Crossing the room, he reached for the door handle, paused and returned to Dean’s bedside. Following another hunch, he removed an EMF detector from his bag, switched it on and placed it beside the note.
As Sam left the room and closed the door quietly behind him, the detector’s lights glowed in the dark room, the device reassuringly silent.
SIXTEEN
By the time Sam arrived at the police station, the post-blackout emergency calls had dwindled to a few. Holding and booking would stay busy into the early morning hours, but the extra dispatch personnel had left and the overnight pair that remained flipped a coin to see who would take first break. From the squad room, Gruber had collected three extra computers and lined them up in the conference room, which was located across from the chief’s office, currently vacant, to the senior patrol officer’s relief.
“Said he’d better not see me till morning,” Gruber explained.
“And yet you’re here,” Sam said.
“What can I say? Off-duty calls,” Gruber replied. “Anyway, I’ve queued up all the stored feeds I could find. Some live cams don’t save footage, and some overwrite the disks after so many hours unless they’re backed up. Generally, it’s a whole lot of nothing, so no reason to save it. If a crime is reported, then pertinent footage is offloaded as evidence.”
“So, let’s see what we’ve got,” Sam said, taking the chair next to Gruber.
“Some of this footage I started to review last night—early yesterday morning, I guess,” Gruber said. He connected the monitors to the computers and powered everything up. “Before half the town decided to go crazy. It’s all a blur. But car accidents, for example. With the blackout, interviews were a waste of time since everyone was unconscious at the time of the accidents. Is either party at fault? Both? Neither? I have no idea how the insurance companies will sort this out, but they’ll certainly have something interesting to study.” Gruber logged into three computers, one keyboard at a time. “Same for the accidents, especially the fatal ones, though I imagine they’ll be classified as accidental deaths. I mean, how could they not?”
“Unless we prove somebody caused the blackouts.”
“Who could have done this? A mad scientist? A Bond villain?” Gruber asked, smiling. “Maybe a secret government agency conducting unsanctioned scientific experiments on US citizens?”
“Option C,” Sam said. “Not that far-fetched.” Incidents of governments experimenting on their citizens were rare, but Sam was leaning toward something even more unbelievable, at least to the layman. Or the lawman.
“Are you sure you’re with the FBI?”
“According to my ID,” Sam said, deadpan.
“I don’t normally wear a conspiracy hat,” Gruber said, rubbing his stubbled jaw. “Maybe an oversight on my part.”
“Let’s agree we can rule out a Bond villain as a suspect,” Sam said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Gruber called up recorded footage from a few minutes before midnight from the day before on all three computers, and each computer had a four-square grid of camera views from locations around Moyer. One by one, he clicked the play icons to start the queued playback on all grids and screens. Some of the views matched what Sam had hacked into live at the motel. But everything he watched on these screens had happened over twenty-four hours previously.
Sam watched casually as the time stamps switched from 11:57 PM to 11:58 PM and nothing seemed unusual. Traffic remained light, as expected at that hour. Only a few people walked the streets. In the commercial district, a few late diners walked from restaurants to parked cars.
The time stamp jumped to 11:59 PM. Sam leaned in close enough to block out the rest of the room, his gaze flickering from one screen to the next, zigzagging across the grids, and he thought he saw a dark shape ripple across the shadows in one shot. And again, in another grid view. Something obvious if you were looking for it, but easily overlooked if you were accustomed to scanning for people or motor vehicles. He could have pointed the shapes out to Gruber, but they would be meaningless shifting of light and shadow to him, with no context. Sam had to wait for something more definitive to clue him in to the real enemy.
Meanwhile, Sam waited for the fateful moment when everyone… stopped.
12:00 AM.
Everything happened at once and lasted seconds.
Cars drifted out of their lanes or made sudden turns as drivers slumped in their seats. A camera above a storefront showed a car burst into the frame and smash the display window. One traffic camera with a long view of a busy highway showed a pileup of several cars as one after the other descended an embankment above a storm drain. Along downtown streets, people walking alone or in pairs captured on multiple cameras, fell in unison, as if heeding a silent command.
Before a minute had passed, Moyer became a ghost town. Nothing moved. Cars either slowed to a halt in the middle of the roads as drivers no longer pressed on accelerators, or they crashed into buildings, mailboxes or parked cars. Steam rose from some. Fire from a couple. People lay in the streets, unmoving, or sat slumped over steering wheels or deflated airbags. One camera, however, showed a feral cat trotting down an alley, checking out the collection of dumpsters behind an outdoor shopping center.
On a few screens, Sam noticed darker shapes, sliding through shadows. Their appearances were so infrequent, their movements so subtle, Sam began to wonder if he was imagining them, the way the brain sees faces in random blotches or in patterns on wallpaper.
Focusing on the humans, as still as fallen mannequins, Sam said, “Eerie. They don’t move at all. Not even a twitch.”
“Like watching a preview of the end of the world,” Gruber added. “By the time I reached town, people were starting to wake up. I never saw everyone like this.”
“If you’d returned a few minutes sooner,” Sam said. “You’d be lying right beside them.”
“Strange to think that not a single person in Moyer was—”
“Hold on,” Sam said, pointing at the monitor on the far right, bottom left square in the grid of four. “Check the time stamp on that one.”
Gruber looked. “12:01… Wait, 12:02 now.”
“So, why is that man walking around when everyone else is out cold?”
Adjusting the monitor so they could both see it better, Gruber switched to full screen. The man wore a knit hat, an old pea coat, threadbare jeans and old boots, his hands covered with fingerless gloves. He walked with a stumbling gait, as if completely exhausted or moderately inebriated. And he appeared to be muttering to himself, a running, animated monologue which included an array of hand gestures.
“Could be a simple explanation,” Gruber said.
“Such as?”
“Incorrect time stamp,” Gruber said. “Most of this footage is never viewed. It could have been off by an hour if someone forgot to fall back or spring ahead.”
“Look,” Sam said. “Top right of the frame. Guy lying next to a car.”
As they watched, the raggedy man crouched beside the unconscious man and snatched his wallet, plucked out the cash and returned the empty billfold before moving on, out of frame.
“Damn,” Sam said. “Do you know where that is?”
Gruber rewound the footage, examined details in the frame. “Definitely downtown.”
“Is this all there is?” Sam asked.
“What are you looking for?”
“Something that shows us where he was right at midnight.”
“I have a few more cam views I planned to queue after these.”
Gruber opened a file they hadn’t viewed yet. “This is also from Central Avenue, a few blocks back, depending on how fast he walked…”
The view showed an extreme angle of a row of shops and restaurants and the sidewalks in front of them without much coverage of the street, a security camera view rather than a traffic cam. To the left of the frame, a middle-aged couple emerged from a restaurant, the man in a two-piece suit, the woman wearing a cocktail dress.
The timestamp read 11:59 PM.
Gruber provided commentary. “That’s Angelini’s, a new Italian restaurant in town. Can’t ID the couple, especially not from this angle. But no sign of—”
“Spoke too soon,” Sam said, as the raggedy man entered the frame behind the couple, closing the distance between them. He swung his hand next to his head as if he was swatting at a flying pest by his ear.
Leaning forward, Sam spotted a dark shape flow between the camera and the man’s pea coat. It slipped into and out of frame so fast, if he hadn’t been paying close attention he might have missed it. Then Sam noticed another dark shape ripple past the side panel of an SUV. Sam wondered if the raggedy man noticed the shapes but thought he was imagining them.
He raised his hand again and must have called out to the couple, as the woman glanced back. The man swatted at something near his head again. Sam detected no dark shape movement, but it could have occurred out of camera range.
The woman clutched the arm of her companion and whispered something to him. He pointed his key fob at a nearby SUV and disengaged the locks. Raggedy man continued to plead his case, but SUV man shook his head.
A moment later, he fell over, dropping the key fob as his body rebounded off the side of his car. Right beside him, his dining companion collapsed, her leg twisting awkwardly underneath her before her face slammed into the curb. Man and woman fell simultaneously.
Raggedy man stared down at them, his hands shaking, obviously confused.
After a few seconds, he shook off his disbelief, and crouched beside the man, reached into the chest pocket of his suit and removed a billfold. After a moment or two, he seemed to return the wallet to the suit pocket, while stuffing his pocket with the cash he’d lifted. Then he turned his attention to the woman.
Gruber leaned forward. “What’s he doing?”
“Checking for a pulse,” Sam said. “She’s bleeding.”
Raggedy man removed more folding money from the woman’s purse, then left it lying beside her.
“We had some reports of missing cash after the blackout,” Gruber said. “But nothing else was taken, not credit cards or cell phones, so I chalked it up to memory lapses or a pickpocket. Obviously never considered the possibility the thefts happened while everyone was unconscious.”
12:02 AM.
As raggedy man stood up, he wavered before catching his balance. He nodded politely toward the unconscious man and woman, then continued walking along Central Avenue. But before he walked out of the camera frame, he glanced back over his shoulder, a brief, grainy flash of his face beneath the knit hat. Sam doubted he heard anything, as he was—as far as they knew—the only conscious person in the whole town. The more likely explanation was that he was tracking one of the dark shapes moving past him. Or he simply couldn’t believe his good fortune and, belatedly, felt a pang of guilt.
Then he was gone.
Gruber reversed the recording and paused on the side view of raggedy man’s face. He clicked on the digital zoom button to increase the size of the face. But it was mostly light blur and shadows, no distinguishing features.
“Know him?” Sam asked.
Gruber sighed. “Can’t tell from this image,” he said. “But I have an idea.”
Sam leaned back in his chair, fingers interlaced behind his head. One person in the entire town had immunity from the blackouts. And what did they know about him? From his apparel, Sam guessed he was homeless. Judging by his behavior, he was either an opportunistic thief or a man with a faulty moral compass. Based on his reactions, he had some awareness of the shadow creatures. Maybe he only sensed their presence without seeing them. Even if that was true, he was several steps ahead of his fellow townspeople.
Gruber continued to stare at the blurry face.
“Hoping you can get a conviction from that?” Sam asked.
“Would be nice,” Gruber said, smiling. “Looking for any detail to confirm my suspicions.”
Sam leaned forward. “We need another view.”
“We’ve looked at all the coverage for that area of town.”
“What about tonight?” Sam said. “The second blackout.”
“If he stayed awake again…”
“Easy to spot in a motionless town.”
“I’ll need time to gather fresh footage.”
“I’ll brew fresh coffee,” Sam said.
“Sounds like a plan.”
Thirty minutes later, they returned to their seats before the multiple monitor setup with piping hot coffee and a new batch of security and traffic cam footage to review. With a shorter blackout window, they found their shot in less than ten minutes.
Wearing his pea coat, raggedy man sat hunched over on a wrought iron bench near a bronze plaque denoting the entrance to Penninger Park as the timestamp changed to 12:00 AM. As if hearing sounds nearby—probably somebody collapsing though no one else was in the shot—he looked up startled, glanced from left to right and a smile lit up his face.
“He just realized it happened again,” Sam said. “And Blackout Bank is open for business.”
“And I just realized my hunch was right,” Gruber said, momentarily pausing the image when raggedy man looked straight toward the camera. “I do know him.”
“He lives here? In Moyer?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
SEVENTEEN
Around town, as night rolled into the early morning hours, and the emergency vehicles retreated, the shadows with substance roamed freely along the deserted streets. They avoided the commercial district for two reasons. Closed stores were vacant, so held little appeal for them, while bars and all-night businesses presented an exposure risk.
Instinctually, they escaped detection by moving in and with shadows. Their interaction with humans remained on the periphery of human affairs, the stuff of campfire tales and urban legend. While they remained unknown and undetected, they had free rein of the living world, invisible observers, unthreatened by mankind.
But something had changed in their nature. Observation alone became insufficient. No longer trapped on the sidelines, they now had the ability to participate, to experience again. So far, the humans had no answer for their invasions and remained clueless of their existence.
With a new sense of abandon, the dark shapes sailed down suburban streets, hovering above sidewalks, sliding up walls, down roofs and chimneys, through gaps in windowsills, under doorways, through keyholes. Like moths to flames, they were drawn to sleeping humans. Their human shapes overlaid human bodies, stretching their extremities to reach the human extremities, morphing and mapping their shapes until the human was coated head to toe in inkblot darkness like a second layer of skin, which then eased down through the pores, settling into the host—
—and taking control.
Once they had taken up residence inside a human, they suppressed the human’s consciousness, shoving it below any sensory connection to the world, deeper than sleep. As soon as they took over, they made the human body rise and took it for a test drive.
One made a husband climb out of bed, walk down the hall and throw himself down the stairs, just to experience what the moment felt like. Before the man’s wife awoke, the free shadow took control of her and made her leap out the second-story window.
Another went into a crowded house, jumped from one family member to the next, had each rise and walk to another room and dropped them there to sleep it off. When they awoke, every one of them would think they had been sleepwalking. One of the younger ones liked to take the humans out in the street for short bouts of mischief. Throwing rocks at neighboring houses or striking a baseball bat against car windshields.
Another, whose natural shape jittered uncontrollably, enjoyed suicide scenarios. It had a difficult time taking and maintaining control of humans, and faced failure more often than success, which created a buzzing rage inside it. Despite having control of the humans, its attempts to make them commit suicide triggered their basic instinct of s
elf-preservation. It had made the girl climb the fence and jump down into oncoming traffic, but it had felt her fighting back, struggling to stop what was happening.
Now it slipped inside an old man and had him get into his car—barefoot and wearing pajamas—and drive to one of the busier roads. Older minds were weaker, more accepting of their own mortality even if they didn’t acknowledge it. That helped it retain control when it had the old man swerve in front of an oncoming tractor-trailer. The trucker managed to avoid a head-on collision but sideswiped the old man’s car, crumpling the right rear wheel well, which began to rub against the back tire.
Losing speed, it had the old man swerve again, this time into a tree. The crash was jarring even as the airbag deployed and it let itself be thrown up and out of the host body, unsure if it had been successful.
But the night was young.
* * *
The shadow shape hovered before the motel room door, its head-shape level with the room number, 142. After a moment of consideration, it moved forward, its edge pushing through the thin gap between door and doorjamb, emerging inside the room without having to distort its shape. The room held two twin beds, the one on the right occupied by a sleeping man, not a Moyer native. But touched by darkness nonetheless.
Receptive.
It glided forward, closing the distance between them.
On a small table next to the man, a blocky device with lights and a meter activated, lights flashing, emitting a squealing sound, almost in protest.
The sleeping man rolled over in his sleep, arm extended, swatting at the table…
* * *
Dean rose from the depths of a troubling dream of a shadow army marching on a city of humans, when the scared man next to him opened his mouth and began to squeal, an almost robotic sound that startled Dean. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and shook him. Not human, Dean thought in the dream. What is he?
A spy, hidden among the humans, to warn the shadow army.
He demanded the man stop squealing but…
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