Blackout (9 page)

The cables were everywhere.

I felt used-up and broken. I found that I was edging closer to one of them, staring at it, fixated on it. I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it.

I touched the cable.

Just with my fingertips, but I did touch it. There was nothing. It felt like cool rubber. I couldn’t imagine anything as harmless as that damn cable. It wanted me to grip it. I know it did. It wasn’t some inert and harmless thing. I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t seem to convince myself of it at that moment.

So I gripped it with my hand.

Yes, then I knew why Al had looked like he had been shocked when he touched it. It had gone from being cool to hot as the jelly oozed out and webbed my hand to it. I can’t say that the heat was unpleasant because it felt very nice. There was a certain tactile pleasure to the thickness of the cable in my hand, the heat of it, the engulfing goo.

I was screwed and I knew it.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get this fucking done with already.”

About two seconds later, the cable vibrated, jerked a couple of times and then it was going up and I was going with it, higher and higher and higher.

18

The farther up I went, the more scared I became. The idiotic suicidal nature of what I had done really took hold and I fought and thrashed like a trout being reeled up out of the depths. I had no idea how high I was taken. But suddenly I
felt
rather than saw something immense above me. It was then I remembered the little Tekna flashlight in my pocket. I pulled it out and clicked it on.

The collector.

I was being towed up to it. At first, it was just a gigantic dark shape that I again likened to an aircraft carrier. Then as I got closer and closer to it, I could see it in some detail, not the entire thing, of course, because it was just too big. But enough of it to marvel over its alien-ness. Machines on Earth tend to be smooth-shelled things, but this was not smooth. It was knobby and jagged and irregular, looking more like something carved roughly from black-green quartz than anything else. And set in that serrated skin I saw what looked like open manholes that the cables fed into. Dozens and dozens of them. The underside of the collector craft was pitted with them as if it had been worked on by some gigantic drill press. They went on farther than the light could reach. I don’t think the idea of hundreds or even thousands of them is too far off the mark.

The cable pulled me through one of those openings and I felt a sudden pressure as I passed through like I had just breached some invisible membrane. Then I was inside. I couldn’t see much of anything even with the flashlight. It was absolutely cavernous in there. I was still being pulled upwards, to what fate I couldn’t even guess at. I was listening for screams, the sound of all those people that had been captured being horribly used.

But there was nothing.

The silence was ominous.

It seemed I would go up forever, and then there was a sudden hollow sort of thudding sound and it stopped. I was just dangling there. I pointed the flashlight up and I could see the cable fed into a long groove set in a ceiling of that quartz-looking material. There were other cables around me that fed into similar apertures. Then my cable was moving. With dizzying speed it followed the groove above and went on and on. I felt oddly like a garment at a dry cleaner’s, the cable being my hanger and the groove above the sliding track system they use.

There was a sudden low grinding from somewhere in the bowels of the collector and everything shook. I was swinging back and forth on my cable, my stomach in my throat. It came again and I was aware of a trembling seesawing motion. Something was going on, but I didn’t know what. I had the oddest sense that whatever it was, it was not on purpose. Finally, the cable stopped and the goo on my hand became very cold and then it wasn’t there at all as if it had evaporated.

Then I dropped.

It wasn’t far. I fell maybe ten feet into a swirling warm pocket of air that held me aloft but didn’t keep my head from spinning with vertigo. The flashlight showed me I was in a funnel and I was slowly, slowly going down and down and then I was tugged into a tube, still held aloft by the warm air, but now being sucked down the tube whose walls were beaded like the flesh of a lizard. I tried to fight against it, but it was pointless. I could move. I could kick out with my legs and thrash with my arms, but there was no way to stop the forward progress.

Then ahead, the tube opened and I could see some sort of horrible machinery that looked like three spinning wheels with jagged teeth. I panicked and fought, but I was going in there. I was going to be processed like the rest.

And then—

Then I heard that grinding noise again, only it was louder now, echoing through the tube with maximum volume. I was spinning. The collector was moving in fits and jerks and I had the sense that we were falling. Then there was an impact and I bounced around in my column of air, buffeted softly, never hitting anything.

The air stream cut out and I fell to the bottom of the tube.

I felt vibrations and smelled a burning stink that reminded me of blown fuses and melted wiring. It was pungent and sickening. The spinning wheels ahead were not moving. I didn’t know what had happened, but I was certain the collector had seized up.

I wasted no time.

I ran down the tube until I reached the funnel. I could see the opening of it at least thirty or forty feet above. The funnel walls were made of that same beaded material. If it hadn’t been for that, I would never have been able to climb out. It would have been impossible. I climbed up to the lip. It took some time.

Then what?

That was the thing. I didn’t know what to do. I had to find a way out. I could no longer feel a sense of motion and I was pretty sure the collector had either crashed or set down somewhere. How long I had was anyone’s guess. I climbed down from the funnel and found an uneven walkway of sorts, though I’m sure that’s not what it was. I followed it deeper into the collector along a V-shaped trough that was filled with some kind of rancid, slopping waste. I squeezed between high walls and after a time, the passage opened and I was in a room the size of a huge amphitheater. To either side of me were colossal vats or boilers hooked to a maze of pipes that reached above and away.

The room had to have been an easy three stories tall, the ceiling a network of diamond-shaped beams and narrow walkways and overlapping grids. The vats were big enough to boil station wagons in. I walked among them, staring with something like awe at those huge vessels and their snaking tubes and pipes and coiled hoses. I listened to them hissing and bubbling and simmering. They were warm to the touch and looked like gigantic deep-sea squids with all those tubes and conduits twisting above and around and to either side.

That I was in a factory, I didn’t doubt.

And the farther I went, the more obvious things became. It was like being in a human cannery, but instead of fish guts, scales, and sea slime on the floor, there was three inches of accumulated blood, fat, and offal, the by-products of the rendering process. The stench was unimaginable and sickening. The stink of acids and oils, stabilized fats and raw tallow, embalming fluids and preservatives, human grease and hair and bone.

This place was a slaughterhouse.

I stumbled along, my hand covering my nose and mouth as I pushed through an envelope of odors that reminded me a little too much of the smell of a clogged drain—a heavy, meaty odor of blood and tissue and dissolving fat that was moist and nauseating.

As I panned around with my light, I became even more convinced that something had happened, some sort of mechanical failure. Some of the vats looked damaged and the hoses and conduits above were blackened as if from fire. As the smell worsened, I came to a vat that had literally burst open…ribbons of steam were escaping the bubbling witch’s cauldron. They blew in my face in a burning, repulsive wave that almost brought me to my knees. It was the stink of putrefaction, of carrion stewing in its own rancid juices. A rank, foaming stew of something dark and oily and vile had leaked out. There was a great pool of it whose surface was clotted with great islands of creamy-looking fat and gobs of hair.

I couldn’t stand it.

I started running and the vats went on forever. Finally, the air grew chill. Not just drafty, but actually frigid like the wind from an icebox. I pushed on and it got colder. I moved through a high archway and I felt that sense of pressure again as when the cable pulled me through the opening into the collector. Another palpable but invisible membrane or bubble. A blast of arctic air fell over me and made me suck in my breath in quick, short gasps.

I was in a freezer, a cold storage area. Every meat-packaging house has one. Before me were rows upon rows upon rows of what looked like long, heavy plastic bags covered in frost that hung from hooks. I walked among them, looking, looking. When I got up the nerve, I went up to one and brushed away the frost to see what was inside.

I almost went to my knees again.

I knew what I would see, but a dark terror still roiled through me. I was staring at the face of a woman, stretched out, exaggerated, boneless. She had been shaven bald, twined up with wire, and stuck in that heavy transparent bag. Nothing but a package of meat.

I went to the next bag and then the next and the next. Men, women, and, yes, children. I wandered among those sides of human beef, taking it all in, letting the horror fill me like poison until it began to seep out of me. I had no idea how many bodies were in that endless black chamber, but I was certain there were thousands. The entire population of the town at least. Somewhere, I knew, was Kathy and Billy and Bonnie and all the others.

I took out my jackknife and tried to puncture one of the bags. It felt much like polyethylene. I managed to slit it after some sawing and there was a hissing of air either rushing in or out. But the most disturbing thing was that the bag was bleeding. A thin trickle of some pale blue liquid was dribbling from the slit.

I guess I panicked then.

I freaked out.

I backed away from the bag and bumped into another and then flinched, stumbling into yet another. And suddenly it seemed I was lost among them, lost in a forest of icy body bags and they were swinging from their hooks and bumping into me and brushing my back and arms and I fought and pushed my way through, seeing meat locker faces pressed up against the plastic material and feeling their hideous swinging weight. I fell to the ground and crawled on my hands and knees until I was clear of the freezer again.

I made it out of the chamber, gasping and shaking, a raw knot constricting in my belly.

I kept running. I had no idea where I was going. I slipped on the waxy, greasy floor once and plunged into the fetid, stygian depths of some kind of collection pool. A noxious pool of fat and filth and bones breaking the surface like they were clawing their way from quicksand.

The bones were human, of course.

I was pretty much out of my mind by then. My skin felt like it was scummy with human grease. My nostrils were thick with its stink. My flesh was crawling and my belly was filled with tar. I don’t remember much, only running, stumbling, and crawling until I finally fell out of one of the holes that brought me in.

I recall hitting the ground and running from the immense, towering shape of the dead collector.

19

That’s all there is.

That’s really all there is.

I’m sitting on my porch now and looking out at the ruined houses across the street and the gargantuan shell of the crashed and disabled collector beyond. It took out eight square blocks. They were flattened beneath it. In the light of day, it still looks like a gigantic block of quartz, jagged and crystalline, completely lacking any earthly symmetry. It does not even look like a machine. It looks like some kind of crazy crashed asteroid. Even its surface is burnt in places, cracked and broken and punched in with what almost look like meteor impacts. Who sent it and from where it came and how long ago that might have been is anyone’s guess.

Its nature is obvious.

It was an automated factory ship, an extraterrestrial version of a long-liner, a deep-sea trawler. As our fleets go great distances to remote fishing grounds to harvest the depths of the ocean, the collector and its kind go unimaginable distances through the depths of interstellar space to remote worlds to harvest entire populations. The journeys might last a thousand years or ten thousand or ten million for that matter. And like our fleets, now and again a ship doesn’t make it back.

The one I’m looking at will be grounded here forever, I suppose.

As a science teacher, it makes me think. Not just about who might have built it and where it came from and what kind of propulsion might drive it or what sort of software package might do its thinking, but how
long
this has been going on. Maybe I’m reaching, but I keep thinking about the mass extinctions on our planet. There have been five major extinction events. The K-T extinction—Cretaceous-Tertiary—that everyone hears about was the last one. It took out the dinosaurs and the giant sea reptiles and flying reptiles 66,000,000 years ago, allowing for the mammals to rise and man to evolve. Before that, the Triassic-Jurassic event left dinosaurs as the dominant land animals. And before that, the Permian-Triassic event some 250,000,000 years ago closed the Paleozoic era and wiped out 95% of the species on the planet. Before these were the Devonian and Silurian events.

You get the picture.

Life forms disappear from the fossil record with unsettling regularity in the greater scheme of geologic time and I believe another has followed suit.

This has been going on as long as there has been life on the planet. I have to wonder if the fleets of collectors didn’t have something to do with it. I keep wondering what sort of creatures built these things and if they even exist anymore. They might have died out a long, long time ago. Their star system might not even exist anymore. But the machines exist. They keep doing what they’re programmed to do and will until another singularity like the Big Bang destroys time and space and matter as we know it.

Theoretical as all hell, I know. But I
do
wonder.

It would answer a lot of questions.

I’ve been broadcasting on a ham radio setup powered by my generator for six weeks now. I haven’t received a reply. I’m pretty sure no one is left to transmit. I think I witnessed what may some day be known as the Holocene extinction event, which closes out the Cenozoic era. I wonder what will fill the vacuum of man as mammals filled the vacuum of the dinosaurs. What evolved ancestors of creatures out there right now will rise up and dominate the world. Some day in the far distant future, they’ll study the rocks and put together the history of man and the extinction event that destroyed him. Maybe they’ll even be wise enough—unlike us—to know their turn is coming.

Regardless, I’ve lived through the Holocene extinction as I suppose some dinosaurs survived the K-T extinction. In their own simple way, they must have wondered what the hell had happened and where everyone had gone just as I’m wondering now.

Forget the Bible and the rest of that,
this
is the greatest story ever told.

I only wish there was someone left to tell it to.