SIXTEEN
***
Ox Mackey stood behind the closed door of his store and looked out into the otherworldly mist that had somehow surrounded the town. A dark shape whipped by, too fast to see much, but what Ox could see immediately convinced him that he wanted no part of what was going on outside.
He just stood there, watching, waiting for the inevitable moment when one of the...things...in the mist tried to come in.
But none did.
That was good. Ox knew he could hold his own in a fight, but he had no wish to find out if his skills were up to a brawl with him on one side and some nightmarish creature on the other.
Another one of the shadows appeared out of the fog, and Ox held his breath as it stood for a long moment beside his store.
The door rattled. It was locked. Ox knew it was because he had locked it himself. And now he was especially grateful that he had done so.
The door rattled again, and Ox felt himself tense.
Then the shadow melted away as if by magic, and the door stopped shaking.
There was a popping noise, and suddenly half the store was plunged into darkness as a fuse popped.
Ox looked at the fuse panel. It was behind the counter, high enough on the wall that he would have to stand on the small stepladder he kept around for such emergencies. Normally he waited until a customer came along and asked whomever it was to help out.
Ox didn't like heights.
Actually, it was worse than that: heights absolutely paralyzed him. His own seven foot two inch frame had him high enough that he felt like he was going to break out into a nosebleed sometimes, and anything higher than that...forget about it. Even standing on the small stepladder made him feel nauseated, and he couldn't remember the last time he had set foot on the second floor of a house.
At the same time, however, Ox somehow didn't think that anyone was going to be braving the mist to come get milk or sugar anytime soon. So he had two alternatives: either wait in the dark, or reset the fuse himself.
At first he felt sure that he could wait in the semidarkness of the store. But the shadows kept marching past the plate glass storefront in the fog, and each time one did so he felt a little more exposed; a little less safe.
Finally he could bear the darkness no longer. He would brave the stepladder.
He pushed the ladder to where he needed it, then inhaled deeply and took the first step. Immediately he felt dizzy as all the blood rushed away from his head, as though not even that small part of him wanted to be so high up. He waited a long moment like that, steadying himself, before trying to move again.
Before he could, though, the door rattled once more. It was another one of the shadows, standing at the door. This time the rattling was more insistent than it had been; harder and faster. Ox held his breath, standing halfway up the ladder, his head at the rarefied height of eight feet or so, and waited for the door to be broken down.
But just as it had each time, the door stopped shaking and the shadow moved away, becoming one with the fog that surrounded the store.
Ox took another breath...and took another step.
This time he did not feel faint. The exact opposite occurred, in fact. He grew hyper-aware of everything around him. The hum of the bulbs that were still lit, the feel of the air across his face, the base taste of the salt on his lip. It was almost overpowering, and he stood on that second step for a good five minutes, gulping air in huge draughts until he felt like he could move again.
He reached up a shaky hand and opened the panel that held the circuit breakers. Sure enough, several of them had flipped into the off position. Ox reset them, and the lights powered up to full.
A moment later he looked behind him...and immediately wished he hadn't. The light had apparently acted like a beacon to the otherworldly beasts outside, because it looked like there were more than a dozen of them, huge eyes weird within the mist, the vaguely horn-shaped points on their heads floating back and forth as their heads ululated like seaweed in a gentle current.
The door started to rattle again. Harder this time.
Ox knew he couldn't stay like this; knew he should get down and load one of the shotguns he had in the store. But he couldn't move. The height he stood at had done its work, paralyzing him as completely as though he had sustained a spinal cord injury.
The door rattled harder. Now it was booming as several of the things started hammering on it at once.
Ox had to get down.
Had to get down.
Get down, Ox, get down.
He finally took a step. His foot dropped the six inches to the rung below the one he was standing on. It felt like a tremendous drop, like a fall from heights untold, the six inches stretching into a gap that spanned eternity.
But at last his foot touched down.
One step to go. One step, and then he would be on solid ground and all he would have to worry about was the alien invasion or whatever it was that had gripped Rising in its cool, misty clutches.
Ox inhaled, almost hyperventilating as he tried to psych himself up for that last step.
The door was shaking harder now, rattling so hard he felt sure that the hinges must be about to disintegrate into a million pieces.
One more step.
One more.
He dropped his foot....
And slipped.
His arms windmilled faster than a hummingbird's wings, his body reeled as he tried to withstand the terrible force of gravity that wanted to catch him, to throw him to the ground. Ox tried to overcome the terrible pull, but knew he could not; knew that he was going to fall the terrible half a foot to the ground. He would not suffer long, the tiny part of his brain that remained calm and lucid was saying. He would only fall for a fraction of an instant, and all would be well.
But the rest of Ox's brain was screaming as his foot lost traction.
Now his other foot was slipping, too: he was free-falling.
Falling.
Falling.
That small part of his brain that had counseled against panic was now asking what was happening. Surely he should have touched down on the cool tile floor by now. Surely he couldn't still be falling.
Ox managed to look down. He saw the tile rushing up at him. He saw the highest row of dry goods whip past eye-level. He had to be done. The fall had to be over.
But it wasn't. He kept falling. Impossibly, eternally. He looked down again. Still saw the tile speeding up to meet him, saw the very air that surrounded him rushing past with gale force.
Ox fell. And fell. And fell.
Then he felt his foot touch the ground. At long last, after what seemed like minutes, his foot touched solid earth. But it was not the gentle touch of a six-inch drop. Rather, he felt his ankle shatter as though he had pitched himself to the ground from the highest floor of a skyscraper. He had a split-second to open his mouth in a round "O" of surprise and pain as his ankle compressed, then pushed up through his leg, shattering his tibia and fibula into a thousand thousand small pieces, jagged bone rushing up and pulverizing his femur, his pelvis.
His other foot hit ground, and the process repeated.
He felt his lower extremities driven up like bullets from a gun, bone from his ankles rushing up to fill his body cavities, shredding his guts and tearing through intestines, kidneys, stomach like shrapnel from a cannon.
Ox tried to scream, but his diaphragm was in tatters inside him, and drawing breath was impossible.
The air shot from his lungs, exploding out of his nose in a bloody mist that removed the lining from his sinuses, literally turning him inside out in a blur of mucus and pain.
Then the shredded bones that had once held him aloft reached up, past his intestines, past his stomach. They rent their way through his heart, and blood ceased its pumping instantly.
Ox had a final lingering moment before his oxygen-deprived brain turned off to think of his mother.
Then all was black.
***