Lost Signals

by Josh Malerman

  Elsa peeked around the corner, toward the front end of the police station, far at the end of the alleyway. The gunshot appeared to have gone unnoticed among the other sounds of violence that filled the city. Policemen ran to and fro, preparing their sortie into the city.

  Elsa picked the grating back up. She had to squat and then lift the heavy gate as if it were a barbell. Rusty rebar dug into her palms and tore her skin. With the grating pushed open against the wall, she walked down to the first step and peered into the gloom.

  After seven steps, a bare passageway led straight under the police station.

  She lowered the grating over her. It clanged shut, flush with the concrete. The seven steps terminated at a platform lit by burnt, flickering bulbs. The hallway continued under the police station’s foundation. Along the stone wall, more light fixtures lined the hall, their plastic covers burnt and stained the brown-yellow of a baby’s shit.

  The rough-hewn stone wall resembled a castle bulwark. It sweated a slick coating and an incessant dripping echoed from somewhere along the hall. Her fingertips came back black and greasy after running her hand along the wall.

  The air was wet and musty, like wet books in a forgotten basement.

  The interval between each fixture was about six paces. Elsa hurried down the hall and after four fixtures, came to another set of stone stairs that descended deeper into the mantle of West Berlin.

  As she stepped into that deeper level, faint music floated through the corridor.

  Although so quiet it sounded like a melodic whisper, she knew the tune. It was the rhapsody she last heard in Alex’s closet. The one he’d spent so many hours huddled over while she sold herself nightly for the price of a loaf of bread.

  The music grew louder, more distinct, as she continued, and it played with the clarity not available when heard through speakers.

  It was clear enough to be the source of the broadcast.

  Ahead, after she passed another eight fixtures, the hall ended.

  Before her, lit in the ghostly orange light, stood a plain office door with a frosted glass window. Probably a thousand like them in West Berlin. Ten thousand. She tried to find comfort in the familiarity.

  A brass plaque was tacked over the door.

  ‘SWEDISH RHAPSODY NO. 1’ STATION

  The rhapsody played behind the door, along with a smattering of mumbles and whispers.

  The girl’s voice picked up next—just feet away from where Elsa stood. The same voice Alex had transcribed into countless notebooks and sheaves of paper.

  Achtung !

  Eins, Zwei, Sieben, Sieben, Sieben . . .

  A shadow appeared behind the frosted glass.

  The doorknob twisted.

  Elsa threw herself against the wall. She sucked in hard to flatten herself against the stones like she was standing on a tenth-floor ledge.

  The door opened outward, shielding her Elsa, and then closed.

  A girl had walked out. Slim, blonde, with dusty jeans and a t-shirt—fresh off of any school playground. The girl shut the door behind her and walked down the hall. Her footfalls echoed over the dipping pipe, even after she disappeared up the first set of stairs that led to the street.

  After the girl’s footsteps faded, Elsa adjusted her sweaty grip on the gun.

  No use in waiting.

  Elsa turned the knob. The door glided open on mercifully silent hinges.

  She peeked in first, hand tight on the knob.

  The room was as big as her flat bedroom, with the same stone walls and electric lights as the hall.

  A desk-style console filled with lights, levers and buttons lined the wall opposite the door. The console was divided into different work stations, each possessing the same configuration of dials and levers and marked with different designations—FM, AM, SHORTWAVE, SATTELITE, PLASMA LASER, and a few others written in the strange language Elsa saw on the poster in the alley. The stations were crammed with switches and toggles, each like the cockpit of a jetliner. There were small monitors built into each console with foreign characters that scrolled across a flickering screen.

  Someone sat in an office chair at the SHORTWAVE station, the high back blocking Elsa’s view of the occupant. Next to the chair, a conventional microphone jutted from one of the control panels. The person in the chair held a hand-crank music box up to the microphone with small, gray hands and turned the small crank to play the rhapsody over the airwaves.

  On the other side, a ball of avocado-green light about the size of a peach floated in the air. Other dials and electrodes emitted the same sickly green hue, which made Elsa’s eyes flutter and her stomach queasy.

  The gun—the useless hunk of steel and brass—almost slipped from her sweat-slicked hand.

  The only other person in the room was a man in a crisp, khaki uniform who sat on a stool next to the high-backed chair. He wore striped, black and yellow shoulder boards and his uniform hat was ringed in crimson and gold—a Soviet officer. Elsa had seen them before at the checkpoints into East Germany. He sat facing the other chair, absorbed in jotting on a clipboard with a pencil, and hadn’t noticed her walk in.

  After the last bar of the rhapsody, the person in the chair leaned forward and spoke into the microphone—twenty German numbers in the same little girl voice that emitted from Sepp’s shortwave radio.

  After she recited the string of numbers, the office chair squeaked as it turned slightly toward the floating green ball. The person spoke into the green ball as if it were also a microphone of some cosmic design. But what she spoke wasn’t German—instead, it was a nonsense string of consonants that sounded impossible for a human mouth to enunciate.

  The Soviet officer made a notation on his clipboard, then gazed off with a bored look on his face.

  Finally, the girl (was it a girl ? Elsa had yet to see her face) held the music box up to the microphone and began again.

  The consoles were interrupted immediately opposite Elsa by an entryway that opened into a room filled with children. They stood in a line that led toward a steel door. Like the door of a bank vault, it had a crank wheel like a sailor’s steering column and gleaming silver dials.

  There was no way to see what lay beyond the steel vault door. A halo of the same pea-green light radiated from within the portal.

  As one child emerged out of the green aura and the vault, another walked in to take their place. Alex stood in the line, a few children back from the vault—motionless, his arms slack and shoulders slumped.

  The last boy to exit the vault walked past Elsa, out the office door, and into the hall, with the same focused intent as the others and no interest in Elsa or anyone else in the room.

  “What are you doing to them ?”

  The officer flinched and jumped up from the stool. His clipboard clattered to the floor.

  “I want my son back.” She pointed the pistol at the officer. “Alex !” she screamed at the line of children. “Get out of there !”

  The officer spoke in rapid, nervous Russian. A question, but Elsa couldn’t piece it together, even with her life spent in the diverse city.

  He looked toward the open entryway and shouted.

  A tall Soviet guard in a steel helmet stepped into the control room. He brandished a submachine gun, slung across his chest. His wide shoulders stretched the buttons of the khaki uniform coat and his small eyes were like a snake, unblinking.

  “Come with me, fraulein.” The words came out of him with greasy finesse like the buzzing of a housefly. “Come.” He beckoned to her like she was a lost child.

  “Fuck you. I want my son.” She turned the pistol from the officer to the guard and aimed at the bridge of his nose.

  The girl in the high-backed chair spoke her alien tongue into the levitating green sphere. The officer had cringed as far back as he could against the console. His wide eyes, topped with bushy eyebrows, bounced between Elsa and the guard.

  “Come with me, Fraulein. I will take you to him.” The guard’
s voice vibrated and quivered, taking on even more of an insectile sibilation. The words shuddered, as if something were wriggling free of his body. He bared his teeth and his head quivered.

  Alex stood in line, almost up to walk into the greenish light.

  Elsa stepped forward and gripped the pistol with both hands. “Give him to me !”

  The soldier’s whole body tremored.

  His shoulders bulged and contorted, ripping through the uniform coat.

  The skin split down the front of his forehead and over his nose, revealing a greasy, black membrane underneath.

  The jacket tore at the seams under his arms. Segmented, spindly legs—like that of a crab or spider—poked through the sides of his ribcage. Quivering tentacles punched through the chest and waved around in desperate, reaching motions. The soldier’s Russian-accented German was replaced with gibbering, nonsensical consonants punctuated with slobbering screeches.

  A tentacle reached out and looped around the gun’s barrel. Elsa fired with panicked jerks of the trigger into the soldier-monster’s face.

  The gunshots pounded her eardrums.

  The officer turned away and crouched, hands over his ears.

  The tentacled soldier staggered backward. The human skin had sloughed off of its head and hung like a jacket hood. Its head was an oily black appendage, marked by the same colorful compound eyes of a common housefly. Ragged, unbleeding bullet holes had punched between its eyes.

  It staggered backward and tripped. Laying on its back, the tentacles waved above its chest, like the rubbery fingers of a sea anemone. Elsa eased toward it, ready to fire again at the creature.

  The door slammed behind her.

  The officer had fled. Running footsteps echoed down the hall.

  The soldier-thing’s spider-legs grabbed at the concrete floor, tips scratching stone as it clawed frantically in its death throes. Its black head imploded in a gassy hiss, and all that remained was a shriveled, dripping husk.

  The high-backed chair swiveled to reveal its occupant. It was a girl, just as Elsa had pictured her. Her feet hung, not yet long enough to touch the ground. She wore pigtails in her blond hair and a plaid dress suitable for a first day of kindergarten.

  “Hello,” she said in the cheery voice.

  The girl’s face was decayed, strips of flesh teeming with maggots. Marbled, blue-veined skin. Teeth the color of rotten fruit flashed through a wide, practiced smile.

  “What are you doing here ?” A scrap of the girl’s cheek hung loose, exposing the glistening, enamel-white cheekbone.

  Elsa looked into the adjoining room.

  The latest occupant of the vault walked passed them and out the office door. Alex stepped closer, next in line to disappear into the verdant mist.

  Elsa screamed his name.

  “I know. Let’s play hide and seek.” The girl stifled a giggle. She pressed a button on the control panel. The dim lights blinked off, leaving them in darkness. The only thing that kept the total absence of light at bay was the pale green glow that emitted from the vault and the console. The girl was just a shadowy outline in front of Elsa. “Want to play with me ?”

  The chair creaked and footsteps shuffled over concrete.

  Elsa took a running step toward Alex and the adjacent room, but something grabbed her ankles. As she fell, she watched Alex step into the vault’s green haze.

  She landed on the dead guard. Greasy tentacles smudged her cheeks and lips. The rest of his insectile body crunched and caved under her weight like papier-mâché.

  Elsa rolled off the body and pulled herself toward the next room on her elbows.

  Something grasped her leg. Teeth bit deep into her calf.

  Elsa screamed and kicked.

  The girl pulled herself up Elsa’s leg. Tiny fingernails tore through the denim and dug into her thighs.

  Alex walked out of the vault. The next girl in line took his place.

  Elsa thrashed and kicked while Alex walked toward her.

  “Alex ! Help !” She reached to him as he approached, the other hand still tight around the pistol. Her fingers brushed against his leg, just out of reach.

  Her son looked down at her as if she were a cockroach underfoot, stepped over her, and walked through the outer door into the hall.

  She screamed his name again, but the door shut behind him.

  Elsa flattened against the floor. The look Alex gave her sucked the fight from her.

  The girl’s fingers cut into her shoulder blades and the nape of Elsa’s neck as she worked her way up Elsa’s back. The low, wet rumble from the girl’s throat was almost next to her ear.

  No, I can still catch him, Elsa thought. He’s still there, somewhere.

  Elsa flailed, flipping like a dying fish. The girl tumbled into the darkness.

  The girl’s skittering footsteps echoed within the gloom, just like the soldier’s spidery legs scratching the floor.

  A heavy weight hit Elsa as she tried to regain her feet. She landed on her back, the girl clutching at her chest. Thin fingers grasped Elsa’s neck. The girl uttered a raspy chortle as she squeezed Elsa’s windpipe and stared into her eyes. Elsa grabbed a handful of the girl’s hair and pulled back. The girl’s chin, decayed through to the bone, pointed at the ceiling. Her chortle rumbled into a growl.

  With the barrel jammed against the exposed flesh under the girl’s chin, she pulled the trigger.

  The girl’s head snapped back and the hair came loose from the scalp in Elsa’s hand. The dead fingers fell from Elsa’s neck.

  Elsa tossed the body off and got to her feet. She threw open the outer door and fled into the hall. Alex’s feet disappeared up the first flight of steps. She ran after him and bounded up the stairs. The steel grating slammed shut ahead of her. Gunshots and shouts echoed from the alley. She reached the steps up to the steel grate. With her shoulder planted against the cage, she pushed the grating up and bolted back into the alley. The steel crashed against the brick wall of the station then slammed back down in place.

  Instead of just the dead bum who Elsa had shot, the alley was littered with dead protestors. A dissipating cloud of smoke rolled over the prostrate bodies. Injured men struggled with one another while sporadic gunshots were fired from behind dumpsters and out of windows.

  The attack against the police station that Sepp was supposed to join had started.

  Elsa crouched against the police station’s brick wall.

  Alex walked through the bodies, looking over the corpses.

  From the alleyway spur that led to the front of the police station, shouts and commands—along with shrill whistle blasts—rang out from an approaching squad of policemen.

  Alex knelt next to a dead fighter and rummaged through the corpse’s pockets and ammo pouches.

  “Alex ! Get down !” Elsa walked toward him in a half crouch until she reached the alley intersection.

  Her son pulled a submachine gun from the dead fighter and checked the magazine and bolt as if he were a seasoned soldier. Gunshots blasted the dirt and dead around him. Rounds ricocheted off the asphalt where Elsa crouched, forcing her back behind the corner. Alex took cover behind a battered trashcan and aimed down the alley toward the policemen. The bursts from his gun were white stars at the end of the barrel and each round battered Elsa’s already buzzing ears.

  Elsa sprinted across to the far wall, nearer to Alex. From there, she had a view of the policemen who made their way down the alley toward her son.

  “Alex ! Look at me !” A bullet smacked into the wall over her head. Splinters and brick dust coated her shoulders.

  The boy fired off another burst, and then looked over at her.

  His eyes softened as recognition tried to force its way in.

  More bullets kicked up garbage near her knees. She turned and fired her pistol down the alley where the nearest policeman ducked behind a dumpster. There was no thought as to who she was shooting at.

  There was only Alex.

&nb
sp; “Run ! Get out of here, Alex !”

  The police inched closer. A machine gun chattered and knocked over the steel can Alex crouched behind. His eyes hardened again and he fired a burst down the alley.

  A policeman fell back onto the asphalt.

  “No ! Stop shooting at them, Alex !”

  Alex turned toward her.

  She held her hands up, pistol pointed at the dark sky. “Alex, it’s me.”

  Another sliver of the old Alex glinted in his eyes.

  “Your mother.”

  His face contorted, at battle within himself. He pointed the weapon at her.

  She kept her eyes open. His face, despite the drawn look of apathy that masked it, would be the last thing she ever saw.

  A sharp blow hit her thigh, another in her calf, and she dropped to her good knee. She screamed, felt as if her leg had been dipped in molten steel.

  Alex hadn’t shot. He sprinted away from Elsa and the encroaching policemen, farther away into the dark alley.

  Her vision clouded and shimmered as she tried to stay focused. Blood poured down her jeans and formed a black circle on the dingy asphalt. She dropped her gun, raised her arms in surrender, and screamed her son’s name over and over.

  The boy disappeared into the gloom.

  Her yells were silenced by the stock of a policeman’s rifle across her forehead. Elsa’s face slammed down onto the garbage-strewn alley. She tried to keep her eyes open, to make out Alex’s silhouette one more time, but the alley did somersaults and then faded into an oily, black abyss.

  ***

  CIA MEMO #33-1992

  DATE : August 12, 1992

  FROM : Berlin Station Chief

  TO : Office of Russian and European Analysis

  SUBJECT : Elsa Dietrich / Hostel Riots / Precinct 31 Bombing

  In August, 1977, Elsa Dietrich (“the subject”), a West Berlin prostitute, was arrested and charged with multiple crimes during the Berlin riots known as the “German Autumn.” The subject was associated, through her brother (Josip “Sepp” Dietrich), with the left-wing terrorist group ‘Red Army Faction.’ She was charged with assault with deadly intent on police officers, possession of illegal weapons, and conspiracy to free suspected terrorists held in Berlin’s Police Precinct 31.