profusion up there was a great black abyss that might have been a mouth.
Those limbs were draped everywhere.
I felt very much like a fly in a spider’s web. I knew whatever way I moved, it would have me. So I did not move…I crouched there, stunned, feeling an aching need to piss. The beast hung above me like some freakish nightmare that had being birthed from the fog itself. Slimy and dripping and bristling. The appendages trembled from time to time with shuddering tremors.
It had something in its mouth.
I think it was Price.
It was working him, rendering him. Sucking and slobbering and chewing. Something fell from that colossal maw and clattered to the ground. It was a human femur, polished and gleaming.
I felt a wet peal of hysterical laughter bubble in my throat.
Slowly, painfully slowly, I began moving forward, towards the Jeep which seemed about two city blocks away.
I was a human slug, inching and wriggling forward, moving at such a lethargic pace it took me ten minutes to make it five feet. And even then, I kept moving. The beast was still chewing and slurping, but its limbs twitched and quivered from time to time. Perhaps sensing prey or merely flexing their alien musculature.
The Jeep.
It was close now.
When I was within six feet of it, I panicked. Panicked and crawled madly through the mud until I reached it. The beast moved and slithered and its many limbs-Christ, dozens of them-contracted and fluttered and a few of them began to search over the ground like questing fingers.
It was insane.
The beast kept eating, dropping bones and other things.
I could see it pretty clearly. Or at least that part of it that was hanging from the fog.
It looked like something from a 1950’s B-movie, some blasphemy from a Roger Corman flick…a gigantic, hairy jellyfish with those coiling pink appendages.
That’s all I could see and it was enough.
I jumped up and ran to the door of the Jeep. I got it open and jumped into the front seat just as something brushed over the top of my head. When the door was closed, that thing got pissed. It dropped appendages and they slithered over the roof of the van, looking for what had gotten away. For one terrifying minute, those limbs were covering the Jeep windows, squirming and scraping, pink suckers kissing the glass. As crazy as it sounds, it was much like being in one of those car washes with the soft flaps brushing up against the windows. I watched those dozens and dozens of pink suckering mouths. They looked like lips.
When the thing pulled away, Carl gunned us out of there.
Something scratched against the roof and something else pounded the tail gate and made the Jeep shake. Then blood, very red and running, splattered over the windshield and Carl cleared it with the wipers. I saw one of those semi-human hog’s heads roll off the hood.
Then we were back on the main road, racing through the mist.
I never asked any of them why they didn’t try to come after me when I was trapped out there and I didn’t think I needed to. I knew why: they’d been paralyzed with fright.
5
Carl stayed well outside of Omaha, cutting north up to U.S. 30, and the farther we went the quieter it got in the Jeep. Even the small talk petered out after awhile.
We drove on through the fog, moving slowly in case there were stalled cars or trucks on the road.
Carl drove and drove and drove.
The silence grew thicker, almost permanent.
We drove for an hour and then stopped in a little town to gas up. I do not remember the name. It was dead, completely dead. A black silence echoed through the streets. The houses were gray and sagging, paint beginning to peel from their boards. The lawns were overgrown, weeds spouting up through cracks in the streets. The windows were all dusty and blank. Nothing had lived there in a long time. Mickey found a few skeletons in a little park across from the gas station where Carl did some siphoning.
But that was it.
We drove away.
I slept for awhile and when I came awake, Mickey was sleeping with her head on my lap, her knees pulled up to her chin. I looked over at Carl and he smiled at me with a wicked grin. Mickey came awake and looked like she was ready to do what Carl had been insinuating.
The fog was still pretty heavy.
We rolled into another little town and the streets were deserted, burned-out houses to either side. Lots of wrecked cars, weedy lots, and shattered plate-glass windows.
“Look,” Mickey said.
I saw them: people. They were lined up on the streets as we passed, faces distorted from sores and growths, raw and rotting. Ulcers had eaten holes right through them. For every one that stood, a dozen more were sprawled on the pavement or rotting in the gutters. They were all hot with plague. They threw things at us that splattered against the Jeep. I want to think they were rotting tomatoes.
We drove for a few more hours and then slowed down. I saw a town ahead.
“Bitter Creek,” Carl said.
6
We didn’t go in the first night. We camped outside at a little roadside park. It was getting late and I don’t think anybody wanted to charge in there in the dark, especially without knowing what it was we were charging into. We built a fire and we ate and we sat around. Nobody said much.
It was a nice night.
The fog had lifted and the stars were bright. It could have been a sky ten years ago or anytime before Doomsday. The only telltale giveaway was an occasional flickering purple-blue corona at the horizon. Other than that it was perfect.
I was thinking about Price and all the things he’d told me, how they all fit in with what I knew and what my dreams told me. I was sorry Price was dead. He hadn’t wanted to go out in the fog, but we had made the decision for him. Was that a portent of death? Probably not. Just a very wise man recognizing a fool idea when he saw one.
I squeezed my eyes shut and all I could see were the faces of dead friends. Then that faded and I saw the cities to the east-lifeless, wind-blown, heaps of smoldering bones. Nothing but death to the east of the Mississippi now and nothing but death creeping slowly west. Iowa was dead now. So was Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and East Texas. Dead. Kansas was going to its grave and so were the Dakotas. Nebraska would fall next and I knew it.
The Medusa was getting closer, moving faster and faster.
I started to sweat and shake because like The Shape, I could feel it out there chewing westward town by town. I had some kind of vague psychic uplink with it and I could feel it getting closer, seeking me out on a hot wind of pestilence.
“You okay, Nash?” Mickey said. “You look funny.”
“He always looks funny,” Texas said.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.
Nobody believed it and neither did I.
