The Town

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.

The kids were on edge, too. The hyperfriendly Gregory of the morning was gone, and since Adam and Teo had come home, their father had been avoiding them, not speaking to them either, and she found that troubling. She wanted to grab the kids and take off, let them know what was really happening, but Gregory was holding the van keys and they certainly wouldn’t get far by walking.

Adam and Teo had been hiding in Teo’s room ever since they’d come home—it was downstairs, farther away from him—and they emerged into the living room as soon as the lights went out. Julia broke out the candles, setting three on the coffee table and four others around the perimeter of the room, letting Adam and Teo light some of them, lighting the rest herself.

Sasha had still not returned home, and that worried her. Not as much as it would have ordinarily, though. She was concerned for her daughter, but part of her couldn’t help thinking that she would be safer away from this house, away from her father. Julia found herself hoping that Sasha would stay with a friend until daylight.

There was the sound of a crash from upstairs, and Gregory’s shouted curse, and Adam and Teo both looked at her. She tried to offer them a reassuring smile, but she was still in quite a bit of pain and it probably came out closer to a grimace.

None of them said anything.

Julia looked out the window once again, hoping to see a Molokan cavalry coming to the rescue, but there was only blackness, only night, and the three of them sat together in the living room, waiting, listening to the battery-powered radio, trying to ignore the sounds of Gregory up in the attic.

3

The lights went out at the perfect time.

Sasha had taken off her clothes and crawled into the bed, and Wilbert was just starting to undress.

The truth was that she didn’t really want to see him naked. The beer gut distending his T-shirt was bad enough when he was fully clothed, but staring at that hairy blubber hanging over an erection would be a serious turnoff, and she was glad when the lights winked out.

She was not so glad when he hit her.

She did not know why it happened, did not know if it was an accident, if he simply hadn’t been able to see her in the dark and her face had been in the way of his hand’s intended destination, or if the blow was intentional, but it made her angry, and she yelled at him, making sure he got her message loud and clear. She was doing this ugly porker a big favor by fucking him, and if he was going to try and pull this shit, she’d kick him in the goddamn balls, grab her clothes, and get the hell out of his rat-infested trailer.

He did not respond to her tirade, and against her will she felt the first faint stirrings of fear.

“Aren’t you even going to apologize?” she asked, keeping her voice angry.

No answer.

She could feel his weight on the bed next to her, so she knew he had not left, but still he said nothing.

Now she was definitely afraid. She did not like the fact that he was not speaking, that the room was silent. “Wilbert?” she said hesitantly.

Silence. A slight shifting of weight.

“Wilbert?”

“Boo!” he said.

Relief flooded through her. “Wilbert!”

He was laughing, rolling around on the bed.

And there was someone else in the room laughing as well.

She heard several people laughing.

Her mouth suddenly went dry.

There were others here.

She started to sit up. He slapped her again, and now her mouth was no longer dry. There was blood in it.

A strong hand pushed her down, and then he was on top of her. The other laugher had not yet stopped, and even as Wilbert spread her legs apart, she was listening carefully, trying to determine how many different voices she could pick out.

Three.

Five.

Six.

She could not differentiate how many others.

There was a scream from the next room.

Cherie.

It was too dark to see, but Sasha closed her eyes anyway. This was a nightmare, like something out of a movie. She should have learned her lesson last time, should have stayed as far away from these rednecks as possible, but… but something had made her do it.

And as Wilbert’s bulk settled on top of her and the laughter grew, she began to cry.

4

Jesus H. Christ.

Sheriff Roland Ford paced in the dirt in front of his office, rifle in hand, waiting for those dipshit policemen to show up. The two departments were pooling their resources tonight, and though he did not like the idea, he recognized the necessity for it. Neither could handle this situation alone—there was so much going on that they needed to coordinate who was going to do what. It was like New York out there rather than McGuane—a night filled with looting and random violence. He found it hard to believe that one extended blackout could cause so many problems.

From far off up the canyon he heard the sound of sirens. Fire, it sounded like. Or ambulance.

He shook his head. What the fuck was going on here? It was as if lights and electricity were the only things maintaining people’s sanity, the only things upholding civilization, and without those basic technological comforts, they panicked, reverted to savagery. It made no sense on any sort of rational level, and he had to admit that he did not understand it. As someone who often went camping and hunting, the night held no terrors for him, and he could not figure out why seemingly well-adjusted adults would overreact to such an unbelievable extent.

Of course, not all of them were well adjusted.

Two separate local militia groups had appointed themselves the official protector of McGuane, and they were fighting it out in the park over jurisdiction. A bunch of overweight, undereducated losers who wouldn’t even be able to make it through the sheriff’s academy’s female course, they were now proclaiming themselves the only real law in town.

Word was that they’d tried to lynch a man, a Mormon elder who had dared to question their right to even participate in law enforcement, and Tom Sobule, the town’s newest police recruit, had had to fire his sidearm into the air in order to rescue the man and head off a confrontation. They hadn’t been brave enough to actually go up against a real officer, to abandon all pretense of the rule of law and degenerate completely into anarchy and vigilantism—but the night was still young.

Since then, the two militia groups had gotten into it with each other. If he was lucky, they’d kill each other off, and his men could just go in and arrest the last man standing.

Or take him out if he wanted to fight.

They’d had blackouts before, and he failed to understand what made this one different. The others had been local, confined to McGuane or, at most, Rio Verde County—they had not involved whole states—but he found it hard to believe that the size of the affected area had any bearing on the behavior of people in town. Did they learn that the blackout was affecting Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and automatically assume that it was the end of the world or the collapse of the country? The militia nuts, perhaps. But he could not see ordinary, everyday citizens believing such lunacy.

Yet it was those ordinary, everyday citizens who were out there looting and fighting and doing who knew what.

Roland sighed. The truth was, it wasn’t just the blackout. Something else had caused this unrest, something had led them to this point. The blackout was just the catalyst, the excuse. The real reasons went far deeper, and while he prided himself on his fairness and open-mindedness, while he did not like to pick on one specific group of people or indulge in any kind of scapegoating, he could not help but think that the Molokans were somehow at the root of it all. Things had been getting increasingly strange around here for quite some time, but it was the hairy church yesterday that had really kicked the situation into high gear. Though the Russians might be victims just as much as everyone else, he could not seem to maintain the objectivity he knew his job required, and he found himself thinking that they were somehow responsible, that, intentionally or unintentionally, they had brought about this craziness.

And it was crazy.

A woman had called in to his office, claiming that the sheets that had been drying on her clothesline were flying around the outside of her house, trying to find a way in. A girl had called saying that her younger brother had tried to stab her and she’d had to lock the boy in a closet. Two kids had run down to the police station afraid that a giant lizard was chasing them.

There were reports of rat armies and cat attacks, and throughout the canyons came the almost constant echoes of gunfire.

Roland hoped to God it was animals that were being shot.

It was chaos out there. There was so much going on that it was impossible to know what was happening. Even with all of the shifts called in, the sheriff’s office was severely undermanned, and that was why, against the strong feelings of his gut, the instinct he usually trusted above all others, he’d agreed to throw in with the cops.

Someone somewhere screamed in the darkness, and a moment later the police car finally pulled up. Two officers got out, clutching flashlights, and Roland ushered them quickly inside the building. “About time,” was all he said.

The emergency generator was on, but that meant that only the backup lights were lit, and the office was still dark and gloomy.

All of the phones were ringing, but there were only two receptionists, and they were answering the calls as fast as they could.

He led the policemen into his office, closing the door behind them.

“No, Mrs. Kennedy,” Alice was saying as the door closed. “There’s been no reports of any spacecraft landing anywhere in Arizona.… No, I don’t know anything about little alien men.”

Semyon Konyov sat at the picnic table in the yard next to the church while he waited for the others. Peter and Nikolai had driven out into the desert to get the prophet, and the others had gone in search of Russian Bibles, since theirs were still inside the church and could not be retrieved.

Agafia was waiting at his house. The rest of them had not wanted to hear from her, still blamed her for this, still thought she was tainted and corrupt, her information lies, but he had lied himself and pulled a Vera, saying that he’d seen the answer in a dream. He told them everything Agafia had said to him, pretending the words were his own.

And Peter and Nikolai had gone to get the prophet.

Semyon looked toward the street. Where were the others? His candle was burning low, and his flashlight batteries were almost dead; he’d turned the light off some time ago in order to conserve them.

It occurred to him that they had been killed, that something had gotten them, but he pushed that thought out of his mind. He turned around, looked back toward the church, saw the dark hair waving slightly in the almost nonexistent breeze. Quickly, he looked away.

The night had been noisy, the town alive with fights and screaming, gunshots and sirens, but most of it seemed to have been coming from elsewhere in the canyons.

Until now.

There was the sound of an engine drawing closer, bringing with it angry voices, and he was embarrassed to discover that he was afraid. He closed his eyes and offered up a quick prayer, asking the Lord for strength.

He opened his eyes and saw headlights. A pickup was pulling up, coming to a stop in the church’s small parking lot. The truck’s bed was filled with cowboy-hatted, overalled men carrying shotguns.

He had a quick flashback to a similar scene, in another time, a time he had not thought of for decades.

Flashlights played across the hairy front of the church. Several of the men leaped out of the truck onto the ground, and one of them screamed at him. “This is the last straw, man. The last fuckin’ straw. You milk drinkers think you can just come to our town and do whatever the hell you want? Well, we’re not going to put up with that shit no more!”

Semyon stood, scared, flustered. He walked toward the men. “No—” he began.

A shot rang out.

He stopped in his tracks, and one of the men laughed. Had they shot at him? He didn’t know and he was afraid to find out. His first instinct was to run, try to find help, but he knew there would be no help this night, and though he was trembling with fear, he remained in place. “Go!” he said. “Go home now!”

“Go home now!” Someone made fun of his accent, and the others started laughing.

They started shooting up the church, aiming their guns at the front of the building, taking turns, some focusing flashlights while their companions shot. The bullets sank into the hair at first, but after several minutes and several rounds, chunks of hair-covered wall began to be blasted away, pieces falling, flying off. Semyon turned on his own flashlight, and he saw something completely unexpected, something he never would have believed.

The building was bleeding.

What was under that hair now? he wondered. He could not imagine. It was obviously not a building. The voices of the shooters became at once angrier and more frightened as they, too, saw the dark liquid spreading out across the dirt.

Semyon gathered up his courage once again. “This our church!” he said. “Leave us!”

“Shut up, old man!”

He felt the bullet pierce his chest, felt it rip through his body, shattering bone and organ, stopping somewhere deep inside him. He staggered to the right, clutching the burning, bleeding section of his torso where the bullet had ripped into him. He fell against the wall of the church and was immediately engulfed in a forest of hair that clutched at him and pulled him into itself.

It felt soothing, was the last thing he thought. It felt good.

The lights led Wynona down into the mine, her feet slipping on the gravel of the extant road that wound down to the bottom of the pit. The lights were beautiful, appearing and then disappearing, forming patterns, and she thought that she had never seen anything like them.

They’d come to her bedroom window, tapping musically on the glass, and they’d drawn her outside, leading her down Ore Road all the way to the realty office before flying into the air above the pit and dispersing with a whirling flourish that no fireworks could ever hope to match.

The lights had floated down, settled and winked up at her from their various locations throughout the massive pit, beckoning to her. She’d found a hole in the chain-link fence, climbed through, and started down the old truck trail to meet them.

The gravel was slippery, and several times she nearly fell, but she always managed to keep her footing.

She finally did fall twenty minutes later, when she was halfway down, her right foot flying out, throwing her off balance, and she landed on her back on the road, the hard ground knocking the wind out of her.

She tried to get up, but she could not, her left arm wouldn’t work right, and she prayed that it was only sprained and not broken.

Throughout the pit, the lights flew up again, coming together, swirling, dancing, then flitting over to where she lay. If she could not come to them, they would come to her, and for a brief second Wynona was delighted, filled with an exuberant sense of joy.

But something changed before they even reached her, and as suddenly as it had come, her exultation disappeared, and she was left with a strange sense of dread that caused her to once again try to sit up and get back on her feet.

She rolled onto her right side and was up on her elbow, when the gravel beneath her shifted again, and she fell back down.

The lights danced above her head and landed on her body. Up close they no longer looked so beautiful.

They looked like they felt.

Terrible.

And the night continued on.