Chapter 6

Some urge or emotion made Julie and Ron pass by her and her family's former home as close as she could. The flattened Land Rover and the tree lying atop it loomed out of the mist to the left.

Julie drove the RV across the front yard, and just as the RV passed the sidewalk, their house loomed out of the mist across the lawn.

Perhaps Mike or Zoe had been able to retreat back into the house, Julie thought. But that little sparkle of hope for them died away almost as soon as it was born as she put the RV in park halfway across the lawn, and took a good look at the house.

A puddle of fresh blood, like the blood on the pickup, was patterned across the path just beyond the door, which Julie could see, was wide open.

At that moment, a new urge flared into Ron.

Without thinking, he swung his door open, and burst out, into the mists of hellish terror.

The moment he did so, the frantic cries of Ben and Julie and Kelly rang in his ears.

Following instinct rather than common sense, Ron burst full-speed for the front door, closed it gently, and tore across the yard, back towards the RV.

Ron heard something scurrying after him, but he didn't dare turn back to see what it was. He slipped back into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

"You could have been killed, you son of a b*tch!" Julie snarled furiously through gritted teeth.

The moment Ron climbed back into the RV, his senses began to return. He opened his mouth to apologize, but before anything could escape his throat, Julie put the RV back into drive, and began to pull away from the house, back onto Kansas Road.

Imagining that Ben was doing the same at the table, Ron quickly craned his neck to get one last look at the only home they had ever known.

At once memories of the kitchen, the living room, even the boring old cellar came flooding back to Ron, and he cherished every one of them.

Then the house faded back into the mist behind them, and it was gone.

It was another five houses, then the comic store, and finally the candy store, Super Sweet, to the book store. Two of the houses were dark and abandoned, but each one of the rest and the comic and candy stores, had the front door or a window wide open, and beyond the doorway or windows, Ron and Julie could clearly see thick white silk, exactly like cobwebs, clinging to every surface the mist which was eddying in allowed Ron and Julie to see.

Finally, the book store loomed out of the mist up ahead.

Ron immediately pictured him and Julie and Ben finding their mother safe inside, and embracing, happy to be together again.

But as Julie pulled up beside the door and put the RV in park, and Ron saw the door, every trace of hope and excitement to see his mother again came crashing down and his heart sank into a never-ending abyss.

The door had been propped open with a block, and, beyond the open doorway, Ron could see the rows of bookshelves had been coated in the thick, cobweb-like silk he had seen in the houses they had passed.

"Ben don't look," Ron instructed, his voice trembling. He turned to Julie. "Maybe she's still in there, maybe ..." Ron saw Julie's gaze fixed on the display windows, tears welling in her eyes.

Ron, hoping he wouldn't find what he feared he would, slowly followed her gaze, and immediately felt his heart go plummeting down the infinite abyss again, only much faster this time.

There was a tall bookshelf placed in front of the massive display window. Like the ones in the doorway, it was coated with thick cobwebs. But in the middle of this one, Ron could clearly see two shapes in the cobwebs, side by side.

The first, Ron saw, had long, messy hair, and its head was tilted back, mouth a gaping, round hole.

It was Bruce, the store owner, who had always been so polite and kind and helpful to any customer who set foot in his store, even the straight-minded Bud Brown!

The second ... Ron recognised it at once.

It was his mother, her eyes closed and peaceful.

Ron sat, transfixed, staring at the dead corpse of his mother.

But then, out of the edge of his sight, he saw the web-covered figure of his mother turn her head slightly and open her eyes.

Julie saw it too. The two both leaned towards the driver's window to get as clear a look as they could, and saw her open her mouth in two inaudible syllables.

Ron was about to lean back to throw his door open and go dashing out to the book store, towards his mother, but then her eyes went wide with horror, and Ron saw why almost at once: tiny, crawling shapes were crawling out from beneath Elisa's web cocoon, leaving thin tracks of blood behind them.

Then some instinct made Ron reach for Julie's door, roll down the window, and slip the handgun from his back pocket and hold it at point-blank range.

Ron hesitated for a moment.

Then he squeezed the trigger, and there was the loud BLAM! of the gunshot, the smashing sound of countless jagged pieces of glass coming crashing down to the sidewalk.

Ron heard Ben cry out in surprise at the gunshot and Kelly screamed at him not to look.

A mere second later, Ron watched on in horror as his mother's body burst open, pouring out thousands of the small, crawling things onto the glass-littered sidewalk.

Then, as Julie quickly rolled the window back up, she and Ron buried their faces against the dashboard and cried.

It took Ron and Julie about half an hour to stop crying.

When they looked back, they saw most of the hatchling spiders had crawled off into the mist, but a few stilled crawled over the litter of glass and the sidewalk.

Julie started the engine back. She and Ron cast one last look at the ruined remains of their mother. Then Julie pulled away from the book store and it was gone.

They drove south down Kansas Road. Apparently, most of the cars that were driving had pulled over to the side of the road when the mist came, but once or twice, there was a car in the road, upturned or smashed apart. Most of the cars had been pulled over, their doors wide open or their windows rolled down. Most of them were deserted, but some had a human shape coated in the spiders' cobweb-silk in the driver's seat, head slumped against the wheel, and sometimes some more human shapes covered in the webs in the passenger or rear seats, slumped against the window.

Since the surface of Maine was riddled with rivers, Julie had to drive across a bridge a few times. Most of the fully intact ones were too high up from the river below for anyone to see through the mist the things that might have been crawling or slithering in the water.

But one of the bridges was fairly low, and the left-hand side of it had fallen into the water.

Julie easily crossed the bridge by driving along the right-hand, intact side, but as she passed, she saw through the driver's window, down the drop, at least half a dozen shapes moving through the mist in what she guessed was the water of the river below.

Although the bridge was low, the river was still too far down for Julie to clearly make out the creatures through the mist, and the ripples running across the water's surface only helped the mist obscure the swimmers. But from what Julie could tell, their skin was armoured, like a crocodile's, but with at least three dorsal fins protruding from their backs, and they each had a long, shark-like tail. But beyond that, the mist and the rippling water obscured them.

Julie wanted to pull over closer to the drop to get a clearer look at the swimmers, but then she remembered she was inches from it. Then, the drop was behind them as Julie drove on.

At Exit 11 onto the Maine Turnpike, the sign marking it had partially collapsed, and the right-hand side of the sign was lying across the road. The left-hand side, however, was about ten feet above the road, and the RV narrowly squeezed under it.

They had only driven about a mile further on from Exit 11, when a dark shadow at least the size of a house glided out of the mist overhead.

Julie quickly slammed down on the brakes and put the RV in park. Ben and Kelly rushed up to the front of the RV to see what had made Julie stop the RV.

Less than a split second later, the flying thing was almost just above the RV, and solidified enough for everyone to quite clearly see it.

The mist obscured the flying thing's colour, but its body was shaped like a cross, but without the top end, and with twin, vein-riddled webs tapering from the arms to the lower body.

Each end of the flying thing ended in thin, coiling tendrils.

Then, everyone leaned forward and craned their heads up as it disappeared above the RV's roof. Everyone whipped their heads round in time to see the kite-thing, a shadow through the mist once again, glide the way the four had come, into the mist, and begone.

Julie and Ben stood, frozen by what they had just seen, and Julie waited to see if any more of the kite-things would follow the one they had just witnessed.

After about ten minutes, when nothing happened, she put the RV back in drive, and drove on, up the freeway, into who knows what else.

Like Kansas Road, most of the drivers had pulled over when the mist had reached the I-295, so it wasn't much harder to pass than Kansas Road.

After another two or three hours of driving, the four reached Portland, but Ron and Julie saw there had been an accident up ahead - if it had indeed not been one of the bigger things in the mist. To the RV's right, there was a neat row of cars pulled over, empty but most with their doors wide open.

But to her left, stood a small, yellow school bus, and just inches in front of it, up ahead, just in their line of sight through the mist, were two upturned cars. The furthest one was a State Police cruiser, pinned under a fallen utility pole.

Julie and Ron glanced at the school bus beside them. The sliding doors were open, and a few of the windows had been broken open.

Julie, slowly, glanced up at the second window from the front of the school bus ... and felt her heart fall with sorrow.

A boy, of about 14, was slumped against the window. His hair looked blonde, but Julie could not tell through the spiders' cobwebs which coated his head.

Blinking the tears from her eyes, Julie quickly sped away from the bus, away from the boy and who knows how many other defenceless children fallen prey to the bloodthirsty monsters of the mist, before she could see any more. But she knew in her heart, that she would never forget what she had seen that moment, as she would never forget seeing her own mother's blood-curdling demise.

The four reached New Hampshire at about 5 PM, when the fuel gage was almost upon the E. Three deep claw marks had been raked into the sign at the state border, obscuring the word "New" in New Hampshire's name on the sign.

They got to a small town in Northern New Hampshire, before the engine began to sputter and cough, and the RV began to jerk to a stop, and then forward a couple feet.

Then the engine gave one last sputter and the RV jerked to a stop and everyone fell silent.

Hope any of you reading this has enjoyed the fanfic so far. The final chapter is coming!