Chapter 25
Gas struck the windshield first, smearing the glass in a green and gray film.
Then it slipped into the cabin through the vents and around the door seals, as if the truck were made of cloth instead of metal.
Charlotte had time for one clean breath before the cloud filled her lungs.
The pain ran deeper than smoke or chemical fumes.
A corrosive heat started in her throat and spread through her chest until every breath felt like swallowing ground glass.
She coughed once, then lost control of it, doubling over the steering wheel as her body convulsed.
Her eyes flooded at once, and her vision blurred as the gas reached every soft, vulnerable place and set it burning.
The truck was still in reverse, her foot pressed to the accelerator.
Through the wash of tears clouding her sight, she saw the rear end swing toward a parked car.
She hit the brakes, killed the engine, and grabbed the door handle.
The coughing wouldn’t stop. Every breath dragged more gas into her lungs, and every cough left behind the same raw burning and a thin copper taste she recognized, even through the panic, as blood.
She shoved the door open and stumbled onto Crestview Street.
The cloud had swallowed everything, a thick, rippling wall of green-gray that cut the world down to the few feet in front of her.
People were collapsing everywhere: on porches, on sidewalks, in yards.
Some still moved, but others didn’t. A man lay face down in a flowerbed with one arm stretched toward his front door, as if he’d almost made it.
Charlotte covered her mouth with her forearm and ran.
She didn’t head back toward the post office or deeper into the cloud.
She went east, toward the rise of Maple Street and the higher ground beyond it, but her lungs screamed with every step.
The coughing came in wet, ragged spasms, and she felt something warm and thick climbing from deep in her chest. She swallowed it and kept going.
The gas was heavier than air. She understood that, as she climbed, she felt its density shift around her legs and waist, the way water changes temperature at different depths.
The higher she went, the thinner it became.
By the time she reached the intersection of Crestview and Oak, the cloud had dropped to a mist around her ankles, and the fire in her lungs had eased into a steady ache.
She stopped at the corner and braced herself against a stop sign with both hands.
She coughed until white flashed at the edges of her vision.
When it finally passed, she spat onto the pavement without looking down.
Behind her, Crestview had vanished into the clouds.
The houses, the parked cars, the people who hadn’t escaped were gone behind the rolling green-gray mass as it kept moving through the neighborhood with slow, deliberate purpose.
Charlotte had seen enough. She turned and ran up Oak Street toward higher ground, toward home, toward Sophia and her parents in the house with sealed windows and supplies in the basement.
The coughing came less often. Her lungs still burned, and each breath felt like drawing air through soaked cloth, but she could run again.
She’d covered three blocks when she heard it.
The sound began as a vibration, low and deep, traveling through the soles of her shoes before it reached her ears.
Then it sharpened into the roar of jet engines, but something about it was wrong.
It was too loud and too low, and the pitch shifted in ways commercial aircraft never did.
Charlotte stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked up.
The sky above Tuckerton was a cloudless blue.
Crossing it far too low and moving far too fast was a passenger jet.
She recognized the type at once. It was a Boeing, maybe a 737 or something larger; its white fuselage was bright in the morning sun.
It flew at an altitude that made no sense, low enough for Charlotte to pick out the individual windows along its side, low enough for the engine noise to shake the windows in the surrounding houses.
The aircraft banked slightly with its nose tipped downward and tore across the sky at a speed no commercial flight should have reached over a town like this.
People stopped running and looked up. A woman stood on her front porch with a dish towel still in her hands, head tipped back and mouth open.
A man helping an elderly neighbor to his feet froze where he was, both of them staring at the sky.
The jet drowned out everything else: the coughing, the scattered shouting, the panic that had filled the neighborhood.
For a moment, nothing existed except the terrible roar of those engines.
Charlotte tracked the jet with the precision of someone who had spent twelve years memorizing every street and angle of her town.
It was heading east to west on a line that would take it over the older section of Tuckerton, where the houses sat on wider lots and the trees had been growing for half a century.
That was where her parents’ house stood at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, with a red maple in the front yard and a garden her mother had tended for decades.
Sophia was inside, behind sealed windows, cut off by a dead phone in a world that no longer made sense.
The jet continued to descend. It wasn’t a dramatic plunge, though.
It dropped steadily, foot by foot, as it raced westward with grim speed.
Charlotte was still measuring angles and mapping its path against the streets in her mind when the truth hit her.
The aircraft was heading straight for her home.
Without fully processing the thought, she ran. Her legs carried her down Oak Street toward Maple and the western edge of town, where the houses thinned and the trees grew dense. The jet remained visible above the rooftops. Charlotte ran toward it because Sophia was there, and nothing else mattered.