Rise the Dark (10 page)

J
ay and Sabrina had talked about having a baby. In the months just before Tim's death, they'd spoken of it often. Jay was perhaps more enthusiastic about the prospect than Sabrina had been. She saw the reality of it in a different way than he did. Time she needed to devote to her business would vanish with the ring of the phone and the report of an outage, Jay heading out the door and leaving her a single parent. Why rush into that? They had time. She'd said that over and over again, reminding him of their youth, of the expansive horizon ahead. Plenty of time.

That was before they went to the closed-casket funeral for her brother.

Time changed that day. Time changed in a hurry as she stood in the receiving line that was not so far removed from the receiving line of her wedding and accepted condolences instead of congratulations, a large photo of her grinning, adolescent-humored brother at her side. His remains just below.

She'd never seen the way he'd looked at the end. She'd asked, but Jay refused to speak of it. It didn't seem like the sort of thing you pushed. Not with someone who did the same work, certainly. However he had looked—and it had to be terrible, she knew that—it would have been more than a horror for Jay. It would have been a possible future.

They had stopped speaking of the baby then. A topic once omnipresent in their lives gone in a flash, just like the uncle the child would never know. There was the unspoken but absolutely shared knowledge of how easily it could have been Jay, Sabrina left a young widow and, if they'd had a baby, a single mother.

She wondered, in private moments, if that was the reality she'd considered the whole time, if the funeral she hadn't allowed herself to envision for fear of making it real was not her brother's but her husband's. And so her business and their youth became the most convenient reason, but not the real one. Single-parent nights were one thing, and she'd had no trouble voicing that concern. Single-parent life, though? To tell him of that would have been so much harder.
You'll make a mistake someday. Just like Tim. It will happen, and to pretend otherwise is selfish, Jay.

But he'd come down from the lines, had taken that foreman's job in Red Lodge. Why hadn't they spoken of the child again then?

Time again, that was why. The endless supply of time. They had time to get settled in Red Lodge, they had time to put distance between themselves and the tragedy, time for everything.

Then a man with a pistol entered their home.

Time changed again.

She wondered, if she ever saw Jay again, what would be said about bringing a child into this world. A world that had sent her brother to an early grave and brought Garland Webb into their new home.

You're imagining he's still alive. What if you're all that's left? What if this is the end?

Her brother had been unmarried and childless. Plenty of time for him too. He'd been dead for six months. If Sabrina never left here, that was the end of it. Their parents had been only children, and they'd been dead before they reached forty. Their son had already joined them. Their daughter sat in shackles in the mountains.

She pulled feathers from the dead chickens and piled them beside her, not looking at the birds as she worked. Her fingertips were sore and raw. She suspected Eli hoped for more disgust from her, hoped to find her cowering in revulsion, maybe even vomiting from the smell of the charred flesh, from the fading warmth of the bodies.

Should have picked a dog, asshole,
she thought as she jerked another feather free.
If you knew me even a little bit, you'd have done that to a dog. Then you might have gotten the reaction you wanted. But a chicken? Please.

Eli wouldn't have a dog, though. Not up here where his particular brand of obedience was required. You had to earn obedience from a dog. From the chickens and Garland Webb and apparently from Violet, it came easier.

But there was more to Violet than he knew. Sabrina was sure of that. Violet's obedience with him, which was more disgusting to Sabrina than anything else she'd seen in this place, also seemed questionable. Ironically, this revelation had come in the moment she hit Sabrina in the face with the flashlight. In that instant, she'd been nothing like the demurring follower she appeared to be in Eli's presence, and she was not to be taken lightly.
He
took her lightly—dismissed her entirely, even—and Sabrina wondered about that. What was the great hold he had on her? How had it been achieved?

Violet was older than he was by a decade at least, maybe much more. She had a past without him, and Sabrina wondered what was in it. Who was in it. There were some things about the situation that made a perverse level of sense. Garland Webb and Eli, for example, were clearly predators, the type of people you knew were out there in the world but just never expected to cross paths with.

Violet was a different matter entirely.

There was a metallic clink as a key found the lock on the front door and then it opened and filled the room with daylight and Violet stood there with her strange smile, cheerful as a New England B and B hostess.

“I've got something to make you more comfortable,” she said.

It was a sleeping pad, a Therm-a-Rest like people took on backpacking trips. It
was
surprisingly comfortable, and Sabrina adjusted herself onto it without breaking her pace on plucking duty, watching Violet instead of the birds.

“Why don't you see the truth of this?” Sabrina said.

The older woman blinked. “I'm sorry?”

“I've been kidnapped. I am chained to a wall. You know this is evil. I can tell that. I can tell it because
you
are
not
evil.”

“Please, dear. Just be patient. If you'll just listen to Eli, you'll learn that—”

“Eli is insane,” Sabrina said. “I already know it. Why don't you?”

“Dear…” Violet sighed and shook her head in the manner of someone dealing with an impossible rube. “It's so much larger than what you understand.”

“It's evil,” Sabrina repeated. “And you're not.”

Violet dismissed her with a wave of her hand and turned to go. Sabrina didn't want that; she wanted to engage her, and so she asked a bizarre question, born of her own muddled thoughts.

“Do you have children?”

Violet stopped short. She didn't turn. “Why do you ask that?”

“I don't have any,” Sabrina said, plucking another feather. Her right index finger was bleeding now. “I was never sure I wanted any. Some days, yes. Others…my God, things can go badly for children in this world. I was an orphan. Did you know that?”

“I did not.” She still had not turned. But she hadn't left either.

“Sure was. So I know exactly how bad it can go. But my husband and I talked about it. If things had gone differently, I might have had a baby by now. Would you still be so comfortable with all this if that were true? If you knew a child had been left behind? Is there a point where you'd look at this and admit that it was evil? What if the chicken had been a child, Violet? What if that had been a baby reaching for that fence? Would you still admire Eli?”

“It wasn't a child.”

“If it had been?”

“It wouldn't be. He's not what you think, dear. He's a pacifist to his core. We all are. No harm will come to you here unless you demand it.”

“And what good will come of this?”

“So much more than you know.” Violet turned, finally, and faced her. “The
world
will thank us when this is done. It's an awakening. A desperately needed awakening.”

Sabrina stopped pulling feathers. She held one of the electrocuted birds in her hands and stared at the older woman and thought,
This is the difference. This is what makes her special.

Violet believed. She and Eli said the same things, and in fact he said more of them, but Sabrina felt it was an act with him, a grandiose stage play. When Violet spoke, she
believed,
and the difference was palpable.

“What if he's lying?” Sabrina said.

“He isn't lying, dear. He isn't even speaking. He just listens. The earth speaks, and he listens.”

“Indulge me,” Sabrina said. “Imagine, for one moment, that he is actually a brutal man. Nothing like the pacifist you believe in. What then?”

Violet left the cabin and closed the door behind her. Sabrina stared after her for a few seconds and then resumed plucking feathers. It occurred to her that Violet had never answered the question about children.

J
ay's goal for the day—the most immediate goal, at least—was simply to get through it without attracting attention or questions. He thought the truth was as visible on his face as a sunburn, but he survived the morning without drawing so much as a raised eyebrow.

Then came lunch.

They were running switchgear tests at a substation for one of the company's electrical engineers, a good guy from Ohio who seemed to know the system better than most men knew their own families, and Jay had always liked him, or at least liked him as much as a lineman could like an engineer. That changed at the deli, when the engineer said, “Something wrong with your food, Jay?”

Everyone looked at him. They were all nearly done with their sandwiches, and Jay's was untouched. He'd tried one of the potato chips and barely got it down. When their eyes went to him, all of them scrutinizing his face, he felt a flush of panic.

“You just gotta observe everything, don't you, Pete?” he said. “I've had the shits, that's all. I was hoping not to have to announce it, but I guess you've got to run diagnostics even during the lunch hour. Frigging engineers.”

That got a small laugh and they turned away again, probably more worried about whether he was contagious than whether he was hiding a secret, but still he felt like he'd made a fatal mistake.

He tried to follow the conversation, people arguing about football now, most of the group Broncos fans, Pete a Cleveland Browns fan, which required heckling, and Jay did his best to grin and chuckle in the appropriate places. His mind was far from the restaurant, though. It was back in Billings, in a darkened bedroom with Sabrina.

They'd been married three months when the power went out in their apartment, and he'd started for the phone automatically, intending to call the control center to see if he was needed. She'd pulled him back to bed, her lips against his ear as she reminded him that he was off that day, and someone else could fix this one.

They'd made love in the darkness with a warm summer breeze blowing through the cracked window, and afterward, spent and breathless, he'd been close to sleep when she spoke.

“So what happens to make it do that?”

“It seems like you understand exactly what happens to make it—”

She'd laughed and smacked his chest. “The
outage,
smart-ass. There's no storm tonight. Why'd the lights go out?”

“Could be a lot of things.” He was groggy, drifting blissfully toward sleep, but she was awake and alert.

“Like what? The storms I get. Or equipment failure. But sometimes it's neither. What triggers those?”

He'd propped himself up on one elbow and searched for her face in the black room.

“Squirrel suicide bombers.”

“I'm being serious.”

“So am I. Now, it may be a tree limb blowing into the lines, but limbs are easy to find. A dead squirrel is tougher. They'll get down into the switchgear and chew.” He reached out and pinched the base of her throat lightly, tickled up her neck, giving a ridiculous impression of a rodent's biting sound. Her skin was warm and damp with sweat.

“If that's all it takes, I'm amazed the lights don't go out daily. One squirrel in the wrong place can shut off the lights? One tree limb?”

“Well, it depends on the circumstances. The system tries to heal itself.” He put his index finger on her shoulder. “If your limb falls into the lines here, and it gets blown over to here…” He traced the finger to her other shoulder, beading her sweat on his fingertip. “Then the lights might take one hard blink. That's a transient fault. Brief contact, brief disruption. The system senses that there's voltage leaving the lines and going to ground somehow, and the system is scared of voltage going to ground. It has an automatic recloser that will test this, open that circuit up and see if there's still a ground path for the voltage. If it's a limb that fell and made brief contact, the ground path will be gone, and the lights will stay on. But…” He traced his finger back to her left shoulder. “Let's say the limb stays tangled in the lines. Or the squirrel suicide bomber gets into some switchgear.” He tickled her left shoulder again, and she laughed. “Then the fault is still there, and the recloser will cycle just once more. You'll get two hard blinks, and the next time it's going dark for good. Three strikes and it's out. Because by then, the system will have decided that the problem is dangerous. It kills the current to prevent larger problems. That's when yours truly gets sent into the mix.”

“You really think it's a squirrel that did this?”

He shrugged. “No idea. Clear day like this, equipment failure is possible. Suppose an insulator breaks and two lines touch. If two energized lines touch, say good night for a while. The system does
not
like that.”

He traced his finger lower, down her shoulder, between her breasts, down. He could barely make out her face in the dim room, but the outage had brought a special silence with it, like a snowfall, and their home felt safe and sacred.

“Not all bad,” he said. “People find ways to pass the time without electricity.”

“Sometimes,” she agreed, guiding his hand, “a little darkness is not a bad thing.”

“Jay?
Jay?
”

The voice shook him back into the present, and he looked up and saw that he was the focus of the table's attention again. It wasn't Pete calling to him now but Brett, one of his own crew, who was looking at him with concern.

“You okay, boss? You're kind of pale.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, “I'm okay. Just…just fighting through this. I hope it's not catching.”

He got unsteadily to his feet, picked up his untouched sandwich, crossed the room, and threw it into the trash.