Tim Curran - Blackout

“Well, it ain’t dangerous or anything,” he said.

“Just leave it alone,” Bonnie told him.

But there’s something about the male of the species, isn’t there? When a woman tells a man not to do something, it seems to be the first thing he does. We do it when we’re boys and it doesn’t always get any better when we’re men. True to form, Al kept prodding it until it was swinging back and forth like a bell rope.

“Al, come on,” I said. “Enough. Leave it be.”

Bonnie and I started back to the truck and he laughed at us as if we were fools to be afraid of a little old cable hanging in the air. To prove how foolish we were and maybe how fearless he was, he poked it with his finger. “See?” he said. “It don’t bite. It don’t bite at all.”

“Al…” Bonnie said, but it was too late.

He grabbed it with his right hand and seized up immediately, his eyes going wide and his mouth hanging open. For a second there, I thought maybe it was a high-power line and he had just gotten zapped. But that wasn’t it at all. I raced over to him and saw that his fingers were locked around the cable, that a prodigious amount of some clear goo had gushed over his hand. I didn’t know what it was. It was transparent and glutinous like Vaseline. Whatever it was, he was stuck to it.

“I…I can’t get my hand free,” he said with a sick little smile, his face gone yellow and waxy. Drops of sweat had popped on his brow. I could almost smell the fear coming off him. It was sharp and unpleasant. “Jon… Jon …I can’t get my fucking hand free.”

I went to grab it myself, to peel him off there, but Bonnie cried, “Don’t touch it!”

She was right. I handed the flashlight off to her as Al became increasingly panicky. His face was covered in sweat by then. His lower lip was trembling and his eyes were shining like wet plastic. I took hold of his free arm and tried to yank him free, but it was no good. He was stuck fast. The line just went with us as if there was no end to it.

Bonnie set down the flashlight and grabbed a section of fender wall that was hanging from the patrol car. She pushed on the cable as Al and I pulled. No dice. I ran over to my pickup with the flashlight. I opened the toolbox in the back and grabbed my hacksaw. We would cut him free. I brought it back over and Al offered me a thin little smile, as if to say, That’s it, now you’re thinking, boy. I gripped the saw in both hands and dragged the teeth over the cable. No good. They skated right over its surface. It was like trying to saw glass. I tried it again and then again. The blade was sharp but it didn’t even scratch the cable’s outer covering.

“Wait,” Bonnie said.

She pushed the section of fender wall against the cable to steady and support it. I tried sawing it again with everything I had, but it was hopeless. I don’t know what it was made of, but it was durable as diamond.

The cable began to vibrate.

I saw it, so did Bonnie.

It vibrated and then it jerked two or three times. I thought I heard a sort of electronic humming from somewhere high above us. Al gasped and suddenly he was three feet off the ground, dangling from his stuck hand. He was thrashing and screaming, shouting at us: “Get it off me! Get it off me! Jesus Christ, I’m hooked to it!”

His eyes were wild and bulging, his mouth drawn into a grimace, his teeth chattering. There were huge sweat stains on his back. Bonnie told him to take it easy, we’d get him free…even though she knew that probably wasn’t going to happen. I had ideas of somehow hooking the cable to the truck and breaking it. Stupid, frantic ideas. Al was out of his head by then. The cable jerked again and he was pulled up another foot. He looked ridiculous, hanging there like a rag doll. Without even thinking, he reached out and grabbed the cable with his other hand to pull himself free.

I saw it happen this time.

As soon as his hand wrapped around it, the cable secreted a copious amount of that clear goo and Al’s other hand was trapped as surely as a bumblebee in amber. He shrieked and kicked, yanking with everything he had, swinging back and forth on the cable like some kind of half-ass Tarzan.

“JON!” Bonnie cried. “DO SOMETHING!”

But there wasn’t anything I could do and I think we were both fully aware of it. The cable vibrated again; then Al was towed away into the blackness far above, screaming the whole time. Within seconds, his screams had faded off into the night. If I had to guess, I would have said he was pulled up hundreds of feet if not a thousand or more.

After that, Bonnie and I just stood there, breathing and staring up into the darkness. It was all bad, of course, and we both knew that whatever this was about, we’d never see Al again. What bothered me was that he had poked the cable with the trim and with his finger, but neither had stuck. The section of fender hadn’t either. Nor had the hacksaw blade. What did that mean exactly? It did not exude that sticky stuff until Al had securely grasped it. Had it been the heat of his palm? A chemical trigger reacting to the salt or oils of his skin? It had to be something like that. It just had to be…because otherwise what happened meant that the cable itself was sentient somehow.

Bonnie let out a little cry and I saw not two but three more cables drop from the darkness above us.

There was only one thing to do and we did it: we got the hell out of there.

It took us some time to get back. We cut off Maisey onto Piccamore and we hadn’t gone half a block before we saw more of those cables. They were hanging above the streets and yards, several tangled in the trees or lying on rooftops like dead snakes. I had a mad urge to open up the truck and plow right through them, but I had a nasty feeling Frankovich had tried the exact same thing.

I stopped and turned around.

Bonnie barely spoke the entire way back except for asking, “What’s it all about, Jon? What does it mean?”

And I had absolutely no answer for her.

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.