Julia looked from their drawn faces to Gregory’s beaming visage, and she forced herself to nod. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m feeling better.”
Eighteen
1
Frank Masterson gunned his Jeep and sped down the winding dirt trail that led to transformer 242. The sun was setting, and he was anxious to get this problem settled before nightfall. For one thing, he hated to work in the dark. And he and Shelly had tickets for tonight’s Garth Brooks concert. The concert didn’t start until eight, and there was an opening act, so Garth probably wouldn’t go on until nine, but it was still a two-hour drive back to Tucson, and if he had a hope in hell of making it on time, he had to make it to the transformer, fix whatever was wrong, and start back within twenty minutes.
Shelly had predicted this would happen, and he hated it that her prediction was confirmed. He’d never hear the end of it. She’d bitch and moan all night, and the concert would be ruined. Then they’d fight over that and the whole thing would spill over into the weekend.
If he was lucky, it would be nothing. Those computers down at the office weren’t worth shit in his book, and nine times out of ten the problem turned out to be not with the transformer or relays but with some glitch in a computer program. The company had spent millions of dollars over the last two years, upgrading their system, but it still wasn’t half as efficient as the old one. Give him a good old-fashioned low-tech, labor-intensive human monitoring system any day of the week.
He picked up the phone from its cradle beside him, checked in again. “Frank here. I’m almost to 242. Any change in the readings?”
The voice on the other end was barely audible through the static. “Nope. 242’s still offline and needs a reset, copy.”
“I’ll get back to you in ten.” He replaced the phone in its niche. If it wasn’t a computer error and the transformer simply needed to be reset, that wouldn’t take long. He’d be in and out in five minutes. If it was anything else, though, he was screwed. He would have to call the office, have them patch him in to home, and lay out the situation for Shelly.
God, he hoped he didn’t have to do that.
The trail wound out of the hills and led over a flat section of desert, ending up ahead at what looked like an iron scrap yard fenced in with chain-link and barbed wire. Lines and cables emerged from this mess in two directions, climbing up to lie in the arms of the monstrous metal power towers that had always reminded him of Japanese robots and that marched to the west and to the north across the open land.
He stopped the Jeep, hopped out and unlocked the padlocked gate. The sun was a brilliant orange half-globe on the edge of the horizon. To the east, he could see the coming night.
He had to hurry. Frank swung open the gate and jumped back into the Jeep, gunning it and braking to a sudden halt just before the blocky transformer building. From the rear of the vehicle, he grabbed his tools, diagnostic equipment, and a flashlight, just in case. He popped open the door of the building, flipping on the lights and walking inside, and headed immediately to the control panel, installed in a series of metal cabinets and insulated wall units at the opposite end of the room. Checking all of the appropriate gauges, he frowned. There was nothing wrong here. Everything was running smoothly. Everything was as it was supposed to be. He turned around—
A shadow flitted past the door.
Frank practically jumped out of his boots.
The movement had startled him, but that was not what scared him. Or it was only the start of it. For there was something strange and unnatural about the shape he’d seen, some sense he’d gotten from that fleeting glimpse that whatever was inside the gates here with him was… not right.
Evil.
That was the word that was echoing in his mind, and while he wasn’t a churchgoer like Shelly, while he thought he’d left all that fire and brimstonery back in his mama’s house, he offered up a quick prayer. He was smart enough to know that there were things he didn’t know, and right now, out here in the middle of nowhere, that sense of ignorance seemed particularly strong. He was trying to hold on to some half-baked notion that this was an animal or a homeless man, but his emotions, his brain, and his gut instinct told him otherwise, and he wished to Christ they’d sent Tyler out on this call instead of him.
There was a pounding on the roof.
He glanced again at the instrument panel, saw that nothing was wrong, and thought that whatever this creature was, it had caused the system anomalies they’d recorded back at the office and had purposely tried to make them think there was something amiss.
But why?
Maybe it wanted to lure someone out here.
For what?
He didn’t even want to think about that.
From his tool kit, he withdrew his heaviest socket wrench. He didn’t have a hammer with him—it was back in the Jeep—but this would do in a pinch, would enable him to fight off whatever came at him until he could get to the Jeep.
Outside, the light was failing fast. Already, the sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving only an orange glow where its specific shape had been. The lights in the transformer room made the dying light outside seem even darker.
Dying light?
Frank hurried toward the open door. He flipped off the inside lights, closed the door behind him, and in the brief second before it hit him and knocked him down, he saw a dark shadowy figure swoop down from the roof of the transformer building. He landed on his back, staring up for a moment at the steel girders and the intersecting power cables and the purple sky above.
Then something dark passed between him and the sky.
The face that pulled close to his was wrinkled and horribly old, wizened and evil, and he screamed as the hideous creature bent down to kiss him and rubbed its slimy skin against his cheek.
2
The blackout occurred at 6:45.
Julia heard over the radio that it had affected five western states and that electric company representatives believed it to be the result of a downed transformer in either eastern Arizona or western New Mexico. Similar blackouts had occurred because of heavy monsoon activity in the past, but there was no lightning this time, no storms in any of the Four Corners states, and experts were at a loss to explain what had brought about this failure.
Big cities, they predicted, would be quickly back on line, would have power restored within the next three or four hours, but it might take three days before the entire power grid was again up and running.
Where did that leave McGuane?
She wasn’t sure.
Julia sat in the kitchen, waiting for Agafia to return. Her mother-in-law had been gone all day, and in Julia’s fantasy she was gathering the other Molokans together, hatching a plan to get her and the kids out of here, but the truth was that she was probably trying to perform one of her exorcisms or rituals, attempting to get at the root of the problem rather than focusing on their specific situation. Like most true believers, Agafia would put her cause ahead of her family—and Julia resented her for that.
The atmosphere in the house was tense. Aside from those few angry words in the bedroom and his false cheer at breakfast, Gregory had not spoken to her since… since the beating. He was not only hostile and angry, which she would understand, but there was a distracted distance in his attitude that frightened her. He had shadowed her all day, not letting her out of his sight, and it was only after the kids returned from school that he finally went upstairs and locked himself in the attic. Her hands were still shaking nervously, but at least he was out of her hair for the moment, and she was grateful he’d decided to leave her alone.