was preternaturally quiet.
Ryan gazed at it, filled with an awe that came close to fear. In all his life he
had never seen anything like it. The fog squatted on the road, at least the
forward part of it did, and behind it rose vastly above them until it merged
with the sky. It was impossible for Ryan to guess its height. Despite the wind
all around them the fog did not move, beyond a gentle rocking, pulsing movement
that seemed to be generated somewhere within its enormous bulk. It looked as
though a light glowed somewhere within it, like some settlement glimpsed at a
great distance through mist.
He took a few cautious steps toward it, and the swaying increased. The whole
mass moved the equivalent paces toward him. Tendrils came creeping from its
base, edging along the road in his direction. They stopped moving as he did.
Hunaker threw back her hood, ice gathering immediately on her short, green hair.
“Let me waste this shit with my rifle!” she shouted.
Immediately the fog reacted, swooping with its sinuous fingers down toward them,
sending them all scurrying quickly back along the trail, back toward the bend.
The fog reached to within a few steps of where Hunaker had been standing, then
seemed to gather itself together and resume its previous condition, swaying
smugly within.
“If I might proffer a small suggestion, Miss Hunaker?” began Doc.
“What? How ’bout, don’t make any fuckin’ noise or threaten it or even go close
to it?”
“Those were my thoughts, dear lady. Those were indeed my thoughts.”
While it had been just Kurt’s ravings, or the mythic words of Krysty and Doc, it
had not seemed as if it would be such a problem. Ryan had somehow thought that
they’d walk through it or climb around it. Confident that once he saw it,
assuming it really existed, it would just be a minor problem like hundreds of
others, and with an easy solution. Now that he stood so close to it, he realized
that this was in fact a form of primal force that functioned in ways that he had
no idea about.
“Now what?” J.B. muttered.
Ryan unzipped his coat. Despite the ice and the bitter wind, he found that he
was sweating freely. “Who knows,” he said angrily.
Dix widened the question. “Anyone? How about you, Doc? You know about this
bitching thing?”
“Not to put too fine a point upon it, young man, I am as much in the dark as
you. I believe this is here to keep malefactors away from the Redoubt and the
gate.”
Ryan noted the word gate and filed it away as something to ask about later. If
there got to be a later.
“We could try some grenades,” suggested Okie.
“Could do,” Ryan said. “Gotta think. No other trail. Not one that we could ever
hope to find. It’s this or nothin’. And there’s no way under it. It hangs over
the edge of that sheer cliff. There’s no way over it. So you want to know what I
think? I think one of the Barons out east’s got him a chopper. If we just had
that…”
“If we had a balloon we could float up and over it,” said Koll. “But we don’t.”
So they tried grenades.
High-ex and incendiary looked the best bets. No point in wasting shrap or nerve
against a fog.
The hand bombs made a load of noise and some fire. The flames seemed muffled by
the fog and the high-ex did nothing at all that anyone could make out. Some
rocks and ice from high above them came rolling down, pattering on the road. The
fog retreated about as far as a man could spit, then came back. Back toward
them, stopping at the bend of the trail, becoming a huge wall, almost as if it
had been cut clean with a giant’s cleaver.
Doc had sat down, drawn and pale, looking as though the confrontation with the
fog had exhausted him. He felt Ryan’s eye on him and clambered up, pulling
himself to a standing position with his hands on the rock face.
“My apologies, sir, but all the noise and fire has quite…” The eyes cleared as