A can of peas flew across two of the checkout lanes suddenly and struck Mrs. Carmody on the right breast. She staggered backward with a startled squawk.
Amanda stood forward. «Shut up,» she said. «Shut up, you miserable buzzard.»
«She serves the Foul One!» Mrs. Carmody screamed. A jittery smile hung on her face. «Who did you sleep with last night, missus? Who did you lie down with last night? Mother Carmody sees, oh yes, Mother Carmody sees what others miss.»
But the moment’s spell she had created was broken, and Amanda’s eyes never wavered.
«Are we going or are we going to stand here all day?» Mrs. Reppler asked.
And we went. God help us, we went.
Dan Miller was in the lead. Ollie came second, I was last, with Mrs. Reppler in front of me. I was as scared as I’ve ever been, I think, and the hand wrapped around my broom handle was sweaty-slick.
There was that thin, acrid, and unnatural smell of the mist. By the time I got out the door, Miller and Ollie had already faded into it, and Hatlen, who was third, was nearly out of sight.
Only twenty feet, I kept telling myself. Only twenty feet.
Mrs. Reppler walked slowly and firmly ahead of me, her tennis racket swinging lightly from her right hand. To our left was a red cinderblock wall. To our right the first rank of cars, looming out of the the mist like ghost ships. Another trash barrel materialized out of the whiteness, and beyond that was a bench where people sometimes sat to wait their turn at the pay phone. Only twenty feet, Miller’s probably the» by now, twenty feet is only ten or twelve paces, so
«Oh my God!» Miller screamed. «Oh dear sweet God, look at this!»
Miller had gotten there, all right.
Buddy Eagleton was ahead of Mrs. Reppler and he turned to run, his eyes wide and stary. She batted him lightly in the chest with her tennis racket. «Where do you thing you’re going?» she asked in her tough, slightly raspy voice, and that was all the panic there was.
The rest of us drew up to Miller. I took one glance back over my shoulder and saw that the Federal had been swallowed up by the mist. The red cinderblock wall faded to a thin wash pink and then disappeared utterly, probably five feet on the Bridgton Pharmacy side of the OUT door. I felt more isolated, more simply alone, than ever in my life. It was as if I had lost the womb.
The pharmacy had been the scene of a slaughter.
Miller and I, of course, were very close to it-almost on top of it. All the things in the mist operated primarily by sense of smell. It stood to reason. Sight would have been almost completely useless to them. Hearing a little better, but as I’ve said, the mist had a way of screwing Up the acoustics, making things that were close sound distant and — sometimes — things that were far away sound close. The things in the mist followed their truest sense. They followed their noses.
Those of us in the market had been saved by the power outage as much as by anything else. The electric-eye doors wouldn’t operate. In a sense, the market had been scaled up when the mist came. But the pharmacy doors … they had been chocked open. The power failure had killed their air conditioning and they had opened the doors to let in the breeze. Only something else had come in as well.
A man in a maroon T-shirt lay facedown in the doorway. Or at first I thought his T-shirt was maroon; then I saw a few white patches at the bottom and understood that once it had been all white. The maroon was dried blood. And there was something else wrong with him. I puzzled it over in my mind. Even when Buddy Eagleton turned around and was noisily sick, it didn’t come immediately. I guess when something that … that final happens to someone, your mind rejects it at first-unless maybe you’re in a war.
His head was gone, that’s what it was. His legs were splayed out inside the pharmacy doors, and his head should have been hanging over the low step. But his head just wasn’t.