“The road started going down real fast. I saw
some fog ahead of me. It was real strange because it was level. I
could see over it. It looked like the ocean, except that it was
brown, and there were no waves. There was a deer standing next to
the road, close to the fog. I stopped to watch it. Then it walked
into the edge of the fog. The fog was only by the ground there.
Then it walked down farther into the fog, so its feet and part of
its legs disappeared. Then I saw its head come up, and it tried to,
like, jump out of the fog. It fell down with its head and shoulders
out of the fog. I could see it was trying to struggle. It was
making strange sounds. Then it stopped moving. I think it was dead.
Then I saw the body of the deer moving backwards into the fog like
something was dragging it. Then it was gone.
“That really scared me. I was, like, not
breathing and my heart was pounding. I watched for another hour,
and I saw a bird fly very low over the fog. Something came out of
the fog and grabbed the bird, and it disappeared. It was so fast,
that I couldn’t tell what had happened. I climbed a little hill
next to the road, and I looked over to the other side. There was
more fog. It's like we're on an island in an ocean.
“That's when I turned around and started
back. I felt sick to my stomach, and I didn't eat anything that
day, I only drank water. I tried to conserve my food and water on
the way back, but then I ran out."
The faces of the other boys grew grimmer and
grimmer as Jacob told his story. Mike felt the hairs on his arms
and on the nape of his neck stiffen. John was thinking about the
Admin and the counselors who had left to find some help. Had they
driven into the fog?
Mike drew a breath. "Well," he said slowly.
"Now we know."
"We'll have to tell the others," said
Howard.
Mike nodded. "Yes, but not today. The sun’s
going down. We'll tell them in the morning."
"Why not tell them now," Eric asked.
"Better to get scared in the morning than at
night," John answered. Mike nodded.
"You come with me," Mike said to Jacob. "The
rest of you; well, just don't tell anyone, all right?" There was a
chorus of agreement.
Mike and Jacob walked up to the Admin’s
cabin. As they were entering they heard a shout. Jacob was too
tired to turn back, but Mike looked towards the shouter. It was
Ralph; at seventeen, one of the oldest boys in the camp. Hurriedly,
Mike shut and locked the door, just as Ralph arrived at the
cabin.
Mike told Jacob to lie down on the bed.
Outside, Ralph was banging on the door and demanding to be let
inside. Jacob pulled the bed covers over his head, and soon he fell
asleep. Mike ignored Ralph. He decided to climb the ladder leading
to the loft. Upstairs, he found two separate futons. He laid down
on one and waited until Ralph gave up and went away.
Sometime after midnight, Jacob awoke and
insisted on returning to his own bunk. Mike accepted his decision
reluctantly. He hoped no one was awake in Jacob’s cabin who would
try to get Jacob to talk. He thought it would be better for
everyone to hear the story at the same time. He walked with Jacob
to his cabin. The night was bright, because the moon was just past
half full, and there were only a few thin wispy clouds in the sky.
Mike was unsettled as he returned to the Admin’s cabin, and he
wondered if John, Pete, Howard, and Eric were getting any
sleep.
Mike’s late night anxiety caused him to sleep
later than usual the next morning. Shortly after he left the cabin,
he realized that one of the boys had talked. He wasn't surprised.
He hadn't expected that news of this sort could be kept quiet for
long. As he made his way to the dining hall, he heard boys
whispering about monsters and aliens.
There were a lot of boys in the dining hall,
and Mike could see why. Jacob was there eating a bowl of cereal.
Many boys were pressing close, trying to talk to him, but John,
Pete, Howard, and Eric were fending them off.
"Tell us what happened," a boy angrily
demanded.
"Shit!" John exclaimed. "At least let him
finish eating his Cheerios!"
Mike walked past the clump of boys, and he
stepped on to the platform at the end of the building.
"Hey!" he said in a loud voice. Everyone
stopped talking and turned to look at him.
"Jacob's going to tell everyone what he saw.
Give him a few minutes. Some of you need to go down to the girls’
camp, and tell them that we're having a meeting."
"Who died and made you Chief?" someone
sneered. Mike looked to one side, and he saw that it was Ralph who
had spoken.
"Do you think Jackie will come up here, if
you tell her what's happening?" Mike asked Ralph.
Ralph shut up. Everyone knew that he liked
Jackie. He hesitated, and then he stood and left the room. Mike
truly hoped that Ralph could get Jackie to come and listen to
Jacob’s tale. Jackie was the only person available who was close to
being a real adult.
Jacob finished eating and took his bowl and
spoon to the kitchen window. Mike noticed that no one had done the
dishes for days. While they waited, a few of the girls began to
trickle in, and soon there was a crowd of them entering. Mike did
not see Ralph or Jackie. Jacob stepped up next to Mike, and then
Mike stepped to one side.
"Hey!" Mike called out. The teens stopped
talking.
Mike continued. "Everyone come close so that
you can hear him." The boys and girls crowded up against the
podium.
Jacob told his story in a plain, flat tone of
voice. By the time he finished some of the kids were weeping,
others were just sniffling. Mike looked down at his feet. He felt
worse than when he had heard Jacob’s story the first time, just
from hearing all the crying. He felt like crying himself.
"Bullshit!" someone yelled. Mike looked up.
It was Ralph, and the older boy sounded as if he were about to
panic.
"You're so full of crap! You never went
there. You never saw anything. You're just making this up, you and
Chief there."
Jacob stared at him. Then he said, “So go see
for yourself. Go stand in the fog if you don't believe me."
Ralph looked angry and frustrated. "Screw
you," he snarled, and then he left. Mike still saw no sign of
Jackie.
"Are you telling the truth, Jacob?" a girl
asked quietly.
Mike realized that she was the girl he had
seen running around the dirt track. He had learned that her name
was Yuie. She was Asian-American, and she had long, straight black
hair, large lovely dark eyes, and a fair complexion.
"Yeah, it's true. But I don't know what the
fog is or where it came from," he answered.
"It must be aliens," a boy suggested.
"Oh, right," sneered another boy. "And NASA
or nobody else saw it coming."
"Maybe it's something the Russians
invented."
"Or the Chinese."
"Or Al-Qaeda."
"Whatever it is," Yuie answered. "There are
monsters in it, real monsters." At that, everyone fell silent
except the few kids who were still crying. Mike saw that Kathy was
one of them.
"Whatever it is," Mike said. "We have to
decide what to do. We don't know if anyone but us survived the fog.
We don't know if anyone is coming to rescue us. If they are coming,
we don't know how long it will take them to find us. We can drink
water from the river, but what if we run out of food? What if we
are still here when winter comes? It's going to freeze. It's going
to snow. What are we going to do?" For minutes there was no
response.
"We can cut back on the stuff that we are
eating," a girl spoke slowly.
"Yeah, we've been pigging it lately," said
another.
"But how can we stop anyone from just getting
food for themselves?" a girl asked, and the other girls looked at
Mike.
Mike had been thinking about that same thing.
"We might have to put a guard on the food," he suggested.
"A guard?" someone repeated. There was
silence.
"I've got to roll up my bag," someone
said.
Slowly the teenagers drifted away. Most of
them did not seem open to any discussion of their future. Mike felt
frustrated. He felt like most of them were afraid to tackle the
dangerous predicament that they were facing.
After a while, the only ones still in the
dining hall were Mike's group of boys and Yuie. After talking it
over, they decided to make a list of the problems that they would
need to solve.
"First on the list is the food," Mike said.
"We have to ration the food. We have to figure out how to get more
food."
"We could hunt game," Yuie suggested.
"Do you know how to hunt?" Pete asked. "If
you catch something, do you know how to cook it?"
"Not really," Yuie admitted. "I can shoot a
handgun or a rifle," but I've never hunted."
"There's forty-nine of us counting Jackie,"
said Mike. "Ask around. Someone must know something about hunting
or about cooking animals."
"I do," said Jacob. They looked at him with
surprise. "I hunt deer and birds with my Dad. I know how to cut the
patches off, and how to gut them, and how to skin them. If we can
kill a deer or a bird, I can get it ready to be cooked."
"All of us are probably good at something,"
said John. "We should make a list of what we know."
"And we should ask everyone else, and make a
list of what they know, too," suggested Howard
enthusiastically.
"I'm great at video games," offered Pete with
a laugh.
They all chuckled. Pete was popular,
especially with the girls, but also with the boys. The handsome,
blond, blued eyed boy had a great personality, and he always made
the people around him feel better.
"Could we live in here during the winter?"
Eric asked. They looked around, seeing the dining hall for the
first time as a possible shelter.
"It's pretty small for forty-nine people,"
Howard observed, scratching his short red hair.
"And it's got a metal roof," Mike added.
"It's going to get real cold in here, I think."
"But we have the oven and stove to keep us
warm," Eric argued. "And we have propane in the tank."
"I wonder how much propane is in the tank,"
said Howard. "How long will it last?"
Yuie knew the answer. "I heard the Admin say
that she would have to order a refill at the end of next year."
"And they weren't planning to use it during
the winter," Mike pointed out.
"So they were planning to use it for two
years in the summer," said Howard.
"How cold will it get here?" Eric asked.
"Below zero degrees, my father said," Howard
replied.
"Will our sleeping bags keep us warm enough?"
Mike asked.
"Some of the kids have mummy bags for below
zero temperatures," answered Yuie. "Most of us just have bags for
about twenty degrees. If we're stuck here, we are going to need a
lot of wood to make fires."
"I think we need to save the propane for as
long as possible, and use it to run the frig during the summer,"
said Mike. "We probably won't need it for the frig during the
winter. Stuff will stay cold enough if we cover it with snow."
"So we stop using the oven and stove?" Yuie
asked. "People aren't going to like that."
"Well, we gotta have some rules if we're
going to stay alive," Howard stated. There was silence.
"Yeah." Deep in thought Mike replied slowly.
"That's the hard thing. We've got to have some rules. And we've got
to have some way to enforce the rules."
"There's a barbeque in the back," said Pete.
"We could at least start cooking with wood."
"No one is using the stove now, anyway," said
Eric. "I think most everybody is eating out of cans without heating
it up."
"How much food do we have?" Mike queried
Yuie.
"I don't know," she replied.
"We have a lot of hamburger patties," said
John. "And there are a lot of hot dogs and buns."
"We have milk for awhile. Most of it is
boxed, but some of it is frozen concentrated so we have to mix it
with water. And they were cutting it with powdered milk so we have
a lot of that," Howard said.
"Yuck, so that’s why the milk tastes so
weird," Pete complained, and then he added, "There are a lot of
bags of rice and flour. Most of the other stuff is in cans, like
beans, fruit, and corn."
"Don't forget the weenies," Eric said.
"We'd never forget you," joked John as Eric
scowled.
"Let's disconnect the stove for the time
being. And keep this to ourselves," said Mike. "And let's get the
barbeque out of the storage room and build a fire in it. If we keep
it going, maybe people will get use to using it." They all agreed.
John volunteered to disconnect the stove.
"Too bad the cave only has that one part
that's really a cave," John mentioned. "That would be way big for
us." There was a chorus of agreement.
"What if we made it into a real cave?" said
Mike thoughtfully.
"What do you mean?" Eric asked.
"What if somehow, someway, we put a front on
it?" said Mike. "We could all live in it for the winter."
"Just get a couple of girls to live with you
in the Admin’s cabin," cracked Pete. "You'll be warm and happy all
winter."
Yuie exclaimed, "Shut up!" without any real
anger as the boys laughed.
"Seriously, what about the cave idea?" Mike
asked again.
"What could we use for a front?" Eric
asked.
"What about taking the canvas tops off of the
cabins and using them?" Pete suggested.
"Too cold," Yuie replied.
"Could we pile up enough rocks?" Howard
asked.
"Maybe," John replied.
"We could use logs," Mike suggested. "There
are hatchets and axes for chopping wood in the store room. What if
we cut down a lot of small trees, and leaned them against the top
of the cave?"