“There’s food. Plenty to drink.”
“The supplies don’t have anything to do with it, and you know it. What do we do if one of the big beasties out there decides to break in instead of just going bump in the night? Do we try to drive it off with broom handles and charcoal lighter fluid ?” Of course he was right. Perhaps the mist was protecting us in a way. Hiding us.
But maybe it wouldn’t hide us for long, and there was more to it than that. We had been in the Federal for eighteen hours, more or less, and I could feel a kind of lethargy spreading over me, not much different from the lethargy I’ve felt on one or two occasions when I’ve tried to swim too far. There was an urge to play it safe, to just stay put, to take care of Billy (and maybe to bang Amanda Dumfries in the middle of the night, a voice murmured), to see if the mist wouldn’t just lift, leaving everything as it had been.
I could see it on the other faces as well, and it suddenly occurred to me that there were people now in the Federal who probably wouldn’t leave under any circumstance.
The very thought of going out the door after all that had happened would freeze them.
Miller had been watching these thoughts cross my face, maybe. He said, “There were about eighty people in here when that damn fog came. From that number you subtract the bag-boy, Norton, and the four people that went out with him, and that man Smalley. That leaves seventythree.” And subtracting the two soldiers, now resting under a stack of Purina Puppy Chow bags, it made seventy-one.
“Then you subtract the people who have just opted out,” he went on. “There are ten or twelve of those. Say ten. That leaves about sixty-three. But—” He raised one sugar-powdered finger. “Of those sixty-three, we’ve got twenty or so that just won’t leave.
You’d have to drag them out kicking and screaming.”
“Which all goes to prove what?”
“That we’ve got to get out, that’s all. And I’m going. Around noon, I think. I’m planning to take as many people as will come. I’d like you and your boy to come along.”
“After what happened to Norton?”
“Norton went like a lamb to the slaughter. That doesn’t mean I have to, or the people who come with me.”
“How can you prevent it? We have exactly one gun.”
“And lucky to have that. But if we could make it across the intersection, maybe we could get down to the Sportsman’s Exchange on Main Street. They’ve got more guns there than you could shake a stick at.”
“That’s one ‘if’ and one ‘maybe’ too many.”
“Drayton,” he said, “it’s an iffy situation.” That rolled very smoothly off his tongue, but he didn’t have a little boy to watch out for.
“Look, let it pass for now, okay? I didn’t get much sleep last night, but I got a chance to think over a few things. Want to hear them?”
“Sure.” He stood up and stretched. “Take a walk over to the window with me.” We went through the checkout lane nearest the bread racks and stood at one of the loopholes. The man who was keeping watch there said, “The bugs are gone.” Miller slapped him on the back. “Go get yourself a coffee -and, fella. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He walked away, and Miller and I stepped up to his loophole. “So tell me what you see out there,” he said.
I looked. The litter barrel had been knocked over in the night, probably by one of the swooping bird-things, spilling a trash of papers, cans, and paper shake cups from the Dairy Queen down the road all over the hottop. Beyond that I could see the rank of cars closest to the market fading into whiteness. That was all I could see, and I told him so.
“That blue Chevy pickup is mine,” he said. He pointed and I could see just a hint of blue in the mist. “But if you think back to when you pulled in yesterday, you’ll remember that the parking lot was pretty jammed, right?” I glanced back at my Scout and remembered I had only gotten the space close to the market because someone else had been pulling out. I nodded.
Miller said, “Now couple something else with that fact, Drayton. Norton and his four… what did you call them?”
“Flat-Earthers.”
“Yeah, that’s good. just what they were. They go out, right? Almost the full length of that clothesline. Then we heard those roaring noises, like there was a goddam herd of elephants out there. Right?”
“It didn’t sound like elephants,” I said. “It sounded like—” Like something from the primordial ooze was the phrase that came to mind, but I didn’t want to say that to Miller, not after he had clapped that guy On the back and told him to go get a coffee-and like the coach jerking a player from the big game. I might have said it to Ollie, but not to Miller. “I don’t know what it sounded like,” I finished lamely.
“But it sounded big.”
“Yeah.” It had sounded pretty goddam big.
“So how come we didn’t hear cars getting bashed around ? Screeching metal? Breaking glass?”
“Well, because—”
I stopped. He had me.
“I don’t know. ” Miller said, “No way they were out of the parking lot when whatever-it-was hit them. I’ll tell you what I think. I think we didn’t hear any cars getting around because a lot of them might be gone, just… gone. Fallen into the earth, vaporized, you name it. Strong enough to splinter these beams and twist them out of shape and knock stuff off the shelves. And the town whistle stopped at the same time.” I was trying to visualize half the parking lot gone. Trying to visualize walking out there and just coming to a brand-new drop in the land where the hottop with its neat yellow-lined parking slots left off. A drop, a slope… or maybe an out-and-out precipice falling away into the featureless white mist…
After a couple of seconds I said, “If you’re right, how far do you think you’re going to get in your pickup?”
“I wasn’t thinking of my truck. I was thinking of your four-wheel-drive.” That was something to chew over, but not now. “What else is on your mind?” Miller was eager to go on. “The pharmacy next door, that’s on my mind. What about that?” I opened my mouth to say I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, and then shut it with a snap. The Bridgton Pharmacy had been doing business when we drove in yesterday. Not the laundromat, but the drugstore had been wide open, the doors chocked with rubber doorstops to let in a little cool air-the power outage had killed their air conditioning, of course. The door to the pharmacy could be no more than twenty feet from the door to the Federal market. So why
“Why haven’t any of those people turned up over here?” Miller asked for me. “It’s been eighteen hours. Aren’t they hungry? They’re sure not over there eating Dristan and Stayfree Mini-pads.”
“There’s food,” I said. “They’re always selling food items on special. Sometimes it’s animal crackers, sometimes it’s those toaster pastries, all sorts of things. Plus the candy rack.”
“I just don’t believe they’d stick with stuff like that when there’s all kinds of stuff over here.”
“What are you getting at?”
“What I’m getting at is that I want to get out but I don’t want to be dinner for some refugee from a grade-B horror picture. Four or five of us could go next door and check out the situation in the drugstore. As sort of a trial balloon.”
“That’s everything?”
“No, there’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Her,” Miller said simply, and jerked his thumb toward one of the middle aisles.
“That crazy cunt. That witch.” It was Carmody he had jerked his thumb at. She was no longer alone; two women had joined her. From their bright clothes I guessed they were probably tourists or summer people, ladies who had maybe left their families to “just run into town and get a few things” and were now eaten up with worry over their husbands and kids. Ladies eager to grasp at almost any straw. Maybe even the black comfort of a Carmody.
Her pantsuit shone out with its same baleful resplendence. She was talking, gesturing, her face hard and grim. The two ladies in their bright clothes (but not as bright as Carmody’s pantsuit, no, and her gigantic satchel of a purse was still tucked firmly under one doughy arm) were listening raptly.
“She’s another reason I want to get out, Drayton. By night she’ll have six people sitting with her. If those pink bugs and the birds come back tonight, she’ll have a whole congregation sitting with her by tomorrow morning. Then we can start worrying about who she’ll tell them to sacrifice to make it all better. Maybe me, or you, or that guy Hatlen. Maybe your kid.”