Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  Anne spoke up. “I get that you’re helping people who are being held captive by bags and all, but how are you finding them? I mean, this isn’t a big city, but it’s still a whole town. There must be thousands of houses and apartments here.”

  Greg put his mug down on the table and leaned back in his chair. “I think that’s enough free information from me tonight. Chuck said he brought you here because you claim to be able to help, and you’ve obviously run into these things before. Now it’s your turn. What do you know?”

  I smiled. “I know that we’re lucky to have found each other, Greg. You know the battleground and where the enemy is, and I know who the commander is, and why the battle is being fought in the first place. The man behind it all is Piotr Rafal Ostrowski.”

  Greg laughed. “Pete Ostrowski? I don’t think so.”

  “You know him?”

  “Well, not personally, but I know plenty about him. He’s a sweet old man and everybody loves him so much they call him Saint Peter. You practically need an insulin shot after shaking his hand.”

  “Everybody knows about him?”

  “I guess so. I mean, after all, he is the mayor.”

  30

  Greg went to the fridge, popped a round magnet off the door and tossed it to me. On the front was a cartoon picture of an older man with a halo around his head, sitting on a fluffy white cloud against a baby blue background. In rounded yellow balloon letters underneath the figure it said, “ST. PETER FOR MAYOR!” I recognized the face. Even as a campy drawing it gave me a chill. Anne took it from me to have a look.

  Greg sat back down. “You can have it, I have a bunch. Pete’s lived here forever, and been mayor for the last, I don’t know, seven years? I’ve met the man. A stiff breeze would blow him over, and there’s not a mean-spirited bone in his body. I seriously think you have the wrong guy.”

  “No. That’s him, I recognize the face. He’s older than the last time I saw him, and it’s been awhile, but I’ll never forget him.” A vivid memory popped into my head of Piotr walking between two hanging bodies, pushing them aside like heavy hanging curtains. His face frozen in self-righteous anger and his hands stained pink with scrubbed off blood. I could remember every detail as if I were still there.

  Greg sat back down at the table. “How long is awhile?”

  “The last time I saw Piotr it was 1945, in Warsaw.”

  Greg froze. There’s a look that people get when they suddenly discover that they’re trapped in a room with an actual crazy person. You can see their eyes go batshit, while disconnected smiles solidify on their faces.

  “I’m not crazy, I’m just older than I look.”

  He raised his hands and made patting motions in the air. “Of course, Abe! I never said you were crazy. I wouldn’t do that.”

  Anne stifled a laugh, which I did my best to ignore. “Look. You believe that your friends and neighbors are being mind controlled by freaky tentacle-faced worms that live inside them, right? You’ve seen that?”

  “Well … yes, but that’s different.”

  “No, it isn’t. I got caught up in the last operation that your mayor was running, and this is what happened to me. I haven’t aged a day since. It’s the truth. And frankly, it’s not that weird compared to the other stuff you’ve seen.”

  His eyes flicked to the ceiling and back to me so fast I almost didn’t see it. “I guess I have to give you that. I mean, why the hell wouldn’t an immortal guy show up here out of the blue to help me fight body snatching worm people? Why the fuck not?” He sniggered, and then laughed, and then roared, slapping his hand on his leg over and over.

  “I mean, shit, at this point you could have swooped in on a fucking dinosaur and things wouldn’t be any weirder!”

  He laughed until he had a coughing fit. Now it was my turn to get the crazy person heebee-jeebies. He stopped and wiped his eyes. “Sorry, sorry.” He giggled one more time. “Oh, that felt good. I can’t remember the last time I had a good laugh like that. You’re right, of course. If you say you’re immortal, and you’ve been fighting Saint Peter since the forties, then who am I to say different? I’m just glad you’re here. We even have something of an advantage, since Peter doesn’t know you’re here.”

  “About that. Even if he doesn’t know I’m here tonight, he knows I’m coming. After all, he’s spent the last couple of weeks leading me here by the nose.”

  Anne and Greg blurted out, “What?” at the same time.

  I turned to Anne. “Think about it. When Dominic took the pieces from us at the hospital, he was away clean. The only reason we were able to track him down was because Peter ordered Dominic to leave some goons behind. He knew damn well those guys weren’t a real threat.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Yeah, three guys with guns were totally no threat.”

  I shrugged modestly. “And you remember what happened to them, right? Their real purpose was to lay a trail to Dominic, who Piotr conveniently failed to kill after receiving the altar pieces from him. Which, of course, gave us the final to Belmont.” A thought struck me. “Greg, you said this has been going on for a year now?”

  “Or longer. I only got wind of it a year ago. Who knows how many people went missing before that?”

  “That’s what I thought. So if he’s been operating under the radar for a year or more, why would he expose himself now?”

  Anne got it first. “Because he’s ready. Whatever he’s been setting up all this time is done, and he needs the last parts to make it happen. And if you’re right about drawing you here even after he has the altar pieces, then he must need you to make it work.”

  “That’s my guess. Only I don’t think he’s completely ready yet. If he were, he would have had an army of bags lurking around the hotel and all the restaurants to grab me the second I showed up. Hell, the bag in the diner would have grabbed me, come to that. No, he’s not finished, but he will be soon enough that he wants me close at hand.”

  Anne said, “You obviously took some power or something from that blood pit. Maybe he needs it back to finish what he started?”

  “Why, when he’s been making another pit for at least a year? Why not just use that?”

  Greg used his coffee cup like a gavel on the thin table. “Hold up. Blood pit? Power you stole? Clue me in, here.”

  So, for the next hour, Anne and I filled Greg in on the whole mess, starting with the war and ending up with our arrival into town. It finally sank in, as I was telling the tale. The past that I had been running from all these years was finally catching up to me.

  Piotr was no longer years and miles away. He was here, in this very town, right now, and it didn’t matter how cute his nickname was, or how harmless he looked on his campaign button. There was something in him, something driving him, that was beyond sanity or good or evil. He was wrong. Twisted out of step in a way that made the hair on your neck instinctively rise.

  I didn’t know what Piotr was planning for me or this town, but I was terrified of it.

  31

  There were no unoccupied bedrooms in the small house, so Greg made us a pallet of sleeping bags and blankets on the living room floor. By the time we had unloaded our duffel bags from the car and gotten settled in, the rest of the house was asleep. Soft darkness made the impromptu bed cozy and snug, with the white noise of the ceiling fan overhead adding to the pleasant sense of isolation. Anne leaned her head against my chest, warming me.

  “Abe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re going to beat this Peter guy, and we’re going to make it out of here alive. All of us.”

  “Even Chuck? Because if you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re doing it wrong.”

  “Yes, even Chuck. I saw the way you looked back in the kitchen. I don’t know if Greg noticed, but I could tell you were afraid. I just wanted to say that you don’t have to be. We’re going to be fine.”

  I gave her hand a squeeze and lied. “I’m not worried. Piotr’s an old man now. We’re going
to kick his ass.” The words were ashes in my mouth. Even though he was old on the outside, whatever was driving him from the inside didn’t care about age. It didn’t slow down or weaken or lose focus. It just burned. “How’s your nose doing? Can you warn me if something gets close tonight?”

  “I think so. This place still reeks, but I’m sure I can work through it now.”

  “Okay.” I closed my eyes and tried to put tomorrow out of my thoughts. “Night.”

  She stayed close, pressed against my side. “Night.”

  We slept like that until morning noises from the kitchen woke me. Anne was curled up on her side facing away from me, so I slipped out of the covers and grabbed a quick shower. When I got back, she was still asleep.

  I knelt down and gently shook her. She didn’t wake. I walked around to the other side and pushed her hair out of her face. Her features were pinched and her lips were twitching, like she was almost speaking. The bones in her neck stood out and she was rigid. As sensitive as she was, I should have realized that sleeping this close to Piotr’s operation would affect her. Fear made my heart race.

  “Anne. Anne! Wake up!” I shook her again, this time harder. Her eyelids scrunched down tighter as though she were trying to shut me out. I put my hands on each side of her head and put my forehead to hers. “Anne, it’s Abe. I’m right here. Wake up.”

  “Abe.” It was a faint whisper.

  “It’s me. Time to wake up.”

  She sucked in a huge lungful of air and her arms shot out and clutched me tightly. “Oh, God, Abe.” She gasped a few more times like she couldn’t catch her breath, and I realized belatedly that she was crying. I had no idea what to do, so I just held her until she calmed down and pulled her face out of my neck, now wet with her tears.

  “Bad dream, like before?”

  She swallowed a few times before speaking, her words coming fast and tumbling over each other. “Worse. So much worse. I was in the air, way up high above Belmont. It looked like regular air but it felt all oily and greasy, and it wouldn’t let me fall. I was just kind of sliding around on my stomach and on my back, flopping around. It was horrible. I kept trying to stand up, but I couldn’t get my balance. You know how sometimes in dreams you do things without knowing why? It was like that. I kept trying to stand up and then falling down, over and over again.

  “And it hurt, but not like physical pain. It was like failure and loss and four-in-the-morning loneliness all at once. Does that make any sense?” I held her hands and nodded my best understanding nod. Most of all I tried to offer her my calm reassurance, because right this instant, huddled with her on the floor in a stranger’s living room, she radiated a kind of brittle madness.

  “Way down below I could see the town lurching back and forth underneath me as I flopped all around in the air. God, it was so mixed up, like being a cat in a dryer or something, tumbling end over end and trying to see what was happening on the other side of the glass.”

  A harsh little bark of a laugh escaped her lips. I glanced over at the kitchen to see if anyone had noticed. “You know what else? The houses weren’t really houses. They were roundish and swollen and you could see right through them, like if you blew up a bladder or something and shone a flashlight through it. Some of them, they were healthy looking. Pink. But some of them had worms in them, curling around each other inside. Those houses looked saggy and full of, I don’t know, brown jelly.” She squeezed my hands. “You wouldn’t believe how many of them were wormy, Abe. Dozens of houses, maybe hundreds. The whole town is sick. Rotten.” She hugged me tighter and whispered in my ear. “I think it was real. I think that’s how bad it really is.”

  We sat like that on the floor for a while. She stared into space while I rubbed her cold arms and hands. She was trembling.

  Chuck peeked out of the kitchen door behind Anne’s back. I shook my head and he gave me a silent nod and disappeared.

  Anne sniffed a little and pulled away. “Thanks. I think I’m better.” She gave herself a shake. “It was so intense. Thick, like being steeped in cloying rotten sickness.” She stood up and scrubbed her face with her hands. “I really need a shower.”

  “I hate to ask, but do you think you could remember where some of those houses were? Maybe mark a map?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. I could see the houses, but they didn’t look like houses so I wouldn’t recognize them if I saw them. And I have no idea where in town I was looking at any given time. I don’t know any of the landmarks or streets. It was just this endless tumble across the sky, over unknown territory. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m sorry you had to go through it.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be back.” She got up and practically ran into the bathroom.

  I thought hard about Georgia and her paintings as I folded the blankets and rolled up the sleeping bags. Anne was strong. I had to believe that she could handle this.

  Having restored the living room to its original state of disarray, I went into the kitchen for some of the coffee I had been smelling for the past twenty minutes.

  Mazie and Chuck were sitting at the table not talking. Chuck was eating a bowl of cereal and reading his paperback, and Mazie was reading the paper. I helped myself to a cup and gave the cereal box on the counter a shake. “Morning. You mind?”

  Mazie spoke without looking up. “Help yourself.”

  The cereal appeared to be made entirely out of spun sugar, so I put the box back down. It looked like the equivalent of eating a can of frosting for breakfast. The coffee would have to do. I’d have killed for a couple of eggs or some of Henry’s grits, but a quick search of the pantry and refrigerator turned up a bleak landscape of pre-packaged boxes full of dried things that you added water or milk to. Astronaut food, Maggie used to call it.

  The newspaper crackled as Mazie folded it back up and pushed it to the center of the table. “Chuck said your girlfriend looked pretty upset this morning.”

  “Nightmare.” Mazie glanced at Chuck, who was peering over his book, but didn’t say anything.

  “Who had a nightmare?” Greg swept into the kitchen with an ugly plaid robe, frayed into softness by time, flapping around him. He started groping for a mug in the cabinet.

  “The girlfriend,” said Mazie.

  “I see.” Greg poured. “A bad one?”

  “Looked like it.”

  Anne came into the kitchen, hair still damp and brushed smooth and gleaming. She took my coffee out of my hands and had a sip. “You ever have good ones?”

  Greg chuckled. “I guess not. What was it about, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Why, are you a psychiatrist?”

  “Okay, sorry. You hungry?”

  “Ugh, no. Thanks.”

  Mazie stood up, making her chair squeak backwards against the linoleum. “Seriously, it took you like five minutes to get it together when you woke up. What was it?”

  Anne stuck her chin out, which I had learned was a bad sign. “What’s your problem? If this whole situation isn’t giving you nightmares, then maybe something’s wrong with you. You think of that?”

  There was more going on than just morbid curiosity about a bad dream. I watched the wary, expectant expressions on Mazie’s and Greg’s faces, and then things clicked.

  I looked at Greg. “It’s your wife, isn’t it? The living room is full of pictures of you and her, but we haven’t met her.” The anger drained out of Anne’s face as it clicked for her, too. Greg didn’t answer. “That’s how you know who to rescue. She’s dreaming about it, too. But she’s not the same anymore, is she? That’s why all of you are so interested in Anne’s nightmare.” He looked away, so I asked quietly, “When did you have to lock her up?”

  “Two months ago. How did you know?”

  “We met somebody else that had a similar thing happen to them.”

  “Jesus, this is happening somewhere else?”

  “Not exactly. She was living with one of those altar pieces I was telling you about.�
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  “What happened to her? Was she okay after you took the piece away? Did she get better?”

  I hated to see the hope in his eyes as he said that. “I don’t know what would have happened, Greg. She tried to kill us. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, if that altar thing was doing it to her, then it only stands to reason that once it was gone, she would have been fine.”

  “Could be. But Greg, maybe not. And your wife hasn’t been exposed to any of the altar pieces.”

  “But it’s all connected. If we stop whatever is happening, then Valerie will get better. It’s possible.”

  I didn’t look him in the eyes. “Sure, it’s possible.”

  “We’re getting off track here,” said Mazie. “The point is that she’s like Valerie and she was loose last night. While we were sleeping, she was loose.”

  Anne took a step in Mazie’s direction. “I’m not crazy!”

  Mazie balled her fists and stepped closer. “Only crazy people say that!”

  I got between them and put my hands up. “Hang on! Mazie, I appreciate that you think you might have been in danger last night, but I assure you that you weren’t. Anne, we know you aren’t crazy, so calm down.”

  “You totally don’t know that,” said Mazie.

  “I don’t know it for sure about anyone, including you. Or me. Or anyone who claims to be running an underground railroad for victims of worm infested bad guys. What I do know that you don’t is that Anne is particularly suited for this. She has a gift. Her grandfather had it, too. She knows when a … coerced person is close, and she can tell you where they are. That makes her a little more sensitive than the rest of us, but she can handle it. Her grandfather had dreams, too, but they never got the best of him. Don’t worry about Anne, this is what she’s good at.” That sounded great coming out of my mouth. God, I hoped it was right.

  “She better be.” Mazie grabbed her rifle out of the corner. “I’m locking my room tonight, and I’ll have this, so you better head for Chuck’s room if you lose it.” She stomped out of the kitchen.