Blackout Read Online Free Page B

taken! I would personally crawl down the throat and up the ass of everyone from the super of the electric company to the guy throwing the switches at the power plant! Every lineman and every desk jockey at city hall would know my name and when they saw me coming, brother, they’d know I meant business!”
    “Praise Jesus!” Billy said, toasting him with his beer.
    Frankovich looked stunned. It was easy enough to see by his face that he was of the mind they had enough goddamn trouble downtown without Ray Wetmore getting involved.
    “Well, I’m sure everyone is doing everything they can,” he said.
    “I hope they are,” Ray told him. “God in heaven, I hope they are.”
    Billy belched. “You tell him, Ray! You give it to him! Amen, brother!”
    “Knock it off,” Bonnie said to him. “Just knock it off, you idiot.”
    He saluted her and belched again.
    Frankovich said he had to get back to the station, fielding about a dozen questions as he walked to his patrol car. I caught him before he got in and he complained to me how the radio wasn’t working.
    “I was just down there,” I told him. “There’s no one. There’s nothing.”
    “Mr. Shipman, I want you to relax. We’re going to do everything we can to find your wife. People just don’t disappear into thin air except on TV. I’ll get the wheels rolling on this.”
    “You don’t understand. There’s no people downtown. They’re all gone.”
    In the light coming from inside the car, I could see his face was pinched and sweaty. “It’s going to work out, Mr. Shipman. One way or another, it’s going to work out.”
    “No, you don’t get it. You don’t understand—”
    He hopped in the patrol car and pulled away and I knew then it wasn’t that he didn’t understand, he just didn’t want to understand. He was going through the motions because he really didn’t know what else to do. What I sensed in him I sensed in the others. Instinctively, and perhaps psychically, their backs were up. They were feeling something they could not adequately put a name to and it was easier to pretend business as usual than to face the dark truth of what was closing in around them. God knew I felt it, too. It was thrumming inside me like electricity. I could almost feel the noose that encircled us gradually being tightened.
    There was a flash of light behind me and I turned quickly, only to discover that Al Peckman had dragged his portable fire pit out into the front yard. Flames were burning bright in it. It threw a lot of light and a lot of warmth. It was very comforting. The Ebler boys had hauled over a nice stack of wood. Everyone pushed closer into the ring of light.
    “Hey, might as well turn a bad thing into a good thing,” Al said, dragging out a cooler of beer and pop. “Who’s for roasting marshmallows and burning a couple weenies?”
    “I’m already there,” Billy Kurtz said, helping himself to a beer.
    A lot of beers made the rounds at that moment. There’s nothing more soothing to the human beast than the protection of fire and the mellow buzz of alcohol. I stood off in the darkness with Bonnie, not knowing what to think. I found myself studying the faces of everyone in the firelight. In the flickering orange glow, they stared into the flames, lips drawn into straight lines. They did not speak and they did not move. These were the faces of savages looking at the only true god they had ever known—the one that lit their world, kept the beasts at bay, and cooked their meat. They were transfixed by it, pulled together by its light and heat. Now that technology had failed, they returned to the old god of fire to keep the shadows away.
    “I got an idea,” Billy Kurtz said. “Let’s make a picnic of it. Have ourselves a regular clambake. Let’s get some picnic tables out here and a couple more fire pits. We got a lot of steaks and chops that are going to go bad if the juice don’t come back on soon, so let’s eat our fill.”
    Everyone else