NOTE: This story is fan fiction, protected by the Fair Use Doctrine.
It is not being written or posted for profit. It has not been 
authorized or approved by Stephen King, Frank Darabont, or anyone 
connected with the film “The Mist” or the novella of  the same name.



INTRODUCTION: Here is a short (150 page) fan story about one 
of the most interesting of the film’s minor characters, the eccentric 
young woman simply identified in the credits as the Woman With Kids At 
Home (and who I have dubbed “Mattie”). The story focuses on Mattie’s wild 
and happy adolescence in the Ozarks; the tragic end of her youth in 
addiction, jail, breakdown, and the violent death of her first love; her 
struggling existence as a single mother in small-town Maine; and, of 
course, her journey through the mist to save the children she loves.


I hope you enjoy the story. If you have any comments, please write me at 
jeremygordonmarch@yahoo.com


“A GOOD, BAD WOMAN”

by Jeremy Gordon March


“I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad 
ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.”

Song of Solomon 3:2.


I

The scrawny, short-haired young woman, nearly blind, staggers through the 
mist. She tries to run from her pursuers but she cannot. Her strange, 
old-fashioned clothing is torn here and there, there are cuts on her face 
and hands, and she drags her injured left leg behind her. Her ribs are 
broken and her left side convulses painfully with every breath. She had 
been able to tear herself away from them, but she had landed hard on the 
rough pavement and then rolled down a hill, twisting her knee as she 
went. Her other knee, of course, was nearly broken when she was attached 
hours earlier.



The woman is in her own neighborhood, but over the last few hours that 
old familiar place had turned into a deadly trap for her, and there was 
nowhere she can go and no one to protect her. Except…


Over and over, her bruised, split lips whisper two names, the names of 
the only two people on earth who love her. If she can just reach the 
house, she knows, she will be safe. Her loved ones will let her inside, 
and the sight and sound of them will comfort her, and calm her down 
enough so that she can warn them. The woman knows it is too late, even 
she gets inside there is nothing they can do but wait for the end, but at 
least they will do so together.



And another thought enters her mind as she drags herself through this 
hell which, only that morning, had been her home town: This is my fault. 
I left them alone and they can’t protect themselves…



The woman prays, for the first time in years, prays that they will all be 
reunited before they die, but she doesn’t know who she is praying to or 
if They will listen. 

She was born Moragh Magdalene Allen. A ancient Celtic first name, and a 
middle name taken from one of the most beloved figures in her parents’ 
faith. As a very young woman she dropped the first name that almost no 
one else could spell or pronounce. At the same time, she abandoned her 
parents’ faith, simplifying her middle name into “Mattie Lee,” and vowing 
never to pray again. 


Until now.



Mattie reaches what looks like a familiar corner – but how can she know 
for sure, with the mist and the darkness and her own blood leaking into 
her eyes down from the gash in her forehead? – and sharply turns right. 
Part of her wants to run up to one of the shabby, old-fashioned houses on 
the street, pound on the windows or doors for help and simply break 
inside if no one answers, but to do this she would have to come to a door 
and stand still - and to stand still is to die. And even if she got 
inside a stranger’s house, what dangers would she find there? Better to 
keep moving, however slow that might be.


She hears a low rumble, coming from somewhere behind her. They have found 
her, and they are closing in. Mattie frantically tries to think. Just 
three or four more houses on this street, and then another right turn 
will take her onto her own street. And the house she longs for, and the 
people she loves, are at the far end of that street but if she can just 
keep ahead of her pursuers – and if no one else is laying in wait for her 
on that street – she might be able to make it after all.



As she glances over her shoulder and tries to go faster, something 
unyielding knocks her to the ground and she screams in fear and surprise. 
Mattie picks herself up painfully – her leg, mercifully, has gone numb 
below the knee, but her back still aches from the fall down the hillside 

and her cracked ribs send waves of pain through her chest – and she gasps 
as she sees the thing that has knocked her down.



A wooden post is directly in front of her, with a yellow diamond sign 
reading “END.” She is on the wrong street. There are no dead-end streets 
near her house, meaning she is not just one street over or two streets 
over from where she should be. Mattie is lost, somewhere in what was her 
town. And from behind her, she hears the growl of her pursuer, getting 
louder. 



Mattie realizes now that she will never reach the house, never see it 
again or the two she loves so much. And this thought makes her cry, 
blocking out what little remained of her vision. She turns 
around, not sure what she can do. Even through the mist and through own 
tears and blood she can see a shadow, getting larger and darker, as it 
closes in on her.



“I’m sorry,” Mattie says aloud, not to the advancing assailants or even 
to anyone who can hear her. She is talking to her loved ones, and she 
knows she is saying goodbye. “Please forgive me, I left you, I left you 
alone, I went someplace bad, and I can’t protect you and you can’t 
protect me.” 



She looks upward, at the dark sky with its very few stars, and thinks, if 
there is a God, can God please punish her and not them, take her life but 
spare the other two. Please let them stay in the house, with the doors 
locked and the windows closed, and let them be safe. Let them find 
someone else who will love them and protect them, who will not fail them 
as she did.



As the thing in front of her stops moving, Mattie reaches into her pocket 
and withdraws the only thing she might be able to use as a weapon: A tiny 
folding knife, a gift from her late father. Almost completely useless 
against a monster, but she doesn’t want to go without fighting. She is 
still crying helplessly, tears of fear and longing and regret and self-
loathing flooding down her face and stinging the cuts on her cheeks, but 
she forces herself to straighten up and stand still. Mattie 
pulls out the blade, locks it in place, and holds it out in front of her, 
waiting for the end of her irresponsible, selfish, sixteen-year-old life.



“Mama?”



“Mommy, wake up!” 



Wanda Lee Allen, eight years old, and her five-year-old half-brother 
Victor Lee, ran into their mother’s bedroom in the small, cold, rustic 
house as they heard her cry out in her sleep. They found Mattie kneeling 
in bed, the covers thrown every which way on the floor, her hands 
reaching out, supplicating to someone or something unseen, as she called 
out the name of an old friend over and over again. “Rose, Kyle!” Her 
voice rose to a scream, hideous with fear and sadness and desperation: 
“Where are you?”



Wanda, with little Victor in tow, rushed to the bed and grabbed her 
mother’s shoulders, shaking her gently, all the while murmuring, “Mama, 
it’s okay, you’re here with us…”



The skinny young woman’s eyes finally opened, she stopped shouting, and 
for a moment she stared at the children and the room around her 
uncomprehendingly, as though she’d never seen them before.
 

“Mommy,” Victor, by now crying, threw himself at her. 

Mattie looked first at Victor, and then to Wanda. “My little ones,” she 
managed, before starting to cry herself. She pressed the little boy to 
her chest and rocked him back and forth while repeating “I’m sorry,” in a 
tiny frightened voice, over and over again.



 “It’s okay, Mama,” Wanda tried to assure her. “It was just a-“



“Nightmare,” Mattie nodded, as she got herself under control. “I dreamt 
about-“



“It was Aunt Rose again, wasn’t it?” Mattie had had the nightmares and 
the crying fits throughout her children’s’ lives. She wished she could 
tell her children the full story of what had had happened – to her, her 
childhood friend Rose, and their friend Kyle – but of course she 
could only tell them a little bit of what had happened, at least until 
they were much older.



“Yes. I-I dreamt…she needed me, and I wasn’t there, I-” Mattie burst into 
tears again.“Should we call Aunt Rose?” suggested Wanda. The only time 
Mattie seemed fully at ease was when her old friend was visiting. Rose, a 
strong, quiet woman who could have passed for Mattie’s twin sister, 
understood better than anyone else what this was about, and she sometimes 
knew how to calm Mattie down.



Mattie shook her head. “Aunt Rose is in Iraq. She won’t be back for 
months.”



“I’ll get your medicine.” Wanda opened the bottom drawer of the 
nightstand next to Mattie’s bed and took out the bottle reading “Vicodin 
– 10/325.” “Vicodin” was a word Wanda and Victor had learned early in 
life, just as they had become accustomed to the bad dreams and tears 
that visited their mother, sometimes for days in a row, often without 
warning. Mattie had been prescribed the medicine for residual pain in her 
knee, a permanent injury she suffered when she was sixteen, but she also 
gave it to herself for depression. 



“Oh, bless you, dear,” Mattie, despite having lived in New England for 
the last seven years, had maintained her strong Southern accent and the 
distinctly Irish lilt to her speech. There was no need to change the way 
she spoke because it reflected who she really was. So did her name, 
Mattie Lee Allen - old-fashioned, Irish, Southern, androgynous.
Mattie was tall, skinny as a rail but well-muscled, flat-chested, 
with pale white skin punctuated here and there by red freckles, 
particularly on the tip of her long but delicate nose. Her classically 
Irish red hair (at least she still thought of it as red; it was actually 
going prematurely gray) was buzz-cut on top and nearly shaved on the 
lower sides and back of her head, in memory of a happier time in her 
youth. And, of course, there were the matching Celtic knotwork bands, 
tattooed in black across her right and left triceps, that she’d had since 
she was fifteen. These were visible now as she sat on her bedside in 
boxer shorts and a tank top, being consoled by her children, trying to 
fully wake up. 



Wanda handed Mattie the open bottle and she counted out one, two, three 
Vicodin tablets – three times the prescribed dose but the amount needed 
to steady herself, make her forget the nightmare and the terrible sense 
of fear and loss it had brought  – and washed them down with 
the glass of water on the nightstand.



“Mama,” Wanda said warily, “Doctor Black said you shouldn’t-“

“Hush, little one,” Mattie said, but she smiled and winked as she said it 
and she jokingly put her finger over Wanda’s lips. Wanda, who looked like 
a miniature version of Mattie but with long and curly hair, was far 
brighter than Mattie ever was. Earlier that year, Mattie had been 
overjoyed to hear that Wanda had qualified for the gifted students’ 
program at Castle Rock Elementary. Mattie had been, at best, a marginal 
student, more interested in her friends and mischief-making than in her 
studies. Wanda was much more focused and picked up on things 
more readily. The family was moving forward. Mattie would like to think 
it was her influence, that Wanda was learning from her mother the value 
of hard work, perhaps as she assisted Mattie in her job as a children’s 
librarian. However, Mattie also acknowledged – if grudgingly and only 
to herself - that Wanda had likely inherited her intelligence not from 
Mattie, but from her father Tim, who Mattie had known briefly after 
being thrown out of her home. Victor was more like Mattie: Emotional, 
dreamy, and disorganized. She knew he was only five, and it wasn’t fair 
to judge how he would turn out from his performance at such an early age, 
but Mattie felt she understood him better than she did Wanda. After all, 
she had been just like him when she was five.



Mattie glanced over at the digital clock on the nightstand; was surprised 
to see that it was completely blank. “The power’s off,” Victor explained. 
“It blew off in the storm last night.”



“You mean,” Mattie corrected him gently, “the power’s out; and it blew 
out in the storm.” Normally, she’d be more upset about the outage – 
almost all of her pastimes, from surfing the Internet to watching 
television to listening to the her collection of CDs (everything from 
Irish folk music to syrupy 1950’s love songs to Led Zeppelin), required 
electricity. But the Vicodin was starting to take effect, starting to 
give Mattie a sense of well-being. She knew it was artificial and would 
only last for an hour or so – after taking the drug most days for the 
last ten years she’d built up quite a tolerance – but she needed it to 
calm herself down, to respond to her children, fix them breakfast, be 
their mother that morning. 



“What time is it?” Mattie couldn’t wear a watch; no matter how small a 
watch band she got the watch would hang down both sides of her skinny 
wrist.



“It’s about noon,” Wanda showed Mattie her own watch.



“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Mattie said to herself. Her one day off from work, 
and it was halfway gone already. She knew how that had happened; her 
Vicodin might make her feel good but it also caused insomnia; she’d taken 
some around ten o’clock last night – the thunder and lightning from the 
storm, and worries about what the rain and wind would do to their house 
had jangled her nerves - and she’d finally fallen asleep around four in 
the morning. “Have you had breakfast?”



“We had grits,” Victor said proudly, knowing this would please his 
mother. The breakfasts they made together also had a Southern flavor: 
When it came to hot cereal, oatmeal was not allowed, only grits. Wanda 
and Victor had all day at school to assimilate the Yankee culture. When 
they were at home, though, Mattie wanted them to be exposed to some of 
the special things, not always found in this part of the country, that 
she herself had grown up with. Even if Wanda and Victor never set foot in 
Missouri, it had been the land of their ancestors for the previous one 
hundred and thirty years, and it would be wrong to just forget about it.  
About a year after Mattie had arrived in Maine, come to live in this 
rickety little house left to her by her Aunt Judy, Harriet Turman, an 
elegant, middle-aged woman for whom Mattie had done some babysitting,
invited Mattie to her very first Passover seder. Although Mattie was 
familiar with the story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt, she was 
completely unfamiliar with what she saw – as well as what she ate – that 
night. She asked Harriet about the purpose and meaning of the rituals. 
Harriet began to stumble through an explanation, but then Harriet’s 
father – a huge bearded man who somehow reminded Mattie of Colonel 
Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken – explained that their purpose, like 
the purpose of most Jewish holidays, was to keep alive, for each 
successive generation, the memories of ancient Jewish culture and Jewish 
historical events; and with that the hope that Jews could someday return 
to their original homeland. Mattie, who in those days was still 
desperately homesick, could relate to that. The father’s suggestion had 
remained with her and she had used a similar approach in raising Wanda 
and Victor. Little things from the South – grits, okra, corn bread, folk 
songs – kept the hometown memories alive in their home.



“We made you some too,” Wanda continued, “but you were still sleeping and 
we didn’t want to wake you. Do you want it now?”



“You’re so good to me,” Mattie beamed down at them. “When was that?”



“Eight o’clock.” 



“No, honey, they’re probably pretty gross by now.” The three of them 
laughed briefly. Mattie gave them a final kiss each and then stood up and 
stretched. “Mommy’s going to get dressed and see if the storm did 
anything to our house.”



It had. Once outside in her robe and slippers, Mattie saw the top half of 
her chimney scattered all over the front lawn in little mixed chunks of 
brick and cement. She could see part of the rest of it sitting on top of 
her roof. At least she knew what she and the kids would be doing together 
on their day off. And in miserable weather, too: It had stopped raining, 
but the lawn was soaked with icy water; a chill wind was blowing; and she 
could see what looked like another set of storm clouds above the nearby 
mountains.



Whispering an oath to herself, Mattie turned back inside to get – what? 
What would she need? A garbage bag and a broom would not be enough. More 
like a whole box of garbage bags, a shovel, a rake, and everything else 
they had in the house – and probably a whole bunch of things they 
didn’t have - for moving debris.



She abruptly decided it would have to wait. She was hungry, having slept 
through breakfast, and Wanda and Victor undoubtedly were too. She fixed 
them lunch – some reheated chicken-fried steak and slices of ham pulled 
from the defrosting refrigerator (she realized, with dismay, that 
unless the power went back on quick she would have to throw out their 
food before it went bad) along with some lemonade. As they ate together, 
Mattie explained that they had a little work to do. They could relax 
during the first phase, she said, while she was piling up all the big 
debris and putting it into bags. All they would have to do is help her 
carry it out to the trash, and then sweep up the small pieces.

 

“But it’s cold out there,” Victor complained.



“I know, darling, but it’s not safe to have that junk all over the lawn. 
And you know our neighbors; sooner or later they’ll say something.”

Wanda and Victor looked at their mother a little apprehensively. Her 
voice was rising; and when she mentioned their neighbors in that tone, it 
was usually a bad sign. Mattie didn’t get along with most of the other 
people on the street. They often argued about things such as noise 
(Mattie sometimes liked to play her music late at night) or parking (the 
Cobbs next door had once hired a building contractor who had parked his 
car in the Allens’ driveway) or Mattie’s refusal to pay to have her 
street number stenciled on her curb like everyone else. The disputes 
often got nasty, with Mattie digging in her heels and refusing to 
compromise. That might not have been so bad but having the face-to-face 
disputes was often terribly upsetting to their mother, sometimes even 
triggering her crying fits. One night, after someone had actually called 
the police to complain about her music (Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” one of 
the songs of her youth, played at one A.M. on a Tuesday morning), 
Mattie’s kids had watched in confusion and dismay as their mother, 
trembling and crying with anger and embarrassment, shrieked over and over 
again to the young  officer who had come to their door that her neighbors 
were “violating” her.



“We’ll help you, Mama,” Wanda quickly said, and laid her hand over 
Mattie’s as she sought to calm her mother down. “It’ll be fun, won’t it, 
Victor? All three of us, together, in the fresh air?”



Mattie knew Wanda was trying to do, and the love she felt for Wanda 
extinguished her anger. She smiled as a few tears rolled down her face. 
She reached over and hugged her daughter. “’Love and light return with 
thee…” she half-whispered, half-sang, to her.



“’as in that sweet Spring…’” Wanda sang back. It was a private joke 
between them. When Wanda and Victor were younger, Mattie used to sing 
them to sleep with an old folk song, titled “Aura Lee,” which most people 
know as “Love Me Tender.” And now the three of them sang it together.

 

Aura Lee, Aura Lee
Take my golden ring.
Love and light return with thee
As in that sweet Spring.



“You know, Non taught me that song,” Mattie said softly, to no one in 
particular. ‘Non’ was Wanda and Victor’s nickname for their grandmother 
Sue. Mattie wasn’t sure where she had  come up with that name – maybe it 
was taken from the word “Nanny” – but it had somehow stuck. Neither Wanda 
nor Victor had ever actually met their grandmother. But they were 
fascinated with her. Mattie, who missed her mother terribly, endlessly 
told them stories about Sue and showed her pictures from a large photo 
album (which Mattie had actually stolen from her mother’s house on her 
last night there, knowing she would never come home again). Mattie 
found that it was actually easier for her to refer to her mother as 
“Non.” She would never dream of calling her “Sue,” and saying “my 
mother,” or “my mom,” or “your grandma” would bring her to tears, 
because those words reminded her of the role that Sue had once played in 
her life and of the role she should have played in Wanda’s and Victor’s 
lives.



“Non is a good person,” Mattie added, and this triggered more tears.



“But you’re a better person than she is.” Mattie wanted her children to 
have some idea of what had happened to her, why they weren’t part of the 
larger family, and so she had told Wanda, just after her eighth birthday, 
in general terms that she hoped would not frighten her daughter, what 
Mattie had done to make Non angry and ashamed of her and why it made Non 
so angry and ashamed. She had even explained to Wanda that many people 
might agree with Non that Mattie had done bad things or even that she was 
a bad person. Mattie added that some people might even hold some of the 
things Mattie had done against Wanda herself or even against little 
Victor – but that they should never pay any attention to anyone who did 
that. But Wanda - who had grown up in a somewhat more cosmopolitan place 
than had Mattie, and went to a public school – was more sophisticated 
that Mattie sometimes gave her credit for being. Mattie, Wanda knew, 
had never meant to hurt anyone; not even Non thought that she had. That 
was what counted, not some crazy ideas that Non had. Wanda loved Non, 
too, but she knew how badly Non had hurt Mattie by driving her a thousand  
miles from her home.



Mattie shook her head no. Wanda began nodding her own head yes. Mattie 
finally had to smile. “And you…and your brother…are better than us both.” 
Victor was not, of course, Wanda’s full brother. Wanda’s father had been 
Mattie’s old boyfriend Tim. Mattie would never know for sure who little 
Victor’s father was – but she wanted them to regard one another as 
brother and sister, equally loved by her.



After lunch, Mattie dragged out the tools, in twos and threes, and began 
raking the debris into a single pile.“Hey, kiddo, what happened to you?” 
It was her next-door neighbor, Eugene Fisher, a sixty-seven-year-old, 
heavyset, perpetually-rumpled-looking man. His longish, wavy salt-and-
pepper hair had been combed only slightly, and there was at least a day’s 
worth of white stubble on his face. His paunch strained against his worn, 
red-and-black plaid flannel shirt. 



“The whole chimney came down last night, can you believe it?”



“That’s not much debris on your lawn,” Fisher noted.

“This isn’t the worst of it. Half of the brick ends up in my front yard. 
The other half is stuck in the flue. I won’t even be able to light a fire 
tonight.”



“Mine’s working just fine. If you and your kids get cold, feel free to 
come over. I’ve even got power.” Fisher, perhaps alone among the other 
people on the street, liked his eccentric young neighbor. A retired 
corporate lawyer from Atlantic City, New Jersey, Fisher had spent most of 
his adult life dealing with difficult people. Former business partners 
who had one another and were trying to use the legal system to extract 
mutual revenge; other lawyers, some of them bullies, some of them high on 
cocaine; unsympathetic and impatient judges. Compared to so many of the 
people he’d known, Mattie was not bad at all. Certainly, she was shy, and 
childlike, more than a little strange, and she had money problems and her 
hands full raising the two kids.

 

He was also sure she’d suffered some kind of very serious trauma earlier 
in her life. But she didn’t mean anyone any harm and obviously loved her 
children very much. He had seen her sometimes in the local video store 
with Wanda and Victor, on occasion spending an hour or more going with 
them from shelf to shelf, patiently reading aloud the descriptions of the 
children’s’ movies to see if she could find something that appealed to 
them.



Suddenly, Mattie put her rake down and walked over to the fence that 
separated their homes. 



“What in hell is that?” 



“What?”



“That.” Mattie was pointing at the mountains that loomed in the distance, 
beyond the lake at the edge of town. When she came outside earlier, she’d 
seen a few clouds above them. Now, the clouds – actually it appeared to 
be one big, very thick cloud – had virtually swallowed the mountains. She 
thought she could actually see it moving towards them.



Fisher shrugged. “They said it might start raining again.”



“Rain clouds – at street level?”



“Let me see what they’re saying now.” Fisher went back inside his house. 
He had power, thanks to the generator he’d bought the year before last. 
The TV switched on, but he got nothing but static and noise from the 
channels he tried. The radio likewise yielded only static. He thought of 
getting a weather report online, but his laptop told him that the ISP 
connection was temporarily down. Shaking his head, Fisher started to walk 
back outside. As he did, he heard Mattie begin to scream. 


He hustled out into his front yard, running toward the fence that 
separated the two homes, and saw Mattie, holding two parts of her rake, 
in despair. In her left hand was most of the wooden handle. In her right 
– which he saw was bleeding – was a broken fragment of the handle and the 
metal teeth.

Now he could make out words to Mattie’s screaming: “This goddamn piece of 
trash! How am I supposed to fix my house with this fucking-!” She began 
to cry again. Wanda and Victor were framed in the doorway, looking at her 
in dismay – but not looking terribly surprised.



“Mattie, you’re hurt. Let me see your hand.”



Slowly, as though embarrassed that someone had witnessed her tantrum, and 
reluctant to admit that yet one more thing had gone wrong, Mattie dropped 
the pieces of the rake and walked over to Fisher with her arm 
outstretched. As she reached him, he saw what had happened: The head 
of the rake had broken off, the wood near the head had splintered, and a 
large piece of it had gone into the palm of her hand.



“I think there’s still some of it in there.” He hopped the fence with 
surprising agility – it was a low fence but it was an accomplishment for 
the overweight older man – and ushered her into her own house, Wanda and 
Victor in tow.



“Oh, Mr. Fisher, you don’t have to-“



I think I do, he almost responded, but instead he just said, “Oh, no 
problem. I just want to make sure you’re okay. Where’s your bathroom?” 
Once there, he tried the light switch out of habit – it didn’t work, of 
course – and then turned on the faucet, got the soap and a washcloth, and 
began cleaning out the area. And in the near-darkness (the bathroom had 
only one small window) he saw - or at least thought he saw - a thin, 
jagged, shiny white scar starting at the base of her palm, then running 
the length of her wrist directly over the big vein. He forced himself to 
say nothing, but something must have showed in his face, because all of 
the sudden Mattie was staring at him.



“What?” she asked. He could feel the tension in her arm.



“Nothing,” he shrugged. “Just want to make sure you don’t get infected.”



“You’re too kind,” she said, but sullenly. Victor motioned for him to 
step back, then pulled open a drawer underneath the sink. “Bandages,” he 
pronounced, as he pulled out some adhesive pads and a roll of tape.



Fisher tried to find a neutral subject. “I have a rake in my garage, if 
you want to borrow it. But if I were you, it’s not the front lawn I’d be 
worried about.”



“What, then?”



“Well, you said part of your chimney fell back down the flue. Did you 
feel that cold air when we  went by the fireplace? It’s holding the vent 
open.”



“So? We can have a fire after all?”



“I don’t think so. Half the smoke would end up in young living room. But 
if it rains again – which it will very soon, judging by those clouds you 
pointed out – the rainwater’s going to go through the vent and through 
the fireplace. Your carpet, everything else, will get soaked.”



“Shit.” Mattie remembered the children were there, and she grinned 
weakly. “Can you help me clear out the flue?”



“I don’t think there’s time before the rain.”



“What would you suggest?”



“Well…” he thought for a moment. “You should call a chimney service, but 
the phones are out – at least they are at my place –“



“Here, too,” Mattie nodded. She couldn’t afford a cell phone, and her 
land line was completely dead.



“-and even if they weren’t I don’t know if you can get anyone on a 
Sunday. So…let’s see…let’s try to control the damage. Maybe put some 
plastic sheeting on the roof - that should keep at least some of the 
water out – and then some sandbags and towels in the fireplace itself – 
to absorb some of what comes in – and then maybe some more plastic 
sheeting on the carpets – just in case anything makes it beyond the 
fireplace.



“Towels we have…don’t we?” Mattie looked around in confusion. Except for 
a tiny hand towel – the one Fisher was now using to pat her arm dry – all 
the bathroom towels had vanished.



“We did the laundry, Mama, they’re in the dryer.”



Mattie was smiling again. “You little angels, you. Go get them for Mr. 
Fisher, will you?” As her kids left the room, she turned back to Fisher. 
“So we’ve got towels - but not the rest of that stuff you mentioned.”



“I think I have a roll of plastic sheeting in my garage,” Fisher said, 
“left over from last year’s rainy season. I should have put it up before 
the storm last night. And sandbags…no. That one eludes me.” 



Is the hardware store open today?” Mattie asked as the kids returned with 
several neatly-folded towels (the folding was Wanda’s idea, no doubt; 
Victor, like Mattie herself, did not know how to fold them – and like his 
mother, he wouldn’t have bothered to do so).



“I think so. Probably doing just great today, with everyone cleaning up 
from the storm. Why don’t you and I and the kids run down there together? 
We’ll take my station wagon.” They would have to if they were buying 
sandbags; the Allens had no car.



Wanda and Victor applauded. “Oh, Mr. Fisher, you’re too kind to us.” 
Mattie pecked the big, older man on the forehead and he blushed. “Let’s 
hurry,” he advised, “before that rain starts. Why don’t you get dressed; 
I’ll bring the car around.”

Mattie walked him through her living room – sparsely furnished with some 
of the cheap furniture she’d inherited from Aunt Judy as well as some 
secondhand items – and saw him out. As they neared the entryway, Fisher 
stopped in his tracks. “Whoa. Look…at…that!” he gestured at the window by 
the door. Half of the houses on the other side of the street – the side 
closest to the lake and the mountains beyond - were now covered by the 
thick white mist. He looked out the window again. “Strange. It’s not 
raining…but-“ He pulled open the door and this time both he  and Mattie 
drew back. The air outside was unexpectedly cold, far colder than it had 
been when they’d been outside ten minutes earlier. And, more ominously, 
it was silent outside. No sounds of people cleaning up their yards, or of 
conversation, or traffic, or even of the wind blowing. It was an absence 
of white noise, like watching a TV program with the volume on mute.



“What is this?” Mattie, nervous at the best of times, was beginning to 
panic. She thought she knew why: Her dream of the night before, and her 
dreams of all the weeks and months before stretching back to that night 
during her sixteenth summer. But that wouldn’t explain why Mr. Fisher – 
comfortable old Mr. Fisher, who came from a very different and much safer 
background and presumably had no such terrible memories – seemed afraid 
as well. 



“I don’t know, my dear, but-“ He forced himself to walk through the 
doorway. “Listen, if that’s a- a raincloud, we can’t lose any more time. 
I’m going to get my car. Can you and the little ones be ready in five 
minutes?”



“You bet.”



Fisher had an afterthought, and turned back one last time “And Mattie?”



“Yes?”



He gestured to the door. “Keep this closed until I get back.” He walked 
away, pulling the door firmly shut behind him. Mattie watched him walk to 
the left, towards his own house, which had not yet been swallowed by the 
advancing cloud or mist or whatever it was.



“Mommy, what is that?” Victor was pointing out the door at the screen of 
white.



“Just a cloud. A fluffy little cloud…come to visit us.” Mattie tried, 
without success, to hide her unease. She turned to her kids. “Well, are 
you all ready for Mr. Fisher when he comes back?” They were. Mattie was  
ready to step out the door when she realized she was still in her robe 
and slippers.“Shame on me,” she told her kids as she ran into her bedroom 
to change.



Mattie had few, if any, clothes that could be called “normal.” Her 
wardrobe, like her nickname and mannerisms, reflected her attachment to 
her youth and to the Old South. On one side of her closet were a handful 
of skin-tight, pitch-black denim jeans, t-shirts, jackets, and black 
cowboy boots. That’s what she and her friends had worn, long ago, during 
that special time of their lives, in Missouri, when they would hang out 
on the street corners, bars, and pool halls during the day and drive 
drunk and stoned down the nearly-empty rural highways at night. She wore 
those outfits less and less as time went by; except for Rose (who could 
only visit her once or twice a year at most), her friends were all gone 
now. It made no sense to wear those clothes, she found, when there was no 
one to wear them with. They served more and more as a reminder of her \ 
loneliness; many of the items, such as the tank tops that showed off her 
tattoos, went against the dress code at work; and on occasion wearing 
those clothes, particularly with her nearly-shaved head, had actually led 
to serious and painful misunderstandings. During the last election, the 
volunteers manning the polling station had claimed – even as Mattie 
pointed out her name on the printout of registered voters in front of 
them – that she was not registered to vote there, and when she had 
pressed the point, one of them had asked her if she was sure she wasn’t a 
member of the KKK.



Most of the closet was dominated by another kind of outfit, just as 
individualistic but more benign. She had found this style of clothes 
around the time she took her job in the children’s section of the local 
library. Indeed, they made her look a bit like a nineteenth-century 
librarian, schoolmarm, or perhaps a preacher’s daughter. She had several 
full-length, flowered dresses, surmounted by a knitted cardigan sweater 
or cape, which in turn was secured with a large pin or brooch.  Mattie, 
Wanda and Victor had had a wonderful time looking through local vintage 
stores – actually, most of them had been junk shops – finding the 
sweaters and brooches. She was, consciously or not, trying to dress like 
some of the women in the old tintype photos in her family album. It gave 
her a sense, even if a fanned-up or false sense – of continuity. After 
losing her first home, her family, and all her friends but Rose, and 
being thrust into this strange, unprotected world that she still didn’t 
fully understand, continuity was important to her.



Ten minutes later, Mattie emerged, wearing what she thought of as her 
“pioneer outfit” – a beige, full-length dress with a fitted waistline and 
a dark-brown velvet cape closed off in front with a cameo brooch, and 
carrying an umbrella and her purse (a large, carpetbag-type thing that 
contained, among other things, a small handgun, a speed loader, and a box 
of .22 caliber shells; a container of mace; and her jar of Vicodin; the 
handgun was illegal but it had been given to her by Rose; and to Mattie,
it was a reminder of Rose’s promise to stand by her and protect her.


“Mr. Fisher, I’m-“ she paused. Wanda and Victor were there, but Fisher 
wasn’t. She looked out the window. The mist, if that’s what it was, had 
now covered all the houses on the opposite side of the street, and part 
of Fisher’s own house as well. But her front yard was still 
clear, as was the street itself. His car was nowhere to be seen.



“Son of a…” Mattie turned to her kids. “Did he come back?” They shook 
their heads.



“Did he honk, did you see his car?”



“No, Mommy.”



“Great.” Mattie’s purse and umbrella slid unnoticed onto the carpet. “How 
am I supposed to bring back twenty pounds of sandbags without that son-
of-a-bitch!” She was aware that she was screaming now, and that her own 
children had backed slightly away from her, but that didn’t matter to 
her. “It’s gonna rain, our home is gonna be flooded, but he doesn’t 
care!”



“Mama, please stop,” Wanda said gently. Victor was staring wide-eyed at 
his mother.



“He left us alone to face the storm!”



“Mama, please,” Wanda tried again, more firmly, as Victor began to cry.



“Everybody…” Mattie shrieked, emptying her lungs with each word and then 
gasping for breath before the next “always…leaves us…alone!”



“Stop it, Mama!” Wanda stepped directly in front of her younger brother 
as she confronted Mattie. “You’re scaring him. You’re hurting him. And 
you’re hurting me!”



Mattie was too stunned to speak. Her little Wanda had never talked to her 
like that before. She stood where she was, shaking her head slightly.



“Please don’t do this anymore,” Wanda went on. “We love you, Mama, we 
love you so much. But you – you scare us sometimes. You’re always sad, or 
you’re angry, or-or you break things, or you fight with people, and we 
don’t even know why.”

 

For a moment, Wanda feared that her mother would become angrier still. To 
her relief, Mattie nodded, then sank to her knees and hugged her with one 
arm, and reached out to Victor with the other. Victor, somewhat 
reluctantly, came to her, and they all embraced one another as they had 
done that morning.



“I’m so sorry, baby.”



“I shouldn’t have talked to you that way, Mama.”



“No, honey, you were right. I shouldn’t yell like that. Not at you, not 
anyone. I never, ever, want my own kids to be afraid of me.”



“And please don’t be mean to Mr. Fisher,” Wanda said. That was part of 
what hurt. He was one of the few people was nice to them, who tried to 
help them, and she was worried Mattie would drive him away.



“No, no, no, of course not. Mr. Fisher’s a very nice man. He’s our only 
real neighbor. I-I just got worried when he didn’t come back.”



“Please don’t get so angry, Mommy,” Victor said.



Mattie looked down at the floor for a moment, considering something, then 
looked back up at her offspring. “Tell you what. On Monday – after they 
get the power and the phones back up – I’m going to talk to Doctor Black. 
I’m going to see if he can find me…someone I can talk to. About getting 
angry so much.”



“Like a psy-chi-a-trist?” Victor asked hesitantly. 



Mattie was surprised – but pleasantly so. “How’d you learn that word, 
Victor Lee?”



“From the TV.”



“Good boy.” Mattie cuffed him lightly on the cheek. “That’s right. I’m 
going to see a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, someone, who can 
help me with my getting angry.”



“I’m glad, Mama,” said Wanda.



“I have to be here for the long haul,” Mattie continued. “And I can’t 
keep doing something that – that gets me – gets us into trouble 
sometimes. Especially if it’s something that scares you guys. 



So that’s a promise. On Monday morning, as soon as I can use a phone, I’m 
gonna find someone. But first, I’ve gotta seal up our fireplace.” Mattie 
looked at her watch. Fisher had gone twenty minutes ago.“Where is he?” 
she asked, careful to keep her voice – and her thoughts – calm. She 
got up and went back to the window. The mist was still advancing, having 
now swallowed the rest of Fisher’s home and the curb opposite them.



“Okay,” Mattie announced. “I’m going to his house to get him.” Wanda and 
Victor got up, as to follow her. She remembered his warning as he walked 
out the door: Keep this closed until I get back. “You know what? Why 
don’t you two stay here. Victor, can you stay out of trouble?”



“Yes, Mommy,” Victor said in his singsong voice.



“Wanda, can you keep an eye on him?” They’d recent argued about this, 
about whether Wanda had left Victor unattended when Mattie went out to 
get the mail. Wanda insisted she had not. Mattie wasn’t sure who was 
right. 



“What if he’s not there?” Wanda, Mattie realized, was organized enough 
that she could think of everything.



“Then…” she was about to suggest that the three of them would walk to the 
hardware store together. But something told her that her children didn’t 
belong outside, not in that terrible cold and the blinding mist. She 
didn’t belong there either, she appended her thought, but as the head 
of their little family it was up to her to make the trip and patch up the 
house, with or without Mr. Fisher. “Then I’ll go to the store myself and 
bring back as much as I can carry. Maybe someone  there can give me a 
lift home.” 

She pulled the door open and felt that dreadful cold again. She thought 
she could sense a faint, acrid scent, kind of like smoke from a campfire 
but somehow different from anything she’d ever smelled before. “Okay, 
here I go. Like Mr. Fisher said, keep this closed.”



Mattie closed and locked the door behind her as she walked across the 
front lawn, stepping over debris from her chimney, toward the fence. “Mr. 
Fisher?” she called as she approached the side of his house. Only part of 
the wall was visible, the rest of the house was inside the mist. “Hello?” 

She gently rapped her fist on his side window. The window felt 
unexpectedly cold, like touching the outside of a metal freezer. She 
leaned forward, peering into the window, and frowned. The inside of the 
house was dark (strange, given that he’d said he had his generator on), 
and all she could make out were a few paperback books held between two 
bookends on a small table just beyond the windowsill). She hiked up the 
bottom of her dress and started to cross the fence, and then a strange 
thought intruded with curious force. 



Don’t go into the mist.



This thought was accompanied by the sudden appearance, and then the 
sudden disappearance of something – though she had no idea what – in her 
left peripheral vision. As if something had been there and, just as she 
had had time to react, had moved away. She looked back at the side 

of Fisher’s house and saw nothing. Mattie took a step away from her 
neighbor’s house. She wondered, for the second time that afternoon, 
whether her unease, if not the mist itself, wasn’t some sort of flashback 
to her own, long-ago nightmare in the mist. She tried, once more, to 
step across the fence but something in her mind or her body wouldn’t let 
her.



“Okay, then, we go away from the mist.” Mattie walked across her own 
lawn, which was still  perfectly clear, pulled open her white-painted 
front gate, and stepped out onto the street. The mist had drifted about 
halfway across the street, neatly bisecting the manhole cover and speed 
bump in the middle of the road. But her side of the sidewalk was still 
clear. She walked to the corner (casting a sideways glance at the 
advancing mist every three steps or so), turned to the  right 
(thankfully, the shopping center lay away from the mist), and walked down 
the hill. And every so often, as she walked with her back to the mist, 
she got that same strange sense of something sneaking up on her and 
hiding, sneaking up again and hiding once more. And somehow she was very 
glad she had not taken her children outside with her.





II



Rockwell Plumbing and Hardware was the largest building in a shopping 
center just off Kansas Road, two right turns and a quarter of a mile from 
the Allens’ house. Mattie had walked past the store several times a day, 
nearly every weekday, for the last two years; the Castle Rock Civic 
Center, with the public library, lay two blocks beyond it. During her 
lunch hour, Mattie would usually go over to the Foodhouse, the grocery 
store in the shopping center, for a bowl of the hot  New England style 
clam chowder they served at the market’s small delicatessen; and then to 
the soda fountain at King’s Pharmacy next door for a vanilla milkshake. 
(She also had her Vicodin prescriptions filled at King’s. One time, about 
a year ago, there had almost been a nasty scene when she’d run out early 
– her mounting tolerance to the stuff had led to start taking six pills 
at a time, several times a day, when she was restricted to six a day, 
leaving her about twenty days short. She had walked in and asked for the 
next refill, and the head pharmacist, a wiry man with unkempt straight 
red hair named David King, had told her he legally could not refill the 
prescription for another nineteen days. Mattie – who had no idea what 
would happen to her if she tried to go for even two days – let alone 
nineteen – without the stuff – was on the verge of screaming, crying, 
something, right in front of old Mr. King, but held herself back when she 
realized that could be the end of her Vicodin supply for all time. She 
thanked him as politely as she could, walked out of the pharmacy and then 
back home as steadily as she could – and then collapsed in tears on her 
living room couch in front of her confused and worried children. She 
couldn’t explain to them what had happened, even though she was certain 
that Wanda Lee, at least, had a rough idea of what was going on; and she 
knew of no legitimate way – or even any likely successful way – to get 
more of the drug she lived on. Castle Rock had no dealers, at least none 
that she knew of at that time or that she could then afford to pay; she 
already had a prescription from the one doctor in town; and she knew Mr. 
King, proprietor of the only pharmacy within thirty miles, would be 
suspicious if she reappeared later that day with a second prescription 
from another doctor. She thought of going to another doctor and 
complaining of pain (all he would have to do is examine her and see she’d 
had a full knee replacement; that would give her some credibility) but 
she assumed that the doctor could easily find out, maybe by typing her 
name into his computer, that she already had a Vicodin prescription from 
another doctor. And of course she’d seen a million ads for those online 
pharmacies where you could supposedly get whatever you wanted without 
having to go to a doctor - but she’d also heard that some of those 
pharmacies were really operated by the DEA or the police or whoever and 
were designed to catch people like her. However, three days later, as she 
began experiencing the full fun of withdrawal (it was like the worst flu, 
the worst hangover, and the worst frustration she’d ever experienced, all 
at once – and on top of that the pain in her knee had returned in full 
force), she broke down her resistance and ordered a hundred tablets 
online, paying extra for the next-day delivery. It took care of her 
cravings and her pain but not her fear; for two whole months, Mattie kept 
expecting someone to come for her at work or while she was driving or 
while she was at home with her babies; every time she saw a police car or 
patrolman, even one two blocks away, she had a panic attack, her heart 
pounding and her hands and feet losing all feeling. Finally, she realized 
that she’d gotten away with it and that no one was coming to arrest her. 
She knew the whole thing was her fault, caused by her own stupidity and 
greed, but she also felt that Mr. King could have saved her three days in 
hell and two months of terror by simply giving her the damn refill when 
she’d asked him to.)



Apart from her little long-ago problem at King’s, the routine was 
comforting to her – she had become a kind of fixture in both places 
during the lunch hour, readily identifiable by her clothes and hair - and 
one or two folks always welcomed her back and called her by her name. 



This contact was important to her because she tended to get  homesick 
during mealtimes. When Wanda was much younger and Victor still a toddler, 
Mattie worked at home – usually several ill-paying jobs at once, like 
addressing junk mail envelopes, working for an answering service, doing 
alterations on a junky old Singer sewing machine – as much as she could. 
She, Wanda and Victor would spend lunchtime together, usually watching 

Sesame Street and The Electric Company while eating Hebrew National 
hotdogs. Once Wanda, and then Victor, was enrolled in kindergarten and 
then elementary school, they were apart for half of the day – and Mattie 
missed them acutely. Of the three of them, only Wanda seemed to take 
being away from home in stride. Mattie remembered, very clearly, how 
Victor had cried all the way to his first-ever day at kindergarten. In an 
effort to calm him down, Mattie had walked him into the building and then 
into his classroom, holding his hand all the way, and had introduced him 
to the kindergarten teacher, a plump young brunette named Susan Cadish. 
The moment Mattie turned to leave the room, Victor began crying again. 
Mrs. Cadish found Victor a marble game (kind of like a very small pinball 
machine without flippers) that interested him enough to calm him down, 
and Mattie had kissed him goodbye a final time and left. But then 

Mattie herself began to cry as soon as she was outside of the building, 
and kept it up all the way home. She and Victor had been overjoyed to see 
each other when kindergarten ended at three o’clock that day. But then 
the whole drama had repeated itself the next day, and the day after that. 



That had been a whole year ago, but neither of them was still completely 
comfortable being apart from the other. Mattie sometimes wondered what 
would happen when Wanda and Victor became teenagers, expected to spend 
their free time hanging with their friends – or what would happen 
when they were supposed to go away to college.



Today, though, there would be no time to stop for lunch. The mist kept 
advancing south and east across town (it always seemed to be just a few 
feet behind her); and from the cold and clammy feel of the air, it might 
start raining at any time. Perhaps she should have gone to Fisher’s door 

after all, seen what was holding him up, and gone down in his car when he 
was ready. But that would have meant crossing over into that strange mist 
– and maybe meeting whatever it was that kept jumping in and out of her 
peripheral vision.



Mattie heard a siren and jumped. Three police cruisers in a row, lights 
flashing, sped past her down Kansas Road. A deep voice from a loudspeaker 
on one of the cars roared at her to “clear the road.” Her initial 
surprise gave way to a deep, slowly-burning anger. The police did not 
like her very much and almost every encounter with them had been a bad 
experience for her. They had come, at the behest of her neighbors, to 
tell her to turn down her music, lower her voice when she  was talking on 
the phone, even to clean the junk off her front lawn (that had been the 
time she’d bought the old junk car advertised in the paper; it had been 
sold, as-is, with a dead engine. The seller, an aging hippie type named 
Cornell, had taken an extra hundred dollars of her hard-earned in return 
for a promise to fix the car so she could drive it; of course, he’d never 
gotten around to it or returned her money, and a mechanic later told her 
the car needed a thousand dollars worth of work, far more than the car’s 
bluebook value). Each time they seemingly went out of their way to insult 
her while Wanda and little Victor were in earshot, as if the officers 
were trying to tell the children they had a fool for a mother. And they’d 
gone after her for littering and for jaywalking, and even told her she 
couldn’t dress as she wanted (she’d been jogging in boxer shorts and a 
lacy black brassiere - the only clean running clothes she had that day – 
when the patrol car had stopped her and the driver had “counseled” her 
for her “inappropriate attire”. So what, she’d asked the man again and 
again as he lectured her, her rage building as she saw him looking her up 
and down. So what??). As soon as the cars were a fair distance ahead of 
her, she lifted her arms and raised both of her middle fingers.



Apparently they had better things to do than pick on Mattie today; they 
kept their speed up as they went over the hill towards the shopping 
center. Maybe they’d picked up some other unfortunate and were headed 
back to the small police station in the Civic Center, their sirens 
trumpeting their self-righteousness and self-importance.



As she reached the crest of the small hill, she saw something that made 
her forget entirely about the police: Several military vehicles – it 
looked like a whole convoy - tearing up the road in the opposite 
direction. An outsized dark green Humvee, its headlights on, was in the 
lead. Behind that she could see two - no, three – military transport 
trucks. 



Mattie stopped and stared at them as they roared by her into the mist, 
her errand forgotten for the moment. Something was very wrong. The 
vehicles were going fast, far faster than the police cars had gone, and 
faster than she’d ever seen anyone drive on Kansas Road. And the trucks 
were full of soldiers wearing helmets, gas masks and shiny green 
protective clothing (Rose, who was serving with the Army in Iraq, had 
once shown Mattie a picture of herself dressed that way and told her the 
outfit was called an “NBC suit,” with NBC standing for “nuclear 
biological-chemical.”). And worst of all, they all had their rifles at 
the ready. And then the air began to vibrate and a cold wind struck her 
in the face as a helicopter gunship – Rose had showed her a picture of 
one of those too, and said it was called an Apache – swooped down over 
the vehicles and vanished with them into the mist.



Mattie stood by the side of the road, trying to think. There was an Army 
base in the nearby mountains; she’d never seen it but she occasionally 
saw the military personnel (once she’d actually struck up a conversation 
with two nice boys from Georgia who, like her, were homesick for their 
native South; at the end of the conversation, they had asked her –
respectfully and haltingly enough that she knew their intentions were 
honorable - if she wouldn’t like to go to dinner with them. Mattie had 
politely declined, but had been put out with herself even as she  turned 
them down). Once in a while, some of the locals would exchange rumors 
about some terrible top-secret project going at the base, but Mattie took 
these all with a grain of salt; she herself was from a military family 
(her late father had fought in Operation Desert Storm) and she 
could tell fact from fantasy when it came to the armed forces; most of 
the locals had never been in the service and probably had all sorts of 
crazy ideas about what went on at an Army base. From the very few times 
she’d tried to discuss politics with people in town, most of them felt 
about the military the way she felt about the police. But the mere 
presence of a base nearby wouldn’t explain why soldiers in full battle 
dress were conducting maneuvers in a populated area. Or why they had all 
been going so fast. Or why they were headed in the direction of her home. 
And that mist… 



Her heart began to pound as she looked around her and realized that she 
was now almost completely surrounded by it. A cloud of it had blown in 
front of her; it had crossed the road and was slowly advancing toward her 
from the north, and it had caught up with her from behind. The driveway 
to the shopping center, which was on her right, and the shopping center 
itself, were still clear, but she didn’t know for how long, and she half-
ran down the driveway in an effort to reach the store while the going was 
good. Something – perhaps something she’d perceived, very faintly through 
her peripheral senses, during that brief moment when she’d been poking 
around the side of Mr. Fisher’s house – warned her not to go into the 
mist. 



Part of her was sure she was overreacting. She hadn’t directly seen 
anything in the mist; it was just a cold, somewhat funny-smelling, vapor. 
And she hadn’t seen anything amiss when she’d looked through Mr. Fisher’s 
side window. More likely than anything else, the mist had set her on 
edge because it reminded her of the fog that had blown down the highway 
that terrible night ten years ago. Hadn’t she awakened screaming that 
morning – as she all too often did – from a dream about that night? 
Although there hadn’t been this much mist back home on that night, there 
had been some, and seeing the mist now might be giving her a partial 
flashback.  But of course that wouldn’t explain why the Army had just 
sent a whole company of soldiers – and a helicopter gunship as well – 
into the mist.

 

Mattie’s heart began to pound as she realized that her entire route home 
– perhaps from the moment she stepped outside the hardware store until 
the moment she walked through her front door – would take her through the 
mist. She almost turned around right then and there, thinking Wanda and 
Victor must be as frightened as she. She could run through the mist at 
full speed (she was somehow terrified at the idea but there was no other 
way back) and be home in five minutes. She wouldn’t have her plastic 
sheeting or sandbags, but so what? They could always take the large 
plastic bucket from under the kitchen sink, along with some pots and 
pans, and place them inside the fireplace; maybe pile up the towels right 
in front of the hearth to absorb at least some of the overflow; and just 
hope for the best. 



She nixed that idea a moment later as she wondered what would happen if 
the mist got into the house through the chimney. Fisher had pointed out 
the cold draft by the fireplace. Hot air, she knew, was supposed to rise, 
but the mist was cold, and even if it wasn’t it was creeping along the 
ground. If she was afraid of the mist (and she was) and it could enter 
through the remains of the chimney and then through the fireplace (she 
was satisfied it could) she had to get whatever was necessary to seal off 
the fireplace. What was it that the homeland security agencies had urged 
everyone to buy after the terrorist attacks? Plastic sheeting, yeah, and 
also duct tape. The hardware store would have duct tape, wouldn’t they? 
And because she wasn’t totally sure whether the tape would come loose 
because of the moisture in the mist (or if it rained), shouldn’t she get 
some long nails – and maybe a nail gun – as well? At the very least, they 
could simply wrap up the whole fireplace – or even the whole wall – in 
plastic and then seal it shut with the  tape and nails.



The hardware store was jammed. Everyone, it seemed, had suffered some 
damage from the storm, and they were buying the plastic sheeting and 
sandbags Fisher had recommended as well as boards, shingles, and other 
building materials; screws and nails; as well as hammers, trowels, 
knives and other tools. Although Mattie wanted nothing more than to get 
her stuff (she’d decided against the sandbags; no way could she carry 
even the smallest of them) and go home, she was forced to move around  
slowly and carefully, because the smooth tile floor was covered with 
puddles and a few triangles of glass; the storm had torn part of the roof 
and ceiling off and had blown in one of the two large windows by the 
entrance; and the employees, perhaps worried about a lawsuit, were moving 
from place to place with mops, buckets and towels.



A man in the back cut her two large pieces of thick plastic sheeting, 
managing somehow to roll them up tightly enough that they fit (sort of) 
in her handbag. She got two large rolls of duct tape and a box of long 
roofing nails as well. The nail guns looked like they would save a lot of 
time and effort (they also looked like they might be fun to use) but they 
were too expensive and she had no more room in her bag. She joined the 
long line in the front, which was moving slowly, not just because of the 
puddles and glass but because power and phone lines were down, disabling 
the credit card readers and automatic cash registers. Fortunately, Friday 
had been Mattie’s payday; she’d deposited most of her small check at the 
bank in the Civic Center but had taken two hundred dollars in cash.



“Excuse me, do you work in the library?” asked the clerk up front. He was 
a tall, heavyset young man with long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail 
and a goatee.



“Why…yes.” Mattie didn’t remember having seen him before.



“My kid likes you,” the man continued. “A couple weeks ago, did you read 
one of those Dr. Seuss books to a bunch of preschoolers? A book with the 
made-up letters, or letters from another alphabet-”



“Yes!” Mattie smiled and clapped her hands together. “’On Beyond Zebra!’ 
I read that when I was a kid.”



“Well, when I picked him up from school that day, it was all he could 
talk about. And he said it was read to him by this real pretty lady with 
short red hair and all this jewelry. I think-“ the man leaned towards her 
conspiratorially and lowered his voice. “I think he has a crush on you, 
from the way he went on and on about you.”



Mattie blushed. “Tell him thank you. What’s his name?”



“He’s George Junior. And I’m George Senior.” He held out a beefy pink 
hand and Mattie took it. He nodded at her plastic sheeting. “You have 
some broken windows?”



“No, worse. Our whole chimney fell down and we’ve got drafts of cold air 
coming down the fireplace. I’m worried that our home’s gonna flood…or 
fill up with that mist.” Mattie paused. 



“What is that, anyway?”



The man shrugged. “I’ve been seeing it all morning and I don’t know. My 
supplier was in early today, and he said he first saw it around Pleasant 
Mountain, on the other side of the lake.”



“I saw a bunch of Army vehicles go by about ten minutes ago. A big 
helicopter was following them. Is everything all right?”



“I’d like to think it is, but who knows? Police cars, fire trucks, you 
name it, have been going by all morning. I didn’t see the Army trucks, 
but an MP came in here just now, looking for AWOL soldiers or something. 
I told him I hadn’t seen any.”



“Where is he? I wonder if he knows what’s going on.”



“I don’t know, but you might check the grocery store or the pharmacy. 
Guys on leave sometimes stop there on the way to the bus station.”



“I will.” She thanked the man and told him that George Junior was welcome 
at the library any old time. As she left, she looked at the window frame 
next to the door – almost all the glass was gone except for some tiny 
fragments by the edges – and wondered what would happen when the mist got 
into the store.



The Foodhouse – the old-fashioned supermarket building at the south end 
of the shopping center – was only slightly less crowded than the hardware 
store. People expecting the return of the storm were stocking up on 
groceries – as well as other storm-related items like mops, buckets and 
towels. The cash registers were down, and the lines were slow as people 
paid in cash. Mattie, standing just inside the glass doors (which 
normally opened on an electric-eye circuit; today, however, they were 
simply propped outward) scanned the crowd for someone 
in uniform. (She’d  seen an old-style military jeep parked just outside 
but had no idea whether it belonged to the Army or not; it looked much 
more old-fashioned than the ones in the pictures Rose had shown her of 
life in occupied Baghdad, or even than the ones she remembered from her 
childhood.)



“Good morning, Miss Mattie,” Ollie Weeks, one of the market’s assistant 
managers, called out to her as she waded into the crowd. He was a short, 
pudgy, good-natured man who went out of his way to welcome her each time 
she came. Mattie knew why; it was an ongoing attempt to help her make up
for a bad experience she’d had in the market almost six years ago. 


In those days, she’d been doing far worse than she was now. Mattie, at 
her mother’s urging, had come to Castle Rock to care for her maternal 
aunt, Judy Frost, as she struggled through her last battle in a ten-year 
losing war with cancer. Her mother and Aunt Judy had promised Mattie room 
and board; a place to raise Wanda Lee, who was only a year old at the 
time of their arrival; and, although no one mentioned it, a chance to 
start over someplace where no one knew who she was or what she’d done. 
They’d lied to her. Aunt Judy had showered her with verbal and sometimes 
even physical abuse as she either lost her mind or realized she’d face no 
consequences for hurting her niece. Mattie, sick with fear of her aunt 
after only a few weeks on the job, was overcome with guilt and sadness 
after her aunt died nine months later. She’d inherited Judy’s small house 
– really more of a cabin, built by Judy’s late husband three decades 
earlier – but had no money with which to pay the bills and learned that 
the house itself was almost worthless. She knew from her own experience 
that no one in her home town wanted her back there, except for Rose’s 
parents, who couldn’t afford to take her in. And, likewise, no one in 
Castle Rock wanted her either. They made fun of the way she talked, 
claimed to be afraid of her tattoos, her shaved head, and her heavy metal 
music - but made it clear that they wouldn’t accept her even if she were 
to dress and act like them. She could live on the margins of the town, 
working for them for minimum wage, with no real friends or prospects. Oh, 
some of the younger men in town wanted her, all right; but they wanted no 
part of Wanda Lee. The only person who cared for her was Rose, Rose who 
she only saw once every year or so when the Army would let her out on 
leave. When Rose was there, Mattie and her daughter felt safe, needed, 
even happy. And then two or three days later Rose would return to her own 
folks in Missouri or to the Army in Germany (and later in Afghanistan and 
then Iraq) and Mattie and Wanda would go back to being unwanted.



On one of those days, Mattie, in a fit of nostalgia, had put on the kind 
of outfit she and Rose had loved to wear back home: The skintight black 
denim jeans (Mattie’d had to squeeze herself into the jeans, but not too 
hard; a minor thyroid problem had always kept her from gaining much 
weight); black tank top (no bra); combat boots, and a large steel chain 
running from her side belt loop to the wallet in her back pocket. And 
then, feeling somehow younger and happier, she’d walked into town. She 
was minding her own business – simply picking up benign little things 
like milk and baby food and putting them in a basket – and it had not 
occurred to her that she was raising any eyebrows. At some point, she’d 
noticed the manager, a serious young man with straight brown hair, a red 
vest and a small white nametag reading “Bud Brown,” following her from 
aisle to aisle, asking her, each time they made eye contact, whether 
there was something he could help her with. The first few times, she’d 
simply said no and gone on shopping. 





When she didn’t get the hint – she had a feeling he didn’t like her but
didn’t understand why – he had finally asked if  she had seen the sign 
just inside the entrance to the market. The sign saying he had the right 
to refuse service to anyone. Mattie told him that she was simply buying 
food for her two-year-old daughter, and had gestured to the jars of 
Gerber baby food in her basket she had just taken down from the shelf in 
front of her. 


Brown, to Mattie’s amazement, had  reached into the basket, begun taking 
the small glass jars, one by one, and putting them right back on the 
shelf, and asked her if she would please leave. At first Mattie was too 
shocked to be angry. She told him she had no car; reminded him that this 
was the only grocery in ten miles and asked him where else she was 
supposed to get food for her baby. 



Brown had curtly told her that was her problem; his problem was to make 
sure that his customers didn’t feel threatened by strange persons in his 
store.


“How dare you,” Mattie began, feeling her anger build as she strove to 
keep her voice down, “I live here with my little girl-“


“Leave the premises,” Brown repeated.




-just down the street,” she continued, her voice rising anyway (and, to 
her dismay, her Southern accent becoming more pronounced), as some of the 
other shoppers turned to see what was going on, “in the house that 
belonged to Judy Frost, my aunt-“


“You’re creating a disturbance in my store. Either leave right now-“

“-my aunt who lived in Castle Rock since before you were born-“

“-or I will call the police and have them run you in.”




By then Mattie was shaking with rage. She was about to start screaming at 
this pompous little man, ready to tell him in front of everybody that he 
would burn in Hell for embarrassing her and stealing food from her 
child. Mattie, who by then had already had a few run-ins with the 
local law, was dimly aware that he had the power to ask her to leave and 
that if she refused to leave and hollered at him instead, he probably 
could call the cops and have her arrested for loitering or disturbing the 
peace or whatever. But at that moment she didn’t care. All that mattered 
– not only for her but for little Wanda Lee as well – was that she 
not let these strangers, these goddam Yankees, push her around anymore.


“Is there a problem? May I help you, Miss?” Mattie had turned, half 
expecting to see some huge  store security guard or maybe one of the 
promised cops. Instead, it had just been Ollie, little Ollie. 


Something about him – she later decided it was the way his quiet, 
perfectly ordinary tone and the  look of calm on his baby face contrasted 
with Brown’s hostility – told her he had come to help her, had come to 
save her from Brown. 


“Ollie,” Brown had said, “this woman refuses to leave the premises. 
Perhaps-“


“Sir,” Mattie decided to trust him – and go for his sympathy. “It ain’t 
like that at all. I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. I have a 
little girl, a two-year-old, at home; and I was  just..trying…to buy 
them some food.”


“No, Ma’am,” Brown continued in that curt tone of his, “you were creating 
a disturbance is  what you were doing.”


“How was I-“ Mattie began, her outrage flaring again. Ollie held up a 
hand in front of her. “Just one moment, please Miss.” He turned to Brown. 
“Bud, I saw her when she came in and just a few  minutes ago in the dairy 
section. All I could see her doing was shopping.” He paused. “And she  
was – she was humming a tune to herself.” Mattie looked down at her boot-
tops and smiled faintly. It had been “Danny Boy.”



“She was disturbing the other customers. They don’t want a punk or a 
skinhead or whatever in the store.”



“No, I’m not one of those folks,” Mattie had tried to make her voice as 
calm and quiet as Ollie’s. “I’ve lived here for about a year. I work for 
Miss Edna, in the laundry on Blaine Street. She lets  me bring my kids 
with me.” Her voice broke slightly.


“Look, Bud,” Ollie asked, “have any of the customers said anything about 
the lady, uh-“


“Mattie,” she supplied, “Mattie Lee Allen.”


“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mattie,” Ollie smiled. “I’m Ollie Weeks, 
the assistant manager.” Ollie  turned back to his boss.  Bud, has anyone 
said anything about Mattie?”



“Well, no,”  admitted Brown, sounding unsure for the first time, “but-but 
Alan and Harriet Turman are here now, and Mr. Sonnenschein is over by the 
lunch counter, and I don’t want our Jewish customers to feel threatened 
by anything or anyone in the store.”



“Oh, I babysit for the Turmans,” Mattie piped in.



“Then,” Ollie said, spreading his hands in front of him. “I think it’s 
safe to assume that the Turmans wouldn’t have a problem then,” Ollie 
assured him. “And I doubt Sonny Jim is afraid of anyone.” Jim 
Sonnenschein, Mattie later learned, was a huge, bearded biker type who 
owned and operated Sonny’s Cycle Repair at the edge of town. He was a 
head taller than Mattie and outweighed her by perhaps a hundred and fifty 
pounds. “And I think it is the policy of our chain of supermarkets, and 
of the district office, to help new mothers however we can.”



Brown still looked angry, but he seemed to have transferred his feelings 
from Mattie to Ollie. “In that case, Ollie, why don’t assist Miss Mattie 
with the rest of her shopping and then make sure she gets safely out of 

the store.” He emphasized the last four words, and then looked Mattie in 
the face once more. “You’re in good hands now. It was a pleasure meeting 
you, ma’am.” His tone of voice suggested it was anything but.



As Brown turned away, Mattie shook Ollie’s hand. “Thank you, sir, Thank 
you very much.”


“No problem at all, Mattie. And Bud- Bud’s a very nice man.” Before 
Mattie could argue with him, or his own facial expression betrayed him, 
Ollie quickly changed the subject. “Is there anything else you need?”

Mattie looked down at the basket, and then at the shelves of Gerber cans. 
“Just some more of these.” She began replacing the cans – mostly 
applesauce and pureed carrots for Wanda, and the soft finger sausages, 
which she herself liked – that Brown had taken out of the basket. Ollie 
helped her.



“I’m trying to place your accent. You from down South?”


“Very good!” Mattie brightened at the mention of her home – her real 
home. “From Missouri. A little town called Rubidoux, about an hour out of 
Jefferson City.”



“Have you been here long?”


“About a year. I live in Judy Frost’s old place.”


“Yes; she worked in City Hall for many years,” Ollie said, “a very nice 
lady. My condolences.” Aunt Judy had been dead for three months.


“It’s a small world, ain’t it?” Mattie was feeling good again – though 
she realized that Ollie certainly hadn’t known her Aunt Judy very well if 
he thought she was a nice lady. Mattie, of course, had made the same 
mistake. Although maybe she had been, once, before she’d been handed her 
death warrant.



“Yes,” Ollie nodded, “and this is a small town. I should tell you, 
though, that some of the folks here are a little…heavy-minded.”



“Like your boss?”



“No comment on that one,” Ollie said, and they both laughed. “It’s just 
that some people – not everyone, of course, but some – have some pretty 
fixed ideas about how young people should dress.” He looked at Mattie, 
saw she had begun to pout, and he quickly added, “I’m sorry; I  didn’t 
mean to offend you. I only meant…some people, people who don’t know how 
good you are to your kids, who don’t know Judy Frost was your aunt, might 
take a look at you and say, ‘whoa, who is this person and what’s she 
doing here?’”


Mattie had looked at him before answering, thinking about how the people 
in her very own hometown had, sometimes, reacted the same way. “No, 
you’re right. I don’t dress this way all the time. I-I did it today 
because I was feeling low. I wanted to feel young and pretty again.”


“Actually…you-you still are,” Ollie smiled shyly.


“You’re such a sweet man,” Mattie had said. Then she quickly thanked him, 
reminded him that she had to get home to her daughter, and moved away 
toward the checkout lines. Wanda, her first responsibility, 
was indeed waiting for her. And, of course, she always felt a little 
awkward and uncomfortable when talking with authority figures (nearly 
everyone in town, even an assistant store manager, seemed powerful to 
her). But she was very grateful that Ollie had approached her and helped 
her out; it was the first time anyone had really welcomed her to Castle 
Rock; and it flattered her to know that, even after all that had happened 
to her, someone still thought she was pretty.



“Ollie,” she asked him now, “do you by any chance have a military 
policeman in here?”



Ollie looked up from the groceries he was bagging. “Funny you should ask. 
One came in here just a minute ago, asking if we had any soldiers in 
here. I told him to look in the back.”




“Thanks.” Mattie moved past the tangled lines of shoppers, browsing for 
men in uniform. Finally, toward the meat counter, she saw a tall young 
black man, wearing a rather old-fashioned looking  khaki uniform with 
sergeant’s stripes, and a white helmet and black armband, both bearing 
the capital letters MP. He was talking – arguing, from the sound of it – 
with three other soldiers wearing Class A uniforms.



“…I don’t care about that,” the MP was saying as he shrugged his 
shoulders at something one of the others have said. “I told you; all 
leaves are canceled.”



Mattie, as the daughter of one soldier and the best friend of another, 
knew how much those words could hurt. About four months earlier, Rose had 
E-mailed Mattie, saying she’d been granted a two-week furlough. The two 
friends had planned to spend three whole days together (the balance of 
Rose’s leave being divided between a visit to her folks and the travel 
time to and from Baghdad). As the date of Rose’s arrival grew closer, she 
and Mattie E-mailed one another more and more often, until they were 
exchanging as many as five messages a day. Mattie, feeling like Rose was 
already in her home, had begun digging out some of the CDs they had 
listened to as teenagers and had begun to scour local video stores for a 
copy of “Heavy Metal,” which had been their favorite film in high school. 
All day long, she told Wanda and Victor stories (most of which they’d 
heard many, many times before) about all the trouble she and Rose used to 
get into back home. And then, the day before Rose was to leave for the 
U.S., she called Mattie and – her voice shaking with frustration and 
anger – explained that the leave had been revoked. Mattie, realizing her 
friend could do nothing about it, told her that she understood, and they 
vowed to get together as soon as Rose’s unit could spare her. Mattie had 
then hung up the phone, thrown herself face-first on her bed, and cried.



As Mattie approached them she heard one of the soldiers, a short and 
stocky young man with curly hair, start to ask a question, something 
about Pleasant Mountain. She saw another of the soldiers quickly step on 
his foot and shush him. The MP, perhaps seeing her approach, preempted 
the rest of his question by saying, “I don’t know why. Now, I’ve got to 
check the pharmacy. You men meet me back at the jeep in five minutes? 
That’s an order.” The MP turned and began to head towards the exit. 
Mattie trotted after him.



“Excuse me, sir?” He either didn’t hear her or was ignoring her. “Sir?” 
she tried again.



The man turned and faced her. “May I help you?” he asked, in an icy-
polite tone suggesting that he didn’t particularly want to.



“Well, I saw some…troop movements, I guess you’d call them…on Kansas Road 
a few minutes  ago. There were three transport trucks and a-“



“I’m afraid I can’t discuss that, Ma’am,” he said in that same cold 
voice, turning on his heel  again and striding the rest of the way out of 
the store.



Mattie was irritated, partly with the MP for brushing her off, but mainly 
with herself. She’d lost ten minutes trying to talk to him, time that 
would have been better spent getting back home before the mist closed 
completely around her. She could see it now through the plate glass front 
of the store, a wall of white pushing its way through the shopping center 
from the north. She had no idea how she was going to get home without 
walking right into it (it still seemed dangerous somehow), but she 
realized she’d better get started right away.



Mattie took one step, then another, towards the exit, and then froze 
along with nearly everyone else. The market was filling with a sound she 
didn’t want to hear, one that confirmed her worst fears about the mist: A 
high wailing mechanical sound that went slowly up, then down, and then 
up again between a high tone and a lower one. It seemed to be coming from 
above the store and to their right, perhaps from the civil defense siren 
mounted on the Civic Center down the road. She recalled her father once 
using the term “doomsday siren” to refer to those things, and all of 
the sudden she wished that her father, or Rose, was there to tell her 
what this was, protect her, to get her home to her children. But her 
father was now dead and Rose was six thousand miles away.



But then she thought again of Wanda and Victor, the broken chimney and 
the cold air coming down the fireplace, and she began to move forward 
once more. Just as she did, though, she saw a man, an elderly man with 
curly gray hair, just outside the glass doors, coming towards the store 
at a dead run. She stopped again as she saw the blood running down from 
his nose. Had he been in the mist, maybe running into – literally – 
whatever it is she had fleetingly seen or felt by the side of Fisher’s 
house?

 

“Something in the mist,” the man gasped as he pulled open the door. 
People began to surround him and Mattie could hear someone telling him to 
calm down, that it would be all right. 



The man wasn’t having it. “Something in the mist took John Lee!” Someone 
else – it sounded like Ollie this time – told him again to calm down. 



“Something in the mist took John Lee-” the man said a  bit more softly, 
either because he was finally calming down or because he was out of 
breath, “-and I could hear him screaming.” 



All at once, everyone seemed to lose their cool. The man himself began 
screaming, this time imploring Ollie to shut the doors. Several people – 
including a big, beefy young guy in blue denim who had been standing next 
to Mattie, rushed for the exit, as the mist finally swept over the market 
and old man warned them again not to go out. Mattie desperately wanted to 
follow them – there was, she knew, no more time; she had to get home now 
– but a terrible fear kept her where she was. And just as she managed to 
tell herself that nothing really bad could be out there - that maybe John 
Lee, whoever he was, had simply tripped over his own two feet in the mist 
and yelled in surprise or pain, that the siren had simply been to warn 
motorists not to drive in the zero visibility – a man just outside the 
market began to scream. 



The man screamed once, a second time, and then made a terrible choking 
noise and was silent. 



Two men in mechanic’s coveralls yanked the doors shut, and everyone fell 
back from the exit.



“It’s death,” a woman whispered in a deep, theatrical voice. Mattie’s 
reeling mind was not quite able to place who it was, but somehow she 
associated that voice with danger. And then, as if in confirmation of 
what the woman had said, Mattie was knocked to the ground (landing 
squarely and painfully on her bad knee) as the entire building began to shake. 



People, too many to count, began to scream (although none as desperately 
as the man outside) as cans and boxes toppled from the shelves; one of 
the overhanging lighting fixtures crashed down from above; and a large 
crack zigzagged across one of the plate-glass windows. The shaking went 
on for what seemed like a minute or more. Something else seemed subtly 
different; Mattie finally realized that the siren had fallen down to a 
low, monotonous, foghorn-like noise before cutting off altogether. 



And then it was over. Mattie and the people around her slowly and 
uncertainly got up off the ground, only straightening up when they were 
sure the shaking had stopped. A few people,  including Bud Brown, said 
something about an earthquake; Old Man Cornell – who had sold her that 
wonderful worthless junk car – insisted that the nearby chemical mill had 
blown up.



Brown walked to the front of the checkout lanes and spread his hands. 
“Everybody,” he began in that same cold authoritarian tone he’d used on 
her on her first trip to the market, “everybody, just stay put, okay? 
Just stay inside the store.” Ollie and one or two others murmured their 
assent.



Mattie knew, though, that she simply had no more time. Wanda and Victor, 
especially Victor, had to be as terrified as she. She realized that, at 
this point, she had no way of knowing if they were all right. Had she 
ever told them what to do in case of an earthquake? For that matter, had 

she ever even told them what an earthquake was? She couldn’t remember. 
Did they know to go under a table for cover? And even if they did, would 
the cheap secondhand furniture protect them? For that matter, was their 
rickety little house still standing? Or were her children – like  
everything else in her miserable and worthless life -  now buried under a 
heap of rubble? 



She tried to speak and found she had no voice. Swallowing, she tried 
again. “I can’t stay here. I can’t. I’ve got to get home my kids.” She 
hooked the strap of her bag over her right arm.



“You can’t,” said a heavy, middle-aged woman standing by the front. “It’s 
death out there. It’s the end of days.” She was the same woman who had 
spoken earlier. Mattie recognized her now and she felt a chill spread 
through her whole body. It was Mrs. Carmody – or “Mrs. Crazy” as 

Mattie and her kids privately called her – the proprietor of one of the 
small “antique” stores (actually secondhand junk stores) in town where 
Mattie sometimes browsed for the cameo brooches and other old-fashioned 
costume jewelry that were part of her “schoolmarm” look. Mattie had gone 
into Carmody’s store exactly once, with Wanda and Victor, on a Saturday 
afternoon a few months after she’d taken the job at the library. For the 
first few minutes, the older woman had been friendly enough, plying 
Mattie’s children with taffy, and apologizing that she had one or two 
brooches, and taking down Mattie’s name and number and promising to call 
her if any more came in. Then the woman had begun, quite literally, 
talking crazy. She had asked Mattie if she was from the South. Mattie, 
always happy to talk about her homeland, had brightened and said yes. 
Mrs. Carmody had asked if she was Christian. Mattie had said not really, 
she’d been baptized Catholic but hadn’t set foot in a church in ages. 
Mrs. Carmody, in a pitying and contemptuous voice of a schoolteacher 
trying to explaining an obvious point to a stupid child, had asked her if 
she didn’t know that Catholics weren’t Christians. Mattie – who had long 
ago given up on the Church and religion in general – had nonetheless felt 
compelled to address what she perceived as an insult to her family 
members – and friends like Rose – who were practicing Catholics. So, 
hoping it didn’t set the woman off any further, she’d begun to say that 
Catholics were a different kind of Christian than Protestants, an older 
kind, but they were really all quite similar, kind of like an extended 
family. Mrs. Carmody had responded in that same slow, patronizing voice, 
with three words: “Coons, Kikes, Catholics.” Mattie had asked her what in 
God’s name she was talking about. “If you’re from the South, dearie, you 
should know just what I mean. That’s what the letters ‘KKK’ stand for: 
‘Koons, Kikes, Katholics.’ The three peoples who aren’t welcome in the 
South.” Mrs. Carmody had leaned back in her chair, smiling triumphantly. 
Mattie had realized, to her horror, that Wanda and Victor were listening 
to this strange woman. She had curly thanked Mrs. Carmody for her time, 
hustled her kids out the door, and had never come  back or spoken to her 
again. She’d since learned that almost everyone in town had had bad  
experiences, similar to hers, when dealing with Mrs. Carmody. 



Right now, one of the cashiers was disgustedly telling the older  woman 
to please stop it. 



A heavyset, well-dressed man in a plaid shirt and blue windbreaker – he 
looked to Mattie like he might be one of the out-of-towners who came up 
here on weekends - urged everyone to relax.



“I’m sorry,” Mattie repeated. “I can’t just stay here!”



“Ma’am, no,” said the old man who had run into the store, “you can’t go 
out there.”



“Could be a poisonous gas cloud,” said Mattie’s good friend Mr. Cornell.



“Didn’t you hear that man screaming?” asked someone else.



“I agree,” Ollie said. “Let’s just figure things out-“



Mattie realized that no one else wanted to leave. But how could she 
possibly get home by herself?  “You’re not listening,” she insisted, “I 
can’t just…stay here!” She looked from face to face and no one seemed to 
understand. “Wanda’s looking after little Victor; she’s only eight,”  she 
tried to explain, as her tears came again. “Sometimes she forgets she’s 
supposed to be watching him, you know?” Mattie knew Wanda would be angry 
with her for saying that, and – as she imagined her daughter alone and 
frightened in the house – she instantly regretting having said it. 



Last weekend, the three of them had been watching TV in the living room 
when Mattie had seen the mail truck drive past the front yard. She was 
going out to get the mail, she announced, and asked Wanda to keep an eye 
on Victor. Mattie was gone longer than expected. The mail included a form 
letter from a collection agency regarding a doctor bill that was several 

months overdue. Mattie, perplexed at first, suddenly remembered that she 
had not paid the bill. She hadn’t had enough money that month; and by the 
time her next paycheck came in, she had forgotten about the bill, having 
accidentally tossed it out. Interest was now due, and she was sure her 
credit rating had been damaged. And, once again, she did not have enough 
money to pay the bill. She had leaned against the mailbox for several 
minutes, seething and wondering what to do. Finally, she had calmed down 
and gone back inside. She saw Wanda in the living room, but Victor was 
seemingly gone. Mattie, already upset by the collection notice, angrily 
demanded to know where Victor was. “He was here a minute ago,” Wanda 
said, “and then he said he was hungry, so maybe the kitchen-“



“You mean you don’t know!? Mattie asked incredulously. “I told you not to 
let him out of your sight!”



“Mama, that’s not fair,” Wanda protested. He was here just a moment ago.”



“Don’t tell me what’s ‘fair,’ little one,” Mattie’s voice was rising.



“Hey, what’s going on?” Victor asked as he came out of the kitchen, 
holding a candy bar.



“Thank God,” Mattie said, half to herself, and then ran to Victor, 
kneeled before him, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Did your sister 
let you alone? Did your bad, bad little sister leave you alone?”



“No, mommy,” Victor said in confusion.



“Mama, he-“ Wanda began.



“Wanda Lee Allen,” Mattie turned to her daughter, “don’t argue with me. I 
told you not to let your brother out of your sight.” She turned back to 
Victor, began running her hands through his straight black hair. “He 
could have fallen, cut himself with a knife-“



“Mommy, I told her I was going to the kitchen,” Victor piped up. “I was 
only there for a minute. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”



“Don’t say that, Victor,” Wanda said. “It’s not his fault, mama – and-and 
it’s not mine, either.”

Mattie let go of Victor and stood up.  “Have it your way, then,” she said 
sullenly. “Wanda, you do such a mighty fine job looking after him, why 
don’t you just watch him for the rest of the day? And fix him his dinner 
tonight and his breakfast tomorrow morning. And your own. After all, I’m 
not his mother; you are!” Mattie walked past her children, switched off 
the TV, stomped into her bedroom and slammed and locked the door behind 
her.



Twenty minutes later, Wanda had knocked on the door. She told her mother 
she was sorry she’d made her angry, but still insisted she’d done nothing 
wrong. Mattie, who had by then calmed down, told Wanda there was no need 
to apologize, that all Wanda had to do in the future was to  please 
follow Victor into the kitchen if he went there; that she herself was 
sorry for losing her temper and spoiling their time together. But it had 
surprised - and frankly annoyed - Mattie that Wanda was starting to 
question her, to argue with her.



Mattie, reliving this, again regretted what she’d said and done as she 
continued to plead for help getting home to her children. “…I told them 
I’d only be gone for a few minutes,” Mattie repeated. “She’s only eight.”



“For their sakes,” said the old man with the bloody nose, “don’t.” 



Mattie looked around. She’d come there on foot. She was terrified of 
walking out into the mist. 



Surely someone would be willing to drive her home, or at least walk with 
her so she wouldn’t be alone. “Well?” she asked. “Isn’t anybody gonna 
help me?” There was no response. “Won’t someone here see a lady home?”



She turned to Bud Brown. “You?” Brown looked back at her but said 
nothing. He finally shook his head miserably, and she could see the fear 
in his eyes.



She looked then at the heavy, well-dressed man who had earlier urged 
everyone to stay calm. “You?” The man immediately turned his eyes away 
from her, opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it again.



To her left, she saw a familiar face, a man she’d never actually met but 
who she recognized. David Drayton was a fantasy artist, drawing movie 
posters, graphic novels and such, who lived in a large house near the 
center of time. Mattie, in her old life, had loved fantasy and science 
fiction. It had been part of the culture she shared with Rose and her 
other friends at home. In those days, she’d had a huge, treasured 
collection of old “Heavy Metal” magazines that she read again and again 
(most of the people in her small town thought she was nuts), and could 
actually remember seeing one or two of Drayton’s early illustrations 
there. She’d always had it in the back of her head to introduce herself – 
tell him how she’d appreciated his surreal, illustrated version of Ray 
Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” – but she was just too shy to go through 
with it. He was a handsome man in his late thirties, holding a golden-
haired little boy who looked to be about Victor’s age. Perhaps, as a 
father himself, he would understand her need to get back home. So  she 
finally summoned her nerve and spoke to Drayton for the first time. 
“You?”



“Ma’am, please,” he said, “I have my own boy to worry about.” 



Mattie’s fear began to give way to a mounting rage as she realized that 
no one would help her. But that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, should 
it? Castle Rock was not, and would never be, her home, and to most of 
these folks she was nothing but a domestic servant, poor white trash  
from another part of the country they didn’t understand. Someone to use; 
not to understand or treat kindly or even fairly. She’d cleaned up their 
homes, served them their food and drink in the local coffee shops and 
bars, mended their clothes, did everything they were too good or too lazy  
to do for themselves; and after two years of doing menial work for them 
they’d rewarded her by allowing her to read to their children. They 
treated her like a child to her face – except, of course, for the police, 
who harassed her endlessly - and behind her back her neighbors made fun 
of the way she talked, called her a “junkie,” “skinhead,” even a “dyke.” 
The people here despised her. And Mattie despised them. All she had left 
in the world were her beautiful little babies, who were worth a thousand 
of these selfish, cowardly people around her. She’d rather die out there 
in the mist than be in this place for another instant.



“I hope you all rot in Hell,” she muttered as she stalked toward the 
exit. 



“Ma’am, please-“ Ollie began. Mattie shoved him out of the way. “Don’t 
talk to me!”



She reached the door, pushed it open – and hesitated and turned back 
around to face the others. A little of the mist had drifted into the 
market. And once again, there was that terrible cold, that  faint, 
peculiar “burning” smell – and that feeling, just beyond her actual 
physical senses, of something else in the mist. Part of her knew she was 
as good as committing suicide by going out there. And it would not be 
almost painless, like her first attempt with the pills and alcohol; or 
merely uncomfortable like her second try in the bathtub with her father’s 
old-fashioned straight razor. She sensed this time it would be something 
terrible, maybe even something that had never happened to anyone before. 
And if she didn’t make it home, Wanda and Victor would have no one. They 
would be left to face the mist – and whatever other traps life had for 
them – alone.



But that had already happened, she realized. Wanda and Victor were alone 
now, certainly wondering what was happening, wondering where their mother 
was and whether she was coming back. She and her kids thought alike on 
many things; if she could sense danger in the mist, they could too. If 
the mist – or perhaps something that was in the mist – came down their 
chimney… 

No. She had to get to them right away. Even if this was the end of the 
world, she had to try to make sure they were together - in one another’s 
arms if possible - when it happened. Walking out the door might be the 
final thing she could do for them, and she had to do it. 



So Mattie stepped through the door and let it swing shut behind her. That 
strange smell assailed her again, and she remembered Cornell’s warning 
about the chemical mills. She took one deep breath, waiting to see if the 
mist seared her throat or made her dizzy. It didn’t. She took another. 

Whatever had happened to the air, she could still breathe. 



She looked straight ahead and then to her left. The hardware store and 
the other buildings in the shopping center were no longer visible. 

The sun itself was barely visible, looking like the moon behind a thick 
layer of cloud. She could not see Kansas Road, but she had gone to and 
from the market during so many lunch hours that she could probably get 
there with her eyes closed if she had to. She could see the fire lane of 
the parking lot and the first row of cars – about ten or so feet ahead of 
where she was - just fine. And she had the gun, the speed loader, and the 
box of shells in her purse. She was terrified, of course, but she could 
do this.



Mattie, walking briskly, set off to her left towards her home and 
children. As she walked, she unzipped the bag, and dug in with both 
hands. Her left hand – she was a lefty – closed around the small handgun, 
as her right found the speed loader that was already full of six .22-
caliber bullets. She took them both out. She fumbled the cylinder open, 
put the speed loader in, released the bullets, and snapped the cylinder 
shut. Quickly dropping the speed loader back in her purse, she closed 
both hands around the tiny gun, her left index finger over the trigger, 
slowly waving it in front of her as she walked through the mist. 





III.



Mattie’s confidence lasted perhaps ten seconds, right up until she heard 
the gunshot. She yelped and froze in her tracks. For a moment, she 
thought it had come from her own gun – but no, that wasn’t possible, was 
it? Even a tiny gun like the .22 Rose had gotten her had a little recoil; 
if it had gone off, the gun would have bucked slightly in her hands. And 
the sound would have been different. Not necessarily louder than what 
she’d just heard, but different. The day Rose had gotten her the .22, she 
had taken Mattie to a target range in neighboring Bridgeport and showed 
her how to use it. (The proprietor, a good ol’ boy with a full red beard 
and a beer belly straining behind a T-shirt reading “God, Guns and Guts,” 
had clearly been thrilled at having two young women, both with boyish 
figures and crew cuts, come into his store; he’d done everything he  
could to make them feel unwelcome until Rose showed him her military I.D. 
and its notation that she’d been wounded twice in Afghanistan.) The .22, 
when fired at the range, had made a little spitting noise. Mattie, who 
found the sound vaguely amusing, had imitated it over and over with her 
own lips and tongue when they went for a drink afterwards: Psht. Psht. 
Psht. (Rose had shaken her head in mock disgust, and swore she’d just 
given a deadly weapon to the world’s oldest child.) The sound Mattie had 
just heard, while almost as loud, was much deeper and came  with an echo. 
Powww. It also seemed to be coming from somewhere ahead of Mattie and to 
her right, where King’s Pharmacy would have been. And there it went 
again, several times in succession. Powww…powww…powww.



Mattie, still rooted in place, turned to her right, but could see nothing 
that gave her a clue as to  what might have happened. All she could see 
was the blacktop of the parking lot and a few cars. Beyond that, the mist 
obscured everything.



“Hello?” she called out softly. There was no response. “Hey, there!” she 
shouted. Her voice echoed once or twice in the mist. And then, as the 
echoes died away, she heard two more shots, followed by screams, again 
coming from the other end of the parking lot. First a man’s (it 

sounded vaguely like he was saying “get behind me”), and then two people 
– one sounded like a woman, the other like a teenage girl – screaming at 
once. 



And then she heard the most terrible thing. One of the voices, probably 
the younger girl, began to scream first the word “Mom,” and then the word 
“Mommy,” over and over again, each time louder, longer, more 
hysterically, as the girl began crying as well. Mattie listened for the 
other voice, the voice of the older woman, but she could no longer hear 
it. 



She felt herself being pulled in two directions at once. She  imagined 
the girl near the pharmacy – she was sure that’s where the shooting and 
voices were coming from – calling for her mommy (although she could not 
imagine what had happened to make the girl cry out for her mother like 
that). Then she imagined Wanda Lee and Victor Lee at home, each of them 
calling for Mattie in the same terrified voice. But they were at home, 
she had closed and locked the door behind her, and if they stayed in the 
house they might be safe. This girl and her mother, though, they were-



“Hang on!” Mattie, both hands wrapped around the .22, took a step to her 
right, towards the pharmacy. But then the cries for “Mommy” lost their 
coherence, spiraling up and up into a desperate, wordless, animal scream 
like none Mattie had ever heard before – “aaaaaaAAAA-“  – and then 
quickly fading away. 



“Mommy…” Mattie whispered softly to herself, as she realized there was 
nothing she could do to save the girl, that the girl and Mommy were 
probably dead - or maybe worse. She had to get home to Wanda and Victor. 
Still brandishing the gun, she turned all the way back to her left and 
took off across the parking lot, looking ahead, side-to-side, and over 
her shoulders (Rose told her that was called the “circle of awareness”) 
as she went. She fled past aisles full of parked cars  – which  made 
sense because the hardware store and the market had been jammed – but she 
saw no other people in the lot. The lot had been full of people not ten 
minutes earlier, but of course that had been before the doomsday siren 
and the mist – and the man screaming outside the market, the gunshots, 
and the girl calling for her mother. 



As she neared the end of the aisle (at least she thought it was the end; 
she couldn’t see more than about ten feet ahead of herself, but she 
thought she saw a point where the blacktop of the lot gave way to a 
lighter paved sidewalk), something appeared in her right forward 
peripheral vision, a kind of dark blur or shadow on or above one of the 
cars in the aisle, giving her that same funny sense of seeing-but-not-
seeing that she’d had when she’d briefly leaned into the mist next to Mr. 
Fisher’s house. 



Mattie stopped running, swung the gun to her right towards the car (like 
she’d seen a SWAT man do on TV the other night, while conducting a room-
to-room search of a house), and turned.



Through the mist, something large and yellowish-orange, perched on the 
trunk of the car, swung into view. Because of its size and color and 
shape, Mattie assumed that she was about to see dog, perhaps an Irish 
Setter or a Golden Retriever, perhaps looking for its master in the mist. 
And for a split second, a dog was what she saw, and she began to calm 
down. But then, as she finished her turn to the side and her eyes 
focused, the big orange dog turned out to be something…else: A plump, 
cartoonish thing with a host of chubby, jointed legs, a bulbous yellow-
and-brown striped body, and worst of all, an outsized round head with big 
black eyes and what looked like a grinning mouth with teeth. It reminded 
her – vaguely – of the potato bugs she and Rose would find from time to 
time in Rose’s plastic wading pool when they were kids. But this thing 
was half her size, and the old Chevy was bouncing up and down slightly as 
it thumped its striped abdomen softly against the hood.



Mattie wondered, just for an instant, whether she was hallucinating and 
decided she was not. For ten years – ever since they’d taken her old life 
away - she’d had crying spells, panic attacks and fits of impotent rage 
that came without warning and left her neighbors, the people she worked 
with, and even her children, uncertain and put-out and sometimes a little 
afraid of her. But she had never, to her knowledge, seen anything that 
wasn’t there, and certainly not a monster like this. Even the drugs she 
lived on – the Vicodin, the other painkillers, and the marijuana – didn’t 
produce hallucinations.



No, this was real, and now she knew why the man had screamed when he left 
the store; what they had been shooting at near the pharmacy; and why the 
little girl had screamed so loudly for her mother. 



“Go away,” Mattie whispered at the orange thing. “Please, go away.” The 
orange thing didn’t regard her. It just continued bouncing up and down – 
somehow the motion reminded Mattie of humping – on the car.



“Go away!”Mattie shrieked as she fired twice at the thing, hitting it in 
the face and blowing away its “grin” and one of its eyes. There was no 
blood – she wondered fleetingly whether insects even had blood – but it 
continued its obscene bouncing, which was now stronger and more rapid 
(with the car lurching up and down), and some of its legs began to shake 
back and forth, pounding against the metal of the car with the force of 
fists. 



Mattie, shaking her head in horror, turned away from the monster, began 
to run once more toward Kansas Road and home – and abruptly stopped. What 
else, she wondered, might be out there? More like this? The thing might 
be dead or at least dying (it was still convulsing and pounding against 
the car), but she’d used up two of her bullets. What if there were four 
more things out there? Or eight more? Or a hundred? Should she go back in 
the market? But that  would mean going all the way back through the 
parking lot – and past the pharmacy. She was sure she could hear more 
thumping sounds elsewhere in the lot. No, the market was too far too-



“Car,” she said, in the same tone of simple realization and satisfaction 
little Victor might have had when he matched a picture to a written word. 
“Cars!” There were little shelters all around  her. Some of them, of 
course, would be locked or would have car alarms on, but (as she well 
knew, having stolen a car or two – among other things - back home) some 
people would leave the doors unlocked, particularly in a small town like 
Castle Rock. Some people, she knew, were even dumb enough to leave the 
keys in the glove box or above the sunshades. 



And then, just as she knew what she had to do, she ran out of time to do 
it. She heard that fists-against-metal sound again, this time ahead of 
her. An SUV at the very end of the aisle – four or cars down from where 
she’d shot the “potato bug,” began to rock violently, and she heard the 
sound of breaking glass. 



Mattie – by now a little calmer, given that she’d already killed one of  
the intruders (fairly easily at that) and had figured out a way to get 
home – assumed what Rose had called the “Weaver stance,” holding the gun 
out in front of her while planting her feet apart; and waited for the 
next orange bug with a big silly head to appear. 



And, once again, she got more than she bargained for: On top of the SUV 
was not just one thing  but three. And right away she knew these things 
were more dangerous than the silly orange thing bouncing up and down on 
the car. These were hunched, black, hairy things, the size of  dogs but 
shaped more like spiders, each with eight – twelve? – more?? – jointed 
legs, round red glass-like things at the front of their heads that might 
have been eyes, above open mouths with long, crooked dirty-white teeth. 
They were crawling over the top of the SUV, perhaps ten or  twelve feet 
away from her, just within her line of sight.



And then the biggest of the three looked at her – at least its head was 
pointed directly at her – and screeched at her.

 

Mattie was too stunned to scream back, as she had at the orange thing. 
Staying in her target stance (it felt far from natural but she was too 
shocked to move), she pointed the .22 at the largest of the spider things 
and squeezed the trigger. It screeched again; something black (it 
looked like tar and smelled worse) erupted from its head; and it toppled 
backwards off the SUV. 



The other two made that same horrible screeching sound. Mattie moved the 
.22 slightly to her left and fired again. A second spider erupted in the 
spray of black goo as it was lifted off the roof. The third reared up on 
its hind legs – Mattie could see its belly was slate-gray with black 
stripes, and she could hear a spitting sound somewhat like the psht-psht 
sound her own gun made. She wondered if it was afraid of her, or perhaps 
getting ready to retreat; and if so, whether she could safely run past 
it. But then, as she began moving to the side, she saw something long and 
white drifting slowly down by her side. It was almost invisible against 
the mist, but it contrasted well against the bright red car to her left. 
It looked vaguely like a piece of crepe paper, perhaps like a streamer on 
a maypole. It landed on the roof of the red car, making a soft sizzling 
sound. When Mattie glanced down at the car (daring to take her eyes off 
the spider for only a split-second), she could see the paint on the roof 
begin to blister and bubble. And some more of the strand of whatever-it-
was still floating in the air in front of her.



She quickly sashayed to her left, out of the way of the deadly streamer, 
and fired once more at the remaining spider. It flipped over onto its 
back, legs flailing, and, even against the whiteness of the mist, she 
could see more of the streamers jetting up into the air from the spider’s 
belly. Some of the black goo sprayed against the streamer. Even from this 
distance, she could hear it sizzling like blobs of grease jumping out of 
a frying pan.



Praying that she wasn’t running headlong into death (she was pretty sure 
she had only one shot left), Mattie charged across the aisle towards a 
large, sturdy-looking, two-door brown Oldsmobile. As she ran toward it, 
she tried to peer above it and head of it to see if anything else 
was there. She felt sick as she realized the orange things or the spider-
things (or who knows what else) might be waiting for her under the car, 
or just beyond the car in the mist, where she couldn’t see them, but she 
also she knew that if she did not take cover, she would be dead in 
minutes, just as the little girl had died across the parking lot, but 
maybe screaming for Wanda and Victor-



Mattie grabbed the chrome door handle on the driver’s side, pushed in the 
button, and yanked. It was locked. “Fuck it!” She thought of smashing the 
window (or of shooting it open) but realized she’d have no way closing 
the hole after she got in. Then she thought of trying the passenger’s 
door but realized she’d have to back up, go around the rear of the car, 
and then forward again. 



And she knew she didn’t have time for that. She tried the passenger door 
of the car to the left of the Olds, some kind of silver sports car. This 
door, to her relief, was unlocked. She pulled it open and began to get 
in-


When she saw that the window – the INSIDE of the window – was covered 
with little orange potato bugs – as was the motionless, man-sized lump 
seated on the driver’s side and slumped over the wheel.



Mattie, revolted, slammed the door and backpedaled away from it, puking 
as she went. She stumbled against the Olds, hit her head against the 
window hard enough to see stars, and went down on her knees (the Vicodin 
had worn off and her bad knee hurt like hell), dropping the gun. She 
heard – or thought she could hear – something else scurrying towards her.



And then, as she picked the gun – and herself – back up, she heard (and 
also somehow felt) a strange sound: Not bouncing, not hissing, but a 
strange, deep, vaguely mechanical groaning sound, sort of like a 
nineteenth-century locomotive beginning to chug into life. She was also 
aware that there was, somehow, less light than there had been a moment 
before, as though something were blocking out what was left of the 
sunlight. The groaning noise came again, vaguely from the direction of 
the market.



“What-? What-?” Mattie wildly looked back and forth for shelter. There 
were two cars directly ahead of her, the ones parked right in front of 
the Olds and the sports car. If she could just get into either of those-

The car to her right – a small, expensive-looking white one with a New 
York vanity plate (JGMESQ) – was facing toward her. The one to her left 
was an ancient, beat-up green station wagon with cracked, fake wood 
paneling facing away from her.



Mattie chose the station wagon, partly because she herself was a leftie; 
because she thought she could get the door open more quickly because the 
car was facing away from her; and above all because she imagined the 
owner of such a wreck would be less likely to lock the door since the 
car probably wasn’t worth stealing. She crawled along the passenger side, 
lifted herself up just enough to peer inside (the car was full of junk – 
books, CD cases and the like – but she saw nothing alive; she also saw 
that all of the windows and doors appeared to be closed) grabbed the door 
handle, and tugged-



-and the door pulled open. Glancing hurriedly around her (she could see 
nothing but she heard that horrible groaning sound again), Mattie threw 
herself into the passenger side, slammed the door behind her, and pressed 
the lock button under the window.



The inside of the car was dark and full of unfamiliar shapes. Mattie 
turned on the dome light (as it came on, like a rapid sunrise, she half-
expected it to illuminate some giant orange bug hidden in the car. She 
then began to slowly and carefully inspect the car, for things she hoped 
were there (keys, another gun or something else she could use as a 
weapon) but mainly for things that she prayed were not there. After 
checking the glove box and the space under the seat (the station 
wagon had bench seats, not bucket seats), she crawled into the back, 
inspected that space and found nothing amiss; and finally checked the 
storage space in the back. 



The owner was a slob and a pack-rat – with a half-empty water bottle in a 
drink holder on the dash, an ashtray full of butts, a collection of empty 
fast-food bags; an even larger collection of bad CDs; and a still larger 
collection of used paperback books on every subject from Marxism to 
bondage – but there was nothing alive inside the car except Mattie 
herself.



Mattie also waited, for a minute or to, to see if any of the things in 
the lot – the orange bugs or  the black ones, or that huge whatever-it-
was – would try to follow her to the car. But nothing did. She sat there, 
in silence, as her heart slowed down. She looked at her watch – it was 
close to 2 o’clock, over an hour after she’d left Wanda and Victor at 
home. Mattie prayed that they had listened to her and kept the doors 
locked. If so, and they sat tight, they should be able to-



Then, with cold despair, she remembered the chimney, and the cold air 
filtering down the fireplace. Her babies were not safe. The flue had been 
clogged with bricks, cement, wood and shingles; and she didn’t think 
there was a space big enough for one of the orange things or the  spider-
things to get inside. And, she reminded herself, nothing had tried to 
break into the market; and thus far the things had left her alone in the 
station wagon (although she shuddered as she remembered how the small 
sports car had become infested). But what if – and she hated herself 
for thinking of these things but she couldn’t stop – something 
accidentally broke open a window, the way the three spiders had broken 
the window on the SUV? Or suppose something began banging against the 
door; and the kids thought it was Mattie or Mr. Fisher? Or what if-



No, Mattie had to get home, and as quickly as she could. She looked once 
more in the glove box, under the front seat, and on the sunshades for a 
set of keys. Finding none, she smiled faintly and scooted over in front 
of the steering wheel. 



Years ago, during the happiest time of Mattie’s life – that time of true 
friends, first loves, drunken midnight rides, a time of pushing back 
frontiers while coming of age in Rubidoux, Missouri, way out in the 
Ozarks – what Mattie thought of as the Time of the Old South -  Mattie’s 
best friend, same as now, had been Rose Sullivan. Rose had had a brother 
Mike, a big, bearded bear of a young man who resembled a pirate king. 
Mike, like Mattie and Rose and most of the other people in town, was 
poor, and so he worked  two jobs: One legitimate (as a clerk at Duke’s 
Liquor) and one doing various illegal odds and ends for a man from 
Jefferson City named Ted Maxwell. It was impossible to dislike Ted 
Maxwell, a dapper, handsome, middle-aged gentleman with silver hair, a 
lean face and deep-set blue eyes shadowed by a large Stetson hat (Mattie 
always thought he looked like Lee Marvin). If he wanted something from 
you, he would “go to work on you” – flattering you, talking you up about 
the things that interested you, always happy to buy you a drink and to 
pay for whatever you did for him. He was fun – and profitable – to be 
around, even if you knew he was leading you into trouble. (And later he 
had indeed gotten Mike into trouble, using him to run a batch of 
methamphetamine that turned out to be poisoned; Mike had gone away for 
two whole years because of that one.) Stealing cars had been part of the 
scope of Mike’s work for Maxwell. And one evening, when all  of them were 
fifteen, Mike had shown Mattie and Rose how to do it. Mattie had ended up 
boosting three of them – and being rewarded each time with five twenty-
dollar bills, which seemed like such an enormous amount of money to the 
two poor young girls.



She thought back to what Mike had taught her. “First off,” he’d said, 
“take the cover and panels off the tumbler – that’s the place where you 
put  the key.” (Mattie did so now, with a little help from the claw head 
of the hammer she’d purchased earlier that day.)


“Then, you have your ignition setup – that’s the little panel there, with 
the wires by the rear of the tumbler. See how they’re different colors? 
Well, those ones there are positive, and those ones are negative. Strip a 
little of the coating off…” (Mattie had a little Swiss Army knife in her 
purse, ideally suited for that purpose.) 



“Now, twist them together…” (Mattie imagined that Mike and Rose were 
there beside her,  encouraging her.)



Mattie let out a Rebel yell of delight as the engine turned over and the 
car roared to life. And beside her, she imagined that Mike and Rose were 
cheering as well. The fantasy Mike clapped her on the back while Rose 
planted a kiss on her  right cheek.



“Wait! Wait!” she heard Mike say. “Now that the car’s started, don’t keep 
them wires together” (And so she carefully separated them, making sure 
she held onto the insulated handle of the  knife).



Mattie was ready to put the car into gear when she had a thought: 
Insects, she knew, were  attracted to light – but would they be attracted 
to the heat coming from the car, or maybe the  smell of the exhaust? She 
waited ten, twenty, thirty seconds, looking out the windshield and  each 
of the windows (not that she could see much). As far as she could tell, 
nothing was approaching the car. She switched on the headlights, then the 
high beams and, very slowly, began to maneuver the car out of the lot. 
(Even with the high beams, she could only see about fifteen feet ahead.) 
As she reached the edge of the parking lot, she heard a loud “crunch,”  
followed by a “squish.” She smiled grimly. That was one less of those 
bastards. One for the little  girl.



Mattie could barely see anything on Kansas Road, other than a few cars 
resting motionless on the shoulder of the road (she shuddered to see that 
one of them had a door open), couldn’t tell if there was any cross-
traffic coming. She remembered the police cruiser tearing down the road 
and the military convoy coming back up, briefly imagined the station 
wagon being flattened by a tank  or an armored personnel carrier 
appearing from nowhere. As she turned the car left (again, going  very 
slowly; the speedometer said she was going less than five miles an hour), 
she kept the horn pressed down, wondering if there was anyone who could 
hear her. And then she began to wonder, more fearfully, whether anything 
might be attracted by the sound. She took her hand off the horn as soon 
as she had completed the turn. 



“The radio…” Mattie’s first intention had been to see if she could get a 
little music. She did almost everything to music, singing lullabies to 
Wanda Lee and Victor Lee, singing in the shower, wearing her Sony Discman 
when putting the books back in order at the library. Irish folk music  or 
country-western to remind her of her home; Led Zeppelin to remind her of 
those wild nights tearing down the empty highways with Rose; Fifties 
music to remind her of her dad (when he’d been stationed at Fort Biloxi, 
he and his fellow soldiers had always gotten themselves amped up for 
their weekly brawls with the sailors from a nearby Navy base by listening 
to The Students’ rollicking song “Every Day of the Week.”). But then she 
realized that if the radio was working, it might give her something more 
important and useful than music – emergency announcements or  warnings, 
even a weather report. So she switched on the radio, slowly searching 
through the AM band and then the FM. All of the stations were either 
completely silent or gave varying degrees of static. 



No luck there. Careful to keep her eyes on the road (although how 
important that was she wasn’t sure; visibility in the mist was near 
zero), she opened the glove box again and felt around for a cell phone or 
Blackberry, something she could use to contact the outside world.

 

Finding nothing like that in the glove box, she looked on the passenger’s 
seat (nothing there but a McDonalds bag with some empty cigarette boxes 
in it), and then on top of the dashboard (no luck there either). She saw, 
however, that the fuel tank was almost full. That gave her an idea. 

Once she got Wanda and Victor, the three of them could grab some food and 
other supplies (the first-aid kid, some clothes, the little money they 
had in the house, her second box of .22 caliber shells and the rest of 
her Vicodin supply) and make a break for it. The mist had been traveling 
slowly, after all, even slower than she had been walking, and if they 
drove South at a halfway-decent speed, perhaps they could outrun it.



As Mattie neared her own street, she saw some flashing lights and 
panicked. Ahead of her, stopped diagonally across the road, was a police 
cruiser, its yellow lights blinking on and off.

 

Here she was, the favorite victim of the Castle Rock police department, 
Mattie Lee Allen of the junk car on the front lawn, of the music played 
at 1 AM, and of the morning jog in her black underwear – and now driving 
a stolen car. They probably didn’t even care about the mist, the horrible 
things she’d found in the parking lot, about the people trapped in the 
market (or the screams of the people outside the market). And they 
certainly wouldn’t care about her babies at home. They would care only 
about the car, and the illegal handgun on the seat beside her. They 
would only care about that, and about listening to the sound of their own 
loud voices while they drove her off to the police station. After all, 
that would be easier than having to shoot at dangerous animals (or 
whatever the hell they were) like the kind Mattie had found in the lot.

Approaching the patrol car (while mentally preparing to stop and also to 
give the arresting officers – she was sure they would arrest her – an 
earful of abuse), Mattie saw that the cruiser had been in some sort of 
accident. As she inched closer and closer, (even if the police car hadn’t 
been on the road, she didn’t feel safer going faster than about five 
miles an hour, given the mist and given the crunching and squishing 
sounds she heard every few minutes), she saw that the car was dented on 
the driver’s side, that the driver’s door was half open, and that the 
glass of the driver’s window was cracked around the edges. And as passed 
the patrol car on the left, she saw that wasn’t quite right; the entire 
window had shattered (or been shattered, she corrected herself) and that 
only a little glass adhered to the edges. And then she saw a trail of 
something dark and red and viscous (it glittered in her bright lights) 
running down the side of the open passenger door.

  

Mattie knew what had happened, and also knew she had to get home as soon 
as possible. But she gave in to an urge – almost irresistible, to pull up 
as close to the patrol car as she could and to slow down to a crawl.



“Fuck you!” Mattie shouted at the empty and wrecked police cruiser. And 
that felt good, so she went on. “Fuck you! I hope it hurt, you son-of-a-
bitch! I hope it hurt for a real long time!” And her heart was pounding, 
her mouth was dry, and she saw flecks of white spittle flying across the 
passenger seat, but she couldn’t stop herself. 



“’I happen to be a police officer!’” Mattie was actually screaming now, 
her voice breaking, hurting her own throat, as she quoted the words of 
the officer who had come to her door to cite her for having the junk car 
on her lawn and who had ended up yelling at her, humiliating her, in 
front of Wanda and Victor, making the three of them feel helpless. “’I 
happen to be a police officer!’ ‘I happen…to be…’” Her throat, dry from 
the fear and the screaming, constricted on her and she was momentarily 
silenced. She caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror and saw 
that her normally pale face had gone bright red. She grabbed the half 
empty water bottle from the drink holder on the dash, took a swig, and 
then kept on raving in a voice that barely sounded like her own. “You 
scared my children! I hope it took you far…far…away! I hope it took your 
wife…your children…I hope…it tore apart…your 
dirty…filthy…stinking…children…and I hope they died…hating…you!“ 



Mattie, while continuing to curse the officer who was no longer there,  
who was almost certainly dead, while still calling for the death of the 
man’s children, began to cry as she realized what she was wishing for. 
She was shouting and crying so hard she was dizzy from lack of oxygen – 
and even as she began to feel faint, she realized her car was veering off 
the road. She remembered something that one of her doctors, an elderly 
man named Dr. Black, had taught her as a means of preventing herself from 
fainting. She gently stepped on the brakes (she wanted to slam them on, 
but realized she couldn’t risk damaging the car, the one means she might 
have to get herself and her children out of this); leaned forward, put 
her fingers in her mouth – and jabbed her nails into her upper gums hard 
enough to draw blood. The pain was excruciating (having been hooked on 
painkillers for nearly half her life, she had almost no tolerance for 
pain left), but it brought her back to some sense of reality. 



She didn’t know how long she sat in the station wagon alongside the 
wrecked, bloodstained car, face pressed against the steering wheel, 
trying to calm herself down. Then she remembered the jar of Vicodin 
nestled in her purse. When she’d first hot-wired the car, she’d thought 
of taking some, but had been afraid – after all, in a situation like 
this, she needed her wits, not to be lulled into a chemical sense of 
serenity. But now, she recognized, she was almost insane with fear and 
anger. What would happen if she passed some other sight that set her off; 
or something tried to get into the car; or, for that matter, when she had 
to leave the car, however briefly, to get inside her house?



“All right, all right,” she said to herself. “Just a few. Two, three…what 
could it hurt?” Mattie, hands shaking, fumbled the orange plastic bottle 
out of her purse, pulled off the lid (getting those child-proof caps off 
medicine bottles was, at this point, as natural to her as breathing), 
shook out six of them and popped them into her mouth – probably enough, 
she realized, to calm down that pyramid thing she’d seen and heard 
stumbling around in the parking lot, washed them down with what remained 
of the water, and swallowed. She immediately regretted taking so many, 
but it wasn’t a disaster – having taken them for so many years, six might 
make her a little too euphoric, and might later cause insomnia, but 
wouldn’t put her out of commission. She carefully put the bottle back in 
her purse, wiped her eyes, and stared straight ahead.



“I’m coming,” she promised her kids. Putting the car back in drive, she 
steered around the police car, and then turned left again, up the street 
that led to her home.





IV.



From what little Mattie could see – in the ten feet beyond each of her 
side windows and the fifteen or so beyond her windshield – her street had 
been completely overrun by whatever was in the mist. The pine trees 
lining the street were all festooned with white streamers like the one 
that had almost burned her in the parking lot. The streamers had been 
laid down evenly, with an almost geometric precision, making the pines 
look like Christmas trees. And these Christmas trees had “ornaments” as 
well – large, egg-shaped things the size of human heads hanging from the 
ranches. She saw little white fluttering things around some of the 
“ornaments”; she thought they might be birds until she saw that they had 
too many wings and far too many legs. 



All of the houses she passed were draped with the white streamers as 
well. She saw no people on the street. Mattie tried to imagine that her 
neighbors (even ones like the Cobbs who weren’t nice to her) were all 
safely inside their homes, but in the driveway of one house – the one 
that belonged to that grumpy retired man – what was his name, Blake? – 
she could see an SUV with all four doors open. Scattered on the lawn next 
to the SUV were several pieces of luggage (one of them, a suitcase, was 
open, and clothes were spilling out). 



When Mattie reached the end of the street, she was afraid to look at her 
own house. What if it was completely covered by the streamers – whatever 
the hell they were – and she couldn’t get inside? What if the earthquake 
had torn the cracker box walls open or had shattered the windows? There 
were still a few safe places her babies could go – she thought of the 
closets in the front hallway and in the bedrooms – but would they know 
they had to go there? Mattie had stupidly stuck her own head inside the 
mist when she’d gone over to Fisher’s house (she wondered whether Fisher 
was all right). And then, despite the warnings of the man with the 

bloody nose and hearing the screams of the man in the denim jacket, she’d 
marched out into the mist. She’d survived this far only because she’d had 
some initial idea that the mist was dangerous – and because she had a 
gun. Wanda and Victor had no clue there was any danger. She thought again 
of the earthquake. Even assuming the house was still standing (she would 
force herself to look in just a moment), would they have tried to stand 
in the front doorway? Or, if the house began to come apart (not 
impossible given that it was nearly sixty years old and that the chimney 
had already collapsed), would they simply run outside, perhaps in an 
attempt to get to Mr. Fisher’s?



Slowly, Mattie turned her head and made herself look at her house. Yes, 
the house was intact – at least the front of it, because that was the 
only part she could see. The front door was intact, and still closed, and 
as far as she could tell, none of the front windows were broken. But the 
pine trees around the house – as well as the apricot tree on their front 
lawn - were covered with those horrible streamers and “ornaments,” 
though, and some of the streamers ran off the edge of the roof down to 
the driveway, like those bead-curtains you might see in a movie about the 
Arabian Nights. A jagged crack – perhaps caused by the earthquake? - ran 
down the length of the driveway. She couldn’t see the remains of the 
chimney. 



“Hang on, hang on…” Mattie said to no one as began to turn into her 
driveway. Then she stopped, drove past her house, turned the car around, 
and pulled to the curb next to Mr. Fisher’s house. There was one more 
thing she had to see. Right before this craziness had started, before 
the mist had drifted over their street, Mr. Fisher had told Mattie he 
would bring his car around. By the time Mattie had gotten dressed five or 
so minutes later, the mist was covering his house. If he had been in his 
house – and stayed there – he might still be all right. Mattie didn’t 
know if she could get to him but that didn’t really matter. Mr. Fisher 
could probably take care of himself – if he was locked in his house. But 
if he had been outside when this happened…



Fisher’s house – also covered with the streamers and eggs - loomed before 
her. Like most of the other houses on the block, it was much newer and 
larger than Mattie’s. He had an attached garage, for one thing. The 
garage door seemed to be open, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem. 



From this distance, she couldn’t see anything (amiss or otherwise) inside 
the garage; and in any case, if the inner door had been closed and he had 
been inside when the mist arrived, he might be safely and comfortable in 
his living room. Mattie, remembering how he had offered to help her that 
morning (and ashamed of how she had told Wanda and Victor that he had 
abandoned them), pulled into Fisher’s driveway and inched towards his 
garage. She almost honked the horn but decided against it, in case Wanda 
and Victor heard the sound and decided to run towards the car.



Mattie drove closer and closer to the garage. It was difficult to see 
anything in the darkened space. Finally, when the nose of the station 
wagon was a foot or two away, the lights began to pick out…Mattie, her 
fists clenched helplessly, lowered her head and shut her eyes, squeezing 
out her tears. 



Mr. Fisher’s hatchback, passenger door open, was in the garage. The 
inside of the garage and the outside of the hatchback were covered with 
the streamers. The inner door leading to the house – her lights shone off 
the white paint and the little brass knob – was open. The space beyond 
the inner door was too dark to allow her to see what was there, but she 
didn’t want to. She didn’t want to think about that. She thought instead 
of Wanda and Victor, put the big car in reverse, and backed down the 
driveway as she cried for Mr. Fisher. She remembered that he had been 
trying to get back to her house to take her to the hardware store. I’ve 
caused one more death, Mattie thought, first Kyle, who loved me; and now 
an old man who tried to help me. I can’t live with this. I’ll stay alive 
as long as it takes to get Wanda Lee and Victor Lee to safety. But then 
it will be time for me to go. I know Rose will take care of them. She 
loves them because she loves me and she will do it in my memory. She’d 
make a better mother than me anyway – even if she doesn’t know it. She 
looked at the .22 on the seat next to her, and thought of its one bullet 
– all it would take to put an end a life of pain and humiliation and 
failures – and then forced herself to look away. That comes later, she 
promised herself. For now, get your children out. And feeling a strange 
surge of resolve, Mattie drove back to her own house.



Mattie realized, though, she didn’t really know how she was going to get 
inside her house. She tried to think how long she’d been in the parking 
lot before the things had found her. It couldn’t have been more than 
twenty seconds or so. That was enough time to park in the driveway and 
make a break for the front door (avoiding the streamers and eggs, of 
course). But she also remembered how the man in the denim jacket had 
started screaming almost immediately after going outside. So the things 
could attack in no time at all if they saw (smelled? heard? Felt?) you 
right away. And, given the hole in the chimney (and the generally flimsy 
condition of the rest of the house), she suspected she and her children 
might have to leave the house on a moment’s notice.

 

No, if possible, she needed to be able to go directly from the car to the 
house and back. She drove the car onto her own front lawn (she vaguely 
remembered the Cobbs bitching about the junk car on her front lawn and 
then realized that would never matter again), coming up directly 
alongside her front door. For a moment, she couldn’t remember whether her 
front door opened in or out (the Vicodin, while already working to calm 
her down, wasn’t helping her memory any).

 

Holding out her hands, she mimed the hand-motions she would make in 
opening her front door –push the key in with her left hand, turn to the 
right until she heard the click, and then push in… okay, the door would 
open in, which made the whole operation easier. She also saw she had
another lucky break in that the station wagon had a bench seat, rather 
than bucket seats; she’d have to twist and turn less, making it easier to 
get Wanda and Victor in the car, and also saving some wear and tear on 
her bad knee.



But even if she pulled up directly parallel and next to the front door, 
how could she get her front door open without getting out of the car – or 
at least opening the car window? She thought of calling to Wanda and 
Victor and telling them to open the door, but she realized that even if 
they could hear her instructions, she had no idea whether the front 
hallway or living room were safe. What if she drew them out of a closet 
where they were hiding safely into a living room that was breached or 
infested?



No, Mattie would have to do this herself. She spent several moments 
looking from her car door to her front door and back again (for some 
reason, she kept thinking of a sci-fi movie she’d watched at Rose’s place 
where a bunch of astronauts were trying to get a fellow crew member of an 
airlock before he exploded; at the time, she and Rose had found this 
predicament hysterically funny with respect to everybody involved, but 
right now she didn’t think it was the least bit funny). 



Finally, realizing that she was of no use to her kids out here and that 
she simply had to get inside as soon as possible, even if it meant some 
risk-taking, she decided on a course of action. First, she was going 
reload her gun. Then she would open the car door (she was too close to 
the front wall of her house to open the door all the way, but she had 
about two or three feet of clearance, enough to squeeze out of the car). 
Next, once she closed the car door (having a car would do them no good if 
something got inside, the way the orange bugs had somehow gotten into the 
sports car in the parking lot, or the way the spiders had – no, she would 
not allow herself to think of what she’d seen in Fisher’s garage) she 
would run to her front door, keys at the ready, unlock it, push the door 
open, and slam it shut behind her. Then she would be with Wanda and 
Victor, and the family would have a car, with a full tank of gas, only 
two or three feet outside the front door. (Mattie actually felt a surge 
of pleasant surprise that she had used that word when thinking of herself 
and her kids – she supposed they were a family, even if there was an 
irrational, stupid mother and no father). 



Mattie opened the gun and weeded out the empty shells. Then she went 
through her purse, found the box of ammunition, and reloaded the gun. 
Sliding across the bench seat, she unlocked the passenger door. Using her 
right hand (which also held her keys, but she had a loaded gun in her 
left hand), she reached towards the door handle. Using her right arm, she 
slung her purse – which had the rest of her ammunition, her little 
leather mace container, the plastic wrap and hammer she’d bought, and of 
course the all-important jar of Vicodin - over her shoulders, hoping it 
wouldn’t get in the way either of the keys or the gun.



Mattie was about to leave her shelter, and she knew she would be exposed 
to whatever was out there, but if this worked, she would be inside her 
house ten seconds later.



“Ready,” she whispered to herself as she leaned forward.



“Set,” she started to pull the door handle back with her right hand while 
hefting the gun with her left.



Mattie imagined that Rose was in the car with her, urging her on, 
promising to protect her.



“Go!” Mattie tugged the handle backwards and felt the door open. She 
leaned against the door, sliding to her right and maneuvering out of the 
car around the door. As soon as she cleared the door, she pushed her 
backside against it (this brought her fully upright and let her slam the 
car door without having to turning around) and charged towards her own 
front door. The house key was between her thumb and forefinger. It slid, 
readily enough, into the lock. She turned it to the right, twisting and 
twisting, straining a little (it was sometime stubborn; and the storm and 
perhaps the humidity from the mist had might have warped the wood around 
the lock a bit) until she heard the blessed click, pushed the door open, 
and charged into the front hallway. Behind her, she heard (or thought she 
heard) some kind of scuttling noise. Mattie, without turning around, 
pushed her butt (she was getting pretty good at that maneuver) against 
the inside of the house door and pedaled backwards until she heard the 
door slam shut.



Mattie looked back at the front door. It was closed and in one piece, 
just as it should be. Nothing, as far as she could tell, had followed her 
in, although a few small eddies of mist(probably left over from the few 
second when the door was open) were dissipating along the floor of the 
entryway. Then, remembering the chimney (the house was deathly cold, far 
worse than it had been when she left) she surveyed the living room. 



It was dark, silent, and full of a thin layer of the strange-smelling 
mist. She could not see Wanda or Victor. Mattie forced herself not to 
panic - yet. That morning, a small amount of cold air had been leaking 
down the fireplace, which was at the far end of the living room. If the 
house was enveloped in mist, some mist would be coming down the chimney 
and out through the fireplace. She had been gone at least an hour, so 
there would be enough mist to be visible. The mist itself did not seem 
harmful; she had breathed it in the parking lot and she could breathe 
now. Their secondhand furniture (most of which was cheap enough to 
probably come apart if normal-sized insects landed on it, let alone the 
giant ones she’d seen) was all in place. She could not see any open or 
broken windows; and the sliding glass doors were closed as well. Her 
backyard was completely enveloped in the mist.



Mattie stuffed her car keys into her sweater pocket. Clutching the gun 
close, with both hands, she cautiously moved around the room. 
“Wanda...Victor?” The mist in the living room (what little there was; it 
was more like the very thin layer of tobacco smoke or pot smoke that 
pervaded the Allens’ living room in the evenings, when Mattie watched TV) 
was indeed thicker around the fireplace. It must be coming from there. 
Mattie, thinking back to her high school science classes, vaguely 
wondered if that meant that the mist was heavier than air, if it traveled 
down the chimney. Their small kitchen area likewise seemed intact, with 
the furniture in place. Moving in circles and swinging the gun in front 
of her, she moved down the front hallway (which likewise seemed safe), 
calling her children’s’ names again. She moved from the front hallway to 
the rear hallway, to the kids’ bedroom (intact but empty) to the rear 
bathroom (where everything was also in place; and she was pleased to see 
that the louvered glass window there had held). 



That left only her bedroom. The bedroom door had been open when she left 
the house, and now it was closed, but she didn’t think that the things 
she’d seen would be able to-

 

“Mama!” 



“Mommy!” 



“Where are you?” Mattie screamed, and immediately regretted doing so. If 
Wanda and Victor hadn’t already been frightened half to death, now they 
would be. “I’m…I’m coming,” she called out, in a marginally softer and 
calmer voice. The bedroom door burst open and two shapes, silhouetted 
against the white light coming from the bedroom, charged down the wooden
hallway. Mattie ran towards the bedroom, her gun pointed towards the 
ceiling (she didn’t want to put it away in case the sound she heard was 
something running to attack her; but she didn’t want risk pointing a 
loaded gun at her kids). 



Wanda and Victor, silhouetted by the white light of the mist, ran into 
view.



“My babies! Wait! Wait-“ Mattie, keeping the gun pointed at the ceiling, 
turned on the safety. Then she knelt and carefully set the gun down, the 
barrel pointed towards the kitchen and away from them.



“We love you,” Victor said as he buried himself in Mattie’s arms. Just 
before he burrowed into her sweater, Mattie could see the tears streaming 
down his face. She grabbed him and then Wanda, whose eyes were also red 
from crying.



“I’m sorry,” Mattie, by now crying herself, said over and over again as 
she rocked them. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the mist. You were 
scared and – and I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. I won’t leave 
you ever again.”



“Something’s in the back yard,” Wanda told her. “It came over the fence 
from Mr. Fisher’s. I couldn’t really see it, but it- it looked a-a big 
black crab-“



“-but with too many legs,” Victor finished for her. “And it won’t go 
away!”



“I know,” Mattie said, “I saw it on the way home.” She wondered if she 
should tell them it was all right, that everyone around here knew what 
those things were, and that they wouldn’t harm you if you didn’t harm 
them. And then Mattie realized that would be the most dangerous thing 
she could tell them. They were all in danger, and they had to know it. 



“It…” Mattie tried to say something but didn’t know what to tell them. 
She looked at her own crying children – and thought, unwillingly, of the 
girl screaming mommy over and over again, perhaps as mother and daughter 
helplessly watched one another die – and could not speak. “Come to 
mommy,” was all she could manage before breaking down. And the Allen 
family, the family she had created, crouched on the floor of their home, 
held one another and shivered and cried.



A few minutes later, Mattie realized there were things – even some good 
things – that she could tell them. “Listen to me,” she began, “that 
thing-“ she thought of saying those things but didn’t want to scare them 
any further, at least not for now, “can’t get indoors. As long as we stay 

inside…and keep the windows and doors closed…we’re safe.” Then she 
thought of the chimney, and the mist slowly leaking down the flue, and 
realized that wasn’t necessarily true. “And…” she continued. “we have a 
car now. A big car…with room for all us…and a full tank of gas. And 

you know what that means? It means we can leave. We can leave whenever we 
want to and go someplace safe.” Once again, Mattie realized that wasn’t 
completely correct. The car was, indeed, parked right outside the front 
door. But she would have to go back outside – and take her for them, 
directly beyond the front door, if they tried to leave. 



“And I also have Aunt Rose’s gun. That’ll help keep us safe. In fact, I 
even shot a couple of those things.” That part, at least, was completely 
true. But even as she said it, Mattie realized that Wanda and Victor now 
knew – if they hadn’t known already – that there was more than one monster out there. 



“Mama, should we stay or should we go?” this from Wanda Lee.



Good question. The house, although somewhat rickety, seemed to Mattie 
like a good temporary shelter – it had survived the earthquake, and based 
on her (very) cursory inspection, nothing seemed to have gotten inside. 
It was large enough for the three of them, they had enough food for at 
least a couple of days, and gave them a place to sleep. She knew, though, 
that if they stayed she’d would have to do a more thorough inspection, to 
see if there was any way something could get in; and that she’d have to 
do what she could to seal off the fireplace. On the other hand, their 
house was in the middle of a jungle filled with unknown danger. There was 
probably no one, for miles around, who could help them - Mattie had 
encountered no other people on her trip back from the market. She’d seen 
no sign of the soldiers who had driven past her into the mist; and her 
last sight of civilian emergency services had been the wrecked police car 
on Kansas Road (she was ashamed of what she had shouted as she drove by 
it, even though no one had heard her).  If there was another earthquake – 
or even another storm like last night’s – a window could shatter, a wall 
could collapse, and they would be forced out, alone, into that jungle of 
mist and streamers and eggs and monsters.



The other possibility was the car. She could hot-wire it again, it ran 
well, and – judging by the number of crunch-squish sounds she’d heard on 
the way home – probably able to stand up to the things in the mist. She 
could drive down Kansas Road to I-295 South, and try to outrun the mist, 
maybe try to reach Boston. But to do that, she and her children would 
have to go outside (for however short a time). And even if they got 
safely in the car, she had no idea if they would be able to leave town. 
The roads might be blocked, by individual accidents or by people trying 
to flee. She’d easily been able to navigate around the police cruiser – 
but what about a wrecked bus or gasoline truck? For that matter, what if 
she got on the freeway only to find a thirty-car pile-up caused when the 
drivers were suddenly blinded by the mist or attacked through their open
windows? And even assuming the roads were somehow clear of traffic (she 
thought of all the cars that had pulled off of Kansas Road, probably when 
the mist arrived, and were parked along the shoulder) what else might be 
on those roads? How about the pyramid-thing she’d vaguely glimpsed in the 
parking lot? And even assuming that there roads were somehow perfectly 
safe – which they wouldn’t be – what would she do when they ran out of 
gas? They could stay in the car at first, but even if they took food and 
water with them, that would run out, someone would get hungry or have to 
go to the bathroom (never mind ‘have to,’ she corrected herself, they 
would simply go in the car, again and again until no one could breathe), 
and after a while – maybe two days, three at the most – they’d have to 
leave the car. And then they’d have twenty seconds, tops, to find another 
car that wasn’t locked or infested. Siphoning gas (something else she’d 
done as a kid) took longer than twenty seconds and so was out.



And suppose they reached Boston and they found no people, only empty 
buildings covered with mist and streamers and eggs?



And what if wherever else they went – wherever else they could go – was 
covered with the mist, and things in the mist? Even as she cowered with 
her kids, was her beloved South being overrun by this terror?



“Mommy?” Victor asked.



“Just thinking, little one.” Mattie ruffled his hair. “Maybe…Okay. I 
think we should stay here, in our pretty house, for now. I’m going to 
look in every room and make sure all the walls and windows and stuff are 
in one piece. If they aren’t, or if we think there’s any danger, we have 
our new car-“ actually it wasn’t their car but she doubted the owner 
would be making a complaint anytime soon “-just outside. When I’m done 
checking the house, I’m going to pack a bag for us, and I want us all to 
be ready to run out that front door if anything happens.” The young woman 
paused. “How…how does that sound to you-all?” Wanda and Victor looked 
at each other, then at their mother, and nodded. 



Mattie hugged them again, feeling a little dazed. Everything that had 
happened to her that day – from the chimney to the monstrous 
transformation outside to the trip home – was unbelievable. But she was 
also amazed by herself. How could she, of all people, have gotten herself 
safely home, then carefully (if not necessarily correctly) weighed the 
merits of staying put versus trying to drive away, and then come up with 
a plan for evacuating the house, and managed to calm down her own 
children? By now, the Vicodin was going through her system full-blast, 
taking the edge off of things, but this was something else. It was as 
though some rational part of her mind was taking over from her emotions. 
Rose had always been like that – very hard to scare or anger, always 
thinking on her feet – and Mattie had envied her. Maybe she’d finally 
learned something from Rose.



Feeling as though she were on a roll, Mattie stood up. “All right. It’s 
cold in here, and I’m going to put some plastic sheeting over the 
fireplace. But while I do that, I want you two go to someplace safe. 
Where were you staying when I came in?”



“We’ll help you,” Victor said.



“Victor Lee Allen,” Mattie said gently, even as she envisioned a swarm of 
the small orange potato bugs, or the “birds” with four wings and twenty 
legs, falling unexpectedly down the chimney and covering her, “don’t 
argue with me. We’re going to find you a nice safe place to stay. I’ll be 
in to see you as soon as I’m done with the fireplace and with checking 
the rest of the house.”



“We can help you, mama,” added Wanda, “you shouldn’t be alone.”



“No, it’s dangerous, I’m going to put you someplace safe, and-“



“Mama,” Wanda repeated, “we want to stay with you. We talked while you 
were gone. We thought you couldn’t come back. We don’t ever want to be 
away from you again.”



Mattie, remembering how Wanda had argued with her the other week, began 
to get angry with her daughter, but she held her tongue. Mattie was their 
mother, but in a way she wasn’t. She was really more like their sister. 
An adult, yes, but a poor, ignorant, scarred one. An older child raising 
two younger ones. Her judgment wasn’t necessarily better than theirs, 
especially Wanda’s. And they were all in danger now, and there might soon 
come a moment – though Mattie prayed not – where they were confronting 
some horrible thing in their house or in the car, with no way to
escape, and knowing they only had moments left to say goodbye to one 
another. If they wanted to spend their last hours with their mother, they 
could.



“Come on, then. But you don’t go out of my sight, and do what I tell you 
to do, you hear?” 



Mattie would not, of course, let them touch the gun or any of the tools. 
She told them to get back while she quickly and anxiously peered up the 
chimney (she couldn’t see the sky, or see or even hear anything creeping 
around in the flue). Wanda and Victor each helped to hold out the 
plastic sheet as Mattie, very gingerly, nailed it to the walls on either 
side of the fireplace (she had a terrible, if unrealistic, mental image 
of striking the hammer too hard and then watching the entire wall of the 
house crumble). Then, she took the large, brown, imitation-leather 
recliner in the middle of the living room and pushed it so that it was 
pressing directly against the fireplace. It might still be possible for 
something to come down the chimney and get into their living room, 
but at least this way they would have some warning (the chair bouncing 
around) and some time to get away. Then she moved their ugly white couch 
into position in front of the sliding glass doors (having seen the 
spiders clamber up and over the SUV, she knew this was not a perfect 
precaution. However, it made it slightly harder for something to get into 
the living room and bought them a little time. She then went from room to 
room, looking at the ceiling for cracks, closing the vents and blinds, 
locking the doors, checking the windows (all were intact), and 
moving furniture in front of the windows. 



As she looked out of the kitchen window, she saw – or thought she saw – 
something crawling across the front lawn, something the size of an 
alligator. The first part was round and flat – the size, shape and 
thickness of a large deep dish pizza. But it was pitch black and 
supported by six or so black legs that looked like daggers. A long, 
tapered tail, also supported by spiky black legs, trailed behind. 



Mattie wondered just where these things had come from. The “potato bug” 
she had seen back at the market looked just like a larger version of a 
common insect. The spiders looked a bit more exotic but were still 
clearly arachnids. But others, like the pyramid or Mr. Pizza Head on her 
front lawn, seemed different than anything she’d ever seen or read about. 
They had come with the mist, she was sure of that. But where had the mist 
come from? She thought back to all that nonsense and rumors she’d heard 
about – what was it called again? – the Arrowhead Project. Could her 
crazy neighbors have been right about that after all?



“What do we do now, mama?” Wanda asked. Victor immediately answered the 
question. “I have to pee.”



Mattie had no idea whether they still had running water or not. She 
thought of turning on a faucet in the kitchen, and then hesitated, 
imagining a swarm of flying red ants coming out of the tap. 



“Remember what we said? Neither one of you leaves my sight.” And so 
Mattie and Wanda took little Victor Lee into the bathroom. The toilet lid 
was up, and the water inside seemed normal. Mattie held his hand while he 
went, something she hadn’t done since he was three. (Wanda rolled her 
eyes but said nothing.) When Victor was done, Mattie hesitated, flushed 
the toilet – and was pleased to see that they still had running water.

Mattie wondered whether she shouldn’t fill some bottles with water from 
the kitchen sink but decided against it. She had no idea where their 
water came from, but it might come from the nearby lake. She’d overheard 
someone in the hardware store say they had seen the mist on the lake. If 
those creatures had gotten into the lake, and laid eggs…or even if they 
had germs…no thanks. The Allens had enough soft drinks in their pantry to 
last them a while.



“Okay. Now, I said we were going to pack a bag in case we have to leave 
in a hurry. Come on. Together, they went to the front hall closet and 
took down their one piece of luggage, a large brown canvas suitcase. The 
bag smelled faintly of cannabis, as Mattie had kept her stash of pot 
right behind it for years. They went, together, from room to room (Mattie 
knew it might save time if she asked Wanda or Victor to get some of the 
things they needed and bring them to her, but she did not want either of 
them to leave her side) gathering their first-aid kit along with soap, 
toothpaste, deodorant, and toilet paper from the bathroom; 
changes of clothes and Victor’s stuffed cat from the kids’ bedroom; a 
change of clothes for Mattie, the second box of .22 shells, her birth 
control pills, her small supply of cash, and her much larger supply of 

Vicodin from her bedroom; and two flashlights, batteries, candles, 
several soft drink cans, small boxes of cereal, and utensils (including a 

very sharp carving knife) from the kitchen. Mattie also packed an old 
Auto Club map of New England, a few CDs, her Sony Discman small family 
photo album, including pictures of not only herself, Wanda and Victor, 
but also of Mattie’s own parents and of Rose and of Kyle. 



They put the suitcase in the front hall, right next to the door, so they 
would be ready to go at a moment’s notice.



“What about bug spray?” asked Victor.



Mattie actually laughed. “No, little one, that won’t…” she began, as she 
imagined herself trying to spray one of the giant things in the parking 
lot, or Mr. Pizza Head outside, with Raid. But then she paused. It might 
work. She carried mace with her; this was like mace for insects. And…a 
can of Raid could easily be turned into a little flamethrower when 
coupled with a lighter. And even if she wasn’t close enough to the bugs 
to burn them, weren’t most animals afraid of the sight of fire? “Good 
thinking, Victor Lee,” she corrected herself. They had one can of Raid 
and one can of Black Flag Ant and Roach Killer in their pantry. Mattie 
decided to keep those handy. She went back into the bathroom and added an 
old can of hairspray to her arsenal.



The sun went down around 5 o’clock, taking away what  little light 
remained. The moon came up but was barely visible though the mist. Mattie 
– who had raised the blinds on her bedroom window a bit, just to keep an 
eye on things - could see no light outside. It was freezing in the 
little house, and the three of them broke out their warmer clothes from 
the bedrooms and the front hall closet. Mattie didn’t dare light a fire, 
although she lit some tea candles and placed them on the dresser and the 
night tables in the master bedroom. Mattie sat down on the recliner by 
the side of her bed, Wanda and Victor on either side of her; the gun 
(safety on), the first box of shells, a can of Raid and a little plastic 
lighter on the night table next to her. And they waited to see what would 
happen next.



V.



Mattie’s newfound ability to plan, and the little confidence she’d been 
able to muster, faded with the day. Mattie, for the last ten years, had 
been afraid of night. She was not particularly scared of the dark 
(although tonight she wasn’t thrilled with not being able to see when the 
house was literally surrounded by monsters). But at night things closed 
down, other people went off to their homes, she had to put the children 
to bed, and she was finally left alone. And when she was alone for long 
enough – more than an few hours - the memories came back to her. 
Sometimes she imagined them to be physical objects, seeping out of the 
corners of her darkened bedroom and coming at her, just as the spiders 
had come at her in the parking lot earlier that day. They brought with 
them feelings of nostalgic longing, sadness and loss, and fear and guilt 
and rage. Even this terrible, unexplained thing that had happened to them 
today couldn’t keep her mind off what had happened to her when she was 
sixteen, in that last summer of what had, until then, been a happy life. 

Yes, Mattie always smiled, and laughed, and cried softly to herself, and 
then wept, whenever she thought about the Time of the Old South, that 
final sixteenth summer, coming of age in the town of Rubidoux, Missouri, 
halfway to the Ozarks. 

Then as now, Mattie’s best friend was Rose Sullivan. Most people, looking 
at them, thought that Mattie and Rose were twin sisters. They looked 
almost alike: Tall and skinny (though Rose was a bit taller than Mattie 
and had broad, muscular shoulders and arms); almost no breasts; very 
short red hair; pale freckled skin. And they may even have been distant 
relatives. Like most everyone in Rubidoux, they were both Irish Catholic; 
and their ancestors had arrived in the early 1860’s, from County Cork, 
just in time to fight for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Both 
the Allens and the Sullivans had records of family members fighting in 
the First Missouri Confederate Brigade at the Battle of Champion Hill in 
Mississippi. Most importantly, Mattie and Rose they had been best friends 
ever since they had discovered one another at the age of four (they lived 
two houses down from one another and they had spent the whole summer 
digging holes in Rose’s backyard and then filling them with dirt from 
other holes they had dug; even now, Mattie smiled and shook her head at 
the memory). They had always laughed at the same things, gotten angry at 
the same things, dressed alike, and had, over an eleven-year period, 
built an entire culture between themselves, a culture of Irish and 
Southern legends and symbols, of elaborate stories and jokes based on old 
comic books and issues of Mad Magazine they had read when they were 
younger, of mock battles fought in vacant lots with homemade wooden 
swords. As they got older, their common culture had expanded to include 
sex (Mattie preferred guys and Rose preferred girls, but they shared 
accounts of their experiences and kept score); a distinctive style of 
dress (all-black clothes and heavy black boots to go with their military-
looking haircuts); tattoos (they saved their money and got matching 
Celtic knotwork bands across their upper arms); drinking; and later, wild 
drunken drives down the empty highways at night, and a little bit of 
petty crime. 

Things might have turned out all right for them. Most people in the 
conservative small town liked them, notwithstanding their nearly-shaved 
heads, strange style of dress, and petty hooliganism. Both girls were 
bright and creative (in their first year of high school they had gotten 
special recognition for writing a detailed report on an imaginary 
Shakespeare play about King Arthur called “The Sword in the Stone,” 
complete with quotes in iambic pentameter and commentary by medieval 
critics). Rose had long planned to join the Army after high school, and 
she was steadily selling Mattie – who was a bit less athletic than Rose 
and more sensitive and cerebral - on the idea on joining up with her 
(“we’ll be together,” was Rose’s simplest and most persuasive argument. 
Other good arguments were “we’ll party every weekend in Amsterdam and 
Hamburg and all those places,” and “if we don’t join – what’re we gonna 
do here in town for the rest of our lives?”)

The drunken midnight rides were becoming more and more a part of life for 
Mattie and Rose and later also for Kyle Denton, the tall, thin, long-
haired blond kid who’d been Mattie’s first real boyfriend. (Rose 
endlessly but good-naturedly teased Mattie for liking boys; kept asking 
Mattie where and why she had gone wrong; and jokingly accused Kyle of 
“corrupting” her best friend.) Mattie was intrigued by Kyle who, apart 
from his good looks, seemed to be almost the exact opposite of what she 
thought of as a man. Men, to Mattie’s way of thinking, loved to watch 
football and racing on TV, talked loudly, swore, and always seemed to be 
on the verge of getting into fights. Kyle was the first person she knew, 
besides herself, who actually liked to read (true, for Mattie, “reading” 
generally meant reading graphic novels, comic books and other things that 
mixed text with lots of pictures; Kyle liked these too, but he also read 
actual books).  He hated to watch pro sports, which he said bored him; 
and he was quiet and polite. He was the first boy Mattie had ever met who 
didn’t scare her, not at all; and they became one another’s first lovers. 
He also enjoyed being around Rose, and three of them would spend hours on 
end in Mattie’s or Rose’s rooms, overanalyzing the plots of old graphic 
novels or cartoons from MAD Magazine; and also drinking and smoking pot.

Mattie was still amazed at just how much the three of them had been able 
to drink in those days; between them they could polish off a whole 
bottle, and often more, of the cheap whiskey they bought at Duke’s Liquor 
in town between the time they left town and the time they returned early 
the next morning. The booze, and the fellowship, the feeling of Rose’s 
ancient Camaro hurtling past the moonlit cornfields at a hundred miles an 
hour or more, the lights of the neighboring towns glowing in the 
distance, and the pagan songs of Led Zeppelin blasting out of the stereo, 
made them feel invincible. Although the stretch of highway they used was 
a remote one, lit mostly by the moon and stars, cutting through a part of 
the Ozarks where only a few hundred people total lived, it was a wonder 
they never got pulled over. (The three of them had discussed it and 
concluded that the state likely had no money to spare for radar equipment 
or patrol cars in such a remote place, where there were virtually no 
other cars, no pedestrians, and no valuable property for a drunken driver 
to hit. One time, though, Rose had speculated that the cops had in fact 
seen them, perhaps more than once; but concluded that there would be no 
point in pulling over poor slobs like them, keeping them in jail 
overnight, giving them lectures they would doubtless ignore and fines 
they couldn’t pay, only to let them out the next day so they could do the 
whole damn thing all over again. Kyle, a man of few words, had nodded 
sagely and drawled the words, “judgment-proof,” and when he explained 
what that meant Mattie had laughed and laughed until she was doubled over 
on Kyle’s lap, red-faced and wheezing, clutching her chest.

And now, ten years later, as Mattie sat in her tiny ramshackle house in 
the Maine countryside with the two young children she couldn’t afford to 
properly feed, looking at the old scars on her wrists shining softly in 
the candlelight, she reflected that she wouldn’t have been laughing so 
hard if she had understood at the time just how much danger they were in. 
Because it was also a wonder that they didn’t destroy Rose’s car earlier.

That happened one night in August, exactly three weeks before they were 
to return to school. While the sun was up, it had been too hot for them 
to go anywhere or doing anything except hang out in Rose’s room. The 
power had gone out around eleven in the morning, leaving them with no TV, 
radio, or even working fans, so they had been drinking almost nonstop 
since then, stripped to their underwear, sweating it out almost as fast 
as they could put it down. (Rose’s father, Tom Sullivan, had actually 
joined them at about two in the afternoon; he had a good sense of humor 
and was kind of fun to be around - and Mattie was privately amused that a 
middle-aged adult had no more sense than they themselves did – but they 
had politely evicted him around three-thirty when they realized how 
quickly he was running through their supply of bad beer and whiskey.)

The power finally came back on around eight, as the sun set and the 
temperature began to fall. By then, the three of them had fallen into a 
kind of stupor, drifting in and out of sleep, from the heat and the 
booze. As the big electric fan on Rose’s desk chugged back to life, so 
did the kids. They took turns standing in front of it, like living 
scarecrows, letting the delightful breeze cool off their sweating bodies.

“Damn, that feels good,” Rose said, drops of moisture glistening in her 
buzz-cut red hair. She and Mattie had both adopted the hairstyle two 
years earlier, when they were fourteen: About a half-inch on top, a 
quarter-inch at the temples, and shaved off almost completely on the 
lower sides and back. It was low-maintenance, the girls could do it 
themselves, and Mattie was pleasantly surprised that Kyle found it sexy. 
(Occasionally, they got less flattering comments, like “White power,” or 
“dyke,” but what the hell?)

 “I want to go out on the road,” Mattie had said, restless after spending 
an entire day in the hot little room.

“I second the motion,” Rose raised her right hand.

“I can’t,” Kyle had said, looking at his watch. “My mama wants me home 
for dinner. Brian’s coming tonight.” Brian, or Brahn, as he pronounced 
it, was his mother’s boyfriend, a burglar alarm salesman whose route took him through Rubidoux.

“I thought you hate that guy,” Mattie said as she got up, somewhat 
unsteadily, from her Rose’s couch. 

“And I do,” Kyle said gravely. He knew that Brian – a loud-talking, 
authoritarian security guard type with pretensions to  becoming a cop – 
wanted to marry his mother, and he didn’t like it. Kyle’s father had 
simply disappeared four years earlier, when the boy was thirteen. He had 
said he was going to meet a friend; had gotten in the family car; and no 
one in town had ever seen or heard from him again. He had been very good 
to Kyle, his two brothers, and his mom. Kyle missed him just as much as 
Mattie missed her own dad. On their very first date, Kyle had confided to 
Mattie that he was sure his father was dead; if he was alive, reasoned 
Kyle he would have come home or at least contacted the family. And then 
Kyle had broken down and cried in Mattie’s arms. She had held him, gently 
rocking him back and forth, softly whispering to him to calm down. Then 
she told him about her own father, how he had died fighting in Operation 
Desert Storm, and about the terrible day that the two soldiers showed up, 
in their dress uniforms, at her door, with a folded American flag and a 
telegram from the Secretary of Defense. Kyle had continued crying softly. 
Mattie, after telling him again that everything was all right, telling 
him to please not cry, had embraced him and joined in. When they both had 
calmed down a bit, she told him they would always be friends. And that, 
she later reflected, was the first time she had felt love for anyone 
outside her own family. Mattie thought of Kyle often,  of what a good 
husband he would have made for her and what a wonderful stepfather he 
would have made for Wanda Lee and Victor Lee. But Mattie knew that would 
never, ever happen – because she had killed him. If only she had let him 
go home that night to his mother and to Brian…

“Mama?” Mattie looked up from her reverie. Wanda Lee, silhouetted by the 
candles on the dresser, was standing over her, with Victor Lee by her 
side. Mattie realized that she had been crying, rocking back and forth as 
she did so, fists clenched in front of her. 

“I’m all right, little one,” Mattie assured her. “Now…you go back and 
keep looking out that windows, like I told you. You tell me if you see 
anything out there. I’m all right.” But of course she was not all right. 
She didn’t deserve to be.

Mattie had known, at least on some level, that she and Rose and Kyle had 
been drinking all day long and that to drive a hundred miles an hour 
would be even more dangerous than usual. But she was hot and restless 
after being cooped up all day long and wanted to have her usual good time 
with her friends. She reasoned that they were usually drunk when they 
drove at night; and that in any case, they had sweated out most of the 
extra booze.

So she had walked over to Kyle, put her arms around him, and pressed her 
slender figure against his. “Kyle Denton, who do you want to spend the 
evening with: Brian…or your friends?”

Kyle’s resistance melted. “I…you.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Why don’t we shower, and maybe put our clothes on too?” Rose asked 
sarcastically. She and Mattie, to escape the heat, were barefoot and 
wearing only black tank tops and boxer shorts, completely soaked through 
with sweat. Kyle only had on a pair of green gym shorts.

“I’ll go home and change,” Kyle volunteered. Later, Mattie wondered what 
might have been if only Kyle had gotten waylaid by his mother and Brian 
when he reached his house. Maybe she and Rose would have waited around in 
her room for another twenty or thirty minutes, only to have the phone 
ring and a frustrated Kyle tell them that he had to spend that evening at 
home, that the ride would have to wait until the following evening. But 
no. Kyle loved Mattie Lee, and he could see what the ride meant to her, 
so he snuck into his own house, got his clothes, crept out again (a 
neighbor later reported seeing the half-naked boy climbing through a 
window into his room; and out again a few minutes later wearing a t-
shirt, jeans and cowboy boots), and was back at Rose’s place fifteen 
minutes later. By then, Rose and Mattie had each showered and dressed and 
were ready for action. While Kyle got himself cleaned up in Rose’s tiny 
bathroom, the girls discovered that they had no liquor for the trip.

“What happened to those two bottles of Celtic Cross?” Celtic Cross was a 
120-proof whiskey that sold for six dollars a bottle at Duke’s.

“All gone,” Mattie shrugged, feeling vaguely ashamed for all of them. How 
could they possibly have killed two bottles of whiskey in a single day?

“We-?” Rose began to ask, surprised.

“’Fraid so.”

“But what about that six pack of Old Traveler?” Old Traveler was a 
sickly-sweet, high-alcohol wine, locally produced.

“No offense, but I think your dad…” Mattie said accusingly.

“Okay, we’ll swing by Duke’s on the way.” Duke’s liquor was the largest 
liquor store in town. It was owned and operated by an easygoing redneck 
named Donald Eustis Duke who was happy to sell anything to anybody – 
minors, parolees, whoever – as long as they overpaid in cash and showed 
him a remotely passable ID.

The bathroom door opened up and there was Kyle, already fully dressed. 
Mattie reflected, not for the first time, on what a gentleman he was. 
Even though she’d seen him naked before – after all, they’d made love 
several times already – he didn’t think it was proper to get dressed in 
front of the two girls. 

“Let’s get going.” Kyle suggested.

Only one of them – Rose – would truly survive their trip. In four hours 
Kyle would be dead; and Mattie would be physically and mentally crippled 
and with Kyle’s blood on her hands forever. But they had no way of 
knowing that, so they piled into Rose’s old Chevy – Rose at the wheel, 
Mattie and Kyle in back - and headed right for their doom.

And what a ride it was. After swinging by Duke’s and getting two bottles 
of Celtic Cross, they drove, with reasonably caution, down Hewes Road 
(Rubidoux’s main drag, where there was some chance of encountering the 
cops), eased onto Highway 60, again watching their speed until they were 
a mile or so out of town – and then took off at full speed. 

They had been on the road for about an hour and a half when Rose 
exclaimed, “oh, Christ!” and slammed her fist into the steering wheel. 

“What?” Mattie, sandwiched between Rose and Kyle in the front seat, had 
just taken a big hit from the first bottle of Celtic Cross, followed by a 
puff on her Dutch Masters cigar, and was listening to Alannah Myles 
singing “Black Velvet” – one of her favorites – on the car radio. Rose 
had just shattered her concentration. She was ready to be angry until she 
saw that her friend’s face was ashen, her eyes bloodshot, and that a thin 
line of saliva was running down her chin.

“What, honey?” Mattie gently squeezed Rose’s shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” Kyle, in the shotgun seat, had was peering over at Rose 
with concern.

“Oh, Christ,” Rose repeated again, much more weakly this time. “Oh, Jesus 
Christ, I’m gonna be sick,” Rose said in a weak voice. The car, which had 
been going at a hundred and ten miles an hour, began easing down, to a 
hundred, to ninety, then below.

“Just pull over,” Mattie urged her, “pull over now!”

“I can’t,” Rose said urgently. “I can’t see where I’m going.” The road 
was shrouded in mist. She stopped talking and flipped on the high beams. 
They illuminated what seemed like an endless stretch of perfectly 
straight, perfectly flat road on the Salem Plateau, with the Saint 
Francois Mountains looming in the very far distance, silhouetted against 
a faint, unseen light source. From time to time, Rose would jog the car 
slightly to the right, trying to find the shoulder of the road. Sometimes 
they could see stretches of light brown dirt in their headlights. Other 
times, though, the headlights picked out seemingly bottomless black 
ditches.

“Take it easy,” Kyle placed his arm around Mattie’s shoulders, reached 
past her and gently put his hand on the nape of Rose’s neck, massaging 
her lightly. “Don’t smash the car. If you have to puke, just do it.”

“No….” Rose groaned and smiled at him wanly. “My beautiful car…”

“Okay, then,” he said softly. “Just ease down. We’ll be able to stop 
soon. See, we’re at sixty already? Now try for fifty, forty…” He took his 
hand off Rose, then leaned out the passenger window. “We’ve got us a 
shoulder now. Just ease down a little more, and---“

Rose followed his advice. A few seconds later, the car was still and off 
the road. Rose killed the engine, fairly kicked open the door, leaned out 
into the road and was loudly sick. Mattie, mainly concerned but more than 
a little revolted, looked at her and then at Kyle as she heard Rose get 
sick again.

“Honey?” It was Mattie’s pet nickname for Rose; and a source of some 
concern for Mattie’s mom  after she learned that Rose liked women.

“Rose?” Kyle was already out of the car and coming around to assist her.

“It hurts….it--” Rose managed before throwing up yet again.

“Take it easy. Now you’re sittin’ in the middle of the highway, here, so 
let’s-” Kyle put his arms on her shoulders and gently maneuvered Rose 
around the front of the car to the edge of the road. As he did so, he 
kept his eyes on Mattie and winked at her. This was, they both knew, the 
first time he had laid his hands on another girl since they started going 
out two months earlier. She shrugged, was not jealous. 

“Mattie Lee, I saw a water bottle in the back,” Kyle said gently but 
quickly. “Can you-“

“Yeah.” Mattie twisted around, fumbled under the back seat, and came up 
with a small plastic ribbed bottle half full of water. She handed it to 
Kyle.

“Here...here. Drink this-“ He put the bottle to Rose’s lips, then waited 
to see if the water was going to come back up, perhaps with some more 
Celtic Cross. It did not. 

“Okay, good, now take a couple deep breaths, real deep,” he said 
encouragingly. Mattie slid out of the passenger door and joined them.

Rose threw up once more, but she seemed less distressed and the color was 
returning to her face. “I’m so sorry…” she said lamely, and then, to 
everyone’s surprise, laughed.

“It’s cool, honey,” Mattie said, gently ruffling Rose’s short, carrot-
colored hair. “Gets it out of your system, that’s all. Leaves room for 
more.”

“That all you can think about, Mattie Lee?” For the first time, Rose 
sounded fully alive.

“Maybe we should go home?” Kyle suggested.

“Leave me be,” Rose said, “just for a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Mattie promised her. She got behind Rose, kneading her shoulders, 
and began to softly sing a slow, sad old Irish folk tune:

O can't you see yon little turtle dove
Sitting under the mulberry tree?
See how that she doth mourn for her true love:
And I shall mourn for thee, my dear,
And I shall mourn for thee.

Kyle, careful not to disturb Rose, gently leaned over and kissed Mattie 
on the cheek. “That’s beautiful,” he whispered.

“What would you know about it, you…Brit!?” Mattie asked him with mock 
contempt. Kyle, who along with his mom and his brothers, was the only 
Anglo-Saxon Protestant in a town of Irish Catholics, grinned and stuck 
his tongue out at her. Rose caught the mood and started to giggle. “No, 
honey, don’t laugh. Not now,” Mattie said, beginning to laugh herself.

“Really,” he pressed. “Keep singing.”

Mattie, a little embarrassed, looked down at her boots. But she kept 
on going:


O fare thee well, my little turtle dove,
And fare thee well for a-while;
But though I go I'll surely come again,
If I go ten thousand mile, my dear,
If I go ten thousand mile.


And the three friends sat there, by the side of the road, for the next 
ten minutes, until Rose declared that she felt well enough to travel.

“I should drive,” Mattie said. 

“Listen, Mattie,” Kyle began, “maybe I should-“ 

Mattie cuffed him on the cheek. “Always the perfect Southern gentleman. 
I’ll do it. There’s things about this car that you don’t know.” That was 
true; the ancient, overused car had problems with the brake and the 
clutch that had to be handled very subtly.

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“It’s okay, Kyle,” Rose assured him.

So they put Rose in the back, belting her in, placing the water bottle in 
her lap and rolling down the window just in case. 

“Go easy, Mattie Lee.”

“Don’t you worry none.” Mattie said as she spun the car around and took 
off at high speed, through the mist, towards home. 

The last thing Mattie clearly remembered was yawning a bit as she thought 
about how tired she was, and how good it would feel to be home and in her 
own bed, perhaps with Kyle. She also vaguely recalled Kyle looking at her 
a little funny, with that same concerned expression he’d worn when 
assisting Rose. He might have said something to her – and if so, Mattie 
wished she could remember what it was because those were likely the last 
words he spoke on Earth.

Beyond that, there was a blank space in her memory – maybe even a dead 
cell or two in her brain – that, she later learned, covered two whole 
days. Mattie had blacked out twice before. The first time was under 
circumstances remotely similar to this – when she’d gotten far drunker 
than usual, mixing liquor, beer, and Old Traveler on a New Year’s Eve two 
years earlier. There, she remembered sitting on a couch, laughing at 
something Rose had said – and then inexplicably found herself, fully dressed, inside Rose’s bathtub, which was filled with lukewarm water. It had also happened to her last year, the time she and Rose had tried that Valium. She remembered taking the pills and watching a movie as she waited for  the stuff to take effect; and then abruptly found herself curled up in  her own bed, fully dressed, ten or so hours later, with no memory of what came between. Rose assured her that they had had a long and detailed  conversation, lasting about seven hours, covering everything from the American Civil War to preferred sexual positions. Both times, she’d been a little miffed with herself for losing several hours of her life; but she’d felt fine upon awakening. No harm done.

This time, however, she knew something was wrong the moment she tried to 
open her eyes and found that she could not. Her eyelids were gummed shut. 
As she worked to open them, she became aware of something hard pressing 
against the roof of her mouth, which was sore. Her back and neck felt 
terribly stiff, as though she had been sleeping in an uncomfortable 
position; she could feel a dull pain in her left knee; and she felt ice 
cold all over. She tried to speak, but the thing in her mouth (it felt 
like some kind of flexible plastic thing with sharp corners) was taking 
up almost her entire mouth. And from somewhere far away, she could hear a 
man and a woman talking; and also a mechanical beeping sound. She could 
feel things pinching her arms and legs; and she sensed she was lying 
spread-eagled on her back.

Mattie – blind, freezing, confused, and beginning to be scared - tried to 
sit up. She couldn’t raise her back up all the way, and when she tried 
bending her legs, a monstrous flash of pain – worse than anything she’d 
felt before in her life – shot through her left knee. She gasped, cold 
air rushing past the thing stuck in her mouth, and fell back. She tried 
again to pull open her eyelids, and only succeeded in unsticking the left 
one slightly.

“Honey,” the woman’s voice spoke again. “Don’t try to move. Just lie 
still.”

Moving her tongue and lips carefully around the plastic block, she said 
what should have brought the words “where am I” in a normal tone of voice.  Instead, she heard her voice come out as a very faint, weak hissing sound, like a whisper coming from the back of her throat. She tried again, but her cold, dry throat closed up on her.

After swallowing painfully a few times, she tried yet again, drawing a 
deep breath that brought a stabbing pain on her left side, and spoke as 
loudly and distinctly as she could. 
“Where…am….I...What’s….happening…Please…tell me” Her voice, rusty and 
hoarse, was further distorted and muffled by the thing in her mouth.

 “Don’t try to talk, sweetheart,” the lady said again. She must have seen 
Mattie’s eyes fluttering beneath the gummed lids, because a few moments 
later Mattie felt a sponge – also freezing cold – being dabbed gently 
against the corners of her eyes. “Open your eyes very slowly.”

Mattie didn’t listen and the bright white light and the cold air stung 
her eyes. On top of everything else she now had a headache. She opened 
her eyes again, this time gradually. As her eyes got accustomed to the 
light, things came into focus, and she looked around, a feeling of horror 
fell over her.

She was in a tiny, cold hospital room, reclining in a narrow bed with 
metal rails, and hooked up to some kind of machine that beeped 
monotonously as various numbers and squiggles flashed on a small 
television screen. A fat young woman in a white coat – Mattie assumed 
this was the woman who had spoken to her and wiped her eyes – was sitting 
by her side; and a serious-looking young Asian man, bearded and 
bespectacled, also dressed in white, was standing over her making notes 
on a clipboard. Mattie could make out the words Nakamura and M.D. on a 
little white plastic badge clipped to his coat. Despite the freezing 
temperature, Mattie was wearing only a thin white hospital gown. Her arms 
were covered with wires and round pads, and a fat IV needle protruded 
from her left wrist. An accordion-like white plastic tube snaked up her 
chest and into her mouth, making a weird hydraulic sound every few 
seconds. She felt that dull pain in her left knee again, but she could 
not see her legs; some kind of miniature white curtain – a little like 
the one that separated booths in the coffee shop on Hewes Avenue – had 
been drawn across her, keeping her from seeing anything below her waist.

“My leg?” Neither the woman nor the man seemed to understand what she was 
saying, not with that gadget in her mouth; so she repeated the question 
twice more, finally wiggling her right leg (she didn’t dare try to move 
the left one again) to make herself clear.

“Don’t worry,” the man identified as Dr. Nakamura said in a deep voice, 
“they’re both still there. But you banged up your left knee pretty bad; 
and we had to do a total knee replacement. It’ll hurt for a month or so, 
and you may need some physical therapy. The right leg’s fine.”

“Why?” Again, they didn’t understand. Mattie, using her tongue, tried to 
pop the thing out of her mouth so she could speak, but it was taped or 
glued inside. The man understood what she was doing, and he smiled – 
though just a bit.

“I can take that out for you now. Hold on-“ He held the tube with one 
hand, put his other hand inside her mouth for a moment, and then it was 
out.

“What…happened?”

“Okay,” Dr. Nakamura said as the woman (Mattie figured she was a nurse) 
patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll tell you in one second.” He turned to 
the nurse. “Give her twenty milligrams of…” and then he spoke some 
chemical-sounding name. The nurse opened a drawer, produced  a needle, 
and injected something into Mattie’s IV line. 

“What happened?” she repeated. Her voice was beginning to come back.

“I just want to give this a moment to take effect. You must be in a lot 
of pain.” A warm sensation spread through Mattie, as if she had just 
stepped out of the cold into a nice hot bath. She felt herself relaxing a 
bit. “Do you want to see your mom? She’s outside, along with your 
friend…Rosie?”

Mattie smiled faintly. “Rose. And where’s Kyle?”

“I think it would be best for your mother to come in now. She’s been 
waiting for you.”

Mattie didn’t like the way this was going at all. He wasn’t answering her 
questions. She remembered the drunken ride down the Interstate and, to 
her mounting dismay, remembered being at the wheel and beginning to feel 
tired. She assumed there had been an accident in which she’d mangled her 
knee and hurt her back. If Rose was outside, she must have fared better. 
But where was Kyle? Why wasn’t he here?

“Please tell me what happened. I’m scared.”

Dr. Nakamura held up a finger, then disappeared behind a curtain and 
spoke to someone she couldn’t see. A moment later, the curtain parted and 
he returned, along with Rose and Mattie’s mother Sue, both of whom looked 
about ten years older than she remembered them. Rose was sporting a 
square gauze bandage on the left side of her forehead. 

“Mattie, honey,” Sue put her arms around Mattie, but gingerly, as if she 
was afraid of crushing her daughter.

“Mattie…” As Rose bent down to kiss her friend, Mattie could see that 
there were tears on her face and that her eyes were red and puffy.

“Okay,” Dr. Nakamura began. “I think we need to take this slow. You were 
in a car accident two nights ago-”

Rose cut him off. “He’s dead, Mattie.”

Dr. Nakamura held up his hand again. “Rose, I understand you’re upset, 
but you’re not helping your friend. She’s very badly injured, and I don’t 
want to cause her any-“

Rose ignored him and pushed on. “Kyle’s dead. They said he died right 
off, and he didn’t feel no pain. He loved you. Mrs. Denton says she knew 
that.” Rose was standing over Mattie, holding her hands out, palms up, as 
she shook her head back and forth helplessly.

 Mattie had known that – somehow – from the moment she woke up. “I killed 
him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Mattie, I think it would be best if you slept for a while, and then we 
can try this again.” Nakamura was glaring daggers at Rose as he spoke. 
“Mrs. Allen, Rose, I’m going to have to ask you folks to please leave the 
room.”

“He loved me,” Mattie said dully, as she felt something big collapse and 
die inside her – perhaps that happy, eccentric young girl who for ten 
years had played Celtic warriors with Rose in the empty fields on the 
edge of town; who’d made love with a boy, Kyle, for the very first time 
six months ago; who’d whooped and hollered as she and her only two 
friends in the world drove down the empty country roads at night at a 
hundred miles an hour. She turned to Dr. Nakamura. “Please bring him 
back!”

“Shush, Mattie,” Mrs. Allen said, taking her daughter’s left hand and 
squeezing it, gently caressing it. And then, abruptly, she stopped. Sue’s 
expression, which a moment ago, had been one of sadness and sympathy, was 
now one of shock and mounting anger.

Mattie didn’t understand. “Mama?”

“What the hell is this?” Sue asked angrily. 

“Mama?” Mattie was crying now, not only with grief, but with fear, 
thinking that her mom was addressing her.

“What are you doing to my little girl!?” 

Mattie realized Sue was staring, wide-eyed and red-faced, at Mattie’s 
left hand. For a terrible moment, Mattie thought that her left hand had 
been amputated or burned or-.

But as far as she could see, her hand, draped over the metal rail of the 
bed, seemed fine. She tried to move it closer to her face. But she could 
only bring her hand about halfway around when it froze in midair, with a 
metallic clink, stopped by the metal handcuff and short chain clamped 
around the wrist. She jerked her right hand towards her face. Again, it 
stopped a foot short, at the end of another pair of handcuffs. And then 
she understood. Kyle had died because she was driving drunk. She’d lose 
not only him, but her mom and Rose and everyone else.

“Please…I-I never wanted this…I loved him…I…wanted…”

She said other things but they were lost in a flood of tears. Nakamura 
(who by now was being cursed liberally, not just by Mattie’s mom but also 
by Rose) began to yell himself, shouting at Rose and Mrs. Allen to leave 
the room before they upset Mattie any more than they already had. He then 
said something quickly, quietly, to the nurse, who monkeyed with one of 
the tubes sticking out of Mattie’s arm. Mattie began to feel drowsy, but 
she continued to talk feverishly to Kyle, to Rose, to her mom, to her 
dad, to the living and to the dead, as she faded away.

Yes, Rose had told Mattie the truth. Mattie, while driving Rose and Kyle 
home at a hundred and ten miles an hour, she had either fallen into a 
drunken sleep or passed out. The Camaro, almost immediately, had veered 
off the road and landed nose-first in a six-foot-deep ditch. Mattie’s 
life had been saved by her seatbelt, although her left knee had been 
crushed by the steering column as the front of the car crumpled against 
the hard earth. The front passenger side had taken the worst of the 
impact and had completely collapsed, killing Kyle instantly. Rose, who 
had already puked most of the alcohol out of her system - and who became 
aware, at the last moment, of what was about to happen - had thrown 
herself down on the floor of the rear seat and curled herself into a 
ball. She plowed into the upholstered seats and suffered only a 
concussion. Regaining consciousness after some indefinite time (when she 
finally looked at her watch, she saw that only an hour had elapsed since 
she’d gotten sick), she had nearly fainted again when she saw what was 
left of Kyle. For a horrible moment, she thought Mattie Lee, laying 
silently in the collapsed front seat, her legs drenched with blood, was 
dead as well, but, digging her fingers into her friend’s neck, she had 
found a faint pulse. Fearing the car might explode, Rose had tried to 
drag Mattie out, but there was simply no space between Mattie and what 
had been the dash. Rose had run into the middle of the road, waving her 
arms, trying to flag down a car, but none had come. There were no 
settlements around for twenty miles – the only clusters of lights were in 
the distance. Rose, nearly hysterical with shock and desperation and 
beginning to feel dizzy from her own head injury, had finally remembered 
the call boxes they attached to telephone poles by the side of the 
highway. The first one she saw – right across the road from the wrecked 
car – had been dead. The second, twenty feet down the road, had been 
vandalized. After zigzagging back and forth across the road for nearly a 
half a mile, trying box after broken box, she’d found a working one; 
summoned help; and rushed back to sit with Mattie Lee. For the rest of 
her life, Rose would blame herself, first for driving them all out drunk 
in her car to the death trap in the Ozarks; and also for letting Mattie 
drive her car back. Rose was far more level-headed than Mattie; and as a 
practicing (if very imperfect) Catholic, she would never consider trying 
to get herself killed or injured. All the same, she repeatedly 
volunteered for dangerous duties in Afghanistan; had been shot twice as a 
result, once in her own left leg; and had hoped both times that she was 
doing penance for her sins against Mattie and Kyle.

Mattie never recovered in any way. She spent three weeks in the hospital, 
visited only by Rose and Rose’s parents (Rose, a true friend, saw her for 
hours every day, doing everything she could to amuse her friend but also 
holding her and crying with her about Kyle); Sue Allen (who with each 
visit seemed less and less loving or even sympathetic, and increasingly 
angry about the medical bills and Mattie’s disgrace to their family); 
once by Kyle’s mother (who, after launching into a disjointed, tearful 
lecture, had actually slapped Mattie and been forbidden by hospital staff 
to return); and twice by a not-very-good lawyer who was Rose’s distant 
cousin. No one else came to see her. Mattie began to have vivid 
nightmares about Kyle, in which she saw his death; or believed she was 
being pursued by his family (sometimes driving Rose’s old Camaro); or in 
which she simply saw his face or relived their time together. When Rose 
was not with her, Mattie began to cry without warning or to have 
conversations with Kyle (she said she knew he was not there, but refused 
to stop talking to him, claiming the conversations helped keep her worse 
feelings at bay). The doctors gave her antidepressants which helped 
somewhat but made her nauseous and irritable. They also gave her various 
painkillers  - some working with opium, others working by blocking 
sensations from her brain – for the constant pain from her mangled leg.  

When Mattie was discharged from the hospital, she spent two weeks at home waiting to be arraigned. She tried, twice, to take her own life, once with pills; and once by cutting open her own wrists with her father’s razor. A psychiatrist, examining her at her lawyer’s request, concluded that Mattie was suffering from severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He opined that she was a danger to herself; and recommended that she be treated at a private mental health facility in Jefferson City. But Mattie’s family had no money or insurance for that kind of thing; and in any case the police and the District Attorney did not want her moved.

At her arraignment, Mattie was, as her lawyer had predicted, charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. Mattie pled guilty, not only on the advice of counsel but because she knew she was guilty. Her lawyer considered arguing that Mattie, who had once been found by her mother sitting in the corner of her room while crying,  rocking back and forth, hugging herself, and singing softly to herself; and who had twice attempted suicide; was not mentally competent and was a danger to herself; but he was concerned that she would be in more danger if she were sent to a public psychiatric hospital - full of junkies, religious fanatics, and the criminally insane as well as low-paid attendants who weren’t much better - than to a minimum-security juvenile prison.

Mattie was sentenced on September 20, 1997. Rose, Rose’s parents, and 
Mattie’s mother and lawyer accompanied her to the hearing. Kyle’s family 
was there (Kyle’s mother having been warned not to approach Mattie) Rose, 
her mother, and her lawyer accompanied Mattie to her sentencing hearing. 
The judge, a middle-aged woman with silver hair sitting behind a 
nameplate reading “Hon. Ann A. Isenberg,” was not only the first Jewish 
person Mattie had ever seen but also the first one who spoke without a 
strong Southern accent. Mattie had to strain to understand what she was 
saying.

Judge Isenberg asked Mattie if she had anything to say before sentence 
was passed. Mattie began to cry; and when she brought herself under 
control enough to speak, she said she wished only that Kyle had lived and 
she had died. 


“I know,” the judge had said, and was silent for several moments. She 
said had read Mattie’s medical and psychiatric records and was certain 
the girl was already being punished – and perhaps would be for the rest 
of her life – far worse than anything the State of Missouri could impose 
on her. She explained, though that she had to impose a sentence on Mattie 
anyway for two reasons. First, Mattie’s crime carried a mandatory minimum 
sentence of eighteen months; a sentence which was necessary to deter 
other young people, with less conscience, from doing what Mattie had 
done. Second, Judge Isenberg was concerned that Mattie, consumed as she 
was with guilt and grief, would try to hurt herself if she was left to 
her own devices. Thus, Mattie would spend the next year and a half at a 
“girls’ facility” in the Southeastern corner of the state, where she 
would receive counseling and treatment and have a chance to finish her 
education. The judge added that because Mattie was a minor, the record of 
the prosecution and the sentence would be sealed. Judge Isenberg urged 
Sue Allen and Rose and everyone else who cared about Mattie’s welfare to 
please visit here there as often as they could.

She asked Mattie if she had any questions or had anything else to say.

Mattie turned to face Kyle’s mother, and then her own mom and Rose. “I’m 
sorry. I know that doesn’t help any of you, but I’m sorry. I caused this. 
I deserve this.”

“Miss Allen,” said the judge, “I’m sorry too. The bailiff will take Miss 
Allen into custody.”

As two bailiffs approached Mattie with a fearsome-looking set of 
handcuffs and chains, Sue Allen rose. “Can I kiss my daughter goodbye?”

Judge Isenberg smiled. “Of course you can.”

Rose blinked back tears. “Me too.”

Mattie turned towards them for the last time in a long while, arms 
outstretched – and fainted. She woke up in the infirmary of the County 
Jail.

Two days later, Mattie was transferred to the Elizabeth Virginia Wallace 
Truman Juvenile Center, just south of Hayti, near the border with 
Tennessee. Like all of the other girls there, she was issued baggy orange 
coveralls with no belt or pockets and white canvas slip-on shoes. She 
spent sixteen hours a day in a room, the size of her old bedroom, that 
she shared with one, and sometimes two, other girls. The other eight 
she spent preparing to take the high-school equivalency exam (bored to 
tears, she threw herself into studying and obtained her GED after six 
months); earning a certificate in Web design (not so bad, really, 
although she herself had only very limited, and closely monitored, 
Internet access); attending alcohol- and drug-abuse lectures; meeting 
with the facility’s psychiatrist, a nice old guy named Dr. Black; reading 
in the library (her only real escape); and receiving visitors on 
weekends. As for visitors, Rose came every week, without fail, and stayed 
as long as they would let her, usually bringing food, cigarettes and 
other comforts not only for Mattie but for other girls in the prison as 
well. Mattie lived for Rose’s visits – but she came to dread the less-
frequent visits from her mother, who showed her almost no love; 
complained about the doctor and legal bills; and asked Mattie pointless 
questions, which Mattie of course couldn’t begin to answer, about what 
she’d do with her life when she was released.

Mattie, pining for Kyle and Rose and her old life, was homesick every 
day. It hit her worst in the morning, right after she woke up, feeling 
like a dull ache in her chest and throat. Then it went away, usually as 
soon as she’d left her cell. It came back at lunchtime – perhaps because 
she remembered the lunches she’d shared with Rose at school – and 
disappeared after she left the cafeteria. And then it returned in the 
early evening – because she was looking forward to dreaming about Rose 
and Kyle and even her mom but she knew it was too early to go to bed – 
and didn’t disappear until they turned out the lights. And of course 
sometimes, as she slept at night or did the homework for her Web design 
class or wrote carefully-monitored E-mails to Rose or her mom, she would 
imagine herself, Kyle and Rose riding happily down the road in the black 
Camaro and she would break down crying.

One day, Mattie quite literally stumbled on a way to cope with what had 
happened to her. It may have kept her from depression or even suicide but 
it drove yet another wedge between Mattie and the real world. Since about 
her final week in the hospital, her knee had been feelings steadily 
better (in part because it most of it wasn’t, in the strictest sense, her 
knee; the joint in her leg was actually an artifice of metal, plastic and 
rubber). But during her first winter in the place, she slipped on a patch 
of ice in the exercise yard, twisted her leg as she came down, wrenching 
her new knee loose from its moorings with a sickly and audible crack. 
When an attendant arrived two minutes later, she was still convulsed with 
pain, holding her knee while curled up in a ball. Her cellmate Valerie – 
a friendly, basically innocent, girl from Moscow who had come to St. 
Louis to take what she thought was a job as a model; found to her horror 
she was expected to work as a prostitute instead; and had accidentally 
killed her “manager,” running him down with his own car, as she tried to 
flee to the airport – later told Mattie that they could hear her 
screaming halfway across the prison. Mattie was taken to a nearby 
hospital for further surgery; spent the night there under guard; and was 
driven back to the prison the next day. She spent three days in the 
prison infirmary recovering from this second operation. Almost as soon as 
they checked her in, the nurse on duty gave her two tablets of the very
same medicine – Vicodin - as she had been given following her initial
knee surgery. Within minutes, the pain was gone – and within minutes
after that, it  seemed to her as though all of the problems of prison –
the boredom, the homesickness, the sense of wasted time – had receded
into perspective; and she stayed that way – calm and good-humored – for
the next several  hours. They continued giving her Vicodin throughout
her three-day stay. 


During those three days, Mattie felt as though she had, in a way, escaped 
from prison. For the first time since Kyle’s death, she felt at peace 
with the world around her. She told the hospital staff how much she 
appreciated their care and that she was sorry she was such an 
inconvenience. She found that the Vicodin stimulated her imagination and 
her writing abilities, and she wrote very kind, elaborate, and emotional 
letters to her Mom and to Rose, asking again for their forgiveness, 
recalling happier times in the past, and telling them that she knew 
things would someday be all right. She also began to make detailed notes 
for a graphic novel, about a young girl contemplating her sins while in 
prison, for her and Rose to create after she was released. One of the 
nurses let Mattie borrow her Sony Discman and Mattie listened to 
“Tuesday’s Gone” by Lynyrd Skynyrd a dozen times in a row, the song 
sounding better and better each time she heard it.

Finally, Mattie’s leg, now in a metal brace, healed enough for her to 
return to her cell. A half-day later, as her last dose of Vicodin wore 
off, the knee began to trouble her again. Worse, she found that without 
the drug, her loneliness and boredom and regret were also returning. She 
called over a guard – a big, blocky, middle-aged woman named Barbara – 
and asked to see a doctor. He put a cold compress on her knee, and then 
sent her over to the pharmacy next door to pick up a bottle of thirty for 
the residual pain. The directions read, “take one every 12 hours as 
needed for pain,” and she did. She took two tablets of Vicodin a day for 
the next three months. By then, she had built up such a tolerance that 
some of the pills didn’t even work – Mattie thought of those as “duds” – 
and to get the full effect she had to wash them down with large amounts 
of strong black coffee. So she requested another visit with the doctor, 
told him her knee was bothering her more and more these days, and asked 
if she could have three a day. By the time she was released she was up to 
six a day. No one suspected her. For one thing, Mattie was disabled and 
had had two painful surgeries in less than six months. For another, her 
records described her as having problems with alcohol abuse but said 
nothing about any drug abuse; and after a while staff concluded she was 
not at risk for any kind of substance abuse because she was cooperating 
so well with the alcohol-rehabilitation program (Mattie, horrified over 
what she had done to Kyle, would never drink again). And insofar as the 
Vicodin made Mattie quieter and more withdrawn, the staff simply assumed 
this was a sign of her depression.

On the day Mattie was released, Rose and Rose’s parents Tom and Jean were 
waiting for her in the front office. Tom, who had visited her once a 
month, lifted her off the ground in a bear hug. Jean beamed at her, 
gathered her in her arms, and kissed on the forehead. Mattie had thanked 
them and then run to Rose; the girls, realizing how much time they’d 
lost, cried in each other arms for nearly ten minutes.

There was an awkward moment when Mattie asked, without much real hope, 
where her mother was. Rose, Jean and Tom exchanged glances, and finally 
Tom launched into something about her Mattie’s mama was sick.
 “Tom?” Jean gave him a look that cut him off. 

Tom shrugged. “All right. We’re gonna take you back to your mama. In my 
opinion,” he said, his voice rising slightly, “she should have been here 
for you; and also in my opinion she doesn’t understand what you’ve been 
through.”

“Be quiet, Tom,” Jean reproached him again.

“No, it’s all right,” Mattie, who had suffered through a dozen of her 
mother’s angry visits (for the last few, she’d actually been relieved 
when the time came for Barbara to take her back to her cell), had 
suspected she was headed for something like this. She couldn’t blame her 
mother for how she felt, but at the same time she resented it. At least 
the Sullivans were here for her; and in any case she wouldn’t have a 
four-hour drive home next to her mother.

“You’ll…you can stay with us, if you want,” Jean petted Mattie’s short 
hair.

“Imagine it’s a sleep-over,” Rose smiled tentatively.

“I love you,” Mattie hugged Rose again.

 “Are you cross-dressing now?” Rose asked to break the mood. For her big 
day, the prison staff had dressed Mattie in a red-and-blue checkered 
short-sleeve shirt; a white high-necked undershirt, baggy blue jeans, and 
a pair of cheap, outsized cowboy boots that made her feet look huge. With 
her crew cut and no makeup (not allowed at the institution), Mattie could 
have passed as a boy, perhaps one who worked at a rodeo.

“Well, I-I got turned in prison…” Mattie tried to joke. She wasn’t sure 
if it was an appropriate thing to say. For that matter, she was beginning 
to realize that she wasn’t completely sure how to relate to other people, 
how to speak to them or even how to look at them, now that she was an ex-
con. 

None of this bothered Rose, who clapped her hands in mock delight. 
“Finally! Mattie Lee finally sees the light!”

“Rose!” Jean sounded shocked.

“I was kidding,” Mattie explained for Jean’s benefit. “Truth is, 
everybody was pretty good to me here.”

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Tom picked up Mattie’s small gym bag 
(which contained the notes for her graphic novel, all of her books, the 
jar of Vicodin she’d gotten from the pharmacy that morning, and not much 
else). “But first-“ he reached in the pocket of his blue denim shirt and 
took out a small box. “We got you this. It ain’t nearly enough, but…” 
Mattie opened the box. Inside was a chain, of some golden metal, with a 
large golden pendant in the shape of a four-leaf clover. She put it on 
and never removed it, not when swimming, or showering, or even when she 
was giving birth to Wanda Lee and Victor Lee.

On the drive back to town, the Sullivans filled Mattie in on what had 
happened in her absence. Mattie wanted to know first about Kyle and his 
family, even if it was painful. She was looking at Jean as she said this, 
because she gave what Jean said a little more weight than what she heard 
from Rose or Tom, because Rose – like her - was a little crazy, and 
because Tom had already lied once to protect her feelings. Kyle, Jean 
said, had been cremated and interred at a cemetery in Jefferson City, 
where his family was originally from. (“I can find out which one if you 
want, honey.”) Kyle’s mom had remarried and had taken her other kids to 
Jefferson City as well. Jean said Kyle’s mother had seen, at the 
sentencing hearing, just how sorry Mattie was; and she regretted having 
struck her in the hospital and wished her well. 

Next, Mattie asked for more about her mom. “She’s angry, Mattie Lee,” 
Jean shook her head. “But not with you. With everyone. She’s alone in 
that house. We’re going over to visit her, all of us together, later 
today or tomorrow. Don’t do it yourself; follow my lead.”

Rose told her the next piece of big news, something she’d mentioned 
repeatedly during her visits: “I finally join the Army this Spring, four 
months from now. I didn’t want to go while you were in that place, not 
while you might have needed me.”

Mattie felt a sense of despair. The original plan was for them to join 
together, spending their weekends on leave in Amsterdam and Berlin. But 
even if Kyle’s death and her eighteen months in prison somehow didn’t 
appear on her record, she couldn’t join the Army now, not with her 
artificial knee. “But…I still need you. What’m I gonna go without you?” 
She began to cry. Rose gathered her up, looking back and forth at her 
parents. “Look…” Rose said finally. “Nothing’s in stone. Maybe I can wait 
another year.” 

“Please!”

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. Mattie Lee and I are gonna get jobs 
somewhere together, this year, while Mattie gets back on her feet.” Tom 
started to protest, but Rose shook her head at him and went back to 
comforting her friend.

So there was very little left for Mattie when she returned to her 
hometown that evening. The Sullivans brought her over to her mother, who 
was initially silent but soon erupted in anger. So she stayed with the 
Sullivans, rooming with Rose, paying them rent from a minimum-wage job 
at the city’s very small public library. She kept waiting for someone to 
accost her in the street and accuse her of killing Kyle, but no one ever 
did. The people in town remembered her, and they felt sorry for her, but 
they had liked Kyle and knew how he died and so they were polite to her 
but not much more. She often dreamed about Kyle at night and woke up 
crying. Rose, in the neighboring bed, always came to comfort her, but 
each time Mattie realized, with mounting dread, that someday soon Rose 
would no longer be there. 

And when Mattie was eighteen, she once again fell in love, this time with 
an articulate young man named Tim, a student at Lincoln University in 
nearby Jefferson City, who was in town visiting an old friend. They had 
met at a party. His long blonde hair and his love of reading reminded her 
of Kyle; and blinded to her his faults and intentions. Tim was a 
sociopath. He flattered her constantly, quickly researching any subject 
she mentioned so he could pretend to share her interest and discuss it 
intelligently with her; agreeing with most anything she said; and, worst 
of all, sharing her love of pharmaceuticals. Rose, by now making her 
arrangements to enlist in the Army, wanted to make sure Mattie was left 
in capable hands, or at least not in the hands of a predator. She tried 
to warn Mattie about Tim, but Mattie – perhaps thinking of Kyle and 
wanting to believe she’d been granted a second chance - wouldn’t listen. 
Two months after meeting Tim, Mattie learned she was pregnant (up until 
then she’d actually believed that sex, even unprotected sex, couldn’t 
make a woman pregnant unless she specifically intended to conceive).

She told Tim over dinner two days later; and two weeks after that, Tim 
disappeared. Even if an abortion had been available, even if it was not 
against the values of her Catholic home town, Mattie would never have 
considered getting one. Rose, while agreeing with Mattie that the baby’s 
life was sacred, made Mattie a standing offer to kill Tim. She wasn’t 
kidding. But Mattie insisted, all the way through her third month, that 
Tim would come back to her and that she would soon have a family of her 
own. He never did; and on the evening of December 2, Rose and Tom drove 
Mattie all the way out to the hospital in Jefferson City, where she had 
her first daughter, a plump, blond-haired girl she named Wanda, in honor 
of  Wanda Maximoff, a character in one of the comic books she and Kyle 
had loved. Mattie told herself, every time she looked at Wanda (or “Wanda 
Lee,” as she called her, so her daughter’s name would have the same 
rhythm as her own), that Kyle was her real father; and she excitedly told 
Rose, to Tom and Jean, and even to her own mom, that the infant had 
Kyle’s eyes, nose and forehead. It worked to a degree; Mattie still had 
her bad dreams, but less frequently.

Once Rose was satisfied that Mattie had the baby situation more or less 
under control, she enlisted and was sent to Fort Biloxi, Mississippi. 
Mattie, who had thought for years about enlisting with Rose, felt almost 
as bad as she had when she had gone to prison. Rose was moving ahead of 
Mattie, headed off in a different direction, and Mattie couldn’t follow 
her. She would have adventures that Mattie would never be able to share 
and grow in ways that Mattie could not. Mattie wondered whether they 
would still be friends when Rose returned, probably with a beautiful 
girlfriend and a chestful of medals.

Mattie – who by now had lost her job at the library – continued living 
with the Sullivans, trying to take Rose’s place, paying rent out of her 
monthly welfare check. Wanda Lee had softened Sue Allen somewhat but 
Mattie still rarely saw or talked to her mother. Apart from Tom and Jean, 
she had no friends in town now that Rose was gone. She began to have her 
bad dreams again; began to cry again without warning; walking the streets 
where she’d hung out with Rose brought painfully nostalgic memories. 

And then, when Mattie was twenty, her mother asked her to please come 
back to the house for lunch. When Mattie arrived, her mother was sitting 
with a tall, pale, sixtyish, patrician-looking woman who might have been 
an older version of Mattie.

“You remember your Aunt Judy, don’t you?” Sue asked. Judy Frost was 
Mattie’s paternal aunt. She was nearly six feet tall, with a boyish 
build, piercing green eyes, and curly hair, once red, that was now almost 
entirely gray. She was dressed in a curiously old-fashioned sweater, 
skirt and blouse, and wore a pair of antique spectacles on a chain around 
her neck. On the lapel of her sweater, she wore a round ceramic pin that 
had bore the words “City of Castle Rock.” She hadn’t spoken a word yet, 
but somehow she radiated self-confidence.

“Hello there, Mattie Lee,” the woman said, with only the faintest trace 
of a Southern accent, mixed in with a strange accent Mattie had never 
heard before (it was, in fact, a Maine accent). “I hear you’ve been 
having quite a few adventures lately. Like I told your mama here-“ she 
pronounced it he-yah, “-I want to talk to you about something.”

Over lunch, Judy Frost provided Mattie with a little history of her own 
family. Back in the 1970’s, Judy, along with Jim Allen - Mattie’s future 
father – and their siblings had grown up in a rented trailer not too far 
from here. Money had been scarce and no one had wanted to help them out 
because the Allens weren’t “good folks.” Judy had had the good luck to 
marry an engineer, Arnie Frost, whose work had eventually him from rural 
Missouri all the way to Portland, Maine. They had ended up in a nice, 
middle-class town called Castle Rock, where Arnie had set up his own 
construction company and built them a modest wood house with his own two 
hands. The house was still standing but Arnie, unfortunately, was not, 
having died of a heart attack the previous Spring. Judy, herself sick 
with cancer, now needed someone to look after the house and keep her 
company. Looking at Sue as she spoke, Judy said she regretted not having 
helped out Jim and his family more in the past; and felt this was the 
best way to do so now. In short, Mattie and Wanda Lee were invited to 
come live with her in Castle Rock. Judy said she knew Mattie had been 
moved around a lot lately and might not want to be uprooted one more 
time. However, if Mattie took the job, the house would be hers and 
Wanda’s when Judy died. She would own a home, free and clear; and Wanda 
could grow up in a nice small town with good schools and beautiful views.

As Judy spoke, both Mattie and Judy saw what looked like rising anger in 
Sue’s eyes – and Mattie got the feeling she was just beginning to learn 
about a whole chapter of her family’s history, one involving sibling 
rivalry and envy and poor relations struggling to get out of the boonies and not helping those they left behind. Judy assured her that she, Sue, was the beneficiary of an annuity that  that the City of Castle Rock had taken out on Judy twenty years earlier, when she had first been elected City Clerk.

Mattie, who didn’t like change, was loath to leave her hometown. Apart 
from her stint in prison, she’d never lived anyplace else. But then she 
thought of how painful it was to visit her old haunts without Rose, Kyle, 
or the goodwill she’d once enjoyed from her neighbors. She’d miss the 
Sullivans, but she knew she’d long ago become a burden on them. 

Mattie looked to her mother. “I think it would be best for you, honey.” 
Her tone suggested she was about to add, “and I don’t want you here 
anymore.”

A few weeks later, following a party at the Sullivan house, Mattie packed 
her bags and she and daughter flew to Maine to care for their dying Aunt 
Judy. Mattie cried as Tom drove her, for the last time, down the streets 
where she had grown up; and later she felt part of herself torn away as 
she saw Jefferson City – and beyond it the tiny cluster of lights that 
was Rubidoux – disappear as the plane climbed into the sky. For her, the 
Time of the Old South was over.

Yes, Aunt Judy, who had abandoned her family to escape from the trailer 
park in Rubidoux, had indeed given her niece a place to live – a 
homemade, run-down, leaky house on the outskirts of Castle Rock. Judy 
Frost died nine months later. Nine loveless months of angry, unending 
demands, criticism, and sarcasm directed against not only the poor 
crippled girl who had burned all her bridges and had nowhere else to go, 
but against her innocent baby daughter as well. She screamed at Mattie 
for hours on end, sometimes all night long, about her real or imagined 
mistakes. Called her white trash and a junkie and a killer. Called Wanda 
Lee a “bastard.” Told Mattie – on a night when Wanda’s crying woke them 
both up - that she should have been sterilized at birth. Again and again 
threw the food Mattie cooked for her across the kitchen or bedroom. Hid 
Mattie’s painkillers until the girl was sick with withdrawal. Threw all 
of her belongings in the trash. Once  - after Mattie had broken down in 
tears and begged her please to stop the abuse- hung a piece of cardboard 
with the crudely-lettered words “I CRY” around the girl’s neck. When 
Mattie gathered enough courage to tell her aunt that she and Wanda were 
leaving, told Mattie that if she did she would go back to jail, this time 
for “elder neglect,” and Wanda Lee would be taken away from her and 
placed in a home. And, when she saw the end was near, perhaps weeks or 
even days away, Judy began to accuse Mattie of poisoning her. 


And after putting Mattie through nine months of hell, Judy played one 
more trick her on her: She had, as promised, left Mattie the house – but 
had left her no money with which to run, or even to heat – the little 
dwelling. Mattie had called her mom and begged for some of the money from 
the annuity to use for the house – or at least enough for plane tickets 
so she and Wanda Lee could come back home. “You have no home,” Mattie’s 
mom had replied; and then hung up on her; and they had never spoken to 
one another since.



And now, Mattie sat in what had been Aunt Judy’s house, Wanda and Victor 
by her side, but off not only from the South but the rest of the world, 
waiting for the monsters outside to break down the windows and the doors.

VI.

The monsters did indeed come for Mattie and her kids that night – but 
Mattie was fast asleep when they began to arrive. She had been dreaming 
again – darker and more troubling dreams than usual – about her loved 
ones but also about a cloud of mist, bringing with it six-legged animals 
and flying things and other monsters, that she imagined closing in on her 
hometown. In the dream, Kyle and Rose were taking care of Wanda Lee and 
Victor Lee while Mattie went to the store. As the mist closed over the 
market (it was the Foodhouse; not the Market Basket – Rubidoux’s much 
smaller grocery store) she, alone among the people in the store, knew 
what lurked inside. She also realized that she had left open the rear 
door of her small trailer. Kyle and Rose, let alone Wanda and Victor, had 
no way of knowing what was in the mist or even that there was any danger. 
And given the terrible heat (Rubidoux, both in her dreams and in real 
life, always seemed to be hot and muggy regardless of the season), they 
might well open the rest of the doors and windows or, worse, go outside 
to cool off in the mist. So Mattie again begged the people in the store – 
Tim and her Aunt Judy among them – to please see her home. They again 
silently refused. She marched past them and pushed open the exit door, 
just as she had done in real life earlier that day. But as she tried to 
walk out into the mist, she froze up. In her dream, she remembered having 
walked out into the mist once before, but when she had done that, she had 
no idea of the terrible things she would find there. Now that she did, 
her legs and feet simply would not cooperate with her brain. They “knew” 
it was certain death for her to go out there, although in the dream she 
knew everyone she ever cared about would certainly die if she didn’t 
reach home in time to warn them. She also knew her own life wasn’t worth 
nearly as much as theirs. And if she was too cowardly to even try to get 
to them, her life wasn’t worth anything at all.



“Mama.” 



“Mommy.”



Mattie could hear Wanda and Victor somewhere in the market. She was 
flooded with a sense of relief – only partial relief because she assumed 
Rose and Kyle were still at home. She turned away from the doors and 
began to walk through the market, calling out their names. But her fear 
and frustration came back as she couldn’t find them. She couldn’t even 
tell where they were; their voices seemed to be coming from everywhere at 
once.



“Mama!”



“?!” Mattie awoke with a gasp. It took her a moment to realize that she 
was home; still seated in the rocking chair by the window. Wanda and 
Victor were standing over her and Wanda was pulling at her left arm. For 
a moment, Mattie worried that her .22 would go off, but it was no longer 
in her hands. She looked around. It was on her dresser – the one she’d 
moved against the window. The chamber was open and the bullets were out.



Mattie realized it was much darker than it had been when she sat down in 
the chair (although the mist now brightened and darkened every few 
seconds with very faint flashes of light). She looked at her watch and 
saw, to her horror, that the red LCD display read 2:32 AM.



“Oh my God…” In addition to her fear, Mattie now also felt a mounting 
guilt and rage – the anger directed mainly at herself but also at Wanda 
and Victor. “I could have killed all of us!” She turned to Wanda. “Why 
didn’t you and your brother wake me up?”



“We tried, mama-“ Wanda began.



“You didn’t try hard enough, young lady. Were you trying to get me killed 
instead?” Mattie knew her voice was rising and that what she said made no 
sense but she didn’t care. She laughed bitterly. “Because even if you’d 
set out to kill your mama, you couldn’t have done a better job of it!” 
She was on the verge of telling them what she had heard as she walked 
past the pharmacy – the mother and daughter, perhaps even a whole family 
– dying together, screaming for one another as they went – but even in 
her half-crazed state she knew that would be unforgivably wrong. And then 
she realized that what she’d said to Wanda was almost as bad.



She held out the palms of her hands in a gesture of conciliation (or 
perhaps surrender to Wanda), and lowered her voice. I’m…sorry. I should 
never have said that. But why didn’t you wake me?”



“We did wake you up, mama, just after you nodded off, and you told us to 
let you go back to sleep.”



Mattie frantically searched her memory. “I didn’t do that…did I?”



“You did, mommy,” confirmed Victor.



Mattie shook her head in confusion. “I don’t remember.”



“You stayed up ‘til about nine o’clock,” Wanda explained patiently. “Then 
we saw you were asleep. We woke you up and you said you were exhausted 
from going outside. You said your heart was pounding and you needed to 
sleep. You said, ‘you don’t know what I’ve been through. Let me go.’”



“I…did?”She couldn’t remember that. But on the other hand, she had been 
exhausted when she sat down in the chair the previous evening. Exhausted 
and also probably more than a little in shock.



“And about an hour after that,” Victor added, “you got up and you went to 
the bathroom. And then you came right back and went to sleep again. 
Your…your eyes were closed.”



She shook her head in dismay. She did have the vaguest memory of getting 
up at night and someone asking her where she was going. “I was 
sleepwalking. I…used to do that when I was pregnant with your sister.” 
She’d been caught doing that a few times while she was pregnant with 
Wanda. Rose or her folks would tell Mattie that they had found her in the 
hallway, or at the kitchen table eating something from the fridge, or, 
just once, trying to reach Kyle by telephone. She had no idea if she’d 
walked in her sleep while pregnant with Victor; she’d been alone for most 
of that time, with no one to help her out until the very end.



“You took the gun with you, mama,” Wanda told her. Mattie, now angry only 
with herself, buried her head in her hands. “I waited ‘till you got back. 
I told you to give it to me and I put it over there.” Mattie saw, for the 
second time, that the gun was on the dresser, the chamber open and the 
bullets out.


“I handed you a loaded gun?” Rose had given the gun in part so that she 
could keep her little ones safe – not so she could carry it while 
sleepwalking and then hand it to them. “How?” Wanda didn’t understand at 
first. “Show me how I was holding it when I handed it to you.” Mattie 
paused. “It’s okay. I won’t be angry this time.”



“Like this-“ Wanda let her left hand fall down at her side until it was 
pointed at the floor. Then she stuck out her thumb at a right angle and 
pointed her forefinger straight down, the classic pose of a child 
pretending to have a gun. “That’s how you held it,” she said. Then she 
lifted her hand until the forefinger was pointed straight at Mattie’s 
chest. 



“Oh my God.” Mattie looked down at the two little children she loved so 
much but couldn’t care for – and her own words to her daughter, spoken in 
anger just a few moments ago, came back to her: If you had set out to 
kill…you couldn’t have done a better job. 



“It’s okay, mama.” Wanda smiled a little. “We stepped out of your way. I 
took it out of your hand. I remembered Aunt Rose showing you how to get 
the bullets out. I put them over there.”



But it didn’t matter. She had left her kids alone, gone sleepwalking with 
a loaded gun, and then pointed it at her daughter. “Okay. I want you 
both…to look away from your mama for a minute. Okay?” She tried to laugh 
at them. It came out as a faint sob instead. Both Wanda and Victor were 
looking at her uncertainly. “Just – just turn away from me. I’ll be right 
here.”



“Mommy-?” Victor began.



“Don’t look at me!” Mattie screamed at them, and then began to hit 
herself, slapping her own face first with her right palm, then with her 
left, then scratching at her right cheek, tearing away a lock of her own 
hair, and-



“Victor, help me!” She heard Wanda’s voice, rising to meet her own, as 
her daughter jumped into her lap (the rocking chair suddenly tilting 
backwards) and grabbed Mattie’s right arm. “Get her left hand! Hold 
mama’s left hand!” She felt both of Victor’s little hands close on her 
left hand. She couldn’t get her right hand free – Wanda was too strong 
for her – but she pulled her left away from Victor, and used it to land 
one more stinging slap against her face. For a moment, she was aware of 
all three of them crying and shouting, and then the chair – which could 
barely hold her, let alone her and her two growing kids – tipped over to 
the right, depositing them all on the floor.



And for the longest time – perhaps minutes – maybe even half an hour – 
they lay there on the floor crying. Now it was Mattie who couldn’t bring 
herself to look at her children. It just got worse and worse – now she’d 
not only left her kids alone and pointed a gun at them; she frightened 
them and knocked them down and made them cry. She hadn’t been “right” for 
many years – not since the night of the accident ten years ago – but 
there’d always been people – mostly Rose but also Rose’s folks, some of 
the people she’d worked with at her various jobs, older people like Mr. 
Fischer who felt sorry for her – who could help her along. Right now, 
though, they were alone, trapped in a rickety house surrounded by death. 
Wanda and Victor had no one but her – and she simply didn’t know how to 
keep them safe. And now she had frightened them – and she knew she 
deserved their anger as well. If this ever ended, if she could somehow 
get them out of the mist to safety - someone else, ideally Rose, would 
have to take responsibility for them. Mattie wanted to see them whenever 
she could, but as she was she could not care for them. She would continue 
to frighten them and make them cry and endanger them and perhaps even 
hurt them despite her best efforts. And she herself would have to “go 
away” for a while. Maybe the people she worked for at the library – or 
even at the prison where she’d stayed - would know of someplace where she 
could get help.



“We love you, mommy,” Victor finally said, as if he had read her 
thoughts.



“You don’t have to, little one,” Mattie told him sadly.



“But we do,” Wanda assured her. “You’re the only one who loves us. You’re 
the only one who takes care of us.”



“But I can’t do a good job.” Mattie began crying again, but more softly. 
“We’re only here because I couldn’t get us a safe place to live. And then 
I fell asleep, and…“ she trailed off, too upset and ashamed to mention 
the incident with the gun again.



“You take care of us,” Wanda assured her. Wanda assured her. “You got 
home to us-“



“I almost didn’t-“



“-You found us a car. You blocked off our windows-“



“And the chimbley-“ Victor put in.



“Chimney, honey,” Mattie corrected gently as she laughed a little. 



“We feel safe because of you.”



Mattie got up, set the chair back upright, and sat down in it (carefully 
wiggling around to make sure the chair would hold her and would stay 
upright). “Come here.” Neither Wanda nor Victor would risk climbing back 
into the chair (Mattie hoped they were afraid of the rickety chair and 
not of her), but they both faced her and put their arms around her. She 
hugged them back. As she held her children, she wondered if they realized 
just much danger they were in. She decided that they probably did, even 
if they didn’t know all of the specifics. They’d certainly felt the 
earthquake right after the mist arrived; and she’d found them hiding in 
the closet when she got back home. Wanda had said she and Victor seen a 
thing that looked like a “big crab” in their backyard (she wondered if 
that had been the same as the thing she’d glimpsed through the mist on 
the front lawn yesterday, the creature that looked vaguely like an 
alligator but with the “pizza head” and the spiky legs). And they’d seen 
her going from room to room, gun in hand, blocking off the windows and 
the fireplace. But then why did they seem so unworried about her having 
gone to sleep for what – seven hours? Eight?”



“When I was…asleep…did you see anything outside?”



“No, mama. We stayed up after you went to sleep and looked out the 
windows. I also went to look at the chimney a couple times.” (Mattie 
thought of asking Wanda if she’d brought her brother along or left him 
alone with his sleeping mother, but decided there was no point. Either 
she had or she hadn’t, and in any case they were both still here). We 
couldn’t see anything outside. It was too dark. We heard some noises, 
though.”



“Like what?” Mattie remembered the odds sounds the creatures in the 
parking lot had made; the hisses from the spiders and the almost-
mechanical, “hydraulic”-sounding noise from the huge thing at the edge of 
the lot.



“Something was making a sound like an elephant, like screeching. We heard 
one thing buzzing, kind of like a saw. And something big was moving.”



“Big? Like how?”



“We couldn’t see it. But we heard this sound, like footsteps, but-“



“Boom…boom…boom,” Victor imitated the sound for her, pausing several 
seconds between each noise. 



“Kind of like- what-his-name from last year?”



“Pawfield!” Victor smiled delightedly. About a year ago, Victor had 
become entranced (obsessed was more like it, Mattie thought) with a book 
of “Garfield” comic strips that Harriet Turman had gotten him. He spent 
all of his time drawing crude pictures of Garfield until finally, he’d 
created a similar character of his own: A nine-foot-tall, six-foot-wide, 
ill-tempered Siamese cat named “Pawfield.” Victor then spent the next six 
weeks or so drawing pictures of Pawfield stepping on Garfield’s owner Jon 
and most of the other characters from the strip; knocking over their 
house and the neighbor’s houses; uprooting trees and eating them; and so 
forth. When he waddled around, Pawfield (who, despite his giant size, had 
the tiny paws and tail of a normal cat) made a booming sound; and Victor 
would sometimes pound his little fists on their breakfast table – making 
Mattie’s coffee cup and Wanda’s juice glass and cereal bowl bounce around 
– to imitate the sounds of his imaginary friend coming and going. Mattie 
was just beginning to be concerned by the rather violent themes of 
Victor’s cartoons (true, the cartoons she and Rose had watched as kids 
had not only been extremely violent, but often loaded with barely-
disguised bathroom humor and even sexual humor as well; but on the other 
hand she and Rose and grown up to be a couple of hooligans) when he 
abruptly lost interest. Mattie ended up pleased that he had such a vivid 
imagination – but she was also grateful that his next interest (or “hang-
up,” as she called them) had been the far more benign “Peanuts” specials. 



“How long ago was this?”



“We heard the elephant sound first, at about ten or so. The buzzing came 
around the same time. The booming sound came around midnight.”



Mattie shook her head. Even if she was exhausted, how could she possibly 
have missed all this? And then, something drew her attention away from 
her kids and out the window. “What’s that?”



Outside, through the mist, she could see a reddish light repeatedly 
turning itself on and off – the way a driver of a car parked in front of 
a house might flash their lights to let the owner of the house know they 
were outside and waiting. As she watched, the light – it was so diffused 
through the mist that she couldn’t tell how far away it was or what 
direction it was coming from – flashed on once for about two seconds; 
then stayed off for a little while (perhaps five or ten seconds); then 
flashed on and off three times rapidly; and then it was gone. Ten seconds 
or so later, it started up again: One flash, followed by a pause, 
followed by three brief flashes, followed by a longer pause. And then it 
repeated the pattern again.



Mattie thought of those signals that ships sent one another using 
flashing white and red lights – what was that called, semaphore? – and 
she wondered whether someone might be out there, trying to signal her? If 
that was a military signal, could the Army or National Guard be out 
there? She thought for a moment of those troops and the helicopter 
gunship she’d seen flying into the mist the previous day, in the 
direction of her home, as she down Kansas Road towards the market. 
Perhaps they, or their friends, were in the area. Or could it be someone 
– maybe even Mr. Fisher? – signaling for help? She tried to remember if 
Rose had ever told her, or if she had ever heard, what a “three-and-one” 
signal meant.



And then, the mist was lit up again, but this time by a greenish light 
(this one, which was somewhat brighter and more focused, seemed to be 
coming from somewhere to the right of the Allens’ bedroom window. This 
one was flashing different pattern: Two short bursts on, then a pause of 
a couple of second; followed by two more short bursts on; and then 
another pause; and so forth.



Mattie looked at Wanda, then at Victor; and giggled slightly at their 
puzzled faces. “Wait.” She leaned forward and picked up her small 
flashlight. 



“Mama?” Wanda sounded apprehensive.



“It’s okay. If someone’s out there, I just want them to know we’re in 
here.” She turned the light on in imitation of the flashing red light: 
On, off, pause; then on-off-on-off-on-off. Then she waited and imitated 
the green light: On-off-on-off; pause; on-off-on-off.



“Is that safe?”



“Of course, little one; nothing can get in here.” She turned to Wanda. 
“I’m hoping that it’s Mr. Fischer. The phones don’t work and he has no 
way of getting over here. He might have some kind of flashlight, or fog 
light, and be trying to see if we’re here. If it’s him; he’ll know we 
are.” Mattie held onto the hope that he had locked himself inside one of 
the back rooms in his house. His car, as she drove by it in his garage, 
had been empty and filled with spider webs; she’d also seen webs like that 
in the entryway beyond the door that connected his garage with his 
kitchen. But if he realized what was going on, there was a chance that 
he-



“Mama!” Mattie turned to look at her daughter, who was staring, eyes and 
mouth almost comically wide, at the window. Victor was behind her, 
looking almost as shocked. Mattie barely had time to register that they 
were bathed in fluorescent red light.



“It’s okay, it-!” she stopped talking, and dropped the flashlight, as she 
turned and saw what was at window. She now knew that the flashes of light 
had not come from Mr. Fischer or from the Army or anyone or anything 
she’d ever seen before. Something was flying – no, not flying, more like 
floating or – yes, hovering – just on the other side of the window. It 
was odd-shaped, a bit like a kidney bean, maybe six or so inches across 
at the longest point. As she watched, its entire body illuminated itself 
from within with gentle, reddish-pink light. 



“Wait…” Mattie picked the flashlight back up and kept it trained on the 
creature as she walked to the window. The hovering thing had turned 
itself “off.” Mattie flashed the light once, briefly. The creature turned 
itself back “on.” Mattie could see little, translucent, odd-shaped things 
– organs, she wondered, maybe eggs? -  floating inside its body. 
Something blurry was moving rapidly behind it – perhaps its wings, going 
so fast that she couldn’t see them. And it had no legs, at least none 
that she could see, but the light from its body illuminated what looked 
like a multitude of short, straight hairs on its underside. The thing 
looked just a bit like pictures she’d seen of those one-celled animals 
that you were supposed to be able to find in your drinking water if you 
had a microscope. Mattie didn’t dare open the window, but something told 
her this little creature was benign.



“Well, hello there…” she turned the light on and off, on and off. The 
creature flashed on twice, as if in reply.



“Look at this,” Mattie turned to her kids, her voice filled now with 
wonder, not fear.



“There’s another one,” Victor said. When Mattie turned back to the 
window, it had been joined by a companion, but this one, slightly 
smaller, glowed with pale green light. She flicked the light on and off 
again (her red and green companions joining in). A moment later they were 
joined by yet a third, and then by a fourth, both flashing red.



“Is that safe?” Wanda was by her side, pulling slightly on her arm.



“Well, I-I don’t know, but they don’t seem-“ Mattie was still playing 
with the light, leaning closer and closer. As one of the red things flew 
close enough to the windowpane to thump it lightly with its wings, 
Mattie, by now smiling like a delighted child, gently tapped her side of 
the window.



“Mama, please stop-“ Wanda began. Before Mattie could respond, her red 
companion was abruptly dashed against her window, its body rupturing and 
spraying luminescent red fluid (which, after leaving the creature’s body, 
almost immediately ceased to glow, turning a dark, translucent red that 
reminded her of tree sap or even of dried blood) across the outside of 
the glass. She jumped back in surprise and with a little cry of disgust. 
As the other three creatures quickly extinguished themselves and 
disappeared into the night, the rest of the thing remained stuck to her 
windowpane for a moment, its wings (if that’s what they were) flapping, 
more and more slowly, against the window and the sticky gelatinous mess 
sliding down towards the windowsill.



“Oh, God, look!” Mattie continued backing away from the window. Something 
else – something much larger and every bit as horrible as the potato bugs 
or the spiders she’d seen at the market or the alligator creature she’d 
seen on her front lawn – was now crawling on her window, wiping up(or 
more likely eating or drinking) the remnants of the red thing. This thing 
was huge – a foot long or more – dark green or brown, with a hard, 
tapered segmented body, far too many jointed legs (Mattie could feel 
herself becoming sick as she saw all those legs squirming around on its 
underside), and long gossamer wings flapping slowly, perhaps to help it 
stay still as it ate the remains of the smaller creature. Overall, 
Mattie’s impression was of some kind of giant insect – the size they 
sometimes found them in the tropics or in a rain forest - resembling a 
cross between a dragonfly, a grasshopper, and a wasp.



“Get behind me,” she cautioned Wanda and Victor. “No wait – get behind 
the chair.” As they scrambled out of her view, she kept the light trained 
on the new creature (everything about it, from its appearance to the 
sight of its gossamer wings flapping to the faint croaking sound it was 
making, repulsed her) as she reached for the gun on the dresser. She set 
the light down (again, keeping it on the window) as she fumbled the 
bullets into the gun and closed the chamber.



“Go away,” she shouted at the thing – aware that there was nothing she 
could do – short of shooting out her own window – if it decided to stay. 
A moment later, a second one joined it, and then a third and a fourth, 
all trying to lick up the blood (if that’s what it was) of the poor 
little red thing that had come to play with her.



“Go away!” she yelled again, and rapped her fist gently but insistently 
against the glass. For a moment, it looked like it was working – two of 
the things began to beat their wings faster and pulled away from the 
window – but they came right back a moment later, as soon as she stopped 
knocking on her side of the pane.



“Turn off the light, Mama,” Wanda said from behind the chair.



“I can’t, honey. We have to see what’s out there.”



“Bugs are attracted to light. You’re bringing them here!”



Wait…could that be right? Mattie vaguely remembered hearing the same 
thing, long ago, the time she’d gone on that fishing trip with Rose and 
her brother Mike to the Lake of the Ozarks the Spring right before she’d 
met Kyle. They had brought along a little tent, and had decided to sleep 
there after spending the entire day in the hot sun, catching only one 
lousy fish and getting so sunburned that they couldn’t touch their 
clothes and so overheated that they were not only sick to their stomachs 
but couldn’t tell hot from cold. That night, they had gotten eaten alive 
by mosquitoes (insect repellent was out of the question for their 
reddened, burned skin) – and Mattie remembered Rose telling Mike it was 
his fault for putting such a bright camping light on the outside of the 
tent.



“Hold on.” Mattie, hoping it was the right thing to do (and at this 
point, inclined to trust Wanda’s knowledge, or at least her good sense, 
over her own), switched of the light, and for good measure blew out the 
two tea candles on the dresser. After a minute or so, one of the things 
lost interest (either that, or it had had its fill of Mattie’s little 
friend) and it flew away. Shortly after that, a few short bursts of green 
light – again, on-off, on-off; followed by a pause and then on-off, on-
off appeared somewhere beyond the window; and a second of the creatures 
left the window to go after its prey. The other two, however, continued 
crawling over the glass. Mattie wondered how much they might weigh, and 
how many of them it would take to break through the windows. (She also 
forced herself to think of her collapsed chimney and the thin layer of 
mist in front of her fireplace. Could there be enough space between the 
pieces of debris to allow even one or two of those things to get down her 
flue? And if they reached the fireplace, would the plastic sheeting be 
enough to keep them out?)



She’d only a few moments to ponder this when she saw the mist outside her 
window darken, she heard a terrible shrieking noise, and abruptly 
something else – something nearly the size of a man, but with a skeletal 
blue-white body, red eyes, a long yellow beak, and four pink, leathery 
wings - appeared out of the mist, slammed into the picture window, 
crushing one of the two large bugs and scooping its remains up in a beak-
like mouth; and seizing the other with a bony, clawlike hand with too 
many joints and too many nails. It reminded her of the pictures she’d 
seen of those big dinosaur birds – what were they called? – oh yes, 
pterodactyls.  



Mattie opened her mouth to scream but before she could do so, something 
heavy plowed into her and the next thing she knew, she was again on the 
floor, once more beside the overturned rocker, her children huddled 
against her. For a moment, she thought this new monstrosity had broken 
through the window and was upon her. But no, the window, apart from a 
web-shaped crack near its center, was intact; and the thing had 
disappeared back into the mist. She realized, with relief, that Wanda and 
Victor had again jumped into her lap, upending the chair once more. She 
could hear – no, feel – their little hearts pounding in time. Despite the 
deadly situation they were in, Mattie found herself remembering how both 
of them used to kick against her when she was pregnant. Especially 
Victor; after all, that was how he’d gotten his name. Mattie had been 
carrying Victor for over seven months. Rose, on leave from her duties 
as an MP in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, had been visiting her 
and Wanda. The three of them (four, if you counted the impending arrival) 
had been sitting on Mattie’s front porch. Rose had asked – a bit 
haltingly, because she knew Mattie had always been just the teeniest bit 
uncomfortable with Rose’s sexuality – if she could put her hand on 
Mattie’s belly and feel around for the baby. (“Don’t worry; you still 
look ugly to me,” Rose had assured her). No sooner had Mattie placed 
Rose’s hand on her stomach than both of the women had felt a strong 
kick…and then another…and then yet a third. Rose had been enthralled and 
Mattie had smiled at her proudly (only Wanda, miffed at not being the 
center of their attention, seemed less than excited). Then Rose had said 
something about how with strength like that, the kid would emerge 
“victorious” into the world. And that was that. They decided that if it 
was a boy, it would be called Victor; or Victoria if it was a girl. Rose 
hadn’t been there seven weeks later when he was born, but a nurse in the 
maternity ward at Bridgton Hospital had taken picture after picture of 
the beautiful new child with a cell-phone camera and helped Mattie to E-
mail them to her friend. (Mattie had also sent the pictures to her mom 
and, a week later, cried for almost a whole day when she finally realized 
Sue Allen wasn’t going to reply, probably because Sue saw her grandson – 
who had been conceived out of wedlock in the faraway place to which 
Mattie had been banished - not as a bond between them or even as a 
continuation of their family – but only as further proof of Mattie’s 
failure.)



Mattie, still prostrate on the floor and arms still wrapped protectively 
around her children, lifted her head and looked up at the window again. 
The bird-thing and its prey were gone, although she could see occasional, 
distant flashes of red and green and could hear more of the hideous 
shrieking noises coming from somewhere beyond the cracked glass. She 
willed herself to slowly sit up. Her own heart was hammering, adrenaline 
still flooded her body, her mouth had gone dry and it took her a moment 
to find her voice. “Stay down.” She gently set down first Wanda, then 
Victor (who didn’t want to let go of her) on the carpet, giving them each 
a kiss. At first, she couldn’t find the gun in the darkness (the moon, 
shining through the mist, gave off only a little light, but after her 
encounter with the bugs and the bird-things, she didn’t dare turn the 
flashlight on again or relight the tea candles). Then a flash of red 
light briefly illuminated the room and she saw it, a tiny dark shadow on 
the floor by the bedroom wall. Walking on her hands and knees (she didn’t 
know if the creatures could see inside but it seemed safer to her), she 
retrieved the gun and then forced herself to stand erect, walk over to 
the window, and put her fingers on the crack. The glass around the crack 
felt terribly cold – almost like touching an ice cube – but she could 
feel no air coming in and the pane seemed no wobblier than usual. 



All was well, she began to think-



-and then she once again felt sick with fear and despair as she 
remembered she had to look in the rest of the house.



Wanda and Victor must have seen it in her face. Her eyes were becoming 
accustomed to the dark and she could see them looking uncertainly at her.



“Come on.” She didn’t like the idea of dragging them through the house – 
and perhaps into unknown danger – but that seemed better than leaving 
them alone. At least she had the gun, and at least they would be together 
if-



“Mattie, stop it,” she whispered to herself. Then she forced herself to 
laugh – it sounded slightly convincing this time – and told them they 
were all going to check the other rooms in the house before retiring back 
to the bedroom for the rest of the night. They walked in a rough triangle 
- Mattie leading the procession with the gun held out at arm’s length in 
front of her; Wanda and Victor literally hiding behind her skirts and 
holding onto her brown wool sweater. She’d brought the flashlight with 
her after all, quickly playing over the floor, the walls to her left, 
ceilings, and then the walls to her right, as they went through…



…the closet (Mattie gingerly pulled the clothes hangers aside, waiting 
all the while for something to jump out at her, but nothing was there)…



…the hallway connecting the bedroom and living room (as with the closet, 
she found nothing there, but her heart began to beat higher as she saw 
the pictures were crooked; but then she realized they had been that way 
when she’d returned from the market, probably having been knocked off-
balance by the earthquake)…



…the bathroom (as a precaution she opened the small cabinet under the 
sink and the medicine cabinet, and went so far as to look under the 
antique clawfoot bathtub; but it seemed as though nothing had visited the 
bathroom since she last had;)…



…the living room (the thin cloud of mist around the fireplace seemed to 
have dispersed, perhaps because the plastic sheeting was still covering 
the fireplace; the windows and the sliding glass door were completely 
intact; and most importantly, nothing seemed to be there, even when she 
looked under the couches and chairs)…



…and finally their tiny kitchen (the window had a webbed crack similar to 
the crack in the bedroom window; and she could see a dark stain on the 
other side of the crack, perhaps the blood of one of the unfortunate 
glow-worms, but the window was otherwise intact. Nothing was on, in or 
under the kitchen table, the kitchen sink, or the refrigerator or icebox 
– although the refrigerator, which had now been defrosting for eighteen 
hours or more, had begun to smell a little. She briefly debated grabbing 
a can of Red Bull from the fridge and, upon returning to the bedroom, 
using it to wash down a few Vicodin which would keep her up and keep her 
nerves steady – and abruptly decided she had no right to do that now, if 
ever she did. )



Victor tugged at her sweater. “Can we go back now, Mommy?” 



“Of course we can, little one.” The three of them turned and went back 
through the house towards the bedroom (Mattie realizing that, in a sense, 
they were moving as one, a bit like the six-legged creatures outside.



Mattie set the rocker upright again and sat down, holding the gun on her 
lap. “Your job,” she told her kids as they took their places on either 
side of her, “is to make sure I don’t go back to sleep – no matter what I 
say.” 

She wanted to say something more to them – something that would comfort 
them after all that had happened. Or that would make them forget. Or that 
would at least make them smile or laugh for a moment. But she couldn’t. 
Her mind kept going back to the horrible things they’d seen just outside 
their bedroom window. And the crack in that window, and the crack like it 
in the kitchen window. And the few bricks and chunks of cement and the 
thin plastic sheet that stood between them and whatever might try to come 
down the remains of their chimney. And the bitter cold throughout the 
house (she could actually see her breath as she exhaled). And the food – 
what little food there was – spoiling in their refrigerator.



This aging, handbuilt, damaged house wasn’t shelter.



And with that, she came to a decision. “You know what?”


“What, Mama?”


“Tomorrow, when the sun’s up, we’re gonna be real careful; we’re gonna 
take that suitcase in the front hall; we’re gonna make a dash for our new 
car; and we’re gonna drive out of here and leave this mist behind.”


“Where will we go?”

I don’t know, Mattie almost told her daughter; then realized that wasn’t 
the right thing to say. Not now. Even if it was true. So she thought in 
silence, trying to remember the confusing events of yesterday and her own 
earlier thoughts about escape. “This morning – yesterday morning – a man 
told me the mist was coming from around Pleasant Mountain,” she said 
finally. “That’s…North of here. So the mist is headed South. But it was 
going real slow. When I was going to the store I was walking faster than 
it. Even with my bad knee.



“We have a big car out front, with a full tank of gas. I want us to try 
to drive South, maybe toward Portland or someplace big. They may have 
soldiers there, or police, or someone who can help us.” Of course, she 
reflected, everyone in Portland may be dead by now just like they 
probably all are here, but she didn’t say that to her kids. She suspected 
they knew it anyway. “I don’t know how far we can get – or what we’d find 
there – but I’d rather we be in that nice heavy car than in this house.” 
She paused again. “What do y’all think of that?”



Victor, as though seeking guidance, looked confusedly first at his 
mother, and then at his sister.



Wanda took Mattie’s hand in both of hers. “You always said we’d go down 
South someday, Mama,” Mattie, it seems, had made her smile and laugh – if 
faintly - after all. And Mattie found herself laughing too.

Victor nodded up and down. “Okay, Mommy.”



“Then it’s settled.” And Mattie, flanked by her children and refreshed by 
her hours of sleep, cradled the gun, stared out the window, and waited 
for sunrise.



And, as she so often did, she began to sing, very softly, to her little 
ones, another verse of the song she had sung to Rose on the night that 
Kyle had died:


Ten thousand mile is very far away,
For you to return to me,
You leave me here to lament, and well-a-day!
My tears you will not see, my love,
My tears you will not see.


And indeed, this time Mattie did not cry.


VII.


Starting around eight o’clock that morning, the sky outside the window 
brightened a little as the sun – looking like a pearly-gray disk through 
the mist – began its climb through the sky. For hours, Mattie had been 
leaning forward in her chair, the gun clutched tightly between her hands, 
staring almost nonstop out of the window. She told herself that was the 
best way to stay awake and alert. Part of her knew, though, that she was 
punishing herself for her lack of vigilance the night before.



Mattie looked briefly down and to her left, and then down and to her 
right. Wanda and Victor were both asleep – Wanda leaning against the side 
of Mattie’s chair; Victor curled up, somewhat to Mattie’s dismay, in what 
almost looked like a fetal position. She got up from the recliner and 
stretched (her back, knees and even her elbows cracked liberally as she 
did so; she knew this was partly the result of spending almost the whole 
night sitting in a chair, but she also knew it was a sign that she was 
getting older, perhaps faster than she should). Then she roused her kids. 
She thought of chastising them, just a bit, for falling asleep when they 
were supposed to watch her, but then she realized that would be unfair 
and hypocritical, considering that she herself had fallen asleep for 
hours. She also realized that they were just children, terrified, 
exhausted children who were probably a bit in shock from all they’d seen 
the day before.



After Mattie gently shook his shoulder, little Victor woke up slowly, bit 
by bit, as he always did. When Mattie touched Wanda, however, her eyes 
snapped open and she rapidly looked around the room, mortified at having 
fallen asleep.



“Mama, I’m sorry-“



Mattie smiled at her. “Hush, little one. You didn’t do nothing wrong that 
your mama didn’t do wrong last night.”



Wanda looked relieved that her mother, for once, wasn’t angry or 
irrational. “Besides, now we all have some sleep, and we’ll be able to 
think better when we get on the road.”



“I’m hungry,” Victor said.



“I think we all need something to eat,” Mattie concurred. 



On their way into the kitchen – they moved in a single line, Mattie at 
the head of the procession with her gun drawn, Victor right behind her, 
and Wanda bringing up the rear – Mattie began to question her earlier 
plan to leave the house. How could she take her kids out of this shelter 
with its food, water, plumbing and room to move around – a shelter which 
nothing so far had been able to invade – and make them dash through the 
mist towards a tiny car so they could drive through unknown danger? And 
they had no guarantee, of course, that they could even make it beyond 
Castle Rock; Kansas Road had been relatively passable but the Interstate 
might be jammed with wrecked or abandoned cars. Why not stay here, unless 
and until the house became truly unsafe?



Mattie learned the answer as they reached the living room. Their little 
house, merely damaged yesterday, was now actually coming apart. The 
plastic wrap had begun to sag and another cloud of mist had come down the 
chimney, rendering their living room hazy, odd-smelling, and unnaturally 
cold. On closer inspection, Mattie could see chunks of brick and cement 
in the fireplace, almost covering the logs, that she couldn’t recall 
having seen yesterday. Either the debris blocking the flue was coming 
loose on its own accord or something had knocked it loose. The windows – 
both in the living room and the kitchen – had several more of the 
circular cracks in them, each with a “bloodstain” of some unfortunate 
creature at the center. Almost all of the windows were now slightly 
convex; and she could feel cold air coming in through the cracks. The 
walls also seemed to have pulled slightly away from the ceiling in some 
places; she could see cracks and dark gaps, particularly at the upper 
corners of the living room, between the two surfaces. And something had 
happened to their front door during the night; it was still closed and 
basically intact but it seemed warped, somehow bent inwards, as though 
someone – Mattie hoped it had been a someone and not a something – had 
thrown itself against the outside of the door in an effort to break it 
down. The strip of moulding to the left of the door had broken off at the 
top; and was now leaning at a forty-five-degree angle towards the floor. 



Mattie abruptly thought of a collection of “famous last words” she and 
Rose had laughingly invented one afternoon when they were fourteen or 
fifteen. Their object – which each of the girls understood and knew they 
did not have to explain to the other – was to come up with phrases that 
gave you only the most general idea of the dumb thing the speaker had 
done to cause his or her death; but left the details of the accident and 
the death to your imagination. One of the funniest – at the time – had 
been “oh, shit, the glue isn’t holding!” perhaps because it was so open-
ended and involved so many possible things that could have gone wrong. 
Well, Mattie didn’t know about the glue – did they even use that on 
houses? - but the bricks and the mortar and the glass and the wood used 
by Judy and Arnie Frost on their dream house – certainly weren’t holding 
up. She winced as she realized just how much of her and Rose’s 
entertainment as teenagers, how many of their jokes and stories and 
drawings from that time in their life, involved making joking about 
death. Perhaps they could have waited. If it was actual experience with 
death they wanted, let’s see - Kyle’s death and Mattie’s suicide attempts 
were maybe two years off; a few years after that, Mattie would watch as 
Aunt Judy died slowly and horribly; then it was Rose’s turn to find 
herself surrounded by suicide bombers, stonings and beheadings in 
Afghanistan and Iraq; and if all that wasn’t lesson enough for the two 
silly girls who had once made fun of death, here came the things in the 
mist, which had killed who knows how many people almost without warning 
and over a space of minutes.



“Mommy,“ little Victor moaned. He and Wanda were staring at the dented 
door, looking rightly worried; but Mattie suspected they had also been 
scared by something they’d seen in her face, her own fear or her anger 
with herself or her reminiscing. 



“Hush.” She ran her hands through his hair, so much like her own. “We’re 
all right for now,” she said, and with some conviction. She didn’t think 
they had to leave immediately. She could hear and see nothing outside the 
cracked windows; it seemed as calm outside as it had been when she had 
returned from the market yesterday afternoon. And although they could 
sometimes hear rats and roaches scurrying around in the spaces between 
their walls, she could hear no such noises now. Perhaps the things in the 
mist were more active at night; or had only been attracted by the candles 
and the flashlight she’d foolishly brought out. She guessed that the 
house would suffer no further damage until nightfall, when the bizarre 
food chain of the glowing worms and the scorpions and the birds came 
back. But Mattie wanted to be gone long before then. If a piece of glass 
fell out of one of the windows, or if a wall pulled just a few more 
inches away from the ceiling, it would be enough for a few of the little 
creatures – she was thinking of the scorpions – to push their way inside. 
The larger creatures – the birds, or maybe the spiders she’d seen in the 
parking lot - would pursue the smaller ones, shattering the windows and 
breaching the walls as they did so - and the collapsing house would be 
overrun with crawling and flying death, with Mattie and her kids chased 
from room to room until they were slaughtered like the mother and 
daughter in the pharmacy - unless Mattie somehow had enough time and 
strength to-



Mattie came down from her terrible reverie to see her kids staring at her 
in fear.



“I was just thinking…” she said hoarsely, but of course she couldn’t ever 
tell them what she’d just imagined. “…thinking of…”



“Mama,” Wanda tried to assure her, “it’s all right. Shouldn’t we eat 
something before we leave?”



“Yes.”



Breakfast that morning was extremely simple; some granola bars softened 
with the bottled water in their pantry. None of them wanted to go near 
the refrigerator, which had now been defrosting for a day and a half. 
Mattie wished she had some vitamins in the house but she couldn’t afford 
them, any more than she could afford to get her kids a computer with 
Internet access or more than one set of new clothes each every season or 
any of the other things they deserved to have. And in just another half 
hour or so, she thought bitterly, they would actually be homeless, living 
in a stolen car and with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some 
odds and ends taken from the house. Even if they managed to get clear of 
the mist – for that matter, even if she somehow got them all the way back 
to Missouri where they belonged - all they had to look forward to was a 
shelter or even the street.



Wanda put her small hand on Mattie’s shoulder and asked her something. 



“What was that?” Mattie was certain she hadn’t heard her daughter 
correctly. 



“I said, should we pray?”



“Wherever did you get that idea, little one?” Mattie would never have 
suggested anything like that to her children. When she was Wanda’s age or 
perhaps a little older, she had realized that she simply didn’t believe 
in God. It was nothing personal, no angry rebellion against the Church or 
her family. She just didn’t think God was there; and the Bible stories 
about Him or about the life of Jesus didn’t particularly interest her. 
And most everything that had happened to her over the last ten years had 
reinforced how she felt. If there was a God, it was one that had let 
Mattie kill Kyle. Allowed Mattie’s mother to turn her back on her 
daughter when Mattie had needed her most, and to conspire with Aunt Judy 
to exile Mattie from her hometown. Let Judy mentally and physically abuse 
her niece. Let Mattie lose her mind – become addicted to drugs, even - as 
she suffered through ten years of pain and poverty and humiliation. Made 
Wanda and Victor suffer for Mattie’s own mistakes. And, a day ago, 
surrounded their house with unseen lethal monsters. 



But who would have encouraged Mattie’s kids to pray? Yes, Wanda and 
Victor were getting older; and they now spent several hours, at least 
five days a week, away from her and around other kids and their teachers. 
But Mattie, as their mother, was still the biggest influence in their 
lives; and Wanda’s suggestion was so completely alien to everything she’d 
taught them or told them. She certainly couldn’t imagine them getting 
that idea from the liberal teachers at Castle Rock Elementary. (Mattie 
still fumed when she thought of the parent-teacher conference she’d had 
with that new teacher – what was her name, Amanda Dumfries? – a well-to-
do, simple-minded young woman with the figure and face of a bimbo. Ms. 
Dumfries had told Mattie, in a patronizing tone and with a vacant, almost 
joyous smile on her face, how happy Mattie should be that she and her 
children now lived in a “progressive” state where the schools taught 
evolution and where men respected women and where Mattie was free to have 
whatever “lifestyle” best suited her. She’d even added that she’d heard 
Mattie’s “partner” was serving overseas in Iraq and how terrible she 
thought it was that “your Rosie” had to risk her life fighting for Bush 
and Cheney. And then she had noted that Mattie’s hands were trembling and 
that she didn’t blame Mattie for being upset. How dare she, Mattie 
thought to herself over and over again on the way home. No, Wanda 
wouldn’t have learned about prayer from someone like that.) And none of 
their neighbors – certainly not Mr. Fischer or their few other friendly 
neighbors - were religious. The only person in town who Mattie had ever 
seen “witnessing” to others – sharing her faith in God to anyone and 
everyone in earshot – was that crazy Mrs. Carmody, and she had frightened 
not only Wanda and Victor but Mattie herself. So who could have planted 
this seed in kids’ heads? Of course, it couldn’t have been-



“Aunt Rose,” Wanda completed her thought as Victor nodded solemnly. “She 
said talking to God keeps her safe when the people are shooting at her,” 
he added with what must have seen to him like inexorable logic.



“That’s…great.” Mattie fought to keep herself from losing her temper. 
Rose, perhaps as a result of spending the last four years in a war zone, 
had become more and more religious. The change, which had taken place 
gradually, had first struck Mattie as surprising and amusing (especially 
given how hard-headed, and also how irreverent, Rose had always been); 
but now she saw it as obsessive and even self-destructive. Rose had 
always been at least a little religious; even as a small child she wore a 
little golden-colored crucifix. But she now not only wore the crucifix 
but also two saints’ medallions, depicting St. Patrick and St. George 
(the latter being the patron saint of soldiers). She attended Mass every 
Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, in an ancient church in Baghdad, 
regardless of the danger involved; and went to confession once a week and 
also whenever she’d had to use deadly force. About a year and a half ago, 
Rose had had ten days’ leave and spent three days at Mattie’s place. All 
through the visit she’d been preoccupied by something she’d seen – or 
perhaps even by something she’d had to do - back in Iraq. She never told 
Mattie exactly what had happened, but it held her conversation back 
somewhat; kept her from smiling or laughing as much as she usually did 
when visiting her friend; made her a little edgier than she normally was. 
During the visit, Rose slept on the living room couch (that was 
traditional; when Rose came to stay Mattie always offered her the bed and 
Rose always refused; she said sleeping in a soft bed would make the bunks 
and hammocks in Iraq all the harder to get used to when she returned). At 
about four in the morning of Rose’s last day with her, Mattie had 
awakened to hear her friend repeating something over and over again in 
hushed tones. It sounded as though Rose was talking in her sleep. Mattie, 
mostly curious but also a little apprehensive, had tiptoed into the 
living room and observed her friend kneeling in front of the couch, a 
rosary in her hand, whispering the seemingly endless prayers over the 
beads. 



None of this would have especially bothered Mattie if she hadn’t begun to 
notice what seemed like other, more fundamental, changes beginning to 
take place in Rose. Rose, in describing her experiences in the war, began 
to speak more and more as though her fate was in divine hands rather than 
in her own; she frightened Mattie more than a little by speculating that 
maybe a date and place had been set for her own death. And although Rose 
still bragged about her adventures among the better-looking women 
soldiers stationed in Iraq (some things, Mattie reflected gratefully, 
never changed), she was beginning to wonder if her exploits might not 
land her in Purgatory after she died. When she’d been to the house last 
year, Rose, after giving Mattie an animated description of her latest 
girlfriend, an athletic, very-well-endowed Signals expert originally from 
El Paso and who loved surfing and sailing, Rose had lowered her voice and 
asked her, “what the Army don’t know won’t hurt ‘em – and they’d never 
find out anyway - but how do we hide ourselves from God?” She sounded as 
though she was joking, but not joking.



They had been standing side by side in Mattie’s kitchen, cooking dinner 
for themselves and for Mattie’s kids, when Rose made this last comment. 
Mattie was frying a fish as Rose diced a large white onion. Mattie had 
turned off the stove burner, faced her friend, and, interrupting herself 
over and over again to apologize for what she was about to say, for what 
she had already begun saying, had asked Rose if they could please not 
talk about God again. She added that she was scared of alienating her 
only friend but that she was also scared that her friend seemed to be 
changing. Mattie reminded Rose of how grateful she was when Rose had 
delayed her enlistment for a year while Mattie got back on her feet after 
being released from jail and while she had Wanda Lee – and of how alone 
she’d been when Rose had finally shipped out to Fort Biloxi and then to 
Germany. (“It’s almost the same thing,” Mattie had explained. “When you 
say that God knows the day you’re gonna die; or that God doesn’t want you 
chasing those other girls; or anything else about God, it’s like your 
mind is going somewhere and my mind can’t follow, because you can see 
something I can’t.”) Mattie had added that she couldn’t stand to hear 
anything at all about Rose’s death, let alone the idea that it was 
preordained. 



By the end of her little speech, Mattie had begun to cry. She expected 
Rose to be hurt, perhaps even angry, but she knew of no other way to keep 
Rose from scaring her. Rose had reached over and hugged her, suddenly, 
almost convulsively, and told her how sorry she was. “Oh, I shouldn’t 
have…oh, honey…” the stronger woman began, then trailed off as she tried 
and failed to find the right words. “Never again, okay? Never again.” 



Indeed, Rose had never raised the subject with Mattie again (at least not 
directly; a few hours later, Rose took the name of her Lord in vain and 
made the sign of the cross when a pickup truck nearly collided with them 
as they drove home from the bowling alley; and the following night Mattie 
could see the religious medals swinging back and forth across her 
friend’s neck as they slugged it out, laughing, in their annual pillow 
fight; that kind of thing.) But Mattie now knew that Rose, at some point 
in time, had said something to Wanda and Victor about her faith. If she 
did it before that moment in the kitchen, before Mattie had asked to her 
stop, Rose had done nothing wrong because she didn’t know, couldn’t have 
known, how strongly Mattie felt until Mattie told her. But if Rose had 
talked to her kids about religion after that moment, though, Mattie would 
have every right to be angry with her.



But for now, Mattie felt she had to say something to her kids. Not to 
vent her frustration with Rose or to turn them against her friend. But to 
tell them something she thought they badly needed to know. And she had to 
say it before she took them out the front door and they all risked their 
lives to get inside the car.



“What’s wrong, mama?”



“Nothing’s wrong. But I don’t think we should do what Aunt Rose says 
about praying.”



Victor and Wanda were looking up at her curiously. She could tell from 
their expressions that she hadn’t said anything to frighten them – that 
was by far the most important thing – but they were probably very 
surprised to hear her say anything bad about Rose.



Mattie took Wanda’s hand in one of hers and took Victor’s hand with her 
other hand, and looked back and forth between them, occasionally moving 
their hands up and down for emphasis as she talked. 



“You asked me a good question. Your Aunt Rose-” she heard her voice 
rising, and she forced herself to lower it before going on. “-believes in 
God. I think she always did. She thinks God loves her, and that He’s 
watching her, and that He’ll help her if she believes in him enough and 
prays enough for His help. 



“I love your Aunt Rose – not as much as I love you two, but I love her 
and I want her to be happy. And she can believe that if it makes her 
happy. 



“But here’s the thing – I don’t know if she’s right or not. Nobody knows.   
We’re in real bad trouble right now – you know that, don’t you?” Her kids 
nodded; and she could see that they understood so far. “And when we leave 
the house, we have to run to the car. We have to move real fast until 
we’re in that car with the doors closed. I don’t want us to spend any 
time praying for help from someone who might not even be up there.” 



She could tell, by looking at her kids, that she’d lost them. So she 
pressed on.



“Look. Who do you think keeps Aunt Rose from being hurt in Iraq? Aunt 
Rose, that’s who. I’ve never known anyone who was so strong, and so fast, 
and so brave. And she had to get that way herself. When we were kids, and 
I was sitting around reading my comic books, she was exercising – 
running, swimming, lifting these big old weights. She even taught herself 
how to shoot a gun when nobody else would show her. Maybe she thinks 
someone up in the sky’s protecting her, and maybe it makes her feel a 
little safer to think that. But if she didn’t know how to take care of 
herself, all her little charms and crosses and prayers wouldn’t help her 
either.



“And how do you think I got home yesterday? Not by praying. I got home 
because I had a gun, which Aunt Rose gave me and taught me how to shoot; 
and because her brother once showed me-“ she looked down and smiled 
shyly, a little embarrassed at what she was about to tell her kids “-how 
to steal other people’s cars. Do you think Aunt Rose’s God would teach me 
how to steal somebody else’s car?” By the time she finished the sentence, 
all three of them were giggling.



“Now, what if I thought I didn’t have to take my gun out, or that I 
didn’t have to take that car, because I thought all I had to do was ask 
that man in the sky to protect me? Or what if Aunt Rose decided she 
didn’t have to shoot back no more because that man in the sky would keep 
her safe? What if we just stood still?”



“But if He’s up there,” Victor began, “He’ll help you, won’t He?”



“Do you know He’s up there?” Mattie asked her son.



“Aunt Rose thinks He’s up there.”



“Never mind Aunt Rose. What do you think?”



Victor frowned, looked almost grave, the way Mattie herself did when she 
was trying to solve a puzzle. “I…don’t know.”



“Have you ever seen God, Victor Lee?”



“I don’t think so.”



“And what if He wasn’t there? What if there’s no man in the sky?”



Victor frowned. “Then…you’d be standing still. She’d be standing still.”



“And if we’re standing still because we think someone’s gonna protect us; 
and there really is no man to protect us, is that safe?”



“No, mommy.”



Mattie moved their hands up and down once last time and then let go. 
“That’s why I don’t like it. I think sometimes people don’t do everything 
they can to help themselves, because they think this man in the sky is 
going to step in and help them.”



Somewhat to Mattie’s relief, neither Wanda nor Victor pursued the 
argument. She was also pleased with herself that she had made it through 
the discussion without becoming irrational or shouting at her kids. Her 
mistakes notwithstanding, they were growing up just fine, continually 
surprising her with their questions and thoughts. 



After breakfast, Mattie opened their suitcase and added a several things. 
The rest of the granola bars, their entire supply of canned goods (two 
cans of soup and one can of beef stew), as many bottles of water as would 
fit, salt (she’d heard of people taking salt tablets when they went 
camping so she assumed it was something people needed), sugar (she knew 
people couldn’t function with low blood sugar; she herself was 
hypoglycemic); plastic garbage bags (she had some vague ideas for their 
use if someone had to use the bathroom but she was too squeamish to dwell 
on that); a roll of electrical tape; various utensils (a can opener, two 
spoons, two forks, and several sharp knives); the cans of insect spray 
and hair spray she’d taken into the bedroom; and a few disposable 
lighters. 



Wandering from room to room, Mattie tried to think if there was anything 
else she should do. Only a few things suggested themselves. 



In spite of herself, she couldn’t help swallowing three tablets of 
Vicodin from the supply in her purse (consisting of the last twenty 
tablets of her own prescription and ninety or so she’d bought from a drug 
dealer in nearby Bridgton). No, it was not the right thing to do, but she 
would not be able to function if she went into withdrawal during the 
dangerous drive South. She made them all make one final stop in the 
bathroom. And then she took a few sheets of paper and a pen from what had 
been Aunt Judy’s desk, sat down at the kitchen table, and wrote a note to 
whoever might next be in their house. As she wrote, she felt confused, 
self-conscious, and sad. She wondered if anyone would see the note and 
what they would make of it.



November 22, 2007, 9:13 AM:



I don’t know what’s happened - but I am very frightened and must get my 
children to safety before anything can get inside the house.



We are headed South, first on Kansas Road, and then on I-95, to try to 
reach Boston. From there we will try to get to Rubidoux, which our home 
town in the Eastern corner of Missouri.



If you get this note please do the following for us:



Our neighbor, Mr. Eugene Fisher, may be trapped in his house at 206 Cross 
Creek Road. We will try to find him on our way out but for obvious 
reasons we may not be able to get to him. Please send help.



Please contact the following persons:



My best friend, Staff Sergeant Rose Emily Sullivan, 2033rd Military 
Police Battalion, U.S. Army, Baghdad, Iraq; Serial Number ______; E-mail 
rsullivan1689@usarmy.mil. Please tell her we love her and to look for us.



My mother, Suzanne Allen, Rubidoux Trailer Park, Unit 114, Rubidoux, 
Missouri, 91601; (573) 555-8272. Please tell her we always loved her very 
much and that I am sorry for everything and to please stop being angry at 
me and to please not blame my mistakes on my innocent Wanda and Victor. 
Please ask her to do this because of “Tamara” - She will understand what 
this means.



I tried so hard.



Please let us live on in your memories.


Moragh Magdalene Allen
Wanda Lee Allen
Victor Lee Allen


And Kyle, my Kyle - please forgive me. Every night I dream of you and of 
the life we could have had. I will love you and miss you forever.

VIII



There was nothing more to say. Mattie wiped her eyes, pulled herself 
together, put the note inside an envelope and propped it up against one 
of the empty cereal bowls. Then she picked up the .22, checked to see 
that it was fully loaded, and tucked it into her belt.



She turned around, and saw that her kids were looking expectantly at her. 
“Ready?” she asked them as she tried to smile. 



“Will we come back someday, Mommy?” Mattie realized that in spite of all 
their bad experiences here – let alone the horrors of the last day and 
night – this was the only place Victor had ever called home. She didn’t 
want to argue with him or hurt his feelings. “If you want,” she shrugged.



The three of them went over to the damaged front door. Peering out the 
tiny window, Mattie could see the faint outline of the station wagon just 
a few feet beyond. As far as she could tell, nothing was nearby. She 
wondered, though, how she was supposed to get herself, and her kids, and 
the suitcase, out the door and in the car in one swift motion. She 
couldn’t pick up Wanda anymore but she could probably carry Victor - he 
was still light enough for her to do that, although in another six months 
he wouldn’t be – but that was a two-handed job and then she wouldn’t be 
able to hold the gun. Wanda wouldn’t be able to carry her brother either 
him – he was two-thirds her size – and she doubted that her daughter 
would be able to lift the bulging suitcase either.



So Mattie would have to take both the gun and the suitcase. She wished 
there was some way for all three of them to hold hands – she wanted to 
have the contact with them – but there was not. She finally settled for 
asking Wanda to hold Victor’s hand and to hold onto the back of Mattie’s 
sweater with her other hand.



She knelt in front of her kids, putting her arms around their shoulders 
like a football player in a huddle, and explained to the kids what she 
had in mind. Wanda would pull the front door open and let Mattie outside. 
Mattie would run toward the car and Wanda and Victor, holding hands, 
would immediately follow. (“It’s just about ten feet, darlings, maybe 
even less.”) Mattie would then pull open the door, get her kids inside, 
get inside herself, get the suitcase inside, and close the door.



“Ready?” she asked them again? They nodded.



“Okay,” she faced the front door and drew her gun, pointing it straight 
up, Wanda grasped the doorknob. Part of her wanted to forget about the 
whole thing. Being inside the house was safer than being out in the mist, 
even for a few seconds. But she reminded herself that the house would not 
stay safe for long – maybe one more night, maybe a few more hours, maybe 
not even that.



“GO!” Wanda tugged the door open and Mattie, the gun in her left hand and 
the suitcase in her right, charged the three steps towards the car, 
dropped the suitcase and yanked open the driver’s door. She heard 
something loud click behind her and then she realized one of her kids at 
had reflexively closed their front door. As she stopped, something bumped 
against her back and she realized it was Wanda. She pivoted to the side 
and saw her terrified children, holding hands like she’d told them. She 
didn’t have to tell them to get right in the car; they raced past her 
onto the bench seat. As soon as they were in, she sat down, reached 
clumsily outside the car for the suitcase, swung it over onto her lap, 
and then—



Something big and black and heavy – she had the impression of something 
spinning, alternating light and dark like a huge propeller or industrial 
fan - appeared her in peripheral vision and at the same time a high-
pitched whining sound, very loud and grating like a circular saw cutting 
through lumber, suddenly filled the air, so strong she could feel her 
bones vibrate.



“Mama!” “Mommy!” They must have seen it too.



Mattie, praying the thing wasn’t already in the car, tugged the door 
shut. The shock of the door closing rattled the windows and for two 
terrible seconds Mattie thought they would shatter, turning the car into 
a death trap. But no, the windows held fast; a terrible shifting shadow – 
round, then elliptical, then round again - crossed over their car; and 
the sawing noise rapidly receded. Mattie also had a sensation of motion; 
as though something large and heavy had just flown past their car, 
creating a small vacuum in its wake.



I tried so hard…Please let us live on in your memories…



“Oh, my babies,” Mattie reached for them as she broke down. They cried 
together on the front seat for minutes, knowing they should go but unable 
to move. Victor was hyperventilating, gasping for breath. Mattie, sensing 
that the things outside could not detect them in the car, unzipped the 
suitcase and gave him a bite of one of the candy bars and some water.

“Let’s go.” She looked around for the car keys and then remembered there 
were none. At first, she could not remember how to hot-wire the car; and 
then when she could remember the steps, her hands were shaking too badly. 
Ten minutes later, though, the engine chugged to life and they circled 
out of the driveway. 



“I want to check on Mr. Fischer before we go. After all, he was so nice 
to us for so long; maybe we can finally do something for him.” Although 
his car and garage had been covered with what looked like spider webs, 
Mattie remembered the unsullied back room – maybe his bedroom, or a 
hallway – that she’d glimpsed through the window in the side of his 
house. There was a chance – if he’d somehow seen what was coming at him 
through the mist, or maybe if one of the other neighbors had managed to 
shout a warning to him – he might have had time to lock himself in the 
rear part of the house. His house was far newer and sturdier than 
Mattie’s, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the windows breaking open or 
the ceiling falling off like she had. But he would no doubt be as 
frightened as Mattie and her kids and, unless he happened to have some 
food in that part of the house, he would be far hungrier.



Mr. Fischer’s driveway as empty, as it had been the day before. Mattie 
didn’t dare drive into his garage - even through the mist she could see a 
pink-and-white curtain of cobwebs, thick as cotton candy, all across the 
garage entrance.  But the front door was closed and the windows seemed 
intact. She honked the horn, once, a second time, and then five times 
rapidly. The girl could think of no way for her to get into his backyard; 
the picket fence separated his property from hers on one side; and 
several pine trees separated his house from the Cobbs next door. The 
trees were impassable and she didn’t want to risk puncturing the tires by 
trying to drive over the fence. Remembering how the flashlights had 
attracted the worms and scorpions the night before, she cautiously turned 
on the station wagon’s bright lights and drove toward the front windows. 
It was impossible for her to tell what might be inside; the lights simply 
reflected off the window glass. So Mattie honked the horn a few more 
times; waited in vain for some signal from her friend’s house; and 
finally drove on.



Mattie switched on the radio as they left Mr. Fischer’s. She went all the 
way up the AM band and all the way down the FM. Apart from some very 
faint static and an occasional whistle or screech, she heard nothing. 
Likewise, they found no signs of life as they drove down Cross Creek Road 
and then onto Kansas Road. The wrecked patrol car was still on the 
corner. Occasionally, they had to steer around an accident – there had 
been a few fender-benders, probably after the mist had arrived - but all 
along Kansas Road they found cars neatly pulled over to the shoulder of 
the road, many with the windows rolled down or the doors open. 
Occasionally they passed a car which appeared to be intact and with the 
windows and doors closed, but the high beams of the station wagon could 
not pick out anyone or anything outside.



As they drove by the shopping center, Mattie remembered the screams and 
crying and gunshots she’d heard as she walked past the pharmacy. She also 
thought sadly of the hardware store, the store with the broken windows 
and open doors. She remembered “George Senior,” the friendly young 
cashier who had told her that his son had had a crush on her – and wished 
there was something she could do for them. Hopefully at least his son was 
safe. Her heart hardened, though, as she thought of the grocery where 
she’d been when the mist arrived. She wondered if anyone was still there. 
Probably they were, she decided. It was a sturdy building with plenty to 
eat and drink – an ideal shelter, really – and they had known of the 
danger outside. But even if there were people inside who needed her help, 
there was nothing she could for them and nothing she wanted to do. Just 
as they had no time for her and her babies yesterday, she now had no time 
to spare them. 



With the accidents and poor visibility, they couldn’t drive more than 
about ten miles an hour. It took them almost a half-hour to navigate 
their way to the on ramp for I-95 South. As they went up the ramp, Mattie 
held her breath, expecting to find herself in an impassible sea of 
wrecked or deserted cars, perhaps with creatures poking through the 
remains. Once again, though, many drivers seem to have simply pulled over 
to the side; and they had whole stretches of the freeway to themselves. 
The radio – she asked Victor Lee to take over the job of scanning up and 
down the two bands – likewise yielded no signal on the freeway.



A few times, Mattie asked her kids if they were hungry, or wanted 
something to read, or maybe wanted to listen to some music. They had 
found quite a treasure trove inside the station wagon: Styrofoam boxes of 
dried noodles; a six-pack of Coke; a gram of actual coke, complete with a 
small mirror and a tiny porcelain spoon (Wanda, sounding genuinely 
confused, asked what all that was and Mattie gently told her not to touch 
it); a Walkman; old issues of Time Magazine. But the kids, their minds 
perhaps overloaded, just stared straight ahead, fiddling with the radio, 
occasionally telling her they loved her.



At some point – they’d gone maybe thirty miles or so, Mattie had Wanda 
get out of the map. She planned to take the I-95 in Boston; but she 
noticed that the 95 would go inland, whereas another freeway in the area, 
- I-295, which they would pass as they went through Gardiner – would take 
them a bit closer to the coastline before rejoining the 95. Wondering if 
the sea air would somehow blow the mist away (it was worth a try, anyhow) 
she switched to the 295. The sign announcing the turnoff lane for the 295 
had partly collapsed, leaving it only about ten or so feet off the 
ground, and they squeezed under it. Going along the coast didn’t make any 
difference; the mist still stretched as far as the eye could see. Mattie 
wondered if the creatures could swim; and if so, what would happen to 
life on earth if they got into the Atlantic Ocean.



“Oh, no!” 



They were going through Portland when Mattie hit the brakes. Victor had 
been fiddling with the radio (still no luck), and Wanda had been shifting 
her attention back and forth between the map, her mother, and a magazine 
article dealing with the Iraq War. Both of the kids instinctively looked 
ahead.



“Mama, what-“



“Cover your eyes! Don’t look at it!” She was actually shrieking now, 
first telling her kids not to look; and finally just screaming over and 
over again in helpless rage.



Wanda put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Mattie jerked away from her, 
buried her own hands in her face, and broke down crying. Victor did as 
his mother said, closing his eyes and putting his hands over his eyes for 
good measure. Wanda, knowing she could be arousing her mother’s wrath but 
seized by a sudden, terrible curiosity, squinted, placed her hands 
loosely over her face, peered out the windshield, and saw what her mother 
had seen.



Just a few feet ahead of them – Mattie had been right to brake the car – 
was the aftermath of an accident involving at least three vehicles. One 
of them, on Mattie’s side, was overturned and pinned under a fallen 
utility pole. Beyond that was another car, partly crushed, with a broken 
rear window and an open driver’s door. But that wasn’t what had upset 
Mattie. Directly in front of them was the third vehicle – a small yellow 
school bus. The rear emergency exit door was gone; either having been 
opened or having fallen off in the accident. The front sliding doors were 
open, as were most of the sliding glass windows. Other windows were 
broken open from within, cracked fragments of glass and even metal window 
frames projecting almost at right angles from the vehicle. As though the 
children inside had, all at once, desperately tried to escape from the 
little yellow bus in any way they could.



Mattie thought back to another accident, of maybe a thousand dreams she’d 
had, over so many nights, where she walked down that deserted, darkened 
stretch of highway in the Ozarks, condemned for eternity to search for 
the wrecked Camaro that was Kyle’s final resting place and to lay a rose 
or wreath beside it. And this was worse. She and Kyle, at least, were 
practically adults. Rose had survived. Wanda and Victor – if she could 
get them to safety – would grow up and have lives of their own. These had 
been children, the driver perhaps a kindly retired old man like the one 
who drove the school bus in Castle Rock.



She tried to speak, but for nearly a minute she could not. “I can’t live 
with this,” she said finally.



“Mama, is anyone inside?”



“What?”



“Maybe it just happened. Maybe someone’s hiding in there.”



It seemed unlikely to Mattie – they hadn’t encountered one other moving 
vehicle – let alone three – since leaving Castle Rock; and it seemed 
almost impossible that anyone could have survived in an open space over a 
whole day and night. Still, though, the creatures seemed to go by smell; 
and if someone had managed to get inside a sleeping bag or equipment bag-



“Victor Lee,” Mattie said, struggling to keep her voice calm, “Keep your 
eyes closed. You’re doing fine.” She turned to Wanda. “And you, young 
lady, you didn’t do what your mama said before, but you’ll do it now. 
Close your eyes, and put your hands all the way over your eyes. Got it?”



“But, Mama-“



“I’ve told you about what happened to me,” Mattie said inexorably. “It’s 
been ten years, but I see it every time I close my eyes. You’ve seen 
what’s begun to happen to Aunt Rose, a little worse each time she comes 
home from that war. You said it right - I’m your mama. And I can’t let 
you see something that that might give you bad dreams for the rest of 
your life.”



“Yes, mama.”



Mattie looked at her kids. When she was satisfied that they could not 
see, she honked the horn twice; then twice more; took a deep breath; and 
drove as close as she could to the rear end of the bus; turning on the 
high beams so that they shone through the rear entryway. Wanda and Victor 
heard a soft gasp, a strangled cry of despair and disgust, followed by 
the sound of Mattie weeping. Wanda reached over, blindly, and felt for 
Mattie’s hand. Mattie took her hand and squeezed it. After a very long 
time, they felt their mother put the car briefly in reverse; brake again; 
and resume their drive South.



“I’m sorry, mama,” Wanda said, maybe a half hour later.



“I’m sorry too, baby,” Mattie told her lifelessly.





Two hours or so after the encounter with the school bus – they were back 
on I-95 and had just passed an exit marked “Biddeford,” Victor tugged on 
her sleeve. “What’s that, mommy?” 



“What?”



“That shadow.”



“I…What is that?” She braked again. The clock on the dashboard only read 
4:10, but the light was suddenly gone. Not all the light, though; the 
sky, seen through the driver’s window, was still that bright silver-
chrome color. But something – seen from the passenger window - was 
blocking the light in front of them and through the passenger window. It 
looked like a long, thin cloud, maybe in the shape of a cigar. And as 
they watched, the cloud seemed to grow to twice its size. Then it 
disappeared and the sky brightened again. A moment later, the sky 
darkened once more.



Wanda stared out the passenger window. “Look at that!” The girl seemed 
more amazed than scared.



Something – Mattie knew now it wasn’t a cloud, but something living – was 
flying or floating or gliding directly overhead. It cast that shadow once 
more – a straight line, maybe twenty feet wide – ahead of the car and 
maybe five feet to each side of the car. But there was still light coming 
through the rear window and the backseat windows.



“Let’s get out of here.” Mattie began driving again, perhaps a little 
faster than she should, hoping to get out from under whatever-it-was. But 
the shadow kept pace with them. She slowed down and it slowed down with 
them. She sped up again and the thing above them sped up. This went on 
for a few minutes until she hit the brakes – none of them had their belts 
on and they were all thrown forward a bit – and stayed still. The thing 
finally glided ahead of them and disappeared over the horizon. Its exact 
form was obscured by the mist but it appeared to be dark green, tapered 
at both ends, with a thick, stubby, stationary pair of arms? – wings? – 
fins? - sticking out about three-quarters of the way down its body, held 
in place – or perhaps supporting – a pair of webs that tapered from the 
arms to the body, giving it the rough shape of a crucifix. An upside-down 
crucifix.



Mattie cared only that it was gone. “What would your Aunt Rose make of 
that?” She laughed nervously.





They never made it to Boston. By the time they began seeing signs 
mentioning New Hampshire, Mattie was keeping a nervous eye on the fuel 
gage. The idiot light underneath the “E” switched on just as they crossed 
the state line. She didn’t want to have a completely empty tank – just in 
case they had to run something over, she supposed – so she found a 
turnout and pulled off the road. Night was falling. She hated the idea of 
sitting in darkness – she didn’t want the kids to be frightened any more 
than they already were – but she killed the headlights and the engine 
anyway, remembering how the scorpions and birds were attracted to light.



Both Wanda and Victor were looking at her. “What do we do now, Mama?”



“I…I don’t know. Just sit tight, I guess. We have food, water, we have a 
heater. We have the gun. Maybe…someone will come along,” she added 
without conviction. 



Was there a way they could keep going? She didn’t think so. There were 
cars pulled over all along the road – probably with enough gas to get 
them to Saudi Arabia. But there was no way to siphon that gas. Even 
assuming she could find a hose in the station wagon – after all, it 
seemed to have everything else on board – it would take far too long. 
She’d have to pull up alongside one of the other cars, get out, open the 
station wagon’s fuel tank and the other car’s tank - and didn’t most cars 
these days have locked fuel tanks, the kind you had to open with a key or 
with some button hidden inside the car? – insert the hose, suck on the 
hose long enough and get the gas flowing (she smiled as she remembered 
Rose’s brother doing that once back home; he’d swallowed a mouthful of 
gas and ended up puking his guts out for a day or so), and then get back 
inside the station wagon. No. They’d nearly been torn apart in the ten 
seconds or so it took them to get from their house to the car.



Then she thought of switching to another car. That seemed less suicidal, 
but not much more practical. Even in the mist, they could see a few feet 
ahead. They could move forward slowly until they found a car with the 
windows and doors closed; shine the brights or a flashlight inside, 
looking for cobwebs or strange shapes; pile inside; and Mattie could 
hotwire that one as well. She assumed that the cars she saw alongside the 
road had pulled over when the mist hit. Any of them would probably have 
gas. But how could they know ahead of time – before they left the station 
wagon and were running around in the mist at night – whether their “new” 
car was locked? If it turned out to be, they would already have spent 
several seconds outside, time during which they could be smelled out. And 
then would have to leave that car, run back to the station wagon, open 
the door of the station wagon, get back inside, and close the door.



Mattie wondered if they could use their remaining fuel – she assumed they 
had an eighth of a tank left – to find a gas station. She rejected that 
idea as well. First, almost every gas pump she’d seen for years had been 
electronic. You put the credit card in, choose your fuel, and pump away. 
But the power had been off in Castle Rock – not only in her house but in 
the hardware store and grocery store as well. Even though they were still 
on the highway, the overhead lights were off and she could see no lights 
in the distance. So the gas pump probably wouldn’t even work. And she 
assumed that it would be even harder to siphon gas from the pumps than it 
would to siphon gas from another car. So that was out.



What about driving through town and looking for a store or house or 
motel? They might not have to break in; if the mist had swept over town 
suddenly, as it had in Castle Rock, many people might have left their 
doors unlocked. If they found someplace that looked promising – someplace 
with space and food, like a maybe a convenience store – they would circle 
it carefully beforehand, looking for open windows and doors. But what if 
there was some tiny opening – a rear bathroom window that someone had 
propped open; or a hole in the roof – that they couldn’t see through the 
mist? They could be walking into a welcoming death trap; and not see the 
danger signs until they had left their station wagon far behind and it 
was too late to safely get out. 



There was, reflected Mattie, one way to be sure that a store or house was 
not infested: If they saw lights and people inside. Mattie – half-crazed, 
drug-addicted Mattie, of all people – had made it home in one piece. 
There had to be other survivors. Someone driving by her house would have 
seen the tea candles glowing in the windows, seen her and her kids 
hunkered down in the bedroom. But Mattie and her kids were decent, 
harmless people. Could she bet her life – and the lives of her children – 
that other people would act the same way? What if she found people who 
had been trapped in a store or office when the mist arrived and who had 
now gone for twenty-four hours without eating or drinking? What if the 
people she found had gone crazy from the nightmare outside or the loss of 
loved ones? Or who had simply been waiting, all their lives, for a chance 
to treat a young single mother and her two children with no more morals 
or compunction than the monstrous things in the mist? Yes, she would have 
the gun with her; but she was physically weak and someone strong or 
desperate enough could easily take it away from her.



Mattie closed her eyes. Perhaps some other idea would come to her. For 
now, the safest option – not a very safe one at that, mind you – seemed 
to be to stay where they were.



That night, Mattie sang to her kids and told them how much she loved 
them. They talked about where they would go when this was over. She would 
take them to Missouri, a place Wanda Lee barely remembered and where 
Victor Lee had never been. Maybe they would share a house with Rose, who 
was due to get out of the Army soon. They kept the lights off and hoped 
nothing would bother them in the car. Mattie kept the .22 nearby, on top 
of the dashboard. After several hours, they decided they might actually 
be safe and allowed themselves to take a nap, huddling against each other 
for warmth. Mattie woke up a few times during the night, for a minute or 
two each time. 



The first time, her watch said 10:22 PM. All was still; she could hear 
nothing except the sound of her kids breathing; and all she could see 
outside the windshield and windows was a layer of white.



The second time, her watch said 1:01 AM. She thought she could hear a 
wind – just a perfectly ordinary wind - blowing somewhere in the 
distance. The layer of mist still blanketed them.



They were jolted awake sometime later to the sounds of shrieking and 
cracking glass. The first thing Mattie saw were the faces of children – 
staring, silent, beyond horror. She followed their gaze and screamed. 
Things – fat, sickly-green snakes with mouths full of teeth and what 
looked like hundreds of little jointed legs – were crawling all over the 
windshield and windows and the skeletal bird-creatures were tearing them 
off. One of the birds had dashed itself directly against the windshield, 
just as the one outside her bedroom window had. 



“Mama, do something! Make them stop!” Mattie grabbed for the .22 – and 
realized almost immediately that she couldn’t use it without shooting out 
the windshield. The birds smashed into the car again and again and soon 
the windshield and windows were riddled with star-shaped cracks. If one 
of the things actually got inside the car, she would kill it – but her 
next act would have to be to kill her own children and then herself 
before the other things streamed into the car through the breach and 
swarmed over them.



She forced herself to calm down at least a notch. The glass was strong, 
for now it was intact, and if it did break apart, it would do so bit by 
bit. If anything got in, it would do so gradually and they would have 
time to fight back. She turned to Wanda. “Get the suitcase open.” Wanda 
fumbled the suitcase open and its contents – food, pills, clothes, spray 
cans – spilled all over the front seat and floor.



“Cans,” she told her kids. “Get the bug-spray cans.” The warnings on the 
backs of the cans notwithstanding, they were probably safer for her kids 
than the knives and might be more effective – after all, she didn’t know 
how strong the creatures were – whether they had thick skins or armor 
plating – but the insect sprays were poison, and poison designed to kill 
insects. If the things crawling over the car were constructed like 
ordinary insects, they wouldn’t like the sprays.



Mattie looked to her right and saw that Wanda and Victor had each taken a 
can of Raid – one red, one green; she didn’t know what the difference 
might be – and uncapped them.



“If anything...starts to come through the windshield,” she said, trying 
to keep her voice and her imagination under control, “don’t touch it, 
okay? Just spray it. Spray it and it’ll go away.” Mattie hoped that was 
true.



Another bird swooped out of the night, crashing into the windshield to 
pull another of the things – Mattie now realized they looked more like 
centipedes than snakes – and leaving another dented crack. Soon it would 
give way and none of their little weapons – the gun, the bug spray, even 
the knives – would keep them safe. But why was this happening now? After 
all, nothing had even come close to the station wagon when she had driven 
home from the market or when they were driving on the freeway—



Driving…



“Put on your belts. Right now. Wanda, belt your brother in.” Mattie, 
forcing herself to ignore the horror just inches ahead of her, set the 
.22 down, wired the ignition once more (she didn’t dare turn the lights 
on, not after what had happened last night, laid her hand down on the 
horn, and made the car lurch forward a foot or so back onto the road. She 
was rewarded with the immediate sensation of something big being dragged 
underneath the car and crushed. She hit the accelerator again, going a 
few more feet, turning the wheel violently to the left and then to the 
right, and then stamped on the brakes. They were all thrown forward, but 
they heard another crunching sound and most of the centipedes lost their 
grip on the car and disappeared from the windows and windshields. Mattie, 
not daring to go too far ahead – she didn’t know what might be on the 
road, whether it was another pile-up or some living thing big enough to 
stand up to their car - jerked the station wagon ahead a few more feet 
and slammed on the brakes once more. The windows – except for the many 
cracks and just as many greenish stains – were now clear. She moved the 
car, more slowly and gently, back off the road.



Mattie looked over at her kids. They were still clutching the bug spray 
cans and staring, hypnotized with fear, out at the mist behind the 
windshield. She reached toward them – she was amazed how badly her hands 
were shaking – and gathered them in her arms.



“At least we know what to do now,” she told them. “The birds – they don’t 
care about us. They care about those smaller things. If they come back, 
all we have to do is drive a little and we can get rid of them.”



“I want to go home,” Victor whispered.



Mattie remembered the last words her mother had said to her: “You have no 
home.” They probably didn’t anymore; they had no way to get back to their 
little house, which was probably overrun by now, perhaps by the spiders, 
the Allens’ clothes and toys and furniture and all other signs of the 
life they’d tried to build covered and burned by the deadly webs. But she 
couldn’t tell him that – even though, she reflected, he probably already 
knew.



The young woman, feeling exhausted and shaken, reached onto the car 
floor, came up with her bottle of Vicodin and a bottle of water.



“Mama…?” Wanda looked at her.



Mattie smiled at her and stroked her long blonde hair. “Mama knows it’s 
wrong. Mama knows she has to get help if…once this thing is over. But for 
now, she has to stay awake. And she can’t get sick. The withdrawal-sick. 
Not now.” She shook out four tablets – four times her prescribed dose – 
and washed them down with a swallow of the water. “Forgive me?”



“Of course we do, Mama.”



And Mattie held her children and waited for morning.


IX.

They were “visited” twice more that night – once more by three or four of 
the centipedes; and another time, just before dawn, by a very strange, 
egg-shaped, brown thing with spines all over its body, three bony, 
jointed legs on each side, rapidly-fluttering white wings, and bug eyes. 
It looked, for the brief moments in which it appeared and landed on their 
windshield, like a flying porcupine. Both times, Mattie and her kids had 
cried out in fear and revulsion. But both times, Mattie got rid of the 
unwanted visitors by wiring the ignition, starting the car, and briefly 
jerking back and forth across the road. “At least,” she told her children 
after driving off the spiky thing, “now we know what to do.” 



She realized, as she said this, By now she was slurring her words a bit, 
as her body and her mind gradually ground to a halt. She was exhausted 
and disoriented from sleeping only fitfully (Wanda and Victor kept a 
lookout while she napped; each time, she’d told them not to let their 
mama sleep for more than an hour). She was both hungry and thirsty (she 
wouldn’t eat more than a bite or so of granola or take more than a sip of 
water at a time; after all, when that food ran out, they had no safe way 
of getting more). Her bad knee ached nonstop; and her lower back, also 
injured in the long-ago crash, was also beginning to act up. And she 
realized that she was beginning to get confused about what day it was; 
how long ago they’d left their house; how much food and water they had. 
She also took two Vicodin tablets every few hours. They kept her awake, 
as they usually did – how many days of her life had she stumbled through, 
exhausted, disoriented and crabby, because the stuff had kept her up the 
whole night before? - but she wasn’t taking enough to improve her mood. 
Part of her wanted to swallow fistfuls at a time – or at least a few 
batches of four or five each - to calm her nerves and make her see the 
bright side of things. But she didn’t dare do that, not now. Under normal 
circumstances, if she ran low she could just present to an emergency 
room, claiming to be in terrible pain from her knee. That would get her 
enough to last a day or two, giving her time to arrange a meeting with 
“Merlin,” as the long-haired, scruffy young dealer from Bridgton called 
himself. If she exhausted her supply now – or two days from now or even a 
week from now – there’d be nothing and no one to save her from the 
sickness within her, let alone to protect Wanda and Victor from the 
monsters outside.



“What’s wrong, Mama?”



For a moment, Mattie thought of snapping at her daughter, sarcastically 
asking her what possibly might be wrong. She forced herself first to be 
quiet, to remember that this wasn’t Wanda’s fault, and then to answer her 
daughter in a normal tone. “Mama’s hooked on drugs,” she said finally. 
“They don’t do nothing for her anymore but she can’t stop taking them. 
And that’s not all. I can’t a good job. I can’t buy you anything nice. 
And it’s my fault that we’re trapped here right now.”



“You said we couldn’t stay in the house-“



“That’s not what I mean, little one. We never belonged up here. We’ve got 
no past here. No friends here. Except for Mr. Fischer and Mrs. Turman, no 
one wants us here and no one helps us. And I didn’t realize just how 
dangerous that was until it was too late. After your Aunt Judy died I 
should have taken all of us back home. I asked Non-“ Mattie used Wanda’s 
pet name for her grandmother “-to help us come home but she wouldn’t. I 
should have told Aunt Rose we needed to get there. I could have done work 
for her mama and her dad; or gotten a job waitressing or at the 
laundromat. If we ever get out of this, I’ll get us back home.”

And for the next two hours, they let themselves talk about what that 
would be like; how they could live at the little motel at the edge of 
town; how Wanda and Victor would go to Mattie’s old school; how Rose 
would come home from the Army and they would be like a little family.



They had almost taken their mind off where they were when they became 
aware of the sounds coming from somewhere behind them. It was vaguely 
like a foghorn or factory whistle, low and rhythmic. Then it came again, 
louder and deeper, filling the air. As it came yet again, they felt a 
tremor go through the floor of the car.



“What is that, Mama?”



“Hush.” It came once more, accompanied this time by a crash that made the 
car bounce up and down. A few drops of water spilled out of the little 
ribbed plastic bottle in the drink holder on the dashboard. The sky 
darkened ahead of them, and Mattie could see something – it looked almost 
like a black cloud – emerging in the rear-view mirror. The car lurched 
again, and the foghorn sound seemed to be coming from all around them.



Only Victor seemed unworried, seemed certain that he knew what it was. 
“It’s just Pawfield, mommy,” he said as he nodded matter-of-factly. 
“Remember Pawfield?”



She did. Victor’s imaginary friend, the gigantic Siamese cat who was a 
violent outgrowth of his interest in the Garfield books and toys she’d 
gotten him when he was four. Only this was real and – from the terrible 
bass sounds filling the air and the shape that was beginning to emerge in 
the mirrors – she could see legs, big and small, what looked like dozens 
or even hundreds of terrible legs – like nothing a healthy little boy 
would ever imagine.



“Get down!” The car was bouncing inches off the ground at a time. The 
windshield and windows were rattling violently and Mattie was certain 
they would break open. When her kids were on the car floor she laid down 
over them, pressing them together, laying her hands over their ears. 
Underneath her, she could hear Victor crying, repeating to himself over 
and over again that it was just his friend Pawfield.



“Go away, please go away…” the thing seemed to be directly over their 
car. She could not only hear the horrible sound but feel it in her bones 
and through every surface in the car. And in between the bellows, she 
could hear screeching and buzzing noises, the sounds made by the birds 
and the bugs last night but multiplied a thousandfold.



And then it was ahead of them, the bouncing and noise rapidly subsiding. 
“Stay down,” Mattie still had to shout to make herself heard. She raised 
herself to a kneeling position and looked out the windshield. She 
couldn’t make out much through the mist but she could see the silhouette 
of a giant tapered body – it looked the thorax of a wasp or beetle – 
supported on both sides by legs the size of skyscrapers.



“What was it, Mama?”



It’s the end of the world, Mattie thought, as she imagined that thing – 
maybe a whole swarm of them - walking up and down the coast, knocking 
down buildings, overpasses, power lines, everything built by man, things 
that could never be rebuilt in the mist. “I don’t know,” she said at 
last. She leaned back down and gently kissed Wanda, then Victor. “Maybe 
Victor’s right. It’s Pawfield.” She tried to smile but couldn’t.



“What else is in the mist?”



“I don’t know.” But Mattie wished her daughter hadn’t asked that 
question.



“He sounded…lost,” Victor said as he got back in his seat.



“Not as lost as us,” Mattie said hoarsely. To her great surprise, she had 
made her kids laugh.





The centipedes and the birds came again that night; once more Mattie 
drove them off, literally, by starting the engine and swinging the car 
back and forth. By now, Mattie was satisfied that they couldn’t get 
inside the car. They were somehow less scary than they had been. 



About an hour after that, Mattie bolted upright – but this time with 
excitement, not fear. A new sound, and with it a faint vibrating 
sensation, had begun to fill the car. This sound was wholly mechanical, 
the rush of a jet engine. It was followed by a faint, high-pitched 
whistling sound and then a series of four distant booms which Mattie and 
her kids felt more than they heard. A dull red glow flared briefly to 
their left. Another jet – actually, it sounded like several – passed 
overhead, followed by more whistles, flashes, and booming sounds. Another 
moment and the distant sky came alive with phosphorous. She could hear 
more mechanical sounds – the rumble of tanks, maybe, or at least trucks – 
and, far away, the sound of something screaming, hopefully as it was 
blown to pieces.



“They’ve come,” Mattie told her kids. “They’ve come for us. It’s your 
Aunt Rose come for us!” She glanced in the rear-view mirror and for a 
moment was shocked by what she saw – the skeletal, desperate face of a 
woman; prematurely old; head shaved; her eyes shadowed, bloodshot, 
tearing, but glowing now with a crazed missionary zeal. Is that what I am 
now? - she wondered; and then she looked at her beautiful babies next to 
her and realized it didn’t matter. She thought of Rose, and of her late 
father who had died in Desert Storm, and of all the military parades in 
her home town. And then she thought briefly of Mrs. Carmody and of the 
word, “deliverance.” She became aware that she was, crying, bouncing up 
and down, squeezing her own children way too hard.



“Can they see us, Mama?”



“Of course they can, little one.” Actually, she realized that she knew no 
such thing. How could the planes see through the mist? Did they know 
where the highway was? Did they know not to bomb the highway?



She remembered the radio. It took her three whole minutes to get the 
engine started again – her hands were shaking almost uncontrollably. The 
AM band was completely silent, as it had been before, but as she slowly 
turned the dial down the FM band, she could begin to pick out voices. 



“-in cooperation with the Maine and New Hampshire National Guard and the 
Canadian Armed Forces,” a woman’s voice was saying dispassionately. The 
Federal Emergency Management Agency urges you to remain calm and remain 
indoors. If you are in a storm cellar or fallout shelter please remain 
inside. We repeat, leave all windows and doors closed; and leave all 
electrical devices off and all water faucets and valves in the closed 
position. Drink only bottled water if possible. Boil all other water 
prior to use. If you are driving, pull off the road immediately and leave 
your vehicle windows and doors closed. Do not attempt to leave your 
vehicle. Telephone and cell phone service will be restored as soon as 
possible; however, do not attempt to make any outgoing telephone calls 
unless you have a genuine emergency. We repeat, the area is being secured 
by the United States Army and Air Force in cooperation with the Maine and 
New Hampshire National Guard and the Canadian Armed Forces.”



The bulletin – with a few new variants from time to time – repeated 
itself over the next hour. Other radio stations had other official 
messages telling them essentially the same things. She turned the knob 
further and further down the FM band, finally picking up something a bit 
different: A high-pitched voice alternating between obscenities, Bible 
verses, and thoughts about the end of the world. It reminded her of 
“Captain Jack,” a village idiot who used to buy cheap wine from Duke’s 
Liquor back home and who would stand out in front of the church shouting 
curses at passersby. Mattie shrugged, wondering briefly how many people 
had been reduced to that level, driven out of their minds by the events 
of the last few days, and turned back to one of the emergency 
announcements.



The next morning, their car began to shake again, this time with the 
rumble of an armed convoy. A tank passed within inches of their car – 
Mattie could see soldiers wearing gas masks and cradling flamethrowers 
perched on the side.



“This is where we get off, little ones,” she said as a second tank 
rumbled by. Mattie looked her kids. “Ready to go home?” Without waiting 
for an answer, she laid her hand on the horn, one long burst followed by 
a series of short ones. She could hear a voice – just a few disconnected 
syllables – coming over a microphone or loudspeaker – as a third tank 
came alongside their car. A light shone through their window, almost 
blinding them, and she could hear the sound of the third tank slowing 
down. A figure – the first human other living human being they’d seen in 
almost four whole days – jumped off the side of the tank and knocked on 
the driver’s window. He was dressed in Army fatigues and his head was 
covered by a helmet and a gas mask. 



“Pack all that up,” she gestured towards the food, drinks, and pills, and 
other belongings spilling out of the suitcase on the car floor. “I think 
they’re gonna want us to leave real soon.” 



She rolled down the window just a crack, still apprehensive about being 
exposed to the mist. 



“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, raising his voice to be heard through the 
mask and over the sounds of the convoy. “Sergeant Andy Rodriguez, United 
States Army. Is anyone hurt?”




Mattie didn’t know quite how to answer. Their home was gone. Their 
neighbors were dead. They were half-starved. They’d been exposed to 
things they never should have seen. Worst of all, for the rest of her 
life, Mattie would remember that she’d actually had to contemplate 
killing her own children. And what kind of nightmares and reveries were 
in store for her now? Not just memories of Kyle and her mother and Aunt 
Judy; but now also images of Mr. Fischer, and the mother and daughter 
screaming in the pharmacy, and the things in the mist, and the bus full 
of dead children. No, she hadn’t been hurt. She’d been destroyed yet a 
second time – probably this time for good. And as Mattie remembered Wanda 
and Victor huddled beneath her, crying as the giant thing passed over 
their car, she hoped her babies’ minds hadn’t been destroyed as well. 


She held out her hands and shrugged. “Please, get us out of here.”


“Absolutely, ma’am. We have a camp set up in Hartford. We’ll take you 
there right away. Just stay inside the car for a few more moments and 
we’ll get you onto a truck.”



“Is it safe here?”



“Almost, ma’am. The mist has started to lift; and we’ve been killing 
everything within a hundred miles of here.”



“Sir,” Wanda Lee asked, “what happened?” 



Rodriguez’ masked head turned from side to side and he gave a shrug of 
his own. “We don’t know for sure, honey. There was a terrorist attack, 
with biological weapons, three days ago, at an Army base near Castle 
Rock, in Maine.”



“Oh, my Lord,” Mattie thought of the Army base near her house; of the 
three homesick young soldiers from Atlanta who’d wanted to take her to 
dinner. She should have let them. “My father was in the Army,” Mattie 
said, her voice rising with anger. “My best friend’s in the Army. You 
make them pay.”



“Don’t you worry about that, ma’am,” Rodriguez said, anger coming into 
his own voice for the first time, “we already have.” He stepped away from 
the side of the car to flag down a flatbed truck in the convoy. Most of 
the people in the truck were wearing Army greens or white protective 
suits, but she could see a few civilians – among them a girl with a 
blood-soaked bandage around her head – on the back as well 



Sergeant Rodriguez tugged once at the door handle. It was locked; and 
Mattie pushed it open. She looked uncertainly at the space – just a few 
feet – between her car and the truck. “It’s okay,” Rodriguez said, his 
voice neutral again. He helped first Victor, then Wanda, and finally 
Mattie – who hugged him and gave him a kiss, the first full kiss she’d 
given to any man in six years - into the arms of another soldier on the 
truck.



As they drove along the highway – escorted by soldiers on foot and by a 
fleet of helicopter gunships above, past the burning bodies of deformed 
monsters – Mattie asked the soldiers on board, again and again, what had 
happened. Every time she asked someone else, she got a slightly different 
answer. There had been an attack with a new kind of biological weapon, by 
“someone who hates us” (depending on who you talked to it was Iran, 
Syria, North Korea, or possibly one of the former countries of the USSR). 
There were “ecological disruptions” all up and down the Eastern Seaboard; 
and the exact loss of life was not yet known. But the military – the Army 
and Air Force but also the National Guard and even some Canadian units – 
had begun responding on the afternoon of the first day, closing in on the 
affected area from the South and the West. And if it was any consolation 
to Mattie, the “guilty parties” had been identified and, on the morning 
of the third day, the United States had avenged the people of New England 
with a full nuclear strike. And now, many of our soldiers would be coming 
home to hunt down the remaining creatures and to help restore order and 
rebuild.



Mattie had no idea how much of what she’d just heard was true and how 
much was rumor, wishful thinking, revenge fantasy, or maybe just 
something intended to calm her down. She stopped asking what happened; 
and began to ask instead if they could please contact Staff Sergeant Rose 
Sullivan of the 2033rd Military Police Battalion in Iraq and let her know 
that Mattie and her kids were alive but needed her help. And she asked if 
anyone could help her and her kids return to Missouri. “That’s all we 
really want.”



“Is that where you live?”



“That’s where I’m from. And it’s where my babies belong.” She gently 
squeezed Wanda’s shoulder. “I was tricked into coming here – you don’t 
need to know why or how. Nobody wanted us here. They didn’t even treat my 
kids right. I wanted to go back home so bad, but I didn’t have the money. 
Now you’re gonna have all these homeless people here. I just want you to 
have three less.”

 

“Tell them that as soon as you get to the camp,” the man suggested. “I’m 
sure they can get in touch with your friend, in touch with your family, 
get you back to where you belong.”



“We almost died here,” Mattie concluded, “Please don’t make us live 
here.” And then she fell silent as she gazed into the distance. The mist 
was indeed clearing, revealing nothing but destruction – blackened and 
burning trees; wrecked cars; the ruins of buildings and houses; and 
everywhere, dead bodies, human and otherwise, being incinerated by 
soldiers with flamethrowers. She thought of Kyle; and then of all those 
Kyles who must have lost their lives in the last four days. Boyfriends, 
girlfriends, parents, beloved little children who would never come home 
again. And all the people left behind to miss them. 





X.



Mattie, Wanda and Victor ended up in the refugee camp on the outskirts of 
Hartford – a cold, overcrowded, often dangerous Hoovertown, made of large 
green canvas tents and filled with desperate, sometimes crazed, 
survivors. A cordon of soldiers protected the camp’s residents, not so 
much from the few small beasts that still survived in the forests as from 
the hostile locals. While in the camp, Mattie and her kids shared a tent 
– along with a shower and a latrine - with ten other families. Their only 
privacy was afforded by a white bedsheet that hung in front of “their” 
corner of the tent. Everything they said to one another could be 
overheard and they had no way of keeping out the noise – whether from 
radios or from fights or from lovemaking – from their neighbors. On their 
first night there, most of their belongings, even their shoes, were 
stolen as they slept; on the morning of the second day Victor stepped on 
a nail and it was several hours before a doctor could see him. Mattie 
endured this only by grimly promising herself, over and over, that this 
was the last opportunity these people – these Yankees – would ever have 
to mistreat her or her kids. All day long she asked the camp staff – she 
wasn’t quite sure who they were; they were civilians, perhaps Federal 
employees or perhaps volunteers; either way, they were incompetent - if 
they could contact Rose. They promised her they were doing everything 
they could; Mattie suspected they were lying.



On the morning of the third day, a friendly young man, one of the very 
few staffers she’d seen who appeared to know what he was doing (yesterday 
he’d relentlessly tracked down a doctor for little Victor), entered 
Mattie’s tent and called out to her from the other side of the bedsheet. 
When she pulled the partition aside, he asked her, smiling, if she could 
please sign a few things for him.



“What is it?”



“Can’t you guess?” His smile broadened.



“Please, Mr-?”



“Thibodeaux. Walter Thibodeaux.”



“I don’t-“ Mattie forced herself to soften her tone; after all, he’d 
tried to help them before. “Is this a game? Please. My children and I-“



“Would you mind signing this for my children?” He handed her a newspaper 
and a pen. At first, she didn’t understand. Then she looked at the 
newspaper, really looked at it for a moment, and finally got the point. 



It was the front section of the New York Times. There, under an enormous 
headline referring to the mist, was a color picture of her, Wanda and 
Victor crowded together in the refugee truck as Mattie gazed, haunted and 
weary, into the distance. The caption under the photo read:



UNCERTAIN FUTURE: Mattie Lee Allen, age 26, librarian from Castle Rock, 
Maine, arrives with her children at the FEMA camp in Hartford Wednesday 
evening. Allen is one of roughly 300,000 displaced by the attack.

	

“How-?” She glanced back at him. “Is this a joke?”



“No, Ma’am,” Walter assured her. “You must be the only person in the 
whole world who hasn’t seen this.” Mattie did remember a swarm of 
photographers greeting the truck as it rolled through the front gates of 
the camp. She also vaguely recalled being asked for her name (and being 
told it was an unusual name and then asked for the spelling) shortly 
thereafter, but she’d assumed she’d been asked by a camp employee simply 
gathering information.



“Every other paper for that day,” he said, “had a picture of you as well. 
The Boston Globe. The Washington Post. The L.A. Times. You were even on 
the cover of Time, on this little twenty-page special edition they put 
out, protecting your little boy and girl on the truck. And you’ve been on 
CNN and Fox News. You’re the face of this tragedy,” he concluded. “You’re 
the poster girl for all the victims in New England.”



Mattie looked down at her likeness again and shook her head. She tried to 
smile but didn’t quite make it – and she wondered if she was still able 
to smile at all.



“I look like I’m crazy.”



Walter chuckled. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think so. But…can you…?” 
he gestured towards the pen.



“Oh…sure.” Mattie was still too surprised to protest. She scribbled her 
name – her writing was illegible under the best of circumstances – 
underneath the photograph.



“Should I bring by another copy,” asked Walter, “for you and your kids?”



Mattie didn’t have to think about that one. “One more reminder? 
Absolutely not.”



Three weeks passed. Conditions in the camp improved – food, clothing and 
other supplies poured in from the rest of the country while, every day, 
some of the refugees moved on to new homes as they were “claimed” by 
relatives and friends. Nothing, however, got better for Mattie or her 
kids. Every day, she asked the camp staff and the military personnel to 
please help her find Rose, to please help her get back to Rubidoux, 
Missouri. But the staff was preoccupied with other matters. No one came 
to take them home. Wanda and Victor became restless; Mattie became more 
and more depressed. She began to wonder what would happen if and when 
most of the refugees went home and they closed the camp. They now had no 
money and no address. Would they end up in a shelter, in a slum in 
Boston, on the street? 



Mattie made one friend in the camp - a stout, bearded, middle-aged Polish 
immigrant named Adam with lively eyes and a strong, musical accent. Adam, 
who had a green card and spoke three languages (“a lot of good it did 
me”), had been working in Portland as a translator when the mist arrived. 
Now, his job and colleagues long gone, he was waiting for his brother in 
Krakow and for the Polish Embassy to help him get home. Wanda and Victor 
were enchanted by him. He taught Mattie how to play chess and, after 
losing her first two games, she quickly surpassed him.



One day, Adam asked Mattie where her home was and she broke down crying. 
She told him everything, about Rose, Kyle, Tim, Aunt Judy, the coming of 
the mist and her journey here. “You must go back down South,” he 
concurred. He tried to think of ways she could get back home. What about 
her parents? That wouldn’t work, she explained; her mother had disowned 
her. How about the rest of her family? She had none. What about Rose? 
Another dead end; she’d asked the camp staff again and again to contact 
her and they either couldn’t or wouldn’t do so. Whatever Adam suggested, 
Mattie came up with a reason it wouldn’t work.



Finally, he reminded her that she had been featured on the front page of 
the New York Times; and he suggested she use her “celebrity” status to 
get special treatment. People, he noted, were curious about her and would 
want to know what had happened to her. Mattie shook her head and told 
him, bleakly, that he didn’t understand. “People don’t care about us. 
They don’t want us.” She wasn’t looking at him as she said this. He 
followed her gaze and saw that she was looking, instead, at a small Swiss 
Army knife he kept on his belt.



“I’m sorry; did you need this?” 



“Maybe someday.” She smiled bitterly. The overhead lights reflected off 
the shiny white lines etched into her wrist and her lower palms. He 
hadn’t noticed them before. After that he kept the knife hidden from her.

After that, Adam kept the knife carefully hidden. He tried to keep an eye 
on her, but he wasn’t very subtle about it and two days later she asked 
him, voice rising, why he was following her around. 



For a moment, he thought of denying it or telling her some neutral half-
truth – perhaps that he was just trying to be friendly or make sure she 
was all right. Instead, he told her what was worrying him. She was 
obviously depressed; she kept saying she and her kids had nothing and 
nowhere to go, that no one wanted them; and she’d out-and-out scared him 
by looking at the knife. He added that her children seemed to love her 
and need her very much; that Victor, especially, loved to tell people how 
she’d saved them.



Mattie was silent for a while. When she spoke, it was quietly and slowly, 
as though she was willing herself not to break down or to scold her new 
friend. “This ain’t want you want to hear,” she said finally, “but no, I 
don’t want to live much longer. I killed the only man who ever loved me. 
I haven’t spoken to my mama in six years.”



“But you say your friend Rose-“



“I love Rose, but all we have together is the past. That’s all we talk 
about when we get together. But when we run out of things to remember, we 
just…I don’t know, fall silent. Two strangers, with different lives, with 
nothing to say to each other. I wish I could just go back to that time 
forever, with Rose, and Kyle, and our special clothes, and all the things 
we wrote together and laughed about and all the adventures we had. But 
that’s over. I killed it off. And even if I hadn’t, Rose grew up. She has 
a life of her own – in the Army, in the Middle East, with those other 
women, and her faith. I’m not part of that.”



“But even if that’s so, you have a life with Wanda and Victor.”



“I’m no good for them. I love them but I can’t take care of them. Even 
before the mist, I couldn’t feed them right, or teach them things, or buy 
them clothes. Or I’d get high in front of them. Or scare them by losing 
my temper. And the morning the mist came, I just wandered out of out 
house and left them alone. I almost got them killed. That night I fell 
asleep when I was supposed to be watching them. Give me enough time, and 
I’ll kill them just like I did Kyle.



“You didn’t kill him-“



Mattie held up a hand. “Please. Don’t tell me what happened.” She took in 
a breath. “You’re right that I still have to get my babies to safety – 
get them out of this camp, get them to Rose or her parents. But that’s 
the last thing I can do for them.”



“Have you thought of getting married or at least finding a boyfriend? You 
wouldn’t be so alone; and a good man could help you raise Wanda and 
Victor.”



Mattie clapped her hands, smiled, and laughed. 



“What did I say?”



“You said, ‘a good man…’ Everybody else thinks I’m gay. They hear about 
my good soldier friend Rose; and of course I look like a little boy…“ she 
trailed off. She was dressed in Army fatigues, her own clothes having 
proved a little too light for the cold weather of the camp. Her hair was 
now a uniform eighth of an inch all over her head. There was no barber in 
the camp; Mattie could not properly do the fade haircut herself; and so 
she had to make do with running a electric clipper over her head once 
every couple of days).



Now it was Adam’s turn to laugh. “People love to talk about such things. 
But seriously: Why not find a good husband who will be a good stepfather 
to your kids?”



“I don’t think so. I’m getting older-“



“How old are you?”



“Twenty-six.”



“That’s not so old.”



“-and I don’t think a lot of men would want to take on two little kids. 
And also, I don’t think I’d want to be around a man.”



Adam leaned forward. “Why?”



Mattie looked down at her hands. “I’ve had some…bad experiences. Very bad 
ones. Wanda Lee’s father, he used me. Lied to me. He told me he loved me, 
told me whatever I wanted to hear so I’d go to bed with him. When I told 
him I was pregnant, he said he’d marry me. And two days later he ran 
away. It turned out I never even knew his real name, or where he was 
from, or anything else about him. Or Victor Lee’s father – he was one of 
four guys I was seeing at the time. Four guys, can you believe that? I 
was so alone. Rose was gone, my mama was gone, I had no friends in town. 
So I’d…tell them…they could make love with me if they told me they loved 
me. I knew it wasn’t true – I knew they wanted me for just one thing – 
but I wanted, so much, to hear someone say they loved me.



“If I see a man that’s what I think of, and it just kills it. I relive 
all that, all those dumb things I did. A couple times I’ve made it to the 
point where we’d closed the bedroom door and turned off the lights and 
started to take off our clothes – and then I think of those things and I 
just can’t go through with it.



“And-and there’s more.” Mattie paused and bit her lip. “When I’m with a 
another man I also think about Kyle. He was my first – Rose just about 
went crazy, you know, she’d been hoping I’d see things the same way she 
did and we’d get married.” She laughed briefly at the memory. “But 
seriously, I keep thinking Kyle should still be here, he’s the one I 
should be with, but- I’m sorry.” She folded her arms across her chest and 
began to cry softly. Adam moved closer to her and gently put his arm 
around her shoulders. “Like everyone else in the world,” he said gently, 
“you have regrets. I didn’t mean to raise a sensitive subject.”



After a few minutes, Mattie calmed down and they talked some more. He 
asked her if there was anything that could be done which would set things 
right. Kyle was gone, yes; but her “babies,” as she called them, were 
still here; Mattie’s mother and Rose were still alive; her hometown still 
stood; and she was still relatively young. He wondered if the mist could 
serve as a break between the last ten painful years and a new phase of 
her life. “A lot of people are going to have to start anew,” Adam 
gestured at the camp beyond the open flap of their tent, where a young 
man, handsome and muscular and also missing a leg, propelled himself 
along on crutches. “Why not you?”



“You’re too kind,” Mattie said, patting his arm. “I’m not strong enough 
or bright enough to do the things you said. Or young enough, anymore. 
I’ve lost ten years-“



“-and you’ll lose another ten or twenty or even thirty if you let 
yourself,” he interrupted. 





Two days after that, Mattie was sitting on her cot - mildly high on some 
Percocet obtained from the camp infirmary – helping her kids mend some of 
the holes in their castoff Army clothes. Wanda had always wanted to learn 
how to sew; Mattie was worried that she would poke herself with the 
needle but she supposed this was a useful skill and a proper thing for a  
mother to teach her young daughter. At first she wouldn’t let Victor 
touch the needles, but when he began to pout, face screwing up as though 
he might actually cry, she relented somewhat: She would hold the needle, 
keeping the sharp end safely covered between her fingers, while he used 
his own small and graceful fingers to thread the needle and tie off the 
thread. 



The only thread she could find was white, and it stood out against their 
new dark green clothes. “Did you know,” she asked them, “that my grandma 
thought that if you used the wrong color thread, the Devil would come for 
her if he saw her? But one time, she had to fix her mama’s brown dress, 
and all she had was white thread like we have here. And she had no time 
and no money to get brown thread. So her brother decided to scare her-“



“Mattie…? Mattie!” Before she had a chance to answer, Adam pulled the 
sheet aside. He looked like he was being electrocuted. “Guess what? Your 
friend is here,” he said urgently.



“Who?”



“Your friend Rose.”



“No, honey, that’s-“



“I’m telling you – it’s her.” He explained how, a half hour ago, he had 
been in the camp’s main office, waiting in line to use the phone in yet 
another effort to reach his brother in Poland. At some point he had 
become aware of a woman’s voice speaking in a Southern accent much like 
Mattie’s own. He couldn’t, he confessed, understand much of what she was 
saying. Curious, he spent a minute or so standing on tiptoe and looking 
around the camp office, which was crowded with soldiers and civilians. 
Eventually, he’d seen a young woman in uniform who not only closely 
resembled the pictures Mattie had shown him of Rose, but who also looked 
remarkably like Mattie herself. A tall woman with very broad shoulders. 
Very light skin that seemed badly sunburned (“like someone who’d been in 
the desert”). Whose head was nearly shaved over the ears and down the 
back but sported a tuft of bright orange hair on top (“the same dumb-ass 
haircut as you”). A green uniform (“the dress kind”) with brass buttons, 
sergeant’s stripes, a row of ribbons and several large badges. A little 
snub nose with freckles. Wire-rimmed glasses. She looked worried and 
distraught; Adam remembered his own mother, Sofia, looking like that when 
she’d once lost him while on the beach.



At first, Adam had discounted the idea that this might be the famous 
Rose. There were, after all, many women in the Army; most of them would 
be physically fit; many soldiers hailed from the countryside and might 
thus speak with rural accents; and of course any soldier on duty would be 
wearing a uniform. Then, he noticed that the woman had a copy of the New 
York Times edition with Mattie’s picture on the front page – and that she 
was going from person to person, showing it around. Adam, forgetting 
about his place in line, about his brother, about everything else, had 
gone up to her, introduced himself, and asked if she was looking for a 
Mattie Lee, a Mattie Lee from the South who wanted her best friend Rose.



Adam had, he said, expected the woman to become excited, or at least 
happy. Instead, she became angry: “Where is she? What have you done with 
her?” he barked, in imitation of Rose.



At this point, Mattie, who had been glancing back and forth between Adam 
and the sock she was mending, dropped the cloth and needle, strode over 
to Adam, and embraced him. She gestured for Wanda and Victor to join her, 
to put their arms around their mother and her friend. “It’s her; it’s 
her!” she exulted as she began to cry. “It’s Aunt Rose come to save us!” 
Mattie later explained that she hadn’t been sure whether to believe Adam 
when he claimed to have seen Rose. It seemed suspicious: Mattie had 
described her to him, shown him the pictures in her wallet; he’d maybe 
felt she needed some cheering up. But she hadn’t told him about Rose’s 
legendary impatience; hadn’t told him how, when her friend was on a 
mission that was important enough to her, she regarded everything and 
everyone else as an obstacle to be overcome.



Adam had offered to take Rose to Mattie. They had taken two steps out of 
the main office when several civilians on the camp staff stopped them. 
Rose would need to sign in and obtain a visitor’s pass before she would 
be allowed in any of the common areas; any food or other items she 
brought with her would have be screened; and camp staff would have to 
contact Mattie herself and find out if she in fact wanted a visit.



Rose, obviously her temper in check, told them that the area was under 
martial law, that she was an MP, that as civilians they had no authority 
over her, and that unless they wanted to be arrested they could just 
stand aside as she collected her sister, nephew and niece and took them 
back home.



“But you said…she was your friend,” Adam said, confused. “Is she your 
sister?”



Mattie’s kids were smiling and Mattie was laughing once again. “No. We’re 
very distant relatives – fifteenth cousins or something like that. Our 
families both come from Ireland, from a place called County Cork. We 
lived next door to each other, like I said; and she’s always been my best 
friend. She also tells everybody who’ll listen that she wishes she was my 
girlfriend or my wife, or my ‘domestic partner’ or whatever they call it 
now. But if today, she wants to be my sister, then she’s my sister. But 
don’t you tell no one. Now, go on. What else happened?”



“Rose said she’d spent the last three weeks, off and on, looking for you. 
She’d been in Iraq, but after the mist came they sent her unit to 
Meriden, where they had a riot at a refugee camp. She knew she was only a 
few hundred miles from where you’d lived, and she kept asking people at 
the camps if they had any record of you. A few days ago, your name turned 
up on the database of people in Hartford.”



“That’s Rose,” Mattie said, her eyes tearing again. “She never gave up. 
Never stopped looking for me.”



“There’s nothing more to tell. She’s outside.”



Mattie, perhaps remembering what Adam had said about beginning again, 
looked nervously at her children and then back at him. “How do we look?”



Adam looked at the skinny young woman, head shaved, no makeup; and her 
children, also both thin; all somewhat dirty and wearing the ill-fitting 
Army fatigues. He opted for honestly. “She won’t mind. Wait right there.”



Adam stepped through the sheet into the common area of the tent. Mattie 
could hear him speaking quietly with someone. A few moments later, a 
powerful hand pulled aside the sheet and there she was - a big, pale-
skinned, boyish young woman in a Class A uniform, smiling gently as she 
held her arms open.



“Oh, Rose!” The family surged towards her and she gathered them up, 
lifting them all slightly, briefly, off the ground. Adam stood in the 
background along with some of the other residents of the tent, watching 
Mattie’s reunion with her best friend.



“I’m sorry, honey,” By now Rose herself was crying. “I left you alone. I 
left you and your babies all alone. I’ll get you out of here – take you 
back home – and I’ll never, ever leave you again. Can you forgive me?”



“It’s all right,” Mattie told her. “I let you down, and my mama, and your 
folks, and Kyle-“ 



“That’s not true. You protected your kids-” Rose broke free from Mattie, 
long enough to give Wanda and Victor a hug and a kiss each. “We’re all so 
proud of you back home. And…and we’re so sorry. We’re sorry you left, and 
that we didn’t see you were in pain and we didn’t try to help you when 
you needed us.” 



She paused again, waited for the tears to stop. “I’ve come to take you 
home, to my folks. They’re sorry. They’re sorry they let you go live with 
Aunt Judy and that they didn’t let you come back when you wanted. Please 
come home now, Mattie Lee.”



Mattie could not speak. How many times had she dreamt of home, cried 
herself to sleep thinking about it, made plans to return, plans that 
couldn’t be realized because there was no money to get there and no one 
waiting for her there even if she did make it back. 



“Mama talks about it all the time, you know,” Wanda said, as though 
reading her thoughts.



“Home,” Victor agreed solemnly.



“That’s all I want,” Mattie said finally. “And I also want my babies to 
see their home. Their real home.” She remembered Victor asking if they 
would ever come back to their house, the collapsing house they’d 
inherited from her Aunt Judy. She wondered if it was still standing, and 
decided it was probably long gone. The creatures, or the Army, could have 
whatever remained. They’d never belonged there anyway.



Rose gave Mattie a final, bone-crushing hug. “Let’s do it!” With some 
help from Adam, Rose found a phone and called her commanding officer. 
Rose’s C.O., a Captain Charles Elliott, who along with the rest of her 
unit was trying to head off a further attack by local residents on the 
refugee camp in nearby Meriden, sympathized with her but had no way of 
arranging for Mattie’s ride home. He did, however, extend her leave by 72 
hours so that she could help her sister and her kids get squared away at 
home.



Rose’s next call was to Joe Hurley (or “Father Hurley” as she called 
him), the retired Catholic priest who was now the mayor of Rubidoux. 
Father Hurley had been their parish priest when they were both kids and 
remembered them well. Rose explained that she had located Mattie and her 
children; and that they wanted nothing more than to return to their home. 


Father Hurley, in turn, contacted his Congressman, the Honorable Draper 
Scott (D-MO), who sat on the House Armed Services Committee. Father 
Hurley explained that one of their former constituents, who was now the 
most famous of the New England refugees - the “Woman With Kids,” as she 
had been dubbed in the press – had lost her house, her job, and all of 
her possessions and that she and her children needed to be transported 
back to her home town. Congressman Scott, who sat on the House Armed 
Services Committee, working with a sympathetic Pentagon official whose 
daughter had last been seen on the campus of the University of Maine at 
Orono the day before the coming of the mist, arranged for Mattie and her 
kids to be booked on a military transport flight leaving that evening 
from an airfield outside Boston and bound for St. Louis. His office also 
arranged for passage on a connecting civilian flight from St. Louis to 
Salem, only a short drive from Rubidoux.



Adam helped Mattie, Wanda and Victor pack up their few remaining 
belongings. He also got Rose’s E-mail address and gave Mattie the contact 
information for his family in Poland. “I want to know how you’re doing,” 
he said, “and I want you to make something of this second chance. Twenty-
four hours ago, you thought you were never going to make it back home. I 
hope you learned something from this.”



“If more people had been as good to us as you were,” Mattie told him, “we 
would have made a lot more of our lives.” She kissed him goodbye – the 
first real kiss she’d given a man since before Victor Lee was born.





XI.



Mattie, her kids, and Rose arrived at the Salem airport a little after 
seven o’clock the next morning. A little delegation from Rubidoux was 
waiting to greet them and take them home. It included Father Hurley, 
Rose’s folks Tom and Joan Sullivan (who tearfully welcomed Mattie back 
and asked her, just as Rose had done the day before, to forgive them for 
not letting her come back earlier), and Rose’s brother Mike (who was 
between stays in prison and who roared with laughter when Mattie told him 
that his lessons in hotwiring a car had saved her life). Some of their 
old high school friends were there also. 



Mattie’s mother Sue, who she hadn’t seen in years and years, was there as 
well, standing silently, away from the main group.



“Mama,” Mattie, beckoning her children to come with her, walked toward 
Sue Allen with her arms outstretched. Her mother smiled, but too faintly. 
Mattie, beginning to cry, put her arms around her mother. Sue hugged her 
back, but too lightly.



“Mama,” Mattie repeated. “I’m home now. We’ll be together. And of course 
you remember little Wanda Lee, right?” Wanda, smiling, took a step toward 
her grandmother but then stopped. Something, she sensed, was wrong. Sue 
just nodded at her.



“And this,” said Mattie, forcing false cheer into her voice, in part to 
mask her rising panic, “-is your grandson, Victor Lee, like in all those 
pictures I sent you.” Mattie’s voice was beginning to break slightly. Her 
mother, as she knew, hadn’t responded to the pictures of baby Victor 
taken by the nurse at the hospital.



“So - together again, huh?” Mattie continued, vaguely aware that she 
sounded almost hysterical now, “We-“



“Mattie Lee?” Her mother spoke very softly – but at least she was 
speaking to her.



“Yes, Mama?” Mattie, in some tiny fragment of her mind, hoped that her 
mother would say something, anything, to let her know she loved her 
again.



“What happened to you in that mist ain’t your fault but it ain’t mine 
either.”



“Mama, please-“



“I asked you to leave my house for the same reason you went to prison – 
because you got drunk and you killed a boy.”



“Mama, no-“ Mattie was shaking her head back and forth, as if trying to 
believe this wasn’t happening, that she hadn’t come home, after all these 
years, to this.



“Do you know, his family sued us? They sued us for everything we had. I 
got rid of them – we paid them off – but we had nothing after that. None 
of your father’s pension, nothing for your college or for my retirement-”



“Please, please, no-“



“I knew about the drugs, and I knew about Rose, and I knew about the men 
after her-“



“Grandma, please stop,” Wanda said softly.



“No, no, no,” Mattie was crying, still shaking her head, “that’s not who 
I am-“



“I think it is. You just have these other people fooled, that’s all-“



“What’s going on here?” Mattie jumped. Rose was standing behind her. 
“Mrs. Allen, what were you saying to her?”



“Rose, please stay out of this,” Mattie said hoarsely.



“I don’t think so, honey, not this time.” Rose briefly turned to Wanda 
and Victor, suggested they talk to Father Hurley for a bit (“he’ll tell 
you what your new home is like!”) And when she saw that the kids were 
indeed back with Father Hurley and the rest of the group – and that they 
were, mercifully, all out of earshot, oblivious to the scene with 
Mattie’s mother - she turned back to Sue. “What are you saying to my 
friend?”



Sue Allen stood her ground. “I wasn’t saying nothing, Rose. I was just 
telling Mattie Lee what happened to our family, after that night you let 
her drive your car drunk. Reminder her what happened to her – in case you 
haven’t noticed, she’ll never fly again – and maybe telling her a few 
things, that she didn’t know, about what happened to me after that – with 
a daughter in prison, and doctor and lawyer bills, and-”



“Fine,” Rose held out the palms of her hands. “I’m responsible for most 
of that. I’ve lived with it every day since. You can blame me for that-“



“I do blame you-“



“-but you leave Mattie alone. Look at her. Look at your daughter.”



“Rose, please stop it,” Mattie crying, begged her again.



“Honey, I have to say these things to your mama. Why don’t you go over 
there, with your kids at Father Hurley. Just tell ‘em I have to have a 
little talk with your mama. They’ll know what this is about.” Rose shooed 
Mattie back toward the little knot of townspeople.



“Now,” Rose said, once Mattie was gone. “Look at your daughter – or 
what’s left of her. She’s paid for everything, and then some. No one can 
tell her it was an accident. She thinks she murdered him. She has 
nightmares about it, every night. She cries all the time. She cried for 
you, every night, in the jail. The girls told me. The guards told me. And 
she still cries for you. In her sleep. I’ve heard her do it every night I 
visited her in Castle Rock. And Wanda and Victor – who are innocent, in 
case you don’t know it – cry themselves, because they can’t calm her 
down. 



“And do you know what her Aunt Judy did to her? You told her to go there, 
to help that dying old woman. That woman tried to kill her. Screamed at 
her all night long. Screamed at Wanda Lee when she wouldn’t stop crying. 
Threw plates of food in her face. Locked her outside the house in winter. 
Threatened to have her sent back to jail. Wouldn’t let her talk to anyone 
else, anyone who might be her friend or tell her not to put up with it. 
That went on for nine whole months. 



“And do you know-“ Rose lowered her voice “-do you know Mattie Lee’s 
tried to kill herself?”



Sue lowered her head. “That I know. They said that in court.”



“No, that was just the first time. She’s tried it again and again. She 
tried to hang herself in the jail on her very first night. One of the 
girls told me. She begged them not to tell the guards because she was 
afraid of being locked up in some hospital. And she tried again after her 
aunt died. The man who found her for me at the refugee camp said he was 
worried she’d try it yet again. And those are the only times I know 
about.



“She hates herself. She loves you, and me, and those kids, but she hates 
herself more than anyone in the world.” Rose paused as she discovered she 
herself had begun to cry. After a few deep breaths, she continued. “I 
found a picture she drew of herself once with her kids’ crayons, found it 
on one of my visits, about two years ago. She’s a pretty good artist – 
but I bet you didn’t know that; or if you did I bet you don’t care. This 
time she was too good. This picture, it showed her kneeling, dressed all 
in black, surrounded by scarlet. It scared me. Can you believe that? 
Combat duty doesn’t scare me, but that crayon picture did. I asked her 
what it was. She said, ‘that’s a self-portrait.’ I asked her, ‘what do 
you mean, honey?’ She said, ‘I killed Kyle. All that love. Everything he 
could’ve been. I crushed him to death and they had to burn him.’”



Something in Sue’s face suggested Rose was getting through to her. She 
tried to speak and for a moment she could not. Finally, though, she 
folded her arms. “This is not my doing. I…I didn’t know about some of the 
things you’re telling me, no. But let me tell you something. I saw Mattie 
Lee change, change until it hurt me to look at her, hurt me to even think 
about her. You remember her as a kid, don’t you – how sweet and happy she 
was?”



Rose smiled for a moment. “Yes. I do.”



“Well, that didn’t last long enough. She loved me, and her daddy, and she 
was the best girl in the whole world. And then you came along, when she 
was four or five. You became the center of her life. If Mattie came over 
to visit you, she’d throw a tantrum when the time came for her to go 
home. She’s snap at us afterwards. Anything you did, she wanted to do – 
so long as it was bad. When you started to swear, she started too. When 
you turned fifteen and you shaved your head she had to shave her head 
too. I had to tell people – like Mrs. Weiss at the factory where I 
worked, Mrs. Weiss whose parents were killed in one of those places in 
Europe – that my daughter wasn’t a Nazi. When you got tattooed, she had 
to get the same tattoos. I couldn’t even look at her when she didn’t wear 
sleeves. You wanted to join the Army, she did too. Never mind that that’s 
how her daddy died. And when you started with all the drinking and the 
drugs, so did she. That’s not the way her father would’ve wanted her to 
grow up. I couldn’t get her away from you. The only thing where she 
didn’t want to follow you – at least I hope she didn’t – was in your 
sickness about women. For years I worried that you and she would become 
lovers, probably telling everyone in town about it.”



“Wait, that’s-“



“Don’t say it. I don’t want to know. That’s what everybody thought, 
anyhow; the rumors would’ve kept her from getting married. And when I 
wasn’t worried about that, I worried that you’d talk her into joining the 
Army and that’s how she’d get killed. Or I’d worry that you’d get her 
killed drinking and driving late at night.” Rose hung her head.



“And it turns out I almost got that one right, didn’t I?”



“Mrs. Allen, please listen to me. I have to stop you from hurting Mattie 
Lee. She’s going to kill herself, maybe very soon, can’t you see that? 
She’s going to kill herself and her children will have no one. All their 
lives, they’ll remember how their mama was sad and desperate and how she 
took herself away when they were young. And then they’ll end up like her. 
I-I brought her back home – I even lied to the Army and told them she was 
my sister-“ at this, Sue rolled her eyes and shrugged, as if to say she 
was disgusted but not surprised “-so she’d have a chance. So she’d see 
she still had a home, and still had old friends and family who loved 
her.”



“These things you said - I spoiled her; I got her to cut her hair; I got 
her to drink – those things are my fault, not hers. You said she was a 
good girl before she met me.”



“She was.”



“So why blame her? Why not blame me?”



“I blame both of you because you did it together. Mattie Lee’s a smart 
girl. She could have done something with her life, gone to college. 
That’s what her daddy wanted. If he’d lived, maybe it would have happened 
that way. But it was more important for her to be with you, and have fun 
in this little world you created for yourselves, than to be our daughter. 
And I’m angry at both of you – very angry – because finally I had to pay 
the bill when it all went wrong.”



“I understand. But did you know how bad off she was?”



“No,” Sue said finally. “I knew she never got over Kyle. I knew she 
missed me. I knew about the drugs and the strange men-“



“A moment ago, I thought you were worried about strange women.”



“None of this is funny, Rose. But no, I didn’t know a lot of what you’re 
telling me. She’d send me these E-mails telling me she was…upset. I 
didn’t know about the crying or the drawings, or the other…” Sue couldn’t 
say it. She simply held up one of her wrists. 



“Did you know about her Aunt Judy?”



“Not then, no. I talked to her and Judy on the phone once a week. She 
never said anything. Judy sounded normal. I found out what happened about 
a year after Judy died. Tom and Joan gave me some idea and I followed up. 
If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let her go there.”



“Did you tell her you were sorry?”



“No. I was…I was still too angry. She’d let me and her father down. I 
felt bad for her father.”



“Mrs. Allen, some of what you’re saying about me…you’re right. Maybe I’m 
no good. Tell me how I’ve hurt you and I’ll try to pay you back. But 
Mattie Lee – your daughter – is in trouble right now. She crawled through 
ten years of hell – the accident, the injury, the guilt, jail - capped 
off by this thing that just happened with the mist. She needs you to tell 
her that you love her. You saw how much she needed it a minute ago.”



“I do love her,” Sue said, somewhat uncertainly. “But I can’t forgive 
her. She was gonna be the shining star of our family – go to college, 
marry a nice man, not have strange boyfriends in New England-”



“Then at least tell her you love her. Tell her the rest later, if you 
have to.”



“All right.” Sue and Rose walked back towards the group. Father Hurley 
and the others did not seem surprised or concerned by the delay; they a 
confrontation with Sue, Mattie and Rose had been a long time waiting.



“Mattie Lee,” Rose said quietly, “your mother – that’s your grandma, 
Wanda and Victor – wants to say something to you.”



Sue took a deep breath. “Welcome home, Mattie Lee. I love you; I always 
did. I’m very mad at you, and I’m very disappointed in you” she added, 
“but-“ she held out her arms.



“I love you too, Mama.” And Mattie Lee, for the first time in nearly ten 
years, held her mother and was held in return. And the Allens – a family 
once more – walked with their mayor and neighbors towards the car that 
would take Mattie home.