or an hour, I don’t know, the phone rang. We both jumped out of our skin. I picked up, glancing out of my window to see sheets of ice bits raining down in the night.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. I made it home. Slick as hell, did a three-sixty going around a corner at Lex and Main. Have you turned into a monster yet?”
“No, John.”
“Get this. Molly is here.”
“At your place? John, how does she even know where you live?”
“It’s even better than that. She wasn’t standing outside the building when I got here. She was
“She
“Don’t know. She’s eating a package of hot dogs right now.”
I sensed Amy walking past behind me and a moment later my bathroom door closed. I said, “You gave her the whole pack?”
“Yeah, they’re expired. She’ll stop eating when she gets full, won’t she? Hey, is your power out?”
“No, lights are still on.”
And with that, the lights went out.
“Fuck. They’re out now, John.”
“Yeah, mine were off when I got in. I thought it was the bad guys maybe, making their move. But I turned on the radio and it’s down in several parts of town. I guess they’re working on it. They got the storm on every station, talking like it’s a natural disaster. The ice is knocking down trees and power lines and they said at the state prison the snow drifted up against the fences so high that inmates were able to just walk over it. The guards couldn’t shoot ’em because they were afraid of the ACLU.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the winter storm had been a huge event for practically every person in town except for the three of us, who had bigger fish to fry. I got off the phone with John, blinked as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and then dug around my cabinets for candles. Amy emerged from the bathroom, her purse slung over her shoulder, and she pawed around the wall to find her way. She put her glasses on, as if they would help her see in the dark. She asked, “Will your heat go off with the power out?”
“Oh, I’m sure it won’t.”
I wasn’t sure, though. Can people really just freeze to death in their homes in times like this? I hunted around for a book of matches, found none in the kitchen and tried the bathroom as the only other likely place. I pulled open the drawer on the vanity and found my matches. I opened the medicine cabinet—
Someone had been here. I normally have three prescription bottles of medication and all of it was gone. Hell, even the aspirin was gone. All of it had been here after we came home to find the house ransacked. I had checked.
I shuffled around in the drawers to see if anything else was missing and I saw my scissors were gone, too. I could have just misplaced them, though. I suddenly flashed on Amy leaving the bathroom, her purse with her, and figured out what a smarter person would have figured out the minute John told Amy to stay with me.
It turned out I was wrong about the furnace. The house started losing heat rapidly the moment the lights went down. I guess the gas stays on but the electric fans that blow the heat around don’t operate without electricity. An hour later, Amy and I were huddled in front of my fake fireplace, sitting on the floor and wrapped in blankets like Bugs Bunny Indians. I got the fireplace lit and turned up as high as it would go. There were no logs in it but they were just for visual effect anyway, the blue flames licking the air and putting out their own heat. We sat there like that, a flickering pool of amber light around us, with no sound but the hiss of the gas and the creak of the wind leaning on exterior walls. The silence was driving me nuts.
“You have my medication in your purse?” I finally asked.
She didn’t answer.
I said, “So I’m on suicide watch? Do you have my scissors, too?”
She said, “I’m sorry that I freaked out before, in the yard. That wasn’t fair. You have to accept people for what they are—”
“No, no. Amy, you were right. You were right then, when you freaked out. You’re wrong now, that you’re calmed down and telling yourself everything’s gonna be okay. It’s not.”
“You did fine today. Yesterday, too.”
“That’s not the point. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, we know one thing—that I won’t be able to control it. Amy, you have to get out of town. Away from this place.”
“We all do. Let’s all move away. Bring John if you want.”
I said, “Amy, I told you before—”
“No. We tried it your way. Let’s get far away from here and if the bad guys follow, we’ll deal with it then. But let’s at least try.”
“Okay, but it’ll take time for us, John and me. We got jobs, we got to get things in order. John’s got family here. But you, you can go now and I say we do it tomorrow. Is there anywhere you can go? You got friends far away? Anywhere? Somebody with a couch you can crash on?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I know a girl on the Internet; she lives in Utah with another girl. They’re lesbians.”
“Good. That’s good. You’ll call them or send them something on your computer and ask if you can crash there. We’ll buy a plane ticket and fly your ass to Utah.”
She said nothing. She scooted over and leaned her head on my shoulder, ribbons of firelight dancing on the lenses of her glasses. Eventually she said, “And then I’ll never, ever see you again.”
I couldn’t think of a way to answer that without telling an outright lie, so I just mumbled something that sounded reassuring. She said, “I’ll go, but I’ll call when I’m out there. And you have to take my calls. If you don’t I’ll just come right back. If I don’t get an answer from you I’ll be on a flight the next day.”
“Okay. Um, sure.”
She rearranged herself so that she was lying down, her head on my lap. Her breathing slowed and softened as she drifted off. She mumbled, “It’s, like, so cool that it’s snowing out there but not in here. It can’t snow on us. That’s so cool . . .”
She started snoring softly.
And that was that. I formulated a plan that if she got out there and away from the Hell that is this town, got a job and went to bars with her lesbian roommates, she’d settle in. Forget all about this, all about me. Out there the guys would figure out how hot she was, even without both hands, and she’d meet somebody and she’d stop calling and then all the loose ends would be tied up. I could shoot myself or take a bunch of pills and that would clean up the situation once and for all. I could do a real will, even have a lawyer draw it up, complete with a stipulation that John had to deliver my eulogy in the form of a seventeen-minute-long guitar solo, performed with a dual-necked guitar shaped like a naked woman. As for the property, I could sign it over to—
I saw a light to my left. I slowly turned my head to see that, with power still out all over the city, the television had clicked on.
Hands. That’s what I saw, a pair of hands, palms pressed against the screen. Then another pair, fingers clawing at the glass as if trying to escape. For a moment I thought it was snowing in the background but then my mind registered the worms, the white flying worms that poured through the air behind them. I thought I heard a scream, or felt it somehow, and a spray of red splattered the hands on the screen. A pair of hands fell away and just two were left, grabbing at the glass in desperation. One hand formed a fist and smashed against the glass, as if trying to break it. It pounded again and again, and I thought I could see blooms of blood opening on the knuckles. The fist reared way back this time and swung and—
—the TV shook. I almost pissed my pants. The fist pulled back, blood trickling down between the fingers now, and smashed against the screen once more. Again, the TV rattled on the shelf of my entertainment center, the whole set edging forward an inch with the impact. The fist drew back one last time—the set clicked off. Blackness.
Those transmissions, the ones from Shit Narnia, never returned. It took me four hours to fall asleep.
