Free Keepers by Gary A. Braunbeck

I ran toward the living room. Whatever slammed against the house had raised some dust of its own, because a dissipating smog of sandy debris was skirling against the window. It wasn’t until I was just a foot or so away from the window that I realized it wasn’t dust at all.
    Crouching, I pulled back one side of the curtain to take a look.
    It was a cavernous mist—so thick in places it was nearly impossible to make out the shape of Magritte-Man’s truck in the street—that churned as if caught in a strong wind. But there was no wind. There hadn’t even been any humidity. The old joke might say that if you don’t like the weather in Ohio just wait a minute, and sometimes it sure seems that way, but barring any sort of significant meteorological aberration, no way in hell could a mist this heavy and wide-spread form in a matter of...I quickly played in reverse everything that had happened since I’d loaded the shotgun... ninety seconds ?
    I looked out the window again. At the rate this was going, the mist would turn into heavy fog in no time.
    Ninety seconds.
    Dropping the curtain back into place, I moved through the living room toward the back door. The mist couldn’t be a natural phenomenon. Yes, the weather here can make some extreme swings from time to time, but not like this, not a mist-bordering-on-fog that looks like it followed the tail of a major storm in summer, not in less than two minutes, so it stood to reason (didn’t it?) that Magritte-Man and his droogies had to have created it. It had only been two minutes, so whatever they were using to generate the mist couldn’t have worked up enough vapor to encircle the entire house—hell, even if they had more than one (dry ice, a fog machine maybe?), there still hadn’t been enough time.
    I threw open the back door and stepped onto the porch, the Mossberg pointing out from my hip.
    The mist formed a semi-solid wall that spread out to create a barrier around the yard and rose so far into the evening sky it was impossible to see where it ended and the October clouds began. I leaned over the porch railing to see just how far the barrier extended; at both the far left and right edges of the house it curved so sharply and so abruptly it actually formed corners before continuing.
    It was surrounding the house.
    Yeah, your sanity is just fine, just peachy, solid as a rock.
    Fuck off.
    Such language…
    I felt a damp chill and exhaled; my breath became silver vapor as soon as it hit the air and billowed in front of my face, faintly glowing. From deep inside, the mist shimmered with light—nothing bright or blinding, but enough to illuminate the yard and the outside of the house.
    Moving down the steps I looked from side to side for some sign of the others. I caught a glimpse of one of them when a pair of thin beams cast by their night goggles glided across the mist from about ten yards to my left. Mossberg at the ready, I ran toward the spot from which the beams had come; just as I hit the mist the handle-grip of the shotgun punched into my ribs, causing me to cry out as I tumbled backward from the force of the impact.
    It took a few seconds for my torso to stop throbbing and the breath to find its way back into my lungs. What the hell had I slammed into? Rolling onto my side, I picked up the Mossberg and checked to make sure the gun and knife were still in place, then got to my feet and looked around for whom- or whatever had hit me. As far as I could tell, I was alone in the yard—whose boundaries were rapidly shrinking against the encroaching mist. In a few minutes it would be all the way up to the back porch.
    I turned back toward the spot where I’d remembered seeing the beams and moved closer, slowly this time. I knew this was probably the wrong thing to do—after all, the back door was unlocked and stood wide open ( Why not just send out written invitations, Pal? )—but I had to let them know I wasn’t going down without a fight.
    I heard a dog bark