Blackout by Tim Curran Page A

glossy, glassy sort of material the sharpened end of the pike glanced off without causing any damage. But I got a reaction out of it—the skeletal appendages opened like the fingers of a hand and then it turned itself inside out, protecting its eyes with a cloak of its own flesh. I saw its crimson underside quite clearly. The sticklike appendages were set with long, lethal-looking spikes that had impaled Roger and now withdrawn. But he was still held by a suckering orifice that had swallowed his entire head. He was wet with blood from the many spikes and I thought he was dead.
    Then the hood covered him again and before I could do much more than gasp, it rose into the air with him in tow.
    There wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it.
    And we didn’t have the time because something gigantic was hovering above us, maybe fifty feet up. We wouldn’t have seen it at all, but like with the cyclops, a single orb of light irised open and flooded the world with dull pink light. It was like some immense pod or shell with what appeared to be hundreds of jointed, narrow limbs sprouting from it. Each was roughly the thickness of a telephone pole and probably three times as long. Whatever it was, I don’t think it was the same as the cyclops. It hovered up there and I expected it to drop down on us, but it didn’t. It just turned its glowing milky eye on us and held us in a beam of pale pink light.
    The hood moved up towards it with Roger in tow and then flew up into a central diamond-shaped chasm on its underside. The hood, as I said, was nearly as big as a man, but it was dwarfed by the colossal pod up there. It looked like a pea next to a shoebox.
    That’s when I saw that surrounding the chasm were what looked like countless pulsating polyps clinging there like remoras on a shark’s belly. They were hoods. What might have been hundreds of them. Several detached themselves and swooped over our heads. The air was filled with them. Billy fired again and again. Whether he hit them, I don’t know. One of them came at me and it would have had me, too, but I thrust the pike at it with everything I had and felt it sink into something—the suckering orifice beneath, I thought—and the hood made a sort of electronic squealing sound and hit the ground. It couldn’t seem to fly. It skidded along the pavement, jetting around like a squid.
    We got the hell out of there.
    Billy led the way and we got Doris and the kids between us. I had no idea where we were going, but Billy seemed to know. The hoods dipping down at us, he led us back into the forest of cables where things were too tight for them to follow. It was good thinking and I’m pretty sure it saved all our lives.
    Once inside the depths of the cables, we moved slowly and cautiously again, waiting for them to reach out and snare us.

15

    Doris and the kids were barely holding it together by that point and I wasn’t much better. The children were not just clinging to her, they were practically welded to her so that they almost moved as a single entity. As Billy guided us forward, the entire time talking in a very soothing voice to them how everything was going to be just fine—bless him—I kept a hand on Doris’s shoulder. I think she needed the physical contact and I know I needed it.
    The cables trembled as we passed them, but they did nothing other than that but wait. Time was on their side and they knew it. Eventually, after about ten minutes or so, they thinned out. We didn’t breathe any easier because that put us back in the open where we were prey for the hoods. And, true to form, they made their appearance almost right away.
    The four of us clustered together instinctively and kept our heads down. Herd mentality, I guess. I assumed the hoods were like lions looking for a stray gazelle and we weren’t about to give them that opportunity. They kept swooping, sometimes flying right at us as if they hoped to spook and separate us.
    Finally, Billy said, “There!