Todd (20 page)

"I don't think..." he
starts, but he has no way to finish that sentence. How far east and west does
the moss extend? Tracking back west to the 169 bridge would cost them at least
a day, but it might be worth it if it keeps them out of the blue. Alan cranes
his head both directions, shading his eyes from the sun, and that's when he
sees the giant worm in the sky.

It is slithering just below the
clouds a few miles to the east, a mottled grey rope twisting through the air
like a snake. The sun is behind it, glaring out in furious bursts as the thing
eclipses it and then draws clear. It must be a mile long. It has no wings and
can't possibly be flying, but it is.

A curtain of blue haze spreads
beneath it, drifting slowly toward the ground. Alan thinks of rain clouds, of crop
dusters.

"Oh my God." His tongue
seems to move on its own.

Then he hears it: a long, wailing
rush that echoes up the river valley like a muted scream. It grows louder by
the second. The thing is hurtling over the river like a jet, its trail of moss
transforming rapidly from a distant curtain to an oncoming bullet train.

"Get in the car!" he
screams, but Todd just stares, mesmerized. He is witnessing the destruction of Sodom, the wrath of God.
His father's warning doesn't even penetrate. "Todd!"

Alan runs to his son, jerks the
door open, and stuffs the boy inside. The sun flickers behind a towering wall
of drifting moss, then vanishes entirely. Alan shoves his son deeper into the
car and clambers in after him, slamming the door just as everything beyond the
windows becomes blue ash.

71

It feels like hours, but is only
minutes: an intense, thrashing experience that reminds Alan of his first
childhood trip through an automatic carwash. It sounds like muffled thunder,
whumping
onto the bridge and the car roof. He has a
brief impression of that sickly blue—overpowering, omnipresent—but there's so
much of the stuff that it plunges the world into darkness, leaving them
stranded in the blackness of the car.

Todd whimpers, grabs his hand, and
Alan tries to soothe him. When he is finally able to hear his own breathless
exhortations (
Shhh, it's okay, it'll be okay
), he realizes that the roar
from the monster's passage has faded.

Slowly, his eyes adjust. There is
a haze of light in the cabin now, albeit dim and blue. He can just make out
Todd's gaze, latched to the blackness of the coated windshield.

"I think it's gone,"
Alan whispers.

Todd doesn't answer. He's crammed
awkwardly into the space between the two front seats, his butt halfway over the
center console in a pose that would leave Alan limping for weeks. Alan tells
him to climb into the back, then crawls over into the driver's seat and flips
on the windshield wipers.

They groan, struggling with the
weight of the moss. It reminds him of trying to clear the windshield of a
night's worth of heavy snowfall. Eventually, though, they prevail over the
first huge load, and the rest comes easier. After a few more cycles, he can see
through the glass. It is precisely what he feared.

The bridge is coated in blue fuzz.
The crashed cars and their resulting debris—all the detritus he was winding
around minutes ago—are now featureless lumps in a surreal landscape of blue.
Again, he thinks of the morning after a snowfall. The scene conveys the same
muted flatness, but where a fresh snowfall has always calmed him, this leaves
him raw with anxiety.

The blue extends as far as he can
see, now: from the other side of the windshield, to the far side of the world.

Turn back,
he thinks, but
that's not easy. The bridge was clearer than most, but they are still hemmed in
by an SUV on their right and a wayward concrete divider on their left. There's
not enough room to turn around here, and he can't see through the rear window
to try to drive in reverse. But even if he could turn around, winter—

Fuck winter. Winter doesn't
matter.

But it
does
matter. Unless
all this moss is going to somehow keep them from freezing to death, it is no
less urgent to get south now than it was twenty minutes ago.

"Fuck," he breathes. He leans
his head into his hands and bumps the horn with his elbow. Its blare shatters
the silence like a scream. Todd nearly shoots through the window, then gives
him a glare that could kill a lesser man.

"Sorry." His own heart
is hammering, every nerve on fire; the ghost of the horn sizzles in his ears
like the echo of a heart attack. But this state of heightened alarm is good for
one thing: his paralysis is knocked loose. He knows what he has to do.

"Have you ever touched
it?" he asks. "The moss?"

Todd shakes his head. "I
don't think so."

Damn.
When he nods, the
jitter of his nerves threatens to bounce his head off his neck. "Wait
here. I'm gonna get out."

"
What?
"

"Just for a second. I need to
see behind us, and we need—"
We need to know how dangerous it is.
Because
he's certain, finally, that it is dangerous. Somehow, Earth has never known
anything more devastating than this blue moss. But will it kill him instantly?
How much risk do they take by trying to get through it? He needs these answers
to make a decision.

"Listen to me. Don't come
out. Okay? I'm just going to take a quick look and come back in."

Todd nods.

Alan considers leaving
instructions—
If I don't come back, put the car in reverse and push the gas
pedal—
but that wouldn't accomplish anything besides scaring Todd. The boy
doesn't know how to drive, and the bridge rails are broken in multiple places.
If he even got the car moving, he'd most likely just back off the edge and
plummet into the river.

The truth is this: if the moss can
kill them, they're already dead.

"Okay." Alan nods again.
Sets his jaw. "Wait here."

He opens the door, and steps into
moss up to his ankles.

72

It extends all the way over the
bridge behind them and lies heavily across the trees on either side of the highway
beyond. In the distance past that, he can see buildings that aren't yet coated.
But the worm is also out there, crawling through the sky to the west, and at
some point it will probably turn around for its next pass. He suspects it is
systematically applying its payload across the entire landscape.

Belatedly, he lifts his shirt
collar over his mouth and nose before resuming his scan. To the east and west
he can make out the river, but it, too, is coated in the moss. The stuff bobs
on the water like swamp scum. Here and there are cracks in the blue, through
which he can see black water rushing underneath, but the moss itself is weirdly
still. Impossibly, it doesn't move with the river but seems anchored in place
on top of it.

Once coated, always coated.
It
makes him second-guess his plan. But nothing has changed; he still has to know.

Gingerly, he pokes the small
finger of his left hand into the moss on the car.

At first it feels wispy,
insubstantial, like cotton candy. It clings to him as he pulls his finger back.
Then his fingertip starts to itch. In a matter of seconds it itches so badly he
wants to cut it off.

He takes a handful of his shirt
hem—the only substance nearby not already coated—and grabs his pinky with it,
trying to scrape the fuzz off. It goes easily enough, but the flesh and nail
are stained blue now, and he still itches. Trying not to panic, he spits into a
new patch on his shirt and tries again, scrubbing furiously at the stain.

Slowly, the itching subsides. When
he looks again, the stain is significantly faded but not gone. Beneath it, his
skin has become a glaring red.

So. Not instantly fatal, maybe,
but he wouldn't want to fall in the stuff, and he hopes he never finds out what
happens if it's inhaled.

Far to the west, the sky worm is
banking. As he guessed, it's criss-crossing its way north, painting the world
blue. As a kid, Alan used to imagine a pteranodon gliding overhead, and the
shiver of awe he'd feel as its shadow slipped over him. Sometimes this
experience left him profoundly sad, knowing such an incredible thing could
never happen.

As he shudders at the sight of the
distant worm, he finds the actual experience far less heady and more terrifying
than the boy had hoped.

If he did manage to back the car
up and turn around, he could probably outpace the sky worm by heading north,
but for how long? He doesn't know how far the thing will go, or whether it
needs to take a break to sleep or refuel. It's entirely possible that it would
just overtake them again in the night. And if they did manage to outrun it, so
what? There was another one to the north—that had to have been what they saw
before leaving Brooklyn Park—and
it has probably given the northern suburbs the same treatment.

He turns back south, wishing he
could see how far the blue actually extends instead of relying on his eyesight.
Then insight strikes like a lightning bolt, and he remembers the telescope—but
the trunk of the car is caked with moss. He can't let it get on their supplies,
so he pulls the sleeves of his shirt over his hands and starts wiping the moss
off the trunk with broad strokes of his arms. While he's at it, he gets the
windows, too. And of course, if he doesn't clear the car roof, the stuff up
there will just slide back over the rear window once he starts moving. This is
Minnesota Winter 101.

He holds his breath and turns his
face away as he works, but he can still feel the occasional whisper of fuzz
against his forehead or tickling the back of his neck—he must have it in his
hair now, his beard. He would kill for a pair of gloves and a respirator.

When he's done he knows exactly
where the moss has touched him, because the itch is already starting. The urge
to wipe it off is almost overpowering, but he fights it. His shirt is covered
in the stuff, and there's no way to touch his face without making the situation
far worse.

Stoic, he pops the trunk. This
morning he wrapped the telescope in a towel to give it a little cushioning, a
fact he had forgotten until now. He has never been so happy to see a towel.
After wiping his face the best he can, he climbs atop the car, being
careful—oh, so careful—not to slip and fall into the moss.

He can't be sure. He's no expert
with this thing. But peering through the telescope, he thinks he can see a
glimmer of green, far to the south.

Could they be that lucky? Is there
a chance the sky worm has just started its work, and they're really that close
to the southern boundary of its coverage? Or is he just seeing what he wants to
see?

He looks again, but can't make it out
any clearer. Like everything else up until now, any choice will be a gamble.

73

He strips before he gets back in
the car, and uses his towel to open the fuzzy door. He steps straight out of
his shoes and into the driver's seat, leaving his moss-covered clothes lying on
the bridge. Inside, he wriggles into a change of clothes he grabbed from the
trunk.

"Why are you naked?"
Todd has climbed back into the front passenger seat.

"Didn't want to bring any
moss in."

"Why not?"

"It itches." Alan starts
the car. "I think there's a clear spot down there, where the moss didn't
get to. Gonna try and reach it."

Todd blanches. "We're not
going back? I think we should go back."

"We're not going back."
He explains his reasoning to Todd, but the boy doesn't accept it.

"We could just go back to the
pond house and stay inside. The moss can't come inside."

"Yeah, it can. It can grow
there on its own. Remember the freezer?"

Todd falls silent.

Alan takes his time on the road,
giving a wide berth to anything that makes a lump in the moss, but there's only
so much he can do. Torn metal and shattered glass will chew up the tires fast,
and won't necessarily be visible beneath the fuzz. He resolves that if the
tires blow, he will scrape his way forward on the rims.

As they descend the far side of
the bridge and reach the street, he thinks one last time about turning around,
and puts the thought away. They trundle past open fields and endless wrecks.
Ahead, an overturned semi has blocked the freeway entirely. Luckily, he's able
to take an exit just before they reach it, and they descend into the blue maze
of Burnsville.

They meander past a Dodge
dealership and a Walmart into a labyrinth of office buildings, all covered. The
moss is on the traffic lights and creeping like lichen over the street signs.
Combined with the disorienting, unrelenting blue, it obliterates landmarks and
renders his atlas nearly useless. In time he starts to think it is actually
moving, because already ropes of it extend from the rooftops in some places, inching
down to cover the walls and windows. In an instant of panic he checks the car
window, expecting to see it spreading from the top of the glass, but then he
remembers he cleared the roof.

Lunch time passes, but what food
they do have is all in the trunk, and he won't risk getting out of the car for
it. He sticks to the widest avenue he can, trusting his intuition to guide him
south, but a major accident diverts him into the buried, blue streets of a
residential district. An hour later, after the suburban maze tricks him into
countless dead-ends, it spits him out onto a different broad boulevard. He
angles south again—Home Depot, apartment buildings, a hospital sign—and then,
finally, sees the signs for the 35 merger, marking the start of rural Minnesota.

He takes a frontage road south,
then gets on the highway. The concrete dividers and constant underpasses
vanish. The north- and south-bound lanes are split by a simple cable fence. He
spies a giant tangle of pickup trucks and SUVs, and hoots.