“Give me a hand here,” Bill said, taking one of the canisters. “We can hook this up at the back of the kitchen. There’s enough gas here to last us a while.”
They ferried the six canisters back to the kitchen door, and returned for the generator. They had managed to get it as far as the open doorway when Janet felt a vibration—first in the soles of her feet, then at her jaw. Bill’s nose dripped two large spots of fresh blood down onto his shirt. The darkness in the corner of the shed thickened and seemed to coalesce. Bill grabbed her by the arm and dragged both her and the generator out into the sunlight, but not before she’d seen the old man in the corner; a miner by the looks of things.
“Fred is dead,” a thick voice said dully from the shadows.
Then she was back in the sunshine in the yard, watching the dust on the ground dance, waiting for a collapse to swallow them up.
It never came.
The ground trembled, clumps of earth dancing like dust on a loudspeaker. Then, as quickly as it had come, the hum faded and died. The trembling ground stilled.
“Are we still here?” Bill said, wiping more blood from his upper lip onto the sleeve of his shirt.
Janet didn’t take her eyes off the shed doorway. The shadows inside seemed to shift and sway, but there was no sign of any old miner, and no more voices. Eventually she forced herself to look away and turned to face Bill.
“Let’s get this generator hooked up,” Janet said. “If we’re staying the night in the bar, I want it to be well lit.”
Charlie and Bill got the generator working after a bit of elbow grease and a long bout of cursing. Janet stood to one side, watching the shadows move in the yard outside the open back door.
The light’s fading fast.
“Give it a try now,” Bill shouted, surprising her into an involuntary twitch. She reached over and flicked the switch nearest her. The lights in the kitchen flickered on and off, then came full on and steadied. The generator throbbed noisily and annoyingly here at the rear of the kitchen, but it was a small price to pay for the comfort of the lights.
“And we’ve got enough propane to burn the stoves and rings for a while,” Charlie said. “Ain’t much to cook though. I found some tins of beans and there’s three loaves defrosting from the chest freezer. That’s about it, although there’s plenty of packs of peanuts and chips behind the bar.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about junk food killing us, do you?” Janet said, and Charlie laughed so loud and hard that Janet found herself joining in. Bill rose from the generator and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s so funny?”
For some reason that amused both Janet and Charlie, so much they couldn’t answer for laughing. There might have been more than a hint of hysteria in it, but Janet felt much better as she moved to close the back door. She had one last look outside, but there was nothing to see but the empty yard, and she didn’t look too closely at the shifting shadows in the pickup truck or at the still-open shed door.
The three of them went back though to the main bar.
Fred and the girl still sat shoulder to shoulder at a table, and Ellen Simmons sat on her own in the corner. There was no one else in the bar. The dozen people who had been there before Janet and Bill went to get the generator were gone, taking any good humor Janet might have felt with them.
“What the hell happened?” she asked.
“They got spooked at that last hum,” Fred said. “They decided to take their chances with the CDC. They had a vote and everything.”
Janet went to the front door. It lay open. She looked out to see the CDC guards enter the quarantine tent. The canvas flaps slid back into place, and it was as if they’d never been there at all. There was no sign of any of the people from the bar.
Janet felt bereft, as if some of her reasons for being there at all had just been taken from her. Worse, she felt as if she’d been personally betrayed. Tears ran down her cheeks, a mixture of anger, rage and self-pity.
They were my patients, damn it.
She turned back to Bill.
“So what now? Still staying?”
The sheriff didn’t speak, just led her back inside the bar and closed the door behind them. She put an arm around his waist. Ellen Simmons smirked again.
“You got anything to say, Ellen?” the sheriff asked.
The older woman smiled thinly.
“Only that I can see you all coming round to my way of thinking. Ain’t no use us getting cozy with the CDC; that way will only get us dead. We should sneak out of town under cover of darkness tonight.”
Charlie laughed.
“Under cover of darkness? You’ve been watching too much television, Ellen. And ain’t you been paying attention here? Seems to me that it’s the darkness that’s trying to kill us.”
“Don’t talk such garbage, old man,” Ellen Simmons said. “The liquor has addled you.”
A small voice spoke up.
“No. He’s right. They only come in the dark.” Sarah Bennett looked up from where she’d rested her head on Fred’s shoulder. “The bears like the dark.”
Ellen Simmons laughed, and Janet saw the flash of anger that crossed Fred Grant’s face.
I need to defuse this, and fast.
The sheriff beat her to it.
“The kid’s right, Ellen. We’ve all seen them now. Whether they’re devils, haunts or something man-made from the mines, I know now they’re real—as real as you or me. And they come in the dark.”
Ellen Simmons still looked skeptical. Janet came to a quick decision.
“Charlie. Fetch us some drinks. We’re going to have this out once and for all.”
Five minutes later they all sat around one of the bar’s bigger tables, with drinks and a selection of nuts and chips on the table. It felt absurdly like just any other get-together. But the subject matter of conversation was not so matter-of-fact.
“I’m telling you, it was a miner,” Fred said. “And I think it was one of old Charlie’s dead work mates.”
Charlie went white at that, but didn’t speak, just gulped down a stiff shot of JD and went to the bar for another.
“I believe you,” Janet replied. “I saw him too.”
She went on to tell of their encounter earlier in the shed. Then Bill told of his demons, and spoke of the strange apparition of a flying saucer. Sarah muttered something else about bears but refused to go into detail.
“Charlie. Do you want to talk about what you saw in the kitchen?”
“Nope,” the man said. “But if it weren’t VC, then I don’t know what they were.”
“Hinky,” Bill said, and dropped Janet a wink. “That’s what they were. Show-and-tell time, Ellen. And we’ve shown ours.”
“You’re all mad,” the older woman said. “I’m having nothing to do with this.”
She started to stand, but stopped when Janet spoke.
“So, you’re telling us you didn’t see a biker gang?”
The older woman sat back down, hard.
“That was different,” she said, then went quiet.
“No, I don’t think it was,” Janet replied. “I’m not sure what we’re up against here, but I’m pretty sure its cause is down in the depths of these collapses somewhere. It’s no coincidence it started the same time as the problems at Hopman’s Hollow. I’m also not sure that they mean us any harm.”
Charlie looked up at that. She remembered him, on his knees on the kitchen floor.
But had he put himself there? Was it only his own fear that had crippled him?