by Tim Curran
“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.
I caught hold of the cable with the tines of the rake and slowly pulled it away from the door. “Okay!” I said. “Get out of there now!”
The door opened and Billy helped two pasty-faced kids out, a boy and a girl who were still wearing pajamas. Their mother—or who I assumed was their mother—got out next. The cable was trembling a bit as I held it and the woman got the kids well away in case I lost control of it. Billy went in and helped her husband out. He had banged his head pretty good and there was dried blood all over the left side of his face. It looked like his arm was broken. As Billy got him out of there, he was very groggy. He was also wearing a brown UPS uniform.
When he was clear, I released the cable.
The woman introduced herself as Doris Shifferin and her kids were Kayla and Kevin. The man was not her husband but the guy from next door whose name was Roger. He had gotten them away from their neighborhood, which was a maze of cables, but when that wind kicked up, he lost control of the SUV. And here they were.
“You took a pretty good knock,” Billy told him. “But we can fix you up, I think. First, let’s get the hell out of here.”
We didn’t make it ten steps before something came out of the darkness at us. It was fast. Incredibly fast. A black shape that swooped right over our heads like some immense bird. I knew then that what I had seen pulling away from the light more than once was not my imagination. It came again before we had time to recover from the first encounter.
“Get down!” I told Doris and the kids. “Get your heads down!”
The kids didn’t say a word as she pulled them to the ground and held them tightly to her. I thought they were both in shock. I figured if we could get them back to the house and get some food in them, give them a safe place to rest, they would be okay. But that wasn’t going to be easy. The shape came out of the darkness like a bat and in the illumination of the SUV’s headlights, I saw something like a flying black hood, swollen and elongated. My first impression was that it looked much like a folded-up umbrella, except that it was bulbous and nearly the size of a man.
I ducked when it came again and it swooped within three feet of Roger, who stood there, dazed and confused, half out of it from his head wound. Billy fired at the hood, missed, racked the pump on the riot gun and fired again. He hit it. Just before it disappeared into the darkness, I saw it jerk as the buckshot bit into it.
I told Roger to get his head down and when he didn’t listen, I got up and made to take him down. But I never got to him. The hood beat me to it. It came out of the night with a smooth, sleek velocity and engulfed his head and upper body, closing over him like the trap of an insectivorous plant. The hood opened, looking very much like an umbrella unfolding and then folding back up as it gripped him. I could clearly see the architecture of ten or twelve bony appendages beneath the skin radiating out. They ran from midline of the hood to the very bottom, a slick webbing of black tissuelike material connecting them. The entire creature was shiny black like wet neoprene and had a ring of brilliant red eyes near the apex of the hood itself.
Roger made a grunting sound as it closed over him.
Doris screamed and Billy, with a knee-jerk reaction, brought up the riot gun and made to fire before I knocked the barrel away. For a second there, it looked like he was going to turn it on me, but that was the terror and stress and shock of it all taking hold of him.
I brought up my pike to spear the thing and as I got closer the eyes of it went from bright electric red to the color of fresh blood. They seemed to bulge in their sockets. I jabbed it with the pike again and again but I couldn’t get any purchase. It was much like the cable I tried to cut, made out of some glossy, glassy sort of material the sharpened end of the pike glanced off without causing any damage. But I got a reaction out of it—the skeletal appendages opened like the fingers of a hand and then it turned itself inside out, protecting its eyes with a cloak of its own flesh. I saw its crimson underside quite clearly. The sticklike appendages were set with long, lethal-looking spikes that had impaled Roger and now withdrawn. But he was still held by a suckering orifice that had swallowed his entire head. He was wet with blood from the many spikes and I thought he was dead.
Then the hood covered him again and before I could do much more than gasp, it rose into the air with him in tow.
There wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it.
And we didn’t have the time because something gigantic was hovering above us, maybe fifty feet up. We wouldn’t have seen it at all, but like with the cyclops, a single orb of light irised open and flooded the world with dull pink light. It was like some immense pod or shell with what appeared to be hundreds of jointed, narrow limbs sprouting from it. Each was roughly the thickness of a telephone pole and probably three times as long. Whatever it was, I don’t think it was the same as the cyclops. It hovered up there and I expected it to drop down on us, but it didn’t. It just turned its glowing milky eye on us and held us in a beam of pale pink light.
The hood moved up towards it with Roger in tow and then flew up into a central diamond-shaped chasm on its underside. The hood, as I said, was nearly as big as a man, but it was dwarfed by the colossal pod up there. It looked like a pea next to a shoebox.
That’s when I saw that surrounding the chasm were what looked like countless pulsating polyps clinging there like remoras on a shark’s belly. They were hoods. What might have been hundreds of them. Several detached themselves and swooped over our heads. The air was filled with them. Billy fired again and again. Whether he hit them, I don’t know. One of them came at me and it would have had me, too, but I thrust the pike at it with everything I had and felt it sink into something—the suckering orifice beneath, I thought—and the hood made a sort of electronic squealing sound and hit the ground. It couldn’t seem to fly. It skidded along the pavement, jetting around like a squid.
We got the hell out of there.
Billy led the way and we got Doris and the kids between us. I had no idea where we were going, but B
illy seemed to know. The hoods dipping down at us, he led us back into the forest of cables where things were too tight for them to follow. It was good thinking and I’m pretty sure it saved all our lives.
Once inside the depths of the cables, we moved slowly and cautiously again, waiting for them to reach out and snare us.
15
Doris and the kids were barely holding it together by that point and I wasn’t much better. The children were not just clinging to her, they were practically welded to her so that they almost moved as a single entity. As Billy guided us forward, the entire time talking in a very soothing voice to them how everything was going to be just fine—bless him—I kept a hand on Doris’s shoulder. I think she needed the physical contact and I know I needed it.
The cables trembled as we passed them, but they did nothing other than that but wait. Time was on their side and they knew it. Eventually, after about ten minutes or so, they thinned out. We didn’t breathe any easier because that put us back in the open where we were prey for the hoods. And, true to form, they made their appearance almost right away.
The four of us clustered together instinctively and kept our heads down. Herd mentality, I guess. I assumed the hoods were like lions looking for a stray gazelle and we weren’t about to give them that opportunity. They kept swooping, sometimes flying right at us as if they hoped to spook and separate us.
Finally, Billy said, “There! There it is!”
He shone the light on a parked minivan. I didn’t get it. I understood the need of shelter, but why a minivan at the curb? That would put us in the same position Doris and the kids had been in when we found them. But then I knew, then I remembered as we piled in. Keys. There were keys in the minivan. Billy had pointed them out to me as we checked the cars on our journey.
When the door was closed, I think I let out a long sigh.
Billy, behind the wheel, turned it over and the engine caught right away. “Let them fucking swoop all they want,” he said. “They won’t get us now.”
He pulled away from the curb, turning in the street and pointing the van back towards our section of Piccamore. The lights picked out dangling cables and dead, deserted houses. I saw a woman’s shoe in the middle of the street and I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
The next ten minutes are burned in my memory.
Billy piloted the minivan slowly down the road. He avoided the panic that gripped him as it gripped all of us. It would have been too easy to stomp down on the accelerator and race up the street. He was too careful for that and I can’t say I would have had that much self-control. As he drove, I could see his face in the glow of the dash lights—grim and set, his teeth locked tightly together like someone was digging a bullet out of him. The cables were everywhere and the minivan met them dead-on, bumping them aside like swinging vines. The sight of them brushing against the windows and the sound of them dragging over the roof was almost too much.
We made it about half a block before the hoods started bumping into us.
At first, it was playful, investigatory, as if they were trying to figure out what the minivan was. Then after a couple minutes of that, one of them came screaming out of the darkness and hit the windshield at full speed. It didn’t get in, but the window shattered, hanging there in a sheet of spiderwebbed cracks. Billy couldn’t see through it, so he knocked out a good section with the stock of the riot gun. Just enough so he could get us where we had to go. I think we all knew that if another hood made a run at us, there would be no stopping it.
Billy drove erratically, avoiding the cables now. If one of them got in through the damaged windshield, it would be disastrous. He drove in the street, up on the sidewalk, through yards, anywhere to avoid them as much as possible. The hoods were still out there swooping and circling like moths around a streetlight, but none of them made any further kamikaze attacks.
“Almost there,” he finally said.
I couldn’t see a damn thing and had no idea where we were. My section of windshield was still attached, feathered out with hundreds of diverging cracks and gently swaying with the motion of the minivan. Within five minutes, Billy popped the curb and pulled right into my front yard within mere feet of the porch. I jumped out first and then Billy was at my side. The door opened and Bonnie was waiting for us. We hustled Doris and the kids inside.
We had made it.
We had really made it.
That’s exactly what I thought as I jogged up the steps to get inside myself. I almost didn’t make it. I remember feeling something like a hot wind and I was hit right between the shoulder blades with enough force to knock me right over the railing into the yard.
One of the hoods had me.
It gripped me by the loose skin between my shoulder blades. I couldn’t see it, of course. I was face down in the grass, but I could feel its terrible weight and the pain where its suckering mouth was attached to me. It felt like a thousand red-hot needles had pierced me. I flopped around, trying to reach behind me but it was no good. It had me and it wasn’t about to let go. It was going to fly up with me to that great and evil pod in the sky…and the insane thing was, after a few brief moments of fighting, I was more than ready to accept my fate. I was beaten and I knew it. My body felt heavy and my limbs were rubbery. I remember asking myself what exactly I was fighting for.
What happened after that I can’t really say.
I was out of it. Completely out of it. I felt like I’d been shot up with Demerol. I was just a slab of meat sinking into myself. There were a lot of confused images after that, most of them overlapping one another until none of it made any sense. I didn’t really come out of it until later. And when I did, I was on the kitchen floor. The first thing I saw was Bonnie and Billy staring down at me. Doris was there, too. In the lantern light, their eyes were wide and unblinking.
“What?” I said. “What…what’re you staring at?”
Bonnie giggled. “Sounds like he’ll be all right.”
“Jesus Christ, that was a tight one,” Billy said, wiping sweat from his brow.
“I want to thank you for what you did,” Doris told me. There were tears in her eyes and I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
They said later that I came out of it slowly, asking about Kathy and talking to her as if she were actually in the room. I felt slow and drugged and confused. Apparently, when the hood took hold of you, it also injected you with enough sedatives to put you into la-la land, where you would not fight or cause any undue trouble. Bonnie said the hood grabbed me and we both went over the railing. I remembered that much. Billy went over the railing after us. As the hood made to lift off, he put the barrel of the riot gun up to its head—the top of the hood—and fired three times. The hood released me almost immediately and flew off. Billy figured he’d injured it because it did not fly so well after that. It smashed into the house next door and then got trapped in the branches of a tree.
Regardless, it was over.
They disinfected the wounds on my back with hydrogen peroxide and put a sterile dressing over them. That was the best they could do and I figured it would be enough.
Billy had saved my life.
I wasn’t about to forget that.
16
I was not naïve enough to believe we were safe. The idea that those things out there were simply going to give up on us was ludicrous. Things like them did not give up. Whatever they were—and the jury was out on that one—they were the sort of things that would see the job through. Hoping they would forget about us or decide to spare us was like a dust ball hoping a vacuum cleaner would not suck it up. And there’s a good analogy there somewhere.
We moved down to the basement because it had the fewest number of windows and those it did have were fairly small. There was also another door leading up into the garage so that gave us an exit should we need one. We moved all the food down there including all the dry goods and canned stuff. I figured with the bottled water we could hold out for a couple weeks
if we had to…even if the very idea was depressing.
When Doris had the kids tucked in the back bedroom and was sleeping with them, probably wide awake and on watch, Bonnie and Billy and I sat there by candlelight to save on the batteries and tried to hash things out.
“It keeps coming back to the same thing,” Billy said. “Just what the hell are those things and what do they want.”
“They want us, of course,” Iris said.
We were trying to ignore her as much as possible because she was only making sense half of the time. I think she had the start of dementia. Sometimes she would carry on perfectly lucid conversations and offer wisdom and common sense, other times she was talking about people long gone and events long forgotten. Now and again, she would panic and babble on like a frightened little girl. It was hard to know what to make of her.
“They’re machines,” Bonnie said. “That much is obvious. They can’t be anything else.”
“Yes,” I said. “Most of them are.”
“Those hoods aren’t machines. They’re flesh and blood,” Billy pointed out. “They don’t like getting blasted with buckshot. If they were machines, they wouldn’t give a damn.”
“At least the sort of machines we’re used to,” Iris said. “Just imagine the kinds of machines they might make out there, out beyond the stars we know. Think about that. Machines that don’t just react but think. Machines that plot and scheme. Machines designed to travel to the farthest depths of space on voyages that might last hundreds if not thousands of years to collect populations and with the artificial intelligence to get the job done and find their way home again.”
“Like living computers,” Billy said.
Iris just shrugged. “Maybe…but as high above our computers as a laptop is above an abacus. Machines programmed to harvest entire worlds. Just think of it.”
