Trapped by Michael Northrop Read Free Book Online

I thought he might turn around, but he kept pushing forward into the dark and the snow. He took a few more forced steps, his feet moving unseen under the snow and his upper body leaning forward into it, and then we lost sight of him.
    “You really think it was a flasher or something like that?” said Krista as we returned to our spots against the wall. I think she was talking to Pete, but he was heading off toward the men’s room at the end of the hall, so I took the opportunity to answer.
    “I guess it could be,” I said.
    “But why would it go off and on like that?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, and that was the end of my latest attempt at conversation with Krista. It was quiet for a fewseconds. Some of us took a seat and the others kept standing. My jacket was still warm from the hours I’d already spent sitting on it.
    “Can you see him out there?” said Julie.
    “I think I can,” said Jason, his nose pressed against the cold glass. “Over there, sort of in the middle of the lawn. See how there’s movement?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she said.
    “Maybe they just, like, brushed it with their hand,” said Jason.
    “Brushed what?” said Julie.
    “The button,” he said, “for the flasher. Like they were reaching for the radio and hit the button for the siren-flasher thing.”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “I could see that,” said Julie.
    Les let out some air, blowing a dismissive little
tiisss
through his teeth. When he spoke, you could hear the smugness in his voice.
    “That’s no flasher, no volunteer firefighter,” he said. “That red light? It was a flare. For the road, only there is no road right now. That guy up there is as screwed as we are. More.”
    It was quiet for a few seconds as we turned the idea over in our heads. Then Pete made a
kapow
sound and a hand gesture like he was shooting himself in the head. He knew Les was right. We all did.
    “Why didn’t you say something before Gossell went out there?” said Julie.
    “Why should I?” said Les. “It’s his life.”
    It was, and that was the problem. I don’t think it was really Les’s fault. I mean, I don’t think any of us thought that people would actually die in this storm. We’d been through lots of them, and it’d never happened to anyone we knew. We’d have to change that thinking, though. When we did, we’d all start to think the same thing: that maybe Les had killed a man.
    For now, we still had hope. We went back to staring into the darkness.
    “Can anyone see him?” asked Krista.
    No one could. The headlights burned for a little while longer, and then they didn’t. It had been a while since we’d first seen them, and it was tough to say whether they’d faded out over time or had gone out suddenly. It had seemed like they were getting stronger for a while, but that was probably just because it was getting darker around them. They were gone now, in any case. We thought that was as bad as it could get.
    And then the power went out.

EIGHT
    A half dozen swears crackled down the line where we were sitting, F-bombs going off like fireworks. And then, one by one, cell phone screens popped on and hovered in the darkness like oversized electronic fireflies.
    “Check it out,” said Pete as he activated his flashlight app. Faces faded in and out of view as he swung his phone in a wide semicircle.
    “Ow,” said Julie after looking directly at it. “Jerk!”
    He swung the beam back toward her and they exchanged small, nervous laughs. When he turned it off, the hallway was dark again.
    The lines that brought power to the school from a substation a mile away had come down. They were lying somewhere in the snow, hissing and kicking or just dead and buried. The powerlines around here were thick and even ran underground in places. I guess the power company figured that was cheaper than replacing them after every blizzard or ice storm. Of course, not all blizzards were created equal, and I wasn’t surprised that this one had brought