Bad Radio (35 page)

Initially it appeared to be a thick column which tapered to a blunt point that swayed slowly back and forth in the air high above us. Its skin was rubbery, black, and warty in long strips and patches. In those sections hung drooping sacks, also black, but occasionally shading to gray as they stretched tight under internal pressure. Some of the sacks had burst and hung limp and ragged.

Can something be so horrifyingly wrong and alien that it was hard for the eye to make sense of its lines and features, but at the same time seem completely familiar? A feeling of instant recognition hit me, like glimpsing a friend just as he turns a corner, mixed with stunned confusion as I tried to understand what I was seeing. It was like the instinctive part of me knew exactly what I was looking at, even if the rest of me didn’t.

As I watched, the tip drooped down towards the captives gathered there at the edge of the quarry, pointing like a vast, grotesque finger.

It loomed closer to the knot of men who had been selected as good candidates, and who were on the ground, shouting and struggling against the plastic zip ties that bound their wrists and ankles.

The tip hovered a few feet from the closest man and then in a grotesque spasm, split open into five equal wedges, peeling back a third of its length and revealing corpse-like purplish maroon flesh on the inside, which was studded with thousands of long, thin backwards-pointing teeth.

Men screamed as the smell of rotting meat and oily musk rolled over them, and the wedges began to flex and writhe out of sync with each other. Now that it was fully revealed to me, a second sense of familiarity hit me, this time originating with my own experience. The head resembled one of the large worms that every bag carried in its belly, at least as far as the tentacles went, but on a gargantuan scale.

Only a few seconds had passed since the thing had surfaced. All of the tentacle tips drifted towards one of the helpless men, triggering another round of hoarse screaming, which snapped me out of my stupor.

I bolted forward and put myself between the man and the creature. Don’t ask me why I thought that would be a good plan, it just felt right. I stood my ground with the five thick tentacle tips pointing directly at my face.

They halted and hung in the air, hesitating for long seconds before each of the tentacles resumed their independent questing. I had hoped that the creature would react to me in the same way that the smaller one had done when attacking Leon, and it looked like I was right. I didn’t care to dwell on why that was. It turned from me and fixated on another man, one several feet to my right.

Since it had worked once before, I stepped quickly to the side to place myself once more between the monster and its victim.

Again it hesitated, then darted around me to try to get at the man. I reached down and yanked him away by the arm, sending him tumbling into several other captives. The tips of the massive tentacles dug shallow furrows in the stony ground next to me as the Mother struck where he had been. It jerked back, rearing high into the air.

Enraged, the tentacles snapped open as wide as they could go, revealing a gaping maw at the juncture where they grew out from the creature’s body. An enormous, awful bellow erupted from the creature, making the bruised-looking inner flesh around the maw vibrate and ripple and the water running down its sides stand up in shockwave patterns.

The sound was vast and deafening, but it wasn’t the volume that was so fearful, but the deep, resonant frequency. The vast majority of the sound must have been below the threshold of human hearing, but it could be felt as a punishing wave of pulsing vibration. The gravel around my feet danced and jittered under the assault.

The mouths of everyone around me were open, screaming into the maelstrom with their hands clapped over their ears and the skin on their faces and arms rippling.

I might have been screaming, too, I don’t know. All of the glass windows in the cars became silver dust trembling in the air, framed by rounded squares of painted metal.

Something pinwheeled into my peripheral vision, and I turned. I saw a crumpled piece of sheet metal skid across the ground, soundless against the endless onslaught, and recognized it as the remains of a folding bus door. One of the huge armored bags erupted from the bus.

His arms were flung wide, fingers splayed rigidly out, and his head was tilted back, pointing his face at the sky. His throat was stretched and swollen, with the skin bunching into purpling fleshy bands.

Five black tentacles emerged from his gaping mouth, spread outward across his face: across cheeks, eyes, and forehead, and at the center, a gaping, trumpeting hole occupying the same space as the mouth it was emerging from. The flesh of this maw also trembled, but any sound it may have made was lost in the din.

As if an answer was all that was sought, the unimaginable sound cut off like a switch. I pulled my hands away from my head as I realized that I had been clutching my ears like everyone else, and was surprised to see that there was no blood on them.

Even so, the new silence roared in my ears and things still seemed soundless to me. My body felt numb and buzzy, like I had just stepped off of a rollercoaster, and I could feel my hair settle back onto my head.

Everyone but me was on the ground, still curled up and clutching their ears, including Chuck and Anne. The Mother was no longer screaming, having summoned her offspring, but she was still enraged at my interference. The tentacles blurred into motion like cracking whips and snatched a man off the ground. She shoved him into her mouth with inward curling tentacles and the toothed walls convulsed on him. And then he was gone.

The guard ran ponderously towards me. The tentacles protruding from his mouth did not retreat back inside, but instead flailed at the air, grasping and twisting in my direction.

There was no time to draw my pistol, even had I wanted to do so. I had only my steel baton and my anger, but that was enough for me.

I swung downward in a short, vicious arc intended to pulp the guard’s head, but he jerked aside and my baton ended up coming down on his shoulder. The impact was solid. I felt it all the way up my arm, but it didn’t seem to faze him.

A toothed tentacle raked across my face like a wet rubber strap with broken glass embedded in it, and a ham fist drove into my chest like a sledgehammer.

I don’t recall crossing the space between the guard and the parked car I slammed into. One second I was upright, and the next I was sitting on my ass against the crushed door of a Honda.

By the time my eyes focused, he was nearly on top of me again, so I reached one hand up over my head and groped until I found the side mirror. I snapped it off of the car just in time to smash it into his face, glass and plastic shards exploding outward from the impact. The guard lurched back, both hands instinctively coming up, only to get tangled in the thrashing, bloody tentacles coming out of his face.

I stumbled away from the car while trying to figure out if the pain in my ribcage meant splintered bone fragments were already shredding my lungs, or if I was just bruised to hell and back, when it dawned on me that the first guard by the lake wasn’t bashing my skull in.

A quick look around revealed why. The first guard was too busy holding a captive over his head to be worried about beating me into hamburger. The Mother had the tip of each tentacle holding the captive’s head steady, as a maggot-filled tube joined her mouth with his. It spasmed as a long shadow passed through it into the man, distending his throat briefly.

I looked away in revulsion and discovered something else. Anne and Chuck were gone.

42

F
ear touched me as I felt events wheeling out of control. Piotr had driven off, waving and smiling, and I had no idea where he went. The thing that I had come to the quarry to kill had turned out to be a building-sized monster that could swallow me whole.

Not to mention that the biggest bag I had ever seen was trying to beat me to death, and doing a pretty good job of it. And to top things off, my friends were missing and could be in serious trouble.

I used to be good at this. When my squad was in trouble it was my job to instantly come up with a plan that was clear and simple and effective. And I always did. It was my gift the way that Henry soaked up knowledge and the way Patrick could sense the supernatural. It was why I was the leader, even though I was a good deal younger than everyone else.

But time and events had changed all of that. Now rage clouded my mind when I needed it most. That was just one more victory that Piotr had over me, one more weakness for him to exploit. If I let him. If you were to ask my father, he would tell you that I was the most intractable, unreasonable, pig-headed son of a bitch he’d ever met. And he’d say it with pride. I dug in and forced the world into focus.

My top priority was finding Anne and Chuck, but I needed to be alive for that. This fight had to end. The bag trying to kill me had recovered from being force-fed a car mirror and was heading towards me again.

I held my ground while it bore down on me and hit it at the last second with an uppercut to the jaw as hard as I could. I kept the baton in my fist as I swung, giving me the advantage of the old “roll of quarters” effect.

My fist connected just underneath the bag’s chin with enough force to flip over a car. The impact drove his teeth clean through the extended tentacles and shattered his jaw.

Black blood erupted from the bag’s mouth as it went rigid with shock. I could see its throat bulge and warp as the worm thrashed and twisted in pain.

It was stunned and it was close to me. Game over. I took the baton in both hands, wound up, and swung for the fences with everything I had. The headless corpse fell to the ground.

Nearby, a diesel engine roared to life. The prison bus lurched forward with a painful grinding of gears. Through the windshield I could see an insanely grinning Chuck behind the wheel. Anne stood right next to him, white-knuckled and swaying as she clutched the safety bar next to him. They were alive. The tightness in my chest that I hadn’t been aware of relaxed and let me breathe.

The bus missed the group of captives on the ground by inches as Chuck swerved closer to the edge of the quarry in order to avoid them.

The armored bag watched the bus bear down on it, unable or unwilling to drop the captive he was holding over his head.

There was a sickening thud as the bag disappeared under the bumper, only to encounter the forty-two-inch-tall, foot-wide bus tire coming up behind it. The captive flew over the hood and smashed into the windshield, caving it in.

The impact tore the pale tube out of his throat. That must have been fairly painful for the Mother as well, as she jerked up and back, spilling clear mucus swimming with tiny worms from the torn off end of the tube.

As soon as the bus made contact with the bag, Chuck locked up the brakes, throwing up a cloud of white dust and slamming the bus to a halt between the Mother and the captives. Trapped between the locked wheel of an eighteen-ton bus and the stony ground of the quarry, the bag simply peeled apart like rotten fruit.

Enraged, the Mother wrapped one massive tentacle across the front of the bus, crushing it. The sounds of shattering glass accompanied the squeal of tires as the Mother began to drag the entire bus into the lake.

I raced for the bus as it slid towards the water. The front wheels slipped off of the quarry and the bus chassis dropped onto the ground, scraping and grinding on the rocky ledge.

I arrived just as the back of the bus rose up over my head. The rear emergency door popped open and Anne looked out at me, clutching the bottom edge of the door as the floor of the bus tilted towards the sky.

She held my gaze as she rose into the air. Seconds later, the nose hit the water with a booming splash. The entire bus plunged vertically into the lake.

43