We didn't get going until 9:30 A. M. Seven of us went: Ollie, Dan Miller, Mike Hatlen, Myron LaFleur's erstwhile buddy Jim (also hungover, but seemingly determined to find some way to atone), Buddy Eagleton, myself. The seventh was Hilda Reppler. Miller and Hatlen tried halfheartedly to talk her out of coming. She would have none of it. I didn't even try. I suspected she might be more competent than any of us, except maybe for Ollie. She was carrying a small canvas shopping basket, and it was loaded with an arsenal of Raid and Black Flag spray cans, all of them uncapped and ready for action. In her free hand she held a Spaulding Jimmy Connors tennis racket from a display of sporting goods in Aisle 2. “What you gonna do with that, Mrs. Reppler?” Jim asked. “I don,t know,” she said. She had a low, raspy, competent voice. “But it feels right in my hand.” She looked him over closely, and her eye was cold. “Jim Grondin, isn't it? Didn't I have you in school?” Jim's lips stretched in an uneasy egg-suck grin. “Yes'm. Me and my sister Pauline.” “Too much to drink last night?” Jim, who towered over her and probably outweighed her by one hundred pounds, blushed to the roots of his American Legion crewcut. “Aw, no—” She turned away curtly, cutting him off. “I think we're ready,” she said. All of us had something, although you would have called it an odd assortment of weapons. Ollie had Amanda's gun, Buddy Eagleton had a steel pinchbar from out back somewhere. I had a broom handle. “Okay,” Dan Miller said, raising his voice a bit. “You folks want to listen up a minute?”
A dozen people had drifted down toward the OUT door to see what was going 'on. They were loosely knotted, and to their right stood Mrs. Carmody and her new friends. “We're going over to the drugstore to see what the situation is there. Hopefully, we'll be able to bring something back to aid Mrs. Clapham.” She was the lady who had been trampled yesterday, when the bugs came. One of her legs had been broken and she was in a great deal of pain. Miller looked us over. “We're not going to take any chances,” he said. “At the first sign of anything threatening, we're going to pop back into the market—” “And bring all the fiends of hell down on our heads!” Mrs. Carmody cried. “She's right!” one of the summer ladies seconded. “You'll make them notice us! You'll make them come! Why can't you just leave well enough alone?” There was a murmur of agreement from some of the people who had gathered to watch us go. I said, “Lady, is this what you call well enough?” She dropped her eyes, confused.
Mrs. Carmody marched a step forward. Her eyes were blazing. “You'll die out there, David Drayton! Do you want to make your son an orphan?” She raised her eyes and raked all of us with them. Buddy Eagleton dropped his eyes and simultaneously raised the pinchbar, as if to ward her off. “All of you will die out there! Haven't you realized that the end of the world has come? The Fiend has been let loose! Star Wormwood blazes and each one of you that steps out that door will be torn apart! And they'll come for those of us who are left, just as this good woman said! Are you people going to let that happen?” She was appealing to the onlookers now, and a little mutter ran through them. “After what happened to the unbelievers yesterday? It's death! It's death! It' s—”
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 Onel” 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 1 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 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 there by now, twenty feet is only tin or twelve paces, so-“COh 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 think 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 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-sometimesthat 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 sealed 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. Jim Grondin had had enough. He turned away, his hands over his mouth, his bloodshot eyes gazing madly into mine. Then he stumbled-staggered back toward the market. The others took no notice. Miller had stepped inside. Mike Hatlen followed. Mrs. Reppler stationed herself at one side of the double doors with her tennis racket. Ollie stood on the other side with Amanda's gun drawn and pointing at the pavement. He said quietly, “I seem to be running out of hope, David. “ Buddy Eagleton was leaning weakly against the pay-phone stall like someone who has just gotten bad news from home. His broad shoulders shook with the force of his sobs. “Don't count us out yet,” I said to Ollie. I stepped up to the door. I didn't want to go inside, but I had promised my son a comic book.