Blackout (6 page)

Iris crouched there with Bonnie, her eyes bulging from her wrinkled, sallow face like Ping-Pong balls. There was a visible tremor beneath her skin and she kept smacking her lips like she was trying to moisten them. The loose jowls beneath her chin seemed to vibrate. “All of us, one by one, are going to get taken away,” she said. “That’s the way it is and that’s the way
they
planned it. We can’t hide. They’ll find us. They’ll find us all.”

“Fuck that noise,” Billy said.

He grabbed the only weapon he saw: a broom. He picked it up and held it before him like a lance. The gaping hole in the door where the knob had been suddenly filled with worming motion as one of the tentacles slipped through. About three feet of it entered the room, the tip of it swaying from side to side as if it couldn’t make up its mind what to do. But if it couldn’t, Billy had no such constraints. Before I could stop him, he jumped forward and cracked the tentacle with the broom handle with a solid dull thump. He hit it again and again and it had the same effect as beating a rubber hose with a baseball bat. He knocked it around but it did not retreat.

It just waited there.

We waited with it.

After about five seconds of that and five seconds of Billy smacking it around, I said, “Stop it, Billy. Just leave it alone.”

He hesitated for a second and the tentacle—slick and black and oily—began to pulsate. The tapering sharp tip of it expanded, swelling like a snake that had just swallowed a mouse, becoming bulbous and blunt. Then it opened like a spout and squirted a string of goo at the broom handle. A copious amount of it enveloped the end. Billy still held on to it. The tentacle just waited there, the sticky rope of goo connecting it to the broom end. Then the goo moved. With a slimy, gushing sort of sound it slid down the broom handle towards Billy’s hands. It acted like it was alive and I was reminded of that scene in
The Blob
where the old man pokes the meteorite with a stick and it cracks open, the alien jelly sliding up the stick and engulfing his hand.

Billy let go of it before something like that happened and the tentacle sucked in the string of goo like a kid with a ribbon of snot, taking the broom with it. Both disappeared out through the hole in the door. For another minute or so we could hear the other tentacles rooting about in the living room and then silence. The blue glow winked out. By that time, Billy and I were huddled with Bonnie and Iris by the stove.

Ten minutes later, the thing was still gone.

“Must have needed a broom real bad,” Iris said and Bonnie broke into hysterical giggling that was about as close to the sound of full mental collapse as anything I’d ever heard.

And the night was still young.

13

About an hour later we heard the horn. It sounded in the night, shrill and insistent. One long beep, followed by two shorter ones. At first, I thought it was the things out there making some kind of weird noise, but it was just a car horn. Five minutes later, it repeated the long beep followed by the two short ones. I don’t think any of us thought it was accidental by that point.

“It’s a signal,” Bonnie said. “Somebody’s trying to signal us.”

“Yes,” I said, because it could be nothing else.

We said no more about it. I had a cigarette with Bonnie, and Billy sorted through the refrigerator until he found a longneck Bud. He sucked it down in one long pull, wiping foam from his mouth.

“Now I feel human,” he said.

The horn sounded again and we all tensed. Somebody obviously needed help and, as silly as it sounds, there was almost a desperate tone to the beeping. The horn kept sounding at five-minute intervals. It put us all on edge. God knew we had enough on our plates about then. We weren’t discussing what was going on and I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. We were just waiting, maybe hoping it would all go away and we could put the pieces of our lives back together. The idea of that seemed even more terrifying to me than waiting for the things or the cables to come for us because it meant going back to a normal life without Kathy. It meant accepting her loss. It meant going on, struggling forward without her and I honestly didn’t think I had the heart for it.

The darkness held outside.

I think I was waiting for the moon to come out or for the stars to show. That would have signaled an end to hostilities, I figured. One of my greatest fears was that the darkness would never end. That dawn would come but the sun would never rise. That we would be forced into the existence of moles, of night scavengers who would never know again the light of day. The idea was horrifying. And being a science teacher, I knew that if the sun did not rise day after day after day, there would be no photosynthesis. The plants and trees would no longer process carbon dioxide and release breathable oxygen. I had an image of a dying, dark Earth, shrubs and forests and ferns and flowers all dead and withered, humanity suffocating on its own toxic by-products.

The horn sounded again.

“Why don’t they fucking quit it already?” Bonnie said. “We can’t help ’em any more than we can help ourselves.”

She was right in a way, but Billy and I kept looking at each other and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: whoever was out there needed help and if we didn’t go to them we could hardly call ourselves human. There was death out there. But I feared that less than the idea of living with myself knowing I could have done something to help someone in need. The teeth of guilt are much sharper than any sword.

“I wonder if it’s someone we know,” Billy said, not a question.

“Could be,” I said. “If it was me out there, I’d want someone to help me.”

Bonnie was watching us both by that point. “Don’t even fucking think of it. It’s too dangerous. We need each other. Nobody’s going out there.”

The horn sounded again and I flinched.

“Nothing out there,” Iris said, her mouth stitched in a scowl. “If you tell yourself there’s nothing out there, then there isn’t.”

She was losing it so nobody commented on that. We just sat there. That was the worst part of it all: waiting. I knew the horn was going to sound again and when it did, I was going to scream. I didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t
bear
to hear it.

But I heard it. We all heard it.

“Fuck this,” Billy said. “Jon, you got any weapons around here? An ax? Anything useful?”

“I got a few things out in the garage,” I said.

“No,” Bonnie said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Billy sighed. “What if that was you out there?”

“Then I’d get out of the fucking car and get somewhere safe.”

“What if you were injured and you couldn’t?”

She glared at him, but slowly her face softened. Bonnie was a good person. Despite certain malfunctions of character, she was inherently a good person. She was very kind when it came down to it. “All right,” she finally said. “Go then. Just be careful.”

She kissed Billy before we left and I could see that she really didn’t believe she’d see him again. We took one of the flashlights and went out to the garage. Billy took the riot gun Bonnie had swiped from the patrol car. I took a hatchet and unscrewed the handle of my push broom. I sharpened the end of it until I had a serviceable pike.

Then we walked out into the darkness.

14

There were cables everywhere. They dangled down like creepers in a primeval forest. Just the sight of them in the flashlight beam made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. Billy and I moved slowly, but we did move. We heard the horn again and it was coming from down the block. We began the terrible walk in its direction. The cables were inert, dead things. I knew they weren’t alive, not in the earthly sense of the word. They simply reacted when you touched them. Still…when we got too close to them, they trembled slightly as if they could feel us, sense our body heat or the vibrations of our footsteps.

We gave them a wide berth whenever possible.

As we walked, I wondered about it all. Once they had stripped away all the people—and all the native animal life for all I knew—and the world was empty, what then? Did they have a use for the planet? Were they snatching people off for study or was it a means to an end like miners stripping the rainforest to get at the valuable minerals beneath? What did they want exactly? And while I was at that, I wondered about the big one: who exactly
they
were.

While I was lost in thought, blindly following Billy’s silhouette and the path of light he carved out for us, I nearly stumbled into one of the cables. It was close. I came within a foot of it and it began to shudder at my closeness. I thought it was moving for a moment, but it wasn’t the cable but what was attached to it: bats. Dozens of ordinary, garden-variety brown bats. They were trapped on the cables, webbed in goo, flapping their leathery wings out of fright. I saw what had brought them in—the cables seemed to be covered in bugs of all sorts, mostly moths. Maybe there was something sweet about the secretions that attracted them.

Billy stopped just ahead. “It’s going to get dicey now,” he said.

How right he was. The cables were like a thicket of saplings ahead of us, dozens upon dozens of them waiting to snare the unwary. There was little more than a few feet among many of them. A forest of human flypaper. We moved forward and it was like threading through the spokes of a bike tire. We proceeded slowly, cautiously, both painfully aware of what would happen if that mysterious wind blew up again.

Billy would shine the light about, finding the safest route, and then we would push forward, moving like men tiptoeing through a mine field. Ten minutes into it, I was soaking wet with sweat.

The horn sounded again and we were getting closer to it.

I was worried about what we would find when we got there. Neither Billy nor I had any medical training if it came to that. And the idea of trying to transport injured people through the jungle of cables was simply ridiculous. I didn’t know what we were going to find and I think my greatest fear was that we would discover an empty car and realize we had been baited in.

The horn sounded again.

Billy stopped now and again to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but other than that he kept us moving. When the horn sounded next, we were practically on top of it. The cables had thinned considerably by then and we weren’t in any immediate danger. Billy played the light around and I saw that we were very near the Andersen house at the end of the block where I had been earlier with Al Peckman. In the flashlight beam, I saw hedges, a bike abandoned in a yard, a newspaper on a porch waiting to be read…normal, mundane things that seemed so unbearably threatening now.

“HEY!” Billy called out. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

The horn sounded again and I nearly jumped out of my skin we were so close to it. We moved down the street, examining each parked car we came to. The light found them in the encompassing, crowding blackness and each one was empty. Several times, as Billy moved the spoking beam of the light about, I could have sworn I caught a momentary glimpse of a nebulous black shape pulling away. It had to be my imagination and I told myself so, but as night-black shadows jumped around us, I could not convince myself of it.

“There,” Billy said and his voice sounded dry as dirt.

It came out of the darkness slowly as we approached it like a sunken ship on a seabed—an SUV that had jumped the curb and smashed into a telephone pole. The front end was bashed in. I could smell oil and antifreeze. Cables dangled to either side of it, blocking the doors. Another was coiled on the roof.

“Shit,” Billy said.

Shit was right. There was no way for us to open the doors without getting caught ourselves. We discussed smashing in the rear window, but that was tricky because about two feet of the cable on the roof hung over it. That wasn’t going to work. The side windows were an option, but they were awfully damn close to the cables. We just stood there, thinking it out, knowing we had to do something.

One of the windows unrolled a few inches. I saw a woman’s frantic face peeking out. “Help us,” she said. “We’re trapped. I have children in here. An injured man.”

Getting them out was more imperative than ever.

Billy had her turn on the SUV’s headlights to illuminate the area. It was something. I knew there was only one thing to do. I took the flashlight and jogged down a couple houses and came back with a rake I had seen leaning up against a fence. When Al had gotten stuck on that cable and I tried to pull him loose, the cable had moved with him like a rope hanging from a tree. I was counting on these to do the same.

Billy saw what I was doing. “Watch it,” he said.

I caught hold of the cable with the tines of the rake and slowly pulled it away from the door. “Okay!” I said. “Get out of there now!”

The door opened and Billy helped two pasty-faced kids out, a boy and a girl who were still wearing pajamas. Their mother—or who I assumed was their mother—got out next. The cable was trembling a bit as I held it and the woman got the kids well away in case I lost control of it. Billy went in and helped her husband out. He had banged his head pretty good and there was dried blood all over the left side of his face. It looked like his arm was broken. As Billy got him out of there, he was very groggy. He was also wearing a brown UPS uniform.

When he was clear, I released the cable.

The woman introduced herself as Doris Shifferin and her kids were Kayla and Kevin. The man was not her husband but the guy from next door whose name was Roger. He had gotten them away from their neighborhood, which was a maze of cables, but when that wind kicked up, he lost control of the SUV. And here they were.

“You took a pretty good knock,” Billy told him. “But we can fix you up, I think. First, let’s get the hell out of here.”

We didn’t make it ten steps before something came out of the darkness at us. It was fast. Incredibly fast. A black shape that swooped right over our heads like some immense bird. I knew then that what I had seen pulling away from the light more than once was not my imagination. It came again before we had time to recover from the first encounter.

“Get down!” I told Doris and the kids. “Get your heads down!”

The kids didn’t say a word as she pulled them to the ground and held them tightly to her. I thought they were both in shock. I figured if we could get them back to the house and get some food in them, give them a safe place to rest, they would be okay. But that wasn’t going to be easy. The shape came out of the darkness like a bat and in the illumination of the SUV’s headlights, I saw something like a flying black hood, swollen and elongated. My first impression was that it looked much like a folded-up umbrella, except that it was bulbous and nearly the size of a man.

I ducked when it came again and it swooped within three feet of Roger, who stood there, dazed and confused, half out of it from his head wound. Billy fired at the hood, missed, racked the pump on the riot gun and fired again. He hit it. Just before it disappeared into the darkness, I saw it jerk as the buckshot bit into it.

I told Roger to get his head down and when he didn’t listen, I got up and made to take him down. But I never got to him. The hood beat me to it. It came out of the night with a smooth, sleek velocity and engulfed his head and upper body, closing over him like the trap of an insectivorous plant. The hood opened, looking very much like an umbrella unfolding and then folding back up as it gripped him. I could clearly see the architecture of ten or twelve bony appendages beneath the skin radiating out. They ran from midline of the hood to the very bottom, a slick webbing of black tissuelike material connecting them. The entire creature was shiny black like wet neoprene and had a ring of brilliant red eyes near the apex of the hood itself.

Roger made a grunting sound as it closed over him.

Doris screamed and Billy, with a knee-jerk reaction, brought up the riot gun and made to fire before I knocked the barrel away. For a second there, it looked like he was going to turn it on me, but that was the terror and stress and shock of it all taking hold of him.

I brought up my pike to spear the thing and as I got closer the eyes of it went from bright electric red to the color of fresh blood. They seemed to bulge in their sockets. I jabbed it with the pike again and again but I couldn’t get any purchase. It was much like the cable I tried to cut, made out of some glossy, glassy sort of material the sharpened end of the pike glanced off without causing any damage. But I got a reaction out of it—the skeletal appendages opened like the fingers of a hand and then it turned itself inside out, protecting its eyes with a cloak of its own flesh. I saw its crimson underside quite clearly. The sticklike appendages were set with long, lethal-looking spikes that had impaled Roger and now withdrawn. But he was still held by a suckering orifice that had swallowed his entire head. He was wet with blood from the many spikes and I thought he was dead.

Then the hood covered him again and before I could do much more than gasp, it rose into the air with him in tow.

There wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it.

And we didn’t have the time because something gigantic was hovering above us, maybe fifty feet up. We wouldn’t have seen it at all, but like with the cyclops, a single orb of light irised open and flooded the world with dull pink light. It was like some immense pod or shell with what appeared to be hundreds of jointed, narrow limbs sprouting from it. Each was roughly the thickness of a telephone pole and probably three times as long. Whatever it was, I don’t think it was the same as the cyclops. It hovered up there and I expected it to drop down on us, but it didn’t. It just turned its glowing milky eye on us and held us in a beam of pale pink light.

The hood moved up towards it with Roger in tow and then flew up into a central diamond-shaped chasm on its underside. The hood, as I said, was nearly as big as a man, but it was dwarfed by the colossal pod up there. It looked like a pea next to a shoebox.

That’s when I saw that surrounding the chasm were what looked like countless pulsating polyps clinging there like remoras on a shark’s belly. They were hoods. What might have been hundreds of them. Several detached themselves and swooped over our heads. The air was filled with them. Billy fired again and again. Whether he hit them, I don’t know. One of them came at me and it would have had me, too, but I thrust the pike at it with everything I had and felt it sink into something—the suckering orifice beneath, I thought—and the hood made a sort of electronic squealing sound and hit the ground. It couldn’t seem to fly. It skidded along the pavement, jetting around like a squid.

We got the hell out of there.

Billy led the way and we got Doris and the kids between us. I had no idea where we were going, but Billy seemed to know. The hoods dipping down at us, he led us back into the forest of cables where things were too tight for them to follow. It was good thinking and I’m pretty sure it saved all our lives.

Once inside the depths of the cables, we moved slowly and cautiously again, waiting for them to reach out and snare us.