Tim Curran - Blackout

She was right in a way, but Billy and I kept looking at each other and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: whoever was out there needed help and if we didn’t go to them we could hardly call ourselves human. There was death out there. But I feared that less than the idea of living with myself knowing I could have done something to help someone in need. The teeth of guilt are much sharper than any sword.

“I wonder if it’s someone we know,” Billy said, not a question.

“Could be,” I said. “If it was me out there, I’d want someone to help me.”

Bonnie was watching us both by that point. “Don’t even fucking think of it. It’s too dangerous. We need each other. Nobody’s going out there.”

The horn sounded again and I flinched.

“Nothing out there,” Iris said, her mouth stitched in a scowl. “If you tell yourself there’s nothing out there, then there isn’t.”

She was losing it so nobody commented on that. We just sat there. That was the worst part of it all: waiting. I knew the horn was going to sound again and when it did, I was going to scream. I didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t bear to hear it.

But I heard it. We all heard it.

“Fuck this,” Billy said. “Jon, you got any weapons around here? An ax? Anything useful?”

“I got a few things out in the garage,” I said.

“No,” Bonnie said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Billy sighed. “What if that was you out there?”

“Then I’d get out of the fucking car and get somewhere safe.”

“What if you were injured and you couldn’t?”

She glared at him, but slowly her face softened. Bonnie was a good person. Despite certain malfunctions of character, she was inherently a good person. She was very kind when it came down to it. “All right,” she finally said. “Go then. Just be careful.”

She kissed Billy before we left and I could see that she really didn’t believe she’d see him again. We took one of the flashlights and went out to the garage. Billy took the riot gun Bonnie had swiped from the patrol car. I took a hatchet and unscrewed the handle of my push broom. I sharpened the end of it until I had a serviceable pike.

Then we walked out into the darkness.

There were cables everywhere. They dangled down like creepers in a primeval forest. Just the sight of them in the flashlight beam made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. Billy and I moved slowly, but we did move. We heard the horn again and it was coming from down the block. We began the terrible walk in its direction. The cables were inert, dead things. I knew they weren’t alive, not in the earthly sense of the word. They simply reacted when you touched them. Still…when we got too close to them, they trembled slightly as if they could feel us, sense our body heat or the vibrations of our footsteps.

We gave them a wide berth whenever possible.

As we walked, I wondered about it all. Once they had stripped away all the people—and all the native animal life for all I knew—and the world was empty, what then? Did they have a use for the planet? Were they snatching people off for study or was it a means to an end like miners stripping the rainforest to get at the valuable minerals beneath? What did they want exactly? And while I was at that, I wondered about the big one: who exactly they were.

While I was lost in thought, blindly following Billy’s silhouette and the path of light he carved out for us, I nearly stumbled into one of the cables. It was close. I came within a foot of it and it began to shudder at my closeness. I thought it was moving for a moment, but it wasn’t the cable but what was attached to it: bats. Dozens of ordinary, garden-variety brown bats. They were trapped on the cables, webbed in goo, flapping their leathery wings out of fright. I saw what had brought them in—the cables seemed to be covered in bugs of all sorts, mostly moths. Maybe there was something sweet about the secretions that attracted them.

Billy stopped just ahead. “It’s going to get dicey now,” he said.

How right he was. The cables were like a thicket of saplings ahead of us, dozens upon dozens of them waiting to snare the unwary. There was little more than a few feet among many of them. A forest of human flypaper. We moved forward and it was like threading through the spokes of a bike tire. We proceeded slowly, cautiously, both painfully aware of what would happen if that mysterious wind blew up again.

Billy would shine the light about, finding the safest route, and then we would push forward, moving like men tiptoeing through a mine field. Ten minutes into it, I was soaking wet with sweat.

The horn sounded again and we were getting closer to it.

I was worried about what we would find when we got there. Neither Billy nor I had any medical training if it came to that. And the idea of trying to transport injured people through the jungle of cables was simply ridiculous. I didn’t know what we were going to find and I think my greatest fear was that we would discover an empty car and realize we had been baited in.

The horn sounded again.

Billy stopped now and again to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but other than that he kept us moving. When the horn sounded next, we were practically on top of it. The cables had thinned considerably by then and we weren’t in any immediate danger. Billy played the light around and I saw that we were very near the Andersen house at the end of the block where I had been earlier with Al Peckman. In the flashlight beam, I saw hedges, a bike abandoned in a yard, a newspaper on a porch waiting to be read…normal, mundane things that seemed so unbearably threatening now.

“HEY!” Billy called out. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

The horn sounded again and I nearly jumped out of my skin we were so close to it. We moved down the street, examining each parked car we came to. The light found them in the encompassing, crowding blackness and each one was empty. Several times, as Billy moved the spoking beam of the light about, I could have sworn I caught a momentary glimpse of a nebulous black shape pulling away. It had to be my imagination and I told myself so, but as night-black shadows jumped around us, I could not convince myself of it.

“There,” Billy said and his voice sounded dry as dirt.

It came out of the darkness slowly as we approached it like a sunken ship on a seabed—an SUV that had jumped the curb and smashed into a telephone pole. The front end was bashed in. I could smell oil and antifreeze. Cables dangled to either side of it, blocking the doors. Another was coiled on the roof.

“Shit,” Billy said.

Shit was right. There was no way for us to open the doors without getting caught ourselves. We discussed smashing in the rear window, but that was tricky because about two feet of the cable on the roof hung over it. That wasn’t going to work. The side windows were an option, but they were awfully damn close to the cables. We just stood there, thinking it out, knowing we had to do something.

One of the windows unrolled a few inches. I saw a woman’s frantic face peeking out. “Help us,” she said. “We’re trapped. I have children in here. An injured man.”

Getting them out was more imperative than ever.

Billy had her turn on the SUV’s headlights to illuminate the area. It was something. I knew there was only one thing to do. I took the flashlight and jogged down a couple houses and came back with a rake I had seen leaning up against a fence. When Al had gotten stuck on that cable and I tried to pull him loose, the cable had moved with him like a rope hanging from a tree. I was counting on these to do the same.

Billy saw what I was doing. “Watch it,” he said.