Lost Signals (20 page)

A thin sheen of sweat covered Adam’s face, and he rolled the window down. The wind had intensified outside, but it didn’t bring any fresh air. More like hot breath on the back of his neck, spattering sand into the sweat. He tried to roll the window back up, but it stuck. This car really should have been used for parts. Piece of shit. He heard a honk and glanced back, but there was nothing for miles. Just the empty road. He was rewarded with another hot gust of sand, irritating against his skin, biting like glass.

He turned back to wipe his face on his sleeve and there was someone in the car next to him. A woman. She stared at him. Her eyes were too dark. Endless. He lifted his head, heart thudding, and she was gone.

The mumbling on the radio turned to soft words. Adam’s throat constricted. Something . . . He could only make out a few words, but it was a woman. Saying something in a singsong voice. Uselessly, he spun the knob. The voice rang out clear as bells. A lullaby, one he didn’t recognize. The music accompanying her didn’t sound like normal instruments at all. The plucking sounded more like the creaking of a bed than guitar strings. Something dripping. She chuckled.

“Shut up, you creepy bitch.” His voice cracked as he spun the knobs. Jesus Christ, would he ever be out of this fucking desert
 
? It shouldn’t have taken more than an hour or so to get through this stretch of road, but it was creeping up upon supper time now. His guts cramped, but he wasn’t hungry. He should have been home by now, talking his way back into Karen’s bed.

“Do you think she forgives you
 
? Everyone knows.” The voice was louder than it had been before, the static shocked into silence. Adam’s heart sank deep into his stomach.

Fuck kinda radio show was this
 
?

The static droned, wet sounds beneath it, breathing and something else. Something unpleasant. The skin on his arms prickled. The sweat and sand that stuck to his skin, begging for a shower. Fuck getting home tonight. As soon as he got out of this desert he was checking into a motel, getting a hot shower, and ditching this shitty car. He would call Karen and she could pick him up.

The static gave way to a gentle sobbing. Who the hell broadcast this shit
 
? This bubbling anxiety was an unfamiliar sensation to Adam, and he tried to keep it under control. This wasn’t who he was. He clenched his teeth. The sweat stains beneath his armpits weren’t who he was.

He trained his eyes on the road. Focus. The sobs faded back into the static, and his eyes grew heavy again. In the distance, near the horizon, he spotted a shape. The first landmark for miles. Good. He must be getting closer to . . . something. All this desert could drive a man crazy. He drove faster, eager to see a change of scenery.

He got closer, and the shape gradually turned into something recognizable. His stomach went sour. It was a baby carriage, empty, abandoned among the endless sand. As if triggered by this, the gentle sobs of the woman gave way to a baby crying. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The most irritating sound known to man. The squalls and shrieks were maddening. Adam pounded his fists against the steering wheel. “For God’s sake, how fucking far do I have to go
 
? Fuck’s sake.”

The screams grew louder, shrieking, begging, needy and suddenly they stopped. Abruptly. Just like . . .

Static.

His foot went heavy against the gas. The desert was too long. Something was wrong. He must have taken the wrong turn. He should be in town by now. He should be driving down city streets instead of this fucking desert. Jesus Christ, he didn’t even give a shit about getting back to Karen now. He wanted a cool glass of water, and then a whisky. And another whisky. He felt like he had been driving for days.

The static grew steadily louder the faster the car went, until it was screeching in his ears, discordant offbeat sounds pounding and pounding until he wanted to scream He slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a stop and he got out. He just needed to stand up for a minute. Take a breath. Get his senses back. Faintly, he heard the familiar sounds of traffic, but the desert was empty. The sun was setting, turning the sky blood-red. This was impossible. Ridiculous.

He could still hear it.

The static surrounded him now. He took shaky, weak steps out into the road. The hiss rained down from the sky, along with all the other sounds beneath it—the honking of horns, the screech of brakes. The voices. The murmurs. The screams.

“Stop it. I’m going home
 
! I’m going home
 
! I don’t fucking care what happened to the baby
 
!”

She would forgive him. She always forgave him.

The baby screamed and screamed and he remembered how it felt when he shook it and shook it and its head jolted back and forth until it finally stopped screaming. It was better now. It was quiet. Still breathing, just a trickle of blood from its eyes. It would be fine. He had run but he was done running now. He was going home.

He took a breath.

The static couldn’t hurt him.

He got back behind the wheel. The seatbelt jammed. Fuck it. He was going home. He pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The static was too loud, deafening, but he didn’t care he was moving. He was driving. Next to him the dark woman turned and stared at him. He didn’t want to look at her but he looked and her eyes bled tears and she opened her mouth and a scream of static poured out and she was screaming and the baby was screaming and Adam was screaming and

The desert sky wavered. Warped. It peeled away. The city was there. Oh God, he was so close to home. Traffic was congested and there were cars and people everywhere and he was not in the desert anymore. He could have laughed, but the colors were too bright to look at and he was going too fast. Metal screeched and rubber burned and the car careened off the street and slammed into a telephone pole. He was propelled from his seat and his head slammed through the windshield and the pain stopped and everything went quiet. It was better now. It was such a relief. Ribbons of glass sliced through his head and stuck in his eyes and he didn’t care.

The car behind him swerved, slammed into the fender of the car ahead. Traffic piled up. Cars slid to a stop around the wreck. People ogled and gasped and dialed the police.

A few cars back, a woman parked neatly at the side of the road and came forward. “I’m a doctor,” she said, and pushed her way through the crowd. It didn’t take a professional to see there was no hope for this man. Glass protruded from his face. His bones were shattered, yanked haphazard through his skin. There was nothing she could do. But she could hear something.

The excited chatter of pedestrians faded away. She moved closer.

His mouth gaped open, blood dripping on the pavement. Static. Must be the radio, something happened to it in the crash.

Around the glass, his eyes stared at her. Beneath the static, something hissed and whispered and she leaned in to listen.

Christ’s corpse lies at your feet,

Inglorious defeat,

Fleet is the cloven hoofed one.

Music filled the room. Frayed curtains shuddered under the acoustic assault. A sepulcher voice groaned with barely controlled rage
 
:

Nurse at Baphomet’s decaying bust,

Eyes the color of rust.

Suckle at the festering teat.

Inglorious defeat,

Fleet is the cloven—

Luke slammed his fist against a cymbal. “Godammit
 
! Keep up you guys
 
!”

Molly gripped the neck of her guitar in frustration. Everything felt askew. Small things, difficult to describe, a nagging sense of foreboding.

Ever since Mark found that radio station.

Things had drastically changed once he’d introduced the band to station 6EQU-J5 and its sublime sounds a few weeks ago.

Pirate radio. What else could it be
 
? 6EQU-J5’s schedule was unpredictable, playing ambient, droning gloom intermittently, at random hours. The DJ never announced the bands or song titles, much less themselves, just a woman’s voice identifying the station and following with odd observations and rambling colloquies that never made much sense. None of the tunes were familiar to any of the band. It simply broadcast the most obscure music. The underground of the underground.

Molly couldn’t deny the station’s sounds were influencing their own sound now, and the band
had
advanced leaps and bounds both technically and creatively.

“Calm the fuck down, Lucas.” Mark bared his teeth. A pantomime of someone far more dangerous than mere mortal Mark Woods could ever be. He insisted on wearing gruesome corpse makeup at every practice session. The hot room had his chin dripping black and red rivulets onto a white
Daemonphiliac
t-shirt.

“Didn’t quit
Andromalius-36
to work with a bunch of amateurs.” Gavin stabbed his cigarette in Mark’s direction. He’d recently moved into the house. Brought along an M 88 mic and state of the art Eventide H3000 his music producer father had purchased for him. Real professional.

The band’s living room doubled as their rehearsal space. It stank of cigarettes and the remnants of fried egg sandwiches that Luke seemed to subsist on. The damp weather seeped through the cracks in the concrete floor, into the flimsy drywall, wafted a musty odor into the air.

Molly couldn’t complain, though
 
; Luke’s uncle had rented the ramshackle house to the band at a steal. A cheap place to crash allowed them to practice whenever they had time. And they usually had plenty of that.

She plucked her guitar strings, unconsciously tremolo picking. “Less than two weeks left, guys. At this rate, Temple of Skulls is gonna look like goddam amateurs when we play at the HoloScene.”

“Fuck that. We signed on as Eldritch Covan.” Luke was quick to anger, forehead sanguine as his hair. Even the freckles beneath his German Textualis
font
ZERFALL tattoo flared up.

“Still spelling coven with an ‘A’
 
? Jesus, we’re gonna embarrass ourselves.” Molly propped her guitar against the amp.

Luke swigged his room temperature beer. “Temple of Skulls is queer. Maybe if you weren’t always on the rag you wouldn’t say such stupid shit.” He scratched at a mangy beard.

Molly flipped him off.

Luke pointed his drumstick at Mark as if it were a weapon. “I know a decent bass player if you don’t have the sack to do this.”

“Fuckin’ with the wrong bull.” Mark exposed his ochre teeth again.

Luke stood up from behind his drum set.

“Not another fight, please.” Molly looked to Mark. “You said you made another mix tape
 
?”

“I did. Right here.” Mark picked up a cassette case from the coffee table.

“When’d you record that
 
?” Gavin handed his battered boombox to Mark. Its surface was covered in stickers, goat skulls over a valknut symbol.

Mark dropped the cassette in. “Earlier this morning. 6EQU-J5 just started playing again, so I taped it.”

“You keep your radio on all the time
 
?” Molly asked.

“Yeah. Just in case they start up. Station came alive around 6:30 this morning, I mean, this music we’re tapping into, well, we’re on our way. But this. We might get somewhere beyond with this. This stuff is orgone energy mainlined into your spine.” Mark turned the boombox’s volume way up.

The music was tinny, emanating from deep within the opening of unexplored regions.

Abrupt, dissonant notes squiggled into Molly’s ears. Auditory apprehension, a high-pitched chaos assaulted her brain. Sporadic chords made the colors in the room tremble.

Droning bass instruments, riffs so achingly slow they degenerated into peals of chaotic noise. A crackling in the background, reminding Molly of something she’d heard recorded on an old wax cylinder at the science museum on her third-grade field trip.

She closed her eyes, saw the opening to a cave. Entrance narrow and tall, like a massive wound from a giant’s axe cleft. The only movement came from swaying weeds on a stretch of abandoned train tracks.

She couldn’t describe any of the music as death or sludge or stoner metal, but a vibration of memory quivered inside her body. A dark thrill lingered. Her mouth filled with saliva in prelude to vomiting.

The cave flickered in her memory, edges wavering as if the rock was steaming. She expected a hint of a face nobody deserved to see. But nothing peeked out. Only the hypnotic motion of the foliage and the unchanging black maw. She opened her eyes.

“What the fuck just happened
 
?” Luke was wide-eyed.

“Our new sound happened.” Mark ejected the cassette.

“Are you fuckin’ with us
 
? You really tape this off of that radio station
 
?” He waved the plastic case in front of Mark’s face.

“Yeah. I did.” Mark was red-eyed, sweaty. Words slurred as if he’d just woken with a wicked hangover.

“I think you know more about this music than you’re letting on.” Luke’s voice was laced with rage. His tone made Molly anxious.