Bad Radio (36 page)

I
dove into the water as the rear of the bus slipped out of sight. Faint light filtered down past the surface of the cold water, just enough to paint everything with wavering ripples of silver and shadow.

Anne and Chuck floated out of the rear door and swam for the surface. Behind them the Mother’s tentacles uncurled from the bus like a grotesque flower opening up.

We gasped and coughed as our heads burst into the open air. I grabbed Anne’s waist and shoved her upwards onto the granite ledge that surrounded the lake, pushing myself underwater as I did so. Chuck was already halfway out. I tried not to think of the Mother reaching up through the black water towards me.

I scraped my palms on the rough stone as I hauled myself out of the lake as fast as I could, throwing myself onto the ground to lay on my back, panting. Water hissed and rained down as something huge broke the surface of the water.

“Get up! Get up! We need to get moving!” Anne’s face appeared above me, silhouetted against the clouds, eyes wide as she yanked on my shoulders. Drops fell on my cheeks and lips from the flying ends of her wet hair and also from the tips of the Mother’s mouth tentacles hanging in the air above her, giving her a halo of undulating gray ropes against the churning sea-green backdrop of the sky.

I forced myself to my feet and tried to focus on my surroundings as we ran. I heard cars. A lot of them.

Engines roaring, tires growling against the rocky ground, and slamming car doors all filtered in. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see a steady flow of vehicles piling into the parking lot, mostly just crunching into the nearest stopped vehicle and disgorging its occupants while still running. All of the arrivals seemed to be bags, anything from a single driver to a packed minivan full.

Chuck led us towards the second flight of a rusty iron staircase embedded in the granite face of the quarry, leading up to the working face that loomed high over the water-filled pit below.

“That shrieking that the Mother did earlier?” yelled Anne as we ran. “That wasn’t just for our benefit. She was calling her children home.”

“How many?” We reached the bottom of the stairs and started pounding upwards.

“I don’t know, but from the number of cars I’m guessing that she could be heard for a couple of miles at least.”

We stopped at the top of the quarry face, which was really the crest of a huge granite hill. Two cranes were mounted on the edge up here, one on a sliding track and another, heavier one on a swivel mount bolted into the rock.

Both were scabrous with ancient yellow paint turned dull and pale, flaking off in large brittle chips, revealing patches of dark red rust that wept long streaks down the iron structures.

Hanging from the larger crane was a massive chain with a hook at the end. The chain ran down the center of the latticed arm into a drum attached to a diesel engine. There was no operator’s panel as such, just a long lever to spin the cable drum and a T-shaped handle on a cord to hand start the motor.

Beyond the cranes was a single-story metal building with no windows and a single door, which was secured with a big corroded padlock. More crane drums wrapped with various sizes of chain sat on rotten pallets of wood at crazy angles, the bases sagging through the collapsed wooden slats to rest on the ground beneath.

Below, a sea of enraged bags surged and eddied in the parking lot, each of them clutching a favorite implement, be it a butcher knife, ice pick, or humble wood chisel. They were frantic, like ants after their nest had been kicked over. As we watched, they swarmed over the bound captives and massacred them.

Chuck stared at the carnage with wild eyes. “We’re not going to make it. We can’t fight that many.”

“Maybe not, but for right now, we’re okay.”

“We’re okay? Are you shitting me? There are at least fifty of those things down there looking for us. We’re trapped up here and as soon as they notice us, we’re going to die.”

“Chuck. Hey. Listen to me. We’re not going to die. The Army sent me and my team out against all kinds of nightmare things I can’t begin to describe to you, and we came back every time. That’s what I do. I fight and I win and I will be goddamned if a bunch of fishbait motherfuckers with kitchen knives are going to do me in now. Got it?”

“And the building-sized monster in the lake?”

“Is up next. Now, let’s check the shed and see what we have to work with.”

The blocky padlock bleeding rust turned out to be more robust than the door it was guarding. The shackle was completely jammed in the body of the lock by corrosion, so when I yanked on it trying to break the lock, the entire latch fell out of the tin door.

I tossed the whole mess aside and peeled the door open as gingerly as possible, since any squealing would give us away, and I didn’t want to give the mob below a target just yet. The hinges chirped a little as I shifted the door, so I stopped when there was just enough of a gap to squeeze through.

The inside of the shed smelled like fuel, rusted metal, and rock dust. A wooden bench ran across the back wall, covered in black grime, heaps of decomposing hand tools, and lengths of chain. In one corner sat a fifty-five-gallon drum with a peeling paper label on it that had the word DIESEL stenciled across it, the opposite corner had welding supplies but no rig, and the floor was littered with quart cans of turpentine and machine oil.

My eyes were drawn to the lengths of cord with T-handles attached to the end hanging from hooks on the wall, but when I touched one of them, the cord crumbled between my fingers. Dry rot. The one in the crane engine was probably in the same shape.

“Help me find a thin cable, or a piece of chain in here no bigger around than a finger.”

Anne wrinkled her nose as she began pawing through the dirty, oily mess on the bench. “What for?”

“Just find me some cable. And hurry. I’ll be checking out that crane engine outside.”

I grabbed a couple of wood-handled screwdrivers off of the bench and stepped outside, turning sideways to squeeze through the door so as to avoid moving the rusted hinges any more than I had to.

I knelt down next to the small motor and tugged gently on the T-handle. It came off in my hand as I had expected. The metal shroud that covered the starter pulley was attached with screws that were rusted in place, so of course I ended up stripping the heads out instead of budging them.

“Here, I found this.” Anne crouched down next to me and passed over a length of thin metal cable that looked pretty good under the thick coat of grime. The grease on it had probably kept the worst of the rust away.

“Perfect. The only problem I have now is that in order to use it, I have to get this cover off, and the screws are stripped. That means tearing the thing off, and the instant I do that, our friends in the parking lot are going to know that we’re up here.”

Chuck tapped me on the shoulder. “Too late.” He pointed over the edge.

The Mother was still swaying high over the crowd below, but now the tips of her mouth-tentacles were all pointed directly at us. And so were a couple hundred pairs of glassy, fevered eyes.

44

A
s if released by a starter pistol that only they could hear, the entire mass of bags began surging towards us. The stairway up the side of the quarry was one continuous jointed ramp with no switchbacks that cut deep into the granite face. It was made up of three sections, the top and bottom at a fairly shallow angle, and the middle section at a steeper, forty-five-degree slope.

The steps themselves were stone with metal faces, and if there had ever been a handrail, it was long gone. We had less than a minute before the fastest sprinters in the mob reached us.

Chuck eyed the approaching crowd and patted his gun. “Wish I had more bullets. What now?”

I ripped the cover off of the crane engine with a loud crack. “We do what we came to do. Kill the Mother. If I’m right, all of her offspring will go down when she dies. Hand me that cable.”

He passed it to me without comment and I struggled for a moment getting it wrapped it around the starter pulley. I held my breath and hoped that there was still fuel in the tank and spark in the plugs, and then I opened the choke and yanked.

The engine growled and sputtered, releasing a puff of black smoke before dying. Sparing a glance at the stairwell, I could see that the leading edge of the mob had made it onto the bottom segment of the ramp. I used up more precious seconds re-winding the cable and yanked again. This time there was a longer sputter and more smoke, but it died out just the same.

A group of three bags had pulled away from the pack and were already nearing the top of the stairs. Gunfire echoed off of the quarry walls as Chuck and Anne took them out. Bodies tumbled from the stairs and into the lake far below. Satisfyingly tall geysers erupted from the surface when they hit.

There were plenty more on the bottom third of the staircase, but their charge faltered as heads swiveled down towards the water to see what happened. I dropped the cable and ran to the crushed pallets full of chain spools, grabbed a large one, and duck-walked it over to the top of the stairs.

I dropped it on the edge of the top step, leaving the spool perched vertically like a round-topped table, then ran back and did it again four more times, until there was stack of two-hundred-pound spools taller than my head.

Then I took three more spools and stacked them next to the shed, a single one next to two stacked ones, making a little two-step staircase next to the tin wall.

“Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to deal with the Mother. Your job, the both of you, is to survive longer than she does. Wait until the crowd gets about halfway up the last flight, and then push this stack over onto them. That should clear a good part of the stairway and buy you some time. If I’m still not done, run up those spools over there and get on the roof of the shack. It’s a good ten feet off the ground, so you can probably hold them off for a couple of minutes as they try to climb up after you.”

“And if you’re still fighting, or more likely, being digested?” asked Chuck.

Anne shot him a look. “Then we finish what Abe started.”

“It won’t come to that. One more thing. Chuck, which way lets out the chain on this thing?”

“Pull towards you to reel it in, push it forward to let it out.”

“When I yell, somebody needs to haul ass to the crane and pull that lever to reel in the chain. Now keep an eye on the stairs and wish me luck.”

Turning my back on those stairs was like turning my back on friends who were standing in front of an oncoming train. I knew in my head that they’d get out of the way, but my gut screamed that I was leaving them to die. I bit down on the urge to stand with them and focused on the crane engine.

The cable was stiff and greasy and kept wanting to jump off the starter pulley, so I had to jam my knee against the pulley to keep it from turning, and use both hands to keep pressure on the cable as I wound it. My hands trembled as I raced against the clock.

After an eternity I got it wound, slapped open the choke on the engine and yanked it again. This time it caught with a stuttering growl that quickly built into a solid roar.