by Ronald Malfi
“She’s obviously fine,” Todd said, his tone suggesting Brendan remove his hand sooner rather than later.
Brendan’s hand snapped back and he clutched the lantern in both hands. He had a nervous, bouncy quality that made Todd want to strap him to a chair. “Where’d you two come from?” he wanted to know. “Ain’t from town.”
“Their car broke down outside of town last night,” Tully answered for them. “Their friends were killed.”
“Oh. Shoot.” Brendan’s voice wavered. “I’m Brendan Parker.”
Todd and Kate introduced themselves.
“Where are the others?” Tully asked Brendan as he continued down the hallway. Todd and Kate followed, while Brendan skirted ahead of them to keep up with Tully.
“Bruce is still fucking with those laptops,” Brendan said, “and Molly and the kids are downstairs in the basement. Did you find out what that fire was last night?”
“The church burned down,” Tully said.
“St. John’s? No shit? Damn.” Brendan eyeballed the Superman backpack still flung over Tully’s shoulder. “What’d you get?”
“Make yourself useful and get these two some warm clothes,” Tully said, ignoring the question. “And give me the lantern.”
“You got it,” Brendan said, handing over the lantern to Tully. Brendan nearly collided with Kate as he spun away and took off down the corridor.
“Jumpy little beanpole,” Todd commented.
Tully offered something that approximated a chuckle. “A week ago I wouldn’t have said two words to that squirmy little weasel.”
“Do you smell something?” Kate muttered to Todd.
“Yes. Smells like…”
“Hot dogs,” Kate finished. Grinned.
They walked past a large room filled with desks and empty holding cells. Todd could see that the windows had been boarded up and all cracks and creases secured with industrial gaffers tape. Tully kept moving, not stopping until he came to a second set of doors bathed in shadow at the end of the hall. Again, he produced a new key and unlocked the deadbolt. A resounding clang! echoed through the corridor.
The door was opened and Tully maneuvered himself down a narrow flight of stairs. Calling back over his shoulder, he said, “Watch out. Handrail’s gone.” Then Tully sank down into the murky depths of the stairwell, like a man wading out into the middle of a lake.
Todd went next, Kate’s hand suddenly appearing on his right shoulder. Beneath him, the stairwell swayed and creaked and threatened to collapse under his feet. He wondered just how far down they were going. All of a sudden, he was overly aware of the handgun at the small of his back. If this were some sort of trap, he’d have to be ready. For Kate’s sake, if not his own.
His shoes touched down on warped floorboards. Behind him, Kate almost stumbled but squeezed his shoulder for support before falling on him. Todd reached out and grabbed one of her hands.
“Thank you.”
He couldn’t see her face but she sounded extremely relieved.
Illuminated by the halogen lamp, Tully’s bright orange face hovered in the darkness before them like a harvest moon. “Hold this,” Tully said, handing Todd the lamp.
Bit by bit, the basement of the sheriff’s headquarters took on appearance: slatted wooden bookshelves drooping at angles over wood-paneled walls; a potbellied stove in the center of the room, around which someone had set a bunch of folding chairs; rows upon rows of rifles standing in a large shelving unit. There were unlit Chinese lanterns on bits of wire hanging from the exposed ceiling rafters, and a card table was erected in one corner, playing cards scattered on it. Toward the far end of the room, an enormous hulking furnace stood—dark and defunct.
Tully’s eyes looked like rat’s eyes in the lamplight. “Listen,” he grumbled. “You two wait here. Molly and the kids are still a bit jumpy. Let me tell them you’re here before you storm in on them. Otherwise, you’re liable to get your heads blown to bits.”
“Waiting here sounds like a good idea, yeah,” Kate agreed.
Tully clumped toward the back of the room, where he knocked against a section of wall. Todd could hear faint murmuring coming from behind it. Then there was a sound like someone uncorking a bottle of champagne and the section of wall cracked open on a set of hinges. White light spilled out, briefly spotlighting Tully before he slipped into the room and shut the door behind him.
With only the lamplight between them, Todd and Kate stepped closer together.
“What if he’s another psychopath, like that kid at the church?” Kate whispered. “What if being trapped like rats in this town all week has turned all the survivors into raving lunatics?”
“What other choice do we have?” he countered.
Behind the wall, someone’s voice rose up in what sounded like concern. It sounded like a woman’s voice. How many had Tully said were with him? Six, including Tully himself? Todd couldn’t remember. Then Tully’s head popped back out of the opening and he motioned Todd and Kate inside.
A woman with a very pregnant belly sat on a cot with a bottle of water in her lap. She looked to be in her early thirties, but the exhaustion and fear that had plagued her over the past week had multiplied her age so that she looked old enough to remember the Kennedy administration. Reddishbrown hair curtained her face, and Todd could make out the vague hint of large, staring dark eyes. Her shoes were off, her feet clad in layers of socks.
Two kids curled together in another corner, an ancient-looking board game with wooden pieces laid out between them. They looked to be twins of the opposite sex, roughly around the ages of nine or ten. Their faces looked slim and sallow, with chapped lips splitting from the cold, but they were wearing so many layers of clothing they looked like two plump cherubs.
Tully pointed at each one as he made the introductions. “That’s Molly Sanderson. The boy here is Charlie Dobbins and that’s his sister, Cody.”
“Hi,” Todd said, feeling like a circus performer, the way Molly and the kids stared at him. “My name’s Todd Curry. I’m from New York.”
“And I’m Kate Jansen.”
“New York’s far away,” the boy—Charlie—said.
“Are you married?” Cody wanted to know.
“Yes, New York’s far away,” Todd said, “and no, we’re not married.”
Cody pointed at them. “You’re holding hands.”
Self-consciously, Todd and Kate released each other. “We’re just good friends,” Kate said.
“Did you check their backs, Tully?” Molly wanted to know. She had pulled her hair back to reveal a heart-shaped face with delicate features. She looked terribly mournful.
“Of course.” Tully set the backpack down on a rickety old desk and the two kids stood up. The room itself was small and cramped, a few cots pushed up against a brick wall. There were a desk and a rolling cart stacked high with blankets, as well as a few towers of paperback novels piled high in one corner. The ceiling was a concavity of exposed joists networked with cables and wires.
“What’d you bring us?” Cody asked, both she and her brother sidling up beside the desk in anticipation of what was inside the Superman backpack.
“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.
&n
bsp; 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.
Bruce took another swallow of bourbon, then handed the bottle to Kate. She just stared at it, cradling it in both hands. “What’s that?” Bruce said.
“About those things sending signals or whatever down from the clouds and screwing with the computers. I don’t think that’s what they’re doing.”
“Then what are they doing?”
“See, I think maybe they did send some sort of signal,” Todd said, digging around in his pocket, “but my guess is, it was probably a single pulse sent out earlier in the week. Just one initial jolt that’s kept everything screwed up.”
“Why do you say that?” said Bruce.
“Because of this,” Todd said, producing his cell phone. He powered it on and handed it to the deputy. “I’ve got no signal but it isn’t scrambled. The two other cell phones we found in one of the houses in town looked just like your computer screen—a jumble of characters that made no sense. But my phone’s fine.”
“So was mine,” Kate said, still holding the bottle of bourbon.
Bruce was staring hard at Todd’s cell phone. A
fter a moment of contemplative silence, he said, “So you think whatever was in town when the attack started was affected by the pulse or surge or signal or whatever it was, but anything new that’s brought into town—”
“Is completely unaffected,” Todd finished.
“Jesus,” Tully muttered. He took a step closer to Bruce so he could see Todd’s cell phone more clearly. “Is there a way we can hook that phone up to the fiber-optic cables?”
“Shit,” said Bruce, “maybe some electrical engineer could, but I haven’t got a clue.”
“We’re so close,” Tully said to no one in particular. “There’s gotta be something we can do. I can feel it.”
Footsteps out in the hallway caused Todd to turn toward the door. Brendan materialized through the gloom, his arms laden with fresh, clean clothing. “Hey,” he said, skidding to a stop. “Was wondering where you all went off to. I got you some clothes.” He handed out sweaters and pants to Todd and Kate. “Also, I been heating up some hot dogs in the office down the hall with some candles. They’re probably still cold on the inside, but hell, if you’re hungry…”
“Todd’s cell phone works,” Tully said.
“No shit? You mean we can call for help?”
“Not exactly,” Bruce said. “There’s still no signal, but at least the screen ain’t scrambled.”
Sighing, Bruce handed Todd back his cell phone, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Smirking, he said, “Too bad you didn’t bring a fucking computer with you, too. Then we’d be in business.”
Almost grinning, Todd said, “I did.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Out in the hallway, one of the children screamed. Kate nearly dropped the bottle of bourbon on the floor. Tully and Todd went to the door as Bruce popped out of his chair, one hand already reaching for his service pistol.
“It’s Cody,” said Tully, rushing out into the hallway and taking all the light with him. Kate set the bottle and the new clothes down on the desk and hurried out after the men, her heartbeat already strumming in her ears.