Blackout

10

It came right over the town in that inky blackness where you couldn’t see twenty feet in any direction. But we saw it. It gave off a bluish metallic sheen that glimmered and glowed like it was charged with arcing high voltage. It was immense. Though we could only see portions of it, it had to have been wider than a football field is long. And as to the length of the thing, I couldn’t even guess.

It was gigantic, that’s all I knew and that’s all anyone knew.

Everyone stopped dead at the sight of it. Even the migrant families stopped and stared up at it with eyes wide and mouths hanging open. Even though we couldn’t really see much of it, not even a general shape, just that weird blue-black reflection, it mesmerized us the way, I suppose, a deer is mesmerized by headlights. We were all struck stupid. We stared. Nobody spoke. Nobody did anything but look up into the sky like our god was descending from heaven.

I wondered later if it was just curiosity or something more.

It came over the rooftops and if I had to guess, I would say it was at least 300 feet above us, possibly more like 500, its sheer size making it impossible to know. Then, just as it was completely over us, it disappeared. That weird, eerie electric blue light just ceased and there was nothing up there but the same nebulous blackness as before. That it was still there, I didn’t doubt, it was just that we couldn’t see it and I’m almost certain that wasn’t by accident.

“It’s still there,” I heard Bonnie say in nearly a whisper.

And it was. I think we all felt it up there, hovering, poised above us like a spider preparing to drop. The very size and weight of the thing had disturbed the air somehow and I felt something like an increase in pressure as if it were bearing down, compressing the very atoms of the ether around us, creating a very heavy, almost suffocating aura.

“Fuck is this shit about?” I heard Billy Kurtz say seconds after his beer bottle slipped from his fingers and shattered on the sidewalk.

Yes, what indeed.

The migrant people were muttering nervously, but none of them were moving. It was almost like they were afraid to. Some of them were arguing. I heard a baby crying and then a woman screaming. There was a strange tension in the air and I felt it coming not just from the migrants but from my neighbors on the walks and lawns. Something was building. It was like a current had held us together before, connected us and made us one, part of the same human circuit…but now that circuit was broken and the energy was loose and wild and unpredictable.

A few people ran off. A couple of my neighbors started slowly making their way to their houses. A young guy tossed his backpack and fought madly through the migrant crowd, shouting something incomprehensible to the rest of us. But if we couldn’t understand what he was saying, we sure as hell understood what one of the others said: “Gonna start now…just like downtown, it’s gonna start and we’re all gonna be taken…all of us taken up into the sky…”

It was about then, as panic began to break loose among the crowd, that I began to smell something I thought I had smelled before, though not as strongly. It was an acrid, burnt smell like the seeping acid in an Exide battery. It was coming from above, growing stronger, pungent and sharp and nearly choking. I had smelled it before. It had been in the air downtown and again near Frankovich’s overturned patrol car I had caught a slight whiff of it.

But not like this.

This was gagging.

This was enough to make your eyes water.

And that’s when the cables started coming down. Not one or two or three, but dozens. They dropped from the darkness above, unreeling like firemen’s hoses until there were so goddamn many they looked like trees in the firelight—skinny, limbless trees growing up into the sky. They were all black and shiny and in my mind’s eye they were licorice ropes dropped from heaven above.

“Oh my God,” David Ebler said in breathless voice.

“Do you still think we made it up, hotshot?” Bonnie said to him. “Well, do you?”

But David was beyond speech as he staggered back towards his wife and kids. Ray Wetmore just stood there shaking his head back and forth as if he was trying to toss the image from his head. The rest of us were shocked and fearful, but not all that surprised. I know I wasn’t. I figured it was only a matter of time. Everyone was in a precarious predicament because those things were everywhere. They did not reach out and grab anyone. They didn’t have to. Sooner or later, somebody was going to back right into one.

And somebody did.

It was a guy in working duds with a lunch pail in his hand. He was one of the migrants. He tried to slip away out of sheer panic, elbowing his way through the crowd, and one of the cables got him. He got stuck to it and up he went. It almost looked like the crowd had pushed him into it, but I can’t say for sure. All I know is he went up, screaming all the way.

That was it. Pandemonium ensued.

Maybe that’s what the thing above us was waiting for.

The battery smell got stronger and people started scattering and fighting, knocking each other over and down to get away from the cables and many of them stumbled right into them. The smarter ones came into the yards of Piccamore and begged to be let into our houses, to be taken somewhere they would be safe, and we couldn’t refuse them. Many of them had children. But those were the smarter ones, the calmer ones, the more rational of the lot. The others…well, it was sheer herd instinct and they scrambled. I don’t know how many of them got caught on the cables, but it was a lot. The same scenario played out again and again. Somebody would stumble into one and their family or friends would try to get them loose and they’d all go up.

It was horrible.

And I saw it firsthand. It happened to the Ebler family. About the time the migrants started getting snatched in numbers, more cables started dropping around us in the yards and one of the Ebler boys panicked and ran. His mother cried out and David tried to stop him, but he was too fast. He jumped out of the way of one cable and another got him. His brother tried to get him loose and became glued to it. David and Lisa tried, too. I watched them all go up, the entire family, stuck to the cable like flies on a No-Pest strip. We all heard them screaming and whimpering, crying out for help, but there wasn’t a damn thing we could do.

And that’s when the wind came.

There was a blinding flash like an enormous flashbulb had gone off and we were all blinded by it. It came from above, I think, but I can’t be sure. Milliseconds later, there was a wave of heat that swept through the neighborhood. It wasn’t enough to burn anyone, but its warmth rolling over us made everyone gasp. It was like tropical heat blown from a jungle, but desert-dry, lacking moisture. It sucked the air out of our lungs and dried the spit in our mouths. The only time I’d ever felt anything like it was at a Kiss concert when I was thirteen. Among the usual pyrotechnics, four giant flash pots erupted with fireballs and the heat of them rolled through the crowd. This was much like that.

Bare seconds after that, the wind came.

It funneled down Piccamore Way in a great tumultuous rolling storm of dust and debris that slammed into everyone and knocked them off their feet and threw more than a few into the cables, which had been the point, I suppose. The dust settled quickly and we could see people trapped on the cables like bugs on threads of spider silk.

I saw it as I climbed to my feet, helping Bonnie up.

Before the wind came, I was already reeling from the flash. I was dizzy and my eyes overflowed with tears. My feet got tangled up and down I went, right on top of Bonnie. We all went down. And most of us, save Iris, got back up quickly enough…then the wind hit us.

The image burned into my mind is a woman crawling across the pavement out in the street. Her ankle was attached to one of the cables and I could see the entire thing was trembling, vibrating. She crawled forward, sobbing and squealing, dragging the cable with her but certainly not breaking free of it. The cable jerked and she jerked; then it seemed to whip and she came up off the ground and slammed back down with a fleshy impact, the cable making her dance and kick and twitch. Then it started taking her up. A guy grabbed hold of her, shouting, “Eileen! Eileen! Eileen…for God’s sake…” as he tried to pull her free. Somewhere in the process his hand got caught in the goo and he started to go up, too. But he was a strong guy and he wasn’t about to let that happen, so he yanked back with everything he had, tearing the skin from his palm in the process and hitting the ground. The cable went up with Eileen.

I can’t be sure what happened after that. Not exactly. The rest of us made for the houses and some of us didn’t make it. I led the way to my house with Ray Wetmore, Iris Phelan just behind us being guided by Bonnie and Billy Kurtz. We made it up the steps and inside, but judging from the screaming outside, many people didn’t.

We formed up in the living room like frightened mice in a hole, trying to block the sounds of cries and shrieks coming in at us from the streets. I know I could have guided others in, but I think I lost my nerve after the Eblers went up. I think we all did. We were satisfied to hide there in the darkness, to cower and tremble. Our entire world had changed in a matter of hours and we were trying to make sense of it, trying to get our feet under us, trying to orient ourselves to what was going on.

I would have let anyone in that sought shelter.

But no one came and no one called out.

After a while, there was only silence outside—a nearly leaden wall of quiet that was even worse than listening to the screaming. We all waited, not knowing what to do and not even speaking.

It was Iris who finally broke the stillness. She had moved her walker over to the window and she was studying the street beyond, or what she could see of it. “We should have expected something like this,” she said. “All those years they were abducting us one by one. That was our warning. That was our siren call to action, but we ignored it. We ignored it because we were too scared to do a damn thing about it. It was too easy to call those abductees crackpots and crazies…and now here we are. Here we damn well are, fish in a pond. And just like we harvest the sea, they’re harvesting the planet…”