“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.