Read The Mist for Free Online

nostrils. He coughed, tasting fire.
    "Daddy! Help me!"
    Fiona was sobbing now as she cried out for him. She hadn't called him Daddy since she was ten. She was due to start her sophomore year as a classical harp major at Boston University, and now she'd been caught in a bomb going off at her father's house.
    She deserved better.
    Bob shoved his phone into his pants pocket and shouted to her. "Keep talking to me, kid. Where are you?"
    He felt the wall of heat before he saw the orange and red flames engulfing Abigail's porch, a duplicate of his except neater--and now mostly obliterated by the blast. One structural beam was gone, another was burning, flames working their way up to Scoop's second-floor porch as if the devil himself were spewing them.
    Anyone out back when the bomb had gone off and sent shrapnel flying everywhere would be in serious trouble, but Bob saw only flames, charred wood, debris.
    He didn't see Abigail fighting her way through the fire, or Scoop or Fiona in the thick smoke blackening the small yard.
    "Fiona, where are you?"
    His throat was raw, burning, tight with fear. The fire extinguisher would be useless against the main fire, but he held on to it in case of smaller fires or secondary explosions. He pulled his polo shirt over his mouth and nose and pushed through the smoke, past the outdoor table where they all spent as much time as possible during Boston's too-short summer. The concussive wave from the explosion had knocked over the cheap plastic chairs, but the two Adirondack chairs had stayed put.
    "Fiona! Scoop! Abigail! Someone talk to me."
    "Here." Fiona's voice, slightly less hysterical now. "We're behind the compost bin. I can't move."
    "Why can't you move?"
    "Scoop..."
    Bob jumped over a tidy row of green beans into Scoop's vegetable garden, his pride and joy. He'd kept them in salads all summer and shared whatever was ripe--first the peas and spinach, then the beans and summer squash. Now he was unloading tomatoes on his housemates. He'd been talking about freezing and canning some of next summer's harvest.
    Next summer.
    He'd be there. He had to be. Scoop wasn't meant to die this way.
    Not in front of Fiona.
    A moan, a sob came from behind the compost bin on the other side of the garden. Bob thrashed through tomato and cauliflower plants. Scoop had made the bin himself out of chicken wire and wood slats. He'd bought a book on composting. Now, at summer's end, the bin was full of what he referred to as "organic matter."
    And earthworms. He'd ordered them from a catalog and told Bob not to tell Fiona because she was into the romance of composting and didn't need to know about the worms. He'd explained what they did to help speed the process of turning garbage into dirt. Bob's eyes had glazed over while he'd listened.
    He stepped over a cauliflower plant, letting his shirt drop from his mouth as he saw Scoop's foot peeking out from the edge of the compost bin, toe down inside his beat-up running shoe.
    No movement.
    "Daddy. I can't...Dad..." Just out of sight behind the bin, Fiona was hyperventilating. "Scoop can't be dead!"
    "He's not dead."
    Bob blurted the words without knowing if they were true, something he tried never to do. But they had to be. Scoop was all muscle. He was a boxer, a wrestler, a top-notch cop.
    Steeling himself for what he might see, Bob took a quick breath, sucking in smoke, and stepped behind the compost bin.
    Scoop was sprawled facedown on Fiona's lap. She'd wriggled partway out from under him and was half sitting, pinned between him and the bin. Her thin, bare arms were wrapped around him, smeared with blood and blackened bits of shrapnel.
    Bob could see that most of the blood wasn't hers.
    She looked up at him with those wide, blue eyes he'd first noticed when she was a tot. Tears streamed down her pale cheeks, creating little rivers of blood and soot.
    "Fi," he said, forcing himself not to choke up. "You okay? You hurt?"
    "Just a little shaken up. I--Dad." She gulped