Into The Darkness Read Free Page A

Mountains and
arcing up across the sky, intermingling and dancing with an intense brightness.
Fluorescent hues extended from the northern to the southern horizon in an
instant. The celestial lights were so bright that as he turned to the south, he
noticed that his body cast a faint shadow on the hotel’s parking lot. The tortuous
lights in the sky were approaching a frenzy of brightness and color. He mumbled
under his breath at how amazing this was, and, looking for his cell phone, he patted
the pockets of his sweatpants to find it and record a video of the impromptu
light show. Finding the outline of his phone in his right pocket, he swiftly
retrieved the device and lifted it toward the sky to capture the luminous
ballet unfolding above.
    Dylan
repeatedly tried to turn the device on and noticed that the cell phone
maintained a blank screen. He thought that this was strange because he could
remember turning it on earlier to access the clock to time his run. He fumbled
with the power button several more times before acquiescing to the dead phone. He
dropped it back into his pocket and continued to stare above, slowly turning in
a circle to fully capture the image of the colored lights that had painted the
early morning sky.
    Suddenly,
he noticed a loud humming sound. He turned to see sparks violently flying from
a transformer suspended on an electric utility pole not more than a block away.
Then, just as suddenly, the transformer exploded into a ball of fire. The
explosion made him flinch and he turned reflexively to cover his face. For a
brief moment, the flash of light from the explosion cast shadows across the
parking lot, then an arc of sparks was all that remained where the transformer
was attached. The electrical transmission lines were on the ground, arching and
writhing like venomous snakes striking at their prey.
    He
cautiously lowered his hands and looked around again. Gradually the intensity
of the aurora began to diminish. As the glow in the sky slowly faded away, he
looked to see if anyone else was witnessing this. Across the parking lot was a
road parallel with the hotel. He saw a car, with the driver’s side door and
hood open, stopped on the road. A man wearing dark coveralls and a baseball cap
turned backwards was bent over the front of the car, cursing into the engine
bay. Turning back to the hotel’s main entrance, Dylan noticed that all the
exterior lights were off and the hotel’s automatic sliding glass front doors
were in the open position. Walking toward the hotel’s entrance, he could see
that inside the lobby was dark, too. As he stepped into the lobby, he could just
barely make out the night clerk standing at the front desk. It was the same
clerk that had greeted him on his return from his other early morning runs and
Dylan felt embarrassed that he still did not know the young man’s name.
    “Good
morning,” the clerk said, as he passed a cheap plastic flashlight from one hand
to another. “Sorry, lights are out. Hopefully, they’ll come on soon. You better
get your coffee while it’s still hot.”
    As
the clerk spoke, he gestured, using the flashlight to point at the
complimentary breakfast area. There were a few people fumbling around next to
the breakfast buffet, trying to do their best with no electric lights. Dylan
stepped into the dining area and retrieved the cell phone from his sweatpants
again. After sitting down, he tried turning it on once more, this time to use
the glowing screen as a flashlight. His frustration grew each time he pressed
the power button. He knew it was fully charged and wondered why the phone,
being less than a month old, would have failed this soon. Dylan glanced up just
as Kevin Brown stepped up next to him at the small table.
    “Mine
threw craps, too,” Kevin commented. Kevin, like Dylan, was an information technology
consultant, and they were traveling together for the same job. They had
traveled to Helena with two other coworkers, Henry and