Night of the Purple Moon by Scott Cramer Read Free Book Online Page A

old.”
    Abby tried to ignore her creeping sense of doubt.
    “Try boston.com,” she said.
    Abby’s mother would check this site often for news about Boston. The city of Cambridge bordered Boston.
    The new webpage showed more photos of the comet. The date was also a day old. In Google, Kevin searched for ‘comet’. Thousands of links for Comet Rudenko-Kasparov popped up.
    Abby’s spirit plummeted deeper after he had clicked twenty or so links and discovered every one of them was out of date.
    “Is anyone alive?” he cried.
    She put a hand on his shoulder. “Keep looking.”
    The rest of the Earth’s population might be dead, but all that mattered to her now was the safe return of Jordan and Emily. They’d been gone twenty minutes.
    When Abby returned to the window, her blood turned cold. Purple fingers of fog were working their way between the bare branches of the trees behind the Couture’s house, reaching out for her.
    * * *
    Jordan’s heart pounded. Every house on Melrose Street stood dark and lifeless in the thickening mist. He expected the fog to worsen. When warm air settled over cold water or cold air over warm water, it made for the best conditions for prisons of white to brew up quickly. Within minutes, ten-mile visibility could shrink to ten inches. Sometimes ten inches dwindled to one inch.
    They stayed in the middle of the street. He continually scanned the yards to his left and right for signs of people or coyotes.
    “Should we go back?” Emily asked. “It looks like the fog might get worse.” Her breathing made her brown eyes seem bigger, wider.
    Jordan shook his head. “Stay close. Even if we can’t see, we can follow the road back home.”
    Emily moved closer, her shoulder grazing against his arm felt nice.
    “San Diego was foggy every morning,” she said. “But the sun always burned it off by noontime.”
    “Is that where you grew up?”
    “We lived there for two years. My parents worked at Scripps Institute. Before that we lived in Seattle for three years. Kevin and I were born in San Francisco.”
    Talking about normal stuff, with a girl no less, seemed to calm him down. “What’s it like to move around so much?” he asked.
    “As soon as you make friends, you have to leave them. I have a really good friend, Tess. She was planning to visit me this summer. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
    “You sound like Abby,” Jordan said. “She hated moving here. This week she was supposed to stay with my mom in Cambridge and see all her friends.” He started to explain his mother’s living and working situation, but cut it short when his throat thickened and he felt on the verge of tears. “Does Kevin like the island?”
    “He doesn’t care where he lives,” Emily said. “All he does is read science books and spend time on the computer.”
    “Do you guys get along?”
    She cocked her head. “Yeah, why wouldn’t we?”
    “Abby and I fight about everything.”
    “Everything?” she said in a tone of disbelief.
    “Yeah, pretty much.”
    They passed by the house where an old man who mended fishing nets lived. Sunday mornings, pickup trucks would always line the street as commercial fishermen dropped off and picked up nets. The street was deserted now, no fishermen, no nets, the old man’s house dark.
    Jordan froze just beyond the house. He grabbed Emily’s arm and held her from going further. Ahead of them the green car that had raced by his house had smashed into a telephone pole, the front end badly crumpled. Glass cubes littered the ground, and green antifreeze formed a puddle by the front tire.
    “It drove by our house earlier,” he said.
    “I remember you and Abby and Kevin talking about it.”
    Jordan took Emily’s hand and they inched closer. He saw the airbag had deflated and the motionless driver slumped forward. The driver had red hair. They moved closer still and Jordan could now see streams of dried blood on the driver’s cheeks.
    “It’s a boy,”