And so, lying in her trailer at night, sleeping in a bed for the first time in months, she would try to walk herself through her escape, try to rationalize her chances now that she’d lost her shotgun and her blade. With each passing night, Paul would figure more and more into these fantasies, and she began to see reasons why his presence might give her the courage to attempt it, how it was the only way Paul could escape the fate of his father, how his presence could help her odds of surviving.
But Paul was even more afraid of the monsters in the fog than she was. As much as he despised the Mites, he spoke as though he were in debt to them for at least providing a refuge from the creatures in the high ground surrounding the trailer court. And—as far gone as his father might have been—Paul was truly devoted to the man. Kate doubted she could convince the boy to leave unless his father was brought along.
The solution hit her one morning as she stood in the doorway watching a woman stand unflinching as dozens of Mites skittered over her face and into her open-towering crown. Kate was already positive it would work when Paul showed up later that day, wiping the moisture away from the shotgun he’d discovered in the wormgrasses no more than twenty feet upland from where he’d first found her.
“Paul,” she said, picking a large Mite from his shoulder and crushing it between thumb and forefinger, “I know how we can get out of here. You, me, and your father.” She reached for his face with two outstretched fingers, as though to pluck away another Mite, but instead ran her palm and fingertips playfully across his cheek. She could feel him shudder. He looked down at the ground.
“Dad, too?”
“Yes, Paul. Would you like to hear it?”
He looked up at her. She felt a Mite scurry down the front of her shirt, and saw Paul’s eyes follow it bashfully before looking back into her eyes.
“Okay. What’s the plan?”
“Paul, a Mite just crawled down my shirt. Could you get it for me? Would you kill it for me?”
The boy swallowed hard and looked away, paralyzed. She pulled him close.
“Paul? Please?”
He lay next to her in bed, listening as she filled out the distances beyond the fogbanks with her tales, her description of the world he’d never dreamed of seeing himself.
“When I was a little girl, I remember blue, uncloudy skies… people. The changes had all begun years before, of course, but they started to come on more powerfully then, like waves of fog just washing over us, killing us and nearly everything else that couldn’t hide or adapt. And in their place…” She shrugged and didn’t finish, not wanting to scare him too much about the world into which she was about to throw him.
Paul was eager but gentle, awkward but lovingly persistent. As they held each other in the darkness of her bed, she whispered a sanitized scenario of escape to him, and he nodded in agreement with every point. She needn’t have lied to him. She was sure that this boy, her lover, would have agreed to anything she told him.
They trudged through rolling, hissing clouds of milky-white moisture. Kate took the lead, moving quickly while Paul tried to maintain a central position between her and his father, worried that because of Kate’s haste and determination he would lose sight of her. He was frightened by the openness, the emptiness of the sloping ground, and of the fog that sometimes hid Kate completely. He couldn’t afford to lose her for a second, dependent on her not only for leading the way but for her sensitivity and reaction time to all that lurked beyond his own eyes and ears. Still, he could only move so fast. His father was almost too weak for this uphill climb, and far too awkward to keep from falling on his face every few steps.
The beast won’t dare attack us if it’s as afraid of the Mites as you say, she had told him. Your father will be our shield. Him and his cargo. It had all sounded so convincing. I know where the Straggler’s truck is parked. We’ll be able to cover plenty of ground before we have to worry about gasoline. Down there, lying naked against her warm, smooth flesh, there was no way he could not believe her, no way he could refuse.
Since I’ve never seen these Mites anywhere else, maybe there’s something down in the valley they need in order to survive. We can save your father, bring him back. You can grow back your hair. But the world as it had seemed while she’d stroked between his legs and whispered in his ear was far different from the lonely, desolate plain through which they now climbed, so empty but so loud, so vast and yet—with its clinging, milky vapors—so constricting.
The expression on his father’s face was far worse than blank—it was utterly consumed. His head rolled from side to side under the weight of his encrusted crown and wet, gagging songs dripped weakly from his mouth. He has no idea where we’re going. Is there enough left of him to bring back even if the Mites die up here?
Finally Kate ssshhhhed them to a halt at the top of a ridge.
“Is the truck near here?” he whispered. Her response was a sharp grab at his cheeks, her palm pressed firmly over his mouth. He shook her away and lifted his father again.
Kate raised the shotgun and squinted into the fog, trying to catch a sign of movement in those fleeting patches of transparent air. Her head turned in response to noises he couldn’t make out over the din. “It’s nearby. I can hear it. I can… smell it.”
“What do we do?” he asked, trying to make his voice as soft as hers.
She turned to him coldly. “We put your father out front. I’ll guide him, but he’ll walk ahead of us.”
Paul balked. “You can’t do that. How are you going to keep him on course? Keep him on his feet? How do you know it won’t just attack him anyway?”
She pushed Paul away with the barrel of the shotgun. “Better him than us,” was all she said before grabbing the frail man, pushing him forward and nudging him in the back with the gun every few seconds.
The old man seemed to respond to her treatment, falling down less than he had on the lower, steeper ground, but Paul knew it was no use. He watched the tilts of her head, her prods to his father’s shoulders to change his direction. She wasn’t trying to avoid the beast; she was leading them to it.
He groped for the blade hanging from his belt, measuring how easy it would be to just step forward and stab her in the back. If he killed her, what would he do then? Go on, just the two of them, or take his father back down the hill, back within the sanctuary of the Mites?
But Kate’s instincts were less than sure, and when it finally attacked, it was from behind Paul. He smelled it before he heard it, and didn’t see the beast until it was almost too late to dodge the sideswiping blow of its thick, thorn-fringed arm. He let out a scream as he rolled away and couldn’t look up until he heard the first shots.
He could barely make out the three weak silhouettes in the fog: the beast—its outline distorted by jagged horns and crests, the woman firing at it and the thin, frail man with the crown of encrusted flesh—on his knees between them, crawling aimlessly, oblivious to it all. The shells seemed to do little more than slow the creature’s advance, though it staggered a little more with each impact. It kicked his father away as though the man were no more than a scrap of garbage, then lunged at Kate as she screamed and jumped away.
Paul ran to his father and pulled the dazed man to his feet. His father’s eyes fluttered as the pupils spun crazily through the red-veined whites. A stream of meaningless sounds escaped his mouth on a malodorous cloud. The man had just enough energy left to shake off his son’s help and fall back into the wormgrass, sitting with his head slumped forward so that Paul could Clearly see the panic of the thousand Mites that scurried about from hole to hole on top of his father’s misshapen head.