The kids were fine in the back; he hadn't heard a sound from them since just after dinner. Through glances in the rear-view mirror, he watched them settle in, noting the stages: from talking to each other, to gravitating toward their phones, then only listening via earbuds, finally falling asleep with their heads resting on propped-up pillows. The final step was the phones darkening to sleep as well.
Connor and his Miranda had talked in the front seats all through this time, taking advantage of the hissing white noise of the highway, and the fact that they didn't have to look at each other as they spoke. It always seemed that conversation with a spouse was easier and more truthful when you didn't have to look them in the eyes when you did it. But a little while ago she too had reclined her seat a little, and nodded off. Connor kept stealing glances over at her. The sun was coming closer and closer to setting in the window just beyond her, and it was kind of mesmerizing the way the angled light made her hair and blouse glow around the edges, as if she were an astral projection being beamed in from somewhere far away.
It made him smile to see her so relaxed and peaceful. The camping trip had made her less tense than he had seen her in a long while. Even though this alone would be enough to make him feel triumphant, it was sweetened by this fact: he had pushed the idea of the trip saying that it would help her unwind, and here was proof he was proven right. It was petty, he knew, but he couldn't deny that it was there.
As the sunlight deepened through the rainbow and eventually disappeared, leaving twilight behind it, the reddish-gold nimbus around Miranda's form dissipated too, although he found he was just as content to have the ungilded, real live woman nestled in the car's bucket seat next to him. He reckoned they must be about halfway home, and turned his full attention back to the winking yellow line at the center of the two-lane highway as it wound through the lightly wooden northern stretches of the state. That line was the brightest thing in the world now, the moon nowhere to be seen, and the lights of passing towns still infrequent and fleeting.
He wasn't quite sure when the fog started. By the time he noticed that he could see the edges of the cones of light emanating from the car's headlights, they were already well into it. It wasn't that he hadn't been paying attention; in fact, he chalked it up to the fact that he was paying too much careful attention to that center line. He had never actually felt distracted, but its near-hypnotic winking had certainly chased all other thoughts out of his head. He took a new look around, realizing that he and his family were now cruising through full dark, with a fair percentage of their forward-pointing lights being thrown back at them as they sped down an illusory tunnel bounded by mist.
Connor found that he wanted to turn on the radio, to hear something other than his own thoughts as they continued to slide forward through the dark. Any sign of the world beyond the grayness would have been a comfort. But the volume needed to ease his gently-jingling nerves (thanks, iced tea) would have woken up at least one member of his family, which would be followed by questions about how far they were from home, what's the deal with all this fog, and why didn't he slow down a little bit... all of which were questions he didn't have answers to. He just wanted to push through and get clear of the obscurity as soon as possible. It felt imperative that his family not lose their relaxed vacation-glow, and if he had to go through some tense minutes alone as they slumbered, he would.
There was a flash of light off to to his left, a tiny glint that hit the corner of his vision. At first he wasn't even sure that it was real. It could have been a dashboard light momentarily refracting off the inside of his window, or any number of other things. He shifted his head around experimentally, to see if he could replicate it, but it wasn't until he stopped trying that it happened again. Not only that, but this time it had some kind of movement that Connor's mind somehow attached *swivel* the word to, as if the beam of a tiny lighthouse had swung across him. Again, it disappeared before he could find where it came from.
The air in the car suddenly felt stuffy, heavy with warm, exhaled sleep-breaths. They had rolled up the windows after the sun stopped adding heat to the car's interior, but he hadn't yet turned on the fans to bring in outside air. Now he felt tiny beads of sweat erupting on his forehead, and wanted cool air. He flicked the switch to the lowest setting, and heard the reassuring whoosh of fresh air entering the car. His hand froze halfway back to its spot on the steering wheel.
Smoke, he thought immediately. This isn't fog. It's smoke. The smell was unmistakable. It wasn't a cultured smell, either. Connor had learned long ago that the only smoke that smells good is the kind created by controlled fires. Bonfires, fireplaces, and barbecue smokers all were cautious and pleasant compared to this. Within the few seconds of outside he had breathed before he flicked the fan back off, Connor had smelled raw nature in the smoke: leaves, scorched earth, and what he imagined might have been animal hair. It was caustic and dangerously wild, stirring some primal fear deep inside his bones.
His eyes flicked to Miranda, and then the rear-view to check on the kids. Was their sleep being turned over by the smell of smoke? None of them stirred, and even as Connor vowed to get them through this undisturbed, he found he was relieving his foot's pressure on the accelerator. Was it possible that he was driving his family right into a forest fire? His eyes tried to scan everything before him at once. There was no reddish light coming from anywhere (although he had to admit he didn't know just how much he should expect to see through the encroaching smoke), nor had there been any kind of roadblock to warn him. Again, he barely resisted the urge to turn on the radio to see if there was any kind of news being broadcast.
Another flash of light, this time off to the right, just above Miranda's shoulder. This time his nerves were enough on edge that he could whip his head around and catch a glimpse of what caused it... and immediately wished he hadn't. He now could tell that what appeared to be a single flash was, in actuality, two. And below and between the pair of tiny, perfect circles, was a lean triangular nose.
It was a face, perched only about twenty feet away from the car.
As soon as Connor saw it, it was gone, obscured by Miranda's shoulder, and then the body of the car. Connor almost jerked sideways in his seat trying to look back and get another glimpse. It looked like whatever it was had been just off to the side of the road, but even as close as the face had appeared, it was just too dark and foggy (smoky, he corrected himself) to see.
When he sat back in his seat and firmly reestablished his hands on the wheel, Connor realized that the craning of his neck had turned the car slightly as well. The headlights were now angled just off the side of the road, but even before he straightened the car out, he saw four more of the little white lights, almost directly ahead of his skewed headlights.
This new pair of faces were turned toward him, their hunched bodies beside them. Connor blinked when he recognized the shapes. Gray wolves. There were wolves standing by the side of the road. Not moving, just standing there. Watching.
He kept a close eye on them as the car drifted past, going barely over twenty miles an hour now. Their heads turned to follow, their perfect circles of their eyes casting unwavering light directly into his.
Connor tipped the wheel so the car was heading straight again, and as he did he saw several more of those glowing eyes up ahead. At least five sets of them, randomly placed on either side of the street. His fingers audibly tightened around the wheel. Weren't animals supposed to run from a forest fire? So why were they just standing there, watching him drive by? They made no threatening moves, in fact had no menace in their features at all. He seemed to be drawing attention only because he was the only moving object in the still, smoky night.
Connor heard a barely-stifled gasp from the back seat. Julie. He instinctively held his finger up to his lips, making a silent shh, turning his head slightly to the side, hoping she could see the gesture from directly behind him. He looked in the rear view mirror to see her, and his heart dropped into his stomach. While he saw his daughter, her eyes wide as she looked forward out of the windshield, he also saw what was behind her.
In the middle of the road behind the car stood a pair of wolves, their eyes glowing red from the tail lights. They hadn't been there a mere second before, when the car had passed through the space they now occupied.
"Dad?" Julie whispered, her voice just on the near side of panic. "What are those?"
She clearly knew what they were. Connor knew she was asking the same thing he had been asking himself: *why* were they there? "I don't know," he whispered back in as even a tone as he could. "I'm going to just keep going, and pass them by."
"Should we wake them?" Julie asked, looking over at her brother, still asleep and leaning against a pillow stood on end and wedged against the duffel of future laundry.
Connor shook his head. "It's okay," he said. "Let them sleep. Nothing's going to happen." And he neglected to add, just don't look behind you, honey, and definitely don't think about how fast those things must have moved.
The ground was subtly rising on either side of the road. Connor kept looking ahead, continually hoping that the each tiny pair of bright eyes that appeared at the boundary where the road was lost in smoke would be the last, but there was always another pair beyond, and sometimes there were two. As the car drove deeper into a gulley that was slowly transforming into a ravine, the number of wolves visible by the side of the road continued to grow. And as much as he wanted to look in the rear view mirror to comfort his daughter, Connor couldn't. He could only imagine how many of the red-eyed things were behind them now, motionless and staring. The only safe place he could look was the flickering center line of the road, the only bit of color in this world of gray smoke, asphalt, and wolves.
He kept driving forward. There had to be an end to this, he kept thinking. They would have to come out the other side at some point. There was no major fire, no unnatural explanation for any of this. His family had only chosen the road home where a wolf pack had found the road as an easy means of escape from a smoldering lightning strike somewhere nearby. That's all. If he just kept following the yellow line, they would come out of it.
"I don't like this," Julie whispered from behind him. "Why are they just standing there?"
"It's okay," Connor replied, surprised at how calm and level his voice sounded. "It'll be over in a minute."
"Are you sure?" she asked, her voice starting to tremble. Nearly half the rising ground on either side of the car was now occupied by clusters of stoic, placid wolves, whose only movement was the turning of their heads as the family went by.
At some point, a rumbling had started underneath the car. It had started so subtly that Connor had missed it. The sound and feel was as if the ground were slowly turning to cobblestone underneath them. At the same time, he was noticing that the road itself was changing, too. The yellow line was become less distinct, the sudden new texture of the asphalt making its solid, predictable lines waver out of focus. There was more color creeping in too, a pinkish red that gave the edges of the road a disquieting meaty tone. On the shoulders of the road, in front of the ever-growing press of creatures, there now were low, yellow-white stones at periodic intervals, like markers. Where they appeared, it looked as if they were pushing up the pinkish, softer edges of the asphalt.
"What the hell are those?" he murmured to himself. He felt Julie's hand on his shoulder, gripping progressively tighter. And now he could see a general lightening, something far ahead through the smoke that was casting a strong, hellish light. Was that what was causing the pinkish appearance of--
Julie drew a sharp intake of breath and her fingernails dug deeply into Connor's shoulder, as if she had just figured out something. The road ahead had now taken on a full, undulating pinkness, the center line entirely lost. The stones poking up through the soil by the sides of the road, which formed a boundary the wolves seemed to not dare cross, grew taller and more triangular. The light ahead was starting to take form, a hazy, swirling ball that was always just a bit beyond the point where the smoke made it lose coherence, constantly threatening to rush forward and resolve its true form.
"Dad," Julie hissed, the words clearly requiring great effort not to be screamed. "We don't want to go there. You can turn us around."
Connor didn't respond, but kept the car moving forward. At some point he understood what she was seeing, too. The wolves with the glowing eyes continued to accumulate on the raised banks beside the road, the bumpy road vibrating the car growing more pink and more alive, the rows of sharp white rocks becoming taller and closer together, and a awareness was growing of the ridged red ceiling that was lowering down from above them... It would all close in on them when they reached that burning light, still straight ahead of them and rendering him powerless to turn his eyes away from it...
"Dad," he heard Julie's voice, very close and strained, speaking almost directly into his ear, "You. Don't. Have. To."
Her words made his eyes blink, and in that moment the spell was broken. He was no longer hypnotized by the fire lying ahead, did not feel compelled to drive directly down the burning throat of the biggest wolf that could ever exist. Connor wrenched the wheel to the right, aiming the driver's side of the car at edge of the narrow gap between the two nearest teeth, praying that there was enough of a gap for the car to slip through. He took one last, fleeting look over at Miranda, whose head had rolled to the side with the change of direction but still had not awakened, and then into the blazing eyes of the wolves that lay on the other side of the gap--
The car was wrenched upward on the right side, throwing him back in his seat, Julie's hand yanked from his shoulder, taking more of his strength than he expected with it. Then the car was bumping and rocking every direction at once, thumping and shuddering, the wheels spinning in air one instant, and churning through dirt and rock the next. The view through the windshield yielded nothing but gray smoke and gray fur.
After a few seconds they came to a stop, and Miranda was awake, yelling, "Jesus Christ, Conn, what the *hell*?" and Bryan was yelping incoherently from the backseat. It was a glorious, welcome sound, until he realized that Julie was silent.
There was less smoke ahead of them. Instead he could see trees, the tops of some of them, because the ground dropped away sharply before them. His headlights threw the leaves and needles into sharp relief, as well as the way the smoke drifted in front of them in pulsing waves. He called out his daughter's name and tried to turn around within his seat belt, painfully wrenching his shoulder as he did. But there was a familiar long-haired shape there, the eyes as wide and deep as her mother's, looking back at him.
Connor turned to his wife. "There's a fire ahead," he said, trying to soothe her continued shouts of incredulity. "I was just now able to see. We've got to turn around."
"And you had to run us off the road--?" Miranda began at the top of her voice, but stopped. She was now fully awake, looking at him clearly, and seeing the subtle way the burning forest beyond him was turning his silhouette into a frightening, wavering thing. She quieted.
Connor looked around, trying to determine where the wolves were. His eyes scanned the ground around the car, found nothing. Whether they had taken advantage of their speed, or had never existed at all, there was not a single glowing eye to be seen now. He checked the rearview, and there was the road behind them, solid and flat as it had always been. A broken wooden mile marker, which the car had hit as it left the road, was snapped off about a foot off the ground, pulsing red like a broken fang in the tail lights.
Connor took one more look at his family, noting the safety and preciousness of each and every one, Julie last of all. There seemed to be something that passed in a long look between the two of them, an understanding and a secret that they tacitly agreed to carry the rest of their lives. Connor put the car in reverse, backed onto the road, and headed back the way they had come. They would have to find another way home.
The smoke and light lessened the farther away they got, until the air was once again clear, but Connor did not turn the fan on.
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