Blackout Read online

  I wished that I had.

  I cut down south to Beecher and Fifteenth, then came at Piccamore the long way. I saw candles or lanterns burning in a few houses and more than one immense bonfire blazing away like a medieval need-fire built to drive witches away. The idea was silly, but not as silly as it should have been. If this wasn’t a localized thing, if it was statewide or national or even global, things would begin to break down and people would stop acting rationally.

  When we made it back to our neck of the woods, the fires were still burning and lanterns glowing against the encompassing night. There were more people than ever out there. I figured a combination of curiosity, fear, and helplessness had forced them out from behind locked doors. When things get bad, even loners need the company of other people. All eyes were on us as we pulled to a stop. So many people were asking questions that it made me dizzy.

  Finally, Ray Wetmore pulled us aside with Iris Phelan, Billy Kurtz, and the Eblers forming almost what seemed a jury. Everyone else hung back by the fires.

  “Where’s Al?” David Ebler asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer that question, but Bonnie beat me to the punch. “He’s gone,” she said in a low voice. “Just like that cop and probably most of the people in this town.”

  “Gone where, honey?” Iris wanted to know.

  “Into the sky,” Bonnie told her.

  That didn’t go over real well.

  They started pelting Bonnie with questions—even her own husband—and she simply repeated the same thing again and again, so they listened to her, rolled their eyes, shook their heads, and kept looking at me as if I was the sane one and Bonnie was flat-out mad. Finally, she refused to speak and I charged right in and laid out the entire ugly mess at their feet. I got plenty of eye-rolling and shaking heads, but I got it out. Every time someone tried to interrupt, I talked that much louder and that much more forcibly like I was in school, dealing with an especially boisterous and rowdy bunch of freshman. Truth be told, these “adults” weren’t too far removed.

  Ray Wetmore took the floor seconds after I finished, as I knew he would. “Now let me get this straight,” he said. “You claim that both Sergeant Frankovich and Al Peckman were yanked up into the sky by cables of some sort. Sticky cables. They got stuck to them and were pulled away and there was nothing you could do.”

  “That’s the gist,” I said.

  Bonnie nodded. “That’s what we saw.”

  “Bullshit,” David Ebler said.

  We hadn’t heard much from him thus far. David and his family had only been in the neighborhood less than a year. I had only talked to him a few times. He seemed practical, levelheaded, an accountant used to crunching facts and figures. What I had just told him threw him for a loop. It could not be crunched. It could not be processed. It refused calm, mundane analysis so he rejected it and me.

  “I wish it was,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, no, no. That’s…that’s ridiculous.”

  Ray sighed. “I’m afraid I have to agree with David. It’s…well, it’s nuts.”

  “We’re not making it up,” I told him.

  David fired off some smart-ass comment about how I thought I was being funny but I wasn’t funny at all. He glared at me with eyes rimmed with hate. I think he wanted to take a swing at me. I believed he would have if Ray wasn’t there being the voice of reason. I didn’t give a shit what David wanted. I felt just as childish as he did at that moment. I’m not a violent guy, but if he swung at me, I planned on beating his ass right in front of his wife and sons. Then, soon as I’d thought that, I felt unbelievably embarrassed. No, I wasn’t going to lower myself to that level.

  “You gotta realize how crazy this sounds, Jon,” Ray said.

  “Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.”

  “Then why don’t you knock it off before you start scaring people?” David said, stepping closer.

  “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you yuppie faggot?” Bonnie told him, getting her ire up. Her green eyes burned like fire in the lantern glow. The flames from the fire pits were reflected in them.

  Even though his wife tried to restrain him, David shrugged her off. “You better watch your mouth, you little bitch.”

  Bonnie gritted her teeth and made ready to tell him exactly what she thought of him, but Billy intervened. For a guy who was pretty drunk, he moved fast. He shoved David and David almost went on his ass. “You don’t talk to my wife that way, fuckhead. Keep it civil or things’ll get bad for you.”

  David was practically hissing. Anger seemed to be steaming out of him and I thought he was going to do something very stupid like make a try for Billy. Billy might have been loaded, but he was still an awfully big guy. David, on the other hand, was exactly how you might picture him: thin, sparse, and bespectacled with thinning dark hair and a very meek, very mild face. If he went after Billy, Billy would knock his teeth out.

  I got in between them. “Come on, guys,” I said. “Let’s just keep cool.”

  “Sure thing, Jon,” Billy said, going back to his beer.

  David cursed under his breath. Bonnie and Ray launched into an argument that got increasingly vocal and I had no idea what to do. Meanwhile, as we’d been acting like a bunch of kids at recess, Iris Phelan had been talking nonstop, mostly to herself. She was leaning there against her walker, sipping a beer.

  “…not that anyone should be surprised by any of it,” she said. “They’ve been coming here a long time, gathering things, studying humans and animals. Alien abductions have only been reported since the 1950s, or possibly the 1940s, but no doubt they’ve been going on since long before that. A conservative estimate places the number of abduction cases at somewhere around seventy thousand, but most are never reported. A realistic estimate is well over five million.” She paused, sipping her beer and smacking her lips. “And although most return from their abduction experiences, many do not. Which begs the question—what do these nonhuman entities want with us? Genetic material? Biological study? Are they simply looking for specimens for experimentation or to put in an alien zoo or is it something much darker? Is the reality of the situation that these creatures are not in fact extraterrestrials but perhaps, as has been suggested, highly evolved humans from the distant future whose DNA is corrupt and can no longer breed so they harvest ours to take back to their time to maintain the human stock so the race will not face extinction?”

  Once we tuned into what she was saying, everyone stopped talking. We just stood there with mouths hanging open. This was the Iris Phelan we did not know, the closet UFOlogist, the Fox Mulder of the geriatric set. The Iris we knew cranked her TV so fucking loud it interfered with satellite communications and you could hear exactly what movie was on TCM at one in the morning even if you were a block away. The Iris we knew planted tulips and daffodils, hung her flag out every morning and belonged to three or four old lady church groups. Apparently, we knew nothing about her.

  “That’s enough,” David told her. “I mean, really, I’ve had my fill tonight. Cables from the sky and alien abductions. Of all the silly comic book nonsense.”

  Iris toasted him with her beer. “Not saying it’s so, son, I’m just speculating as I imagine most are this dark night. So settle down. No need to get your tit caught in the wringer over it.”

  Billy Kurtz started laughing. When he stopped, he said, “I don’t think it’s bullshit at all. I know Jon. He teaches science. He’s smart. And Bonnie…well, maybe she ain’t so smart, but she’s no liar.”

  “That’s right,” Bonnie said, comfortable with her husband’s appraisal.

  There was even more arguing then, Ray and David on the con side, Bonnie and Billy and me on the pro side. Iris quoted facts and figures. Lisa Ebler, apparently disgusted by her husband’s performance, retreated to one of the fire pits to roast marshmallows with her sons and some of the more rational neighbors. Many of the others ringed around us, intrigued.

  I heard David out yet again.

  He was
annoying the hell out of me with his flat-earth science, but I listened even though he kept tossing in digs about me and suggesting—more or less—that Bonnie and I had been playing house in my pickup. I listened. I was on my last nerve, but I listened. My wife was missing and I was worried about that and worried about my daughter across the sea, but I listened. In the end, as much as he tried to espouse rational thinking, realism, and cold hard logic, it all failed him because he simply could not explain what happened to Kathy, to Frankovich, or to Al Peckman. And that was the hole that let in the water that sunk his boat every time.

  But I began to understand him and I had more sympathy. He was scared. Hell, he was terrified. He had a young family. He and his wife were just getting going. He had two boys over there and if any of what we said was true, then the future looked not only bleak but downright ugly. He couldn’t face that. When people are scared of something, I’ve noticed, they either joke about it or flatly deny its existence. It’s the only way to keep a grip on their sanity and I think we’ve all done it.

  “Listen,” I finally said to him. “This isn’t getting any of us anywhere. So let’s just put it to the acid test. Let’s hop in my truck and I’ll show the damn things to you. Is that reasonable?”

  “That would be the basis of the scientific method,” Iris said. “Once a phenomena is witnessed, questions can be asked and a hypothesis put forward.”

  I, again, just stared at her. Where had this Iris Phelan been all these years?

  “No,” Lisa Ebler said. “No, David, you can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I have to. They’re trying to make me look like a fool.”

  “You don’t need our help,” Bonnie said.

  “The whole idea is a waste of time,” Ray said.

  Iris rapped her beer bottle on her walker. “Waste of time? Well, listen to me. I watch the Weather Channel every day. Not much else to do when you’re old and alone and no one ever bothers to stop by,” she said. “And I tell you this: clear weather is predicted straight on through the week. Not so much as a cloud for seventy-two hours at least. Look up above! Go ahead! There isn’t a star to be seen! Now, Mr. Ray Wetmore, if you got all the answers, then where are they? Where are the stars? Who turned out the lights?”

  That more than anything shut people up.

  She was right, of course, and I had noticed it earlier. Where the hell were the stars?

  As this was hashed out, something else happened that pretty much evaporated all the talk. Cars started coming down Piccamore. A whole line of them. They passed right by and did not stop to say hello. They moved away frantically, upwards of two dozen of them, and disappeared into the night. And then came the people. I knew a few of them. They were on foot, carrying what seemed to be everything they owned. They were on the march. Some paused by our fires, but the rest kept going. It was very startling…and disturbing. Entire families were on the move. It was like seeing animals fleeing as millions of army ants pushed forward…or the stampeding populace in a Japanese monster movie.

  We kept asking them what the hell was going on and finally what we heard made sense. And what made even more sense is what we saw.

  “LOOK!” somebody cried out. “IT’S COMING! LOOK! CAN YOU SEE IT? IT’S COMING NOW!”

  10

  It came right over the town in that inky blackness where you couldn’t see twenty feet in any direction. But we saw it. It gave off a bluish metallic sheen that glimmered and glowed like it was charged with arcing high voltage. It was immense. Though we could only see portions of it, it had to have been wider than a football field is long. And as to the length of the thing, I couldn’t even guess.

  It was gigantic, that’s all I knew and that’s all anyone knew.

  Everyone stopped dead at the sight of it. Even the migrant families stopped and stared up at it with eyes wide and mouths hanging open. Even though we couldn’t really see much of it, not even a general shape, just that weird blue-black reflection, it mesmerized us the way, I suppose, a deer is mesmerized by headlights. We were all struck stupid. We stared. Nobody spoke. Nobody did anything but look up into the sky like our god was descending from heaven.

  I wondered later if it was just curiosity or something more.

  It came over the rooftops and if I had to guess, I would say it was at least 300 feet above us, possibly more like 500, its sheer size making it impossible to know. Then, just as it was completely over us, it disappeared. That weird, eerie electric blue light just ceased and there was nothing up there but the same nebulous blackness as before. That it was still there, I didn’t doubt, it was just that we couldn’t see it and I’m almost certain that wasn’t by accident.

  “It’s still there,” I heard Bonnie say in nearly a whisper.

  And it was. I think we all felt it up there, hovering, poised above us like a spider preparing to drop. The very size and weight of the thing had disturbed the air somehow and I felt something like an increase in pressure as if it were bearing down, compressing the very atoms of the ether around us, creating a very heavy, almost suffocating aura.

  “Fuck is this shit about?” I heard Billy Kurtz say seconds after his beer bottle slipped from his fingers and shattered on the sidewalk.

  Yes, what indeed.

  The migrant people were muttering nervously, but none of them were moving. It was almost like they were afraid to. Some of them were arguing. I heard a baby crying and then a woman screaming. There was a strange tension in the air and I felt it coming not just from the migrants but from my neighbors on the walks and lawns. Something was building. It was like a current had held us together before, connected us and made us one, part of the same human circuit…but now that circuit was broken and the energy was loose and wild and unpredictable.

  A few people ran off. A couple of my neighbors started slowly making their way to their houses. A young guy tossed his backpack and fought madly through the migrant crowd, shouting something incomprehensible to the rest of us. But if we couldn’t understand what he was saying, we sure as hell understood what one of the others said: “Gonna start now…just like downtown, it’s gonna start and we’re all gonna be taken…all of us taken up into the sky…”

  It was about then, as panic began to break loose among the crowd, that I began to smell something I thought I had smelled before, though not as strongly. It was an acrid, burnt smell like the seeping acid in an Exide battery. It was coming from above, growing stronger, pungent and sharp and nearly choking. I had smelled it before. It had been in the air downtown and again near Frankovich’s overturned patrol car I had caught a slight whiff of it.

  But not like this.

  This was gagging.

  This was enough to make your eyes water.

  And that’s when the cables started coming down. Not one or two or three, but dozens. They dropped from the darkness above, unreeling like firemen’s hoses until there were so goddamn many they looked like trees in the firelight—skinny, limbless trees growing up into the sky. They were all black and shiny and in my mind’s eye they were licorice ropes dropped from heaven above.

  “Oh my God,” David Ebler said in breathless voice.

  “Do you still think we made it up, hotshot?” Bonnie said to him. “Well, do you?”

  But David was beyond speech as he staggered back towards his wife and kids. Ray Wetmore just stood there shaking his head back and forth as if he was trying to toss the image from his head. The rest of us were shocked and fearful, but not all that surprised. I know I wasn’t. I figured it was only a matter of time. Everyone was in a precarious predicament because those things were everywhere. They did not reach out and grab anyone. They didn’t have to. Sooner or later, somebody was going to back right into one.

  And somebody did.

  It was a guy in working duds with a lunch pail in his hand. He was one of the migrants. He tried to slip away out of sheer panic, elbowing his way through the crowd, and one of the cables got him. He got stuck to it and up he went. It almost looked like
the crowd had pushed him into it, but I can’t say for sure. All I know is he went up, screaming all the way.

  That was it. Pandemonium ensued.

  Maybe that’s what the thing above us was waiting for.

  The battery smell got stronger and people started scattering and fighting, knocking each other over and down to get away from the cables and many of them stumbled right into them. The smarter ones came into the yards of Piccamore and begged to be let into our houses, to be taken somewhere they would be safe, and we couldn’t refuse them. Many of them had children. But those were the smarter ones, the calmer ones, the more rational of the lot. The others…well, it was sheer herd instinct and they scrambled. I don’t know how many of them got caught on the cables, but it was a lot. The same scenario played out again and again. Somebody would stumble into one and their family or friends would try to get them loose and they’d all go up.

  It was horrible.

  And I saw it firsthand. It happened to the Ebler family. About the time the migrants started getting snatched in numbers, more cables started dropping around us in the yards and one of the Ebler boys panicked and ran. His mother cried out and David tried to stop him, but he was too fast. He jumped out of the way of one cable and another got him. His brother tried to get him loose and became glued to it. David and Lisa tried, too. I watched them all go up, the entire family, stuck to the cable like flies on a No-Pest strip. We all heard them screaming and whimpering, crying out for help, but there wasn’t a damn thing we could do.

  And that’s when the wind came.

  There was a blinding flash like an enormous flashbulb had gone off and we were all blinded by it. It came from above, I think, but I can’t be sure. Milliseconds later, there was a wave of heat that swept through the neighborhood. It wasn’t enough to burn anyone, but its warmth rolling over us made everyone gasp. It was like tropical heat blown from a jungle, but desert-dry, lacking moisture. It sucked the air out of our lungs and dried the spit in our mouths. The only time I’d ever felt anything like it was at a Kiss concert when I was thirteen. Among the usual pyrotechnics, four giant flash pots erupted with fireballs and the heat of them rolled through the crowd. This was much like that.