He felt his belly roil and he turned his head and threw up into the cold fog. Now the stuff coming into the mist looked thick and mudlike, pale green and blue.
Like vomit, maybe. Or poison.
He thought he could hear the men below him screaming, but the mist distorted sound. The men’s voices sounded like crows, maybe, or a machine tearing itself apart.
He watched as the thick liquid surrounded the trees in the mist, swept away mine buildings, tumbled heavy equipment onto its back.
There were houses in the flood, stone and wood debris, pieces of furniture, signs and dead livestock churning together. Charlie saw the twisted wreckage of a bicycle, a dented refrigerator with its insides dangling, a heavy overstuffed chair tumbling end over end.
Charlie knew then why the flood was so thick. It was thick with time.
The flood hadn’t yet spread to the men. But it was close. Charlie watched in horror as they slipped on the wet stones of the embankment, the dense flood of time and memory swirling just below their feet. He was frozen in place, watching. And then he was moving, scrambling down the slick debris toward them, one hand outstretched, the other shredding on the sharp stones as he dragged it behind him for some support. He had no idea what he’d do if one of them grabbed his hand. How could he possibly support them both?
He was close to the men; they were only a few yards below him. He could see now that there was only a handful, strangers, probably the geologists the Nole Company had sent down. The man in front was stretching his arm out, his fingers straining toward Charlie’s hand. Charlie willed his arm longer, and was amazed to see it get closer, closer, but not close enough. He looked into the man’s shadowed face, and as the face pulled out of the shadows, into the man’s desperate eyes. But he couldn’t get any closer. He couldn’t. Any closer and Charlie would have tumbled down the embankment. He couldn’t look the man in the face while thinking that, and gazed past him.
At the wall creeping up behind them with a slowed down roar. Like a wall of flood, debris hanging out of the front of it, houses and farm equipment and fence posts and ironwork and people’s bodies protruding at all angles from the surface of the wall of water. A slice of time.
Charlie stared into the wall. And faces stared back from just under the surface of water. Faces with mouths stretched back and teeth rotted away.
For a moment Charlie thought the faces were coming closer, that they would soon break the surface. And then he would see their eyes. And they, the long-ago dead of Simpson Creeks, would see him. He gasped and pulled back a few inches up the slope.
The man in front of him, arm outstretched and face straining, eyes popping, screamed. The wall of flood touched the last man in the struggling group, then another, another, sucking them in one at a time. Then it was as if the man in front of Charlie leaped backward, so quickly all Charlie could register was the frantic, kicking legs being pulled back into the churning liquid surface.
Another staring face joined the others inside the moving wall.
Charlie scrambled back up the loose gravel slope, weeping, digging his hands into the sharp stones and trying to focus on the pain.
Ben stalked the loose boards of his front porch nervously, looking up at the clouds every few minutes, then at the tall waves of fog that had actually entered the town. And which looked so similar to the clouds—dark and angry—unlike any fog he could remember.
Shadows moved inside the fog, and at first Ben thought it was some of his neighbors, or people who had come down from the hollows for supplies, but the town had been virtually abandoned all day. He could make out the silhouettes of heads and arms, legs, but the faces were obscured. They moved in slow motion, with what seemed impossible grace, as if they were swimming. Or drowning. Their bodies filling with water…
“Who is it?” he shouted, and found himself shouldering his rifle, aiming it into the fog.
He had one of the dark shapes in his sights, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. After all, it could be anyone. He had to stay calm, get a grip on himself.
Someone was crying out in the fog.
A strangely faint, echoing cry, like that of a very small child locked up in a room. A boiling wave of mist passed in front of the house, about twenty-yards away, obscuring the lot behind his store.
He could hear the child’s cry, trapped inside it. The voice raised briefly as the traveling mist neared him, then faded away as it swirled past.
But it left shadows behind, an almost tangible, tasteable darkness in the air, and suddenly Ben could see much less of the town than before.
The fog wasn’t going to break. For several minutes Audra had been unable to see any of the old Taylor house at all. The fog had grown thicker, massing together, filling up all the spaces, taking up all the air. She could hardly breathe. She had to force herself to suck in mouthfuls of the thick soup, trusting her body to filter out any available air.
She was crying. She thought maybe she had been crying for some time.
Audra sensed a still spot in the whiteness behind her, a place where all noise had been held, denied escape. There was a will behind it, an anger. She could feel the charge of it in the particles of fog. The blonde hairs on her arms stood rigid. Her skin ached. She had never felt so cold.
She began to move in the direction in which she thought the Taylor place must be, but soon realized she had completely lost her bearings. It could be anywhere. It didn’t matter. She knew where she had to go. Away from the presence waiting behind her.
Waiting for her.
She couldn’t run, but she found she could ignore the tears and scratches the sharp-edged forest made as she pushed her way through it. Barbs reached out of the mist to snag her. Sharp branches stabbed at her; leaves and fronds slashed.
She sprawled over a downed tree so packed over with layers of the strange fog it had been impossible to see. Her slacks tore and she felt the sudden shock of blood exposed to frigid air.
This brought a sudden thrill of terror to her arms and legs and she found herself running, banging herself badly against tree trunks and large hidden outcroppings of rock. She couldn’t see, and suddenly she wasn’t sure where the intruder was.
She might be running straight into his arms. Reed’s arms.
A soft, animal hiss in the air. She ran faster, rammed her shoulder into a hidden tree, and exploded off it, screaming.
But the presence seemed so powerful, not like the pale, sickly looking Reed Taylor at all.
There was strength in the still air. An enormous charge contained within that hidden shadow. She could feel it.
She could sense the jagged, stone-hard teeth poised… somewhere, somewhere in the fog surrounding her. The jaws working hungrily as he watched her.
The flood had filled the site of the Nole strip mine rim to rim. Charlie sat on the ledge only a few feet above the surface of the heaving darkness, watching the waves, cataloging the debris, unable to move. For the time being, he thought, the flood waters seemed satisfied with the ground they’d gained.
After all, they’d taken the mine away from the Nole Company. In a way, Big Andy had gotten his land back.
Once, years ago—Charlie figured he had been about twenty years old at the time; he had done his tour in the Navy and was halfheartedly trying to decide if he should live away from Kentucky or let the Big Andy draw him back with its hard-to-ignore pull—he’d visited Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. He’d enjoyed it, he’d loved those northern woods, but the landscape there had made him uneasy as well. With its volcanic pools and restless geysers and periodic tremors, Charlie’d worried that the land might explode right under his feet. They had a thing up there called the mud volcano—jet black mud boiling up and burping furiously into the sky with a nasty-sulfur smell. It had looked just like these waters did now. Like they’d stolen the night and had it trapped in their waves and surf.