Blackout Read Online Free PDF Page B

on,” I said. “Enough. Leave it be.”
    Bonnie and I started back to the truck and he laughed at us as if we were fools to be afraid of a little old cable hanging in the air. To prove how foolish we were and maybe how fearless he was, he poked it with his finger. “See?” he said. “It don’t bite. It don’t bite at all.”
    “Al…” Bonnie said, but it was too late.
    He grabbed it with his right hand and seized up immediately, his eyes going wide and his mouth hanging open. For a second there, I thought maybe it was a high-power line and he had just gotten zapped. But that wasn’t it at all. I raced over to him and saw that his fingers were locked around the cable, that a prodigious amount of some clear goo had gushed over his hand. I didn’t know what it was. It was transparent and glutinous like Vaseline. Whatever it was, he was stuck to it.
    “I…I can’t get my hand free,” he said with a sick little smile, his face gone yellow and waxy. Drops of sweat had popped on his brow. I could almost smell the fear coming off him. It was sharp and unpleasant. “Jon… Jon …I can’t get my fucking hand free.”
    I went to grab it myself, to peel him off there, but Bonnie cried, “Don’t touch it!”
    She was right. I handed the flashlight off to her as Al became increasingly panicky. His face was covered in sweat by then. His lower lip was trembling and his eyes were shining like wet plastic. I took hold of his free arm and tried to yank him free, but it was no good. He was stuck fast. The line just went with us as if there was no end to it.
    Bonnie set down the flashlight and grabbed a section of fender wall that was hanging from the patrol car. She pushed on the cable as Al and I pulled. No dice. I ran over to my pickup with the flashlight. I opened the toolbox in the back and grabbed my hacksaw. We would cut him free. I brought it back over and Al offered me a thin little smile, as if to say, That’s it, now you’re thinking, boy. I gripped the saw in both hands and dragged the teeth over the cable. No good. They skated right over its surface. It was like trying to saw glass. I tried it again and then again. The blade was sharp but it didn’t even scratch the cable’s outer covering.
    “Wait,” Bonnie said.
    She pushed the section of fender wall against the cable to steady and support it. I tried sawing it again with everything I had, but it was hopeless. I don’t know what it was made of, but it was durable as diamond.
    The cable began to vibrate.
    I saw it, so did Bonnie.
    It vibrated and then it jerked two or three times. I thought I heard a sort of electronic humming from somewhere high above us. Al gasped and suddenly he was three feet off the ground, dangling from his stuck hand. He was thrashing and screaming, shouting at us: “Get it off me! Get it off me! Jesus Christ, I’m hooked to it!”
    His eyes were wild and bulging, his mouth drawn into a grimace, his teeth chattering. There were huge sweat stains on his back. Bonnie told him to take it easy, we’d get him free…even though she knew that probably wasn’t going to happen. I had ideas of somehow hooking the cable to the truck and breaking it. Stupid, frantic ideas. Al was out of his head by then. The cable jerked again and he was pulled up another foot. He looked ridiculous, hanging there like a rag doll. Without even thinking, he reached out and grabbed the cable with his other hand to pull himself free.
    I saw it happen this time.
    As soon as his hand wrapped around it, the cable secreted a copious amount of that clear goo and Al’s other hand was trapped as surely as a bumblebee in amber. He shrieked and kicked, yanking with everything he had, swinging back and forth on the cable like some kind of half-ass Tarzan.
    “JON!” Bonnie cried. “DO SOMETHING!”
    But there wasn’t anything I could do and I think we were both fully aware of it. The cable vibrated again; then Al was towed away into the blackness far above,