Chapter 17

  Michael Whyte

  Northeast, to Montana.

  He had stopped at an ATM three towns over from the one where Jim had fainted. He had bought a road map, a lot of water, enough food for several days, 10 gallons of gasoline in plastic bins, and all the paper/crayons/markers/cheap little plastic trays of watercolors that he could find. Someone had sent him a link to an application called CHIME shortly after his conversation with Dwayne and Jacob. Michael stayed long enough to find wifi, download CHIME, and call AJ before driving on. His efforts to contact his mother’s assisted living facility, or his office, went nowhere.

  Jim did not wake up.

  Michael stayed off of the main roads. He didn’t play any music. He was occupied with marveling at the broken sky, and thinking, and praying. As for the sky, it began to leak a thin, pale mist. The blue dome overhead was soon spun with wispy cobwebs, a peculiar pattern of cirrus clouds.

  Jimothy would not wake up. He was in some kind of coma, and this after he had shown that he could…what, make colors out of his hands? And according to AJ, Elizabeth was the same way. Had Elizabeth made colors before she had fallen unconscious? He’d forgotten to ask about that, and he didn’t feel up to calling AJ again. But in the silence and solitude of his gold Alero, humming as it traveled along a winding desert highway, he allowed himself thoughts about himself and AJ. Together, perhaps finding out what had happened to their siblings.

  “I really did like her,” he told Jimothy, reclined in the passenger’s seat.

  “I do,” he corrected himself after a moment. “She’s something special, you know?” Jimothy would agree; he thought everyone was special.

  Thoughts of AJ, of his mother, of Dwayne, of everyone he had known back home, all swirled together into an agitated haze. In the midst of it all, Michael focused himself on the simple act of driving. At least he had a destination. Dwayne Hartman. That was the goal; that was the bright horizon toward which Michael aimed. Everything would be better when he found Dwayne.

  Jimothy began talking in his sleep after a couple of hours. When this first happened, Michael at once pulled over onto the roadside and tried for several minutes to wake his brother. Jim would not wake. Michael found a notebook and tried to copy out what Jim was saying. Michael was pretty sure the first words he’d heard were “Hi, Callie.” But though he listened carefully, he caught only a few disjointed words and phrases.

  “Museum…so many questions…interesting!...colorful.”

  He eventually gave it up and went back to driving. But he kept an ear open for Jimothy’s sleep-talking, and every once in a while he caught a word. Once, he was certain he heard Elizabeth’s name.

  That mist joined up in the sky, muting the sun, and it descended to the earth. A point came when it was a solid plane overhead, which Michael drove through on hilltops and then descended from again. But it came down like a sheet, and it stayed. It was everywhere: solid silvery-gray fog.

  That evening Michael realized that he was lost. He thought he was still on the correct northbound highway, but it was now impossible to be sure. He missed road signs, and the compass app on his phone had stopped working. They should have passed a small town where he’d been planning on spending the night, but he never saw it. He drove for an hour without passing any town at all. At last, Michael resigned himself to a night in the car with Jim. He pulled off the road into a shallow ditch.

  He worried about Jim. Would Jim be getting dehydrated? He hadn’t gone to the bathroom all day. Michael tried pouring water into Jim’s open mouth, but Jim didn’t swallow and only began coughing in his sleep. Michael put a blanket over him in case he got cold.

  Still no music. He wasn’t in the mood. He dug through his bags for a book before realizing he wasn’t in the mood for that, either. The driver’s seat reclined to a somewhat comfortable position. Neither hot nor cold, he lay there for a long time and stared at the fuzzy grey ceiling of the car. It had a curious houndstooth texture he had never really noticed before.

  Photography. Michael had given up that dream for Jim. He didn’t regret it. He did not. ‘Professional photographer,’ was not necessarily incompatible with ‘caretaker of autistic teenage brother,’ but they didn’t go easily together. Michael had wanted to travel. National Geographic, Planet Earth, et-cetera. And anyway, his camera in the past few years had increasingly seemed a feeble tool in comparison to Jimothy’s paintbrush.

  He didn’t know how long he stared at the ceiling because his phone was glitching out and wouldn’t display the time properly. The car’s digital clock was the same. But eventually he straightened out and reached into the back for his camera. His hand first landed on the mysterious device Alan Sheppard had sent to him. He shoved it down between the seats with a contemptuous grunt and seized the camera and flipped through his most recent pictures. Even the ones from just a couple days ago seemed unreal, from a distant time.

  He selected the “Paintings” folder, which contained his shots of all of Jim’s paintings. Most. Most of Jim’s paintings. Apparently, he had missed one. Apparently, an original had found its way to AJ’s hands in Pennsylvania. A strange pang went through him at the thought of AJ, and he sighed. Now, he thought, was probably the worst timing for that sort of thing. Being in love.

  Something moved in the fog outside. He jolted upright and swung the camera around like a defensive weapon as he had done with Ezekiel. The camera flashed and shuttered as he accidentally took a picture. The grainy fog outside the car swirled violently, but not before Michael saw AJ in it.

  He stumbled out the door and into the fog, still gripping the camera. He kept a hand on the open door as he peered about in an attempt to see or hear anything nearby. “AJ?” he called. No response. He had imagined it, dozing off.

  The fog itself caught his attention. He hadn’t paid it much heed before, but something was strange about it. It had a curious texture. And it moved strangely in the wind…

  What wind?

  Michael backed up to his car, out of the fog, and only then realized that the mist made a little bubble a few yards around his vehicle. Something else caught his eye in the periphery of his vision, a familiar half-formed shape. “Hazel?” Michael asked. But no dog came cannon-balling toward him, barking and frenzied with happiness.

  “…anyone?” he said, his voice croaking a bit as he spoke. His own words sounded small and insignificant here. The fog muffled them.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  No one responded, yet Michael was sure something was there, watching him, listening to him.

  “…God?”

  Still nothing

  Michael didn’t know what else was going on, but he was still sure he had seen AJ. He opened his camera to check the most recent picture. There she was, off-center and blurry because of the accidental shot, yet easily recognizable. She was smiling, wearing the yellow shirt with the tan jacket that he’d first seen her in. The background was all gray fog, and so was the bottom part of the image where AJ’s midsection should have been.

  Michael stared at this picture. It made his skin crawl. He felt cold. What was going on here? He leaned down to check on Jimothy (still there, unmoved) and felt a powerful urge to just get in the car, forget the mist.

  He would, he decided, but there was one thing he wanted to try first. He raised the camera and took a picture of the mist. It billowed as though a giant’s invisible fist had passed through it. Then nothing.

  He selected the picture of AJ and located the superimpose function used for double-exposure shots. He snapped a picture of her, overlaying it onto the gray mist.

  And there she was, the top half of AJ. She laughed playfully at him, and her golden hair faded smoothly into the silver vapor.

  Within two seconds, she dissolved into the swirling mist.

  Michael backed up and sat in the driver’s seat, his feet on the ground outside. He flipped through his camera’s folders in a daze and opened up Jim’s paintings. He randomly selected one, activated the superimpose function, took aim at the mist and snapped another picture.

  Again, some invisible force disturbed the mist, and again it coalesced into something new. This time it was one of Jim’s paintings, a strange and colorful flower, curled about with deadly black thorns. It was in motion; the flower bloomed, its petals showered all about, withering and dying in the blink of an eye. The flower fell apart into the mist, but not before Michael caught one of the brilliant blue petals in his hand. He felt it transition from soft flower to cool mist.

  Michael swung his legs back into the car and slammed the door. He leaned back once more and stared at the ceiling of the car. “Jim,” he said, “now would be a good time to wake up. Anytime, now, would be okay.”

  It took a long time for him to sleep, but eventually he fell into an uneasy slumber. His dreams were chaotic and confusing. In one dream, he saw himself and Jimothy in the car. In one dream, some monstrous beast named Black was chasing them. In one he saw Jimothy, alone in a dark place, holding something bright to keep the evil shadows at bay. In one he saw AJ on a sunny green hillside, soaking wet, with a few other people.

  It took him some time to realize when he had awoken. Slowly, with an easy stretch and a yawn, he raised his seat back up to driving height. He checked to make sure Jim was okay. Jim was fine, but his passenger-side window was not. A network of cracks spiderwebbed from a fist-sized hole near the middle of the window. The cracks were strangely angular, honeycomb-patterned. The mist was still there, everywhere, outside. Michael shook the broken glass off of Jim’s blanket and double-checked his brother. Just sleeping, unharmed.

  Michael stepped out of the car and around to the ditch to relieve himself. He made sure not to step into the fog. He watched it with bleary sleep-filled eyes. Shapes formed at the edges of his vision. At first he turned his head quickly back and forth to catch them, but every time they were only strange misty forms. He returned to his seat, closed the door, and was rummaging for the road map when he heard a familiar sound nearby in the fog.

  He stopped, listened.

  Thock

  The shape of a small ball rose up outside his window, paused at the apex, then fell back down with another soft thock.

  Michael watched it bounce a few times. It began tapping against his window on the way up.

  He started the car, put it in drive, and pulled back out onto the road, leaving behind the ball.

  He had driven several miles, at a careful and easy 40 miles-per-hour in the fog, when he saw something flash past his driver’s-side window. At almost the same time, he heard a faint thock on the road outside. He tried increasing his speed and soon confirmed that the ball could keep up even at 60.

  He parked at a fork in the road to consult his road map. Only when he had retrieved the map and begun unfolding it did he realize with a start that he had just parked his car in the middle of the road. In this fog, someone could easily not notice him until it was too late to avoid a collision. But…there had been no other vehicles, had there? None at all, since the fog had descended. He hadn’t even realized until now, and it made his skin crawl. He’d been avoiding the highways, true, but he ought to have seen someone. It was still a paved road.

  He checked the map and was forced to make a guess as to his location. He thought he should have passed a town yesterday, yet he didn’t recall seeing one in the fog. There should have been a turnoff…the road he thought he was on had several forks, and he could be at any of them.

  He was chewing his tongue and puzzling over this when the ball struck the windshield of the car. It rebounded onto the road, then jumped back up against the windshield. It bounced over to the left branch of the fork, barely visible in the fog.

  Michael cautiously rolled down his window. The sound of the bouncing ball became more rapid, then slower. He watched as the ball came toward him again from the fog, then back to the road running to Michael’s left.

  When it returned again, Michael was sure of it. It was trying to get his attention. It was trying to direct him down the left fork of the road. It was trying to show him the way. Michael, consulting the map once more, decided that left was probably the best choice at any of the forks, regardless.

  Shapes congealed in the fog–barely visible, almost recognizable.

  Michel sighed, said a prayer, and pulled out down the left fork of the road.