Bad Radio (38 page)

I beckoned to Chuck, and when he came over, I reached out and tore off one of his sleeves. Having just come out of the water, my clothes were still soaking wet.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, I need the fabric.”

The roof was made up of several overlapping sheets of tin. It was easy enough to peel one back, exposing a wide gap between the two-by-fours supporting the roof. When I judged it wide enough, I dropped through.

The inside of the shed was free of bags. The first time I had been in the shack, I had noticed a striker in the moldering pile of old welding aprons and gloves. Used to light a welding torch, a striker is just a spring loaded handle that rubs a piece of flint against a steel plate. It’s small, lightweight, and reliable. Better yet, it still works if it gets wet.

I stuck that and a can of turpentine into the back pockets of my jeans, and then went over to the drum of diesel. I turned it over onto its side and started punching holes in it with a screwdriver from the bench. I worked as fast as I could, since the noise was sure to attract attention from the outside, and also because I wanted as much fuel left in the barrel as possible when I was done.

I grabbed the leaky drum by the ends and hefted it. It was a hell of a lot heavier than I expected, but I managed a controlled run to the door. One good kick sent it flying open, knocking a couple of bags out of the way and opening a path between the door and the crane. I shot out of the doorway at a dead run.

I could hear them in pursuit as I got close to the crane, but they couldn’t catch me by the time I was close enough to jump up onto the arm. I braved the slope of the crane like a man on a tightrope. The bags lacked the coordination to follow and quickly turned back to the mob surrounding the shed.

Slippery, stinking fuel poured off of the barrel and made the metal struts slick under my feet. If it hadn’t been for the rust to give me traction, I wouldn’t have made it ten steps. As it was, I had several close calls hefting a couple of hundred pounds of fuel up the ever-narrowing steel path.

By the time I reached the top, diesel was running down my arms and soaking into my shirt and pants. At the apex, I could feel the Mother thrashing down below. The crane arm juddered under my feet.

I dropped the barrel straight down into center of her hideously toothed maw. The impact sent sickening ripples through the rubbery flesh. The mouth contracted hard around the drum and I could clearly hear razor-sharp teeth punching through the metal sides. Diesel fountained out of the barrel, creating pools of fuel in the creases and crevices of the Mother’s pit of a mouth.

I wiped my hands off as well as I could on the back of my wet jeans and shirt, hoping to get enough of the oily stuff off of my hands to keep me from going up like a torch, and then pulled the turpentine can out of my pocket. I unscrewed the silver metal cap and tossed it away into the wind.

Chuck’s cotton sleeve made a fine wick once twisted into the mouth of the can. Turning the container upside-down for a moment allowed the thin liquid to soak the cloth all the way through. I pulled out the striker and squeezed the arms of the handle together. A shower of bright orange sparks fell across the cloth. It caught instantly.

I tossed my makeshift torch off the edge and watched as it flared and smoked on the way down. It landed by the barrel in a shallow pool of diesel, the tiny yellow flame a pinprick far below.

I chanted “C’mon, c’mon” under my breath for long seconds until I saw pale flames run out in waves and tendrils all around the barrel, growing higher and fiercer as I watched.

The crane arm lurched hard under my feet as the Mother convulsed, forcing me into a crouch, my fingers gripping the struts with white knuckles. The fire grew into a roaring pillar. Thick, greasy smoke billowed up past me and tentacles whipped and slashed the air as the Mother tried to bend and twist against the chain, fighting to duck beneath the water only a few feet below her head.

The stink of burning meat and petrochemicals was becoming overpowering, pushing me back down the arm a good ten feet or more. Half of the thick tentacles were now hanging limply off to one side, the flesh charred and dead, and the other half jerked around randomly as what passed for the Mother’s brain began to roast and die.

Standing high over the lake, I looked down at the carnage that I had wrought. Just as there had been recognition on an instinctive level, some part of me mourned her passage as she burned.

The Mother’s struggles became feeble and random in her final moments, so I turned and started walking back down towards the ground, watching the crowd around the shed closely. If I was right, the bags would drop any second, unable to survive the loss of their controlling intelligence, the same as when the prime worm inside a bag was killed.

I felt a long, shuddering tremor through the soles of my shoes when the Mother died. I was right in that the reaction from the bags was immediate. But I was completely wrong about what that reaction would be.

47

T
he bags didn’t drop. Instead they went berserk, attacking everything in sight. They were clawing and biting and stabbing the metal walls of the shed while other bags next to them were slicing and ripping the flesh off of their bones. They died without ever seeming to notice.

Bags who were looking up when the Mother died became fixated on the roof and began leaping up with newfound strength, no doubt ripping muscles and ligaments with abandon, and catching the rooftop easily.

Chuck was out of ammo. Anne aimed and shot with impressive speed and precision as bags began pulling themselves up to the roofline, but I could see that she was now down to the shells containing shot in the last half of the drum. Bags were coming up on all sides of the roof now, and I knew that Anne and Chuck would be overrun in moments.

I ran down the crane and made one last leap to the roof. I kept my feet this time and drew my baton.

“You couldn’t kill the Mother?” said Anne as she backed towards me.

“I killed her.”

“You said that the bags would all die when she did! These things are ten times more dangerous now than they were while she was alive.”

An old man with white hair and bloody hands pulled himself up to the roof in front of her. The gun in her hands dry fired on an empty chamber. Anne waited until he got a foot onto the roof and let go with his hands to stand up. In that instant she skipped forward and hit him in the face with a hard forward jab of the stock. With nothing to hang on to, he fell backwards off of the roof, only to be torn to pieces by the bags he landed on below.

“It’s more dangerous, but it won’t last. Look.”

Down below, two thirds of the bags were already dead, gutted and in some cases literally pulled apart limb from limb by the rest. “Pretty soon they’ll kill each other off, leaving just a couple for us to deal with. We’re going to be okay.”

And this time, I was right. I don’t know how long I raced back and forth on that rooftop knocking bags to the ground with my baton, but it seemed like days . Just another endless, frantic combat memory to stack up with the rest of my collection. Eventually the things stopped coming. I walked to the edge and looked down at the last few bags tearing at each other mindlessly.

In moments, only three were left, and those were tearing their own hands to shreds on the sharp, ragged holes that now covered the sides of the shed. I jumped down and finished them. They died still attacking the unfeeling metal walls.

We staggered away from the grisly scene and down the quarry stairs, not stopping until we reached the parking lot.

Trying not to think about what might still be swimming in the black water, I jumped in to rinse off the worst of the diesel and the blood. I stayed in for as long as I dared, and climbed back out.

I flopped down beside Anne and Chuck who were already lying on their backs on the cool gravel, exhausted. It seemed like my entire body was covered with puncture wounds and cuts, all marinated in diesel. Every inch of me burned or ached.

I rolled my head to one side to look at my companions. “See? That wasn’t so bad.”

Anne punched me in the shoulder. Hard. Then she started to laugh. A few seconds later Chuck joined in, and then we were all chuckling and giggling like mad people.

I felt good in a way that I hadn’t since the war. We made a difference here. And it mattered. When I heard about Pearl Harbor as a boy, I left my family to throw myself into the biggest conflict the world had ever seen. For the first time in my life I wasn’t just fighting, but fighting
for
something. But since then, I went from a person who protects to someone who avenges. And then to a person who just inflicts pain because he can.

I felt like the man I used to be. I felt clean. Tears and laughter mixed together unexpectedly. Embarrassed, I covered my face until it passed.

When I was able, I got stiffly to my feet and then helped Anne and Chuck up, grabbing each of them by the hand and pulling them upright, eliciting a pitiful chorus of groans.

“I guess it’s time we headed back. We need to check in with Greg and Mazie at the house and see if they found out anything more about …” The words trailed off as I realized what we had done.

Chuck gave me a quizzical look, but Anne got it immediately. “Oh, God! The whole town is still full of bags.” We all turned to look up at the blood soaked shed in the distance.

Realization dawned on Chuck’s face. “Oh, shit.”

48

I
didn’t need any directions from Chuck as I turned back towards town. I simply pointed the truck’s nose towards the fat columns of black smoke standing tall in the fading light.

Steady clicking sounds filled the truck as Anne and Chuck loaded numerous pistol magazines and both fifty round drums for the shotgun with bad tidings and vengeance. No one spoke as we rumbled down the road, but we all shared the same thought. One way or another, this was going to end tonight.

The residential section of town, an oblong blob between the quarry and the square of businesses framing Main Street, was quiet and deserted, with only the orange glow of the occasional house fire and a few abandoned cars still idling in the road to give any indication of how badly things had gone wrong here. I threaded the streets nervously, keeping one eye on the road and one on Anne as we made our way towards Greg’s house.