Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  “I got something. I wouldn’t agree to bring her the food unless she gave me something I could use. Something really good. I tried to get Peter’s location, but I don’t think she knows it. At first she tried to trade the location for the food, but when I wouldn’t give in without it, she gave up. In the end, she told me where the Mother was. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah, I think so. When Peter called me, he said he would give Henry and Leon to the Mother to turn them into bags.” When it hit me, it must have been on my face.

  “What?”

  “We might not need to rescue the people in the rest of those houses. Anne, do you remember what happened to the other worms when we killed the big one that hurt Leon?”

  She nodded. “They went nuts, and then they went all limp.”

  “Right. Slow twitching, maybe, but pretty much inert. I think the small worms attach to all the parts of your body, but the orders just come from the mother worm, the single big one that each bag carries.” I was feeling my way around the idea, guided by some instinctive knowledge that I didn’t understand.

  Anne shrugged. “I don’t see how that helps with the whole town.”

  “What if the small mothers are connected to the big Mother in the same way?”

  “So you’re thinking that if we kill the Mother, the worms inside all the bags everywhere will go limp.”

  “And all the bags will die, since it’s only the worms that are keeping them alive.”

  Mazie had been inspecting her rifle in the corner of the kitchen, but now she thumped it back down and turned to face me. She crossed her arms.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. No organism would evolve like that, where you kill one and the whole family tree dies. Best case you’d just stop Peter from being able to infect more people.”

  “What if it wasn’t a family, though? What if it was only one creature, and the worms inside each host were just acting as a remote apparatus? The creature stays in one place and sends out infected hosts to hunt. Then it just reels them in when they’re done.”

  “Like some kind of psychic colony creature? That’s pretty far out there.”

  “Well, I can tell you for sure that killing the main worm inside a bag disables the rest, even if they are several feet apart. And they all go nuts at exactly the same time. So at least at that level, they are in communication. Why not one more level? A predator that had a hundred bodies would be very successful, right?”

  “Okay, let’s say that you’re right. Then we absolutely can’t kill the primary Mother. Every coerced victim would die, according to you. We’d be murdering who knows how many innocent people.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice, Mazie.”

  She slammed her hands down onto the table with a bang. “No! My dad is out there! You’re not murdering my dad!”

  I yelled back. “Every bag out there is somebody’s father or mother or sibling, and you guys kill them when you have to, right? How is that different?”

  “Because I say it is!” She snatched up her rifle and pointed it at me. The barrel was just as huge and ominous as I remembered, but this time I could also see the panicked face of the young girl behind it. Weeks of stress and fear had worn these people down to nothing.

  I slowly raised my hands. “Mazie, listen to me for second, okay? There are a lot of very scared and very innocent people out there who aren’t infected. And they’re all going to die if we can’t throw a pretty big monkey wrench into Piotr’s operation.”

  “You don’t understand! My dad is still inside there with the worms. He would talk to me, sometimes. He’s not gone. Not completely.”

  “Okay, if you’re right, then killing the worms should free him. Then he would be saved. If he can’t live without the worms, then the damage is already too great and he can’t be saved, no matter what we do, right?”

  “We can take him to a hospital, they can remove the worms there and save him.”

  “Mazie, I’ve seen what the worms do.”

  “Shut up!” I heard the safety click off.

  “They eat holes in everything. Even the brain, Mazie. I don’t even know how they keep the host going, but whatever they do is why shooting them in the body doesn’t work.” I could see her finger turn white as she put pressure on the trigger.

  “I said shut up!”

  “Your dad wouldn’t want all those hostages to die for him, you know that.”

  “You shut your fucking mouth!” Mazie screamed. She pulled the trigger.

  My eyes never left her finger, and as it jerked back, I tried to twist out of the way. I’m faster than any human being has a right to be, but it wasn’t enough.

  Being shot in the chest isn’t a clear, precise feeling. It’s a realization that something terrible and irreversible has happened, followed by a crashing tidal wave of sensation that only resolves into pain after long, bewildering moments.

  The world became a series of choppy, disconnected movie frames passing in front of me. I saw the flash. I saw Anne with one hand on the barrel and one hand in a fist, smashing against the side of Mazie’s face. The next image was a view across the kitchen floor, just feet. Then it was feet and Mazie’s face, mouth bloody and eyes rolled back, her cheek flattened out where it was pressed into the linoleum.

  Then I stopped seeing anything at all.

  36

  I wanted to live. That fact came as something of a surprise to me after the last year of planning out my death, but there it was. All of the estrangement and loneliness, loss and ennui, and just plain hopelessness faded and shrank to nothing, like shadows before the sun of my new perspective.

  They say that everything becomes precious to the dying; savoring each sunset, each touch and gesture from a loved one, that each and every breath becomes sweet. I can tell you that precious is a meaningless and trivial word to describe the trembling reverence that cradles each second of sensation as you die. I cherished the cold that was stealing the sensation from my limbs, the deeply warm pool under my chest and neck, even the bright tearing pain that fought to eclipse everything else. I pleaded and hoped for one more single instant of agony.

  I don’t know how long I lay there on the floor. It could have been seconds or minutes or hours that I strained with everything that I had to exist for just a little longer. No one can do that forever. Exhausted, I slipped away and waited for numb oblivion, but it never came. The pain in my chest sorted itself out into a serrated tin saw that ran from ribs to shoulder blade, vivid and attention grabbing. The puffy undifferentiated pain of before was gone, bringing my body into sharp tactile focus. Feet, hands, belly, face. I could feel them down to the smallest pore and fold. With feeling came volition, allowing me to flicker my eyes open and spread my hands against the cool floor. Sound rushed back, carrying with it my name, shaped by Anne’s urgent breath.

  I coughed and watched a glistening ruby fan unfold in front of my face as blood sprayed out across the floor. My anguished name rang out again, sweet in my ears.

  My will and my body finally reengaged, and I pushed up off the floor into a sitting position. A sticky, sucking sound accompanied my separation from the linoleum. I focused on Anne who was crying and fluttering her hands over my shoulders and chest, afraid to touch me lest she cause me more harm. I resolved the issue by grabbing her hands in mine and looking into her eyes.

  “S’okay. M’alright.” Everything coming out of my mouth was mushy. My voice was slurred and sounded threadier than I had expected.

  Anne sagged back against a table leg and squeezed her eyes shut with a little sob. Greg and Chuck’s stunned faces swam into focus as I blinked away the fog.

  Anne was the first to act. She got up and fetched a butcher knife out of a block on the counter. Seconds later, she had sawed off my shirt.

  “I can’t see anything with all this blood. I need something to clean this up with. Chuck, find me something. Chuck!” Chuck jumped, startled back to attention. He dampened a kitchen towel in the sink, sq
ueezed it out hard, and tossed it to her.

  Anne snapped it out of the air one-handed and spent the next couple of minutes gingerly dabbing and wiping at my back. Chuck and Greg walked around behind me to watch her work. The towel stopped wiping at me.

  “Well?”

  “Motherfucker.” That was Chuck.

  That didn’t sound good. “What?”

  Anne came around to my front and wiped at my chest, a little more vigorously than before. The men dutifully came around to the front and this time both of them swore.

  I looked down at the semi-clean swatch of skin over my lower ribs. In the center of an angry purple-red weal was a puncture wound about half an inch wide. The edges were lined up and mated, outlined with red-black seams of clotted blood. There was no bleeding. It was at least a day-old gunshot wound. I poked at it with a finger, which hurt like a son of a bitch, but the wound didn’t feel like it was going to tear open if I moved.

  There was a loud click in the kitchen, and I looked up to see the inside of Chuck’s Taurus. “Shit! You’re one of them! You know where we live and what we look like. Fuck.”

  Chuck looked scared and pissed, while Greg looked scared and tired. I looked at Anne, and saw uncertainty and even a little fear on her face. It hurt to think that I had lost the closeness that had grown between us. That she no longer had faith in me.

  “I’m not one of them, I’m worm free.” I sounded much clearer, nearly normal.

  Chuck’s voice was high and fast, panicked. “Bullshit! You should be dead, but you’re just sitting there talking like nothing happened. That’s all the proof we need.”

  “It’s true that bags aren’t affected by shots to the chest, but think about that. They aren’t affected at all. They don’t fall down and nearly die. They just run you down and pull your head off. I was down for, what, ten minutes?”

  “Shit, not even ten seconds. More like five.” The gun was still pointed at my face. “Even you’re not one of them, you still aren’t one of us. You’re not human.”

  “I already told you that, remember? I’m older than I look and all that stuff?”

  “Dude, that was just crazy talk. This is real.”

  While all of this was going on, Anne must have come to her own conclusion about me. She slipped under my arm and helped me to my feet.

  Her voice rang with scorn and authority, loud and sharp in the small space of the kitchen. “Shut up and point that thing somewhere else, Chuck.” He backed up a step and the barrel of his gun wavered. “This whole town is about to host an involuntary blood drive. Now isn’t the time to be killing off your own people.”

  “Fine.” He put the gun away, but he didn’t relax. “Just remember that it’s on you if he turns on us.”

  I stepped away from Anne, wobbly but gravity defiant. “I’m going to wash off all this blood and pack up. You guys decide if you want to trust us or not. Oh, and somebody should probably grab that rifle and see to Mazie. I don’t expect she’ll be in a very understanding mood when she wakes up.”

  I tried not to let on how much I hurt and how weak I was as I turned and walked carefully out of the kitchen.

  37

  Scalding water drilled into my face and chest and ran out of my open mouth as I panted and leaned against the tiles in the shower with my outspread hands. Steam curled and rolled up the opaque and beaded glass door and then out into the foggy bathroom.

  The hot water was dissolving the scabs sealing up the twin gunshot wounds in my chest and back, allowing long translucent red trails to snake down my body. The one from my chest was a fascinating, ever-changing river, the other a mystery revealed only by the dilute whorls of blood eddying around my feet.

  I’ve been shot before, but never in the chest. I took a 9mm from a P08 Parabellum, as the Germans called the Luger, in the thigh, and at the time it was the worst injury I’d ever had, despite being essentially a deep cut.

  The bullet missed the bone and went clean out the other side and even stopped bleeding in about ten minutes. I had never been so proud of a scar before in my life.

  When I fell in the pit in Warsaw, it took all my scars away from me, which was fine, except that it screwed me out of a Purple Heart. Turns out you need to be able to produce a wound for that.

  The water started to run cold, waking me from my reverie. I made an effort to focus and clear my head, letting the frigid water bite into me until I reconnected with the present. I shut off the water and wondered how long I had been standing there. I still felt weak, but the kind of weak you feel after recovering from a high fever, not the kind you should feel when recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound.

  More than ever, my body felt alien to me, a thing of single-minded purpose that had nothing to do with my own.

  My clothes were ruined, so I just wadded them up and threw them in the corner. I put on a fresh set from my duffel bag and packed away the toiletries that I had left out this morning. I had a feeling that Anne and I were never coming back to this house.

  I entered the kitchen cautiously, but this time there were no guns pointed at me. Mazie was nowhere to be seen, but at least the rifle was back in the corner where it belonged. I dropped the duffel on the table. Anne took one look, nodded to me, and left to pack her things as well.

  Greg spoke first. “Mazie went to her room. I think she’s in shock.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “She’s not a bad person, Abe. She just can’t face the fact that she’s lost her whole family. I can understand that, even if you can’t.” He dropped his eyes. “We took a vote. Mazie and I are going to try to get more information from Valerie. We’re not going with you. Even if we don’t learn anything else, I can’t just leave her here, tied up and alone.”

  “I understand. How about you, Chuck?”

  “If there’s a chance that taking out the Mother will get rid of all the bags at once, then that’s what we have to do. I mean, it’s a no-brainer, right? No matter how many bags you kill, she’s just going to make more. So, I’m coming with you.”

  “I thought you didn’t trust me.”

  “I don’t. But I figure that I can still drop you to the ground with a good shot if I have to. Plus, you could have attacked us last night, or in the kitchen when your secret got out, and you didn’t. I guess that’s worth something. Besides, I like the idea of having one of the monsters on my team for a change.”

  He gave me a grin, and I couldn’t help but smile in return. “Fair enough. Greg, before we part ways, tell me where to find the Mother.”

  Greg’s eyes went to the ceiling in a now-familiar gesture. Pain crossed his features as the question reminded him of what he had to do to pay for the information I was asking for. “The quarry. Chuck knows where it is.”

  “Thank you. Good luck tonight, and be safe.” We shook hands.

  “You, too.”

  “Grab anything you need, Chuck. We’re leaving in ten.”

  We waited at the front door while Greg took armfuls of frozen food up the stairs and then came back down for more. Even from this far away I could clearly hear frantic moaning and crunching and sucking noises from upstairs that never paused or slowed. When Chuck came in with his gear, we left the house without a word.

  Low and dark, the oppressive clouds squatted over us, blotting out the sun as far as the horizon in every direction. Even now, during the day, the sunlight picked up a sickly greenish tint as it filtered down between the swirling bands of opaque thunderheads, lending a shadowy aquatic feeling to everything. The wind pushed hard and then shrieked away, plucking leaves and trash off the ground and hurling it at us in random tantrums.

  We piled into the Range Rover, relieved at the sudden silence as the heavy doors sealed tight. “Where to, Chuck?”

  Chuck was in the back seat in the middle, where he could look out the windshield between the front seats. “North. Keller Mining owns a whole section up there, with a couple of pits and a bunch of warehouses and cutting outfits for the gran
ite. Most people in town work for Keller. Should be pretty deserted today, being a Saturday. When you get out of the subdivision, go right.”

  As we drove, Anne turned on the radio. There were only two channels out here, and both of them were playing the same recorded message in Piotr’s dulcet tones. The broadcast had that low, whining distortion under it that you hear in weather broadcasts during a storm.

  “Attention, Belmont. Please stay in your homes until further notice. Severe weather is expected tonight, so don’t get out on the roads. Emergency vehicles need them clear. Television and telephone service interruptions have been reported, but rest assured that we’re working on it. Keep safe, and God bless.”

  Anne killed the radio when the message started up again. “You think that’ll work?”

  I shrugged. “Well enough. He doesn’t actually need to lock the town down, he just needs the roads clear enough to transport the hostages needed to finish his pit. Even if there’s a mass panic later, the traffic alone will bottle everyone up once it hits the only road out of town. Throw a couple of squad cars across that road, and the population leakage should be pretty minimal.”

  “Some people are bound to get out,” said Chuck. “They could bring help eventually. What’s he going to do about that?”

  “Nothing, I’d imagine. The way he was talking on the phone, I don’t think he’s planning on their being an afterwards to worry about.”

  “You and Henry keep saying things like that,” said Anne. “What exactly do you think he’s doing?”

  “I don’t really know. We used to spend hours talking about it after the first time, when we were trying to figure out what was going on, and what to do with the altar pieces that we found. Here’s what we know for sure from Piotr’s journal.

  “He thought that whatever he was doing back in the war was going to avenge his family and his country on Germany. So, at the least, he figured on taking out an entire country.

  “None of Piotr’s notes that were taped into the ritual book mentioned the expected results, but I can tell you something that stood out. Henry knows more than a little about rituals and blood sacrifices, and this whole pool-of-blood thing is way out of scale for anything he’s ever heard of.