Into the Mist Read online

  Mercury saw what was wrong and the sight made her body freeze in place. Coach Davis had … flattened. Blood and body fluids squished under her feet as a pool of liquid expanded from him. He lay on his back. His mouth and eyes were open as if in surprise. His eyeballs had turned red. Congealed blood leaked slowly from them, and as Mercury stood there with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth to hold in her screams, the coach’s body dissolved into a pancake of clothes, skin, bones, teeth, and hair.

  The next contraction consumed Amelia, and her scream was a feral thing that tore from between her panting lips. The sound of it thawed Mercury, and she rushed back to the laboring woman.

  Stella was there, crouched beside Amelia. Mercury joined them as Jenny shifted to allow her near, which gave Mercury a view of the back of Amelia’s maternity dress. The bright, happy butter color was now soaked with red, like a terrible rose that bloomed larger and more brilliantly scarlet with each contraction. Stella met her gaze and shook her head. Mercury swallowed bile.

  “I have to push!” The words burst from Amelia. “Help me up!”

  Mercury, Jenny, and Stella supported her torso as Amelia half squatted, half knelt. Her dress was hiked up around her waist. Her fingers scrabbled at her panties, which Mercury slid down her blood-slick thighs just as her body tensed and wetness gushed from between her legs.

  Amelia slumped back in Jenny’s arms as she gave birth with a torrent of blood. Mercury caught the baby. Its tiny body was viscous and began to disintegrate immediately. It seeped through her fingers while the placenta poured from Amelia, followed by more and more blood that continued to pump from the young mother—a new tide of red with every beat of her heart.

  Mercury bit the inside of her cheek and positioned herself so that Amelia could not see what was left of her son as she placed the little body on the grass between his mother’s thighs. She glanced over her shoulder at Jenny, who was sobbing as she cradled Amelia in her arms, and shook her head slightly. She saw in Jenny’s gaze that she knew—she understood—and the young woman held Amelia more tightly. Stella moved up beside Mercury.

  “No! Oh no,” Stella whispered and then tore off her coat so that she could pull her sweater over her head and hand it to Mercury.

  Mercury took the sweater and pressed it between Amelia’s legs to try to stop the flood. It only took moments for scarlet to soak through the sweater and slick over Mercury’s hands.

  “Why isn’t he crying? Is he okay?” Amelia’s voice was barely a whisper. The spots of red had faded from her cheeks, leaving only chalky, damp skin. Her lips were tinged blue and her gaze was unfocused.

  Mercury forced herself to sound normal—happy even—as she would have had the baby been alive and thriving. “He’s fine. He’s just small. I’m going to keep the umbilical cord attached for a little while yet, but you can hold him in, in a—” her words hitched to a stop as her voice faltered.

  Stella touched her shoulder before she moved to help Jenny hold Amelia. “Yeah, just let Mercury dry him off and wrap him up, then you can hold him.”

  “C-cold. Y-you’re right. It—it’s s-so cold,” Amelia’s teeth chattered and her body convulsed with shudders.

  Stella wrapped her coat over her dying friend. Tears seeped down her face, but her voice was steady and her touch was strong as she held Amelia’s hands. “Right? It is really cold out here. That’s why Mercury has to be sure he’s warm. What’s his name?”

  Amelia’s blue lips tilted up at the corners. “Daniel. After his father.” Her teeth had stopped chattering, and her body had gone very still. She drew a breath that rattled strangely. “He’s our first boy. I can’t wait for Dan to meet …” Amelia released a long exhale and her body relaxed. No inhale followed. Her open, empty gaze looked surprised.

  “Amelia!” Jenny shook her. “Amelia!”

  Stella placed Amelia’s hands together over her deflated stomach, and then she touched Jenny’s shoulder gently. “She’s gone. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Jenny stared at her. “The baby?”

  Mercury shook her head and wiped her bloody hands on the grass. “He—he didn’t make it either.”

  “Oh God! Jesus help us!”

  The three women looked up to see Karen Gay standing just a few feet from them. Her face was bruised and her cardigan torn. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and she was panting as she repeated over and over the same words.

  “Oh God! Jesus help us! Oh God! Jesus help us! Oh God!”

  Mercury collected herself as she hurried to the history teacher.

  “Jesus! Oh Jesus!”

  “Are you hurt?” Mercury tried to touch her, but Mrs. Gay cringed away from her bloody hands.

  “Oh Lord! Oh God!” she shrieked.

  Mercury grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Stop it! Get yourself together and tell me if you’re hurt!”

  Mrs. Gay’s thin, pale lips pressed into a line. She blinked several times, as if trying to clear her vision, and drew a shaky breath before she replied. “I—I don’t think I’m hurt.” Mrs. Gay didn’t meet her eyes. Instead, she stared at the gelatinous mound of red between Amelia’s thighs. “She—she’s dead.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Mercury answered it. “Yes. Amelia and her baby.” Mercury was trying to sift through the horror that threatened to numb her mind. Her gaze went from Mrs. Gay to sweep around the turnout. The rich scent of earth filled the area from several places where the ground had split open. Their rented Escalade had been tossed on its side like a child’s discarded toy. The faded pickup was still upright on all four tires, though it looked as if a giant’s hand had pushed it back to the middle of the gravel lot, which reminded Mercury suddenly of the other men. Her eyes scanned past the broken pines surrounding them—some with trunks so thick she and Stella couldn’t have touched hands around them. They’d been snapped in half like number-two pencils. She looked to where the men had been standing when the bombs—Were they really bombs? Are we at war?—had begun to explode, but her gaze was caught by a person who sat on the closest bench, the only bench still intact.

  Mrs. Gay must have seen Mercury’s start of surprise, because she spun around. “Mr. Hale!” she shouted and rushed to the man on the bench.

  Mercury wanted to warn her, but the history teacher moved too fast. She reached out and touched the principal’s shoulder—and her touch set off a grisly reaction, like he had been held together by a string of wet dominos. His body quivered. Then, with a horrible, sloshing sound, it fell apart. His arm slid from his shoulder to the bench beside him and continued to seep down into the earth. The movement caused his head to detach from his neck so that it dropped behind the bench to hit the ground with the sound of a melon splitting open. His headless torso slumped forward and quivered as it dribbled onto the grass like a macabre Jell-O mold left out in the summer heat.

  “Lord! Jesus! Lord!” Mrs. Gay scrambled back. Over and over she wiped her bloody hand on her khaki pants as she stumbled into Mercury, who grabbed her and held her while she sobbed and called to Jesus to save her.

  Stella was there, beside Mercury. “The men. The two from the truck. That’s them over there.” She pointed.

  Mercury released Mrs. Gay, whose legs collapsed. The history teacher dropped to her knees and began to pray softly as Mercury followed Stella’s pointing finger to two mounds that just minutes before had been living men. Then her gaze continued beyond them, and she looked out at the view.

  At first her brain didn’t register what her eyes saw. How could it? Everything had been altered so utterly that her mind kept telling her that it couldn’t be real—this couldn’t be happening.

  Nothing looked the same. It was like one of the old gods had grabbed an edge of the earth and then lifted and shook it like a dirty rug. The land was ripped and gouged and utterly alien. Portland was gone. In its place was flame and smoke and green-tinged darkness.

  “They finally did it. They finally destroyed the world.” Stella spoke with
no emotion, but she wrapped her arms around her torso while tears dripped from her eyes down her cheeks to soak the long-sleeved shirt she’d layered under her sweater.

  Mercury could only manage one word. “They?”

  “Men. Politicians. Them. The greedy, corrupt people in charge whose job it was to keep us safe.” Stella’s voice cut like a knife.

  Mercury’s gaze swept to the left—to where Coach Davis had said Salem was. It was the same as Portland: flames and darkness. The land between was a ruin—torn, broken, and on fire. Spots that weren’t on fire glowed with the strange green fog that had spewed from the blasts.

  Like a zombie, Mercury ambled around, turning in one spot. Above the broken trees and torn earth, smoke and debris spread like a deadly contagion to cover the day with darkness that had already begun to blot out the brilliant blue morning sky.

  “It’s everywhere.” The words slipped from Mercury’s numb lips. Terror seared through her as she tried to comprehend what her eyes reported. I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home. Her brain replayed the words again and again until Stella’s voice broke through.

  “Mercury! Look at me!”

  Mercury turned to face her best friend. Stella brushed the hair back from her blood-slicked cheek. Mercury had to draw several shaky breaths before she could speak. “I—I don’t know what to do.”

  “Of course you do. You’re smart, capable, tough. Both of us are. Think!”

  “We need shelter.” Mercury forced back the alluring fog of panic. I can freak out later. Now we need to act. She glanced up and then gestured at the growing line of smoke that had begun to shroud the sun. “We have no clue what’s in that, but we’re still alive. Jenny and Karen are still alive.”

  “That’s more like it, Acorn.”

  “Okay, yeah. We can do this. So, let’s get our asses in gear and see if we can all stay alive.” Mercury turned her back to the view that had become a nightmare, and the old Chevy caught her gaze. “You can drive that truck.”

  Stella almost smiled. “I can.”

  “We need to get back to Timberline. Fast.”

  “Agreed,” said Stella, who took Mercury’s hands and squeezed them—hard. “Remember—together we can do this. We have to do this.”

  Mercury allowed herself a moment to hold onto Stella and stare into the blue lifeline of her familiar eyes. Then she dropped her hands; drew a deep, cleansing breath; and raised her voice as if she was projecting to the rear of a noisy classroom. “Jenny, Mrs. Gay—we have to get out of here.”

  Jenny was still holding Amelia’s body. Mercury watched her lay the dead woman’s torso gently on the ground. The young teacher lifted Stella’s coat off the body before she went to what was left of the dead infant. She scooped up the tiny, partially disintegrated corpse and placed it on Amelia’s chest. Jenny gently brushed her fingers though Amelia’s sweat-matted hair before she walked to them.

  “Here.” Jenny handed Stella her coat. “Amelia can’t feel the cold anymore.” She wiped tears on her sleeve and turned to Mercury. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Give the dead a Christian burial, of course!” Karen was still on her knees just a few feet from the three women.

  Mercury responded with the first thing that came to her mind. “Do you have a shovel?”

  Mrs. Gay frowned. “Well, no. That’s a silly question.”

  “It’s a practical question, Karen,” said Stella. “You say you want to bury everyone. How are you going to do that with no shovel?”

  While Karen opened and closed her mouth soundlessly, Mercury turned to her two friends. “The Escalade is trashed. We need to find the keys to that truck and see if we can get a door to the Escalade open so we can pull out the suitcases.”

  Jenny’s gaze slid to the semi-smashed SUV that lay on its side. “Shouldn’t we just leave them?”

  “Sure, if you want to wear only what you have on for the foreseeable future,” said Mercury.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re right,” Jenny said. “Sorry, I’m not thinking very clearly.”

  “You’re doing great,” Mercury assured her.

  “I’ll check out the truck.” Stella headed to the pickup.

  “Let’s get as much of our stuff out of the SUV as possible,” Mercury said to Jenny. “We can toss the suitcases in the back of the truck, and the four of us can squeeze into the cab.” She looked down at Mrs. Gay, who was still on her knees. “Come on, Mrs. Gay. We’re all in this together, and we need your help.”

  “I just—I think we must do something about the dead.” The history teacher’s gaze kept flitting from the mound of rust-colored goo that had once been their principal to Amelia and her dead infant.

  “Mrs. Gay,” Mercury said gently, “there is nothing we can do for them. What we need to focus on right now is our survival. We don’t know what’s in that mess up there.” She pointed above at the expanding wall of smoky darkness. “We have to get out of here and to a shelter. We’re not from here. We don’t know the area at all. Our best bet is to return to Timberline, but it could very easily have been destroyed too, so we need to get moving or we’ll chance being stuck outside at night in the cold and snow and whatever else might be coming for us.” Mercury offered her hand. Karen hesitated and then took it and stood.

  “Mercury Rhodes,” Karen said primly, “at the very least we need to pray over these poor people.”

  “You pray. I’m way more concerned about the living,” Stella said as she rejoined them. She held up a keychain that had a green and yellow “Go Ducks” logo on it. “Keys were in the ignition, and there’s almost a full tank of gas. The men musta been painters. There’re a bunch of old paint cans and tarp in the bed. I’ll toss out the paint.”

  “We’ll get the suitcases,” Mercury said.

  “We need to hurry,” Stella’s gaze kept retuning to the nightmare view. “I have a bad feeling.”

  Mercury rubbed her arms. “Me too, and it’s freezing out here.” She headed to the wrecked SUV with Stella and Jenny in tow—and then stopped when she realized Karen was still standing there—beside the bench—staring at what was left of Principal Richard Hale.

  “She’s going to be a giant pain in the ass,” murmured Stella.

  Silently, Mercury agreed, but she was used to managing pain-in-the-ass students. She knew how to get kids everyone else thought were nothing but trouble on her side and even coax them to perform for her—or at the very least stop being annoying. Automatically, she used her classroom management skills, honed by more than a decade of teaching teenagers Richard Hale used to call “the bottom of the barrel,” on Mrs. Gay.

  “Karen, how about you pray over each of them”—Mercury made a sweeping gesture that took in Hale, Amelia, Coach Davis, and the two dead strangers—“while we get the truck loaded.”

  Karen nodded solemnly and rubbed the gold crucifix she always wore around her neck between her thumb and forefinger. “Yes. Yes, I can do that.”

  “That was smart,” Jenny said as they approached the SUV.

  “Give ’em a task to keep ’em too busy to cause trouble,” Stella muttered.

  Mercury rounded the back of the big Escalade and breathed a sigh of relief. As the vehicle had been thrown on its side, the rear hatch had popped opened. “Here, y’all! It’s unlatched. I think we can force it the rest of the way up.”

  The three women wrenched open the hatch. Stella went to the pickup, started it, and backed it to the rear of the SUV so that the front of the truck was pointed out at the silent highway. She kept the engine idling as she jumped out of the cab, opened the tailgate, climbed into the bed, and began tossing paint cans onto the parking lot.

  “Wait—don’t throw out those tarps.” Mercury struggled to roll two big suitcases over the gravel. “We can cover our stuff with them. Plus we might need them. Later.”

  Stella met her gaze. “You hate camping.”

  “I hate dying even more.”

  “I’m a good camper,” said
Jenny, who hauled two more suitcases behind her.

  “You can pitch a tent?” Mercury asked Jenny as she handed Stella the first of the luggage.

  “Yep. I can even start a fire with sticks, but it’s a lot harder than the movies make it look. Basically, it takes a lot of time.”

  Stella lifted another suitcase, grunted, and then replied. “No need to worry about stick rubbing. I bought a new lighter at the Portland airport.”

  Mercury raised a brow at her best friend. “Before or after you bought those pre-rolled joints?”

  “During.” Stella said, and Mercury lifted another suitcase up to her, which her friend didn’t grab because she was staring over her head toward the once scenic view.

  Before Mercury could ask what was going on, she heard a weird rustle that came from somewhere behind her. It was like a group of kids were wading through piles of fall leaves. She turned just as the first deer ran past her. The doe’s brown eyes were huge and panicked as it raced by. Behind the doe, squirrels, rabbits, several more deer, a fox and a whole cluster of chipmunks poured up over the lip of the mountain, as well as from the tree line on either side of them. The creatures darted past the vehicles, completely ignoring the humans.

  “What level of Jumanji are we on?” As each moment unfolded, Mercury felt more and more like she’d been trapped in a video game where everyone dies over and over again.

  “Get the rest of the suitcases and grab Karen. We need to go—now!” Stella said.

  Mercury and Jenny sprinted back to the SUV. Jenny grabbed the last two suitcases while Mercury climbed up on the side of the vehicle and pulled open the back door. Immensely relieved, she snagged her giant purse, Stella’s Louis Vuitton knockoff, and Jenny’s backpack before she jumped to the ground, dodged a panicked raccoon, and raced to the pickup. They tossed everything to Stella, who hastily tucked tarps over their things before she jumped from the bed and got behind the wheel. Jenny slid quickly in beside Stella.