TWELVE
***
The lights of the football field still blaze, but it is a cold light.
No warmth for the denizens of Rising.
All around town, doors are locked, windows are latched.
Townsfolk draw drapes - dusty with lack of use - over their windows, shutting out the presence that more and more of them are starting to feel as the mist rolls over their houses and consumes them in its unnatural whiteness.
No one wants to know what may be happening to them.
People sit down to late dinners, but can't eat.
They turn on the television, but reception is fuzzy.
Many of them are at desks or tables. Writing feverishly.
Outside, the mist has finished dripping off the mountains and is now oozing its way down the individual lanes and country roads that demark the boundaries of Rising.
Wherever it goes, the mist swallows the light.
A thing alive.
The more the mist envelopes the town, the faster the people write, the more hurried and frightened their penmanship.
Things are just getting started, each person knows in his or her heart.
Just getting started.
And about to get truly bad.
***