The Town (44 page)

He had to hurry. Frank swung open the gate and jumped back into the Jeep, gunning it and braking to a sudden halt just before the blocky transformer building. From the rear of the vehicle, he grabbed his tools, diagnostic equipment, and a flashlight, just in case. He popped open the door of the building, flipping on the lights and walking inside, and headed immediately to the control panel, installed in a series of metal cabinets and insulated wall units at the opposite end of the room. Checking all of the appropriate gauges, he frowned. There was nothing wrong here. Everything was running smoothly. Everything was as it was supposed to be. He turned around—

A shadow flitted past the door.

Frank practically jumped out of his boots.

The movement had startled him, but that was not what
scared
him. Or it was only the start of it. For there was something strange and unnatural about the shape he’d seen, some sense he’d gotten from that fleeting glimpse that whatever was inside the gates here with him was . . . not right.

That was the word that was echoing in his mind, and while he wasn’t a churchgoer like Shelly, while he thought he’d left all that fire and brimstonery back in his mama’s house, he offered up a quick prayer. He was smart enough to know that there were things he didn’t know, and right now, out here in the middle of nowhere, that sense of ignorance seemed particularly strong. He was trying to hold on to some half-baked notion that this was an animal or a homeless man, but his emotions, his brain, and his gut instinct told him otherwise, and he wished to Christ they’d sent Tyler out on this call instead of him.

There was a pounding on the roof.

He glanced again at the instrument panel, saw that nothing was wrong, and thought that whatever this creature was, it had caused the system anomalies they’d recorded back at the office and had purposely tried to make them think there was something amiss.

But why?

Maybe it wanted to lure someone out here.

For what?

He didn’t even want to think about that.

From his tool kit, he withdrew his heaviest socket wrench. He didn’t have a hammer with him—it was back in the Jeep—but this would do in a pinch, would enable him to fight off whatever came at him until he
could
get to the Jeep.

Outside, the light was failing fast. Already, the sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving only an orange glow where its specific shape had been. The lights in the transformer room made the dying light outside seem even darker.

Dying
light?

Frank hurried toward the open door. He flipped off the inside lights, closed the door behind him, and in the brief second before it hit him and knocked him down, he saw a dark shadowy figure swoop down from the roof of the transformer building. He landed on his back, staring up for a moment at the steel girders and the intersecting power cables and the purple sky above.

Then something dark passed between him and the sky.

The face that pulled close to his was wrinkled and horribly old, wizened and evil, and he screamed as the hideous creature bent down to kiss him and rubbed its slimy skin against his cheek.

The blackout occurred at 6:45.

Julia heard over the radio that it had affected five western states and that electric company representatives believed it to be the result of a downed transformer in either eastern Arizona or western New Mexico. Similar blackouts had occurred because of heavy monsoon activity in the past, but there was no lightning this time, no storms in any of the Four Corners states, and experts were at a loss to explain what had brought about this failure.

Big cities, they predicted, would be quickly back on line, would have power restored within the next three or four hours, but it might take three days before the entire power grid was again up and running.

Where did that leave McGuane?

She wasn’t sure.

Julia sat in the kitchen, waiting for Agafia to return. Her mother-in-law had been gone all day, and in Julia’s fantasy she was gathering the other Molokans together, hatching a plan to get her and the kids out of here, but the truth was that she was probably trying to perform one of her exorcisms or rituals, attempting to get at the root of the problem rather than focusing on their specific situation. Like most true believers, Agafia would put her cause ahead of her family—and Julia resented her for that.

The atmosphere in the house was tense. Aside from those few angry words in the bedroom and his false cheer at breakfast, Gregory had not spoken to her since . . . since the beating. He was not only hostile and angry, which she would understand, but there was a distracted distance in his attitude that frightened her. He had shadowed her all day, not letting her out of his sight, and it was only after the kids returned from school that he finally went upstairs and locked himself in the attic. Her hands were still shaking nervously, but at least he was out of her hair for the moment, and she was grateful he’d decided to leave her alone.

The kids were on edge, too. The hyperfriendly Gregory of the morning was gone, and since Adam and Teo had come home, their father had been avoiding them, not speaking to them either, and she found that troubling. She wanted to grab the kids and take off, let them know what was really happening, but Gregory was holding the van keys and they certainly wouldn’t get far by walking.

Adam and Teo had been hiding in Teo’s room ever since they’d come home—it was downstairs, farther away from
him
—and they emerged into the living room as soon as the lights went out. Julia broke out the candles, setting three on the coffee table and four others around the perimeter of the room, letting Adam and Teo light some of them, lighting the rest herself.

Sasha had still not returned home, and that worried her. Not as much as it would have ordinarily, though. She was concerned for her daughter, but part of her couldn’t help thinking that she would be safer away from this house, away from her father. Julia found herself hoping that Sasha would stay with a friend until daylight.

There was the sound of a crash from upstairs, and Gregory’s shouted curse, and Adam and Teo both looked at her. She tried to offer them a reassuring smile, but she was still in quite a bit of pain and it probably came out closer to a grimace.

None of them said anything.

Julia looked out the window once again, hoping to see a Molokan cavalry coming to the rescue, but there was only blackness, only night, and the three of them sat together in the living room, waiting, listening to the battery-powered radio, trying to ignore the sounds of Gregory up in the attic.

The lights went out at the perfect time.

Sasha had taken off her clothes and crawled into the bed, and Wilbert was just starting to undress.

The truth was that she didn’t really want to see him naked. The beer gut distending his T-shirt was bad enough when he was fully clothed, but staring at that hairy blubber hanging over an erection would be a serious turnoff, and she was glad when the lights winked out.

She was not so glad when he hit her.

She did not know why it happened, did not know if it was an accident, if he simply hadn’t been able to see her in the dark and her face had been in the way of his hand’s intended destination, or if the blow was intentional, but it made her angry, and she yelled at him, making sure he got her message loud and clear. She was doing this ugly porker a big favor by fucking him, and if he was going to try and pull this shit, she’d kick him in the goddamn balls, grab her clothes, and get the hell out of his rat-infested trailer.

He did not respond to her tirade, and against her will she felt the first faint stirrings of fear.

“Aren’t you even going to apologize?” she asked, keeping her voice angry.

No answer.

She could feel his weight on the bed next to her, so she knew he had not left, but still he said nothing.

Now she was definitely afraid. She did not like the fact that he was not speaking, that the room was silent. “Wilbert?” she said hesitantly.

Silence. A slight shifting of weight.

“Wilbert?”

“Boo!” he said.

Relief flooded through her. “Wilbert!”

He was laughing, rolling around on the bed.

And there was someone else in the room laughing as well.

She heard several people laughing.

Her mouth suddenly went dry.

There were others here.

She started to sit up. He slapped her again, and now her mouth was no longer dry. There was blood in it.

A strong hand pushed her down, and then he was on top of her. The other laugher had not yet stopped, and even as Wilbert spread her legs apart, she was listening carefully, trying to determine how many different voices she could pick out.

Three.

Five.

Six.

She could not differentiate how many others.

There was a scream from the next room.

Cherie.

It was too dark to see, but Sasha closed her eyes anyway. This was a nightmare, like something out of a movie. She should have learned her lesson last time, should have stayed as far away from these rednecks as possible, but . . . but something had made her do it.

And as Wilbert’s bulk settled on top of her and the laughter grew, she began to cry.

Jesus H. Christ.

Sheriff Roland Ford paced in the dirt in front of his office, rifle in hand, waiting for those dipshit policemen to show up. The two departments were pooling their resources tonight, and though he did not like the idea, he recognized the necessity for it. Neither could handle this situation alone—there was so much going on that they needed to coordinate who was going to do what. It was like New York out there rather than McGuane—a night filled with looting and random violence. He found it hard to believe that one extended blackout could cause so many problems.

From far off up the canyon he heard the sound of sirens. Fire, it sounded like. Or ambulance.

He shook his head. What the fuck was going on here? It was as if lights and electricity were the only things maintaining people’s sanity, the only things upholding civilization, and without those basic technological comforts, they panicked, reverted to savagery. It made no sense on any sort of rational level, and he had to admit that he did not understand it. As someone who often went camping and hunting, the night held no terrors for him, and he could not figure out why seemingly well-adjusted adults would overreact to such an unbelievable extent.

Of course, not all of them were well adjusted.

Two separate local militia groups had appointed themselves the official protector of McGuane, and they were fighting it out in the park over jurisdiction. A bunch of overweight, undereducated losers who wouldn’t even be able to make it through the sheriff’s academy’s female course, they were now proclaiming themselves the only real law in town.

Word was that they’d tried to lynch a man, a Mormon elder who had dared to question their right to even participate in law enforcement, and Tom Sobule, the town’s newest police recruit, had had to fire his sidearm into the air in order to rescue the man and head off a confrontation. They hadn’t been brave enough to actually go up against a real officer, to abandon all pretense of the rule of law and degenerate completely into anarchy and vigilantism—but the night was still young.

Since then, the two militia groups had gotten into it with each other. If he was lucky, they’d kill each other off, and his men could just go in and arrest the last man standing.

Or take him out if he wanted to fight.

They’d had blackouts before, and he failed to understand what made this one different. The others had been local, confined to McGuane or, at most, Rio Verde County—they had not involved whole states—but he found it hard to believe that the size of the affected area had any bearing on the behavior of people in town. Did they learn that the blackout was affecting Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and automatically assume that it was the end of the world or the collapse of the country? The militia nuts, perhaps. But he could not see ordinary, everyday citizens believing such lunacy.

Yet it was those ordinary, everyday citizens who were out there looting and fighting and doing who knew what.

Roland sighed. The truth was, it wasn’t just the blackout. Something else had caused this unrest, something had led them to this point. The blackout was just the catalyst, the excuse. The real reasons went far deeper, and while he prided himself on his fairness and open-mindedness, while he did not like to pick on one specific group of people or indulge in any kind of scapegoating, he could not help but think that the Molokans were somehow at the root of it all. Things had been getting increasingly strange around here for quite some time, but it was the hairy church yesterday that had really kicked the situation into high gear. Though the Russians might be victims just as much as everyone else, he could not seem to maintain the objectivity he knew his job required, and he found himself thinking that they were somehow responsible, that, intentionally or unintentionally, they had brought about this craziness.

And it was crazy.

A woman had called in to his office, claiming that the sheets that had been drying on her clothesline were flying around the outside of her house, trying to find a way in. A girl had called saying that her younger brother had tried to stab her and she’d had to lock the boy in a closet. Two kids had run down to the police station afraid that a giant lizard was chasing them.

There were reports of rat armies and cat attacks, and throughout the canyons came the almost constant echoes of gunfire.

Roland hoped to God it was animals that were being shot.

It was chaos out there. There was so much going on that it was impossible to know what was happening. Even with all of the shifts called in, the sheriff’s office was severely undermanned, and that was why, against the strong feelings of his gut, the instinct he usually trusted above all others, he’d agreed to throw in with the cops.