Blackout Page 2

  I went back outside and to my amazement, the rain had stopped and the wind had died down. There wasn’t so much as a drizzle out there. It was like somebody had flipped a switch. The lightning was still flashing, but there was no thunder. It was not only weird, it was disturbing. Earlier, I had thought there was something funny about the patterns of the lightning and now, as I stood there, I realized what it was. It was the pattern itself. It was not irregular as you would have thought, but very precise. The lightning would flash on and off three times; then there would be a period of darkness; then it would strobe nearly continuously. I found myself counting. The lightning would flash followed by thirty seconds of darkness, then it would strobe for exactly two and a half minutes. I was almost hypnotized by it. I stood there and timed it through three cycles.

  It was completely unnatural.

  This was not some accidental atmospheric thing, it was premeditated and intentional, as insane as that sounds. I walked over to the Peckmans’ and paused once again at the hedges, timing it out. It was the same. What would the chances of something like that be? What would the odds be against a storm forming a perfectly timed pattern like that?

  I looked up in the sky as it initially flashed again and I thought for one moment I saw an immense dark mass like a fucking aircraft carrier up there. It was just an optical illusion and I told myself so. Regardless, with the strobing lightning there was no way I could keep staring skyward. It was like looking into a flashing searchlight.

  I jogged over to the Peckmans’ and as I made to go up the steps, I heard a screaming in the night. It was a hysterical, insane sort of sound that went right up my spine. A scream of pain and terror.

  5

  “Hell is going on out here?”

  I hadn’t been expecting it and I jumped back. It was Al Peckman. He was standing there with the door open. I was listening for the scream again because I had no doubt the voice was female and I was worried it might be Kathy.

  “Jon? What’re you doing out here?” Al asked.

  “I’m looking for Kathy,” I told him, quickly sketching what had happened. “Did you hear that scream?”

  “I thought I heard something.”

  Then it came again, shrieking and shrill and drawn-out before fading into the night. I couldn’t say it was Kathy; then again I couldn’t say it wasn’t. I started off after it and Al told me to wait. He threw on some shoes and we both jogged down the block. The scream came from the direction of the Andersens’ at the end. We stood there, Al and I, not speaking, just waiting for something, anything, but there was nothing except the nearly suffocating silence of the night.

  “This is fucked up,” Al finally said. “Hell kind of storm was that anyway? I never seen anything like it.”

  “Me either.”

  We waited, but we didn’t hear anything else. The storm had completely passed now—even the lightning had stopped flashing. There was nothing but a tomblike silence up and down Piccamore Way that seemed to have crawled right under our skin. What bothered me most, among other things, was the darkness itself. It simply wasn’t right. There are dark nights, but this was beyond any of that. Far beyond it. There was no moonlight. The blackness around us was heavy and concealing and claustrophobic. We couldn’t see more than fifteen feet in any direction even with the flashlight. It was unnatural. The darkness was like a black mist that had settled around us in tarps and sheets.

  Al lit a cigarette and the flame of his lighter was almost blinding.

  “It’s not right,” I said.

  “What isn’t?”

  “This dark. It’s darker than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s like swimming in oil.”

  Al pulled off his cigarette. “It gets real dark when the lights go out. People don’t realize how dark night is until the lights fail.”

  “Sure.”

  But it was more than that and I think we both knew it. I was worried sick about Kathy and I honestly didn’t know what to do. I played the light around in the night, picking out hedges and the Andersens’ porch but not much else. The inky blackness was weird and scary and I admitted the same to Al, who refused to discuss it. The flashlight beam seemed to fade after fifteen or twenty feet and it was almost like it was swallowed by the night.

  I clicked it off.

  The pitch darkness pressed in closer. I swear I could almost feel its weight against my skin. It was a palpable thing and that definitely made no sense whatsoever. This was not the gloom of an ordinary night, even a moonless or starless night, this was the absolute absence of light of any kind, the abyssal blackness of an ocean trench or the darkness that fills the void between galaxies.

  “Jesus, Jon,” Al said, “turn that fucking thing back on.”

  I did and he calmed somewhat.

  He felt the same way I did about the dark, only he didn’t want to admit it and that was just fine. I wasn’t going to say any more about it. I figured that was probably best. Whoever had been doing the screaming had stopped and never started again. We searched around the Andersen house but we saw nothing amiss. Al knocked on the door, but there was no answer. And being as late as it was, we didn’t push it. Either they were sleeping or they had decided they weren’t going to answer any fool knocking in the middle of the night.

  “What now?” Al said as we moved back out to the street.

  “I don’t know.”

  But I did know. Since the phones were out and the power was down, I would have to go for help. It was about a ten-minute ride to the police station downtown. It was the only thing I could think of doing. I needed help finding Kathy and I needed it right goddamn now. There was no time to waste.

  “Listen,” I told Al. “I’m going to drive downtown and get the cops rolling on this. Can you go rouse some of the neighbors and get them out here with flashlights? Get them searching?”

  “I sure as hell can try.”

  It was the best we could do. We went down to Al’s house and the night was so unbelievably dark I knew that if my flashlight faded, we’d never find our way back. We’d be left groping like blind men. Al ducked inside to get his own flashlight while I went back to my house to look one last time for my wife. I went room to room, but she wasn’t there. Not in the yard, not in the garage. I couldn’t make sense of it. My scenarios of her having a heart attack or something and falling down were unpleasant, but at least they made some concrete sense. More sense than the idea of an adult woman stepping out the back door and vanishing into the fucking Twilight Zone.

  6

  I jumped into my Chevy and turned it over. It caught right away. I guess my paranoia was telling me it might not start at all, that whatever had sapped the electricity from the power lines might have done the same thing to my battery. I needn’t have worried. I pulled out into the street, driving as fast as I dared which in that darkness wasn’t very fast at all.

  I clicked on the high beams and was absolutely amazed—and mortified—at the quality of the night around me. Again, I was struck by the dark itself, which was perfectly unnatural. It was too thick, too complete, too seamless, if that makes any sense. Usually, the dark of night is inconsistent, in that there are dark shadowy pockets blending into grays. It’s never perfectly dark. Such a thing probably does not even exist on this planet except in a deep mountain cave or ocean abyss. Even when electric lights go out and candles and lanterns are extinguished, there’s still moonlight and starlight. Even if it’s cloudy, light still gets through.

  But no light was getting through.

  It was like one of those shades they put over bird cages at night had been dropped over the world. It was perfectly black.

  I saw the white swords of flashlight beams as people tried to make sense of things. At first, I saw quite a few people, but the closer I got to downtown, the fewer of them I saw. I came wheeling around a corner and I nearly crashed into a car that was parked sideways right in the middle of the road. It was a sedan, a Lexus, a rich-man’s ride. Both doors were open and I could see there was n
o one inside.

  Dammit.

  I climbed out and went over to it, the headlights from the pickup casting a huge shadow of myself before me like something from a film noir flick. The Lexus was still running, headlights on. I looked around and saw no one.

  “Hey!” I called out. “Move this damn car!”

  My voice echoed and died, but there was no reply. Piss on it. I jumped behind the wheel and backed it out of the way, bumping into the curb. I killed the engine and jogged back to my pickup. It was incredibly silent as I got within a block of downtown. I came up the street and a figure jumped out into the road, scaring the shit right out of me. Just some guy waving his arms back and forth.

  I pulled to a stop and he came over. He was a young guy, maybe college age, and he was carrying a bag of groceries of all things. A loaf of bread was poking out the top.

  “Dude!” he said. “You can’t go any farther! You gotta turn back! Something happened up there and all the people are gone, they’re just…gone! There’s nobody left! Even the cop shop is empty! You gotta go back the other way!”

  “What happened?” I asked him, a cold chill settling along my spine. “Where did they go?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t fucking ask me! I woke up and I heard them screaming and when I got outside, they were all gone! You hear me? They were all gone, dude!”

  He started running off and I called to him, but he didn’t stop. All I heard was his fading voice: “Get out, dude! Get out!” Then he was gone and I was more confused than ever, filled with mounting anxiety. Something had happened and was still happening and I was pretty certain it didn’t have anything to do with a weird electrical storm. I was pretty sure the opposite was true—the electrical storm was a result of it and not the other way around. It made no sense, but nothing did that night.

  I tried my cell again, but all I got was that same high-pitched whining sound.

  I threw caution to the wind and drove slowly forward.

  That’s when I heard screaming. I hit the brakes and the scream came again, louder this time, cycling into a high, hysterical shrilling that ended abruptly. I waited. There was nothing else. I grabbed my flashlight and leaped out of the truck. I knew without a doubt it was the guy I had just spoken to. The caliber of that screaming voice was the same. I shined the light around in arcs. “Hey!” I called out. “Hey! Where are you? Call out to me!” But nobody called out, there was just that familiar dead silence broken only by the idling hum of my pickup. I kept moving farther out into the dark in ever-widening circles, trying to spot the guy.

  I never found him.

  But I did find his groceries.

  They were spilled all over the sidewalk—the loaf of bread, bottles of energy drinks, cans of Chef Boyardee pasta, beef jerky, a few apples, a shattered jar of pizza sauce. I looked and looked, but he was just gone. In my head, I kept hearing his voice: I heard them screaming and when I got outside they were all gone! You hear me? They were all gone, dude! It was enough. I was getting the hell out of there. Whatever was out there, whatever was snatching people off into the night, I knew damn well that I was hardly equipped to handle it.

  I went back to the truck.

  Then, hand on the door, I paused.

  In the distance, I saw what looked like a giant eye.

  It wasn’t an eye, of course. At least, I hoped it wasn’t an eye. It was a large, perfectly round orb of pale blue light that was hovering over rooftops not a city block from where I was. It was like the searchlight of a helicopter and for one moment I was sure that’s what it was. The only problem was that helicopters make noise and this thing, whatever it was, was perfectly silent as it drifted over the roofs, moving gradually west.

  I stood there, trembling.

  Something about it—many things, in fact—scared the hell out of me. It wasn’t right and I knew it. It was part of what was going on and I could not convince myself otherwise. I climbed back into the truck and threw it in reverse, backing well down the street before turning around. I was sweating. I was shaking. That eerie orb had filled me with dread and my survival instinct was amped up. I peeled out of there, heading back towards Piccamore Way as fast as I could safely go. I kept checking the rearview, but the orb was not following me as I feared. I saw it still moving west like a very large and very slow shooting star.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  I pulled over and tried to calm myself. What I needed was a cigarette, but I didn’t have any. That was a good thing because I would have started puffing away right then and there. It was coming and I knew it, the stress of the situation demanded it. In fact, I was half-tempted to break into a store and grab a carton. I got my nerves under control and threw the pickup in drive.

  As I did so, I saw a sweeping bluish light coming up the avenue just ahead. I threw the truck in park and killed the engine and lights. The blackness rushed in and I was almost grateful for it the way a mouse is grateful when an owl cannot see him. And owl is applicable because the orb came over the rooftops and it looked very much like the eye of an owl.

  As it came moving up the street, I crouched down on the seat.

  The night was so black that I couldn’t really see what it was and I had a pretty good feeling I didn’t want to. All I knew is that behind the orb was a dark shape that looked very large. The orb moved closer and closer. Unlike a searchlight, it cast very little illumination. It was like one of those tactical lights special operations forces use. As it passed over the truck, I thought I was going to have a coronary my heart was palpitating so badly. The orb was immense and metallic-looking, very shiny, and had to be about the size of a tractor tire. It filled the cab with a deadly pale phosphorescence.

  If it was aware of me, it gave no sign.

  It drifted overhead, maybe twenty feet up, and something—actually, many things—scraped over the roof of the cab like fingernails. And then it was gone. I waited there another five minutes until I was sure it wasn’t coming back, then started up the truck and drove back to Piccamore.

  7

  My mission, as it was, had been a complete failure. My wife was still missing and I hadn’t been able to alert the authorities or get help of any kind. All I brought back with me were new fears.

  It calmed me to see Piccamore.

  It was alive with flashlight beams and battery-powered lanterns. Candles were burning inside houses. There was activity and I knew Al had really lit a fire under a lot of asses to get people motivated like that, especially in the middle of the night. The best thing was that there was a patrol car parked in front of my house. I felt instantly relieved. I sighed as I pulled to a stop.

  Al was there along with Billy and Bonnie Kurtz and Ray Wetmore. I caught sight of half a dozen other neighbors in the glow of a lantern. Paula Renfew was there, so were David and Lisa Ebler and their boys. I passed by them and went over to Al and the cop. He was a big bull of a fellow with a bald head and a neck like a pine stump. He introduced himself as Sergeant Frankovich and began pelting me with questions.

  “So, you can’t say that she did go outside,” he said.

  “Well, she had to,” I told him, “since she’s not in the house. And the back door was open.”

  “Sure,” he said. He entered the pertinent stuff on an iPad and looked around in the darkness. “This is a mess. A real mess.”

  “How long do you think it’ll be until the power’s back on?” Bonnie Kurtz asked him.

  In the glow of Al’s lantern, he looked at me and I saw something in his eyes that seemed to say, never. He smiled at Bonnie and told her he did not know. She complained that she had a freezer full of meat and there was going to be hell to pay if it all went bad.

  “If it goes bad,” Billy said, “we’ll buy some more. Quit your yapping already. We got bigger fish to fry here.”

  She came over to me and clutched my arm. “I’m so sorry, Jon,” she said. “We’re all worried sick about Kathy. I know she’ll turn up. She has to.”

  The way she said
it made me think she didn’t believe it would happen at all. The tone of her voice was reserved for funerals when you told the widow what a good man her husband was and how the world was a worse place for his absence. I didn’t blame Bonnie because I felt very much like a widower. I didn’t honestly think I was going to see Kathy again either and my greatest concern was not for what I had possibly lost but how I was going to tell Erin that her mother was gone. I would call Italy only when I was certain there was no hope.

  And then I thought: And who’s to say all this is localized? Maybe it’s national or even fucking global.

  But I wasn’t going there. Not just yet. I didn’t really know what was going on and I wasn’t about to charge into any of it with a defeatist attitude, despite the fact that my optimism was bottomed out and dragging its feet.

  Iris Phelan was there in her bathrobe demanding to know what was being done about it all and asking Frankovich if he would look for her missing cat.

  “Mitzy is always there when I open the door but she wasn’t there tonight,” Iris said. “I don’t like it. It’s not right.”

  Billy Kurtz told her not to worry. “Cats are smart, Mrs. Phelan. Don’t worry. Once the hubbub has died down, she’ll come back. Cats are like that.”

  “Sure,” Bonnie said.

  Ray Wetmore was blaming it all on the ineffectiveness of the town fathers. He told anyone that would listen—and nobody wanted to—that if he was on the board, an outage like this would have been taken care of “lickety-split.” “See,” he lectured, “the problem is accountability. Those bums on the council want to sit on their fat white behinds and rake in the cash from their rich benefactors. They don’t want change. They don’t want to take action. The idea of stirring the waters of the status quo gives them the cold sweats. That’s why they don’t want me involved in the process and have fought tooth-and-nail to keep me out. I’m progressive. I embrace change. I thumb my nose at the rich and their underhanded scheming. I’m for the people. I’m for the majority. I’m a man of action that demands accountability!”