Trapped by Michael Northrop Read Free Book Online Page A

them down. I was surprised it had taken this long. I think we’d all been waiting for it.
    “What just happened?” asked Julie, though it was pretty obvious. She wasn’t dumb; she was just talking so she wouldn’t feel alone in the dark. Most of the others joined in, but not me, not right away. I needed to think about this, figure out what it meant.
    This was real isolation now. They wouldn’t even be able to see the school from the road, to see the lights on and realize that people were stuck here. Gossell would know where we were, but a man could get turned around easily in the dark in a storm like this.
    And this was absolute darkness: walk-into-walls, trip-over-furniture darkness. I couldn’t even see the big white face of the clock above the drinking fountain. The little electric hum it had been giving off this whole time had gone quiet. Its hands had stopped short in their slow crawl toward seven o’clock. As far as it was concerned, time was standing still.
    It was winter now, and at this hour it would’ve been dark anyway. And on a totally overcast day like this, there wouldn’t be any last rays leaking over the horizon. I’ve heard that in the big cities it never really gets totally dark like this, because of all the headlights and streetlights and all of that, but we weren’tin a city. We weren’t even near one. Our power was out and we couldn’t even keep one set of headlights lit and above snow level. We were in the boondocks, the sticks, the butt-end of nowhere.
    It seemed like I should still be able to see the snow. I mean it was white, as white as a thing could be. But there was no light for it to catch now, and it was invisible beyond the black sheets of safety glass. It was still falling, though. You could just sort of sense it out there.
    You know how sometimes you can tell that it’s gray and rainy outside, even if you’re not near a window? You know how you can just feel it somehow and it sucks the energy right out of you? That’s what this was like, except it wasn’t rain and it wasn’t draining as much as suffocating. It was like being slowly buried by something quiet and heavy. It was like a cold hand reaching out for your neck in the dark.
    All I could see was the double image of the cell phone screens, floating along the wall and then reflected back from the hallway glass, as if our phantom doubles were sitting and facing us three feet away. They flicked on and off, but after a while, they were mostly off.
    Then there was nothing left to do but sit there on my coat, thinking dark thoughts. I guess I was sort of wallowing in it, but then I snapped back into the conversation going on around me, because Krista said something that I hadn’t thought of.
    “What about the heat?”
    “Oh, yeah,” I said.
    “Will it stay on?” she said.
    “I think, like, the flame or whatever keeps burning,” I said. “Like on a gas stove. I mean, it’s probably lit electronically. It’s not like there’s some dude down there with a match. But once it’s going I think it keeps going.”
    “But it doesn’t keep going, like, constantly, does it?” said Krista.
    “Yeah,” said Julie. “Doesn’t it go on and off?”
    I thought about what I knew about furnaces, or maybe it was a boiler? Not much. It seemed like the sort of thing people used to know about. I thought about the furnace at my house, how on cold days you could hear it click on. How it would sort of hum to life and a few seconds later the warm air would start rising up through the vents and you might put your hand there, feel the warmth, and be glad to be inside. And then I thought about how it would click off a little while later, once the thermostat said its work was done.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
    “Well, will it start up again the next time it shuts off? With the power out, I mean?”
    “Is it on now?” someone else said. I wasn’t sure who.
    “Is anyone near, like, a vent or anything?”
    No one was.
    “I