Bad Radio (5 page)

It seems like my entire life has, in one way or another, revolved around keeping this secret. Those of us who survived Warsaw never told Command the whole story. Of everyone in the world, at least they would have believed it. But my men were willing to lie for me, so that I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life in a basement lab somewhere as a permanent specimen.

I started dying my hair when Maggie turned fifty in order to lie to our friends. There wasn’t much I could do for my face, but you’d be surprised how far a little gray will get you. I had to stop going to veteran’s functions a few years later, when the gray wasn’t enough.

In my own town, I had to avoid even my closest friends, becoming more isolated by the year. Eventually that became less of a problem as they passed away from age or accident or disease.

I let my youth force me into hiding, shrinking my world down to just Maggie and me, and that was just fine. Until she died. Now, sitting across from Patrick’s granddaughter, I found that I no longer cared. I realized that I was carrying the shield long after the battle was lost.

“The answer is that I really am Abe Griffin. Your grandfather knew me because we served together in the war.”

“Oh my God.” She looked at me closely to see if I was kidding. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“If I’m crazy, then so are you. Did you see me shoot your grandfather’s killer?”

“Yes.”

“Where did I hit him? In the chest?” Remembering brought pain to her eyes, but she nodded. “I hit that guy center mass with a .45 caliber slug. Right in the heart. He didn’t even fall down, much less die. Maybe you don’t know much about guns or hearts, but that’s not normal.”

“Maybe he was wearing a bulletproof vest or something.”

“Okay, let me ask you another one. You asked me about a smell before I ran out to the parking lot. You said it was a horrible smell. Have you smelled it before?”

“Off and on for the last couple of days.”

“Usually when your grandfather was having one of his episodes, right? And did you complain to the people who run the home?”

“Of course I did, it was awful.”

“And they couldn’t smell it, could they?”

“They said they couldn’t, but I think they were lying so they wouldn’t get into trouble, or have to clean it up. How did you know?”

“Here’s another one. I heard you scream from the parking lot
before
I heard the glass breaking on the patio. You knew they were out there before they broke in, didn’t you? I bet you looked right at the doors before they even got there.”

She put one hand to her mouth. “I don’t remember, exactly. But that can’t be right. It’s impossible.”

“What are you, twenty-five? Forgive me if I don’t trust your vast experience on what’s possible. Patrick had the same gift, our whole squad was built around it. My job in the war was to protect your grandfather with my life. Your grandfather and one other guy.”

“Did this other guy, you know, could he smell things, too?”

“No, he was the smart guy. Cake would lead us to things, and the Professor would make sense of it.”

“Lead you to what things?”

I smiled at her. “Crazy stuff. The world is so much more, I don’t know, unstructured than you think.”

I drank the last of my coffee and took a stab at explaining it. “This is how Henry, the Professor, explained it to me. He said that people change the world by looking at it, “Pressure of Observation” he called it. We’re hardwired to expect certain things, like cause and effect and the steady passage of time for example.

“No matter what beliefs you may or may not have, we share a primal, unchanging expectation of the world based on how we perceive it. That being the case, as a species we dampen the world’s natural tendency toward unpredictability and a general disregard for what we think of as natural laws.

“And the more of us there are, the more we enforce our world view, and the more stable and predictable things become. So, fast forward to the last couple of centuries where we’ve multiplied and smothered the globe in our worldview, and things are pretty human friendly. Not completely, but close enough. This effect is tied to people, so in places that don’t have very many people, or places that are far away, even underground, that Pressure of Observation is pretty weak and things get a bit wild. You with me so far?”

“I think so, but for the record, this isn’t making you sound less crazy.”

“Fair enough. Now picture the world like a pond, frozen over in the winter. We’re on top making ice and thinking the surface is the whole world, when most of it is really underneath us, and it’s not frozen at all. We walk around right on the top edge of the world, confined to the smallest part, and we think we see it all.

“But, of course, sometimes there are cracks in the ice and things get out. Sometimes those cracks are natural, and sometimes people make them trying to fish for particular things. The world is bigger and stranger than you can imagine.”

“There are more things in heaven and Earth?”

“Pretty much.”

“And you and my grandfather used to find those things in the war.”

“Yep. Or at least the ones that the bad guys were involved with.”

“For the government.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t get old, and my grandfather could smell supernatural stuff, and it was all top secret. You are so full of shit.”

I shrugged into the uncomfortable silence.

Anne toyed with her fork, her eyes far away. “I hated him, you know. I mean, not now, but when I was growing up. I used to think he was deliberately sabotaging any chance of happiness that came my way. It was hard enough not having a dad and watching my mom work two jobs just to buy me clothes I was embarrassed to wear to school. But on the off chance that I did make friends, I could never do anything with them.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was always making me go to the range after school or to shooting competitions on the weekends. Sometimes we’d leave on Friday night, drive for hours to some tiny match in another state, and then get back just in time for school on Monday. He was completely obsessed.

“At first it was fun. I didn’t have a dad, but my grandfather was always there. He started teaching me to shoot when I was ten. It was our special time together, just him and me. After a while he got me coaches and started entering me in competitions, always talking about scholarships and going to the Olympics. After that, every time I wanted to go to the mall or have a sleepover or even go on a date, suddenly I was sacrificing my future.”

“Did it work? Get any scholarships?”

She looked away. “Of course not. I could have, I really was that good. Amazing, in fact. But after I finished high school I just snapped. I moved out, refused to go to college, dropped out of the circuit, pretty much the whole teen rebellion cliché. I even stopped speaking to my family. That really broke my mom’s heart. And Patrick’s.”

Plates bearing wedges of pie slapped down on the table between us, breaking the moment. Anne stopped talking and poked at her pie to give herself something to do. Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth, the green and white layers of key lime quivering in midair. She wrinkled her nose and gave the piece a sniff.

“Ugh. I think mine is bad.” Then her eyes jumped to the window and beyond. Her fork sank back to plate forgotten, while she stared intently at a white minivan as it powered past the diner on the highway. “It’s not the pie, is it?”

My stomach tightened. It had come from the east, the same direction as my farm.

6

I
threw money at the table and pulled Anne out of her seat before it landed. We threaded through the tables too fast, and I ended up bumping into our hostess as we neared the door, knocking a stack of menus out of her hand. I yelled an apology over my shoulder, and she yelled something back at me, but I didn’t catch it. I’m sure it was nice, though.

Two seconds later I was standing by Anne’s passenger door trying hard not to yank at the handle as Anne fumbled with the keys. I was in the seat before the car’s unlock chirp faded from the night air, and moments later we were jerking backwards out of the parking space.

“What are we doing?” she asked, eyes darting between her windows and mirrors.

“Going back to my farm. Fast as you can.”

She threw the car onto the road before she started asking more questions. Anne would have made a great soldier. No hesitation and no arguing when taking action. Of course, if I knew anything about good soldiers, the latter would change at the first opportunity. We merged smoothly onto the long, empty highway before she spoke.

“It was the same men, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t think so. I think that van was coming from my farm, and the men who killed your grandfather wouldn’t have had time to get there and back since we saw them. Was the smell the same?”

“Will you stop with that? I couldn’t have smelled anyone on the highway from inside the diner.”

“You smelled them right before you picked out the van. We both know it wasn’t the pie. It’s not even a smell, according to your grandfather, it’s just your brain trying to interpret information from a sense you don’t have an organ for. Now, was it the same?”

She paused to think. “I don’t think so. It was the same kind of smell, like garbage and swamp gas or something, but it was different than back at the home. Like bad fish and bad steak both smell like rotten food, but not like each other. Why?”

“Patty used to say that they all smelled different. He could always tell if the same one came creeping around.”

“The what came around? The baitbags or whatever?”

“Them, or things like them.” I shrugged in the dark car. “Unnatural things, I guess.”

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me! What does that mean, unnatural? They’re people, right? Why do you call them baitbags? Is that some kind of army slang?”

I glanced at the speedometer. She was keeping a steady but brisk eighty on the highway, even while she was frustrated and scared. Patty would have been proud.

“It’s a nickname that Shadroe came up with. Shad was with your grandfather and me in the squad.”

I looked out into the familiar darkness. Each day was different, but every night was the same one, stretching back forever. You might leave it during the daylight hours, but it was always there, waiting for you to come back.

“It was nighttime, and we were hunkered down in a farmhouse outside of Warsaw. The owners had left after artillery had blown off one corner of the building. At least I hope they left, there was part of a bedroom in that corner. Anyway, that had happened months before we got there.

“So we were trying to get out of the rain for the night in the part of the house that still had a roof, when somebody started shooting into the house. Well, wartime etiquette being what it was, we shot back. This went on, back and forth, for maybe ten minutes. Felt like an hour, easy.

“The funny thing was that we were pretty sure it was only one guy, and like a crazy person, he would come right up close to the house to shoot in through a window. We would wait, rifles pointing at all the windows we could see, and sometimes we would get a shot off just as his silhouette appeared. We’d swear that he was hit, but a couple of seconds later, he’d come right back up at another window. Never said a word. Just one guy running from window to window, shooting into the room, keeping us pinned down and helpless.

“Now don’t get me wrong, we were pretty hard by that point in the war, but it scared us. Shadroe threw down his rifle and pulled out a grenade. Yanked out the pin and tossed it away before we knew what he was doing. That should give you an idea of how scared he was. How scared we all were.

“He was planning on throwing that goddamn grenade out the window, but nobody in his right mind would even think of doing that. Miss that window by a hair, and that potato is going to bounce right back into your lap.

“So now we’re scared of the shooter outside and of Shad with the grenade inside. His face is all white and he’s trying to look at all the windows at once to see where the guy is. I’m thinking about tackling him to try and get the grenade away from him before he lets go of the spoon, because I know that if the shooter does pop up in a window, the grenade will just bounce off of him and roll back into us anyway.