Bad Radio (39 page)

The good news was that the place wasn’t on fire. The bad news was that the front door was laying in the front lawn in two pieces, split right down the middle.

I drew my baton and stepped through the doorway into the murky living room. Two figures lay unmoving on the carpet, haloed by dark stains. Fearing the worst, I flicked on the lights, only to sigh with relief when, instead of Greg and Mazie, I saw two heavyset bags facedown on the floor with 30-.06 exit wounds in their skulls.

Chuck covered our left side with his Taurus, and Anne covered the right with the shotgun. It said a lot that the sight of the two corpses failed to elicit a comment from either.

I crossed the room quickly and listened at the base of the stairs, but I didn’t hear anything. I had expected to be stiff and sore as I climbed, but found that all the various punctures and cuts I had suffered at the quarry were already healed. As much as the psychological consequences of my condition worried me, I had never failed to be grateful for the physical ones.

I climbed as quietly as I could, stepping over the spent brass shell casings on the steps. A foul, swampy smell mixed with copper hit me when I stepped into the hallway at the top. All of the doors were open except for Valerie’s room.

I put one finger to my lips and Anne and Chuck nodded. Then I put my head against the door and listened to the silence on the other side for a full minute. Not hearing anything, I stepped back and kicked the door in, shattering the frame and tearing out the top hinge, leaving the door hanging wide open and leaning halfway to the ground.

The coppery sewage smell billowed out of the room. I stepped inside and flicked on the lights, which in hindsight was something of a mistake. Valerie lay in the center of her shattered bed. Her legs were still tied to the foot board posts, but the headboard was broken apart, the pieces still tied to her wrists. The cords had cut her down to the bone, disappearing into the black, tarry channels on her wrists.

The bed had moved several feet away from the wall before the frame had broken, dumping the box springs and mattress on the floor. Driven beyond what little sanity had been left to her by the death of the Mother, she had managed to free her arms, which she had promptly begun to eat. Deep bloody depressions ran up and down her arms to the shoulders, and her face and neck were covered in gore. A single bullet hole in her temple attested to the mercy killing that ended her frenzied feeding.

“Fuck!” Chuck ran back out into the hallway and threw up noisily against the wall. Anne and I stepped out after him, turning out the lights as we did so. I didn’t think, before I entered that room, that I could feel any more rage and hatred towards Piotr, but it turned out that I was wrong. It was easy.

We looked into the rest of the rooms upstairs and found them perfectly normal, which seemed wrong. Greg and Mazie had packed before they left, leaving half-empty drawers open in dressers, and closet doors wide open. Chuck followed suit by stuffing his few possessions into a faded blue hard-sided suitcase. Nobody would ever live here again. Even if we won, I think too much had happened here for Greg to want to come back.

“We need to search the downstairs before we leave. Mazie would have left a note or something for me. I know she would,” said Chuck.

Anne put her hand on his shoulder. “Of course.”

Downstairs in the kitchen, we found our note. It was written in orange marker in foot-high letters on the wall. “GONE TO NAIL BARREL TO MEET SURVIVORS.”

I looked at Chuck. “Nail Barrel?”

“Hardware store in town. It’s a big brick place with a patio kind of thing on the roof. They hold parties and church socials up there sometimes in the summer. Good place to hold off a crazy mob.”

“Abe,” said Anne. “I don’t think I can do another rooftop siege.”

I opened my mouth to reply when something with a lot of legs dropped off of the ceiling onto the table in front of us. Anne let out a high pitched yelp and brought up her shotgun in a blur. I slapped the barrel towards the ceiling as she pulled the trigger, showering all of us with flecks of drywall and paint.

“Stop! He’s one of the good guys.”

Right next to the salt shaker, tapping his front legs on the table in the rapid staccato beat which meant that he had information to impart, was Mr. Careful.

49

C
huck stepped back a pace, gun half-leveled. “What the fuck is that?”

“It’s a wooden spider, what’s it look like?”

“Dude, that’s not helping!”

“Henry made him during the war to scout for us.” I bent down close to the table. “Hey, Mr. C. What do you have for me?” I unscrewed the lid of the salt shaker and poured the contents onto the tabletop, then smoothed the little mound into a flat patch of white granules.

Instantly the matchstick spider scurried onto the salt, leaving a trail of tiny dots behind him. It then extended one pointed foot and drew a wide, curved V in the salt, followed by a straight line connecting the top points of the V, and then two small circles inside the figure, side by side near the top. Then it stepped back and raised that leg straight out from its body, pointing northeast.

I let out a big sigh of relief.

Anne flicked the safety on her shotgun and rested it on her shoulder. “What?”

“Mr. C just told me he knows where Henry is. Which I have to say is a great load off of my mind. Especially since I’ll lay good odds that Piotr will be right there with him.”

“Of course he did.”

“See what he drew in the salt? That’s Mr. C’s symbol for Henry.”

“It looks like a face, maybe. Eyes but no mouth or nose.”

“Close, it’s a tribal mask. Where he got that from, I’ll never know. We didn’t teach it to him, he just started doing it. Had his own symbol for everyone. He can draw out simple maps and things like that as well.”

“Huh. What’s Abe’s symbol, little bug?”

Mr. C turned to an empty spot in the salt, and drew a circle, then several triangles on top and bottom, like an open-toothed maw. A prickle ran up the back of my neck. “That’s not right. My symbol was three V’s on top of each other, like a sergeant’s stripes.”

The wooden spider retraced the image, and then tapped twice next to it, firmly.

Anne looked up at me. “Not anymore.”

I picked up Mr. Careful and put him into my shirt pocket, where he curled up into a tight flat oval. Then I rubbed the images out of the salt with my finger, feeling unsettled. It sounds crazy, but having Mr. C identify me differently was like looking into a mirror and seeing somebody else staring back at you. I didn’t like it.

We left the house through the shattered front door, reminded as we stepped into the deserted street that this house, this tragic site of desperation and loss, was only one of many created by Piotr. It was warfare on a personal level, fought house to house, family member against family member, all in fearful silence.

People held hostage for months at a time with nobody around them any wiser, forced to live with a monster who looked out at you from stolen eyes. What does that say about us, that we can live next door to someone and never be close enough to see what’s going on right under our noses? When did we start hiding in our tiny worlds behind closed doors, and relying entirely on our televisions and computers for companionship? Maybe the fact that something like this could go on unnoticed for so long was more frightening than the resulting devastation.

We piled back into the truck, and I dropped Mr. C onto the dashboard, where he promptly spun to face the same direction he had indicated in the kitchen. Seeing him there brought back memories of days and nights driving with him on the painted steel dash of a jeep, legs scrabbling for purchase as we flew over ruts and road debris.

I remember Shad using his battered Ka-Bar to punch knifepoint slits into the dashboards of every vehicle we ended up in, so that the little spider could get a secure foothold. The memory brought back smells of mud, bad feet, and cordite, all mixed up with the faces of my old squad.

Patty used to ride shotgun next to me, issuing warnings with a tap on the side of his nose, with Shad, Two-Penny, and the Professor crammed in the back with the guns and gear, taking turns complaining for hours on end about my driving and keeping count of every rut and pothole I hit.

Mr. C swayed with the truck during turns, his legs rolling in time with the dash to keep his body perfectly still. Henry had to have smuggled him into town when he was captured, which was typical of Henry’s foresight. We didn’t call him the smart one for nothing.

I wanted to jam the pedal to the floor mat and follow Mr. C’s directions to where Piotr was keeping Henry, but I held steady and wove through town towards the Nail Barrel instead. The people in town needed me first. Piotr had gone to all the trouble to kidnap Henry in order to make sure that I showed up on time and was cooperative when he called, so there was no doubt in my mind that he would be safe until Piotr felt some leverage was needed.

Until then, if I could save whoever was left in this hellhole, I’d do it.

50

W
e found the Nail Barrel inside a ring of empty cars that were full of bullet holes and shattered safety glass. I flicked off the headlights and put my trust in my inhumanly acute night vision and the faint green foxfire glow of the clouds overhead. Lights were on inside the store, but only in the rear of the building. The front of the store was dark, giving the shattered plate-glass windows in front a yawning, toothy look.

I nosed up against the closest wreck and killed the engine. Silence pressed in on us, disturbed only by random bursts of gusty wind in the street and the ticking of the cooling engine.

Anne’s head swayed left and right as she tried to peer across the street and into the store. “Looks deserted.”

“Still have to check.” I reached into my pocket and fished out the little lock-blade folder that I carried. I snapped it open and looked at Anne. “Give me your hand.”

She immediately balled up her fists and stuck them in her lap. “Why?”

“I want to introduce you to Mr. C, so he can find you if we get separated. A drop of blood is all I need.”

“Ugh, creepy.” She stuck her hand out and turned her head away. I nicked her palm as gently as I could, and then squeezed the little cut until a dark drop welled up. I dipped a finger in it, and then smeared it down Mr. C’s back while he sat on the dash. He remained perfectly still, but the shiny streak vanished into the dull wood of his back as though absorbed by a sponge.