The Hole (18 page)

“Tony used to have one in the shed out back. Been a few years since he needed it, back during the last big blow. It might not be in tip-top order. Want me to have a look?”

“I’ll go,” the sheriff replied. “I need some air.”

“Me too,” Janet said, and got another withering look from Ellen Simmons that didn’t bother her in the slightest. “Let’s have at it, Bill. It’ll be dark again before we know it.”

“We should talk to the general,” Ellen Simmons said. “Maybe they’ll have a spare generator?”

“So now you want to talk to them?” the sheriff said. “Tell us again how well that’s gone for us so far?”

It was only when Janet got the sheriff alone in the kitchen that he admitted the Simmons woman might, for once, have a point.

“At the very least, they’d surely take us all into the quarantine area,” he said. “And that’s certainly got its own generator.”

“It’s also got armed guards at every entrance,” Janet reminded him. “I’d rather be somewhere with more chance of escape if things get hinky.”

“
More
hinky, you mean?” Bill replied. “I agree, for myself, but I was thinking about the others. They might be better off with the CDC. And it’s not just the electricity. We’ll be needing to get folks fed soon, and the pantry is near empty.”

Janet shook her head.

“They’re following their
protocol
. It doesn’t leave much room for individual judgement and snap decision-making. I agree we need to ask about the food, but I’m not keen on anything more than that. I’ll take my chances in here with you, big man.”

That got her a smile.

“Let’s get to it then.”

Bill paused as they reached the back door. Janet realized he was remembering how Fred had looked the last time the door was opened.

“It’s daylight, Bill,” she said softly. “We’re safe.”

As Bill turned the handle, opened the door and stepped outside, she hoped fervently that she was right. She followed him out into the yard.

* * *

Everything was quiet and peaceful. Janet found it almost impossible to stand there and believe the carnage that had taken place in the town. The trees in the rough country at the rear of the bar swayed gently in a cool breeze under a blue sky spotted with cotton wool clouds. High above a passenger jet laid a white line across the blue.

They have no idea what’s going on down here.

The storage shed sat on the other side of the yard, past the rusting pickup truck. As they walked around the discarded vehicle, something seemed to shift and move in the shadows in the passenger seat, but when Janet looked again, she saw nothing there but darkness. She noticed Bill tense up slightly, and his hand reached for where his pistol would have been before he stopped himself.

“Stay close,” he said softly.

It got noticeably colder as they approached the shed. The old, battered door opened at the second attempt, swinging inward with a creak to reveal a dark, windowless room beyond. Bill went first.

“Be careful,” Janet said. She whispered, afraid to speak too loudly, and her flight-or-fight mechanism kicked in. Her heart rate went up, and every sense seemed heightened. Bill stepped inside the shed. She followed close behind.

It took her eyes several seconds to adjust. Something skittered along the far wall, and she nearly leapt into Bill’s arms in fright before she saw the mouse, its pink tail giving a final flourish as it went down a hole in the flooring. Apart from that, nothing else moved in the shed other than dust motes glinting where the sun shone in through the door.

The space served as storage for anything the bar wasn’t currently using, or had used up. Broken chairs, wobbly tables and bashed cabinets piled higgledy-piggledy against the far wall. They found a generator, and six twenty-liter containers of gasoline under a broken tabletop to the side of the door. A thick layer of dust covered everything.

“Give me a hand here,” Bill said, taking one of the canisters. “We can hook this up at the back of the kitchen. There’s enough gas here to last us a while.”

They ferried the six canisters back to the kitchen door, and returned for the generator. They had managed to get it as far as the open doorway when Janet felt a vibration—first in the soles of her feet, then at her jaw. Bill’s nose dripped two large spots of fresh blood down onto his shirt. The darkness in the corner of the shed thickened and seemed to coalesce. Bill grabbed her by the arm and dragged both her and the generator out into the sunlight, but not before she’d seen the old man in the corner; a miner by the looks of things.

“Fred is dead,” a thick voice said dully from the shadows.

Then she was back in the sunshine in the yard, watching the dust on the ground dance, waiting for a collapse to swallow them up.

It never came.

The ground trembled, clumps of earth dancing like dust on a loudspeaker. Then, as quickly as it had come, the hum faded and died. The trembling ground stilled.

“Are we still here?” Bill said, wiping more blood from his upper lip onto the sleeve of his shirt.

Janet didn’t take her eyes off the shed doorway. The shadows inside seemed to shift and sway, but there was no sign of any old miner, and no more voices. Eventually she forced herself to look away and turned to face Bill.

“Let’s get this generator hooked up,” Janet said. “If we’re staying the night in the bar, I want it to be well lit.”

* * *

Charlie and Bill got the generator working after a bit of elbow grease and a long bout of cursing. Janet stood to one side, watching the shadows move in the yard outside the open back door.

The light’s fading fast.

“Give it a try now,” Bill shouted, surprising her into an involuntary twitch. She reached over and flicked the switch nearest her. The lights in the kitchen flickered on and off, then came full on and steadied. The generator throbbed noisily and annoyingly here at the rear of the kitchen, but it was a small price to pay for the comfort of the lights.

“And we’ve got enough propane to burn the stoves and rings for a while,” Charlie said. “Ain’t much to cook though. I found some tins of beans and there’s three loaves defrosting from the chest freezer. That’s about it, although there’s plenty of packs of peanuts and chips behind the bar.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about junk food killing us, do you?” Janet said, and Charlie laughed so loud and hard that Janet found herself joining in. Bill rose from the generator and raised an eyebrow.

“What’s so funny?”

For some reason that amused both Janet and Charlie, so much they couldn’t answer for laughing. There might have been more than a hint of hysteria in it, but Janet felt much better as she moved to close the back door. She had one last look outside, but there was nothing to see but the empty yard, and she didn’t look too closely at the shifting shadows in the pickup truck or at the still-open shed door.

* * *

The three of them went back though to the main bar.

Fred and the girl still sat shoulder to shoulder at a table, and Ellen Simmons sat on her own in the corner. There was no one else in the bar. The dozen people who had been there before Janet and Bill went to get the generator were gone, taking any good humor Janet might have felt with them.

“What the hell happened?” she asked.

“They got spooked at that last hum,” Fred said. “They decided to take their chances with the CDC. They had a vote and everything.”

Janet went to the front door. It lay open. She looked out to see the CDC guards enter the quarantine tent. The canvas flaps slid back into place, and it was as if they’d never been there at all. There was no sign of any of the people from the bar.

Janet felt bereft, as if some of her reasons for being there at all had just been taken from her. Worse, she felt as if she’d been personally betrayed. Tears ran down her cheeks, a mixture of anger, rage and self-pity.

They were my patients, damn it.

She turned back to Bill.

“So what now? Still staying?”

The sheriff didn’t speak, just led her back inside the bar and closed the door behind them. She put an arm around his waist. Ellen Simmons smirked again.

“You got anything to say, Ellen?” the sheriff asked.

The older woman smiled thinly.

“Only that I can see you all coming round to my way of thinking. Ain’t no use us getting cozy with the CDC; that way will only get us dead. We should sneak out of town under cover of darkness tonight.”

Charlie laughed.

“
Under cover of darkness?
You’ve been watching too much television, Ellen. And ain’t you been paying attention here? Seems to me that it’s the darkness that’s trying to kill us.”

“Don’t talk such garbage, old man,” Ellen Simmons said. “The liquor has addled you.”

A small voice spoke up.

“No. He’s right. They only come in the dark.” Sarah Bennett looked up from where she’d rested her head on Fred’s shoulder. “The bears like the dark.”

Ellen Simmons laughed, and Janet saw the flash of anger that crossed Fred Grant’s face.

I need to defuse this, and fast.

The sheriff beat her to it.

“The kid’s right, Ellen. We’ve all seen them now. Whether they’re devils, haunts or something man-made from the mines, I know now they’re real—as real as you or me. And they come in the dark.”

Ellen Simmons still looked skeptical. Janet came to a quick decision.

“Charlie. Fetch us some drinks. We’re going to have this out once and for all.”

* * *

Five minutes later they all sat around one of the bar’s bigger tables, with drinks and a selection of nuts and chips on the table. It felt absurdly like just any other get-together. But the subject matter of conversation was not so matter-of-fact.

“I’m telling you, it was a miner,” Fred said. “And I think it was one of old Charlie’s dead work mates.”

Charlie went white at that, but didn’t speak, just gulped down a stiff shot of JD and went to the bar for another.

“I believe you,” Janet replied. “I saw him too.”

She went on to tell of their encounter earlier in the shed. Then Bill told of his
demons
, and spoke of the strange apparition of a flying saucer. Sarah muttered something else about bears but refused to go into detail.

“Charlie. Do you want to talk about what you saw in the kitchen?”

“Nope,” the man said. “But if it weren’t VC, then I don’t know what they were.”

“Hinky,” Bill said, and dropped Janet a wink. “That’s what they were. Show-and-tell time, Ellen. And we’ve shown ours.”

“You’re all mad,” the older woman said. “I’m having nothing to do with this.”

She started to stand, but stopped when Janet spoke.

“So, you’re telling us you didn’t see a biker gang?”

The older woman sat back down, hard.

“That was different,” she said, then went quiet.

“No, I don’t think it was,” Janet replied. “I’m not sure what we’re up against here, but I’m pretty sure its cause is down in the depths of these collapses somewhere. It’s no coincidence it started the same time as the problems at Hopman’s Hollow. I’m also not sure that they mean us any harm.”

Charlie looked up at that. She remembered him, on his knees on the kitchen floor.

But had he put himself there? Was it only his own fear that had crippled him?

“So what do we do about it?” Fred asked.

That’s the $64,000 question.

“I want to try an experiment,” she said. “Once it gets dark. I think all of these manifestations are something trying to communicate with us. Maybe it’s time we started listening. Maybe even talking back.”

She saw on the others’ faces that they weren’t convinced. But none of them, not even Ellen Simmons, argued with her.

We all know it’s the only way forward.

* * *

They had no other contact with the CDC all afternoon, and Janet was starting to think they would be left alone for the night when two suited figures came to the front door of the bar.

“We’re here for the lady, Doc,” one said.

“Well that ain’t gonna happen,” Bill replied. Janet nudged him aside.

“It’s okay, Bill. Let’s just see what they want.”

“Dr. Mullins wants to see you,” the guard said.

“What about?”

That didn’t get an answer.

Protocols.

Bill was all for closing the door in their faces.

“They don’t get to order us around. Not in my town.”

Janet put a hand on his arm.

“It’s Mullins that has asked for me, not the general. It could be something medical they need me for; a problem with one of the wounded. Stay here, have a beer. I’ll be back before dark, that’s a promise.” She leaned over and kissed him full on the lips. “And that’s another one.”