Nightwalk

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  We arrived at the gate where Casey already had it open and waited for us.

  “Where are we going, Uncle Ed?”

  Good question. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead myself.

  “We’re going to the little gas station with the snack-bar down where the highway crosses under the Interstate. It’s open twenty-four hours and is about three miles away, which should let our cell phones work.”

  I liked that answer, but it also meant Ed was doing the thinking I hadn’t been.

  Being a writer, I tend to do my thinking in carefully planned out plotlines. I’m not saying I can’t think on my feet, but it isn’t my strongest suit.

  I found myself following the two of them as we came around the corner of the house and into the front yard. At least things seemed a little brighter on this side because Ed’s house sat near the end of a cul-de-sac and the trees were thinner at the wide end of the circle.

  His truck waited for us on the driveway like an angel of rescue. The parking lights flashed as Ed used his keychain to unlock the doors, giving us a brief and welcome flash of illumination in the surrounding gloom. Relief flooded through me at the sight. It reminded me the twenty-first century still existed in a night that had started to feel strangely primeval.

  “All aboard,” Ed announced as he crossed in front of the vehicle, “the ‘Screw This Shit’ Express is leaving the station.”

  Casey piled in ahead of me and I quickly followed suit.

  “Ow! Dammit! Watch my feet, Mark!”

  “Sorry,” I snapped, and then added, “Why didn’t you put on shoes before you came out?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because I didn’t feel like stumbling around in a dark house hunting for them?”

  I bit off a retort that if she would put stuff in the same place every night, she wouldn’t have to “hunt” for them. I supposed she couldn’t do anything about it now. Besides, if her feet got cold at the service station, she could stand outside in the warm night and I wouldn’t have to put up with her attitude.

  “Yeah, okay,” I sighed. “They’re your feet.”

  “Yes, they are. And they don’t need both of us walking on them.”

  “Alright, you two,” Ed warned as he started the truck, “I know you’re both worried about Stella, but I’m gonna make you both ride in back if you can’t behave.”

  Chastened, I fell silent.

  This wasn’t the time to be giving Casey grief over something like her lack of shoes. And it only took one glance at the girl to see it hadn’t helped matters with her, either.

  Casey slouched between us, glaring out the windshield with a baleful expression now visible from Ed’s headlights reflecting off the garage doors. Dammit! For all my talk about trying to build bridges with her, I was doing a fantastic job of burning them instead.

  I would need to let her cool down a little bit, but then it definitely behooved me to apologize later. I wasn’t sure how much difference it would make, but I had been in the wrong and I ought to be man enough to admit it. I resolved to do it first thing, once we reached the service station and we got a second alone.

  But as it turned out, things wouldn’t end up working that way either.

  Just as Ed dropped the truck into reverse and started backing down the driveway…it came again.

  Once more a vast cosmic abyss seemed to open under the earth beneath us. The sensation of the world sinking into some unimaginably huge pit of quicksand overcame me even worse than the first time. My stomach tried to float up into my throat, and I think all the blood rushed to my head.

  A shudder swept through me, as if something too horrific for words had stepped on my grave and now sniffed the ground with the idea of digging me up. The wrongness from before now filled the air around me like a physical presence. I had the mental image of some ancient, alien god holding the world in its clawed hand and scrutinizing it with inhuman eyes.

  Then it felt like we hit bottom and the universe’s fall jarred to a stop.

  Everything went dark and I heard Casey gasp beside me.

  “Holy shit!” she choked out. “What is causing that?”

  I didn’t respond right away, trying to regain my own equilibrium. This time the vertigo had been far worse. Nausea clung to the back of my throat and it took a few seconds to fight down.

  And as I recovered, I became acutely aware of the renewed blackness and the truck slowly rolling backward to a stop in the street. Apparently the engine had died, and the headlights with it.

  “Ed?” I swallowed down the bile and called out. “You okay?”

  I heard him breathing harshly in the darkness and worried for a second he had suffered the worst among us. He might have been in decent shape for a guy his age but he still sat far on the wrong side of sixty and I saw room for concern.

  “Yeah,” he gulped at last. “Yeah…I think so.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. How about you, Dodger?”

  “I’m okay,” she replied in a shaky voice. “But if that happens again I’m pretty sure I’m going to throw up.”

  “Me, too,” I agreed. “Whatever it is, it needs to stop…and it needs to stop right now. I think my nose is bleeding.”

  “Actually,” Ed’s voice steadied in the darkness, “I think it just did.”

  “Huh?”

  “I think,” his voice firmed up, “whatever it was, it’s done. Did you feel that at the end…sorta like we hit bottom or something?”

  Now that he mentioned it, I remembered the sensation as well. The first time things had seemed to slide to a stop, but now I wonder if we ever truly had. This time the sensation had a certain finality to it. Like we had been sliding down a hill, then had accelerated at a steep part before coming to rest on the bottom.

  “Yeah,” I nodded in the darkness. “I think you’re right, Ed. I think it’s done.”

  Although we had based this conclusion on nothing but the vaguest of intuitions, it somehow felt right…which lightened the mood in the truck immensely.

  Unfortunately, that small reprieve ended an instant later.

  This time we witnessed a true explosion.

  I heard a faint “whickering” sound through my window. It grew in volume and then a thunderous bang practically shook the vehicle we sat in. A large orange fireball lit up the skies to the south, making silhouettes of the trees and houses at the junction of the street and Ed’s cul-de-sac. The shockwave rattled the windows up and down the block, and it surprised me it didn’t set off a bunch of car alarms.

  Flames leapt for the sky somewhere a block or so behind the houses at the end of the dark street. It gave a hellish new dimension to a night that hardly needed any.

  “Holy shit!” Casey gasped, “Now what?”

  “I don’t know, Dodger.”

  “I think I do,” I murmured, staring at the distant flames. “I think it was the police helicopter circling around earlier. I think it crashed.”

  “Oh my God,” Casey whispered. “Ed? Weren’t Tony and Lisa working tonight? Wouldn’t they be…”

  “Yeah,” he breathed softly, his eyes fixed on the distant blaze. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Aw shit.”

  We gazed at the flames for a few seconds in stunned silence. The whole situation beggared belief. Only minutes earlier we had all been in our houses, going about our late night business, and now we were trying to escape the neighborhood with bullets, fleeing animals, and crashing aircraft all around us.

  I remember thinking at that moment the world couldn’t possibly get any more violently weird and frightening than right then.

  I simply had no way of knowing at the time how wrong I was.

  But as I tried to grasp the disaster happening in front of me, it only took me a few seconds to see the correlation and realize how two events might be related.

  “I think they lost power,” I added. “I think they lost power the same time as the truck died.”

  “No. That doesn’t make any se
nse.” Casey glared at the distant glow. “Having the lights go out is one thing…but a truck and a helicopter aren’t on the power grid. They have separate power sources.”

  I didn’t have an answer for her, but my gut remained convinced. And as it turned out, Ed had come to the same conclusion.

  “He may be right, Dodger. My cell phone doesn’t work anymore either. How about you two?”

  The darkness rustled in the cab as we both fished our phones out.

  “Nope,” I reported. “Mine’s dead as a doornail.”

  “Mine too,” Casey confirmed. “And I pulled it off the charger right before coming out here.”

  As the reports came in, a worse thought crossed my mind.

  “Ed? Does the truck still work? Will it start again?”

  I heard him turn the key in the ignition and gave an internal groan at the lack of result. The motor didn’t even give a click. The truck had joined our phones in the land of the dead.

  We were stuck in a warzone.

  “Okay,” Casey’s voice sounded tight in the darkness. “Now what?”

  “Now,” Ed replied, “we change strategies. I’ve got those butane lanterns I use for parties in my garage, and we’ll take those inside my house and weather this storm there. I’ve got a little gas stove too, so we can cook ourselves a late night meal while we wait.”

  “But what about the helicopter? Shouldn’t we go see if anybody survived? We know those guys, Ed!”

  “Dodger, you saw that explosion. Nobody walked away from that. But I’ve also got a police scanner from my old days as a dispatcher put up in my closet. I’ll get it down, and if the batteries still work we can get a better idea what’s going on. But until we have a clearer picture of the situation, our best move is lying low and staying out of the way.”

  Despite the darkness, I could tell she didn’t like his answer a whole lot. But even if she sometimes suffered from an almost boyish teenage belief in her own immortality, Stella hadn’t raised an idiot and Casey knew good sense when she heard it…at least when it came from Ed.

  So with nothing else to do, we opened our doors and stepped back out of the truck.

  “Whew!” I wiped my forehead, “It’s like a jungle out here.”

  And I wasn’t exaggerating. The humidity, even for Houston, now surpassed anything I had ever experienced. The air felt thick as a blanket, and the temperature had actually gone up. The atmosphere pressed in on me, and behind it lingered a strange odor I hadn’t noticed being there before. It smelled like a compost bin. It reeked of rotting vegetation, but also had a tinge of something else…something I had never smelled before.

  Things had also gotten a lot quieter.

  There only came a sporadic shot or two from the direction of the previous gunfire, and the dogs had gone mostly quiet. I still heard an individual howl come from different yards in the distance, but the mighty chorus of before had come to an end. It sounded like the battle the next street over had finished, but judging from the occasional lone scream, not in a good way.

  Who had they been fighting? What caused those “distortion events” we suffered? And what the hell were the animals running from?

  As that last thought crossed my mind, a scrabbling sound caught my attention. I looked over to see a Rottweiler belonging to one of Ed’s neighbors pull itself over a chain link fence then go tearing down the street in the same direction as the others. Apparently the retreat still continued, and now our canine pals had decided the time had come to join in.

  Watching the dog disappear into the night gave me a sick feeling.

  Maybe this wasn’t over at all.

  Maybe the earlier madness had merely been it revving up and getting up to full power. And what if it now shifted into a new, quieter gear as it hit cruising speed? Wouldn’t we be making a huge mistake by going back inside and hunkering down this close to ground zero?

  I started to frame a sensible way to voice those concerns to Ed, but then a new development interrupted.

  “Ed?” A new voice caught all of our attention. “Mr. Morgan? Is that you?”

  I looked over the bed of the truck to see a small light that could only be a candle heading our way. Its flame created a faint halo in the thick atmosphere. The glow itself dimly illuminated a stocky, middle-aged woman in a nightgown and robe. She approached from the sidewalk of a house two lots over from Ed’s.

  “Agnes?” Ed answered. “It’s alright. It’s only me and a couple of friends. Are you okay?”

  Apparently Agnes thought things were far from alright. Her voice trembled as if she teetered on the verge of tears when she spoke.

  “I don’t know,” she quavered. “I was reading a book and suddenly the lights all went out, and then I heard this horrible racket! It was awful! But when I went to wake up Louis, he wouldn’t wake up. I don’t know what to do! Louis won’t wake up and none of the phones work! I don’t…”

  “Waitaminute,” Ed interrupted, “Louis won’t wake up?”

  “No!” she wailed. “I yelled at him, and shook him, and everything! He won’t wake up! He won’t! And I don’t know what to…”

  Her voice rose in pitch, and I could tell Agnes now headed for a very bad place. She had come close enough for me to see the sparkle of tears in the candlelight. The tight lines on her face were those of a woman barely holding it together. Apparently while the three of us had been beating our retreat, she had been living a nightmare of her own. Ed could obviously tell that too, because he immediately started toward her.

  “Okay, Agnes,” he soothed, “Take it easy. I’ll come look at Louis and see what I can do. But I need you to stay steady, okay?”

  She gulped air like a fish, and I could see Ed’s request would be a tall order for her. Some people can hold it together right up until another person arrives they can lean on.

  Agnes?” Ed took her by the shoulders when he reached her, “Stay steady for me. Can you do that?”

  No answer.

  “Okay? Agnes?”

  This time she managed to gather herself enough to nod in agreement.

  “Good,” Ed continued. “Now I want you to go back to your front porch and wait for me there. I’m going to give my friends the keys to my house and a couple of instructions, then I’ll be right there and you can take me in to see Louis. Okay?”

  “You will?”

  “I’ll be right there. I promise. I just need to give them the keys to my house.”

  “Okay,” she nodded, but she was clearly not happy about returning to the house alone. “Okay, but please hurry.”

  “I will.” He patted her on the shoulder and directed her back up the sidewalk. Then, once he had her heading on her way, he turned and hobbled quickly over to us.

  “Here,” he instructed, as he gave Casey what I assumed to be a set of keys in the darkness, “use these to open the garage door and get the lanterns out of the wooden box under the small tool rack. Go ahead and light them, then take one inside with you guys and leave the other sitting in the garage with the door open. That will make it easier for me to see on my way back.”

  “But, Uncle Ed, do you want me to come back over after we’ve got set up?”

  “No,” he shook his head with a grim expression. “Louis Franzetti isn’t in the best of health, and I have a bad feeling what I’m going to find over there. There’s no point in you two being involved in it.”

  “Oh…”

  “I’ll be back once I’ve seen what’s up and figured out what I can do for him…or do with Mrs. Franzetti if it turns out to be the worst.”

  “Do with Mrs. Franzetti?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be bringing her back with me if he’s gone.”

  “Oh, right,” Casey nodded, now grave with understanding, “We’ll be sure and leave the light out. I’ll try and find some blankets and stuff too.”

  “Good thinking. They’re in the hall closet.” He clapped her on the shoulder and turned toward the Franzetti house. “This shouldn’t take too long…I
fear.”

  Casey and I watched him hobble up the sidewalk, and I noticed how his gait improved when he got within the circle of Mrs. Franzetti’s candlelight. He hadn’t been kidding about the darkness messing up his ability to walk. Once there, he laid a hand on her shoulder and followed her inside.

  “Right,” Casey muttered beside me, then turned and started toward Ed’s garage.

  “You know where this stuff is?” I fell in beside her.

  “Yeah, I’ve helped Ed put stuff up after his parties. I know where everything is.”

  “Oh, good. By the way, have you ever met Mrs. Franzetti before? I don’t remember her at any of the parties…at least while I was there.”

  “Nope,” she grunted, kneeling to fit the keys in the handle of the garage door. “Must be in one of Ed’s other crowds of friends. Heck of a way to meet somebody, all alone on a…waitaminute…”

  Her voice trailed off and she went quiet for second. The she stood up all of a sudden and marched back down the driveway toward the street. Once there she stopped, arms crossed, scowling out at the night.

  “Casey?”

  “What the hell?” she wondered aloud. “That doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  “What?” I asked, wishing she would get back to the business of opening the garage door. “What doesn’t make sense? I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly!” She gestured out toward the silent street. “Where is everybody? It’s been like the Wild West out here, what with all the shooting and the howling. And then an aircraft crashes the next block over! But the only person we’ve seen is one old woman who was already up anyway? How does that make sense?”

  It didn’t.

  The sick suspicion from earlier now solidified into a dread certainty. I knew something else had been wrong with this scene since it started…and now I knew what. This might be a quiet neighborhood, but hardly a deserted one. Every one of those houses she gestured at would have couples, or families, living in them.

  So where were they?

  Why hadn’t they come out on their porches, trying to find the cause for all this commotion? Why weren’t they out here gawking? There should have been a crowd of people standing out in the yards, or at least shouting to each other from their doors or something.