Free Blackout by Tim Curran Page A

breathable oxygen. I had an image of a dying, dark Earth, shrubs and forests and ferns and flowers all dead and withered, humanity suffocating on its own toxic by-products.
    The horn sounded again.
    “Why don’t they fucking quit it already?” Bonnie said. “We can’t help ’em any more than we can help ourselves.”
    She was right in a way, but Billy and I kept looking at each other and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: whoever was out there needed help and if we didn’t go to them we could hardly call ourselves human. There was death out there. But I feared that less than the idea of living with myself knowing I could have done something to help someone in need. The teeth of guilt are much sharper than any sword.
    “I wonder if it’s someone we know,” Billy said, not a question.
    “Could be,” I said. “If it was me out there, I’d want someone to help me.”
    Bonnie was watching us both by that point. “Don’t even fucking think of it. It’s too dangerous. We need each other. Nobody’s going out there.”
    The horn sounded again and I flinched.
    “Nothing out there,” Iris said, her mouth stitched in a scowl. “If you tell yourself there’s nothing out there, then there isn’t.”
    She was losing it so nobody commented on that. We just sat there. That was the worst part of it all: waiting. I knew the horn was going to sound again and when it did, I was going to scream. I didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t bear to hear it.
    But I heard it. We all heard it.
    “Fuck this,” Billy said. “Jon, you got any weapons around here? An ax? Anything useful?”
    “I got a few things out in the garage,” I said.
    “No,” Bonnie said. “You’re not going anywhere.”
    Billy sighed. “What if that was you out there?”
    “Then I’d get out of the fucking car and get somewhere safe.”
    “What if you were injured and you couldn’t?”
    She glared at him, but slowly her face softened. Bonnie was a good person. Despite certain malfunctions of character, she was inherently a good person. She was very kind when it came down to it. “All right,” she finally said. “Go then. Just be careful.”
    She kissed Billy before we left and I could see that she really didn’t believe she’d see him again. We took one of the flashlights and went out to the garage. Billy took the riot gun Bonnie had swiped from the patrol car. I took a hatchet and unscrewed the handle of my push broom. I sharpened the end of it until I had a serviceable pike.
    Then we walked out into the darkness.

14

    There were cables everywhere. They dangled down like creepers in a primeval forest. Just the sight of them in the flashlight beam made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. Billy and I moved slowly, but we did move. We heard the horn again and it was coming from down the block. We began the terrible walk in its direction. The cables were inert, dead things. I knew they weren’t alive, not in the earthly sense of the word. They simply reacted when you touched them. Still…when we got too close to them, they trembled slightly as if they could feel us, sense our body heat or the vibrations of our footsteps.
    We gave them a wide berth whenever possible.
    As we walked, I wondered about it all. Once they had stripped away all the people—and all the native animal life for all I knew—and the world was empty, what then? Did they have a use for the planet? Were they snatching people off for study or was it a means to an end like miners stripping the rainforest to get at the valuable minerals beneath? What did they want exactly? And while I was at that, I wondered about the big one: who exactly they were.
    While I was lost in thought, blindly following Billy’s silhouette and the path of light he carved out for us, I nearly stumbled into one of the cables. It was close. I came within a foot of it and it began to shudder at my closeness. I thought it was moving for a moment, but it wasn’t the cable but what was