Tim Curran - Blackout

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.