Page 10 of Into the Mist

“Here.” Jenny handed Stella her coat. “Amelia can’t feel the cold anymore.” She wiped tears on her sleeve and turned to Mercury. “What do you need me to do?”

“Give the dead a Christian burial, of course!” Karen was still on her knees just a few feet from the three women.

Mercury responded with the first thing that came to her mind. “Do you have a shovel?”

Mrs. Gay frowned. “Well, no. That’s a silly question.”

“It’s a practical question, Karen,” said Stella. “You say you want to bury everyone. How are you going to do that with no shovel?”

While Karen opened and closed her mouth soundlessly, Mercury turned to her two friends. “The Escalade is trashed. We need to find the keys to that truck and see if we can get a door to the Escalade open so we can pull out the suitcases.”

Jenny’s gaze slid to the semi-smashed SUV that lay on its side. “Shouldn’t we just leave them?”

“Sure, if you want to wear only what you have on for the foreseeable future,” said Mercury.

“Oh, I get it. You’re right,” Jenny said. “Sorry, I’m not thinking very clearly.”

“You’re doing great,” Mercury assured her.

“I’ll check out the truck.” Stella headed to the pickup.

“Let’s get as much of our stuff out of the SUV as possible,” Mercury said to Jenny. “We can toss the suitcases in the back of the truck, and the four of us can squeeze into the cab.” She looked down at Mrs. Gay, who was still on her knees. “Come on, Mrs. Gay. We’re all in this together, and we need your help.”

“I just—I think we must do something about the dead.” The history teacher’s gaze kept flitting from the mound of rust-colored goo that had once been their principal to Amelia and her dead infant.

“Mrs. Gay,” Mercury said gently, “there is nothing we can do for them. What we need to focus on right now isoursurvival. We don’t know what’s in that mess up there.” She pointed above at the expanding wall of smoky darkness. “We have to get out of here and to a shelter. We’re not from here. We don’t know the area at all. Our best bet is to return to Timberline, but it could very easily have been destroyed too, so we need to get moving or we’ll chance being stuck outside at night in the cold and snow and whatever else might be coming for us.” Mercury offered her hand. Karen hesitated and then took it and stood.

“Mercury Rhodes,” Karen said primly, “at the very least we need to pray over these poor people.”

“You pray. I’m way more concerned about the living,” Stella said as she rejoined them. She held up a keychain that had a green and yellow “Go Ducks” logo on it. “Keys were in the ignition, and there’s almost a full tank of gas. The men musta been painters. There’re a bunch of old paint cans and tarp in the bed. I’ll toss out the paint.”

“We’ll get the suitcases,” Mercury said.

“We need to hurry,” Stella’s gaze kept retuning to the nightmare view. “I have a bad feeling.”

Mercury rubbed her arms. “Me too, and it’s freezing out here.” She headed to the wrecked SUV with Stella and Jenny in tow—and then stopped when she realized Karen was still standing there—beside the bench—staring at what was left of Principal Richard Hale.

“She’s going to be a giant pain in the ass,” murmured Stella.

Silently, Mercury agreed, but she was used to managing pain-in-the-ass students. She knew how to get kids everyone else thought were nothing but trouble on her side and even coax them to perform for her—or at the very least stop being annoying. Automatically, she used her classroom management skills, honed by more than a decade of teaching teenagers Richard Hale used to call “the bottom of the barrel,” on Mrs. Gay.

“Karen, how about you pray over each of them”—Mercury made a sweeping gesture that took in Hale, Amelia, Coach Davis, and the two dead strangers—“while we get the truck loaded.”

Karen nodded solemnly and rubbed the gold crucifix she always wore around her neck between her thumb and forefinger. “Yes. Yes, I can do that.”

“That was smart,” Jenny said as they approached the SUV.

“Give ’em a task to keep ’em too busy to cause trouble,” Stella muttered.

Mercury rounded the back of the big Escalade and breathed a sigh of relief. As the vehicle had been thrown on its side, the rear hatch had popped opened. “Here, y’all! It’s unlatched. I think we can force it the rest of the way up.”

The three women wrenched open the hatch. Stella went to the pickup, started it, and backed it to the rear of the SUV so that the front of the truck was pointed out at the silent highway. She kept the engine idling as she jumped out of the cab, opened the tailgate, climbed into the bed, and began tossing paint cans onto the parking lot.

“Wait—don’t throw out those tarps.” Mercury struggled to roll two big suitcases over the gravel. “We can cover our stuff with them. Plus we might need them. Later.”

Stella met her gaze. “You hate camping.”

“I hate dying even more.”