by Tim Curran
But it was frightening and we didn’t want to think about it.
I had no doubt Iris was close to the truth. If anyone seemed to have an inkling of what was going on, it was her. But that didn’t mean I was up to it. I think we were all worn out and the last thing we wanted to do was sit around and speculate. She kept tossing out her theories, but one by one we stopped talking and just let her rattle on endlessly. After what seemed a good hour, she finally shut up.
And it wasn’t because she was out of words, but because things were happening again. It began with a rumbling that sounded distant and nearly subdued. I remember thinking in the back of my mind that it sounded like a truck rolling over railroad tracks. It was that same sort of thumpety-thump you get used to hearing when you live near a train station. It came and went and we all got very tense. You could almost hear the blood draining from our faces. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the sudden silence was oppressive and unbroken. We knew it was bad, whatever it was, but being human beings, we all hoped it would just go away. At least, that’s what I was thinking.
Then we heard it again.
And again.
And again.
Each time it was closer and the rumbling was more violent. The next time we heard it, it rattled the windows upstairs and made the floor beneath our feet momentarily vibrate. It was the sound of destruction and it was getting closer and closer.
Finally, Billy said, “We better have a look.”
Iris was not saying a thing and Bonnie offered us a very tense shell-shocked sort of look, her eyes huge and glassy, her mouth pulled in a tight line. She said nothing. In fact, at that moment I think she was physically incapable of speech. I followed Billy back upstairs and we crept like thieves in the night. We crossed through the kitchen and Billy pushed open the door into the living room with the barrel of the riot gun. I clicked on my flashlight and panned the light around. The living room was in shambles. The cyclops had destroyed just about everything. We stepped around shattered furniture, broken glass crunching underfoot. We made it over to the missing picture window and heard that rumbling again. Being upstairs, it was much louder now. The house shook and I heard bits of debris falling from the walls.
“Look,” Billy said under his breath.
What I saw was a pod of the sort I had seen earlier. It was moving up the block across the street, a pale pink beam of light scanning the yards and homes and showing me destruction, showing me nothing but wreckage. It was going house to house, tearing each apart. It hovered above the Renfew house, illuminating it with its “eye,” and I could see it was immense. The cyclopses were but smaller, streamlined versions of this monstrosity. Each of them, I figured, was maybe twice the size of your average pickup truck, but the pod was easily a hundred feet across, a gigantic black sphere with literally hundreds of jointed limbs hanging from it.
I saw very clearly how it put them to use.
It studied the Renfew house with its pink orb and then it dropped down on it like some titanic spider. The limbs ended in what looked like threshing hooks. They took hold of the roof and peeled it free in seconds. There was a crashing eruption and the roof—or the rubble it had been reduced to—was torn completely off like the lid from a box. The wreckage was dumped in the yard, a boiling cloud of dust rising up and filling the pod’s beam of light. Several small fires blazed up from the roofless house. The pod moved off slowly to the next house. It had barely left the scene when we saw a dozen cables drop down in the firelight.
We heard screams.
We saw people being pulled up into the sky.
There was no hiding, I knew then. There was no escaping. They could find you anywhere. They had come a long way and they were not going to be denied what they had come for and that was the grim truth of the matter. As the pod moved on, I saw a cyclops come and begin looting the ruins. That was how it worked. The pod tore the houses apart, then the cables came down, and the cyclops searched for stragglers. It was efficient. Very efficient. They could harvest the world that way. A few could hide from them but not any groups or populations. A lone man might have a chance, but how long could you stay by yourself until you starved for company? Human beings are social creatures. We band together. I had no doubt whoever or whatever was behind all this knew that all too well.
We went back downstairs.
There was no point in pretending so we didn’t bother. We told Bonnie and Iris what was going on and how bad things were. Bonnie heard us out, but Iris seemed to have shut down. She just sat there, slumped forward, her head seeming to hang on her skinny neck like a gourd. Bonnie was not easily beaten, but she looked pretty beaten then. She looked from Billy to me, maybe hoping we had a plan, but we didn’t. We both knew we needed to get out of the house. We needed to escape…but escape to where? What place was safe now?
“The only thing I can think of is maybe one of the houses they already went through,” Billy said. “We could sneak into the rubble and wait things out.”
It was an idea and it was the best one I’d heard.
Bonnie nodded. “Okay. It’s our only chance.”
Iris decided to come to life. She lifted up her head, her eyes wide and bright, a grin that looked positively demented opening up her face and making her dentures dangle from her gums. “Come for us,” she said. “Come for us one by one and find us and gobble us up.”
“Stop it,” Bonnie told her.
But she wouldn’t stop. She was like some toy that had been wound by a key and she was bursting with energy, gesticulating with her hands and rolling her shoulders and talking nonstop: “Get us! Get us all! They’ll gobble up me then you and you and you! Gobble, gobble, gobble!” Her eyes were unblinking, glazed with fear. “Nowhere to run! Nowhere to hide! Fish in a bowl plucked out one after the other until there ain’t no fish left!”
“Shut up!” Bonnie snapped.
“Gobble! Gobble! Gobble!” Iris maintained. “And who’s to stop them? Who’s to stand in their way? They’ll take us all and we can’t do a damn thing about it! Gobblegobblegobblegobblegobble—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Bonnie told her.
Iris did. She was wound down again and she slumped back into her chair as if the air had been bled out of her. She looked very old, shrunken, compressed. She made a low sobbing sound in her throat and when Bonnie got control of herself, she tried to comfort her. It was pointless. Iris was gone. Something had given inside her and she was damaged, irreparably damaged. Bonnie tried to hold on to her but it was like trying to comfort a bag of rags. Iris seemed terribly inanimate all of a sudden, an inert mass.
“When do we leave?” Doris said. She was standing in the doorway.
“Soon,” I told her. “We just have to scope out where we’re going.”
We didn’t waste any more time.
We started organizing things: water, food, blankets, first aid, batteries, flashlights and lanterns. We split it all up so no one would have to carry too much. Once we had things ready, we bundled our goods up in blankets and tied them for easy carrying.
“Let’s just go right across the street,” I said to Billy. “The Renfews’ place is burning, but the Petersens’ looks all right. Nice brick house. Pretty solid. Nice furnished basement.”
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Billy agreed.
We told Bonnie to wait with Iris and Doris and the kids while we went up top to scope things out. Billy grabbed the riot gun and I grabbed a little Tekna flashlight. When we got back up to the living room, crouching before the missing picture window among the debris, we saw that the Renfew house was still burning. The fire had grown but I didn’t think it was strong enough to reach over to the Petersens’. The good thing was that the fire threw a lot of light to see by. It was easy to sketch out our route over to the Petersens’. The cables were all gone and I took that as a good sign. Beyond a lot of rubble in the street, an overturned car, and assorted junk in the yard, it looked clear and smooth. We could do it. And we could do it fast. I had no doubt
about it.
Billy led the way downstairs. I had just passed through the kitchen when the entire house erupted with a dirty pink light and I knew the end had come.
17
I think Billy said something. I thought I heard him shout but it was lost in the volume of noise that came at me from every quarter. The house shifted, moved, trembled, and I went down on my ass. I heard a metallic screeching as the roof came off my house and then debris—ceiling tiles, lathing, and joists were coming down and the walls were falling in. It felt like the house was folding up like a card table. I can remember screaming and my voice was insignificant against the roaring of the house coming apart around me.
Then the floor gave way and I was sliding down, down, as an avalanche of shattered Sheetrock fell over me. When the house, or the pile of junk it had been reduced to, stopped moving, I saw flames. I saw dust-clogged beams of light playing through the ruins.
Miraculously, I was still gripping the flashlight. I clicked it on and looked around.
I saw cables.
The pod had passed on to its next conquest and the cables had dropped down. One of them was about two feet from me, tangled on a heating duct that was precariously balancing against a section of wall. I was in the furnace room and I didn’t seem to be damaged despite cuts and bruises. I wasn’t pinned down, but I was not daring to move in case that cable worked its way free.
I heard debris shifting, then voices, several voices crying out in sheer terror, and I knew they belonged to the kids because the next voice I heard was clearly Doris’s.
“NO! NO! NO!” she shrieked. “PLEASE PLEASE DEAR GOD NOT MY CHILDREN NOT MY CHILDREN—”
I saw the kids going up on one of the cables. They were screaming and fighting but it was hopeless. I could see their wet, tear-streaked faces. I don’t think I’ll ever stop seeing them if I live another fifty years. Doris, fired by maternal instinct, was caught on the cable about ten feet beneath them, still thrashing, still shrieking. She disappeared up into the darkness and that’s the last I saw of her.
The cable by me was trembling as if it was hungry to latch onto something meaty. I was not going to give it the chance. I figured that sooner or later it would have been pulled back up, but the idea of waiting there for that to happen was unthinkable. I had to get out. Even if it was dangerous and suicidal, I had to get the hell out of my hole one way or another.
There was only one way and I took it.
Shoving the flashlight in my pocket, I carefully crawled up on top of the furnace itself. It was this huge pea-green forced-air monstrosity that I had been planning on getting rid of for years and replacing with an energy-efficient hot-water boiler. I no longer had to fret about that. I got up on it, steadied myself while keeping an eye on the cable. I pulled myself up a section of duct, shimmying slowly, afraid it wouldn’t hold my weight. But it held me. I got up to the main floor that was cracked open, part of it lifted up six inches higher than the rest. Everything had been so thoroughly trashed, I couldn’t even be sure where I was. Then I saw the smashed sarcophagus of the refrigerator in the guttering light and I knew I was in the kitchen. I sidled up to it like it was an old friend, hanging on to it, remembering only too well the windy autumn day fourteen years previously when Kathy and I had picked it out at Sears.
It was then I smelled cigarette smoke.
I was certain of it. Either someone out there had lit up or a stray pack was simply burning. I was hoping beyond hope for the former. I waited, the paranoia in me increased far beyond normal limits. Reality, at least the reality I had known and taken for granted my entire life, had been turned on its head and I trusted nothing. Nothing at all.
Finally, after about ten minutes, I said, “Is somebody there?”
My voice was loud in the silence where there was no sound save for the crackling of fires and the occasional shifting of wreckage.
“Jon?” a voice said and I knew it belonged to Billy. “Jon…is that you?”
The same paranoia I was experiencing underlay his words. He trusted nothing and no one. I told him it was me, hesitantly peeking my head up over the fridge. He came over right away and plopped himself down next to me.
“I can’t find Bonnie,” he said. “She’s either trapped below or they got her.”
There was nothing I could say to that. “Doris and the kids went up,” I said.
He nodded. “I heard her. I saw Iris go up, too. She wasn’t moving. I think she was already dead.”
“Her heart probably gave out.”
I bummed a smoke from him and we sat there in the ruins of my kitchen, backs up against the Kenmore fridge, not speaking at all. We were both exhausted, both worn beyond acceptable limits. I was thinking that six, seven hours before I was sitting on the couch with Kathy joking about the tattoo Bonnie had gotten on her tit. In that short span of time everything had changed. The neighborhood was barely recognizable, our house looked like a deadfall, and Kathy was gone somewhere I couldn’t even guess at. It was this that was going to be hard to wrap my brain around in the days to come, I knew. That change, complete and irrevocable, had happened so quickly.
“You got the time?” I finally said.
Billy offered me his wrist. I could see his watch was smashed. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Gotta be getting near dawn. It has to be.”
Old-world logic. That’s all it was. It could no longer be applied to the nightmare we were trapped in. I knew the smart thing to do, the reasonable and cautious thing, was to get ourselves somewhere safe. Somewhere underground. Somewhere the cables couldn’t get to us if there even could be such a place. But I knew there was no way Billy would leave, not until he was 100% sure Bonnie was beyond help. And I couldn’t imagine leaving until I knew the same.
So we waited.
Some time later Billy said, “Listen.”
It was the last thing I wanted to do and the very thing I knew I had to do. At first, I heard nothing. Then, a sound of debris shifting like something was steadily crawling in our direction. We both sat up and got ready for whatever it might be. The transition from complete apathy and exhaustion to razor-edged terror was almost instantaneous. Billy bunched up next to me like a fist getting ready to strike. Then we heard a sibilant sound that could be nothing but breathing, a ragged sort of breathing.
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 lik
e 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.
