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screaming the whole time. Within seconds, his screams had faded off into the night. If I had to guess, I would have said he was pulled up hundreds of feet if not a thousand or more.
    After that, Bonnie and I just stood there, breathing and staring up into the darkness. It was all bad, of course, and we both knew that whatever this was about, we’d never see Al again. What bothered me was that he had poked the cable with the trim and with his finger, but neither had stuck. The section of fender hadn’t either. Nor had the hacksaw blade. What did that mean exactly? It did not exude that sticky stuff until Al had securely grasped it. Had it been the heat of his palm? A chemical trigger reacting to the salt or oils of his skin? It had to be something like that. It just had to be…because otherwise what happened meant that the cable itself was sentient somehow.
    Bonnie let out a little cry and I saw not two but three more cables drop from the darkness above us.
    There was only one thing to do and we did it: we got the hell out of there.

9

    It took us some time to get back. We cut off Maisey onto Piccamore and we hadn’t gone half a block before we saw more of those cables. They were hanging above the streets and yards, several tangled in the trees or lying on rooftops like dead snakes. I had a mad urge to open up the truck and plow right through them, but I had a nasty feeling Frankovich had tried the exact same thing.
    I stopped and turned around.
    Bonnie barely spoke the entire way back except for asking, “What’s it all about, Jon? What does it mean?”
    And I had absolutely no answer for her.
    I wished that I had.
    I cut down south to Beecher and Fifteenth, then came at Piccamore the long way. I saw candles or lanterns burning in a few houses and more than one immense bonfire blazing away like a medieval need-fire built to drive witches away. The idea was silly, but not as silly as it should have been. If this wasn’t a localized thing, if it was statewide or national or even global, things would begin to break down and people would stop acting rationally.
    When we made it back to our neck of the woods, the fires were still burning and lanterns glowing against the encompassing night. There were more people than ever out there. I figured a combination of curiosity, fear, and helplessness had forced them out from behind locked doors. When things get bad, even loners need the company of other people. All eyes were on us as we pulled to a stop. So many people were asking questions that it made me dizzy.
    Finally, Ray Wetmore pulled us aside with Iris Phelan, Billy Kurtz, and the Eblers forming almost what seemed a jury. Everyone else hung back by the fires.
    “Where’s Al?” David Ebler asked.
    I opened my mouth to answer that question, but Bonnie beat me to the punch. “He’s gone,” she said in a low voice. “Just like that cop and probably most of the people in this town.”
    “Gone where, honey?” Iris wanted to know.
    “Into the sky,” Bonnie told her.
    That didn’t go over real well.
    They started pelting Bonnie with questions—even her own husband—and she simply repeated the same thing again and again, so they listened to her, rolled their eyes, shook their heads, and kept looking at me as if I was the sane one and Bonnie was flat-out mad. Finally, she refused to speak and I charged right in and laid out the entire ugly mess at their feet. I got plenty of eye-rolling and shaking heads, but I got it out. Every time someone tried to interrupt, I talked that much louder and that much more forcibly like I was in school, dealing with an especially boisterous and rowdy bunch of freshman. Truth be told, these “adults” weren’t too far removed.
    Ray Wetmore took the floor seconds after I finished, as I knew he would. “Now let me get this straight,” he said. “You claim that both Sergeant Frankovich and Al Peckman were yanked up into the sky by cables of some sort. Sticky cables. They got stuck to