“Yes,” Kayla said sheepishly.
“I promise to try and not do that ever again, alright?”
“Thank you,” she replied with a tiny smile.
They continued a few more yards down the road and made the left turn where they were supposed to, and the road vanished under a wall of the thick smog. Ethan walked a bit further, found the snotty membrane again, and backed away quickly. “It’s blocked, also,” he informed the girls.
“Well, great! Now what do we do?” Shannon’s irritation was clear in her voice.
“I don’t know. We could try skirting the wall; see if there are any breaks in it. I know I can get us through the woods, if we need to.”
“What about up there?” Kayla asked as she pointed up the foot of Black Water Mountain where a path was utterly clear in the moving fog.
Chapter 31
“Is that Black Water Mountain?” Ethan asked as he looked up the sides and along the opening in the dense smog.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Shannon replied softly.
“I’m not sure we want to go up there.”
“Maybe the fog is thinner near the top, and we can skirt around the edge of the mountain and come down the other side. Route 27 will be there, and it will take about ten miles off of our walk.” Shannon did not sound comforted by the idea.
“The problem with this town started up there…” Ethan trailed off deep in thought and worry.
“I know, Ethan, but what else can we do? We can look for another break in the fog wall, try this path, or find a place to hide until all of this is over.”
Ethan did not want to go back up that cursed mountain. It had almost killed him the last time; whatever that creature was, he did not want to encounter it again. However, he could not invent any other solution. They could not skirt the entire town in one day nor could they hold up in a building until someone realized that the whole town was missing. He took a deep breath and let it slowly slip between his lips. “We might be heading right where we shouldn’t go.”
“I know,” Shannon replied, concern dripping from her words. “Did you notice that the plants along that trail are not dead—well, at least not all of them?”
“Yeah, I noticed. It’s just… If you want to, we can go up there. It might get a little crazy, though.”
“We can head up and look for a way around. If we get too high, we can come back, right?” Shannon asked in an attempt at encouragement.
“Well, let’s get some mountain under us, then,” Ethan decided with an air of finality and started towards the trail.
Kayla began to skip after him, and Shannon rushed to keep pace.
The slope grew gradually, making the going easy but tougher as they went—not the steady incline of the other side, the first slope Ethan had climbed up Black Water Mountain, but a challenge to stamina and determination. The trees along this path still lived, as well as some of the more stout undergrowth. Just along the edges of the fog, however, dead and denuded plants bowed to their lost life and dripped rotting sap to the forest’s floor. The farther trees stood stark and still, drooping to ruin, their deaths seemingly long past.
“Shannon?” Ethan called over his shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
“Well, I didn’t, but with all this?” she replied with a yawning arm, indicating the ruin on either side. “This has to be evil, right?”
“Well, it was not the fire and brimstone I expected, but it is evil,” Ethan replied thoughtfully, then listened to the leaves as they scratched beneath their feet before crunching under their soles.
After a moment of thought, Shannon asked, “But this is it, right? Isn’t evil the collective extreme of a society’s distaste, the most deplorable acts imaginable by the sum of a people’s creativity?”
“That sounds right,” Ethan agreed as he navigated around a low hanging branch.
“Could we not say that for every great evil imagined, there is a greater good—a knight to fight every dragon?”
Ethan halted some three hundred yards up, high enough to see the town sprawled below still veiled in the ghostly gray smog. From here, Ethan could see the sister mountain rising from the dankness of the smog. “Look, Shannon, the infection does not reach that other mountain.”
Shannon stopped beside him, still holding Kayla’s hand, and looked to the far mountain. “Do you think, Ethan, that maybe we are the good knights sent to slay the evil serpent?” she persisted.
Ethan turned to her, finally donating enough attention to her to listen. “How do you mean?”
“What if we survived, all three of us, just to battle this evil?” Her eyes looked desperately for vindication, but did not find it. “Think about it: this town has a population of some three or four thousand, we have cops and firefighters and ambulances, a hospital a trauma center, even our own National Guard detachment. Why are we the only ones that survived? Look around, right here, look around and see the fantastical biblical evil. We are in the midst of some world-altering event, not like an earthquake or a volcano; I mean a real world-altering event. The type of event that ruins religions and spawns new ones or adds a new book to the Bible, you know?”
Ethan stared at her a moment before replying, “You have been thinking about this a bit, huh?”
“What have you been thinking about?”
“Last night and how skillful you were,” he replied with a sly smile.
Shannon chuckled back. “But seriously, couldn’t it be something like that?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said truthfully. “Maybe. But if we are to be the heroes of this tale, we are going to look pretty silly running.”
“Maybe we are supposed to get out of here and warn the world. Maybe this is where Hell breaks through or something and we caution the world about it. We tell people, they fight back the hordes of Hell, and we are the heroes.”
“As long as it includes leaving here, I’m fine with that,” Ethan replied, hoping to close down the conversation. He did not want to think about things like this. To him, religion was a dementia, a lie, and a folly for his mind to fall into, especially one as captive to fables as his. “Let’s get going again. It’s getting close to noon and we still have a way to go here.”
Ethan turned and began stalking up the mountain again. He missed his walking stick; it always helped stabilize him when he hiked and gave him a sense of security, but that he had left inside the Heart House.
The trail led upwards without concern for terrain or tree, boulder or tripping hazard. The climbing became rough and tiring, challenging Shannon and Kayla to keep up. She did not want to slow Ethan down, but she was close to falling. Each time she felt she could no longer stand it and had made the decision to call for a break, the ground would lend itself to an easier crossing for a while before continuing its torturous incline.
Kayla made no complaints and struggled on as best she could in her little mukluk boots and pink jacket. She was a determined little girl, clearly frightened but steadfast in her desire to be free of the smog and the cursed town. Where she was going, she was unsure, most likely her grandmother’s in Little Rock, but she would make it nonetheless. She decided she could live with these two who were helping her. They were both rather nice and seemed to like her.
Ethan suddenly stopped, barred from further passage by another membrane of a wall. He turned and looked back at the girls who came to a stop before him. “That’s it; it does not go any further.”
“Oh no! You’re kidding,” Shannon squeaked.
“No, I’m not. If we hurry, I think we can make it down the mountain and back to the drug store before —”
A hissing sound, not unlike bacon frying, stopped the words in his throat as the fog closed in over the trail they had just come up. Ethan suddenly thought that this is what termites sound like while scurrying around in their
