The kids were on edge, too. The hyperfriendly Gregory of the morning was gone, and since Adam and Teo had come home, their father had been avoiding them, not speaking to them either, and she found that troubling. She wanted to grab the kids and take off, let them know what was really happening, but Gregory was holding the van keys and they certainly wouldn’t get far by walking.
Adam and Teo had been hiding in Teo’s room ever since they’d come home—it was downstairs, farther away from him—and they emerged into the living room as soon as the lights went out. Julia broke out the candles, setting three on the coffee table and four others around the perimeter of the room, letting Adam and Teo light some of them, lighting the rest herself.
Sasha had still not returned home, and that worried her. Not as much as it would have ordinarily, though. She was concerned for her daughter, but part of her couldn’t help thinking that she would be safer away from this house, away from her father. Julia found herself hoping that Sasha would stay with a friend until daylight.
There was the sound of a crash from upstairs, and Gregory’s shouted curse, and Adam and Teo both looked at her. She tried to offer them a reassuring smile, but she was still in quite a bit of pain and it probably came out closer to a grimace.
None of them said anything.
Julia looked out the window once again, hoping to see a Molokan cavalry coming to the rescue, but there was only blackness, only night, and the three of them sat together in the living room, waiting, listening to the battery-powered radio, trying to ignore the sounds of Gregory up in the attic.
3
The lights went out at the perfect time.
Sasha had taken off her clothes and crawled into the bed, and Wilbert was just starting to undress.
The truth was that she didn’t really want to see him naked. The beer gut distending his T-shirt was bad enough when he was fully clothed, but staring at that hairy blubber hanging over an erection would be a serious turnoff, and she was glad when the lights winked out.
She was not so glad when he hit her.
She did not know why it happened, did not know if it was an accident, if he simply hadn’t been able to see her in the dark and her face had been in the way of his hand’s intended destination, or if the blow was intentional, but it made her angry, and she yelled at him, making sure he got her message loud and clear. She was doing this ugly porker a big favor by fucking him, and if he was going to try and pull this shit, she’d kick him in the goddamn balls, grab her clothes, and get the hell out of his rat-infested trailer.
He did not respond to her tirade, and against her will she felt the first faint stirrings of fear.
“Aren’t you even going to apologize?” she asked, keeping her voice angry.
No answer.
She could feel his weight on the bed next to her, so she knew he had not left, but still he said nothing.
Now she was definitely afraid. She did not like the fact that he was not speaking, that the room was silent. “Wilbert?” she said hesitantly.
Silence. A slight shifting of weight.
“Wilbert?”
“Boo!” he said.
Relief flooded through her. “Wilbert!”
He was laughing, rolling around on the bed.
And there was someone else in the room laughing as well.
She heard several people laughing.
Her mouth suddenly went dry.
There were others here.
She started to sit up. He slapped her again, and now her mouth was no longer dry. There was blood in it.
A strong hand pushed her down, and then he was on top of her. The other laugher had not yet stopped, and even as Wilbert spread her legs apart, she was listening carefully, trying to determine how many different voices she could pick out.
Three.
Five.
Six.
She could not differentiate how many others.
There was a scream from the next room.
Cherie.
It was too dark to see, but Sasha closed her eyes anyway. This was a nightmare, like something out of a movie. She should have learned her lesson last time, should have stayed as far away from these rednecks as possible, but… but something had made her do it.
And as Wilbert’s bulk settled on top of her and the laughter grew, she began to cry.
4
Jesus H. Christ.
Sheriff Roland Ford paced in the dirt in front of his office, rifle in hand, waiting for those dipshit policemen to show up. The two departments were pooling their resources tonight, and though he did not like the idea, he recognized the necessity for it. Neither could handle this situation alone—there was so much going on that they needed to coordinate who was going to do what. It was like New York out there rather than McGuane—a night filled with looting and random violence. He found it hard to believe that one extended blackout could cause so many problems.
From far off up the canyon he heard the sound of sirens. Fire, it sounded like. Or ambulance.
He shook his head. What the fuck was going on here? It was as if lights and electricity were the only things maintaining people’s sanity, the only things upholding civilization, and without those basic technological comforts, they panicked, reverted to savagery. It made no sense on any sort of rational level, and he had to admit that he did not understand it. As someone who often went camping and hunting, the night held no terrors for him, and he could not figure out why seemingly well-adjusted adults would overreact to such an unbelievable extent.
Of course, not all of them were well adjusted.
Two separate local militia groups had appointed themselves the official protector of McGuane, and they were fighting it out in the park over jurisdiction. A bunch of overweight, undereducated losers who wouldn’t even be able to make it through the sheriff’s academy’s female course, they were now proclaiming themselves the only real law in town.
Word was that they’d tried to lynch a man, a Mormon elder who had dared to question their right to even participate in law enforcement, and Tom Sobule, the town’s newest police recruit, had had to fire his sidearm into the air in order to rescue the man and head off a confrontation. They hadn’t been brave enough to actually go up against a real officer, to abandon all pretense of the rule of law and degenerate completely into anarchy and vigilantism—but the night was still young.
Since then, the two militia groups had gotten into it with each other. If he was lucky, they’d kill each other off, and his men could just go in and arrest the last man standing.
Or take him out if he wanted to fight.
They’d had blackouts before, and he failed to understand what made this one different. The others had been local, confined to McGuane or, at most, Rio Verde County—they had not involved whole states—but he found it hard to believe that the size of the affected area had any bearing on the behavior of people in town. Did they learn that the blackout was affecting Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and automatically assume that it was the end of the world or the collapse of the country? The militia nuts, perhaps. But he could not see ordinary, everyday citizens believing such lunacy.
Yet it was those ordinary, everyday citizens who were out there looting and fighting and doing who knew what.
Roland sighed. The truth was, it wasn’t just the blackout. Something else had caused this unrest, something had led them to this point. The blackout was just the catalyst, the excuse. The real reasons went far deeper, and while he prided himself on his fairness and open-mindedness, while he did not like to pick on one specific group of people or indulge in any kind of scapegoating, he could not help but think that the Molokans were somehow at the root of it all. Things had been getting increasingly strange around here for quite some time, but it was the hairy church yesterday that had really kicked the situation into high gear. Though the Russians might be victims just as much as everyone else, he could not seem to maintain the objectivity he knew his job required, and he found himself thinking that they were somehow responsible, that, intentionally or unintentionally, they had brought about this craziness.