Bad to the Bone

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” pounds out of the speaker that sits under the mounted deer head on the opposite wall. I smile, mentally giving Shane points for every time he plays a song that was released after he died. The DJs stuck - in - time phenomenon isn’t a gimmick—it’s a sad fact of unlife.

  One of their gig posters hangs on the wall above my desk, displaying the six DJs in the garb and attitude of their “Life Times”: Monroe, the 1940s bluesman; Spencer, purveyor of ‘50s rockabilly; Jim, who brings us the dark, psychedelic side of the ‘60s; Noah, the dreadlocked reggae dude representing the 1970s; Regina, the ‘80s punk/Goth chick (and the only one who actually looks like a vampire); and youngest of all, Shane, whose broadcast rounds out the twentieth century with whatever music passes his stringent Generation X authenticity test.

  “So they’re not going to spend the whole day attacking us.” I make an unsuccessful attempt to suppress a yawn. “That’s good, right?”

  “Good for everyone else.” Regina yanks on the silver chain dangling from her belt loop, rolling it over her fingers like rosary beads. “What about me?”

  “Maybe it was a one - time thing.” David holds up a printout. “Maybe the FCC already shut them down.”

  Regina scowls at him. “When has any government ever been that efficient?”

  “The timing could be a coincidence,” I tell her.

  “At exactly midnight on Halloween? I don’t buy it.”

  I glance at the clock on the mantel of the bricked - up fireplace next to me, then put my head down on my desk. I have to be back here to work in five hours. Franklin will no doubt want help soothing the tempers of angry advertisers.

  David shows Regina the different applications FAN has filed for translators, explaining how this was the only one with a conflicting frequency (ours) and no data on the translator’s location. Something’s definitely fishy.

  I rest my chin on my folded arms. “Have you heard of this Family Action Network?”

  David nods. “Religious talk format, some nighttime musical programming. Last year I heard they were going bankrupt, but the FCC’s records show them expanding.”

  Regina sniffs. “Someone funneled them cash, and it sure as shit wasn’t pennies from heaven.”

  The industrial metal riffs segue into the plinky piano notes of Tori Amos’s “Happy Phantom.”

  I drag myself to my feet. “Whether the piracy was on purpose or not, it’s over. I’m going home to bed.” My feet scuff the rough hardwood floor, because I’m too tired to lift them. I take my jacket off the coat rack, which is currently the hand of a life - size cardboard Elvis.

  The song cuts off.

  “Like all of Satan’s deceptions, the lie of Halloween is subtle.” The radio preacher’s once raging voice is now soft and cajoling. “It’s easy to fool ourselves into believing it doesn’t hurt our children . . .”

  David, Regina, and I stare at each other.

  The man continues and finally says, “God tells us in Deuteronomy . . .”

  “Oh, no.” I put a hand to my forehead. “Here comes the fire thing.”

  “ ‘ . . . not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft . . .’ “

  “How’d you know he was going to say that?” Regina asks me.

  “I was bathed in that stuff the first sixteen years of my life.”

  The man’s voice takes on an edge again. “ ‘For whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord.’ “ I can almost hear his spittle splash the microphone. “There’s no arguing with the word of God, people. Are we making our children walk through the fire?”

  The phone rings.

  “Studio line,” David says.

  It goes silent, which means Shane answered it, no doubt hearing the bad news from a listener. We hurry downstairs, through the employee lounge, and through the hallway door next to the lighted ON THE AIR sign.

  To my right is a corridor leading to the vampires’ apartment, blocked by a door that says KEEP OUT. In front of me is the studio, which contains an array of equipment—turntables, tape decks, CD players—some of which dates as far back as the 1940s to maintain “cognitive comfort” for the older DJs.

  It also contains one pissed - off vampire.

  On the phone, Shane sees us and holds up a finger. He speaks into the receiver, his hand forming a fist on the table and his eyes narrowed to slits.

  He punches a switch on his console, slams down the phone, and stalks over to yank open the door.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” he asks us. “I thought it stopped after Regina’s show.”

  “Now you know how it feels,” she says, suddenly calm and smug.

  “I don’t get it.” David rubs the scar on the left side of his neck, which tells me his stress is building to a new level. “Why would they stop for exactly one song?”

  They discuss their next steps—mostly David and Shane talking Regina out of violent solutions—while my mind drifts off, listening to the lilting tune and wondering what it has in common with Regina’s music.

  Shane’s gaze flicks to the console, his DJ’s sixth sense kicking in near the end of a song. He moves back to the CD player just as a flash of insight hits me.

  “Wait!” I scramble into the studio. “What’s your next song?”

  “Kate Bush’s ‘Under Ice.’ “ He sits and adjusts the microphone. “Why?”

  “Switch the order and play the next track with a male singer.”

  With no time to question, he hurries to reprogram the CD player. The song fades, and he hits a switch. “94.3 WVMP -FM. Coming up on ten after three in the morning. I’m feeling a little lonely on my favorite holiday, so phone in and say hey. The ninth caller gets two tickets to this band’s upcoming show at Ram’s Head Live.”

  Ministry’s “Everyday Is Halloween” slaps out of the speakers. The synthesized New Wave riffs make my heel tap against the floor, long after I thought I had the energy.

  The phone is dead quiet.

  David turns to me. “I didn’t authorize Ministry tickets.”

  “That’s not the point. Shane wanted to see if our listeners could hear him.” The phone doesn’t ring, no matter how long we stare at it. “Which they couldn’t.”

  Shane reaches for the transmitter console. “Let’s see if your theory worked.”

  He flips a switch to receive our FM signal, so we can listen to what the world is hearing on our broadcast.

  “—telling you, this culture war will be fought on the streets of our neighborhoods and—”

  I frown at the sound of the evangelist’s voice. “Okay, so my theory sucked.”

  “Wait.” Shane switches back to his studio feed so we hear the music. “The instrumental intro lasts fifty - eight seconds.” He looks at David. “I know from working at stations where they make you talk over the music.”

  “What’s your point?” Regina says.

  “There’s no singing yet,” Shane says, “so our pirates wouldn’t know it’s a man and not a woman playing unless they recognized the song.”

  Regina snickers. “And what are the chances of that?”

  We wait for the fifty - eight - second mark, for the vocalist to display his gender. When he starts singing, Shane gives it an extra half minute, then flips the transmitter back to the FM broadcast.

  It’s “Everyday Is Halloween.”

  “Whoa,” Regina breathes. “Fucking pirates left us alone once they heard a man singing.”

  “But why?” David asks.

  “Ciara was right.” Shane swivels his chair to look at me. “It’s a girl thing.”

  * * *

  I drive back to Sherwood, listening to Shane’s show. He was pissed about changing his carefully crafted Halloween play-list. Unlike the other DJs, nearly half his collection consists of female artists. He’s always going off on how “back in the nineties,” women found stardom through singing and song-writing, not custody battl
es and wardrobe malfunctions.

  A police siren blasts over the shriek of the Meat Puppets’ “Lake of Fire.” I ease the car to the side of the road, hoping I wasn’t speeding.

  The cop continues past, and I pull back onto the street. On the outskirts of town, I pass the green, sloping Sherwood College campus, where two evenings a week I trudge toward a business degree with a concentration in marketing.

  The police car’s wail is joined by that of the volunteer fire department. I turn down the radio as I come over the hill to Sherwood’s central historic district.

  Three blocks past my usual turnoff, a fire engine is maneuvering into the tight space of the main intersection, which was clearly designed in the era when such vehicles were pulled by horses.

  I slow down at my street, located in what could generously be called the “modest” part of town. A scattering of folks are hurrying down the sidewalk to witness the most exciting thing to happen to this town since—well, since the last time a Main Street business caught fire.

  I park the car at the corner near my apartment and follow the crowd. I should at least make sure it’s not the Smoking Pig burning down.

  My steps slow. Uh - oh.

  It is the Smoking Pig burning down.

  The bottom floor of the building is engulfed in roaring, licking flames. Clay - colored smoke billows from the front window. My heart lodges in my throat at the thought of Lori inside.

  I sprint forward, fighting to keep my feet inside my beach shoes. The emergency vehicles prevent me from getting closer than half a block away.

  An ambulance sits to my right, and with relief I notice Stuart sitting on the back bumper, speaking to a cop. A piece of plywood the size of a sandwich board rests against his leg.

  I hurry over to him. “Stuart, is everyone okay?” I yell above the sound of rushing water from the fire engine.

  “Hey, Ciara,” he says in a dazed voice. “I was the only one inside.” He gestures to the cop. “I was just telling him, I was in the office doing payroll when all of a sudden I hear car brakes squealing on the street.” He puts an oxygen mask to his face and takes a few breaths. “Then there’s glass breaking in the bar, like the window shattered. Then an explosion, but not like a grenade. I go out there and the whole place is in flames.”

  “Someone fire - bombed you?”

  “Think so.” He wipes sooty sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “No idea why.”

  I point to the board at his feet. “What’s that?”

  “Found it on the sidewalk when I ran out the back door. Sitting there like a welcome mat. Figured it’d be evidence.”

  He turns the sign around. Four words are slathered on the board in crude red paint.

  YOUR GOING TO HELL

  2

  Wild Thing

  “Now that’s just wrong.”

  I look up from the shelf of eyeballs to see Franklin glaring at a group of children.

  Corporate survival skill number one: Humor boss’s moods, especially “cranky.” In Franklin’s case, there are no other moods.

  He points to the line of costumed kids clamoring for candy from one of the Halloween Land sales associates—the lady in the ballerina costume, not the guy dressed as a flesh - eating bacteria victim. “It’s bad enough kids are trick - or - treating during daylight savings time. Now they have to do it in the mall? What are their parents afraid of?”

  “Vampires, I hope.” I turn back to the shelf of party novelties. “Think I’ll get brains instead of eyes.”

  Franklin grabs another package of candy corn, and we make our way over to the cashier, who’s sporting half a face. Tonight’s party at David’s house is for the DJs—they’ll wear costumes, probably get wasted, and the humans will clean up the mess. Only fair, considering the success of last night’s Smoking Pig party. Plus, it keeps them off the streets and away from the trick - or - treaters.

  We finish our purchase, then wade through a river of sugar- spaced children toward the mall exit.

  Franklin shakes his head as the kids bop from one store to the next. “This is too sanitized. Halloween is supposed to be dark and scary and cold.”

  “Halloween is supposed to be lucrative.” I hold up our plastic shopping bag. “You of all people should appreciate that.”

  “So you think this is better than running from house to house through the dark? Better than waiting for the old man down the street to pop out from behind a gravestone, or wondering which cup of cocoa might be spiked with strychnine?”

  “I never trick - or - treated.” I shove open the glass door to the parking lot and squint into the setting sun.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of Satan.”

  The devil was the excuse for much of my missed childhood. My faith - healer parents fooled a lot of chumps—including their daughter—into swallowing concepts like sin and heaven and hell. Made a great living at it, too. Because crime totally pays. Until it doesn’t.

  Franklin and I climb into his pickup, where he switches on the radio, tuned to National Public Radio.

  “Aw, I’m telling David you’re listening to another station.” I rip open the bag of candy corn.

  Franklin scowls at me as he backs out of the parking spot. “I spend eight hours a day keeping WVMP in the black. Fast -food workers don’t eat burgers on their day off.”

  “Are you comparing my boyfriend’s art to a Big Mac?”

  “Shane flips switches for a living. He sleeps all day.”

  “You’re just jealous because you’re almost forty and he’ll stay young forever.” I bite the white tip off a piece of candy corn.

  “Forever, until he fades. Thanks, I’d rather get fat and bald than turn into a mindless, two - legged leech.”

  I glare at his pudgy physique and receding hairline. “What do you mean, ‘get fat and bald’?”

  Franklin calmly gives me the finger before shifting into first gear.

  We reach the stoplight, and he sends me a half - serious look. “You know, in three years you and Shane will both be twenty-seven, but in ten years, you’ll be thirty - four and he’ll still be twenty - seven, at least on the outside. Then in twenty years—”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead. He’s already the longest relationship I’ve ever had, and it’s only been four months.” Five months if you go all the way back to when we first kissed, but since that encounter resulted in stitches and a tetanus shot, I think it bears exclusion.

  “Wow, four months, that’s what, a decade in con artist years?”

  I pelt Franklin’s temple with a candy corn. “This is why I avoid you outside the office.”

  He smirks as he turns onto the road leading out of Sherwood. We head uphill on the rural highway, and soon the terrain beside us turns from dull gray concrete to bright orange leaves.

  Ninety seconds from JCPenney, and we’re in Blair Witch country. I love this town.

  I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, hoping a five - minute nap will compensate for staying up until 4 a.m. The fire department extinguished the Smoking Pig blaze before it could spread, but the bar took enough damage to be out of commission for weeks, putting Sherwood College’s campus in a state of mourning.

  “Holy crap,” Franklin says. “Where did that come from?”

  I open my eyes to see an enormous white cross at the top of the hill ahead of us, about half a mile away. It’s easily three times the height of a telephone pole, bigger than any cross I ever saw growing up in the Bible Belt. The setting sun gleams orange off its surface, giving it a baby aspirin hue.

  “That wasn’t there the last time we came to David’s, for the Ravens opening game. Can a whole church be built in six weeks?”

  “It’s not attached to a church. Must be a new cell phone tower.” Franklin gives a gruff laugh. “Insert obligatory joke about a direct line to God.”

  We turn onto David’s road, leaving the cross behind at the highway intersection.

  I crane my ne
ck to examine it. “Weird. They left all the trees standing around the base. Usually construction sites will clear them out to get the heavy machinery in.”

  “Must be an environmentally friendly church.”

  “Or they’re hiding something.”

  Franklin utters a noncommittal grunt as he turns onto a roughly paved country lane. I glance at the setting sun, calculating how long before the vampires arrive. Even indirect sunlight can hurt them, so they stay inside the station until twilight—roughly half an hour after sunset and half an hour before sunrise—when the deadly orb is a safe distance below the horizon.

  We pull into David’s driveway, which is lined with cheesy plastic pumpkin lights.

  As we walk up the front pavestones, Franklin says, “Don’t make fun of him. It’s a thing.”

  David opens the door, setting off a canned Vincent Price laugh. He’s dressed in a complete collection of vampire clichés—tux with black cape, a set of plastic fangs, fake blood dribbling down his chin, and his dark hair slicked back Bela Lugosi – style.

  I hold up my shopping bag. “I brought brains, which is good, since you’ve obviously misplaced your own.”

  “Brains?”

  “You fill them with orange juice and freeze them, then float them in the punch.” I hand over the bag as I pass through the door to enter the split foyer house, the kind with stairs leading up and down from the front landing. “By the way, I hired Lori.”

  He follows me up the stairs to the living room area overlooking the foyer. “Hired Lori for what?”

  “As a temp. It’ll take weeks to rebuild the Smoking Pig, which means she’s out of work.”

  “You added someone to the payroll without asking me?” The fake fangs make him lisp, robbing his voice of authority.

  “You’re always saying we need more help with the phones and paperwork.” I survey the snacks on the dining room table. “Besides, those grammatically challenged thugs who torched the Pig might have done it because of us.”

  He sighs. “She can have twenty hours a week. Temporary.” “Thanks.” I glance at the clock—6:05. “This party better be worth missing class.”