Snow(60)

Back upstairs in the hallway, Todd and Kate followed Tully and his bottle of hooch while Tully explained what had happened to Sheriff Farnsworth.

“We were trying to get a signal out through the airwaves,” Tully said. “Course, the phone lines are dead and the electricity’s out, so we figured we might be able to rig some sort of broadcast antenna to the roof of the fire hall next door. The fire hall’s taller than the station, so it made sense to go next door. Joe and Bruce—Bruce was one of Joe’s deputies, see—they thought they could rig up their handheld radios to the antenna somehow. The plan was to try to reach Bicklerville, which is the nearest town, about sixty miles west.

“I volunteered to go up on the roof and set up the antenna but Joe trumped me. He said he was still the sheriff and he was going to do it. And he did—he got up there and got it set up.” Tully took another swig of the bourbon, then said, “They came out of nowhere and took him right off the roof.”

Todd imagined what it must have looked like, watching the man being carried off into the night by one of those things. The thought caused him to think back to Nan Wilkinson, who’d come crashing down through the stained-glass windows in the roof of the church.

“That’s horrible,” Kate said.

“Joe was a good son of a bitch. We went to high school together.”

“Did you guys try the radios?” Todd asked. “Did it work?”

“No. Apparently those clouds hanging low over the town are blocking any signals through the air. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. That’s what me and Bruce think, anyway.”

They arrived outside a closed office door with a drawn shade in the glass. A dull blue light, like the light from a television set, radiated through the slats in the shade. Tully knocked twice, then opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.

The office was a zoo of metal shelves cluttered with computer equipment. The bluish television light radiated from a laptop screen on a desktop; a man of sturdy build with a shaved head perched forward in a chair at eye level with the screen, his deputy’s uniform doused in a sickly azure light.

The man did not acknowledge them as they filed into the room. “Hey, Bruce,” Tully said, clearing his throat, “this is Todd and Kate. Their car wrecked outside of town last night. I found them this morning, wandering around.”

Bruce looked quickly at them, then returned his stare to the laptop. Columns of numbers rained down the laptop’s screen like digital snow. “Hey,” Bruce said.

“Brought you some go-go juice,” Tully said, setting the bottle of bourbon down next to the laptop. Bruce hardly noticed.

“How’s that laptop running?” Kate asked. She came around the other side of Bruce’s chair and looked at the screen from over his shoulder.

“Battery powered,” Bruce said, “but I’m getting ready to shut it down before I drain the damn thing.” He reclined in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Not that it matters. It ain’t working.”

“It looks like the cell phones,” Kate said.

Bruce bounced his foot on the floor. “I’ve got a whole wall of computers behind me. Not a single one’s worked.”

“I told them about the jamming signal,” Tully said. “About the cloud cover, too…and what happened to Joe.”

“It’s like they’ve got us trapped inside a bowl with a lid on it,” Bruce said. When he turned slightly in his chair, Todd could see what looked like a splatter of dried blood down the front of his uniform. “Those aren’t normal clouds. They look almost metallic, like there’s some sort of filaments threaded through them. We had the walkies working hand-to-hand down here on the ground, but that was about as much as we could get out of them. The antenna on the roof of the fire hall didn’t do shit. ’Cept get Joe killed.”

“Even if you got one of these laptops to work,” Todd said, “what good will it do you?”

Bruce reached out and wrapped a big hand around the neck of the liquor bottle. “If we were anyplace else in town, it wouldn’t do shit,” he said, bringing the bottle down into his lap. “But the station here was outfitted with fiber-optic cables earlier in the year. Supposed to make our computers work faster when we’re on the Internet. The cables run underground and they go out past the highway and halfway down to Bicklerville where the transformer station is. The cables themselves are unaffected by the power outage.” He thumped a hand against a small black box that looked like a DVD player. “If I can get one of the computers to work, I can hook this modem up to a battery and power it up, then run the modem to the computer. With a little bit of luck, I could log onto the Internet, get in touch with neighboring PDs.”

“Get in touch with the f*cking military,” Tully suggested.

“But none of that matters, because every single one of these computers is f*cked. Whatever they’re doing—sending blocking signals down from the clouds or using some science fiction goddamned mind control—they’re making the computers go haywire.” Disgusted, Bruce chugged down some bourbon. Then he turned off the laptop to conserve the battery pack. It whined and the room fell dark, except for the halogen lamp Tully carried with him.

“I don’t think that’s totally accurate,” Todd said.

Bruce took another swallow of bourbon, then handed the bottle to Kate. She just stared at it, cradling it in both hands. “What’s that?” Bruce said.