Blackout

8

We all heard it, of course.

In the dead silence of the town, it was like thunder. I jumped in my pickup with Al and Bonnie. I drove as fast as I could down Piccamore and hung a left onto Maisey Avenue where we had seen the lights coming from. The darkness was just as thick, just as impenetrable as before and maybe even more so. I saw lights ahead and pulled the truck to a stop at the curb.

“It’s the cop!” Bonnie said.

And it was.

His car was flipped right over in the middle of the avenue like it had been picked up by Godzilla and then dropped out of boredom. There was oil and gas leaking from the wreckage, shattered glass, strips of trim, and assorted shards of metal thrown over the pavement. One of the headlights was still on, the other was broken.

“We need to get an ambulance over here,” Al said.

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Bonnie snapped at him. “Light a fucking signal fire?”

I climbed out of the cab with my flashlight and Bonnie followed. Al came, too, but only after he saw that we were both fool enough to go out into the dark. It was obvious he wasn’t real keen on the idea. I didn’t like all that gas. I was picturing one of those conflagrations you see in the movies where cars explode like they have napalm in their trunks. I knew nothing like that would happen, but it was still dangerous. Bonnie at my side, we kneeled down and looked inside the patrol car. Frankovich wasn’t in there. There were spiderwebbed sheets of glass lying about and the seat belt looked like it had been slit in half by a knife, but that was about it.

“He must have crawled free,” Bonnie said.

It was possible. I wasn’t buying it, but it was certainly possible. Some little finger of dread was worming inside me, but I ignored it. What else could have happened? There really was no other explanation. While Ray stood there, looking extremely ineffectual, Bonnie and I circled the car, searching around in ever-widening arcs as I had when I looked for the guy with the grocery bag earlier. We found exactly nothing. Side by side, we stood there in the middle of the road not saying a thing, just staring at the wrecked car.

“He must not have been injured too badly,” Bonnie finally said. “Maybe he was dazed or something.”

“Sure.”

“The only problem is how it happened. I mean, there’s no other cars, there’s nothing in the road. What could he have hit to flip over?”

Which was exactly what I was thinking and maybe secretly hoping no one would mention. It was always possible, I suppose, that he had been going too fast or maybe he turned sharply to avoid something. But there were no skid marks in the road. There wasn’t anything to indicate trouble.

“Well, this is one for the books,” Al said to us. “He’s gotta be somewhere. He couldn’t have vanished.”

“I heard them screaming and when I got outside they were all gone,” I said under my breath, remembering what the grocery bag guy had said.

“What?” Bonnie asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

Al was staying firmly in the headlight beams of my pickup. He did not stray from their protective illumination. I had a feeling that three men could not have dragged him away into the dark. He was rooted to the spot. He had that same look on his face when I turned out the flashlight earlier and then turned it back on again—abject terror.

We examined the car one more time. There were deep indentations in the door that looked like scratches. Either Frankovich hit something or something hit him. Bonnie was down on her knees again. She came out with a riot gun.

“Hey,” Al said. “That’s police property. You’re gonna get your ass in trouble, lady.”

“It might come in handy,” she told him and I figured she was right.

We heard a sound like wire being unreeled and something hit the car. Both Bonnie and I jumped back and Al let out a little cry that was high and childlike. I saw what it was, but I had to put my flashlight beam on it just to be sure.

“Is that…is that a power line?” Al said.

I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”

I didn’t know what the hell it was. It was a black cable that was very shiny like wet rubber, though I was certain it was some type of metal. It had dropped from the sky. About four feet of it was curled up on top…well, on the bottom of the overturned patrol car. It trembled slightly like there was some sort of energy pulsing in it. It was weird, but it didn’t look terribly threatening. I followed its length up into the ebon sky. My light could only make it about fifteen feet or so in that viscous blackness. The cable disappeared up there. It was hanging from something, but whatever that was, I could not see.

“What the hell is that?” Bonnie asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not any kind of line I’ve seen before.”

“Looks kind of like TV cable or something.”

It did, only much larger. A cable that had roughly the same circumference of a man’s wrist. As I played the light over it, I noticed there was a repeating pattern of tiny holes set within it. The more I looked at it, the more confused I got as to what its actual purpose could possibly be. The only thing I knew for sure was that it looked a hell of a lot like the black, snakelike thing I had seen in my backyard. I was getting a really bad feeling about it.

“Hey!” Al suddenly said.

We turned and another cable had dropped not five feet from him. It dangled there, the blunt end of it about six inches off the ground. My guess was that the other one would have been about that long, too, if it wasn’t coiled on the patrol car.

“I don’t like this,” Bonnie said. “It’s too…on purpose.”

She was right. There was nothing remotely accidental about these things. Whatever their purpose was, it was surely not coincidental. I noticed the other one over by Al was trembling slightly as well. What did that mean? What the hell did it mean? Kathy was gone and one of those things had been in my backyard and had dragged over the roof of the garage. Now Frankovich was missing and here were two more of them. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t see a correlation here.

“We better get back,” I said, dread rising beneath my words like helium.

The cables scared me and I was not exactly sure why.

Al had picked up a piece of trim and he was prodding the cable nearest him with it. It moved, swaying back and forth, but that was about it. He kept jabbing it.

“Well, it ain’t dangerous or anything,” he said.

“Just leave it alone,” Bonnie told him.

But there’s something about the male of the species, isn’t there? When a woman tells a man not to do something, it seems to be the first thing he does. We do it when we’re boys and it doesn’t always get any better when we’re men. True to form, Al kept prodding it until it was swinging back and forth like a bell rope.

“Al, come on,” I said. “Enough. Leave it be.”

Bonnie and I started back to the truck and he laughed at us as if we were fools to be afraid of a little old cable hanging in the air. To prove how foolish we were and maybe how fearless he was, he poked it with his finger. “See?” he said. “It don’t bite. It don’t bite at all.”

“Al…” Bonnie said, but it was too late.

He grabbed it with his right hand and seized up immediately, his eyes going wide and his mouth hanging open. For a second there, I thought maybe it was a high-power line and he had just gotten zapped. But that wasn’t it at all. I raced over to him and saw that his fingers were locked around the cable, that a prodigious amount of some clear goo had gushed over his hand. I didn’t know what it was. It was transparent and glutinous like Vaseline. Whatever it was, he was stuck to it.

“I…I can’t get my hand free,” he said with a sick little smile, his face gone yellow and waxy. Drops of sweat had popped on his brow. I could almost smell the fear coming off him. It was sharp and unpleasant. “Jon…Jon…I can’t get my fucking hand free.”

I went to grab it myself, to peel him off there, but Bonnie cried, “Don’t touch it!”

She was right. I handed the flashlight off to her as Al became increasingly panicky. His face was covered in sweat by then. His lower lip was trembling and his eyes were shining like wet plastic. I took hold of his free arm and tried to yank him free, but it was no good. He was stuck fast. The line just went with us as if there was no end to it.

Bonnie set down the flashlight and grabbed a section of fender wall that was hanging from the patrol car. She pushed on the cable as Al and I pulled. No dice. I ran over to my pickup with the flashlight. I opened the toolbox in the back and grabbed my hacksaw. We would cut him free. I brought it back over and Al offered me a thin little smile, as if to say, That’s it, now you’re thinking, boy. I gripped the saw in both hands and dragged the teeth over the cable. No good. They skated right over its surface. It was like trying to saw glass. I tried it again and then again. The blade was sharp but it didn’t even scratch the cable’s outer covering.

“Wait,” Bonnie said.

She pushed the section of fender wall against the cable to steady and support it. I tried sawing it again with everything I had, but it was hopeless. I don’t know what it was made of, but it was durable as diamond.

The cable began to vibrate.

I saw it, so did Bonnie.

It vibrated and then it jerked two or three times. I thought I heard a sort of electronic humming from somewhere high above us. Al gasped and suddenly he was three feet off the ground, dangling from his stuck hand. He was thrashing and screaming, shouting at us: “Get it off me! Get it off me! Jesus Christ, I’m hooked to it!”

His eyes were wild and bulging, his mouth drawn into a grimace, his teeth chattering. There were huge sweat stains on his back. Bonnie told him to take it easy, we’d get him free…even though she knew that probably wasn’t going to happen. I had ideas of somehow hooking the cable to the truck and breaking it. Stupid, frantic ideas. Al was out of his head by then. The cable jerked again and he was pulled up another foot. He looked ridiculous, hanging there like a rag doll. Without even thinking, he reached out and grabbed the cable with his other hand to pull himself free.

I saw it happen this time.

As soon as his hand wrapped around it, the cable secreted a copious amount of that clear goo and Al’s other hand was trapped as surely as a bumblebee in amber. He shrieked and kicked, yanking with everything he had, swinging back and forth on the cable like some kind of half-ass Tarzan.

“JON!” Bonnie cried. “DO SOMETHING!”

But there wasn’t anything I could do and I think we were both fully aware of it. The cable vibrated again; then Al was towed away into the blackness far above, screaming the whole time. Within seconds, his screams had faded off into the night. If I had to guess, I would have said he was pulled up hundreds of feet if not a thousand or more.

After that, Bonnie and I just stood there, breathing and staring up into the darkness. It was all bad, of course, and we both knew that whatever this was about, we’d never see Al again. What bothered me was that he had poked the cable with the trim and with his finger, but neither had stuck. The section of fender hadn’t either. Nor had the hacksaw blade. What did that mean exactly? It did not exude that sticky stuff until Al had securely grasped it. Had it been the heat of his palm? A chemical trigger reacting to the salt or oils of his skin? It had to be something like that. It just had to be…because otherwise what happened meant that the cable itself was sentient somehow.

Bonnie let out a little cry and I saw not two but three more cables drop from the darkness above us.

There was only one thing to do and we did it: we got the hell out of there.