Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  “Same as you, trying to put an end to all this. I have some history with Piotr, the guy who’s running things. My name’s Abe, and this is Anne.”

  “I’m Chuck. Tell me what you know.”

  “You said you were part of a group. Why don’t you take us to meet whoever is in charge, and then everybody can swap stories.”

  “I’m in charge, so just tell me what you know, and I’ll let everyone else know what they need to know.”

  I smiled my most reassuring smile. “No offense, Chuck, but I’m going to want to meet your friends, if they exist. I phrased it as a request to be polite, I wasn’t really asking. I know Piotr uses regular folks from time to time, so as much as I like your sunny personality, you’re not getting out of my sight. If you really are part of some guerilla group, then great. If not …”

  Chuck’s eyes rolled to the side and he sighed. “Fine. We’re going to have to drive around for a while to make sure nobody is tailing us, so just follow me, but not too close.”

  “Anne will follow, and I’ll ride with you. If anything goes wrong, I promise that’ll it’ll go wrong for you before it goes wrong for me, understand?”

  “Yes, I get it already. Let’s just get going.”

  Chuck was in a cheap, beat-up sedan. It was a dull green and looked like something you’d buy from a rental car auction. I watched out the windows, trying to get a feel for the town while Chuck drove in sullen silence, for which I was grateful. Anne trailed us by a good block or so, blending into the nearly non-existent traffic as best she could.

  After half an hour of circling, we entered a lower middle-class subdivision called Liberty Estates. Cheap but well-tended houses stood shoulder-to-shoulder down narrow roads, with alleys running behind the houses to give access to the rear-facing garages. Every house had a tiny flower bed out front and a tin mailbox on a post in the yard. The same three or four house designs repeated endlessly down the streets.

  Chuck stopped on the curb in front of the only house on this particular street with the lights still on and killed the engine. Anne pulled up behind him and did the same.

  “Okay,” he said, “let me go in first and introduce you. They’ll trust you more if you don’t go manhandling me in front of them, alright? Just lay off me.”

  “Sure thing. I promise to try not to embarrass you in front of anybody.”

  Anne was waiting for us on the sidewalk when we got out of the car. We made it halfway up to the front door when a woman’s voice called out quietly from the roof.

  “Stop right there and put your hands up where I can see them.” The sound of a rifle bolt being shoved home rang out louder than her voice. I put my hands up and Chuck smirked at me.

  “Not so smart now, are you, asshole?”

  29

  I smiled back at Chuck and whispered, “You’re standing between me and the shooter, Chuck. If I wasn’t trying to be friendly, you’d already be enjoying a career as a human shield.”

  His smirk faded and he quickly stepped away from me. I was aware that I was being childish, but some people just bring out the worst in me.

  The front door opened, and an older man carrying a pump-action shotgun stepped outside. “Hello, Chuck. Who are your friends?”

  Chuck sauntered up the concrete walkway to the front door. “They have valuable information, so I brought ‘em in for questioning.”

  Anne made a choking sound. I shushed her under my breath and then called out, “My name is Abe and this is Anne. I understand from Chuck that we might have some things in common, so he graciously brought us here so that we could compare notes. May we come in?”

  The man nodded in a friendly way, but he didn’t lower his shotgun. “That sounds good to me, as soon as we check you out real quick. Chuck, would you mind getting the light?” Chuck ducked inside. We waited with our hands up in full view of the surrounding houses in the middle of the night, trying not to think about the rooftop sniper looking at us through the crossed wires in her scope.

  Chuck came back out with a handheld spotlight, one of those huge jobs that campers and hunters use. “Put your hand out.”

  I did so, and he put the light underneath and turned it on. The powerful light turned the skin of my hand translucent red around and between my fingers. He watched carefully, and then repeated the test on Anne. Then he took a penlight out of his pocket and looked into our eyes, leaving bright red blobs floating across my vision after he was done. “No wigglers. They’re clean.”

  The man on the porch lowered his shotgun and smiled. “In that case, come on in.”

  The inside of the house was homey, if a little shabby. Stacks of books, magazines, and DVD cases were arranged as neatly as possible, which wasn’t very, considering their number, on every surface and on the floor next to the couch and easy chair. Pictures of the man with the shotgun and a pretty brunette hung on the walls, mostly holidays and vacations, with no kids in them.

  Our host led us through the living room and into the kitchen, which was cramped, but less cluttered than the living room. “Have a seat. Can I get you something? Coffee?”

  I pulled out a flimsy chair with tubular metal legs and a padded vinyl seat. “Love some, thanks.” Anne pulled out another chair and declined the offer. She was young; eventually she’d learn that when somebody points a firearm at you, at the very least they owe you some goddamn coffee.

  The man leaned his shotgun against the wall and poured me a cup from a cheap coffee-maker’s glass pot. The bottom was stained brown from sitting on the warmer for hours on end. He was an older man, late fifties maybe, with a short but full salt-and-pepper beard, round glasses and a tiny ponytail sticking out of the back of his head. He handed me the cup. “I’m Greg. You already know Chuck here.”

  The front door slammed and a young woman about Chuck’s age stalked briskly into the room and leaned her rifle against the wall next to Greg’s shotgun. Getting a good look at it made me shudder. A 30-.06 round is a pretty good way to keep bad guys off your lawn.

  “And this is Mazie.” She had short, jet-black hair and a pretty face that seemed more sorority than sniper.

  Anne stiffened beside me and squeezed my hand. She leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “That’s her. That’s the waitress from my dream.”

  I kept my reaction to myself. “Nice to meet you, Greg. And thanks for not blowing my teeth out through the back of my head, Mazie.”

  “I don’t shoot people.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’m Abe, and this is Anne.” I took a sip of coffee. It was terrible.

  Anne pulled her eyes away from Mazie and pointed at the spotlight. “That work?”

  Greg shrugged. “The big test is whether or not they’ll let you try it. The fact that you didn’t go berserk when you thought it could reveal you was a pretty good indicator that you were safe. The idea of looking for the small worms in the hands and eyes is a good one, however. I think.”

  “You’ve never tested it on a real one?”

  “Oh, no. Thank God. But there are plenty of the coerced around town, we know the signs.”

  “Coerced? I guess that’s one way to describe them. Abe calls them baitbags because of the worms inside of them.”

  Mazie made a face and looked away. “That’s disgusting. And demeaning. Those poor people are victims, and they deserve more respect than that.”

  I had to chuckle. “I don’t know that a high-powered hunting rifle equals respect, ma’am.”

  Chuck clapped me on the shoulder. “Get ready for a speech on monster rights, dude. I’ve already heard it a million times, so I’m going to bed.”

  “Hey, fuck you, Chuck!” Mazie yelled at his back as he slipped out of the kitchen. Then she turned to me and said, “They aren’t in their right minds, so you shouldn’t judge them, but at the same time you can’t let them hurt other people, either. They won’t want the murder of another human being on their consciences when they’re cured.”

  Anne and I exchanged glances across the ta
ble. “Someone you know?”

  “My dad.” Her expression became carefully neutral as she talked. “He went to work one morning and didn’t come back for two days. My mom and I were frantic. The police were no help, of course, being coerced themselves, so we just worried and put up posters and all that stuff. Then he just came home, right out of nowhere. I was so happy, you know? Like the nightmare was finally over and all that.

  “At first me and my mom didn’t talk about what was different, like it would ruin everything or whatever, but we both knew something was wrong. For one thing, after he came home, he never left the house again, except to check up on us if we were gone more than an hour or so. It was so creepy, you’d be at the store or something, and he’d just be there, staring at you. Then you’d, like, wave or something, and he’d smile and wave back, like a dad mask snapped into place all of a sudden.”

  “How long before he stopped snapping back into dad mode?” I asked it as gently as I could.

  “A week? I don’t know. It wasn’t even like he just stopped being my dad, it’s like his personality was getting all stretched out of shape. Does that make sense? Like, he would get angrier than anybody you ever saw, or he would laugh at something and just become manic with it, until he was screaming and laughing all at the same time.” Her expression didn’t change, but she wrapped her arms around herself as she spoke.

  “He wouldn’t tell us what was going on, and we learned pretty quick to stop asking. He’d hit you before you knew what was happening. He never used to hit us.”

  Anne reached out to touch Mazie’s arm, but she moved just slightly away. “That must have been awful.”

  “At first he let us leave if he went with us. He’d drive me to work at the diner where I was watched until my shift was over, and then he’d show up and bring me home. That lasted all of a month. After that he kept us in the house. Sometimes a guy would show up with groceries and toilet paper and stuff, and then drive off. He didn’t even take any money or say anything. Just ring the bell and drive away.

  “We lived like that for weeks. It’s all mashed together now, like a blur. Then one night Greg and Rob came to my bedroom window in the middle of the night. I was so out-of-my-mind scared in the house that even burglars or rapists or something seemed like a welcome change at that point. They told me that lots of people were turning up like my dad, and that they could get me out of the house and hide me.

  “I didn’t go right away, I told them to come back, so I could get my mom out, too. But I had to wait until the next day, because he slept in the same room with her. God, I can’t even imagine what that must have been like.”

  She rubbed at her eyes, even though they appeared to be dry. “Anyway, she wouldn’t go, wouldn’t leave him, so the next night when they came back, I went with them.”

  I looked at Greg. “Rob?”

  He shook his head, and Mazie spoke up. “My dad killed him. I don’t know how he knew, maybe my mom even told him or something, but when they came to the window, my dad broke my door and ran in. He grabbed Rob and started stabbing him, and it was like he couldn’t make himself stop, even after Rob was dead, so Greg and I escaped.” She sniffed at looked at the ceiling for a second. “Excuse me.” She fled the kitchen at a fast walk, angrily swiping at her eyes.

  That left Anne and I alone with Greg, who sat down heavily at the table. “She’s really brave, that one. Everyone else that we rescue can’t wait to get out of town and put this behind them, but she wanted to stay and help. I couldn’t make her go.”

  I nodded. “She wants to be here for her mom, and to save her father. You know there’s no cure?”

  “I don’t know that, but I’ve seen the inside of one of those things. Shot one no further than me to you one night with my twelve-gauge. One minute Rob and I are standing in somebody’s azalea bushes in the dark—this was about a month before we rescued Mazie—and the next thing I knew it was right in front of me. Almost tore my head off before I could get the gun up. What came out of the hole in its chest still gives me nightmares. You don’t come back from that. It’s not even the worms or snakes or whatever, it’s all the eating that they do on the inside.”

  I nodded and stared into my coffee. “I found one pinned under a rolled-over jeep once a long time ago. My men and I tried to save the guy. We doped him up with morphine, which made him thrash around a lot less, but it didn’t knock him out, and then our medic cut him open, real careful-like. Every one of these things has a momma worm inside, much bigger than the other ones. We pulled it out and killed it.”

  “What happened?”

  “The little worms went crazy and the guy died.”

  “Not good. You said “my men.” Are you military?”

  “I was a long time ago. Not now.”

  “So, then, the government knows about this stuff? Maybe we can get word out for help after all.”

  “Nobody inside the government knows about this kind of thing any more. The group that I worked for was a secret to begin with, and they were shut down in a budget scandal claiming that they were making up ghost stories to get funded, in a time when everything related to the war was getting money. Better to just call the cops and claim organized crime.”

  Greg leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his belly. “It’s been tried. Back when the world was all nice and normal, my wife Valerie and I used to be friends with another married couple. We had known each other for years, and we used to get together every weekend. Now, Beth and Rick were good people, but they were also into conspiracy theories and all that stuff. My wife was always more interested in that kind of thing than I was, but they were fun to hang out with, and they weren’t fanatics about it.

  “So, about a year ago, they showed up as usual with a casserole on bridge night, and they were all excited about a cover-up right here in Belmont. The government was snatching whole families right out of their houses for secret experiments, right under our noses. You know the kind of stories the conspiracy nuts talk about.”

  “At least it wasn’t aliens.”

  “At this point, I’m not ruling out anything. Anyway, we laughed about it at dinner, and Rick said he was going to check it out for himself. He and Beth came back not two days later in the middle of the night, all flushed and breathless with excitement. They had located the houses of some of the missing families and broken in. They found houses standing empty of people but full of their possessions, even their cars were still in the garage. Well, as you can imagine, this shook us up pretty good. Rick said that he was going to get the sheriff down to one of the houses the next day.”

  “Well, no offense, but if it was a government conspiracy, wouldn’t the cops be in on it? Going to the sheriff would just be sticking your neck in a noose.”

  “I said the same thing, but Rick and Sheriff Cloyd grew up together. Rick was convinced that they would help him expose the whole thing to the media, and the secret government agency would have to shut down. Exposing secret government projects is kind of a thing with that crowd.”

  “Greg, it’s not a government conspiracy.”

  “Hold on, I’m not done yet. He goes to Cloyd, says his piece. Cloyd’s not convinced, but he agrees that if Rick can get the news interested, he’ll follow up and put some credibility behind him. So, sure enough, Rick gets the attention of a TV news show that sends a crew in to interview him all the way from Cheyenne.

  “Rick is strutting around like the cock of the walk, I tell you. He tells everybody he knows to come to his house the next day, the whole interview will be filmed outside on his lawn. So we go. There’s about fifty people all rubbernecking in a big circle around the film crew. They have a pretty blonde holding a microphone, two guys with cameras on their shoulders, and one of those vans with the dish on top. It’s the real deal. Rick even gets the star treatment with makeup and everything.

  “Now, Rick’s plan was to talk about the disappearances and take the crew to four or five of the empty houses. He even had dates from
when they stopped going to work and stopped collecting their mail. He was pretty shrewd and he didn’t want to sound like some crackpot, so he implied he was talking about some surge in small-town crime or a serial killer or something like that. He had it all worked out.”

  Anne gasped. “Oh my God, I know what happened. It was all over the news.”

  “What was?” I said. “I haven’t kept up with things the last couple of years.”

  Greg looked at me. “You really don’t know? Rick walked out and started talking, just like he had planned, with Beth standing proudly beside him. But instead of his plan of giving the facts and letting the reporter be the one to come to a conclusion, he started going on about secret government assassination squads and spaceships and every other conspiracy theory cliché you can imagine. I’ve never heard anyone sound crazier.

  “Then, with a grin, he pulled out a gun and killed Beth, right in front of the cameras. No warning at all. Then it was random people in the crowd, and finally himself, right in the head. They called it the Belmont Suicide Pact, and made out like Rick and Beth had planned it all from the start.”

  “Sounds like the sheriff tipped off the bad guys and Rick got turned into a bag.”

  “Well, no shit. I’m just glad that Rick never mentioned me to the cops or the news people, or I imagine that this house would be standing empty right now as well.”

  “I’d think that after seeing all of that happen, you’d have been convinced that your friend really was crazy.”

  “No, sir. I knew Rick for twenty years. He was a kind, thoughtful man, and even if he did like to talk about the occasional Man in Black, he wasn’t exactly the murder-suicide type. I knew something had happened to him, so I went checking around myself. I connected with his other friends and looked at the houses myself. Funny thing, the ones that he told the police about, maybe half of his list, were stripped clean, as if the families had moved out. The others were just like he described, empty of people but with all of their things still in place. Like they just up and left. Or were taken. So that’s what I do now, try and get the people out before the house ends up deserted like the rest.”