Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

We were silent after that, just driving through town, feeling the Rover rock and shudder under sudden gusts of wind, and passing by people in their front yards nailing boards across windows and hauling lawn furniture indoors.

When we hit Main Street, there were still a few people out carrying bags of bottled water and cans of gas, with the occasional line in front of a grocery store. Boards were rapidly going up over plate glass here as well.

Anne tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a pair of empty prison buses parked in front of the police station. The prison and state names on the sides of the huge gray vehicles weren’t local, and weren’t all the same. Though the buses were slightly different in design, they did share all the same key features. Iron bars covered the windows, and a steel-mesh door separated the passenger section from the guard section up front.

Men were milling around the front of the station and leaning up against the buses. They had machetes in their hands and were faceless behind riot helmets with dark face shields. They took no notice of us as we drove past.

“Hey, Chuck, you guys have a prison up here?”

“Nope, I didn’t even know we had any buses.”

“Did you see the helmets?” said Anne.

I nodded. “Yeah, and half of those guys were wearing body armor, too. No headshots and no gutting.”

Anne looked worried. “That’s going to be a real problem for us if your idea about the Mother doesn’t work out.”

I watched the clouds roll over each other in a slow boil. “I wouldn’t worry about it. If my idea about the Mother doesn’t work out, we’ll be dead long before we have to worry about these guys.”

We drove past the Keller Mining Company without stopping. The plant entrance was closed, and there were guards posted behind the sliding chain-link fence gates. They were wearing riot helmets and Kevlar vests, and they weren’t doing anything but standing and staring through the gate. The employee parking lot behind them was a vast, empty concrete field.

Chuck craned his head around and watched the entrance recede into the distance. The guard’s heads did not turn to track us as we passed.

“The actual quarries are on the other side of the cutting houses where the slabs are finished. Most places just cut the stone out of the ground and ship it, but we finish it here at the plant. Countertops, pavers, steps, pretty much anything that can be pre-cut and shipped. We don’t sell the raw stone.”

“We? You work there?”

“Yeah. Pretty much everyone goes right from high school to the plant. Not much else out here, especially not if you want a living wage. I work on the pumps and shit that supply water to the gang saws and the thermalling gear. It’s not too bad. I pay my bills and I still have all my fingers. Can’t ask for more than that.” He stuck his arm between the seats and pointed. “Pull off the road over here. We can hike back behind the plant and get into the quarries that way.”

We swayed in unison as the Rover bounced off the raised asphalt onto the low scrub that dominated the landscape. Scraping and squeaking filled the cabin as I drove over the tough, woody bushes.

Everything was greener than I had expected out here in the dry western flatlands, with ankle-high weeds and low trees with wide, fat canopies. I put the largest tree between the truck and the highway, but it ended up looking more like a picnic scene than camouflage.

We got out of the car and dug through our gear for weapons. Chuck threaded a black nylon hip holster through his belt and dropped in his Taurus. He also stuffed an extra clip into the back pocket of his jeans. Anne unrolled Dominic’s blanket and pulled out the drum-fed shotgun that he had given her.

Chuck whistled appreciatively. “Goddamn, lady. Where the hell did that come from?”

“An admirer. The store was out of flowers.”

“Nice.”

I belted on my.45, freshly supplied with ammo thanks again to Dominic, and then strapped on my steel baton. Of the two weapons, I felt a lot better about the baton.

We crunched across the flat prairie while wind flattened the grass around us in sporadic waves and whipped the tree branches into a frenzy. The ground dipped into a shallow gully that looked like it might have been a creek in years past. On the far side of it stood a long stretch of chain-link fence.

Through the fence we could see the back of a tall, corrugated metal building. Acetylene bottles were racked neatly in ten-foot cradles behind the building, and cigarette butts littered the ground around a metal door with a single dusty pane of glass set at head height. A metal “No Smoking” sign was bolted to the wall directly over the butts. Black ash marks on the face of it showed where blue-collar rebels had crushed out their cigarettes on it.

Chuck gestured. “This is the back of the shop where we work on busted equipment. The quarries are about half a mile that way.”

We kept following the fence. On the other side, the buildings gave way to a vast open area with rutted gravel tracks running between the plant and the quarry area. A few hundred yards later the tracks curved away from us, leaving nothing to see but scrub and the skeletal tops of the block cranes in the distance. We stopped when the first stacks of stone slabs appeared.

Chuck spit and hitched up his pants. “This is Site Two. Number One is further in. I don’t suppose anyone has a pair of bolt cutters hidden in their pockets?” The fence was twelve feet high with a barbed wire cap that angled outward at the top.

“Electrified?”

Chuck shook his head. I touched it briefly with the back of my hand just to make sure, but it was fine. I squatted down and put my fingers through the bottom edge of the fence and bunched the lowest six inches of it up in my fists.

I used to do this kind of thing all the time to impress Maggie, or as she liked to point out, impress myself. I stopped years ago when everything went gray and I let my life seep away, but now I felt the old urge tugging at my cheeks and making me smile. I glanced over at Anne to see if she was watching. She was.

I squeezed hard, twisted, and pulled. The metal strands ground together in my fists and then sheared apart. I kept a straight face as I glanced up, but her wide-eyed look of amazement made me want to laugh out loud.

Chuck stepped back, but he didn’t draw on me this time. “That’s fucked up. I sure hope you really are on our side.”

“Our side?”

“You know, people. Normal people.”

“Chuck, if you think you’re normal, I have some bad news for you.”

To his credit, he grinned. “I guess that’s true.”

I moved up a few inches and repeated the process until there was a ragged tear in the fence about five feet high, and then I stretched the edges apart so that we could slip through without getting snagged on the sharp bits.

Quarry Two was frozen in mid-stride, like any other mining or construction project between shifts. The pit itself was an enormous three-sided box, with the open side a ramp that allowed vehicle access to the back wall where most of the cutting took place.

All three sides were solid stone with flat faces with sunken geometrical sections missing out of them. Slabs were cut from the top down, leaving a weird saw-toothed shelf marking the current level of progress.

Two cranes stood silently dangling chains high over the pit, while arcane heavy equipment slept haphazardly around them. It was strange to me, like being backstage at an industrial magic show.

Chuck led us around the excavation area. “This is the active site. Quarry One is a little farther that way, it was shut down about ten years ago.”

“Why do they abandon them?” asked Anne while we crunched along on the gravel road.