Blackout by Tim Curran

tree. I was counting on these to do the same.
    Billy saw what I was doing. “Watch it,” he said.
    I caught hold of the cable with the tines of the rake and slowly pulled it away from the door. “Okay!” I said. “Get out of there now!”
    The door opened and Billy helped two pasty-faced kids out, a boy and a girl who were still wearing pajamas. Their mother—or who I assumed was their mother—got out next. The cable was trembling a bit as I held it and the woman got the kids well away in case I lost control of it. Billy went in and helped her husband out. He had banged his head pretty good and there was dried blood all over the left side of his face. It looked like his arm was broken. As Billy got him out of there, he was very groggy. He was also wearing a brown UPS uniform.
    When he was clear, I released the cable.
    The woman introduced herself as Doris Shifferin and her kids were Kayla and Kevin. The man was not her husband but the guy from next door whose name was Roger. He had gotten them away from their neighborhood, which was a maze of cables, but when that wind kicked up, he lost control of the SUV. And here they were.
    “You took a pretty good knock,” Billy told him. “But we can fix you up, I think. First, let’s get the hell out of here.”
    We didn’t make it ten steps before something came out of the darkness at us. It was fast. Incredibly fast. A black shape that swooped right over our heads like some immense bird. I knew then that what I had seen pulling away from the light more than once was not my imagination. It came again before we had time to recover from the first encounter.
    “Get down!” I told Doris and the kids. “Get your heads down!”
    The kids didn’t say a word as she pulled them to the ground and held them tightly to her. I thought they were both in shock. I figured if we could get them back to the house and get some food in them, give them a safe place to rest, they would be okay. But that wasn’t going to be easy. The shape came out of the darkness like a bat and in the illumination of the SUV’s headlights, I saw something like a flying black hood, swollen and elongated. My first impression was that it looked much like a folded-up umbrella, except that it was bulbous and nearly the size of a man.
    I ducked when it came again and it swooped within three feet of Roger, who stood there, dazed and confused, half out of it from his head wound. Billy fired at the hood, missed, racked the pump on the riot gun and fired again. He hit it. Just before it disappeared into the darkness, I saw it jerk as the buckshot bit into it.
    I told Roger to get his head down and when he didn’t listen, I got up and made to take him down. But I never got to him. The hood beat me to it. It came out of the night with a smooth, sleek velocity and engulfed his head and upper body, closing over him like the trap of an insectivorous plant. The hood opened, looking very much like an umbrella unfolding and then folding back up as it gripped him. I could clearly see the architecture of ten or twelve bony appendages beneath the skin radiating out. They ran from midline of the hood to the very bottom, a slick webbing of black tissuelike material connecting them. The entire creature was shiny black like wet neoprene and had a ring of brilliant red eyes near the apex of the hood itself.
    Roger made a grunting sound as it closed over him.
    Doris screamed and Billy, with a knee-jerk reaction, brought up the riot gun and made to fire before I knocked the barrel away. For a second there, it looked like he was going to turn it on me, but that was the terror and stress and shock of it all taking hold of him.
    I brought up my pike to spear the thing and as I got closer the eyes of it went from bright electric red to the color of fresh blood. They seemed to bulge in their sockets. I jabbed it with the pike again and again but I couldn’t get any purchase. It was much like the cable I tried to cut, made out of some