Blackout

16

I was not naïve enough to believe we were safe. The idea that those things out there were simply going to give up on us was ludicrous. Things like them did not give up. Whatever they were—and the jury was out on that one—they were the sort of things that would see the job through. Hoping they would forget about us or decide to spare us was like a dust ball hoping a vacuum cleaner would not suck it up. And there’s a good analogy there somewhere.

We moved down to the basement because it had the fewest number of windows and those it did have were fairly small. There was also another door leading up into the garage so that gave us an exit should we need one. We moved all the food down there including all the dry goods and canned stuff. I figured with the bottled water we could hold out for a couple weeks if we had to…even if the very idea was depressing.

When Doris had the kids tucked in the back bedroom and was sleeping with them, probably wide awake and on watch, Bonnie and Billy and I sat there by candlelight to save on the batteries and tried to hash things out.

“It keeps coming back to the same thing,” Billy said. “Just what the hell are those things and what do they want.”

“They want us, of course,” Iris said.

We were trying to ignore her as much as possible because she was only making sense half of the time. I think she had the start of dementia. Sometimes she would carry on perfectly lucid conversations and offer wisdom and common sense, other times she was talking about people long gone and events long forgotten. Now and again, she would panic and babble on like a frightened little girl. It was hard to know what to make of her.

“They’re machines,” Bonnie said. “That much is obvious. They can’t be anything else.”

“Yes,” I said. “Most of them are.”

“Those hoods aren’t machines. They’re flesh and blood,” Billy pointed out. “They don’t like getting blasted with buckshot. If they were machines, they wouldn’t give a damn.”

“At least the sort of machines we’re used to,” Iris said. “Just imagine the kinds of machines they might make out there, out beyond the stars we know. Think about that. Machines that don’t just react but think. Machines that plot and scheme. Machines designed to travel to the farthest depths of space on voyages that might last hundreds if not thousands of years to collect populations and with the artificial intelligence to get the job done and find their way home again.”

“Like living computers,” Billy said.

Iris just shrugged. “Maybe…but as high above our computers as a laptop is above an abacus. Machines programmed to harvest entire worlds. Just think of it.”

But it was frightening and we didn’t want to think about it.

I had no doubt Iris was close to the truth. If anyone seemed to have an inkling of what was going on, it was her. But that didn’t mean I was up to it. I think we were all worn out and the last thing we wanted to do was sit around and speculate. She kept tossing out her theories, but one by one we stopped talking and just let her rattle on endlessly. After what seemed a good hour, she finally shut up.

And it wasn’t because she was out of words, but because things were happening again. It began with a rumbling that sounded distant and nearly subdued. I remember thinking in the back of my mind that it sounded like a truck rolling over railroad tracks. It was that same sort of thumpety-thump you get used to hearing when you live near a train station. It came and went and we all got very tense. You could almost hear the blood draining from our faces. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the sudden silence was oppressive and unbroken. We knew it was bad, whatever it was, but being human beings, we all hoped it would just go away. At least, that’s what I was thinking.

Then we heard it again.

And again.

And again.

Each time it was closer and the rumbling was more violent. The next time we heard it, it rattled the windows upstairs and made the floor beneath our feet momentarily vibrate. It was the sound of destruction and it was getting closer and closer.

Finally, Billy said, “We better have a look.”

Iris was not saying a thing and Bonnie offered us a very tense shell-shocked sort of look, her eyes huge and glassy, her mouth pulled in a tight line. She said nothing. In fact, at that moment I think she was physically incapable of speech. I followed Billy back upstairs and we crept like thieves in the night. We crossed through the kitchen and Billy pushed open the door into the living room with the barrel of the riot gun. I clicked on my flashlight and panned the light around. The living room was in shambles. The cyclops had destroyed just about everything. We stepped around shattered furniture, broken glass crunching underfoot. We made it over to the missing picture window and heard that rumbling again. Being upstairs, it was much louder now. The house shook and I heard bits of debris falling from the walls.

“Look,” Billy said under his breath.

What I saw was a pod of the sort I had seen earlier. It was moving up the block across the street, a pale pink beam of light scanning the yards and homes and showing me destruction, showing me nothing but wreckage. It was going house to house, tearing each apart. It hovered above the Renfew house, illuminating it with its “eye,” and I could see it was immense. The cyclopses were but smaller, streamlined versions of this monstrosity. Each of them, I figured, was maybe twice the size of your average pickup truck, but the pod was easily a hundred feet across, a gigantic black sphere with literally hundreds of jointed limbs hanging from it.

I saw very clearly how it put them to use.

It studied the Renfew house with its pink orb and then it dropped down on it like some titanic spider. The limbs ended in what looked like threshing hooks. They took hold of the roof and peeled it free in seconds. There was a crashing eruption and the roof—or the rubble it had been reduced to—was torn completely off like the lid from a box. The wreckage was dumped in the yard, a boiling cloud of dust rising up and filling the pod’s beam of light. Several small fires blazed up from the roofless house. The pod moved off slowly to the next house. It had barely left the scene when we saw a dozen cables drop down in the firelight.

We heard screams.

We saw people being pulled up into the sky.

There was no hiding, I knew then. There was no escaping. They could find you anywhere. They had come a long way and they were not going to be denied what they had come for and that was the grim truth of the matter. As the pod moved on, I saw a cyclops come and begin looting the ruins. That was how it worked. The pod tore the houses apart, then the cables came down, and the cyclops searched for stragglers. It was efficient. Very efficient. They could harvest the world that way. A few could hide from them but not any groups or populations. A lone man might have a chance, but how long could you stay by yourself until you starved for company? Human beings are social creatures. We band together. I had no doubt whoever or whatever was behind all this knew that all too well.

We went back downstairs.

There was no point in pretending so we didn’t bother. We told Bonnie and Iris what was going on and how bad things were. Bonnie heard us out, but Iris seemed to have shut down. She just sat there, slumped forward, her head seeming to hang on her skinny neck like a gourd. Bonnie was not easily beaten, but she looked pretty beaten then. She looked from Billy to me, maybe hoping we had a plan, but we didn’t. We both knew we needed to get out of the house. We needed to escape…but escape to where? What place was safe now?

“The only thing I can think of is maybe one of the houses they already went through,” Billy said. “We could sneak into the rubble and wait things out.”

It was an idea and it was the best one I’d heard.

Bonnie nodded. “Okay. It’s our only chance.”

Iris decided to come to life. She lifted up her head, her eyes wide and bright, a grin that looked positively demented opening up her face and making her dentures dangle from her gums. “Come for us,” she said. “Come for us one by one and find us and gobble us up.”

“Stop it,” Bonnie told her.

But she wouldn’t stop. She was like some toy that had been wound by a key and she was bursting with energy, gesticulating with her hands and rolling her shoulders and talking nonstop: “Get us! Get us all! They’ll gobble up me then you and you and you! Gobble, gobble, gobble!” Her eyes were unblinking, glazed with fear. “Nowhere to run! Nowhere to hide! Fish in a bowl plucked out one after the other until there ain’t no fish left!”

“Shut up!” Bonnie snapped.

“Gobble! Gobble! Gobble!” Iris maintained. “And who’s to stop them? Who’s to stand in their way? They’ll take us all and we can’t do a damn thing about it! Gobblegobblegobblegobblegobble—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Bonnie told her.

Iris did. She was wound down again and she slumped back into her chair as if the air had been bled out of her. She looked very old, shrunken, compressed. She made a low sobbing sound in her throat and when Bonnie got control of herself, she tried to comfort her. It was pointless. Iris was gone. Something had given inside her and she was damaged, irreparably damaged. Bonnie tried to hold on to her but it was like trying to comfort a bag of rags. Iris seemed terribly inanimate all of a sudden, an inert mass.

“When do we leave?” Doris said. She was standing in the doorway.

“Soon,” I told her. “We just have to scope out where we’re going.”

We didn’t waste any more time.

We started organizing things: water, food, blankets, first aid, batteries, flashlights and lanterns. We split it all up so no one would have to carry too much. Once we had things ready, we bundled our goods up in blankets and tied them for easy carrying.

“Let’s just go right across the street,” I said to Billy. “The Renfews’ place is burning, but the Petersens’ looks all right. Nice brick house. Pretty solid. Nice furnished basement.”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Billy agreed.

We told Bonnie to wait with Iris and Doris and the kids while we went up top to scope things out. Billy grabbed the riot gun and I grabbed a little Tekna flashlight. When we got back up to the living room, crouching before the missing picture window among the debris, we saw that the Renfew house was still burning. The fire had grown but I didn’t think it was strong enough to reach over to the Petersens’. The good thing was that the fire threw a lot of light to see by. It was easy to sketch out our route over to the Petersens’. The cables were all gone and I took that as a good sign. Beyond a lot of rubble in the street, an overturned car, and assorted junk in the yard, it looked clear and smooth. We could do it. And we could do it fast. I had no doubt about it.

Billy led the way downstairs. I had just passed through the kitchen when the entire house erupted with a dirty pink light and I knew the end had come.