What's next? Throwing a blanket over his head and whimpering?
No. He opens his eyes again and meets their stare. "It's our room," he says, loudly enough to be heard but not so loud as to wake his son. "It's our building, it's our planet. I'll look at you if I goddamn please."
His challenge might have been Todd's hurled shoe. The pair turns sideways and vanishes into the stream of Blurs.
Alan extricates himself from his son's limbs and stands up. He is suddenly emboldened, heady with temerity. Our building. Our planet. He stalks to the corner, thrusts his arm into the thick of them—
And feels nothing. They continue to swarm around him—through him?—but the hairs on his arm don't even quiver.
"What do you want?" he mutters. There are answers here, somehow. He's sure of it. The Blurs, the moss, somehow they caused everyone to vanish, or are part of what happens next.
Some insight tickles the back of his mind. Something he's overlooked, or brushed off.
He lurches to his suitcase, rummages through the contents until he finds Brenda's phone. For a second his heart jumps, thinking he might be able to learn the date, but it says 1/1/00. The text is still in her history, though—the last one she received.
where are you
They sent a text message. He grabs this fact, examines it like an unearthed diamond. He has paid it nowhere near enough attention.
His mind tries to derail him, demands to know who they are, but he jerks it back. Forget who they are. Somehow, they accessed the satellite system and sent a text, presumably to every phone which could receive one.
Why would they do that?
That is the million-dollar question, but as he ponders it, he finds another facet to this diamond. They didn't just send a text message. They monitored the responses. They answered the responses.
He can communicate with them.
He whips his head toward the Blurs streaking in the corner, as if he has stumbled upon a weapon and expects to be attacked before he can grab it, but they don't notice his revelation. He turns back to the phone, lamely fumbles through the settings menu trying to find a signal, but of course there isn't one. His chance to get answers by texting them—if he ever had it—is gone.
Maybe there's another way. He goes through the mental gymnastics of outlandish, impossible answers: turning the cellular network back on, rigging a private cell network somehow, experimenting with a wi-fi network. It's all ludicrous. He doesn't have the expertise, let alone the time. The snow is coming.
Okay. Nothing electronic, then. But if they were able to read his text message, shouldn't they be able to read a message over any medium? Could he maybe just write them a note?
He looks around the room, bewildered by his own train of thought. He doesn't even know what he'd say to them. As he wrestles with the question, his eyes light on the telescope, and his heart jumps into his throat as a new possibility occurs to him.
He goes into the hall, retraces his steps to the second-story roof deck he saw on the way in. The blue star, when he finally finds it, is almost directly overhead. It is the second-brightest thing in the night sky, outshone just barely by the quarter moon. He sets up the telescope, the tips of his ears burning in the cold. His heart is thundering as he leans into the eyepiece. Is this a good idea? Does he really want to see?
But he has no idea what he's looking at; barely even understands how to operate the telescope. He squints and fiddles with knobs. A dull ache begins to fester in his neck. But the image grows, fills his view, and slowly he begins to realize the blue star is an asteroid. He can't see it clearly—at maximum magnification it still seems the size of a pool ball—but its surface seems to be uneven and rocky. A long trench, like a dried riverbed, bisects it. And it is swarming with Blurs.
He can't be certain, of course. The image is far too small. But it's magnified enough to see that the rock itself isn't blue; the color extends around it like an aura, shifting and warping just like the Blurs in the corner of the bedroom where Todd is sleeping. So it could be anything, really. Maybe it's a weird refraction of the light; maybe it's blue for the same reason Neptune is blue. (Methane, right? Or nitrogen? Something like that.)
So he can't be certain, but he is certain anyway. He has never been so viscerally certain of anything in his life.
The blue star is a seething mass of Blurs, and it's drawing closer every night.
69
They wake up shivering. Alan loads up the telescope and tripod, adding the combo to his mental list of indispensible supplies. After a cold breakfast and a can each of warm Pepsi, they're back on the road.
They don't talk much. The drive requires his concentration: Alan is constantly checking his atlas, taking alternate routes when the roads clog up, steering around debris. But the silence feels different to him, more companionable. He reaches over and squeezes Todd's shoulder; the boy looks surprised, then smiles.
An hour into the drive they reach Interstate 394. The underpass is blocked, but today Alan doesn't waste time checking for other routes. They cross on foot, but instead of packing everything up, they leave it behind. After nicking a Volvo sedan from the first gas station on the other side, they circle back as close as they can to get their stuff. With the telescope, they need two trips to get everything, but it doesn't take too long. Then they continue their slow way south.
They come across another fire zone around midday, this one the result of a monstrous crashed passenger jet. One of its wings is buried in an apartment building. They find a way around.
Sometime in the afternoon they reach Edina, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Minnesota, now a ghost town. Alan gives a wide berth to its malls and business centers, but even picking through the residential areas is difficult, and they end up having to change cars again twice: once at 62 Crosstown, and once at Interstate 494.
The Expedition they were driving yesterday morning feels like a dream from a hundred years ago.
The sun comes down in Bloomington, four miles southwest of the international airport. Alan is vaguely surprised they haven't seen more crashed planes. He maneuvers to another residential area and finds a house by a small pond.
"Ever been skinny-dipping?" he asks as they pull up.
"What's that?"
"Come on, I'll show you."
He brings Todd inside first, loots the home for towels and a bucket, soap and shampoo. He preps a bed with plenty of blankets. He considers trying to start a fire, but the twin specters of suffocation and inferno hold him back. It'll be chilly, but the blankets will probably be enough to warm them up; if not, they can hole up in the car with the heater blasting.
"All right." The pond isn't much to look at. The water's low, the bank muddy and naked. He wonders briefly if the people who bought these houses felt ripped off when the water level dropped. "Get naked, get in the water, and wash up."
Todd looks at him like he's lost his mind.
"Come on, man, I'm serious. We're filthy." He strips off his shirt, grimacing; it feels like pulling off a second skin. "Look. See? We're gonna start growing mushrooms here pretty soon." It's Brenda's line. She used it all the time. Of course, it was never this close to being true when she said it.
Skeptical, Todd pulls his clothes off, wraps himself in a towel, and approaches the bank of the pond. It's not windy today, and it isn't even cold enough to see their breath, so that's lucky. Alan would peg it at maybe 60 degrees, easily the warmest day they've had in weeks, but as the daylight vanishes, that is changing.
Todd pokes a toe into the mud of the bank and yelps. "It's freezing!"
Alan, also naked, follows him to the shore and winces. "That's pretty cold," he admits, "but we've still gotta do this. Come on." He reaches for his son's hand, and the boy pulls away.
"Unh-uh. You first."
Alan's automatic response is fury. The tired, Why, you little—kind of thing that his father would've had. He recognizes it, waits for it to pass, then takes a step toward Todd. "Come on. I'm no
t making you do it alone, so don't do that to me. Let's just do it and get it over with."
"You first," Todd repeats.
Alan draws slowly closer. "Look," he feints, "let's just—" and he howls a war cry as he lunges for Todd's hand, trying to pull him in. The boy screeches and jumps back, and Alan slips and falls ass-first into the freezing mud.
Todd cackles. Alan tries to scramble to his feet, slips again, and plunges into the water.
"Ah, fuck!" he shrieks, between bouts of laughter and coughing up pond water. "That is cold!"
Todd is beside himself, laughing so hard he is doubled over and shaking. "Are you okay?" he finally asks. He is covered in goose bumps, his eyes shining in the dying sunlight. His two front teeth have come in, Alan suddenly notices; they are practically double the size of all the other teeth in his mouth, giving him a beaver-like smile which is both guileless and adorable.
"Oh, yeah, I'm f-f-fine." Alan exaggerates the stutter, clutching his arms around himself like he's freezing to death. "Except that I'm in here alone!" he roars, and bursts from the water like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Todd shrieks and runs, but Alan catches him. The shrieks redouble, echoing through the empty backyards as Alan roars. "Grrrrraaaah! Swamp Monster want company!" He hauls his son back, kicking and screaming and laughing, and plunges him into the pond.
70
He's able to use frontage roads along 35 the next day, sticking close to the highway he's pinned his hopes on. He braces for the worst as they approach the Minnesota River, but the bridge is surprisingly clear. Traffic must have been light here when the people vanished. They don't even have to change cars.
From the heightened elevation of the bridge, though, Alan is able to see the city of Burnsville sprawled out below him. All of it—the lake to his left, the field to his right, every building he can see—bristles with blue moss.
"Oh," Todd breathes. His voice is flat, heavy with shock. "Look at all the moss."
Alan pulls over. He needs a minute to think.
That gibbering panic—the kind that tried to derail him on the first day of this disaster—tries to rear its head, and fails. He's become too inured to devastation to be alarmed. In its place is only a flat-eyed weariness, a deep sense of despair.
He gets out of the car, staring numbly toward the city, cycling through options. How dangerous is the moss? Can they drive through it? From here, he can't tell how far it extends; for all he knows, North America from this point south is covered in it.
"Can we go back to the pond house?" Todd tries to keep his voice casual, but Alan hears the desperate hope packed into the words. "I liked it there."
"I don't think..." he starts, but he has no way to finish that sentence. How far east and west does the moss extend? Tracking back west to the 169 bridge would cost them at least a day, but it might be worth it if it keeps them out of the blue. Alan cranes his head both directions, shading his eyes from the sun, and that's when he sees the giant worm in the sky.
It is slithering just below the clouds a few miles to the east, a mottled grey rope twisting through the air like a snake. The sun is behind it, glaring out in furious bursts as the thing eclipses it and then draws clear. It must be a mile long. It has no wings and can't possibly be flying, but it is.
A curtain of blue haze spreads beneath it, drifting slowly toward the ground. Alan thinks of rain clouds, of crop dusters.
"Oh my God." His tongue seems to move on its own.
Then he hears it: a long, wailing rush that echoes up the river valley like a muted scream. It grows louder by the second. The thing is hurtling over the river like a jet, its trail of moss transforming rapidly from a distant curtain to an oncoming bullet train.
"Get in the car!" he screams, but Todd just stares, mesmerized. He is witnessing the destruction of Sodom, the wrath of God. His father's warning doesn't even penetrate. "Todd!"
Alan runs to his son, jerks the door open, and stuffs the boy inside. The sun flickers behind a towering wall of drifting moss, then vanishes entirely. Alan shoves his son deeper into the car and clambers in after him, slamming the door just as everything beyond the windows becomes blue ash.
71
It feels like hours, but is only minutes: an intense, thrashing experience that reminds Alan of his first childhood trip through an automatic carwash. It sounds like muffled thunder, whumping onto the bridge and the car roof. He has a brief impression of that sickly blue—overpowering, omnipresent—but there's so much of the stuff that it plunges the world into darkness, leaving them stranded in the blackness of the car.
Todd whimpers, grabs his hand, and Alan tries to soothe him. When he is finally able to hear his own breathless exhortations (Shhh, it's okay, it'll be okay), he realizes that the roar from the monster's passage has faded.
Slowly, his eyes adjust. There is a haze of light in the cabin now, albeit dim and blue. He can just make out Todd's gaze, latched to the blackness of the coated windshield.
"I think it's gone," Alan whispers.
Todd doesn't answer. He's crammed awkwardly into the space between the two front seats, his butt halfway over the center console in a pose that would leave Alan limping for weeks. Alan tells him to climb into the back, then crawls over into the driver's seat and flips on the windshield wipers.
They groan, struggling with the weight of the moss. It reminds him of trying to clear the windshield of a night's worth of heavy snowfall. Eventually, though, they prevail over the first huge load, and the rest comes easier. After a few more cycles, he can see through the glass. It is precisely what he feared.
The bridge is coated in blue fuzz. The crashed cars and their resulting debris—all the detritus he was winding around minutes ago—are now featureless lumps in a surreal landscape of blue. Again, he thinks of the morning after a snowfall. The scene conveys the same muted flatness, but where a fresh snowfall has always calmed him, this leaves him raw with anxiety.
The blue extends as far as he can see, now: from the other side of the windshield, to the far side of the world.
Turn back, he thinks, but that's not easy. The bridge was clearer than most, but they are still hemmed in by an SUV on their right and a wayward concrete divider on their left. There's not enough room to turn around here, and he can't see through the rear window to try to drive in reverse. But even if he could turn around, winter—
Fuck winter. Winter doesn't matter.
But it does matter. Unless all this moss is going to somehow keep them from freezing to death, it is no less urgent to get south now than it was twenty minutes ago.
"Fuck," he breathes. He leans his head into his hands and bumps the horn with his elbow. Its blare shatters the silence like a scream. Todd nearly shoots through the window, then gives him a glare that could kill a lesser man.
"Sorry." His own heart is hammering, every nerve on fire; the ghost of the horn sizzles in his ears like the echo of a heart attack. But this state of heightened alarm is good for one thing: his paralysis is knocked loose. He knows what he has to do.
"Have you ever touched it?" he asks. "The moss?"
Todd shakes his head. "I don't think so."
Damn. When he nods, the jitter of his nerves threatens to bounce his head off his neck. "Wait here. I'm gonna get out."
"What?"
"Just for a second. I need to see behind us, and we need—" We need to know how dangerous it is. Because he's certain, finally, that it is dangerous. Somehow, Earth has never known anything more devastating than this blue moss. But will it kill him instantly? How much risk do they take by trying to get through it? He needs these answers to make a decision.
"Listen to me. Don't come out. Okay? I'm just going to take a quick look and come back in."
Todd nods.
Alan considers leaving instructions—If I don't come back, put the car in reverse and push the gas pedal—but that wouldn't accomplish anything besides scaring Todd. The boy doesn't know how to drive, and the bridge rails are broke
n in multiple places. If he even got the car moving, he'd most likely just back off the edge and plummet into the river.
The truth is this: if the moss can kill them, they're already dead.
"Okay." Alan nods again. Sets his jaw. "Wait here."
He opens the door, and steps into moss up to his ankles.
72
It extends all the way over the bridge behind them and lies heavily across the trees on either side of the highway beyond. In the distance past that, he can see buildings that aren't yet coated. But the worm is also out there, crawling through the sky to the west, and at some point it will probably turn around for its next pass. He suspects it is systematically applying its payload across the entire landscape.
Belatedly, he lifts his shirt collar over his mouth and nose before resuming his scan. To the east and west he can make out the river, but it, too, is coated in the moss. The stuff bobs on the water like swamp scum. Here and there are cracks in the blue, through which he can see black water rushing underneath, but the moss itself is weirdly still. Impossibly, it doesn't move with the river but seems anchored in place on top of it.
Once coated, always coated. It makes him second-guess his plan. But nothing has changed; he still has to know.
Gingerly, he pokes the small finger of his left hand into the moss on the car.
At first it feels wispy, insubstantial, like cotton candy. It clings to him as he pulls his finger back. Then his fingertip starts to itch. In a matter of seconds it itches so badly he wants to cut it off.
He takes a handful of his shirt hem—the only substance nearby not already coated—and grabs his pinky with it, trying to scrape the fuzz off. It goes easily enough, but the flesh and nail are stained blue now, and he still itches. Trying not to panic, he spits into a new patch on his shirt and tries again, scrubbing furiously at the stain.
Slowly, the itching subsides. When he looks again, the stain is significantly faded but not gone. Beneath it, his skin has become a glaring red.
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