The Games

Chapter THIRTY-ONE



Silas fell asleep for a while as the car hummed beneath him. His dream was dark and filled with sharp things that moved too quickly, and when he awoke, it was with a dawning sense of dread.

“How long was I out?”

“About two hours,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“After midnight.”

Silas looked out the window and was met with near-complete darkness. Only the glare of headlights illuminated the night.

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a power outage. It’s been going on for miles and miles.”

“How far are we?”

“We’re just outside of Banning.”

“Pull over. You need some sleep. I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

The car drifted to the side of the highway, coming to rest just beside the green Morgan Street sign. Cars whizzed by, following their headlights into the unusual darkness. When Silas stepped out of the car, his feet crunched on a scatter of broken glass that shone in the sweep of oncoming headlights. He turned his face upward, and directly above them was a streetlight leaning out into space. Its bulb housing was shattered, leaving only a burned-out socket that reminded Silas of a missing front tooth.

The mountains had retreated into the distance. They were a dark undulation on the horizon. The sky itself was a lighter shade of black, twinkling with stars.

He walked around the back of the car and slid behind the opened door. He adjusted the seat as far back as it would go, adjusted the rearview, pushed the stick into drive, and then accelerated back onto the highway.

Thirty more miles. He’d driven this particular stretch of highway several times before. Once at night. It had been a different world then, spilling over with light and neon signs. He knew where the billboards should be, but they were dark now. What the hell had happened?

As the miles slipped by and the size of the blackout became apparent, a cool fear seeped into his stomach.

Vidonia leaned her seat back and was asleep almost instantly. Silas felt soothed by her deep, easy breathing. It was something that was normal on this crazy night. As he listened to her even respiration, he could almost believe that things would be okay after all. He wanted to grab on to that one fragment of normalcy and let it guide him back to a saner reality. The reality where he was a respected geneticist, where the car he was driving didn’t put a crick in his neck, where fans hadn’t died, where a strange creature didn’t stalk the night, where unexplained blackouts didn’t grip entire cities. That reality.

The dashed white lines rolled by. He drove. For miles, that was enough.

He flipped on his turn signal and descended the off-ramp. Vidonia felt the change and woke, turning her face away from the glass. She opened her eyes.

“Still dark,” she observed.

“Yeah.”

“Are we almost there?”

“Yeah, just a few more minutes.”

“Do we expect trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“We’ll find out when we get there.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s fine. I thought we might be, you know, unprepared or something.”

They rode in silence for a few miles.

“What exactly do you plan on doing?” Vidonia asked.

“I’m not sure. I just know that if there’s something I can do, it starts there. Otherwise, I’m at a loss.”

Passage through the corporate district was complicated, even on the best of days. Silas had often wondered if the road layout was intentionally designed that way. But today was not the best of days. The stoplights dangled blindly in the breeze, and the street signs were barely readable in the darkness. Silas turned left, trusting his memory to guide him. There usually weren’t many cars on these roads at night, but tonight the streets were absolutely deserted. Anybody working late had left when the power went out. Silas slowed through an intersection, then turned down a long drive. His high beams swung past a neatly sculpted sign: Brannin Institute.

He followed the winding asphalt around a series of low berms designed to obstruct the line of sight to the institute itself. Whether this was for security or effect he had no idea, but as he rounded a final bend, the building loomed ahead, large already, and strangely ominous without its usual shroud of illumination. It was a simple rectangular silhouette set against a backdrop of stars. However, unlike the other buildings he’d seen in the last dozen miles, the Brannin was not completely dark. A single window glowed on the fifth floor. The knot in his stomach cranked tight. Unless he was mistaken, the fifth floor housed Chandler’s computer.

Silas stopped in the circular entranceway, blocking the lane.

“How are we going to get in?” she asked.

“We’ll just have to knock.”

He climbed out of the car, and Vidonia followed him beneath the long overhang of the entranceway.

Silas looked around for any sign of a guard. There was none. Good. The Brannin Institute depended on its electronic defenses.

He knew the doors would be locked tight, but he tried them anyway, giving each of the four glass doors a firm tug. They held fast against their frames. He’d heard once of a group of cat burglars who were caught after spending three hours trying to crack a safe that turned out not to have been locked in the first place. Nobody had bothered to try the handle.

Now he pushed his face against the glass doors, peering inside. Only blackness.

“Any ideas?” she asked.

Silas didn’t answer her. He took a step back, reared his leg, and gave the glass a solid kick with the toe of his shoe. His foot bounced off harmlessly. Well, harmless to the glass, anyway.

“I thought you said you were going to knock.”

“That was a knock. A hard knock.”

“You’re going to cut your leg open.”

“Not likely. I think it’s shatterproof.” Silas limped in a slow circle, thinking of a new plan. “Stay here.”

He walked back to the car and climbed behind the wheel. He slipped on his seatbelt. The motor clicked, then puttered to life. The arc of headlights turned Vidonia’s face into a mask of disbelief as he slowly approached across the sidewalk. The car fit easily between the arch supports.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” he heard her shout, as she stepped out of the way.

He didn’t disagree. The headlights shone through the glass and into the entrance hall now, illuminating the portraiture of various institute administrators that hung on the far back wall. He eased to a stop a dozen feet from the doors. Silas rolled the side window shut, then, after a deep breath, hit the accelerator.

The end result was anticlimactic. There was no explosion of glass as he had envisioned, no screech of twisted metal. He hit the window at about ten miles an hour, and the shatterproof pane simply popped out of its frame and slid twenty feet across the floor. The nose of the car protruded into the building just past its front wheel wells. He put it into reverse and backed out; then, leaving the car running, he swung open the door and stepped into the glow of the headlights, casting a long shadow into the lobby.

He listened for the wail of an alarm, but there was nothing to hear. Not even the sound of crickets.

This building was dead.

“After you,” he said.

She gave him a look. He led the way; she followed.

The lobby was thankfully cool, but the air was redolent with the coppery flavor of overheated wires. It was the smell of an electrical fire. As they walked deeper inside, he noticed the plastic casings of lighting panels lying shattered on the floor. Above them, the ceiling was a starred pattern of black scorch marks and empty sockets. Here and there, darkened fluorescent tubes dangled by half-melted wires, turning slowly in the gentle air current flowing through the broken entranceway. It was a miracle that the entire building hadn’t gone up in flames.

They followed a hall to the left, leaving the glow of the headlights behind them. Vidonia’s hand curled into his.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“The stairs are ahead on the right. We can take them all the way up.”

The backsplash of illumination from behind them was just enough for Silas to locate the doorknob. He turned it and stepped inside the stairwell, expecting to be greeted with the soft glow of emergency lighting. It was a federal law or something, he was sure. But whatever had fried the lights in the lobby had also left the stairwells encased in blackness.

He took a deep breath and started up. Vidonia followed. Behind them, the door creaked, then knocked shut against the jamb, cutting off the reflected glow of the headlights.

Until that moment, Silas had thought he knew what dark was—the simple absence of light. He thought that he understood it. He even thought that he had experienced it before. But as he rounded the first riser of stairs and continued up, step by step, he and darkness were forced into new intimacy. He came to understand that darkness was not just a lack but a thing, that it possessed mass, that it can be felt on your skin, that it can be a burden you carry.

He knew then, with a certainty he could feel in his bones, exactly what had motivated his ancient ancestors when they first gathered around that very thing that the rest of creation fled from. It hadn’t been to cook, or to harden spear points. Those things had come later. Heat was just a collateral benefit. Man had mastered fire simply to push the darkness away.

He counted steps to focus his mind. Six steps, then turn; six steps, then turn; repeat. They were three flights up now. Or had he miscounted? What if the light in the window hadn’t been on the fifth floor? What then? He felt himself becoming disoriented and grabbed the railing for an anchor. The touch helped. Vidonia’s breathing was quick and loud in the closed space near him.

“Silas, I can’t.” Her voice was high, panicked.

“We’ll stop for a second.”

“No, I have to go back. This is—”

“Close your eyes.”

“That won’t—”

“Do it. Close your eyes.” Silas’s voice was harsh.

Silence.

“Now pretend the lights are on. They’re shining down all around you now. You can’t see because your eyes are closed, that’s all. This is a staircase like a million others you’ve climbed. Nothing new. You don’t need your eyes. Let’s keep going.”

Silence.

“Close your eyes,” he said again.

He waited, listening to the quick in and out of her breathing. Gradually, it slowed.

“It helps,” she said, sounding a little embarrassed. “You should try it.”

“One of us has to look where we’re going.”

Her hand squeezed a response in his.

He started up again, pulling her one step behind him. He felt better now, and realized that she had forced him into a role that didn’t allow him to panic. He’d been right at the edge of it. But then she’d needed him to be strong, so he was.

Up, one step at a time.

His hand counted the turns of the rail. When they rounded what Silas calculated to be the final riser, he guided her up the last six steps to the door. The push bar was cool metal in his hands, and for a split second, Silas was afraid of what he’d do if there was only blackness on the other side. Would he lose nerve and go back? A staircase is one thing; it has boundaries you can touch. It is directional. A darkened labyrinth of hallways was quite another thing altogether. If he got turned around and lost his bearings, they might wander for hours.

He pushed, and the flickering yellow glow beyond the crack of the door brought a relieved smile to his face. It was faint, at the far end of the hall, but it provided context. It provided the hall. Without it, they would be nowhere again.

Vidonia moved past him, grinning. “I guess you counted right.”

“I guess I did.”

“You think Chandler’s in there?”

“I do.”

“And you think he’s behind this power outage?”

“I don’t see how he could be. The blackout stretches way past this power grid.” He realized he couldn’t lie to her. “But yeah, somehow, still, I think he’s the cause.”

He started down the hall, walking softly, Vidonia close behind.

He stopped twenty feet short of the door when he heard a sound. He listened. Waves?

Then a voice was talking. A strange, deep voice. A moment later, another voice spoke, and Silas recognized Chandler’s nasal whine. But the words were lost in the sound of crashing surf.

“You stay here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not sure what’s on the other side of that door.”

“I’m going with you.”

“You wanted to turn around in the stairwell. Those were good instincts.”

“I’m coming.”

“Stay here.”

“No way. If I stay here, and you don’t come back, that means I have to go back down that stairwell myself. I’m coming with you.”

“All right,” he said.

“Besides, everything I’ve heard about Chandler says he’s crazy, not dangerous.”

“I can’t believe you said that.”

“What?”

He turned and walked toward the light. “Stay close.”