«Daddy, what’s that bloody man? Why is that bloody man?»
«It’s okay, Big Bill, it’s his nose, he’s okay.»
«What did he mean, something in the fog?» Norton asked. He was frowning ponderously, which was probably Norton’s way of looking confused.
«Daddy, I’m scared,» Billy said through his tears. «Can we please go home?»
Someone bumped past me roughly, jolting me off my feet, and I picked Billy up. I was getting scared, too. The confusion was mounting. Sally, the checker by Bud Brown, started away and he grabbed her back by the collar of her red smock. It ripped. She slap-clawed out at him, her face twisting. «Get your fucking hands off me!» she screamed.
«Oh, shut up, you little bitch,» Brown said, but he sounded totally astounded.
He reached for her again and Ollie Weeks said sharply: «Bud! Cool it!»
Someone else screamed. It hadn’t been a panic before-not quite-but it was getting to be one. People streamed out of both doors. There was a crash of breaking glass and Coke fizzed suddenly across the floor.
«What the Christ is this?» Norton exclaimed.
That was when it started getting dark … but no, that’s not exactly right. My thought at the time was not that it was getting dark but that the lights in the market had gone out. I looked up at the fluorescents in a quick reflex action, and I wasn’t alone. And at first, until I remembered the power failure, it seemed that was it, that was what had changed the quality of the light, Then I remembered they had been out all the time we had been in the market and things hadn’t seemed dark before. Then I knew, even before the people at the window started to yell and point.
The mist was coming.
It came from the Kansas Road entrance to the parking lot, and even this close it looked no different than it had when we first noticed it on the far side of the lake. It was white and bright but non-reflecting. It was moving fast, and it had blotted out most of the sun. Where the sun had been there was now a silver coin in the sky, like a full moon in winter seen through a thin scud of cloud.
It came with lazy speed. Watching it reminded me somehow of last evening’s waterspout. There are big forces in nature that you hardly ever see — earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes — I haven’t seen them all but I’ve seen enough to guess that they all move with that lazy, hypnotizing speed. They hold you spellbound, the way Billy and Steffy had been in front of the picture window last night.
It rolled impartially across the two-lane blacktop and erased it from view. The McKeons’ nice restored Dutch Colonial was swallowed whole. For a moment the second floor of the ramshackle apartment building next door jutted out of the whiteness, and then it went too. The KEEP RIGHT sign at the entrance and exit points to the Federal’s parking lot disappeared, the black letters on the sign seeming to float for a moment in limbo after the sign’s dirty-white background was gone. The cars in the parking lot began to disappear next.
«What the Christ is this?» Norton asked again, and there was a catch in his voice.
It came on, eating up the blue sky and the fresh black hottop with equal ease. Even twenty feet away the line of demarcation was perfectly clear. I had the nutty feeling that I was watching some extra-good piece of visual effects, something dreamed up by Willys O’Brian or Douglas Trumbull. It happened so quickly. The blue sky disappeared to a wide swipe, then to a stripe, then to a pencil line. Then it was gone. Blank white pressed against the glass of the wide show window. I could see as far as the litter barrel that stood maybe four feet away, but not much farther. I could see the front bumper of my Scout, but that’ was all.
A woman screamed, very loud and long. Billy pressed himself more tightly against me. His body was trembling like a loose bundle of wires with high voltage running through them.