Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

Piotr patted me on the arm while I regained my composure, a look of compassion on his goddamned face. “I’m sorry, Abe.” He glanced at Henry. “I’m sorry your so-called friends pulled you out of your womb, your spring of immortality, prematurely. If you had been fully reborn the way I intended, you would never have suffered all these long years with your memories. You’d have been beyond that. But now, while they let you down and made you suffer, here I am, ready to heal you.”

The anger that I had been biting down on for the last hour, for the last week, for the last sixty years, turned into something else, something full of bile and jagged edges that I could no longer resist.

I lunged for Piotr and one of my bookends grabbed for me. I drove one hand into its face, grabbed a handful of slimy, squirming tentacles, and before the bag could react, ripped the worm clean out of its mouth. Or at least part of it, as only the severed head and a foot of the body ended up in my hand, the toothed tentacles thrashing and tearing at my skin all the way up to my elbow. The bag dropped to the ground in convulsions, clawing at its own face and neck. Even as it was falling, I was moving, slinging the head away from me with my right hand and reaching out with my left for Piotr.

My second bookend grabbed me from behind, but as strong as it was, it couldn’t keep me from crossing those last few feet. And then I was close enough. I brought both hands up and reached for Piotr’s neck, desperate to feel his thin, papery skin and stringy neck muscles tearing under my fingers.

But I couldn’t do it. There was no misty fog this time, no gesture or trick. It was just me. My body simply refused to go any further. As the fact dawned on me, I realized that Piotr was shouting into my face, calling my name.

“Abe! You can’t hurt me, but you are killing your friends! Abe! Listen to me.” And then I could hear them, choking and strangling behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and there they were, Anne and Chuck and Henry, all down on the ground, fingers clawing at the cords sunken into the flesh of their necks, faces already purpling, and so help me God, I turned back around and lunged for Piotr again, lost in the madness and the rage.

I could see what was happening, but I couldn’t help myself. I was beyond sanity. Piotr said something, and the bag behind me wrapped his hands around my torso, lifted me bodily, and turned me around so that I was forced to see my friends dying. It took an eternity, but I was able to get some small amount of control back before it was too late. I forced myself to be still until the bag put me down and stepped away.

I watched Anne claw the now slack cord away from the raw ugly skin underneath and suck air into her lungs. She sobbed and gasped and then threw up on the floor between her hands. The wracking coughs that followed were painful to hear. Henry and Chuck were faring little better. I had almost killed them. Knowingly.

My face and jaw hurt, and my throat was sore from the screaming that I never heard. An image appeared in my mind’s eye of a crude painting on a wall in dead woman’s house. A painting of my face, raving and insane, and I knew then that the painting was right. I had seen my true face.

Piotr looked just as calm as always. “Finally. I thought I was going to have to hang one of them on a sacrificial chain to get you ready for your part. Come on, I promise you that soon you’ll never have to deny your nature again.”

I didn’t follow. Instead I turned to look back at the people that I almost killed. “Anne, I’m sorry. I’m not … I’m so sorry.”

I felt sick when I heard her voice, raspy and strained, coming out of her bruised throat. “It’s okay. I know. I’m here because I wanted to be here, Abe. I know you thought you were using me, but we both know that I was using you, too. You needed to find Piotr and I needed someone to avenge my grandfather’s death. So, we’re even, okay?”

I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t okay, so I just shook my head.

Piotr tapped me on the shoulder. “Speaking of vengeance, the time for both of ours is drawing close. Time to go.”

He turned and led us up a mobile set of steel stairs on wheels like you would see blocking the aisle at a home supply warehouse store. It was a huge right triangle of handrails and stair steps chained to the side of the scaffolding, allowing access to the platforms and catwalks that were arranged in a large square around the pool, some twenty feet off the ground.

Once on top, I could see that the square ring of catwalks was actually bisected by another walkway that ran from one side to the other, directly over the pit. Hooked chains hung to either side of the center catwalk so that the victims would be level with a person standing there.

One of the corners where the outer catwalks met had an additional platform secured to it, a ten-by-ten wooden square supporting four bodies, their faces partially obscured by rectangles of otherworldly metal. I could imagine the twin spikes on the backs of the altar pieces piercing their eyes, fixing the blocks to their faces and granting them a view of another place, while at the same time taking their mundane sight.

The length of the spikes should have been more than enough to pierce their brains all the way to the rear of their skulls and kill them, but they were clearly still alive, jerking and twitching as if they were trying to look away from the synchronized shadows that passed over the altar pieces. They were nailed to the platform through wrists and shins to keep them in place, but they remained silent, no cries of anguish escaped their grimacing lips and gnashing teeth.

Piotr turned to my remaining guard and said, “It’s time to open the roof. Go outside and tell the others to begin pulling the chains.” Without any response, the thing turned and stepped off of the catwalk, dropping twenty feet into the darkness below. I heard it hit the ground far more lightly and gracefully than its bulk would suggest.

Piotr relaxed, apparently content to wait for his orders to be carried out, and Anne spoke in her damaged voice. “Why are you doing this? You keep talking about justice and vengeance but if that were true, you’d have already killed us. Abe and Henry are the last ones alive who interfered with you, and you have them, but they’re still alive. Why?”

Piotr kept his gaze on the ceiling as he replied. “It’s not justice for Abe and Henry that I’m concerned with, although they’ll receive their measure as well. It’s all of us. All of humanity in its corrupt, hateful, self-serving glory. We praise ourselves for wholesale slaughter and call it glorious because we have labeled them the enemy. We blow up children to make a point, create anguish and destroy lives to preserve dogma, and commit genocide on a daily basis. Even now, somewhere in the world men are hacking women’s breasts off with a machete so they can’t feed their children in an attempt to wipe their ethnic group from the face of the Earth. And they feel justified in doing it. Proud, even. We need to be destroyed. That’s justice.”

“Even you?”

“Just because I can see clearly doesn’t mean I’m any better. There was a time, before I received guidance, when I thought I was righteous, that I was going to punish the wrong in the name of the right. But Abe gave me the gift of time. I came to understand that the problem wasn’t the men who killed my family, or the nation that spawned them, or their allies. It was just their nature. Our nature. They did what they did because they were in a position to do so, not because they were special in any way. They did it because they could, and given the chance, any one of us would have done the same. All it takes is the tiniest reassurance that we’ll be praised for doing the right thing, the acceptance of those around us. And we’re able to kill and mutilate with the worst of them.”