stood, and as he looked around at the sea of cars, he couldn’t help but smile. A vehicle—even one like his—could go unnoticed for a very long time in a place like this.
When he climbed into the cramped Quarto, Vidonia smiled at his attempts to get comfortable. Even with the seat pushed all the way back, his knees almost touched the dashboard.
She pulled away, headed back toward the highway.
“How long till they catch on?” she asked.
“Long enough. We don’t need a lot of time, one way or the other.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Tears flowed freely down Evan’s face. He wasn’t blubbering, wasn’t making any sound at all. But the tears still slid quietly down his cheeks and dripped from his quivering chin, making a dark spot on his shirt. The sheer beauty of what he was looking at was too much for him to take in at one time. His senses were overloaded.
“You’re right, Pea,” he said, and his voice was a cracked whisper.
The boy loomed larger in the screen now, older by years than he had been just a few hours earlier. His chest was broadening, taking on a new muscular topography. The legs had lengthened. Arms thickened. The boy-face now annealed into something more. And Evan could feel the energy still growing. He was overwhelmed with a sense that Pea was … becoming.
The lighting panels in the ceiling surged suddenly, brightening the room. Then they darkened, almost going out. A moment later, the light surged again, brighter, and this time Evan heard a bulb pop somewhere.
Pea smiled, and Evan knew that if he looked too long, he would go mad. He would go out of his mind, losing himself in the image before him, with no hope of ever finding his way back.
You can look a god in the face, he’d discovered. But only briefly. And looking changes you.
The world behind Pea came into focus. The grayness was gone, replaced by sea and sand, and a golden sun in a blue sky. Pea raised his arms and closed his eyes. The arms were too long, abstractions of what arms could be. They reached for miles into the sky, curling into claws.
The lights surged again, and this time, it was like a camera flash. The glowing ceiling panels exploded one by one, showering Evan in sparks and bits of broken glass and melted plastic.
The room went dark except for the glowing screen.
Pea smiled.
Outside the window, the streetlight popped, sending little runnels of blue flame arcing into the night. The air was greasy with the tang of smoldering electronics. In the distance behind him, Evan heard a fire alarm sounding, warbling higher and higher until it screeched itself silent.
The only sound now was the crashing of waves. Pea’s sun the only light.
THREE HUNDRED fifty miles away, at that exact moment, on a console on the second floor of the Western Nuclear Control Hub, a small red indicator bulb began to flash. Years ago, when the monitoring system was first being designed, some engineer had decided that the importance of this particular indicator justified it being given its own flashy red bulb rather than a mere screen icon. No sound accompanied the pulsing indicator; and precisely because it
When he did notice, he sat up straighter in his chair. His brow furrowed, and he looked around for a supervisor, unsure of what exactly was expected of him. He’d never seen that bulb flash before. Or any bulb, come to think of it. The screen icons occasionally lit up, but never the bulbs on the console.
Then another bulb began to flash. And another.
Around the room now, other systems analysts had begun to take notice. Their bulbs flashed, too. Their screen icons blinked. Understanding rolled across the room like a tsunami. “The grid is crashing,” someone shouted.
A supervisor moved quickly to the bank of consoles, looking over shoulders as he strode between the rows.
“Son of a bitch.”
The supervisor ran to the wall, picked up the red phone, and punched the buttons. After a moment’s pause, he said, “This is Phoenix. We’ve got a crisis.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Silas fell asleep for a while as the car hummed beneath him. His dream was dark and filled with sharp things that moved too quickly, and when he awoke, it was with a dawning sense of dread.
“How long was I out?”
“About two hours,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“After midnight.”
Silas looked out the window and was met with near-complete darkness. Only the glare of headlights illuminated the night.
“What happened?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a power outage. It’s been going on for miles and miles.”
“How far are we?”
“We’re just outside of Banning.”
“Pull over. You need some sleep. I’ll drive the rest of the way.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
The car drifted to the side of the highway, coming to rest just beside the green Morgan Street sign. Cars whizzed by, following their headlights into the unusual darkness. When Silas stepped out of the car, his feet crunched on a scatter of broken glass that shone in the sweep of oncoming headlights. He turned his face upward, and directly above them was a streetlight leaning out into space. Its bulb housing was shattered, leaving only a burned-out socket that reminded Silas of a missing front tooth.
The mountains had retreated into the distance. They were a dark undulation on the horizon. The sky itself was a lighter shade of black, twinkling with stars.
He walked around the back of the car and slid behind the opened door. He adjusted the seat as far back as it would go, adjusted the rearview, pushed the stick into drive, and then accelerated back onto the highway.
Thirty more miles. He’d driven this particular stretch of highway several times before. Once at night. It had been a different world then, spilling over with light and neon signs. He knew where the billboards should be, but they were dark now. What the hell had happened?
As the miles slipped by and the size of the blackout became apparent, a cool fear seeped into his stomach.
Vidonia leaned her seat back and was asleep almost instantly. Silas felt soothed by her deep, easy breathing. It was something that was normal on this crazy night. As he listened to her even respiration, he could almost believe that things would be okay after all. He wanted to grab on to that one fragment of normalcy and let it guide him back to a saner reality. The reality where he was a respected geneticist, where the car he was driving didn’t put a crick in his neck, where fans hadn’t died, where a strange creature didn’t stalk the night, where unexplained blackouts didn’t grip entire cities. That reality.
The dashed white lines rolled by. He drove. For miles, that was enough.
He flipped on his turn signal and descended the off-ramp. Vidonia felt the change and woke, turning her face away from the glass. She opened her eyes.
“Still dark,” she observed.
“Yeah.”
