Blackout

15

Doris and the kids were barely holding it together by that point and I wasn’t much better. The children were not just clinging to her, they were practically welded to her so that they almost moved as a single entity. As Billy guided us forward, the entire time talking in a very soothing voice to them how everything was going to be just fine—bless him—I kept a hand on Doris’s shoulder. I think she needed the physical contact and I know I needed it.

The cables trembled as we passed them, but they did nothing other than that but wait. Time was on their side and they knew it. Eventually, after about ten minutes or so, they thinned out. We didn’t breathe any easier because that put us back in the open where we were prey for the hoods. And, true to form, they made their appearance almost right away.

The four of us clustered together instinctively and kept our heads down. Herd mentality, I guess. I assumed the hoods were like lions looking for a stray gazelle and we weren’t about to give them that opportunity. They kept swooping, sometimes flying right at us as if they hoped to spook and separate us.

Finally, Billy said, “There! There it is!”

He shone the light on a parked minivan. I didn’t get it. I understood the need of shelter, but why a minivan at the curb? That would put us in the same position Doris and the kids had been in when we found them. But then I knew, then I remembered as we piled in. Keys. There were keys in the minivan. Billy had pointed them out to me as we checked the cars on our journey.

When the door was closed, I think I let out a long sigh.

Billy, behind the wheel, turned it over and the engine caught right away. “Let them fucking swoop all they want,” he said. “They won’t get us now.”

He pulled away from the curb, turning in the street and pointing the van back towards our section of Piccamore. The lights picked out dangling cables and dead, deserted houses. I saw a woman’s shoe in the middle of the street and I didn’t want to think about what that meant.

The next ten minutes are burned in my memory.

Billy piloted the minivan slowly down the road. He avoided the panic that gripped him as it gripped all of us. It would have been too easy to stomp down on the accelerator and race up the street. He was too careful for that and I can’t say I would have had that much self-control. As he drove, I could see his face in the glow of the dash lights—grim and set, his teeth locked tightly together like someone was digging a bullet out of him. The cables were everywhere and the minivan met them dead-on, bumping them aside like swinging vines. The sight of them brushing against the windows and the sound of them dragging over the roof was almost too much.

We made it about half a block before the hoods started bumping into us.

At first, it was playful, investigatory, as if they were trying to figure out what the minivan was. Then after a couple minutes of that, one of them came screaming out of the darkness and hit the windshield at full speed. It didn’t get in, but the window shattered, hanging there in a sheet of spiderwebbed cracks. Billy couldn’t see through it, so he knocked out a good section with the stock of the riot gun. Just enough so he could get us where we had to go. I think we all knew that if another hood made a run at us, there would be no stopping it.

Billy drove erratically, avoiding the cables now. If one of them got in through the damaged windshield, it would be disastrous. He drove in the street, up on the sidewalk, through yards, anywhere to avoid them as much as possible. The hoods were still out there swooping and circling like moths around a streetlight, but none of them made any further kamikaze attacks.

“Almost there,” he finally said.

I couldn’t see a damn thing and had no idea where we were. My section of windshield was still attached, feathered out with hundreds of diverging cracks and gently swaying with the motion of the minivan. Within five minutes, Billy popped the curb and pulled right into my front yard within mere feet of the porch. I jumped out first and then Billy was at my side. The door opened and Bonnie was waiting for us. We hustled Doris and the kids inside.

We had made it.

We had really made it.

That’s exactly what I thought as I jogged up the steps to get inside myself. I almost didn’t make it. I remember feeling something like a hot wind and I was hit right between the shoulder blades with enough force to knock me right over the railing into the yard.

One of the hoods had me.

It gripped me by the loose skin between my shoulder blades. I couldn’t see it, of course. I was face down in the grass, but I could feel its terrible weight and the pain where its suckering mouth was attached to me. It felt like a thousand red-hot needles had pierced me. I flopped around, trying to reach behind me but it was no good. It had me and it wasn’t about to let go. It was going to fly up with me to that great and evil pod in the sky…and the insane thing was, after a few brief moments of fighting, I was more than ready to accept my fate. I was beaten and I knew it. My body felt heavy and my limbs were rubbery. I remember asking myself what exactly I was fighting for.

What happened after that I can’t really say.

I was out of it. Completely out of it. I felt like I’d been shot up with Demerol. I was just a slab of meat sinking into myself. There were a lot of confused images after that, most of them overlapping one another until none of it made any sense. I didn’t really come out of it until later. And when I did, I was on the kitchen floor. The first thing I saw was Bonnie and Billy staring down at me. Doris was there, too. In the lantern light, their eyes were wide and unblinking.

“What?” I said. “What…what’re you staring at?”

Bonnie giggled. “Sounds like he’ll be all right.”

“Jesus Christ, that was a tight one,” Billy said, wiping sweat from his brow.

“I want to thank you for what you did,” Doris told me. There were tears in her eyes and I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

They said later that I came out of it slowly, asking about Kathy and talking to her as if she were actually in the room. I felt slow and drugged and confused. Apparently, when the hood took hold of you, it also injected you with enough sedatives to put you into la-la land, where you would not fight or cause any undue trouble. Bonnie said the hood grabbed me and we both went over the railing. I remembered that much. Billy went over the railing after us. As the hood made to lift off, he put the barrel of the riot gun up to its head—the top of the hood—and fired three times. The hood released me almost immediately and flew off. Billy figured he’d injured it because it did not fly so well after that. It smashed into the house next door and then got trapped in the branches of a tree.

Regardless, it was over.

They disinfected the wounds on my back with hydrogen peroxide and put a sterile dressing over them. That was the best they could do and I figured it would be enough.

Billy had saved my life.

I wasn’t about to forget that.