Bad Radio (42 page)

“Fuck you, Piotr. At least be man enough to take responsibility for what you’ve done, instead of blaming me and Henry.” My voice sounded shockingly shrill and hateful to my ears. I needed to be calmer than this, more in control.

He stopped to turn and face us, his eyes moving between mine and Henry’s. “Question. Is it moral to have the ability to bring justice to the world and end all of its suffering once and for all, and then refuse to do so? Of course not. That’s the very definition of evil, and you two stink of it.”

Henry laughed, his deep voice booming out with genuine amusement. “Who are you trying to convince, you crazy son of a bitch? You think that everyone in the world wants to die, on account of their unbearable suffering? Shit, before you showed up, I was getting three visits a week from the Widow Landry up the road. I got no cause to complain. Tell you what, if you’re so miserable, just blow your own goddamn brains out, and let the rest of us get on with our lives. You can’t even fool yourself with that horseshit. You want to talk about evil, why don’t you ask the people you bleed out for your pool?”

For the first time, real emotion, real anger, clouded Piotr’s face. He stepped forward and slapped Henry hard across the mouth, staggering him. Blood ran down Henry’s chin and his eyes glazed over as he stumbled.

“Is it responsible to allow greed and pride to fuel war and genocide without raising a hand against it? What does humanity have to offer creation except blind self-interest and cruelty?”

He turned and hit me next, faster than I could flinch or turn my head, filling my mouth with the hot copper taste of blood and making my ears ring. The blow rocked me back a step, into the bag behind me. I was stunned, both literally and figuratively. Like me, his speed and power were inhuman. By the time the world snapped back into focus, Piotr had turned around and we were moving again.

There were signs taped to the inside of the wire-reinforced security glass at either side of the double doors that announced the “closed” status of the school. Below one of them was a small construction paper sign, a sun-bleached orange square, with its own announcement in big purple crayon block letters that said, “Good-bye Belmont Elementary! —Mrs. Dumphry’s 1st grade class.” I wondered how many of those kids, now teenagers, had been held prisoner in their own homes. Or had themselves held knives on their families.

Piotr opened the locks with an old-fashioned steel ring of keys, granting us entry to a small lobby strewn with leftover packing material and trash, the walls still decorated with posters and banners from the last day of school a decade ago. The smell of mildew and wood rot almost managed to cover the sickly sweet odor of decaying meat hovering faintly underneath.

“Did you like school, Abe?” asked Piotr as he led us down a long tiled corridor, his voice echoing in the empty space. “I did. Of course, my final term was interrupted when the Germans and Russians invaded Poland. Unfortunate. More unfortunate for my father, I suppose, since he was killed at Bzura, and for my mother who was raped and killed in the occupation afterwards. Not so good for my brother who later died sabotaging a supply train with the Armia Krajowa in the resistance, either.”

He stopped in front of a pair of wooden double doors at the end of the hall, which were chained shut. He unlocked the massive steel padlock and let the chain slither noisily to the floor, then tossed the padlock aside. “You might even say that it was worst of all for me when I survived the attack that killed my brother, prolonging my suffering. And worse again when the AK forced me out for nothing more than giving traitors and enemy sympathizers the justice that they deserved.

“They threw me out when they found the remains of a German soldier that I had questioned for a few days. Can you believe that? They abandoned me over a piece of German garbage! They said he was only a boy, as if that made any difference. What does age matter? How old was I when my entire world was destroyed? But all of that was nothing compared to what you did. In the very hour that I was to avenge my family and my country, you stepped in on the side of evil and atrocity and savagery and stopped justice from being done.”

He turned and pushed the doors open wide. “Well, delayed it, in any case. Justice will be done, and by your own hand, no less.”

Behind him, through the open doors, I stared once more into the face of a nightmare that had been haunting me for the last sixty years.

55

T
he room was all too familiar. It was a room that a part of me had never left, that surrounded me every time I closed my eyes. It took a second for me to understand that there were differences between the here-and-now and the persistent past, because the similarities were screaming at me, drowning everything else out.

It was a school gym instead of a train station, but it was rigged with the same equipment for the same purposes. Instead of heavy wooden beams crossing the ceiling, there were interlocking sections of construction scaffolding, but the chains and hooks suspended from them could easily have been the same, gleaming wetly in the dim light provided by camping lanterns set at intervals on the floor.

The wooden basketball court had been excavated in the center to make way for a huge concrete-lined depression situated directly under the hooks, now filled to the brim with what appeared to be an inky black liquid, but which I knew would be bright ruby red if smeared across a fingertip.

The air was humid and foul with the hot copper smell of fresh blood, just as I remembered, because no matter how old the blood was, how long ago the first drops fell from the first victim, the ritual kept it fresh, even warm. Against my will the memory of drowning in it claimed me, nearly choking me with the feel of my mouth and nostrils filling with the thick wetness of it. I had to take deep, gasping breaths until it passed.

Piotr patted me on the arm while I regained my composure, a look of compassion on his goddamned face. “I’m sorry, Abe.” He glanced at Henry. “I’m sorry your so-called friends pulled you out of your womb, your spring of immortality, prematurely. If you had been fully reborn the way I intended, you would never have suffered all these long years with your memories. You’d have been beyond that. But now, while they let you down and made you suffer, here I am, ready to heal you.”

The anger that I had been biting down on for the last hour, for the last week, for the last sixty years, turned into something else, something full of bile and jagged edges that I could no longer resist.

I lunged for Piotr and one of my bookends grabbed for me. I drove one hand into its face, grabbed a handful of slimy, squirming tentacles, and before the bag could react, ripped the worm clean out of its mouth. Or at least part of it, as only the severed head and a foot of the body ended up in my hand, the toothed tentacles thrashing and tearing at my skin all the way up to my elbow. The bag dropped to the ground in convulsions, clawing at its own face and neck. Even as it was falling, I was moving, slinging the head away from me with my right hand and reaching out with my left for Piotr.

My second bookend grabbed me from behind, but as strong as it was, it couldn’t keep me from crossing those last few feet. And then I was close enough. I brought both hands up and reached for Piotr’s neck, desperate to feel his thin, papery skin and stringy neck muscles tearing under my fingers.

But I couldn’t do it. There was no misty fog this time, no gesture or trick. It was just me. My body simply refused to go any further. As the fact dawned on me, I realized that Piotr was shouting into my face, calling my name.

“Abe! You can’t hurt me, but you are killing your friends! Abe! Listen to me.” And then I could hear them, choking and strangling behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and there they were, Anne and Chuck and Henry, all down on the ground, fingers clawing at the cords sunken into the flesh of their necks, faces already purpling, and so help me God, I turned back around and lunged for Piotr again, lost in the madness and the rage.

I could see what was happening, but I couldn’t help myself. I was beyond sanity. Piotr said something, and the bag behind me wrapped his hands around my torso, lifted me bodily, and turned me around so that I was forced to see my friends dying. It took an eternity, but I was able to get some small amount of control back before it was too late. I forced myself to be still until the bag put me down and stepped away.

I watched Anne claw the now slack cord away from the raw ugly skin underneath and suck air into her lungs. She sobbed and gasped and then threw up on the floor between her hands. The wracking coughs that followed were painful to hear. Henry and Chuck were faring little better. I had almost killed them. Knowingly.

My face and jaw hurt, and my throat was sore from the screaming that I never heard. An image appeared in my mind’s eye of a crude painting on a wall in dead woman’s house. A painting of my face, raving and insane, and I knew then that the painting was right. I had seen my true face.

Piotr looked just as calm as always. “Finally. I thought I was going to have to hang one of them on a sacrificial chain to get you ready for your part. Come on, I promise you that soon you’ll never have to deny your nature again.”

I didn’t follow. Instead I turned to look back at the people that I almost killed. “Anne, I’m sorry. I’m not … I’m so sorry.”

I felt sick when I heard her voice, raspy and strained, coming out of her bruised throat. “It’s okay. I know. I’m here because I wanted to be here, Abe. I know you thought you were using me, but we both know that I was using you, too. You needed to find Piotr and I needed someone to avenge my grandfather’s death. So, we’re even, okay?”

I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t okay, so I just shook my head.

Piotr tapped me on the shoulder. “Speaking of vengeance, the time for both of ours is drawing close. Time to go.”

He turned and led us up a mobile set of steel stairs on wheels like you would see blocking the aisle at a home supply warehouse store. It was a huge right triangle of handrails and stair steps chained to the side of the scaffolding, allowing access to the platforms and catwalks that were arranged in a large square around the pool, some twenty feet off the ground.

Once on top, I could see that the square ring of catwalks was actually bisected by another walkway that ran from one side to the other, directly over the pit. Hooked chains hung to either side of the center catwalk so that the victims would be level with a person standing there.

One of the corners where the outer catwalks met had an additional platform secured to it, a ten-by-ten wooden square supporting four bodies, their faces partially obscured by rectangles of otherworldly metal. I could imagine the twin spikes on the backs of the altar pieces piercing their eyes, fixing the blocks to their faces and granting them a view of another place, while at the same time taking their mundane sight.

The length of the spikes should have been more than enough to pierce their brains all the way to the rear of their skulls and kill them, but they were clearly still alive, jerking and twitching as if they were trying to look away from the synchronized shadows that passed over the altar pieces. They were nailed to the platform through wrists and shins to keep them in place, but they remained silent, no cries of anguish escaped their grimacing lips and gnashing teeth.

Piotr turned to my remaining guard and said, “It’s time to open the roof. Go outside and tell the others to begin pulling the chains.” Without any response, the thing turned and stepped off of the catwalk, dropping twenty feet into the darkness below. I heard it hit the ground far more lightly and gracefully than its bulk would suggest.

Piotr relaxed, apparently content to wait for his orders to be carried out, and Anne spoke in her damaged voice. “Why are you doing this? You keep talking about justice and vengeance but if that were true, you’d have already killed us. Abe and Henry are the last ones alive who interfered with you, and you have them, but they’re still alive. Why?”

Piotr kept his gaze on the ceiling as he replied. “It’s not justice for Abe and Henry that I’m concerned with, although they’ll receive their measure as well. It’s all of us. All of humanity in its corrupt, hateful, self-serving glory. We praise ourselves for wholesale slaughter and call it glorious because we have labeled them the enemy. We blow up children to make a point, create anguish and destroy lives to preserve dogma, and commit genocide on a daily basis. Even now, somewhere in the world men are hacking women’s breasts off with a machete so they can’t feed their children in an attempt to wipe their ethnic group from the face of the Earth. And they feel justified in doing it. Proud, even. We need to be destroyed. That’s justice.”