Lost Signals (41 page)

Damn me but even as the machine lurched forward and my toes dragged in the snow, I couldn’t resist a last look at the charred shape broiling over the bonfire, struck by the shocking whiteness of the man’s staring eyes.

***

We rattled and buzzed recklessly through an evergreen tunnel with the looming trees on either side and branches interlocking overhead. Sight was minimal, the narrow cone of brilliance thrown by the snowmobile’s single headlight an invitation to disaster. The sound was a deafening pressure against my ears, my eyes watered and my cheeks burned from the frozen dagger of the wind. Every muscle in my body screamed protest as I hung on for dear life, whipped from side to side and slammed down with teeth-rattling force.

Never stopping. Never slowing.

Our light flashed off metal in the trees but we were past before I could make it out. Ground opened to the right and a vast, circular shadow rose against the starry sky. My guide shifted and weaved the machine as we passed domes of concrete. Three great obelisks. It was a haunted high-tech landscape of metal and ice that had no place in the Alaskan wilderness.

I doubted my sanity. My consciousness. I saw the white of a burned man’s eyes and felt the awful heaviness of a month-long night. In my ears the liquid singing keened against the murmuring voice of a madman riding a cannabis high and over it all the buzzing of the mechanical steed that carried me ever north—

I slammed my broken fingers against my thigh and the wind snatched away my cry of pain before I could hear it. Reality reasserted itself.

We slid to a stop and she switched off the machine. The silence pounded in my ears and beneath the inner thunder I heard a murmuring voice that was not my own. In the last flicker of the headlamp I saw a large bundle hanging from a tree, its lower edges sprouting crimson icicles.

“Oh God,” I said. Me, who hadn’t been inside a church since my balls dropped.

The dark settled around us like a giant’s hand and I fought the urge to crouch. The ticking of the engine was loud and unnatural against the susurrus of breeze and branch, the crunch of snow as my guide moved purposely about the snowmobile removing items from saddlebags. When I moved to get out of her way the murmuring grew louder and I realized a voice spoke on the night wind.

“What is that
 
?” I asked, but she gave no answer.

What I thought were wind-blown flakes turned out to be the outriders of a storm and I wondered if I would get snowed-in after I did this thing.

“Hey,” I said, staggering as she shoved a cloth-wrapped bundle against my belly. I caught it by instinct. “What is this
 
?”

“Give to him,” she said and unlimbered a rifle from a tube that ran along the length of the machine. She slung it over her shoulder with easy familiarity. “Follow.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“No light. Follow.”

I glanced back at an eerie yip-yip-yip drifting through the trees from the direction of the cement towers. The sound wasn’t repeated and I turned back to find my guide nearly vanished in the forest ahead.

The wind and snowfall picked up as she led me through the trees towards a glowing red light. The voice defined itself, clarified into the rambling cadence of the DJ riding a hundred speakers hung throughout the trees. It was a maddening sound, the voices slightly out of synch due to distance so that some words continued long past their allotted time and others were chewed and dragged under by the chorus. Close to understanding. Some words ringing clear but the larger meaning obscured just enough to lure a listener forward.

A snow-covered hump up ahead turned out to be a squat building made of equal parts cement and native logs, as if it had been expanded ad hoc since its original construction. A giant metal radio tower rose beside it but other than that, details were hard to make out.

The red light was a sign over the front door, the familiar words out of place in this remote wilderness
 
:

ON AIR.

***

Twice I lifted my hand to knock on the metal door but hesitated, as well trained as any dog not to make noise while the ON AIR light was on overhead. I turned around to say something to the woman, but the woods were empty save for the echoing voices.

“This is stupid,” I said and knocked on the door, three sharp raps that hurt my knuckles. It was solid as hell, like striking a fifty-five gallon drum full of ice. I wondered if the man inside heard me over the din of horns that filled the forest, Wagner maybe.

I was lifting my hand to knock again when the door opened to bathe me in orange light and I felt a warm puff of air. A little man with a wild beard, Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts grinned up at me.

“Hey Mick, I’m Don,” he said in that familiar voice. “Nice to meetcha.” I caught the odor of marijuana and buttered popcorn riding on the tropical air currents. “Come in and warm—”

I pulled the pistol from my coat pocket, thumbed back the hammer and shot him in the chest.

It made a flat bang. A horrible sound. It seemed as if the music should stop but it didn’t, continuing to wail and thrash as he sat down hard and his teeth clacked. He winced as if that hurt, the teeth, then flopped onto his back, mouth working like a suffocating fish.

The hole in his chest was a low pressure faucet pumping thick syrup. I stepped inside that comforting miasma of weed and popcorn (a black and white movie was playing on a TV in the corner) and jabbed the .38 down at his contorting face before pulling the trigger. His forehead collapsed as if slapped with a hammer and a spray of blood-veined oatmeal spilled across the floor. A wet fan of all that he had ever thought and been and I fired again, the bullet taking him through the gawping mouth, .38 caliber fellatio and I shot him again and would have shot him until the sun burned cold and the earth was finally consumed by the everdark but the gun was empty, the cylinder rotating dutifully with each pull of the trigger, the hammer uttering its oily snap, snap, snap.

A rushing wind swept through my mind as I dropped the gun, turning and tottering out into the rosy glow of the ON AIR light, not fleeing so much as stumbling from the scene of the crime. The murder. I turned back to pick up the revolver when flames reached from the tree line and invisible fingers plucked at my coat. Thunder rumbled as splinters threw themselves from the log walls. Sparks illustrated the meteoric impact of bullet against door as I looked over my shoulder, not comprehending the moving shadows and muzzle flashes. Low shapes trailing snarls as they flew across the snow, dogs with dripping fangs charging with predatory speed.

I lurched inside, tripping over my victim as fully automatic fire blasted all around the door and sent flaming metal wasps darting over my head. I thought,
They have a machine gun
 
!
even as I kicked the door shut and scuttled backwards to land in the moist smear of Don’s offended skull.

Breathing hard as the wet seeped through my pants, I read the warning spray-painted on the inside of the door.

BEWARE DEAD AIR

The operatic music quieted and in the silence I heard no more gunshots, was instead absurdly concerned at the thought of dead air and turned, the seat of my pants sliding in gore. I looked around the endless shelves of record albums covering every wall and heard the old fashioned clicking of a record player as a ghost hand lifted the needle to one side.

A tiny green LED lit up on an engineer’s panel of dials and switches and a cassette engaged. “Hey now,” the disc jockey’s voice filled the room. “I can’t think of a better way to end the show than ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, can you
 
? And what an ending of the show this is, cats and kittens. The
end
end. The Big D. That long awaited day has come and it’s time for me to go off the air. But don’t worry
 
! I’m leaving you in the care of a man who will treat you right, come all the way from Chicago to make magic on the airwaves—I’m talking to you, baby, start with turntable two.”

I looked past an elaborate record press to the turntables lined up like a weird devolutionary display from the Museum of Broadcasting History, starting from a high-tech digital job and going all the way back to an old Victrola with a giant brass speaker horn.

“Everybody give it up for Micky Shaw
 
!”

Applause drowned out the DJ’s voice until silence filled the room when the tape clicked off. I crossed the studio in three great strides and turned the power knob on the second turntable until it popped and I heard a feedback
thumpf
over the speakers. The slightly warped record began to spin and I lifted the needle, lowering it into the outer groove.

“JEREMIAH
 
!” The shout filled the room and I ducked as the speakers continued bellowing, eyes raking across the annotated index cards taped hither and yon across the control panel. I saw one marked
In-Studio Volume
. I spun the dial and braced my hands on the console as the singing dropped to a dull roar.

“What the fuck
 
?” I was a broken record, repeating it over and over. “What the fuck
 
?”

A black chair on wheels was turned to face me and a Memorex cassette tape sat on the cushion with an index card on it. Cheerfully round loops of magic marker spelled out
 
: MICKY, PLAY ME.

How did he know my name
 
? I turned the plastic cassette over and over in my hands and was still doing so as “Joy to the World” faded from the speakers.

Dead air again.

“Shit.”

I snapped off the power knob and grabbed a boom mic dangling at the end of a telescoping arm, tore off the index card commanding TALK INTO ME and flipped a switch at the base from OFF to ON.

“This is Micky Shaw,” I said.
Micky
 
?
“Coming to you from the great white north. It’s been a strange day, my friends, one strange f—” I caught the curse before it escaped on air, “—darned day, really weird, but there’s dead air and everyone knows we can’t have dead air so here it is—” A flailing hand picked up an album and I shook it from the sleeve, whipping
Three Dog Night
off of the turntable and dropping the new record in its place. “‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ from the one and only, Iggy Pop.”

Fuzzy guitars filled the air as I picked up the cassette with my name on it and stuck it into a tape player. Checked to make sure it was only an area speaker and hit play.

“Hey Mick, I know you’ve got a million questions, not the least of which is how I know your name . . .”

“No shit,” I told the control panel.

“. . . but you gotta listen to me now, right fucking now.” The hippy tones were gone and he sounded intense, even scared. “First thing is, never let the dead air last. The music keeps everything calm down below. Second, by now you’ve figured out those Eskimo bitches won’t let you leave. They think you’re infected. Get it through your head, amigo, you’re
never
gonna leave. Ever.”

“Says you.”

“And last, but definitely not fucking least
 
: drag my body down into the cellar. Keep going down through the subbasements as far as you can go until you find the well, understand
 
? Throw my body in the well. Your life depends on it.”

I looked at the corpse resting in a gummy pool of blood.

“Oh, Mick, if I say anything down there—don’t answer.”

***

“You don’t have much time,” Don’s voice crackled over the old, Walkman headphones. “And there’s a lot you need to know.”

A bare bulb swung back and forth on a cord overhead and my shadow danced wildly while I dragged the body down the steps, wincing at each cruel thud of the head on wood. The staircase rocked beneath me and descended towards a weird, blue glow. I was sweating from more than just the cloying humidity and I paused to take off my jacket, draping it over the railing. I untangled my tie from the headphones’ cord and tossed it over one shoulder.

Thud . . . thud . . . thud.

“You’re gonna get a call soon, whoever they’re holding over you,” the DJ continued. “Probably Vera, right
 
?” A wave of cold washed through me when the dead man said her name. “They’re gonna hurt her, make her scream, man. But they won’t kill her yet because they want something from you, something only you can give them.”

Me
 
?

Dark stains were soaking through the blanket in which I’d wrapped the body and I felt squeamish as drops of my sweat dripped on the awful burden. I was relieved when my shoes scraped on the gritty cement of the floor.

“I left instructions for you upstairs.” Feedback squealed on the tape and I reached for the Walkman on my belt. A blue spark of static electricity stung my hand. “. . . tell you how to listen with the dishes, where to listen to give them what they want. I’ll say it again, with this place, you can eavesdrop on just about any electronic conversation in the world, man, dig it
 
? That’s what they want. The mob. The G-Men, but here’s the thing, I tried to tell them but they don’t care . . .”

He paused and I stopped still, listening.

“It only lets you listen to poison, something that means bad news for someone. It doesn’t just
want
ugliness, it needs it. Sucks it down through those big dishes and radio arrays like a junkie.”

I turned and saw row upon row of leafy marijuana plants arrayed beneath sapphire-tinged grow lights. “You’re kidding me.”

The madness began to make some kind of sense.

Don spoke through a smoker’s cough. “Now, quick, find the next cassette and do what I say.” The tape ended and the PLAY button on the Walkman popped up.

I wanted to sit down and laugh until I cried, to pull off a couple leaves from old Mary Jane and chew them until I drifted away. This was too strange and getting more so by the minute. But he’d scared me, this DJ who knew my name. Scared me enough that I was following a dead man’s voice down into the frozen bowels of the earth.

You don’t have much time
. Right.