Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  “It’s a drop of blood, or a cup of blood, or at the very most, a sacrificial human being. And that’s to do something significant. Something at the upper limit of possibility as far as Henry knows. But hundreds of people and thousands of gallons of blood? Henry says that’s not just a matter of scale. It’s something completely unknown.”

  Anne shivered and turned away from me to look out the window. I could see the fear on her face, reflected in the glass.

  We were silent after that, just driving through town, feeling the Rover rock and shudder under sudden gusts of wind, and passing by people in their front yards nailing boards across windows and hauling lawn furniture indoors.

  When we hit Main Street, there were still a few people out carrying bags of bottled water and cans of gas, with the occasional line in front of a grocery store. Boards were rapidly going up over plate glass here as well.

  Anne tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a pair of empty prison buses parked in front of the police station. The prison and state names on the sides of the huge gray vehicles weren’t local, and weren’t all the same. Though the buses were slightly different in design, they did share all the same key features. Iron bars covered the windows, and a steel-mesh door separated the passenger section from the guard section up front.

  Men were milling around the front of the station and leaning up against the buses. They had machetes in their hands and were faceless behind riot helmets with dark face shields. They took no notice of us as we drove past.

  “Hey, Chuck, you guys have a prison up here?”

  “Nope, I didn’t even know we had any buses.”

  “Did you see the helmets?” said Anne.

  I nodded. “Yeah, and half of those guys were wearing body armor, too. No headshots and no gutting.”

  Anne looked worried. “That’s going to be a real problem for us if your idea about the Mother doesn’t work out.”

  I watched the clouds roll over each other in a slow boil. “I wouldn’t worry about it. If my idea about the Mother doesn’t work out, we’ll be dead long before we have to worry about these guys.”

  38

  We drove past the Keller Mining Company without stopping. The plant entrance was closed, and there were guards posted behind the sliding chain-link fence gates. They were wearing riot helmets and Kevlar vests, and they weren’t doing anything but standing and staring through the gate. The employee parking lot behind them was a vast, empty concrete field.

  Chuck craned his head around and watched the entrance recede into the distance. The guard’s heads did not turn to track us as we passed.

  “The actual quarries are on the other side of the cutting houses where the slabs are finished. Most places just cut the stone out of the ground and ship it, but we finish it here at the plant. Countertops, pavers, steps, pretty much anything that can be pre-cut and shipped. We don’t sell the raw stone.”

  “We? You work there?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much everyone goes right from high school to the plant. Not much else out here, especially not if you want a living wage. I work on the pumps and shit that supply water to the gang saws and the thermalling gear. It’s not too bad. I pay my bills and I still have all my fingers. Can’t ask for more than that.” He stuck his arm between the seats and pointed. “Pull off the road over here. We can hike back behind the plant and get into the quarries that way.”

  We swayed in unison as the Rover bounced off the raised asphalt onto the low scrub that dominated the landscape. Scraping and squeaking filled the cabin as I drove over the tough, woody bushes.

  Everything was greener than I had expected out here in the dry western flatlands, with ankle-high weeds and low trees with wide, fat canopies. I put the largest tree between the truck and the highway, but it ended up looking more like a picnic scene than camouflage.

  We got out of the car and dug through our gear for weapons. Chuck threaded a black nylon hip holster through his belt and dropped in his Taurus. He also stuffed an extra clip into the back pocket of his jeans. Anne unrolled Dominic’s blanket and pulled out the drum-fed shotgun that he had given her.

  Chuck whistled appreciatively. “Goddamn, lady. Where the hell did that come from?”

  “An admirer. The store was out of flowers.”

  “Nice.”

  I belted on my .45, freshly supplied with ammo thanks again to Dominic, and then strapped on my steel baton. Of the two weapons, I felt a lot better about the baton.

  We crunched across the flat prairie while wind flattened the grass around us in sporadic waves and whipped the tree branches into a frenzy. The ground dipped into a shallow gully that looked like it might have been a creek in years past. On the far side of it stood a long stretch of chain-link fence.

  Through the fence we could see the back of a tall, corrugated metal building. Acetylene bottles were racked neatly in ten-foot cradles behind the building, and cigarette butts littered the ground around a metal door with a single dusty pane of glass set at head height. A metal “No Smoking” sign was bolted to the wall directly over the butts. Black ash marks on the face of it showed where blue-collar rebels had crushed out their cigarettes on it.

  Chuck gestured. “This is the back of the shop where we work on busted equipment. The quarries are about half a mile that way.”

  We kept following the fence. On the other side, the buildings gave way to a vast open area with rutted gravel tracks running between the plant and the quarry area. A few hundred yards later the tracks curved away from us, leaving nothing to see but scrub and the skeletal tops of the block cranes in the distance. We stopped when the first stacks of stone slabs appeared.

  Chuck spit and hitched up his pants. “This is Site Two. Number One is further in. I don’t suppose anyone has a pair of bolt cutters hidden in their pockets?” The fence was twelve feet high with a barbed wire cap that angled outward at the top.

  “Electrified?”

  Chuck shook his head. I touched it briefly with the back of my hand just to make sure, but it was fine. I squatted down and put my fingers through the bottom edge of the fence and bunched the lowest six inches of it up in my fists.

  I used to do this kind of thing all the time to impress Maggie, or as she liked to point out, impress myself. I stopped years ago when everything went gray and I let my life seep away, but now I felt the old urge tugging at my cheeks and making me smile. I glanced over at Anne to see if she was watching. She was.

  I squeezed hard, twisted, and pulled. The metal strands ground together in my fists and then sheared apart. I kept a straight face as I glanced up, but her wide-eyed look of amazement made me want to laugh out loud.

  Chuck stepped back, but he didn’t draw on me this time. “That’s fucked up. I sure hope you really are on our side.”

  “Our side?”

  “You know, people. Normal people.”

  “Chuck, if you think you’re normal, I have some bad news for you.”

  To his credit, he grinned. “I guess that’s true.”

  I moved up a few inches and repeated the process until there was a ragged tear in the fence about five feet high, and then I stretched the edges apart so that we could slip through without getting snagged on the sharp bits.

  Quarry Two was frozen in mid-stride, like any other mining or construction project between shifts. The pit itself was an enormous three-sided box, with the open side a ramp that allowed vehicle access to the back wall where most of the cutting took place.

  All three sides were solid stone with flat faces with sunken geometrical sections missing out of them. Slabs were cut from the top down, leaving a weird saw-toothed shelf marking the current level of progress.

  Two cranes stood silently dangling chains high over the pit, while arcane heavy equipment slept haphazardly around them. It was strange to me, like being backstage at an industrial magic show.

  Chuck led us around the excavation area. “This is the active site. Quarry One is a little farther that way, it was shut down about ten
years ago.”

  “Why do they abandon them?” asked Anne while we crunched along on the gravel road.

  “Impurities, mostly. We have feldspar out here, which is good as long as it’s fairly regular in the granite, but big veins of it don’t work for us, so they’ll dig a new pit to get back to saleable stone. Doesn’t happen very often, though. You can run a quarry for twenty or thirty years. Quarry One started in the late seventies and ran through about ninety-six or so. That was all before my time.”

  We hiked about half a mile before spotting more crane masts, this time brown and scabby with rust. A low hill squatted between us and the bottoms of the cranes.

  “Shh.” I stopped and listened. I could hear an engine in the distance, and the faint roar of tires running through low grass and gravel. “Sounds like there’s a security patrol driving around back here, so let’s see if we can get out of the open.”

  We ran to the hill, which was dotted with large shrubs and small trees, as well as several large irregular chunks of stone.

  The growling of the tires grew louder, then stopped. A few seconds later, the engine died and car doors slammed. I jumped a little. The sound was shockingly close.

  Weeds scraped at my neck and chin as I belly crawled up the face of the steep hill, the motion as easy and familiar to me as it had been nearly seventy years ago in the field in Europe. I peered down over the top, hidden by grass and head-sized rocks.

  Close to the base of the hill was a large police van with the back doors gaping open. Six uniformed figures stood perfectly still next to it. They were stout, with big guts and big chests blending into one massive barrel with tree-stump legs and gorilla arms. Black armored vests made them look even larger. They all wore riot helmets with tinted face shields pulled down.

  I frowned and looked harder at the cops. I figured that Piotr would have been running an all-bag crew, but never in my life had I seen bags standing perfectly still like that. Scratch that, the one in the diner had been eerily still, too. And the guards out in front of the plant. Were these something different? Or did they just act differently? This was a really shitty time to find out that I didn’t know as much about the other side as I thought I did.

  The van was parked at the edge of the old quarry, a huge square stone pool half the size of a football field. The granite had been mined from the face of a tall hill, easily a hundred feet higher than the surrounding terrain, and a good fifty feet below it.

  A rectangle of stone and earth was missing from the ground, cutting the hill in half and leaving a deep green lake in front of the sheared-off vertical face, like a giant’s swimming pool with a granite cliff on one side and a downward sloping ramp on the other side leading into the water.

  The left and right sides of the pool were flush with the ground, with the water lapping a little less than two feet below the edge.

  The top of the hill had been leveled, and two massive metal crane arms sprouted out of the flat stone top. They appeared to have been bolted directly into the granite. One of them was still tall and comparatively slender, though dark brown and pitted with rust, while the other was broken about halfway up with the top half pointing down towards the water, looking for all the world like a broken fishing pole.

  A long metal shack stood behind the two cranes. Occasional gusts of wind rippled the glassy surface of the opaque water. Even in the wan, cloud filtered sunlight the emerald water and cut stone had a stark and elemental beauty.

  The unmistakable roar of a diesel bus drew my attention to the gravel road leading up to the pit. Air brakes hissed as the long steel carapace of a prison bus pulled up next to the lake. There was movement behind the barred windows.

  The front doors jerked open and another armored guard emerged, followed by a stream of handcuffed men, one after another, until maybe twenty of them stood in frightened knot. A second guard exited the bus, and between the two of them, they began herding the prisoners towards the quarry. They didn’t speak. Instead, they simply pointed and the men started stumbling forward.

  Anne and Chuck had eased up on either side of me to watch. Anne’s breath tickled my ear as she leaned close and whispered, “You think this is the first busload?”

  “Probably. I think those giant bags just got here.”

  “If this is where the Mother is, I’m guessing that those men are about to become a fresh batch of bags.”

  “Not if we can help it.”

  The police van by the edge of the quarry swayed a little, and someone emerged from the back. The top of his white cowboy hat obscured his face as he stepped down. As he straightened up, the wind snatched the hat off his head and ruffled his wispy white hair. He smiled with good humor as his hat tumbled and skidded away from him.

  It was Piotr.

  39

  As a group we flinched back from the edge. Piotr had that effect, like a porcelain doll in a horror movie. He looked perfectly normal, even attractive, but somehow more nightmarish for it.

  The sense of wrongness coming off of him was palpable, like seeing a fresh, clean-cut corpse sit up and smile pleasantly at you. As he walked towards the captives, even his stoic guards swayed back ever so slightly.

  I started to edge towards the top again, but Anne grabbed my arm. She put her lips on my ear. “I don’t like this. We should go.”

  “Can’t. This is my chance. Piotr’s here. I can end this right now.”

  She started to speak again, but I pulled away and eased over the crest of the hill so that I could see what was happening. Anne and Chuck silently followed.

  As soon as I saw Piotr’s face, I was gripped so strongly by a desire to smash his head in with my baton that I had to clench my fists and my will against the sensation. I squeezed my eyes shut until the tide of compulsion receded. The whole episode only lasted a few seconds, but the near loss of control scared me. I’d never experienced anything like that before.

  Down below, two of the silent guards were working. They held a filthy, handcuffed man between them while Piotr looked him over, noting the bruises and split lips with professional interest. At this distance, his voice carried well enough for us to just make out the words.

  “Let’s take a look at you. Or rather, inside you.” The man jerked but the sudden movement produced no give in the iron grip of his captors. Piotr ran his hands over the man’s head, smiling and nodding to himself as he were picking out melons at the market. The man’s shudder was visible, even this far away.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to join us today. Just don’t have what it takes. But don’t worry, you’ll still be able to help the cause in your own way. I can always use more donors.”

  I wondered if Piotr realized how he looked down there, casually herding prisoners like cattle as if he were unloading railroad cars in front of a labor camp. Must we become that which we attempt to destroy? I thought about the portraits in Georgia’s house and the things that I’d done on this journey so far, and about the things I was willing to do before it was over. I didn’t like the comparison, but I didn’t flinch from it. I’d do whatever it took.

  Piotr stepped back and the guards pushed the captive away from the edge of the quarry to an open area and flanked him. While the first two guards were busy with that, two more from the group by the van peeled off to grab another victim from the bus. It looked very well practiced. Two guards stood at the van, two were holding a victim for Piotr, and two were standing next to the rejected captive.

  The next man got the same treatment with Piotr searching his eyes and touching his face, but this time Piotr smiled and patted him on the cheek. The man tried to lunge forward to get at Piotr. “Good man. You’ll be a welcome addition to the family.”

  The man’s feet were bound and he was pushed to the ground where he was, and the next captive was brought up next to him. This went on for several minutes as the captives by the bus were sorted.

  We slowly sank back behind the crest of the hill and put our heads close togeth
er so that we could talk.

  I spoke as quietly as I could. “It’s not going to get any better than this. He’s just standing there out in the open. The longer we wait, the more captives are going to be in the way, and the less time we’ll have before he’s finished and we lose him.”

  Chuck nodded. “What’s the plan?”

  “It’s pretty simple. I’m going to run down there and snap Piotr’s neck for him.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Anne. “I don’t care how tough you think you are, you can’t take on six regular bags by yourself and survive, much less six giant ones in body armor and helmets. And after you drop, they’ll be up this hill and all over the two of us in seconds.”

  I put my hand on hers, but she pulled away. “I know. That’s why you and Chuck are going back to the car and getting out of here.”

  “Not a chance. We’re all going back to the truck together. We’ll do this a different way, one that doesn’t involve suicide.”

  “What way is that? When is Piotr ever going to be just standing out in the open like this again? For that matter, what if I can’t find him again, or if I do, what if I can’t get to him? This is my shot. This is why I came here.”

  Chuck spoke up and earned himself a dark look. “He’s right. It has to be now.” Good old Chuck. “And I’m going to help him.”

  “Goddammit, what did I just say? You two are getting out.”

  “And if he gets away when you’re buried under a pile of bags? This is too important to screw up. Two people have a better chance of killing one old man before his goons tear us apart than just one. If nothing else, one of us can distract the bulk of the bad guys while the other goes for Peter.”

  “And then both of us are dead. Killing Piotr won’t stop his goons from tearing us apart afterwards.”