The barrel of Josie’s grandfather’s rifle swung wildly into the air as Josie stumbled over a raised curb in the mist. She found herself in a parking lot. The visibility was so bad that she no longer had any sense of direction. The impenetrable haze was wholly disorienting.
She continued to breathe in the alien atmosphere tentatively as she recovered from her misstep. The air dampened her skin, leaving it dewy to the touch. The humidity was repressive to her lungs. If any biological contaminants lurked, she had no idea. That possibility was too frightening to even think about. She took shallower than normal breaths, as if that would keep contagions at bay, though she was not under any such illusion.
Lewis couldn’t be far away, but everything beyond Josie’s immediate vicinity was lost to the mist. The one consolation was that she very much doubted anything else could see through the fog any better than she could. She kept the rifle held up, ready to blast a ghast if one stumbled across her. She was confident she could kill a small one, but the thought of the giant ghast she’d seen earlier terrified her. She imagined it would be like fighting a bear.
She stepped lightly across the parking lot maintaining silent foot falls. All noise was already dampened, either by the mist or by the fact that time was frozen here at the city center. Josie didn’t have all the answers. The blanketing hush softened sharp noises with an effect similar to snow cover.
A silent figure poised beside a vehicle to Josie’s left caught her by surprise. She turned the rifle towards the figure, only moving in closer after she determined that it was another person and not a monster. A middle-aged woman in a pantsuit stood frozen in place like a mannequin. Josie lowered her weapon. As she reached the woman’s side, she could already make out more individuals frozen in place across the parking lot.
It felt like walking through a photograph. Everyone was unnaturally still, standing eerily in the mist. Josie maneuvered between them. Their expressions were all mundane—frozen while unaware of any of the dangers that surrounded them presently.
Josie paused as she spotted motion at the edge of her vision. Something was moving amongst the crowd. A dense cloud of mist hung at knee level, hiding the ground. Josie strained her eyes. She still couldn’t make out what was moving.
A flash of black popped up several times from out of the fog. In the limited visibility it looked like a man-sized centipede. It moved quickly between the frozen people, crawling up each of their bodies in turn. Josie couldn’t tell what it was doing to them when it reached face level. She wasn’t keen to find out.
Her heart pounded in her chest as the creature lowered itself back to the ground, disappearing from sight. She wanted to run, but it was already too close. She held the rifle at her side, but kept her finger gently over the trigger. The clicks of the creature’s feet against the asphalt drew nearer. It took everything Josie had to hold steady.
She knew it was coming up to her, but there was nothing she could do. The clicking grew louder until it was right at her feet. Josie was shaking slightly—adrenaline in her veins. She held her breath as the creature rose up into the face of a man frozen directly beside her.
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Stubby insect arms gripped onto the front of his blazer while more appendages prodded at his frozen face. The man’s skin moved like clay, remaining depressed where the creature exuded force. It felt all over with a dozen tiny limbs, poking into the man’s eyes and nose. It pried open his jaw as far as it would go before squishing its insect-like face completely into his mouth and regurgitating something down his throat.
That can’t be good….
The creature withdrew, leaving the man’s jaw gaped wide in a mask of horror as it dropped back to the ground.
Josie knew what was coming next. She silently adjusted the tip of the rifle to point directly in front of her own face. The centipede creature’s pincer arms gripped onto her jeans as it slid up her body. She wobbled slightly under the monster’s weight as it stood up tall against her. Only now did she realize that the creature was at least three times longer than what she could see sticking out of the mist.
It fixed its black, emotionless eyes on her face as it began to prod at her. A hiss escaped its maw as it realized that she was not frozen like the others.
Josie pulled the trigger.
Crack!
The blast made her ears ring horribly. The elongated body of the monster flopped lifelessly to the asphalt. The bang echoed back to her off unseen buildings. Nothing within a mile could have missed the sound of the shot.
Josie ran deeper into the mist. She wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and the parking lot. All the faces of the frozen people she passed had their jaws wrenched open.
“Josie!” someone called from behind her. It sounded like Lewis. She didn’t know if she could trust her ears. Something had called to her in Yost Park earlier as well. Whether a mimic or Lewis, the voice had come from where she’d just fired off her shot. She questioned if Lewis would have really risked calling out to her. He couldn’t have possibly expected her to respond.
The rifle needed to be reloaded. She knew how, but she’d never actually done it by herself before. She felt at the spare rounds in her pocket. She only had a handful—five or six. She gripped one between her fingers and attempted to shove it into the chamber opening. Her hand fumbled with the round, shaking uncontrollably.
She needed to take a deep breath to steady herself. She tried again, relief spreading through her as the round finally clicked into place.
Without warning, Josie’s mouth was suddenly covered from behind. She was spun around by a pair of hands to find Lewis standing wide-eyed at her side. “That wasn’t me,” he whispered.
Josie had to settle her heart again. She was surprised that Lewis had managed to sneak up on her. Lewis kept quiet as he guided her over to the side of a building.
“Help me!” the mimic cried in Lewis’s voice. “Josie! Help!” A bloodcurdling cry pierced the stillness.
Had Josie not known it was the mimic, she would have had no doubt that Lewis was being hurt horribly. The cries ceased suddenly and did not pick back up.
Lewis kept a tight hold on Josie’s hand as he led her down the street. Josie gripped back on to him just as tightly. After another block, Lewis paused at the intersection. A line of frozen festival-goers marked the entrance to the Taste of Edmonds.
Boy, oh boy! Us Parcae are not averse to eating grubs, but that grabbler laying eggs was enormous! The worst part, in my opinion, is not how much bigger those creepy crawlers get when fully grown, but rather, how violent their reproductive process proves to be on the incubator hosts. Time being frozen is their only consolation for a fate most gruesome.
Keep vigilant,
-Mr. Gray