Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  “Don’t talk to your elders that way. And it’s true. As loose ends, we’re expendable. But as allies against something that he doesn’t understand, we’re precious assets.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely. But keep a sharp eye out, just in case.”

  “I don’t think you know what the word absolutely means.”

  Dominic strolled out onto the patio and handed us each a cold beer, something foreign and no doubt excellent. He pulled up a chair and we all sat and drank like civilized people, looking out at the endless blue morning sky and its darker twin reflected in the lake below.

  “I’m going to miss this place. Dream house sounds pretty hokey, huh? But I think the dream of this house on this lake is what pushed me to the top. Funny to think that I’m just going to leave it all behind without a fight.”

  “You could always stay,” said Anne. “When we’re done, Peter won’t be looking you up for any more work.”

  Dominic shook his head and smiled, not without pity, I think. “You and your boyfriend here are a long shot, sweetheart. A hundred to one. A thousand to one. You seem pretty smart, and he’s a hard guy to take in a fight, sure. But Peter has a whole world to himself in that town. And he has something you don’t. There’s something almost like … fate, I guess, hanging off him.

  “I’m happy to see you two take a run at it, that’s all to the good for me, but the truth is, I’m just throwing a couple of cats in a wood chipper hoping that their bones will jam the thing up. Odds are, you guys aren’t coming out. At least not the same way you went in. No offense, but the last thing I want to see is one of you knocking on my door with worms falling out your face. Tell you what. You win, I’ll come back and we can all sit together on the patio and have another beer.” He smiled at her and turned his bottle up to the sun, draining the last of it.

  I smiled and raised my own bottle in salute. “Thanks for the beer and the confidence.”

  “Any time.”

  “I hate to be a bad guest, but we’re wiped out. Do you mind if we get some sleep here before we move out?”

  “How about breakfast first?”

  “I could live with that. I think the last thing I ate was in another time zone.”

  “I’ll whip something up, and then you can get some rest while I pack my things. We’ll leave here together.”

  Anne and I stayed on the patio while Dominic went inside and began clattering and bustling in the kitchen. We sat for a long time in companionable silence, sipping cold beer and enjoying the early morning sunshine. Deep weariness muffled the tension and fear of the last few days, granting us a comfortable lassitude as we basked.

  I nudged her with my beer. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Thanks for helping me get here.”

  “I told you I would.”

  “You sure you want to follow me into Belmont? You promised to help me find Piotr, and now we have. Job over.”

  She smiled a slow, lazy smile. “Again with this? You are so stupid.”

  “Ouch, right in the feelings.”

  She turned to face me. “Pay attention. I’m not helping you get to this Peter guy, you’re helping me. He killed my grandfather. I’m going to make him pay. End of story.” She relaxed back into her chair, face turned up to the sky. “You of all people should understand that.”

  “You have the right, I won’t argue that. But the odds are that this is a one-way trip. No amount of talking and explaining can make you understand what Piotr is like. Patrick would never want you throwing your life away, especially not for him.”

  “And you think he’d want you to go in there?”

  “That’s different. I think he’d understand why I have to go.”

  She patted me on the arm, not ruffled in the slightest. “So do I.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I drank my beer and watched geese touch down amid the silver glitter of the lake’s surface down below. If the silence bothered her, Anne didn’t show it.

  Half an hour later, Dominic called us back into the house for a breakfast of pan seared trout, wild rice mixed with tart cranberries, and roasted new potatoes dusted with chipotle powder.

  He served us himself, setting plates down in front of us with a flourish. “I know fish isn’t your typical breakfast food, but I just caught these and I figured there was no sense in just letting them go to waste.”

  Even if I hadn’t been starving from long hours on the road, it would have been fantastic and we said so. Dominic was self-effacing but obviously pleased at our praise.

  We all have different faces that we show to the world, but we often don’t realize just how little control we have over which one we wear at any given time. It made me wonder what Dom saw in us that brought out the genial host in him. Knowing where we were headed, I suspected it was pity.

  After we ate he showed us to one of the many guestrooms, and neither one of us corrected his notion that we were a couple. We simply thanked him and went inside.

  As soon as the door closed, Anne threw herself onto the bed, fully clothed and on top of the comforter. She didn’t even take her shoes off. She stretched and groaned with pleasure.

  “Oh, that feels good. I am so tired of sleeping in the car all the time.” She rolled over on her back and claimed a pillow. “You haven’t even been able to do that. You must be exhausted.”

  I kicked off my shoes and lay down next to her. “I’m pretty beat.”

  We stared quietly at the ceiling together, contemplating the ornate wooden trim and elaborate ceiling fan as if we were on a blanket at a picnic watching the clouds.

  When Anne spoke, her words came out slow and drowsy. “You still trust him?”

  “I shouldn’t. But I think we’re safe enough.”

  “Okay.”

  After a moment of silence, I turned my head to look at her. She was sound asleep. With her eyes closed and her face relaxed there was no sign of the fierce determination that drove her. She looked small and vulnerable.

  I brushed a few strands of hair from where they lay against her cheek and thought about the first time I saw her, too bright and lively on my front step, and realized how dead to the world I had been then. For all of her vibrant beauty I had just stood there, unable to see it.

  I could see it now.

  I wanted to protect her, especially that innocent and fragile part of her that laughed at my terrible jokes and turned up the radio and sang out loud without the slightest bit of embarrassment.

  There are some things whose loss you can only feel when you get them back. Being able to stand between something precious and those that would destroy it made me feel alive. Like I mattered. There was a time when doing that was the biggest part of my life.

  I joined the Army after Pearl Harbor because we were under attack. The idea of fighting to defend my country drew me like nothing ever had before. I found a sense of purpose that had a rightness to it that changed my life. It was like a key turning in a lock.

  Looking back now it was easy to see how that purpose and sense of worth had dwindled away as I slowly outlived everyone that mattered to me.

  Before now I had been going through the motions of confronting Piotr out of a sense of duty. I knew in my head that I had to stop him, but I hadn’t felt it in my heart. I just knew that I had to try and that I would likely die in the attempt.

  But now I knew that I was going to do more than try. Anne would survive. The world that she loved would survive. I would stand between her and all of the horrors that Piotr could bring to bear, and I would not be moved.

  I held that sense of purpose close and slept.

  25

  My sense of well-being didn’t last long. I had formless, churning dreams of clenched hunger and wet fetid smells in darkness, and always the sense of endless movement in all directions.

  There was also watchfulness. A singular intense scrutiny that seemed to come from everywhere at once prickled at the back of my neck, a savag
e bite just a second away. I was moving, eeling my way through the unseen thickness of the terrain with sleek muscular purpose, searching for I don’t know what.

  The hunt was forever, I knew, but I also felt in my guts that it could end any second, and I couldn’t pull my fevered attention away from the possibility, not even to rest. Rage and hunger and maddening frustration drove me unceasingly, one eternal second of pushing and searching stretched out to infinity.

  Then there was a change, a break that suddenly split my undifferentiated existence into a before and after. I could sense something. My body juddered and my nerves silvered and electrified. My teeth and jaws ached to sink through it. It was here, close.

  Above and around me, a more ancient and patient hunger took notice as well. The endless churning sea of life tangling around me was insignificant, despite its vast expanse, a collection of parasites on the leviathan of our God who filled the sky in all directions. The sense of anticipation cut deep, as unrelenting as the hunger and fear.

  There would be food. And soon.

  “Hey.” Anne’s voice pulled me awake. My body was rigid, and I was nauseous and disoriented. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just a dream.” My eyes were gritty and my hands were sore where I had been clenching them. I sucked in air and flexed my fingers, feeling like I had just been pulled out from under some suffocating mass.

  “Did you see someone in that town like I did?”

  “No, it was something else, but connected, I think.”

  She sat up and watched me with concern. The light from the window behind her ran fire around the edge of her hair and shadowed her features. “Tell me about it.”

  I pressed my palms against my eyes, making sparks. “It was alien. No real sights or sounds, just touch and emotion. I don’t think I shared a lot of senses with whatever it was, so maybe I was just getting the things I could understand. It was all frantic hunger, like panicked starvation, and movement inside some mass of other things that were desperate in the same way.

  “I was aware of this endless mass of them, but at the same time, I knew what any particular one felt, because they were all identical. It was like being an entire universe of crawling things, but also being each one individually, too. And permeating it all was some kind of other consciousness, something even more alien. It was everywhere. If you can imagine the whole universe being alive and grasping, hungry, and packed completely full of other hungry things.”

  “I really can’t. And you were part of it?”

  “Not really. I could tell I was just touching the fringes of it.” I shivered. “That was enough.” She put her hand on mine in sympathy. It helped.

  We took turns using the shower and changing clothes. By the time we were dressed, packed, and downstairs, it was already well past noon. The house smelled like food, leading us by the nose to the kitchen.

  Dominic was once again putting plates on the table. “Last meal. Afterwards I have some presents for you. But first, eat.” He had taken a couple of steaks and cut them into thin strips, then pan fried them with onions and red wine. Stuffed into massive toasted rolls, they became heaven on Earth.

  “So, Dom. Where are you headed to once you leave here?” I found that I was actually interested.

  “I have a ranch out west. It’s remote, comfortable, and has no connection to me as far as anyone knows. It was for my retirement from the business, assuming that none of my enemies retired me first. I never really thought I’d use it. Peter will never find me there.”

  “Out west?”

  He smiled at me. “What you don’t know, you can’t tell. I figure you’ll last about five minutes in that town before you’re shitting worms and talking your head off. Best we don’t read each other’s diaries, if you get my meaning.”

  “Fair enough. You want to know if we win?”

  “You’re not going to win.”

  “So why help? Why come find me at your office and give me that speech about being your best shot?”

  “Shit happens. You could get lucky. You won’t, but hey, it doesn’t cost me anything either way.”

  I laughed and tossed my linen napkin onto my empty plate. “That’s the spirit, never give up. So, you mentioned that you had something for us?”

  He led us out of the kitchen and into the garage. The lights on his black Land Rover flashed as Dom thumbed the remote in his pocket.

  “It’s not registered to me, so feel free to do whatever you want in it. The back has all of the weapons I had left, and some camping gear that I bought and never used. There’s also something special for the lady.”

  He opened the cargo door and pulled a long nylon sleeve from under a black tarp. The zipper sang as he unzipped it, revealing a gleaming black shotgun. He handed it to Anne.

  “I had some of these made to sell to the gangbangers. It’s a .410 shotgun, sawed off short, with a fifty round drum. It fires standard three-inch shells, and being a .410, the recoil is so light even a child can handle it. Which was the whole point, since a lot of the gangs are full of thirteen-year-old kids.”

  Anne stared at him. “That’s awful!”

  “Yeah, and they didn’t sell for shit, either. The little bastards wanted a big macho gun, not a little .410. Never mind that inside ten yards, this thing will explode a guy like an overripe cantaloupe. No, they all wanted SPAS-12 assault shotguns and Desert Eagles and Glocks, like they were in some kind of fucking action movie. Or AK-47s. You have no idea how many requests I got for gold-plated AK’s. Jesus Christ, people are stupid. Anyway, it shoots three rounds a second if you hold the trigger down, and will mulch a room full of people before you can say boo. It’s loaded with alternating shot and slugs, just for the hell of it. Should come in handy.”

  She slipped it back in the case and zipped it up. “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Any .45 ammo in here?” I asked.

  “Couple of boxes, hollow point and jacketed both.”

  “Good.” I had been able to check my Browning during our trips, I just needed the rounds to put in it.

  “Directions to the town are already in the GPS from my last trip. Good luck.” He held out his hand and I shook it. Anne hesitated, but ended up shaking his hand as well.

  Ten minutes later we were on the road, completely unprepared for what was to come.

  Part Two

  Emergence

  “The great sea has set me in motion set me adrift,

  Moving me as the weed moves in a river

  the arch of sky and mightiness of storms

  have moved the spirit within me till I am carried away

  trembling with joy.”

  —Uvavnuk, Netsilik Inuit shaman

  26

  I liked Dominic’s Rover. It had a steady workman-like competence underneath all the leather and wood trim, like a draft horse spruced up for the county fair. It wasn’t as reassuring as my old farm pickup, but maybe that was just because old people like me prefer the familiar.

  I dialed Henry’s cell. Now that we finally knew where Piotr was, I figured that somebody outside this vehicle should know, too. The sere landscape flickered past my window as the phone rang. Eventually there was a click, and Henry’s deep tones urged me to leave a message.

  “It’s Abe. We found him. Peter is holed up in Belmont, Wyoming. I should be there by tonight. Call me when you get this.”

  “No answer?”

  I handed Anne back her phone. “He’ll call when he gets the message. I hope Leon hasn’t taken a turn for the worse.”

  “Worse than being paralyzed by a worm that crawled out of a dead guy?”

  “You know what I mean. Leon is Henry’s whole world.”

  Anne’s head lolled on the creamy leather of the headrest, and her eyes were closed. “He was stable in the hospital when we left. There’s no reason to think he’s gotten any worse now.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he’s okay.” I thought of all the wounded and sick I’d known over the last eighty years, and how quickly things
could take a turn for the worse. There was no point in shaking Anne’s faith at this point, I just wish I shared it.

  We drove northwest up I-25 while the sun slowly turned fat and orange as it fell out of the sky. We were approaching Cheyenne when I broke the silence.

  “Anne?”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “You’re doing it again. I just told you that I’m going to do this, and you agreed. Now you’re going to try and drop me off in Cheyenne. I’m telling you no. You were perfectly willing to sacrifice me when we started this. So was I. The greater good and all that. Don’t screw it up now that we’ve spent all this time together.”

  “That’s not what this is about.” It was, of course.

  “Uh huh. Abe, I don’t want to die. I really don’t. And I appreciate all of these attempts to keep me safe, but when I think about one of those pits, full of blood and parts and stuff, with people hanging alive from racks overhead …” She jerked slightly, like an arrested shudder, and looked out the window. “If this Piotr or Peter or whatever is really holding a whole town hostage, then I have to help. I saw that woman in my dream, I was her, and I could feel how scared she was. I’m going to help her, and the rest of them, no matter what. And so are you. And if we die, well, might as well go out doing some good.”

  “If you’re going to pay with your life, you may as well buy something worth the price.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Your grandfather. We were all volunteers, you know. Before every operation, each of us had to agree to go out, just as if it were a suicide mission. Which, you know, they pretty much were. Patrick set the bar for which ones we were going to go on. Of course, with the consequences being what they were during the war, it meant going out on all of them.”

  “Then it’s settled. You can’t save those people without me. How do you plan to cover an entire town full of thousands of houses and buildings and roads and farms and God knows what else? It’s a pretty big goddamn haystack, isn’t it? I’m a needle finder, just like my grandfather. Without me, you’re useless.”