“I got an idea,” Billy Kurtz said. “Let’s make a picnic of it. Have ourselves a regular clambake. Let’s get some picnic tables out here and a couple more fire pits. We got a lot of steaks and chops that are going to go bad if the juice don’t come back on soon, so let’s eat our fill.”
Everyone else loved the idea. People were talking and laughing again. They were released from their grip of superstitious terror. They all thawed and got into the spirit of things. All except for me. I was seeing beyond it all and maybe thinking too deeply, but what they were doing seemed like some kind of festival to propitiate the pagan gods of darkness. I was probably reading too much into it, but maybe not.
“Are you in the mood for a party, Jon?” Bonnie asked me.
“No, not in the slightest.”
“Me either.”
I wasn’t in the mood for much at all. I was thinking of Kathy and I was thinking of Erin in Italy. I couldn’t think of anything else. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there hoisting beers and gnawing on T-bones and chops while my world crumbled around me. Besides, there was no room for food in my belly. It felt like a great brick of dread had settled in there.
The party never really got going because we saw lights coming in the distance and then there was a horrendous crash and the festivities ground to a halt.
8
We all heard it, of course.
In the dead silence of the town, it was like thunder. I jumped in my pickup with Al and Bonnie. I drove as fast as I could down Piccamore and hung a left onto Maisey Avenue where we had seen the lights coming from. The darkness was just as thick, just as impenetrable as before and maybe even more so. I saw lights ahead and pulled the truck to a stop at the curb.
“It’s the cop!” Bonnie said.
And it was.
His car was flipped right over in the middle of the avenue like it had been picked up by Godzilla and then dropped out of boredom. There was oil and gas leaking from the wreckage, shattered glass, strips of trim, and assorted shards of metal thrown over the pavement. One of the headlights was still on, the other was broken.
“We need to get an ambulance over here,” Al said.
“And how are we supposed to do that?” Bonnie snapped at him. “Light a fucking signal fire?”
I climbed out of the cab with my flashlight and Bonnie followed. Al came, too, but only after he saw that we were both fool enough to go out into the dark. It was obvious he wasn’t real keen on the idea. I didn’t like all that gas. I was picturing one of those conflagrations you see in the movies where cars explode like they have napalm in their trunks. I knew nothing like that would happen, but it was still dangerous. Bonnie at my side, we kneeled down and looked inside the patrol car. Frankovich wasn’t in there. There were spiderwebbed sheets of glass lying about and the seat belt looked like it had been slit in half by a knife, but that was about it.
“He must have crawled free,” Bonnie said.
It was possible. I wasn’t buying it, but it was certainly possible. Some little finger of dread was worming inside me, but I ignored it. What else could have happened? There really was no other explanation. While Ray stood there, looking extremely ineffectual, Bonnie and I circled the car, searching around in ever-widening arcs as I had when I looked for the guy with the grocery bag earlier. We found exactly nothing. Side by side, we stood there in the middle of the road not saying a thing, just staring at the wrecked car.
“He must not have been injured too badly,” Bonnie finally said. “Maybe he was dazed or something.”
“Sure.”
“The only problem is how it happened. I mean, there’s no other cars, there’s nothing in the road. What could he have hit to flip over?”
Which was exactly what I was thinking and maybe secretly hoping no one would mention. It was always possible, I suppose, that he had been going too fast or maybe he turned sharply to avoid something. But there were no skid marks in the road. There wasn’t anything to indicate trouble.
“Well, this is one for the books,” Al said to us. “He’s gotta be somewhere. He couldn’t have vanished.”
“I heard them screaming and when I got outside they were all gone,” I said under my breath, remembering what the grocery bag guy had said.
“What?” Bonnie asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
Al was staying firmly in the headlight beams of my pickup. He did not stray from their protective illumination. I had a feeling that three men could not have dragged him away into the dark. He was rooted to the spot. He had that same look on his face when I turned out the flashlight earlier and then turned it back on again—abject terror.
We examined the car one more time. There were deep indentations in the door that looked like scratches. Either Frankovich hit something or something hit him. Bonnie was down on her knees again. She came out with a riot gun.
“Hey,” Al said. “That’s police property. You’re gonna get your ass in trouble, lady.”
“It might come in handy,” she told him and I figured she was right.
We heard a sound like wire being unreeled and something hit the car. Both Bonnie and I jumped back and Al let out a little cry that was high and childlike. I saw what it was, but I had to put my flashlight beam on it just to be sure.
“Is that…is that a power line?” Al said.
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”
I didn’t know what the hell it was. It was a black cable that was very shiny like wet rubber, though I was certain it was some type of metal. It had dropped from the sky. About four feet of it was curled up on top…well, on the bottom of the overturned patrol car. It trembled slightly like there was some sort of energy pulsing in it. It was weird, but it didn’t look terribly threatening. I followed its length up into the ebon sky. My light could only make it about fifteen feet or so in that viscous blackness. The cable disappeared up there. It was hanging from something, but whatever that was, I could not see.
“What the hell is that?” Bonnie asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not any kind of line I’ve seen before.”
“Looks kind of like TV cable or something.”
It did, only much larger. A cable that had roughly the same circumference of a man’s wrist. As I played the light over it, I noticed there was a repeating pattern of tiny holes set within it. The more I looked at it, the more confused I got as to what its actual purpose could possibly be. The only thing I knew for sure was that it looked a hell of a lot like the black, snakelike thing I had seen in my backyard. I was getting a really bad feeling about it.
“Hey!” Al suddenly said.
We turned and another cable had dropped not five feet from him. It dangled there, the blunt end of it about six inches off the ground. My guess was that the other one would have been about that long, too, if it wasn’t coiled on the patrol car.
“I don’t like this,” Bonnie said. “It’s too…on purpose.”
She was right. There was nothing remotely accidental about these things. Whatever their purpose was, it was surely not coincidental. I noticed the other one over by Al was trembling slightly as well. What did that mean? What the hell did it mean? Kathy was gone and one of those things had been in my backyard and had dragged over the roof of the garage. Now Frankovich was missing and here were two more of them. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t see a correlation here.