Blackout by Tim Curran Page B

There it is!”
    He shone the light on a parked minivan. I didn’t get it. I understood the need of shelter, but why a minivan at the curb? That would put us in the same position Doris and the kids had been in when we found them. But then I knew, then I remembered as we piled in. Keys. There were keys in the minivan. Billy had pointed them out to me as we checked the cars on our journey.
    When the door was closed, I think I let out a long sigh.
    Billy, behind the wheel, turned it over and the engine caught right away. “Let them fucking swoop all they want,” he said. “They won’t get us now.”
    He pulled away from the curb, turning in the street and pointing the van back towards our section of Piccamore. The lights picked out dangling cables and dead, deserted houses. I saw a woman’s shoe in the middle of the street and I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
    The next ten minutes are burned in my memory.
    Billy piloted the minivan slowly down the road. He avoided the panic that gripped him as it gripped all of us. It would have been too easy to stomp down on the accelerator and race up the street. He was too careful for that and I can’t say I would have had that much self-control. As he drove, I could see his face in the glow of the dash lights—grim and set, his teeth locked tightly together like someone was digging a bullet out of him. The cables were everywhere and the minivan met them dead-on, bumping them aside like swinging vines. The sight of them brushing against the windows and the sound of them dragging over the roof was almost too much.
    We made it about half a block before the hoods started bumping into us.
    At first, it was playful, investigatory, as if they were trying to figure out what the minivan was. Then after a couple minutes of that, one of them came screaming out of the darkness and hit the windshield at full speed. It didn’t get in, but the window shattered, hanging there in a sheet of spiderwebbed cracks. Billy couldn’t see through it, so he knocked out a good section with the stock of the riot gun. Just enough so he could get us where we had to go. I think we all knew that if another hood made a run at us, there would be no stopping it.
    Billy drove erratically, avoiding the cables now. If one of them got in through the damaged windshield, it would be disastrous. He drove in the street, up on the sidewalk, through yards, anywhere to avoid them as much as possible. The hoods were still out there swooping and circling like moths around a streetlight, but none of them made any further kamikaze attacks.
    “Almost there,” he finally said.
    I couldn’t see a damn thing and had no idea where we were. My section of windshield was still attached, feathered out with hundreds of diverging cracks and gently swaying with the motion of the minivan. Within five minutes, Billy popped the curb and pulled right into my front yard within mere feet of the porch. I jumped out first and then Billy was at my side. The door opened and Bonnie was waiting for us. We hustled Doris and the kids inside.
    We had made it.
    We had really made it.
    That’s exactly what I thought as I jogged up the steps to get inside myself. I almost didn’t make it. I remember feeling something like a hot wind and I was hit right between the shoulder blades with enough force to knock me right over the railing into the yard.
    One of the hoods had me.
    It gripped me by the loose skin between my shoulder blades. I couldn’t see it, of course. I was face down in the grass, but I could feel its terrible weight and the pain where its suckering mouth was attached to me. It felt like a thousand red-hot needles had pierced me. I flopped around, trying to reach behind me but it was no good. It had me and it wasn’t about to let go. It was going to fly up with me to that great and evil pod in the sky…and the insane thing was, after a few brief moments of fighting, I was more than ready to accept my fate. I was beaten and I