Blackout (3 page)

7

My mission, as it was, had been a complete failure. My wife was still missing and I hadn’t been able to alert the authorities or get help of any kind. All I brought back with me were new fears.

It calmed me to see Piccamore.

It was alive with flashlight beams and battery-powered lanterns. Candles were burning inside houses. There was activity and I knew Al had really lit a fire under a lot of asses to get people motivated like that, especially in the middle of the night. The best thing was that there was a patrol car parked in front of my house. I felt instantly relieved. I sighed as I pulled to a stop.

Al was there along with Billy and Bonnie Kurtz and Ray Wetmore. I caught sight of half a dozen other neighbors in the glow of a lantern. Paula Renfew was there, so were David and Lisa Ebler and their boys. I passed by them and went over to Al and the cop. He was a big bull of a fellow with a bald head and a neck like a pine stump. He introduced himself as Sergeant Frankovich and began pelting me with questions.

“So, you can’t say that she did go outside,” he said.

“Well, she had to,” I told him, “since she’s not in the house. And the back door was open.”

“Sure,” he said. He entered the pertinent stuff on an iPad and looked around in the darkness. “This is a mess. A real mess.”

“How long do you think it’ll be until the power’s back on?” Bonnie Kurtz asked him.

In the glow of Al’s lantern, he looked at me and I saw something in his eyes that seemed to say,
never.
He smiled at Bonnie and told her he did not know. She complained that she had a freezer full of meat and there was going to be hell to pay if it all went bad.

“If it goes bad,” Billy said, “we’ll buy some more. Quit your yapping already. We got bigger fish to fry here.”

She came over to me and clutched my arm. “I’m so sorry, Jon,” she said. “We’re all worried sick about Kathy. I know she’ll turn up. She has to.”

The way she said it made me think she didn’t believe it would happen at all. The tone of her voice was reserved for funerals when you told the widow what a good man her husband was and how the world was a worse place for his absence. I didn’t blame Bonnie because I felt very much like a widower. I didn’t honestly think I was going to see Kathy again either and my greatest concern was not for what I had possibly lost but how I was going to tell Erin that her mother was gone. I would call Italy only when I was certain there was no hope.

And then I thought:
And who’s to say all this is localized? Maybe it’s national or even fucking global.

But I wasn’t going there. Not just yet. I didn’t really know what was going on and I wasn’t about to charge into any of it with a defeatist attitude, despite the fact that my optimism was bottomed out and dragging its feet.

Iris Phelan was there in her bathrobe demanding to know what was being done about it all and asking Frankovich if he would look for her missing cat.

“Mitzy is always there when I open the door but she wasn’t there tonight,” Iris said. “I don’t like it. It’s not right.”

Billy Kurtz told her not to worry. “Cats are smart, Mrs. Phelan. Don’t worry. Once the hubbub has died down, she’ll come back. Cats are like that.”

“Sure,” Bonnie said.

Ray Wetmore was blaming it all on the ineffectiveness of the town fathers. He told anyone that would listen—and nobody wanted to—that if he was on the board, an outage like this would have been taken care of “lickety-split.” “See,” he lectured, “the problem is accountability. Those bums on the council want to sit on their fat white behinds and rake in the cash from their rich benefactors. They don’t want change. They don’t want to take action. The idea of stirring the waters of the status quo gives them the cold sweats. That’s why they don’t want me involved in the process and have fought tooth-and-nail to keep me out.
I’m
progressive.
I
embrace change.
I
thumb my nose at the rich and their underhanded scheming.
I’m
for the people.
I’m
for the majority.
I’m
a man of action that demands accountability!”

“Here, here,” Billy Kurtz, who was half in the bag, said. Ray was the only one that didn’t catch the sarcasm beneath his words that was so thick you could have sliced it like cheese.

Ray was getting worked up. “The power should be on by now! If I was on the council—and you can bet your sweet fucking bippy that I’m
going
to be, hell yes—I would demand to know what’s going on! I would demand to know why action hasn’t been taken! I would personally crawl down the throat and up the ass of everyone from the super of the electric company to the guy throwing the switches at the power plant! Every lineman and every desk jockey at city hall would know my name and when they saw me coming, brother, they’d know I meant business!”

“Praise Jesus!” Billy said, toasting him with his beer.

Frankovich looked stunned. It was easy enough to see by his face that he was of the mind they had enough goddamn trouble downtown without Ray Wetmore getting involved.

“Well, I’m sure everyone is doing everything they can,” he said.

“I hope they are,” Ray told him. “God in heaven, I hope they are.”

Billy belched. “You tell him, Ray! You give it to him! Amen, brother!”

“Knock it off,” Bonnie said to him. “Just knock it off, you idiot.”

He saluted her and belched again.

Frankovich said he had to get back to the station, fielding about a dozen questions as he walked to his patrol car. I caught him before he got in and he complained to me how the radio wasn’t working.

“I was just down there,” I told him. “There’s no one. There’s nothing.”

“Mr. Shipman, I want you to relax. We’re going to do everything we can to find your wife. People just don’t disappear into thin air except on TV. I’ll get the wheels rolling on this.”

“You don’t understand. There’s no people downtown. They’re all gone.”

In the light coming from inside the car, I could see his face was pinched and sweaty. “It’s going to work out, Mr. Shipman. One way or another, it’s going to work out.”

“No, you don’t get it. You don’t understand—”

He hopped in the patrol car and pulled away and I knew then it wasn’t that he didn’t understand, he just didn’t
want
to understand. He was going through the motions because he really didn’t know what else to do. What I sensed in him I sensed in the others. Instinctively, and perhaps psychically, their backs were up. They were feeling something they could not adequately put a name to and it was easier to pretend business as usual than to face the dark truth of what was closing in around them. God knew I felt it, too. It was thrumming inside me like electricity. I could almost feel the noose that encircled us gradually being tightened.

There was a flash of light behind me and I turned quickly, only to discover that Al Peckman had dragged his portable fire pit out into the front yard. Flames were burning bright in it. It threw a lot of light and a lot of warmth. It was very comforting. The Ebler boys had hauled over a nice stack of wood. Everyone pushed closer into the ring of light.

“Hey, might as well turn a bad thing into a good thing,” Al said, dragging out a cooler of beer and pop. “Who’s for roasting marshmallows and burning a couple weenies?”

“I’m already there,” Billy Kurtz said, helping himself to a beer.

A lot of beers made the rounds at that moment. There’s nothing more soothing to the human beast than the protection of fire and the mellow buzz of alcohol. I stood off in the darkness with Bonnie, not knowing what to think. I found myself studying the faces of everyone in the firelight. In the flickering orange glow, they stared into the flames, lips drawn into straight lines. They did not speak and they did not move. These were the faces of savages looking at the only true god they had ever known—the one that lit their world, kept the beasts at bay, and cooked their meat. They were transfixed by it, pulled together by its light and heat. Now that technology had failed, they returned to the old god of fire to keep the shadows away.

“I got an idea,” Billy Kurtz said. “Let’s make a picnic of it. Have ourselves a regular clambake. Let’s get some picnic tables out here and a couple more fire pits. We got a lot of steaks and chops that are going to go bad if the juice don’t come back on soon, so let’s eat our fill.”

Everyone else loved the idea. People were talking and laughing again. They were released from their grip of superstitious terror. They all thawed and got into the spirit of things. All except for me. I was seeing beyond it all and maybe thinking too deeply, but what they were doing seemed like some kind of festival to propitiate the pagan gods of darkness. I was probably reading too much into it, but maybe not.

“Are you in the mood for a party, Jon?” Bonnie asked me.

“No, not in the slightest.”

“Me either.”

I wasn’t in the mood for much at all. I was thinking of Kathy and I was thinking of Erin in Italy. I couldn’t think of anything else. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there hoisting beers and gnawing on T-bones and chops while my world crumbled around me. Besides, there was no room for food in my belly. It felt like a great brick of dread had settled in there.

The party never really got going because we saw lights coming in the distance and then there was a horrendous crash and the festivities ground to a halt.

8

We all heard it, of course.

In the dead silence of the town, it was like thunder. I jumped in my pickup with Al and Bonnie. I drove as fast as I could down Piccamore and hung a left onto Maisey Avenue where we had seen the lights coming from. The darkness was just as thick, just as impenetrable as before and maybe even more so. I saw lights ahead and pulled the truck to a stop at the curb.

“It’s the cop!” Bonnie said.

And it was.

His car was flipped right over in the middle of the avenue like it had been picked up by Godzilla and then dropped out of boredom. There was oil and gas leaking from the wreckage, shattered glass, strips of trim, and assorted shards of metal thrown over the pavement. One of the headlights was still on, the other was broken.

“We need to get an ambulance over here,” Al said.

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Bonnie snapped at him. “Light a fucking signal fire?”

I climbed out of the cab with my flashlight and Bonnie followed. Al came, too, but only after he saw that we were both fool enough to go out into the dark. It was obvious he wasn’t real keen on the idea. I didn’t like all that gas. I was picturing one of those conflagrations you see in the movies where cars explode like they have napalm in their trunks. I knew nothing like that would happen, but it was still dangerous. Bonnie at my side, we kneeled down and looked inside the patrol car. Frankovich wasn’t in there. There were spiderwebbed sheets of glass lying about and the seat belt looked like it had been slit in half by a knife, but that was about it.

“He must have crawled free,” Bonnie said.

It was possible. I wasn’t buying it, but it was certainly possible. Some little finger of dread was worming inside me, but I ignored it. What else
could
have happened? There really was no other explanation. While Ray stood there, looking extremely ineffectual, Bonnie and I circled the car, searching around in ever-widening arcs as I had when I looked for the guy with the grocery bag earlier. We found exactly nothing. Side by side, we stood there in the middle of the road not saying a thing, just staring at the wrecked car.

“He must not have been injured too badly,” Bonnie finally said. “Maybe he was dazed or something.”

“Sure.”

“The only problem is how it happened. I mean, there’s no other cars, there’s nothing in the road. What could he have hit to flip over?”

Which was exactly what I was thinking and maybe secretly hoping no one would mention. It was always possible, I suppose, that he had been going too fast or maybe he turned sharply to avoid something. But there were no skid marks in the road. There wasn’t anything to indicate trouble.

“Well, this is one for the books,” Al said to us. “He’s gotta be somewhere. He couldn’t have vanished.”

“I heard them screaming and when I got outside they were all gone,” I said under my breath, remembering what the grocery bag guy had said.

“What?” Bonnie asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

Al was staying firmly in the headlight beams of my pickup. He did not stray from their protective illumination. I had a feeling that three men could not have dragged him away into the dark. He was rooted to the spot. He had that same look on his face when I turned out the flashlight earlier and then turned it back on again—abject terror.

We examined the car one more time. There were deep indentations in the door that looked like scratches. Either Frankovich hit something or something hit him. Bonnie was down on her knees again. She came out with a riot gun.

“Hey,” Al said. “That’s police property. You’re gonna get your ass in trouble, lady.”

“It might come in handy,” she told him and I figured she was right.

We heard a sound like wire being unreeled and something hit the car. Both Bonnie and I jumped back and Al let out a little cry that was high and childlike. I saw what it was, but I had to put my flashlight beam on it just to be sure.

“Is that…is that a power line?” Al said.

I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”

I didn’t know what the hell it was. It was a black cable that was very shiny like wet rubber, though I was certain it was some type of metal. It had dropped from the sky. About four feet of it was curled up on top…well, on the
bottom
of the overturned patrol car. It trembled slightly like there was some sort of energy pulsing in it. It was weird, but it didn’t look terribly threatening. I followed its length up into the ebon sky. My light could only make it about fifteen feet or so in that viscous blackness. The cable disappeared up there. It was hanging from something, but whatever that was, I could not see.

“What the hell is that?” Bonnie asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not any kind of line I’ve seen before.”

“Looks kind of like TV cable or something.”

It did, only much larger. A cable that had roughly the same circumference of a man’s wrist. As I played the light over it, I noticed there was a repeating pattern of tiny holes set within it. The more I looked at it, the more confused I got as to what its actual purpose could possibly be. The only thing I knew for sure was that it looked a hell of a lot like the black, snakelike thing I had seen in my backyard. I was getting a really bad feeling about it.

“Hey!” Al suddenly said.

We turned and another cable had dropped not five feet from him. It dangled there, the blunt end of it about six inches off the ground. My guess was that the other one would have been about that long, too, if it wasn’t coiled on the patrol car.

“I don’t like this,” Bonnie said. “It’s too…on purpose.”

She was right. There was nothing remotely accidental about these things. Whatever their purpose was, it was surely not coincidental. I noticed the other one over by Al was trembling slightly as well. What did that mean? What the hell did it mean? Kathy was gone and one of those things had been in my backyard and had dragged over the roof of the garage. Now Frankovich was missing and here were two more of them. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t see a correlation here.

“We better get back,” I said, dread rising beneath my words like helium.

The cables scared me and I was not exactly sure why.

Al had picked up a piece of trim and he was prodding the cable nearest him with it. It moved, swaying back and forth, but that was about it. He kept jabbing it.

“Well, it ain’t dangerous or anything,” he said.

“Just leave it alone,” Bonnie told him.

But there’s something about the male of the species, isn’t there? When a woman tells a man not to do something, it seems to be the first thing he does. We do it when we’re boys and it doesn’t always get any better when we’re men. True to form, Al kept prodding it until it was swinging back and forth like a bell rope.

“Al, come on,” I said. “Enough. Leave it be.”

Bonnie and I started back to the truck and he laughed at us as if we were fools to be afraid of a little old cable hanging in the air. To prove how foolish we were and maybe how fearless he was, he poked it with his finger. “See?” he said. “It don’t bite. It don’t bite at all.”

“Al…” Bonnie said, but it was too late.

He grabbed it with his right hand and seized up immediately, his eyes going wide and his mouth hanging open. For a second there, I thought maybe it
was
a high-power line and he had just gotten zapped. But that wasn’t it at all. I raced over to him and saw that his fingers were locked around the cable, that a prodigious amount of some clear goo had gushed over his hand. I didn’t know what it was. It was transparent and glutinous like Vaseline. Whatever it was, he was stuck to it.

“I…I can’t get my hand free,” he said with a sick little smile, his face gone yellow and waxy. Drops of sweat had popped on his brow. I could almost smell the fear coming off him. It was sharp and unpleasant. “Jon…
Jon
…I can’t get my fucking hand free.”

I went to grab it myself, to peel him off there, but Bonnie cried, “Don’t touch it!”

She was right. I handed the flashlight off to her as Al became increasingly panicky. His face was covered in sweat by then. His lower lip was trembling and his eyes were shining like wet plastic. I took hold of his free arm and tried to yank him free, but it was no good. He was stuck fast. The line just went with us as if there was no end to it.

Bonnie set down the flashlight and grabbed a section of fender wall that was hanging from the patrol car. She pushed on the cable as Al and I pulled. No dice. I ran over to my pickup with the flashlight. I opened the toolbox in the back and grabbed my hacksaw. We would cut him free. I brought it back over and Al offered me a thin little smile, as if to say,
That’s it, now you’re thinking, boy.
I gripped the saw in both hands and dragged the teeth over the cable. No good. They skated right over its surface. It was like trying to saw glass. I tried it again and then again. The blade was sharp but it didn’t even scratch the cable’s outer covering.

“Wait,” Bonnie said.

She pushed the section of fender wall against the cable to steady and support it. I tried sawing it again with everything I had, but it was hopeless. I don’t know what it was made of, but it was durable as diamond.

The cable began to vibrate.

I saw it, so did Bonnie.

It vibrated and then it jerked two or three times. I thought I heard a sort of electronic humming from somewhere high above us. Al gasped and suddenly he was three feet off the ground, dangling from his stuck hand. He was thrashing and screaming, shouting at us:
“Get it off me! Get it off me! Jesus Christ, I’m hooked to it!”

His eyes were wild and bulging, his mouth drawn into a grimace, his teeth chattering. There were huge sweat stains on his back. Bonnie told him to take it easy, we’d get him free…even though she knew that probably wasn’t going to happen. I had ideas of somehow hooking the cable to the truck and breaking it. Stupid, frantic ideas. Al was out of his head by then. The cable jerked again and he was pulled up another foot. He looked ridiculous, hanging there like a rag doll. Without even thinking, he reached out and grabbed the cable with his other hand to pull himself free.

I saw it happen this time.

As soon as his hand wrapped around it, the cable secreted a copious amount of that clear goo and Al’s other hand was trapped as surely as a bumblebee in amber. He shrieked and kicked, yanking with everything he had, swinging back and forth on the cable like some kind of half-ass Tarzan.

“JON!” Bonnie cried. “DO SOMETHING!”

But there wasn’t anything I
could
do and I think we were both fully aware of it. The cable vibrated again; then Al was towed away into the blackness far above, screaming the whole time. Within seconds, his screams had faded off into the night. If I had to guess, I would have said he was pulled up hundreds of feet if not a thousand or more.

After that, Bonnie and I just stood there, breathing and staring up into the darkness. It was all bad, of course, and we both knew that whatever this was about, we’d never see Al again. What bothered me was that he had poked the cable with the trim and with his finger, but neither had stuck. The section of fender hadn’t either. Nor had the hacksaw blade. What did that mean exactly? It did not exude that sticky stuff until Al had securely grasped it. Had it been the heat of his palm? A chemical trigger reacting to the salt or oils of his skin? It had to be something like that. It just had to be…because otherwise what happened meant that the cable itself was sentient somehow.

Bonnie let out a little cry and I saw not two but three more cables drop from the darkness above us.

There was only one thing to do and we did it: we got the hell out of there.