Blackout

17

I think Billy said something. I thought I heard him shout but it was lost in the volume of noise that came at me from every quarter. The house shifted, moved, trembled, and I went down on my ass. I heard a metallic screeching as the roof came off my house and then debris—ceiling tiles, lathing, and joists were coming down and the walls were falling in. It felt like the house was folding up like a card table. I can remember screaming and my voice was insignificant against the roaring of the house coming apart around me.

Then the floor gave way and I was sliding down, down, as an avalanche of shattered Sheetrock fell over me. When the house, or the pile of junk it had been reduced to, stopped moving, I saw flames. I saw dust-clogged beams of light playing through the ruins.

Miraculously, I was still gripping the flashlight. I clicked it on and looked around.

I saw cables.

The pod had passed on to its next conquest and the cables had dropped down. One of them was about two feet from me, tangled on a heating duct that was precariously balancing against a section of wall. I was in the furnace room and I didn’t seem to be damaged despite cuts and bruises. I wasn’t pinned down, but I was not daring to move in case that cable worked its way free.

I heard debris shifting, then voices, several voices crying out in sheer terror, and I knew they belonged to the kids because the next voice I heard was clearly Doris’s.

“NO! NO! NO!” she shrieked. “PLEASE PLEASE DEAR GOD NOT MY CHILDREN NOT MY CHILDREN—”

I saw the kids going up on one of the cables. They were screaming and fighting but it was hopeless. I could see their wet, tear-streaked faces. I don’t think I’ll ever stop seeing them if I live another fifty years. Doris, fired by maternal instinct, was caught on the cable about ten feet beneath them, still thrashing, still shrieking. She disappeared up into the darkness and that’s the last I saw of her.

The cable by me was trembling as if it was hungry to latch onto something meaty. I was not going to give it the chance. I figured that sooner or later it would have been pulled back up, but the idea of waiting there for that to happen was unthinkable. I had to get out. Even if it was dangerous and suicidal, I had to get the hell out of my hole one way or another.

There was only one way and I took it.

Shoving the flashlight in my pocket, I carefully crawled up on top of the furnace itself. It was this huge pea-green forced-air monstrosity that I had been planning on getting rid of for years and replacing with an energy-efficient hot-water boiler. I no longer had to fret about that. I got up on it, steadied myself while keeping an eye on the cable. I pulled myself up a section of duct, shimmying slowly, afraid it wouldn’t hold my weight. But it held me. I got up to the main floor that was cracked open, part of it lifted up six inches higher than the rest. Everything had been so thoroughly trashed, I couldn’t even be sure where I was. Then I saw the smashed sarcophagus of the refrigerator in the guttering light and I knew I was in the kitchen. I sidled up to it like it was an old friend, hanging on to it, remembering only too well the windy autumn day fourteen years previously when Kathy and I had picked it out at Sears.

It was then I smelled cigarette smoke.

I was certain of it. Either someone out there had lit up or a stray pack was simply burning. I was hoping beyond hope for the former. I waited, the paranoia in me increased far beyond normal limits. Reality, at least the reality I had known and taken for granted my entire life, had been turned on its head and I trusted nothing. Nothing at all.

Finally, after about ten minutes, I said, “Is somebody there?”

My voice was loud in the silence where there was no sound save for the crackling of fires and the occasional shifting of wreckage.

“Jon?” a voice said and I knew it belonged to Billy. “Jon…is that you?”

The same paranoia I was experiencing underlay his words. He trusted nothing and no one. I told him it was me, hesitantly peeking my head up over the fridge. He came over right away and plopped himself down next to me.

“I can’t find Bonnie,” he said. “She’s either trapped below or they got her.”

There was nothing I could say to that. “Doris and the kids went up,” I said.

He nodded. “I heard her. I saw Iris go up, too. She wasn’t moving. I think she was already dead.”

“Her heart probably gave out.”

I bummed a smoke from him and we sat there in the ruins of my kitchen, backs up against the Kenmore fridge, not speaking at all. We were both exhausted, both worn beyond acceptable limits. I was thinking that six, seven hours before I was sitting on the couch with Kathy joking about the tattoo Bonnie had gotten on her tit. In that short span of time everything had changed. The neighborhood was barely recognizable, our house looked like a deadfall, and Kathy was gone somewhere I couldn’t even guess at. It was this that was going to be hard to wrap my brain around in the days to come, I knew. That change, complete and irrevocable, had happened so quickly.

“You got the time?” I finally said.

Billy offered me his wrist. I could see his watch was smashed. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Gotta be getting near dawn. It has to be.”

Old-world logic. That’s all it was. It could no longer be applied to the nightmare we were trapped in. I knew the smart thing to do, the reasonable and cautious thing, was to get ourselves somewhere safe. Somewhere underground. Somewhere the cables couldn’t get to us if there even could be such a place. But I knew there was no way Billy would leave, not until he was 100% sure Bonnie was beyond help. And I couldn’t imagine leaving until I knew the same.

So we waited.

Some time later Billy said, “Listen.”

It was the last thing I wanted to do and the very thing I knew I had to do. At first, I heard nothing. Then, a sound of debris shifting like something was steadily crawling in our direction. We both sat up and got ready for whatever it might be. The transition from complete apathy and exhaustion to razor-edged terror was almost instantaneous. Billy bunched up next to me like a fist getting ready to strike. Then we heard a sibilant sound that could be nothing but breathing, a ragged sort of breathing.

Billy climbed to his feet, hunched over but rising slowly as if to make a smaller target of himself. “Who…” he began, then: “Bonnie?”

I was up by then.

I saw a shape pulling itself out of the darkness, a human shape moving on its belly like a weary slug. Bands of firelight painted it orange and then it raised its head and it was Bonnie. For a second there, optimism blazed inside me because I thought it was Kathy. I was glad to see Bonnie, but I couldn’t help hoping it was someone a little closer to my heart.

We went over to her and helped her over near the fridge, which had become a sort of rampart for us. She looked like we did: clothes torn, face smudged with dirt, her hair white from plaster dust. She coughed a couple times and then looked at us, seeming to realize for the first time who we were. Her eyes were translucent, the flames reflected in them.

“I heard voices,” she said. “I kept crawling towards them.” She forced a small, hoarse laugh. “I could use a cold drink. It feels like I could spit cotton.”

I barked out a laugh and Billy forced the fridge open. It made a creaking noise like the door to a crypt. Everything was heaped and scattered inside, but we found bottled water, a block of cheddar cheese, and the leftover steaks from the party. We were quite a sight, I bet. Three desperate, filthy creatures gnawing on cheese and meat in the glow of the fire. As I watched them eat, something told me that I was looking at the future of the race. It was back to the caves. At least for a time.

After we finished eating, we all felt a little more human.

“I say we go back to plan A,” Billy said, “and get over to the Petersens’. We can’t just sit around out in the open like this.”

We agreed with him. He told us to wait and he’d scout it out. He grabbed a burning stick and held it up like a torch. He slipped through the rubble very quietly as if he’d been doing it for most of his life. Bonnie and I waited there, tense and expectant; then about ten minutes later we saw his torch coming back to us.

“Piece of cake,” he said.

He told us there were no cables anywhere that he could see. No cyclops lights in the distance. Maybe those things had pushed on and maybe they were gone altogether. He stood there, waiting for us. That’s how I see him in my mind now. A big rugged guy, his boot up on the overturned stove, a friendly and reassuring smile on his face, the remains of my garage burning behind him. That’s how I’ll always see him.

“I heard something,” Bonnie said. She was looking around with quick, jerky motions like a frightened chipmunk.

Billy cocked his head to hear.

I just listened…and, yes, I heard it, too. A buzzing. Not so much like insects but more like that of a streetlight. The way you can hear them on street corners at three in the morning when there are no other sounds to mask them. It was like that. We heard it, and then it was gone. It seemed to fade in the distance like the buzz of a locust—very loud, then fading to nothing. I didn’t like it. I don’t think any of us liked it. We had all lived on Piccamore Way for years and there was nothing that made that sort of sound.

At least, nothing natural.

I helped Bonnie up. Billy had a very concerned look on his face and I’m sure it matched our own. We got to our feet and Bonnie, still a little wobbly, leaned against me. Then the buzzing sound came back and it was all around us. It wasn’t so much loud as continuous and insistent, an electronic noise that went right up my spine and the reason for it became very obvious.

I heard Billy say, “Shit.”

Somehow, he saw it first. It seemed like there was nothing there and then I blinked my eyes and it was mere feet from him. Bonnie gasped and we both froze up, trembling. Hovering about four feet off the ground by Billy was what looked like an immense brown leather sack, wrinkly yet shiny. It was buzzing. My first thought was that it was harmless, my second that it was the most horrible-looking thing I had ever seen. About the only way I can adequately describe it is to say it looked very much like the brown abdomen of a spider, the spherical rear body section. If you’ve ever seen a particularly well-fed house spider with a large, swollen abdomen, then you know what I mean. It looked like that, spider-ish, save it lacked a cephalothorax and legs…and it was easily fifteen feet across.

And it dangled there like a black widow on a thread of web.

Bonnie let out a cry and I saw four appendages spring out of the sphere. They were long, black and shiny, jointed like the legs of a crab, and they ended in something similar to grappling hooks, each with two gleaming claws or flukes. This all happened in seconds. Billy made to move and the hooks lashed out and seized him, the flukes gripping him like fingers. He was lifted off the ground. He cried out not so much in pain but in surprise.

Bonnie screamed.

A split second after he was hoisted into the air, an orifice opened in the center of the sack. It looked like the puckering mouth of an old lady without her teeth in. The orifice irised open and I saw a bloodred orb the size of a softball that looked as juicy as a fresh cherry. It was an evil thing like the eye of a witch or a demon. A wire-thin beam of red light came out of it. I saw it shoot between Billy’s legs and then it was drawn upward quickly. As it struck him, I heard a sizzling and Billy split right open like a hot dog on a grill. He cried out only once. His back was to us and I was grateful for that. The hooks jerked and Billy was peeled like an orange, his skin pulled back from what was beneath.

I remember Bonnie going to her knees, shrieking.

I remember a mist of blood in the air rolling out at us like a patch of fog, seemingly in slow motion, beads of it breaking wetly against my face. More appendages came out of the thing. They were metal and cutting and I smelled a hot, vile stink like blood boiled to steam. They made a noise like the stitching needles of an industrial sewing machine. I heard a wet tearing, a sound like chicken bones plucked from a boiled carcass. It all happened very quickly. Within seconds, the thing seemed to absorb Billy and vanish into the darkness.

It left behind a steaming pile of white bones.

There was not a drop of blood on them. They had been expertly vacuumed clean.

Bonnie was rocking back and forth, sobbing and hysterical. I dropped next to her, all the cheese and steak I had gnawed on coming out in a hot stinking gush of bile. It took me a minute or two to clear my head and accept what I had just seen, which seemed impossible—in a matter of seconds Billy had been filleted, thoroughly de-boned.

Suddenly, Bonnie jumped to her feet.

She was up before I could stop her. I had no idea what was going on in her head. She had seen not only her world turned inside out but her husband as well—literally—and that kind of trauma can do dangerous, scary things to people. I have no doubt she was unbalanced. That when she saw those cables drop down she didn’t really mean to run at them, to get herself tangled in them, to commit suicide. That she was probably fueled by rage and frustration.

That’s what I like to think.

Once the leathery sack took the remains of Billy away, it must have signaled to the great collector above us that there were more humans below. Regardless, the cables dropped, Bonnie lost it…and well you can guess the rest. She screamed and I think I might have, too. She got stuck to two of them. One had glued her arm and the other her leg. They took her up fast. By the time I even got close, she was disappearing into the darkness high above.

I think I kind of lost it myself.

Kathy was gone. My neighbors were gone. The whole town and state and country and world for all I knew. I had watched our little band of survivors get taken one by one. The worst of it was seeing Billy get taken apart and then Bonnie yanked up into the dark. Like I said, I think I kind of lost it.

I ran around through the rubble, calling out for help, needing to hook up with another human being because the idea of being alone, being the last one, was more than I could bear. And whatever was above—I like collector—maybe was listening because cables began to drop around me. If I had been in my right state of mind, I would have run away, found somewhere safe to hide, but I wasn’t and I didn’t.

The cables were everywhere.

I felt used-up and broken. I found that I was edging closer to one of them, staring at it, fixated on it. I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it.

I touched the cable.

Just with my fingertips, but I did touch it. There was nothing. It felt like cool rubber. I couldn’t imagine anything as harmless as that damn cable. It wanted me to grip it. I know it did. It wasn’t some inert and harmless thing. I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t seem to convince myself of it at that moment.

So I gripped it with my hand.

Yes, then I knew why Al had looked like he had been shocked when he touched it. It had gone from being cool to hot as the jelly oozed out and webbed my hand to it. I can’t say that the heat was unpleasant because it felt very nice. There was a certain tactile pleasure to the thickness of the cable in my hand, the heat of it, the engulfing goo.

I was screwed and I knew it.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get this fucking done with already.”

About two seconds later, the cable vibrated, jerked a couple of times and then it was going up and I was going with it, higher and higher and higher.