“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”
But this was the real world.
The new real world.
I hung up the phone.
I went to the living room and looked out through the broken front window. The car in the short driveway looked as if it had been demolished; the hood was up, the windows broken, wires and hoses scattered. Beyond the driveway, at the end of the fallow field, the crater still stood. It was empty and strangely dull, an empty hole in gray, empty dirt.
Someone was watching me.
I turned, my carpet knife ready, and saw the square eye of the television staring at me. The cabinet had been cracked, but the set was on, the sound down, formless lines of an unreceived channel filling the screen. The cable box lay next to it, intact.
Please, I whispered.
I ran to the set, nearly tripping over a broken lamp. My hand was trembling as it picked up the cable box and pushed the number for one of the national affiliates, turning up the sound.
There was a click as the button was depressed, and then nothing. The gray mass of formless lines continued.
I cursed, but then I examined the cable box and discovered that one of the wires into the box had been loosened. I fumbled it back into place, praying as I did so.
I stared at the screen, but the picture had not changed.
I pushed a random number, then another. The first produced static, the second a scrambled picture. It was a station we didn’t pay for. I could not see the picture clearly, except to note that it was in black and white. But the sound was crystal clear. “Gee, Mr. Wilson,” a grating young voice was saying, and at that moment I would have paid my entire savings to get “Dennis the Menace” on that station twelve times daily.
Thank God I said to myself, Thank God, but a moment later my hopes were dashed when a button-pushing move across the spectrum of channels produced nothing else.
I went back to “Dennis the Menace” and left the television. I tried the stereo. If there were any signs of normalcy, perhaps I would find them on the radio. The cover had been broken from the turntable, but the receiver worked when I snapped it on. I was met by static. Starting on the extreme left of the dial, I moved slowly through the bandwidth. Loud static, soft static, loud static. Then, I was startled by a station playing “Beautiful Music,” a 1001 Strings version of a Beatles record. I noted the number and moved on. Nothing more until I came to a second station playing music similar to the first. I went on through more static. Then a soft rock station, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt. Nothing else.
I went back to the three stations, one after another. They played music. Nothing but music. No time check, no news. I looked at the television screen. Dennis had been replaced by a series of commercials, and then “Gilligan’s Island” came on to the scrambled screen. More commercials. Back to the radio. A few commercials on the soft rock station, followed by more music.
No live voices.
No one alive.
It was obvious the stations I was receiving were on automatic tape or satellite operation. I was ready to accept that there would be some disturbance in the normal course of things since the meteors had landed. But to think that there was no one left broadcasting within a hundred and fifty miles of me a mere day after the beginning of this assault was truly frightening.
I dialed slowly through the radio spectrum, coming across the two automatic stations only and, somewhere toward the right of the dial, what I thought was the very end of a word. I stayed at that spot. When nothing further emerged, I dialed slowly to the right and left of it but heard nothing further. Finally, I turned the stereo off.
Whatever despair I felt was overruled by my stomach, which drove me toward the kitchen.
There were the remains of a meatloaf in the refrigerator, along with a quart of milk. I devoured nearly all of the meatloaf greedily and drank half the milk carton. Then I took out a jar of pickles and a cellophane bag of apples. I ate three apples and one of the pickles, chewing on the last apple as I inventoried the rest of my supplies.
On the dry-foods shelf over the counter were two boxes of cereal and a bag of dried fruit. There were cans of fruit and beans. I remembered with regret that I was to do most of our shopping for the week today, including the grocery shopping for Christmas. There was already a turkey in the freezer that we would have eaten on that day.
I filled a glass with water and sat at the kitchen table. Outside, the shadows had lengthened. The sun was sinking, throwing the grim orange cast it always affected in December. It looked cold.
I had food for three or four days. I had water. The generator in the barn would run for a few days with the fuel I had on hand.
But…what about the rest of the world?
I knew nothing of the rest of the world. But even if I had, I knew that my first priority was my son. I could only hope that the process that had turned him into what he had become would somehow reverse. I would do whatever had to be done.
I took the last of the milk, along with the dried fruit, and went back to the cellar. Richie lay on his side away from me, panting. I slid the bowl with the milk toward him with my foot.
“Something to eat,” I said.
He ignored me; when he rolled over it was only to seize the bowl in his mouth and throw it to one side. He growled with anger. He did the same when I put a few pieces of dried fruit down. He continued his struggle to free himself, turning his hateful eyes on me.
“I’ll do what I can, Richie,” I said quietly and went back upstairs.
I stayed up there for the next four hours as it got dark. I kept one lamp on and managed to plug up the hole in the front window with the remains of the Christmas tree and a couple of broken sticks of furniture. There was nothing on the radio, and the television, predictably, showed one rerun after another with nothing but commercials and announcers’ canned comments between.
Finally, a sense of worthlessness overwhelmed me. For a wild moment I thought of going for help. It was obvious I could do nothing for Richie myself. If he didn’t eat, our stalemate would end in a deadly fashion for him anyway.
I had my coat on and was halfway out the door when the howling began. I thought for a horrid moment that one of the creatures had climbed through the hole in the window while I had been in the cellar and was standing behind me. But it was Richie, baying with such intensity that it seemed as though he stood behind me.
I left the stereo on and went back to the cellar. Richie lay on his back, his body arched so that his deformed head was back at a grotesque angle toward one of the cellar windows through which the rising fat Moon shone.
It looked like the white eye of Satan, glaring above the hills. And, like one of Satan’s worshippers, my son paid loud homage to it.
In the near and far distance, I heard other voices, a rising chorus of chilling howls, and I knew that another night was coming, and that I was going nowhere.
In the sky, new meteors began to fall.
I retrieved my hammer, and as best I could, I re-coffined myself against the new night.
CHAPTER 6
The Other
Daylight.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. For all I knew, I might have had one beer too many the night before and fallen asleep on the couch in the cellar. Or, perhaps I had fought with Emily and had been banished for my crimes.
But then the world came back to me.
I had survived. That fact alone I found remarkable—that I had made it through a second night trapped in my own cellar. I had even slept a little, toward morning. Most of the night had been filled with the howling and wild thrashings of my son as he sought to break free and obey the command of the Moon above. At one point, he had almost succeeded, but I had managed to tighten his bonds. I looked over at him now; he was rolled into a fetal position. I could hear his shallow breathing. The scattered food that I had left for him had not been touched; milk still pooled along the wall where he had thrown it.