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something to her. I shouted, ‘Don’t move! Stay covered! Everything will be OK,’ but in reality I willed my body to sink deeper into the sand because as the mist passed us by, and the world went from the gauzy, suffocating yellow of a Florida afternoon to this ominous and claustrophobic twilight, I realised that absolutely nothing was falling out of the sky, except airplanes. Whatever had transformed the waters of Santa Rosa Sound into a hissing, churning cauldron was acting from beneath the surface, and I had no idea what that could be.
    The frying water slid greasily around our island. It reached out into the sound as far as I could see, which was only about 30 metres. It really was like being trapped in a summer thunderstorm, amidst a driving, pounding rain that turned the world into twilight and assaulted the senses so violently that it kindled animal fear. The frying sound was quite loud now, and I could hear nothing of what was being said between Heather and Scotty. I struggled to see them from the edge of my mask and they were still lying in place, although I don’t know where either one of them got their nerve. Maybe being together helped them remain calmer. I envied Scott even more at that moment, because I felt my own panic growing, and I wondered if I might lunge from the beach and … and … do what? Run panic-stricken along the water’s edge until whatever was killing everybody else brought me down too? I struggled to calm myself. I tried to compose my thoughts. OK, Miller. Think . Concentrate on the problem. What could cause this? The disturbance of the water? The mist itself? The reaction to exposure?
    I studied the roiling water as best as I could. It was nearly whitened by the froth of sizzling and spitting, and it seemed to give off a kind of gas – the source of the mist no doubt. It was moving quickly to the west, in the direction of the pass, but the emissions were being drawn north over land. From what I’d seen of the mist before it overtook us, it hadn’t reached a significant altitude. So the particulate material was fairly heavy, which meant it wouldn’t drift far inland before descending, maybe only a few miles. If the sounds of mayhem we’d heard from the mainland were in fact the sounds of people … well, then at least the disaster wouldn’t reach much farther than the Twin Cities about 15 miles to the north – small compensation to the thousands who’d probably been … affected.
    Baitfish skipped across the water’s surface as if frantically trying to escape marauding bluefish. Whorls of smog-coloured gas danced dervishes across the sizzling white storm of water. I thought I could smell something, then, and at that moment I felt my bladder let go, and the sand packed in wetly around the crotch of my clown shorts as the idea settled into my brain with cold certainty: Your mask is leaking . The smell was of sea rot, the wet decay of old mud dredged up from deep, black waters. It came to me faintly at first, but after that initial whiff I was convinced I could smell whatever was in the sound, and I knew that at any second I might begin to itch, and scream, and die. I thought about everything I had done in my life, and how ironic it was that each of those events had in some way conspired to bring me to this place at this moment in time. I closed my eyes and felt tears squeeze between the lids. How awful it would be to die here on this beach, under these circumstances, not even knowing the name of the thing that had killed me. Maybe I was being punished for my indiscreet thoughts about Heather. If so, I offered a silent apology to whatever force was controlling events. Please, let me live. Let us all live. Even Scotty.
    I took shallow breaths, an impossible thing in that the mask slowed my intake of breath already. The sand packed in suffocatingly and instead of cooling me it seemed to trap my body temperature so that I began to