Bad Radio (12 page)

“Lucky for you.”

I smiled at him. Bags are shit with guns, the worms make them shake and tremble when they get excited. They’re also psychotically aggressive and fast as hell, which means they can and will get in close. And they always carry something sharp.

Everyone jumped at the sound of glass breaking. A dull thump followed. The bags had thrown something heavy out of a window. They knew the piece was around here somewhere, they could probably sense it, but they weren’t sure exactly where. Good thing our side was a little more precise.

“Anne, where are they?”

She answered instantly. “Back of the house, in Henry’s bedroom.”

Carlos snorted. “What are you, Miss Cleo?”

Leon glanced at Henry, who nodded. “Tell me when they head this way.”

“Got it.”

“Henry,” I said, “give me the altar piece.” He handed it to me, and I loosened my belt and tucked it against my lower back, with the spines pointing outward. I snugged the belt tight between the two spines, strapping it to me. It was cold and unpleasant as hell, but those fuckers already had my piece and Patrick’s. I wasn’t losing this one.

Another crash from the house. Carlos went to the door.

“Okay, I think me and Leon should surprise them while they’re busy in the house. Take ‘em out before they know we’re here. You folks stay put.”

Leon trotted up and put his back against the wall, gun pointed at the ceiling. Carlos stood in front of the door and flexed his fingers on the grip of his pistol. He whispered to Leon.

“On three, I’ll go right, you go left. Ready?” Leon nodded and shifted his weight from foot to foot. Carlos put one hand on the knob. “One.”

The door flew open, and Carlos was yanked out of the doorway and into the yard. I moved a split second before Leon, letting me hit him in the legs as he was pivoting into the doorway to pursue. A shotgun boomed as we connected, and Leon was thrown back over my shoulder as I hit the ground.

I caught a glimpse of Carlos dangling by the neck from the hand of the bigger baitbag as I slapped the door shut from the floor, but it just bounced right back open.

Carlos’s eyes were a vivid, horrifying red and he was drooling blood from the sudden increase in pressure as his neck was crushed.

I scrambled to my feet. Leon was already sitting up, his gun pointed squarely through the doorway. The bag was long gone, leaving Carlos in a twisted heap on the grass.

I crept forward and looked left and right out of the doorway. Nothing. I quickly yanked the door closed to prevent them from being able to target us from outside, and went to check on Leon.

He was bleeding from the shoulder and the side of his head. The blood was black on his BDU’s. I knelt by his side and inspected the wounds. It looked like he had taken the edge of the blast, with a few pellets tearing through his ear and cheek, and a few more lodging in his shoulder. Two inches over, and he’d be missing half of his head. His eyes never moved from the door, and his hands were rock steady. “Leon, you okay?”

“Carlos is dead.”

“I know.”

“That motherfucker just yanked him off his feet. Just like that. Crushed his neck like a beer can.”

“Those men aren’t like regular people …”

“I know what a baitbag is, I’ve heard the stories all my life from my uncle.” He grunted and stood up. “I heard, but I didn’t understand.”

I stood up with him and pulled the heavy baton from its sheath. It came free with a loud scraping sound. “Anne! What happened to my warning?”

“He wasn’t there before the door opened! I swear, just in the house!”

“How many in the house?” I knew better, but I couldn’t keep from asking, the same as I had done to Patrick time and again.

“How do I fucking know? You smell cookies baking in the kitchen, do you know how many are in there? I’m getting something from the house and the yard now, but a second ago, it was only from the house.”

“Bags don’t just appear out of nowhere.”

“You’re the goddamn expert, you tell me.”

Henry said, “Looks like they can hide themselves somehow.”

I grimaced. There’s no such thing as a good surprise in a fight. “That’s new.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t recall us ever coming across one trying to sneak around.”

“Shit.”

“Hey Abe,” said Anne, “they’re both outside now, moving around.” The sound of a trunk slamming made everyone look at the door. Ten long seconds passed. “Guys? Is it just my nose, or can everyone else smell gas?”

That’s the great thing about life, it’s never so bad that it can’t get worse.

Leon sniffed the air. “They can’t burn us out. This building is made of sheet metal. It won’t burn.”

The door crashed open, propelled by the foot of the massive bag that killed Carlos. Instead of a shotgun, his hands now held a red plastic milk crate full of clear glass bottles. The bottles were full of a pale pink liquid. Gasoline.

He heaved the crate, but held onto it, launching the bottles through the door. They shattered on the concrete floor, spraying everything between us and the door with fuel and shards of glass.

A split second after launching the crate, he moved to the side to allow the man behind him to step up holding a single bottle in his hand. The bottle had a burning rag stuffed in the top, the flames barely visible in the strong sunlight. The larger man was already picking up a second crate.

Leon saved us. His hand snapped up, and he fired twice. The bottle exploded in the man’s hand, engulfing him in a halo of flame.

Leon, Henry, and Anne all started shooting. The bag that was on fire was screaming and frantically flailing at himself to put out the flames.

His skin and shirt began writhing and twitching. The worms were feeling the heat as well. He dropped to the ground and started rolling, and I lost sight of him as he moved out of the doorframe to the right.

The larger one dodged nimbly off to the other side, also out of sight. Leon put two more rounds through the sheet metal to the left, hoping to get lucky. Everyone stopped shooting.

“We have to move. They can throw some fire in here any second, or more likely, the fumes will get thick enough that we’ll light them off ourselves with the guns. I’ll go out first and draw their attention, you guys count to three and follow. Run for a car. Anyone have their keys?”

“Mine are in the house, in my purse.”

“I’ve got mine,” said Leon. “But when I get to the car, I’m going for the trunk, not the driver’s seat.”

“Don’t argue with me, get in the car and drive away. They won’t follow you, I have the piece.” Leon started to say something, but there wasn’t time to listen. He was going to do what he was going to do, and I wasn’t going to change his mind.

I ran for the door and leaped out into the sunlight as I crossed the threshold. A shotgun bellowed but missed me. I hit the ground next to Carlos. The next blast wouldn’t miss.

I dropped my baton and grabbed Carlos’s body by the collar of his shirt, which was sticky and wet, and his belt, and surged to my feet. The man with the shotgun was standing next to the corner of the building, maybe twenty feet away.

Leon was coming out of the doorway. I apologized to Carlos and hurled the body across the intervening space. The shotgun went off again, and then there was a meaty thud as the two-hundred-pound corpse slammed into the baitbag, knocking him to the ground.

Leon immediately changed course and ran for the downed bag, or more accurately, the shotgun now lying on the ground a few feet away from it. The bag surged to his feet, effortlessly throwing Carlos’s body to the side, but it was too late. Leon already had the shotgun.

He fired at point-blank range, catching the bag in the side and tearing open a gaping wound. One of the bag’s fists whipped out and struck Leon in the arm. I could hear the bone break. The force of the blow knocked him backwards on his ass and tore the shotgun from his hands.

I snatched my baton from the ground and raced forward. The bag was grinning and reaching down towards Leon.

I covered twenty feet in the time it took for the bag to bend halfway to its target, my right arm pulled back across my chest. The bag never saw me coming.

I swept my arm outward in a rising arc like a classic tennis backhand, putting all of my strength behind it. When the baton connected, the bag’s head blew apart like a watermelon under a sledgehammer. The body jerked upright from the force of the blow, and then kept going over to topple backwards onto the ground.

The corpse flexed and the shotgun wound heaved open. Worms spilled out in a glistening mass, covering Leon’s feet. They were gray and muscular like eels, but unlike eels they had no heads. Instead, the end of their bodies simply split into five writhing tentacles. Each tentacle had tiny black teeth on the inward-facing side which were curved like rose thorns, and at the center where the tentacles met, a dark red maw clenched and gasped. It was lined with more teeth, and the inner flesh deepened to arterial purple in the center. They twisted and whipped around in a frenzy, bouncing off of the floor with jerking motions so fast and hard that they made snapping sounds in the air.

The larger worms, each as big around as a garden hose, struck at Leon’s legs, grabbing on with their tentacles and then looping and squeezing with their whole bodies. He screamed as blood began to well up around the tentacles. I could hear the worms sucking at the wounds.

The corpse bucked once more and an enormous worm streaked out, as thick around as my wrist and covered with black markings that seemed maddeningly close to a pattern that your eye could never quite resolve.

It was over Leon’s legs and around his waist in an instant, with the head tentacles spreading wide and wrapping most of the way around his chest. It rippled and tensed, and Leon threw his head back and bellowed, the tendons and veins in his neck standing out. Vertebrae broke with a dull crunch.

I reached down and seized the thing with both hands, feeling the slimy pulse of its muscles under my palms, and it suddenly stopped squeezing. I pulled, and instead of fighting me, it gradually uncoiled and hung limply from my hands, writhing slowly, tentacles spreading and probing the air like some kind of nightmare flower.

I stepped back from Leon and without warning the worm’s top half vanished in a black spray as Anne blew it apart with the shotgun.

The other worms went mad all at once, unlatching from Leon and thrashing and keening with a horrible whistling sound. They became blurs as their frenzied thrashing sped up, and then seconds later, they all went limp. They were dead.

I ducked inside of Henry’s study and dumped out the footlocker that had contained the guns and sacks and brought it outside. Together Anne and I scooped the nightmarish things up with spades that we found leaning in a corner with Henry’s gardening gear and threw them in the footlocker.

We stayed well back from the worms themselves, as we had no idea how they got inside of people, and we weren’t eager to find out. When we were done, the box was six inches deep in limp gray coils.

Henry came out of the door holding one of the cloth bags and a propane blowtorch.

“I figured it would be a little harder for us to get phosphorus grenades these days, so I came up with this. Thermite powder in the bag, magnesium ribbons to get it started, and a torch to light up the magnesium.”

“If you say so.” I ripped open the cloth bags, dumped the gray powder liberally over the slimy mass, and threw the silver ribbon on top. Henry passed me the blowtorch. It lit with a pop and a roar. I touched the blue flame to the magnesium ribbon, which started burning with a fierce white light that was painful to look at. Immediately after, the thermite powder caught with an eruption of heat and sparks that filled the entire box.

I backed away from the nauseating smell of the black greasy smoke billowing out of the charred and melted container. Henry and Anne had moved to crouch over Leon’s supine form.

“We can’t move him. I think his back is broken,” said Anne.

“If we leave him out here, he’s a sitting duck for the other one,” replied Henry.

Leon spoke through chattering teeth. “Carlos. Where’s Carlos?”

Henry leaned down and peered into his eyes, one after the other. “He’s going into shock. Anne, run back into my barn and get some blankets, they’re inside the door to your left. Don’t bother looking for a clean one.”

She nodded and ran for the doorway. After three steps the loud crack of a gunshot made her flinch, and I saw Henry jerk sideways. A thin spray of blood appeared on the grass behind him.

“Abe!” screamed Anne. “Do something!”

I ran towards the sound of the shot.

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