Chapter 24

“Wow, that was some service, wasn’t it? A lot more exciting than those in the past! No offense, Lawton,” I chuckled as we all grabbed some food from the local deli.

“Hey, none taken. Hard for any sermon, let alone to a false god, to beat an orgy on the hard floor of a basketball court! I lost track of how many times I came inside someone’s mouth, pussy, or ass, not to mention how many loads I took at both ends! Steve, for instance, definitely used my mouth to clean up between strokes inside every woman that he fucked ... both holes. And every man, for that matter,” Lawton grinned as he wolfed down a ham and swiss sandwich with chips, root beer, and pickles.

“I wonder when the Mist will lift and the brats will awaken,” Lisa winked at me.

“When I’m good and ready for it, of course,” the spirit clarified.

“Ah, okay. So, probably not yet,” Erin licked her lips as she ate some fried chicken that I fed her by hand (yes, I liked doing little gestures like that for my sweet cousin).

“Indeed not. I have my reasons, which the other spirits understand. By the way, just to make things easier, you shall henceforth address me as Gavin. Does that work for you?” the spirit proposed.

“Very well, Gavin. Nice to give you a name and not something so impersonal as ‘spirit,’ you know,” I admitted my thoughts on the matter.

“My sentiments exactly,” Gavin concurred, switching to a posh British accent.

“Can you ever ... take corporeal shape?” I wondered now.

“Well, theoretically, yes, but why would I?” Gavin answered.

“Depends on what one finds appealing, I suppose,” I replied.

“Nothing mortal does as yet, at least not to me. Maybe sex, out of pure curiosity, but that’s only because you mortals seem to enjoy it so much, though until recently, you had precious little of it,” Gavin scoffed a bit, “on the other hand, there is one thing that I could become.”

I could sense Gavin’s absence for a second, and then saw only a black fog replace the Mist for what felt like an eternity. The fog seemed to be ... alive or something, and then when it lifted, after such a drawn-out time, nothing appeared any different for now. I sensed, however, that something dramatic had occurred, so I rushed my followers out of the abandoned deli as quickly as I could. I wanted to catch the news in a hurry.

“Good afternoon, I’m Peter Jennings with a special ABC News Report. At approximately 12:35 pm, Eastern Daylight Time, just fourteen minutes ago, between four hundred and six hundred million people perished during a ‘black fog’ event which seemed to have caused a painless, simultaneous death. There was no noise, there were no screams of agony, there was perhaps not even a consciousness of their expiration, but roughly half a billion human beings worldwide are now deceased. There were other deaths incidental to this mass expiration, of course, but their numbers pale in comparison to the scale of the event itself.

“Among those who have been killed by this global event were George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first President of the United States, and every living former President, from Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. That’s right. They’re all dead. Just six minutes ago, Dan Quayle, the often controversial Vice President of the United States, was sworn in as the forty-second President. Also dead thanks to this global crisis are Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, who has been succeeded by Prince Charles, the new King Charles III, and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

“Russian President Boris Yeltsin has perished as well, putting Alexander Rutskoy, his Vice President, in office as President of the Russian Federation. Rutskoy, as has been noted, is a frequent critic of the ‘shock therapy’ economic reforms of the Yeltsin administration, so one can perhaps expect a moderation or limitation on some of those policies, especially in the present emergency. On the other hand, the Supreme Soviet, Russia’s hold-over legislature from the Soviet Union, is about half-empty from what increasingly appears to be a mass event targeting the elderly,” the famous network newsman reported to the world.