Tim Curran - Blackout

I ran around through the rubble, calling out for help, needing to hook up with another human being because the idea of being alone, being the last one, was more than I could bear. And whatever was above—I like collector— maybe was listening because cables began to drop around me. If I had been in my right state of mind, I would have run away, found somewhere safe to hide, but I wasn’t and I didn’t.

The cables were everywhere.

I felt used-up and broken. I found that I was edging closer to one of them, staring at it, fixated on it. I don’t honestly think it was the cable’s doing, but some weird self-hypnotic thing that made me reach out and touch it. There’s no good explanation for any of it. None at all. The self-destructive urge we all feel from time to time just became so strong, and I was so weak, that I just went with it.

I touched the cable.

Just with my fingertips, but I did touch it. There was nothing. It felt like cool rubber. I couldn’t imagine anything as harmless as that damn cable. It wanted me to grip it. I know it did. It wasn’t some inert and harmless thing. I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t seem to convince myself of it at that moment.

So I gripped it with my hand.

Yes, then I knew why Al had looked like he had been shocked when he touched it. It had gone from being cool to hot as the jelly oozed out and webbed my hand to it. I can’t say that the heat was unpleasant because it felt very nice. There was a certain tactile pleasure to the thickness of the cable in my hand, the heat of it, the engulfing goo.

I was screwed and I knew it.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get this fucking done with already.”

About two seconds later, the cable vibrated, jerked a couple of times and then it was going up and I was going with it, higher and higher and higher.

The farther up I went, the more scared I became. The idiotic suicidal nature of what I had done really took hold and I fought and thrashed like a trout being reeled up out of the depths. I had no idea how high I was taken. But suddenly I felt rather than saw something immense above me. It was then I remembered the little Tekna flashlight in my pocket. I pulled it out and clicked it on.

The collector.

I was being towed up to it. At first, it was just a gigantic dark shape that I again likened to an aircraft carrier. Then as I got closer and closer to it, I could see it in some detail, not the entire thing, of course, because it was just too big. But enough of it to marvel over its alien-ness. Machines on Earth tend to be smooth-shelled things, but this was not smooth. It was knobby and jagged and irregular, looking more like something carved roughly from black-green quartz than anything else. And set in that serrated skin I saw what looked like open manholes that the cables fed into. Dozens and dozens of them. The underside of the collector craft was pitted with them as if it had been worked on by some gigantic drill press. They went on farther than the light could reach. I don’t think the idea of hundreds or even thousands of them is too far off the mark.

The cable pulled me through one of those openings and I felt a sudden pressure as I passed through like I had just breached some invisible membrane. Then I was inside. I couldn’t see much of anything even with the flashlight. It was absolutely cavernous in there. I was still being pulled upwards, to what fate I couldn’t even guess at. I was listening for screams, the sound of all those people that had been captured being horribly used.

But there was nothing.

The silence was ominous.

It seemed I would go up forever, and then there was a sudden hollow sort of thudding sound and it stopped. I was just dangling there. I pointed the flashlight up and I could see the cable fed into a long groove set in a ceiling of that quartz-looking material. There were other cables around me that fed into similar apertures. Then my cable was moving. With dizzying speed it followed the groove above and went on and on. I felt oddly like a garment at a dry cleaner’s, the cable being my hanger and the groove above the sliding track system they use.

There was a sudden low grinding from somewhere in the bowels of the collector and everything shook. I was swinging back and forth on my cable, my stomach in my throat. It came again and I was aware of a trembling seesawing motion. Something was going on, but I didn’t know what. I had the oddest sense that whatever it was, it was not on purpose. Finally, the cable stopped and the goo on my hand became very cold and then it wasn’t there at all as if it had evaporated.

Then I dropped.

It wasn’t far. I fell maybe ten feet into a swirling warm pocket of air that held me aloft but didn’t keep my head from spinning with vertigo. The flashlight showed me I was in a funnel and I was slowly, slowly going down and down and then I was tugged into a tube, still held aloft by the warm air, but now being sucked down the tube whose walls were beaded like the flesh of a lizard. I tried to fight against it, but it was pointless. I could move. I could kick out with my legs and thrash with my arms, but there was no way to stop the forward progress.

Then ahead, the tube opened and I could see some sort of horrible machinery that looked like three spinning wheels with jagged teeth. I panicked and fought, but I was going in there. I was going to be processed like the rest.

And then—

Then I heard that grinding noise again, only it was louder now, echoing through the tube with maximum volume. I was spinning. The collector was moving in fits and jerks and I had the sense that we were falling. Then there was an impact and I bounced around in my column of air, buffeted softly, never hitting anything.

The air stream cut out and I fell to the bottom of the tube.

I felt vibrations and smelled a burning stink that reminded me of blown fuses and melted wiring. It was pungent and sickening. The spinning wheels ahead were not moving. I didn’t know what had happened, but I was certain the collector had seized up.

I wasted no time.

I ran down the tube until I reached the funnel. I could see the opening of it at least thirty or forty feet above. The funnel walls were made of that same beaded material. If it hadn’t been for that, I would never have been able to climb out. It would have been impossible. I climbed up to the lip. It took some time.

Then what?

That was the thing. I didn’t know what to do. I had to find a way out. I could no longer feel a sense of motion and I was pretty sure the collector had either crashed or set down somewhere. How long I had was anyone’s guess. I climbed down from the funnel and found an uneven walkway of sorts, though I’m sure that’s not what it was. I followed it deeper into the collector along a V-shaped trough that was filled with some kind of rancid, slopping waste. I squeezed between high walls and after a time, the passage opened and I was in a room the size of a huge amphitheater. To either side of me were colossal vats or boilers hooked to a maze of pipes that reached above and away.

The room had to have been an easy three stories tall, the ceiling a network of diamond-shaped beams and narrow walkways and overlapping grids. The vats were big enough to boil station wagons in. I walked among them, staring with something like awe at those huge vessels and their snaking tubes and pipes and coiled hoses. I listened to them hissing and bubbling and simmering. They were warm to the touch and looked like gigantic deep-sea squids with all those tubes and conduits twisting above and around and to either side.

That I was in a factory, I didn’t doubt.

And the farther I went, the more obvious things became. It was like being in a human cannery, but instead of fish guts, scales, and sea slime on the floor, there was three inches of accumulated blood, fat, and offal, the by-products of the rendering process. The stench was unimaginable and sickening. The stink of acids and oils, stabilized fats and raw tallow, embalming fluids and preservatives, human grease and hair and bone.