt and the dark-green slacks. She had sandy-blond hair and a good figure. A very pretty young woman. She opened her purse and from it she produced a medium-sized pistol. The crowd made an ahhhh-ing sound, as if they had just seen a magician do a particularly fine trick. The woman, who had been blushing, blushed that much the harder. She rooted in her purse again and brought out a box of Smith & Wesson ammunition.

“I'm Amanda Dumfries,” she said to Miller. “This gun... my husband's idea. He thought I should have it for protection. I've carried it unloaded for two years.”

“Is your husband here, ma'am?”

“No, he's in New York. On business. He's gone on business a lot. That's why he wanted me to carry the gun.”

“Well,” Miller said, “if you can use it, you ought to keep it. What is it, a thirty-eight?”

“Yes. And I've never fired it in my life except on a target range once. “

Miller took the gun, fumbled around, and got the cylinder to open after a few moments. He checked to make sure it was not loaded. “Okay,” he said. “We got a gun. Who shoots good? I sure don't.”

People glanced at each other. No one said anything at first. Then, reluctantly, Ollie said: “I target-shoot quite a lot. I have a Colt . 45 and a Llama . 25.”

“You?” Brown said. “Huh. You'll be too drunk to see by dark.”

Ollie said very clearly, “Why don't you just, shut up and write down your names?”

Brown goggled at him. Opened his mouth. Then decided, wisely, I think, to shut it again.

“It's yours,” Miller said, blinking a little at the exchange. He handed it over and Ollie checked it again, more professionally. He put the gun into his right-front pants pocket and slipped the cartridge box into his breast pocket, where it made a bulge like a pack of cigarettes. Then he leaned back against the cooler, round face still trickling sweat, and cracked a fresh beer. The sensation that I was seeing a totally unsuspected Ollie Weeks persisted.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dumfries,” Miller said.

“Don't mention it,” she said, and I thought fleetingly that if I were her husband and proprietor of those green eyes and that full figure, I might not travel so much. Giving your wife a gun could be seen as a ludicrously symbolic act.

“This maybe silly, too,” Miller said, turning back to Brown with his clipboard and Ollie with his beer, “but there aren't anything like flamethrowers in the place, are there?”

“Ohhh, shit,” Buddy Eagleton said, and then went as red as Amanda Dumfries had done.

“What is it?” Mike Hatlen asked. “Well... until last week we had a whole case of those little blowtorches. The kind you use around your house to solder leaky pipes or mend your exhaust systems or whatever. You remember those, Mr. Brown?” Brown nodded, looking sour. “Sold out?” Miller asked. “No, they didn't go at all. We only sold three or four and sent the rest of the case back. What a pisser. I mean... what a shame.” Blushing so deeply he was almost purple, Buddy Eagleton retired into the background again.

We had matches, of course, and salt (someone said vaguely that he had heard salt was the thing to put on bloodsuckers and things like that); and all kinds of O'Cedar mops and long-handled brooms. Most of the people continued to look heartened, and Jim and Myron were too plotzo to sound a dissenting note, but I met Ollie's eyes and saw a calm hopelessness in them that was worse than fear. He and I had seen the tentacles. The idea of throwing salt on them or trying to fend them off with the handles of O'Cedar mops was funny, in a ghastly way. “Mike,” Miller said, “why don't you crew this little adventure? I want to talk to Ollie and Dave here for a minute. “

“Glad to.” Hatlen clapped Dan Miller on the shoulder. “Somebody had to take charge, and you did it good. Welcome to town.” “Does this mean l get a kickback on my taxes?” Miller asked. He was a banty little guy with red hair that was receding. He looked like the sort of guy you can't help liking on short notice and just maybe-the kind of guy you can't help not liking after he's been around for a while. The kind of guy who knows how to do everything better than you do.

“No way,” Hatlen said, laughing. Hatlen walked off. Miller glanced down at my son.

“Don't worry about Billy,” I said. “Man, I've never been so worried in my whole life,” Miller said.

No,” Ollie agreed, and dropped an empty into the beer cooler. He got a fresh one and opened it. There was a soft hiss of escaping gas. “I got a look at the way you two glanced at each other,” Miller said. I finished my Hershey bar end got a beer to wash it down with. Tell you what I think,” Miller said. “We ought to get half a dozen people to wrap some of those mop handles with cloth and then tie them down with twine. Then I think we ought to get a couple of those cans of charcoal lighter fluid all ready. If we cut the tops right off the cans, we could have some torches pretty quick.” I nodded. That was good. Almost surely not good enough not if you had seen Norm dragged out-but it was better than salt-'That would give them something to think about, at least,” Ollie said.

Miller's lips pressed together. “That bad, huh?” he said. “That bad,” Ollie agreed, and worked his beer. By four-thirty that afternoon the sacks of fertilizer and lawn food were in place and the big windows were blocked off except for narrow loopholes. A watchman had been placed at xce each of these, and beside each watchman was a tin of charcoal lighter fluid with the top cut off and a supply of mophandle torches. There were five loopholes, and Dan Miller had arranged a rotation of sentries for each one. When fourthirty came around, I was sitting on a pile of bags at one of the loopholes, Billy at my side. We were looking out into the mist.

Just beyond the window was a red bench where people sometimes waited for their rides with their groceries beside them. Beyond that was the parking lot. The mist swirled slowly, thick and heavy. There was moisture in it, but how dull it seemed, and gloomy. Just looking at it made me feel gutless and lost.

“Daddy, do you know what's happening?” Billy asked. “No, hon,” I said. He fell silent for a bit, looking at his hands, which lay limply in the lap of his Tuffskin jeans. “Why doesn't somebody come and rescue us?” he asked finally. “The State Police or the FBI or someone?” “I don't know.” “Do you think Mom's okay?”