“This stuff here’s for us grown-ups,” Tully told them, taking out the liquor bottles and setting them on the desk one at a time.
“Is that beer?” Cody wanted to know. Decidedly the more inquisitive of the two children, she pressed her nose against one of the bottle’s labels.
“Not exactly,” Tully said.
“Then what is it?”
“Medication,” he said—another suspiciously dry Tully joke. “Hooch.”
“Hooch,” Cody parroted, pleased with the word.
“What about us?” Charlie said. His jaw was set firmly as he looked up at Tully. “Don’t we get something?”
“Sure do.” Tully reached into his coat pocket and produced two giant Snickers bars, which he held up in a V. The kids cheered and Tully dispensed the candy like a backwoods Santa Claus.
From her cot, Molly Sanderson was still scrutinizing Todd and Kate with uncertainty. “Have they met Bruce yet?” she asked Tully.
“Not yet.”
“You should take them to meet Bruce.”
“They’re fine, Molly.” For the first time, Tully grinned at Todd and Kate. His teeth were atrocious and the grin came across more as a grimace, as if he’d been sucking on lemons. “Ain’t you?”
“Fine as paint,” said Kate.
“Although I suppose I should take you to meet Bruce,” Tully said, pausing to examine the way he’d set up the bottles on the desk. He picked one up, sniffed at the label, then set it down to select another.
Todd asked who Bruce was.
“Big Bruce the Moose. After Joe bit it, he took over.”
“And who’s Joe?” Kate said.
Tully unscrewed the bottle of bourbon and chugged it while the kids watched. A stream of gingery liquid trickled down the corner of his mouth. “I keep forgetting you two don’t know nobody,” he said after he’d wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He set the bottle back on the desk and the two kids stared at it as if in amazement. “Joe Farnsworth. He was the sheriff up until two days ago.”
“What happened two days ago?” Kate said. Todd gave her a sideways glance that suggested he had a pretty good guess.
“Don’t talk about it in here, Tully,” Molly said, before Tully could open his mouth. “You feel like telling your horrible stories, you go on upstairs.”
“Good idea,” Tully said, turning toward the door and taking the bottle of bourbon with him. He nodded for Todd and Kate to follow him, then turned to the kids. “You two don’t eat all them candy bars in one sitting, you hear? Save some for later.”
Back upstairs in the hallway, Todd and Kate followed Tully and his bottle of hooch while Tully explained what had happened to Sheriff Farnsworth.
“We were trying to get a signal out through the airwaves,” Tully said. “Course, the phone lines are dead and the electricity’s out, so we figured we might be able to rig some sort of broadcast antenna to the roof of the fire hall next door. The fire hall’s taller than the station, so it made sense to go next door. Joe and Bruce—Bruce was one of Joe’s deputies, see—they thought they could rig up their handheld radios to the antenna somehow. The plan was to try to reach Bicklerville, which is the nearest town, about sixty miles west.
“I volunteered to go up on the roof and set up the antenna but Joe trumped me. He said he was still the sheriff and he was going to do it. And he did—he got up there and got it set up.” Tully took another swig of the bourbon, then said, “They came out of nowhere and took him right off the roof.”
Todd imagined what it must have looked like, watching the man being carried off into the night by one of those things. The thought caused him to think back to Nan Wilkinson, who’d come crashing down through the stained-glass windows in the roof of the church.
“That’s horrible,” Kate said.
“Joe was a good son of a bitch. We went to high school together.”
“Did you guys try the radios?” Todd asked. “Did it work?”
“No. Apparently those clouds hanging low over the town are blocking any signals through the air. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. That’s what me and Bruce think, anyway.”
They arrived outside a closed office door with a drawn shade in the glass. A dull blue light, like the light from a television set, radiated through the slats in the shade. Tully knocked twice, then opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.
The office was a zoo of metal shelves cluttered with computer equipment. The bluish television light radiated from a laptop screen on a desktop; a man of sturdy build with a shaved head perched forward in a chair at eye level with the screen, his deputy’s uniform doused in a sickly azure light.
The man did not acknowledge them as they filed into the room. “Hey, Bruce,” Tully said, clearing his throat, “this is Todd and Kate. Their car wrecked outside of town last night. I found them this morning, wandering around.”
Bruce looked quickly at them, then returned his stare to the laptop. Columns of numbers rained down the laptop’s screen like digital snow. “Hey,” Bruce said.
“Brought you some go-go juice,” Tully said, setting the bottle of bourbon down next to the laptop. Bruce hardly noticed.
“How’s that laptop running?” Kate asked. She came around the other side of Bruce’s chair and looked at the screen from over his shoulder.
“Battery powered,” Bruce said, “but I’m getting ready to shut it down before I drain the damn thing.” He reclined in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Not that it matters. It ain’t working.”
“It looks like the cell phones,” Kate said.
Bruce bounced his foot on the floor. “I’ve got a whole wall of computers behind me. Not a single one’s worked.”
“I told them about the jamming signal,” Tully said. “About the cloud cover, too…and what happened to Joe.”
“It’s like they’ve got us trapped inside a bowl with a lid on it,” Bruce said. When he turned slightly in his chair, Todd could see what looked like a splatter of dried blood down the front of his uniform. “Those aren’t normal clouds. They look almost metallic, like there’s some sort of filaments threaded through them. We had the walkies working hand-to-hand down here on the ground, but that was about as much as we could get out of them. The antenna on the roof of the fire hall didn’t do shit. ’Cept get Joe killed.”
“Even if you got one of these laptops to work,” Todd said, “what good will it do you?”
Bruce reached out and wrapped a big hand around the neck of the liquor bottle. “If we were anyplace else in town, it wouldn’t do shit,” he said, bringing the bottle down into his lap. “But the station here was outfitted with fiber-optic cables earlier in the year. Supposed to make our computers work faster when we’re on the Internet. The cables run underground and they go out past the highway and halfway down to Bicklerville where the transformer station is. The cables themselves are unaffected by the power outage.” He thumped a hand against a small black box that looked like a DVD player. “If I can get one of the computers to work, I can hook this modem up to a battery and power it up, then run the modem to the computer. With a little bit of luck, I could log onto the Internet, get in touch with neighboring PDs.”
“Get in touch with the fucking military,” Tully suggested.
“But none of that matters, because every single one of these computers is fucked. Whatever they’re doing—sending blocking signals down from the clouds or using some science fiction goddamned mind control—they’re making the computers go haywire.” Disgusted, Bruce chugged down some bourbon. Then he turned off the laptop to conserve the battery pack. It whined and the room fell dark, except for the halogen lamp Tully carried with him.
“I don’t think that’s totally accurate,” Todd said.