Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

Instead of looking up, I was looking down at my own face. It was covered in black, tarry blood and locked in a rictus of pain and rage. The sight should have frightened me, but it didn’t, because I wasn’t alone.

Patrick was there, although I couldn’t see him, and Shad and Two-Penny and the rest of the squad. They held me close to myself and didn’t let me drift away. Or maybe I held on alone, clinging to my body with only the memories of my friends giving me the strength to do so. Either way, I endured.

Another presence came then, surrounding me. It was foul and alien and hungry and endless, stretching from my body all the way up into the sky. It circled and searched, seeking to possess the body that Piotr had created for it, but that body was useless now without a living spirit inside to use as a bridge to the flesh. The presence strained and fought to remain, but without a human spirit to fuse it to this reality, it could not.

The power of Piotr’s sacrifice was now consumed, so it turned to the only other things it could touch, its own kind in the form of the bags packing the bleachers, and consumed them as well, causing the infected townspeople to drop where they stood as the worms inside of them ceased animating their bodies.

Once they were gone, there was nothing left to power the ritual, and the gateway between our realities collapsed. The Devourer vanished like smoke, unable to exist here without merging with me.

I wanted to rest then and drift away, but Patrick’s face wouldn’t allow me to let go. The vision held me there, suspended in unlife, while Anne worked furiously below me, breathing into my mouth and forcing blood through my heart with the weight of her entire body.

The next thing I remember, I was opening my eyes and the sky was full of nothing but stars.

Anne and I disagreed on the smell. Sitting on the steps of the school in the cool silence of the pre-dawn morning, the air smelled crisp and clean for the first time since we arrived in town. The boggy, earthy undertones had gone at the same time as the bizarre cloud cover and plague of bags. I felt relaxed, almost languorous, in the absence of the ritual-fueled rage that had burned inside of me since the first blood pit in Warsaw. I felt at peace.

Anne rubbed her nose for the hundredth time. “I cannot believe you can’t smell that. It stinks like an electrical fire, all ozone and bitter ash.” She hawked and spit to the side. Not very ladylike, which I pointed out. She pointed out that I could keep my opinions to myself by punching me in the arm. For the record, also unladylike.

Henry sat on my other side, one hand on my shoulder. “Goosey, Patrick used to say about that smell. Used to be, some crazy with a hand-me-down ritual would get to working, and that smell would lead us right to him. Or her.”

Anne leaned forward and looked across me at Henry. “But we stopped the ritual, right? So why am I smelling it now?”

“I suspect that rituals don’t have a smell, but what they produce does. And this was a doozy. For a few minutes, another world hung over our own, and a godlike being was loose, in spirit at least. That’s got to have some kind of consequences, even if we can’t see them yet.”

“Well, it stinks. I can’t wait to get away from here.”

I nodded in heartfelt agreement. “Only one thing left to do, as soon as Chuck gets here. Then we’ll leave and never look back.”

Henry looked at me, then forward into the lightening dawn. “I never thought I’d see it finished.”

“Yeah. You think all of this was our fault? Because we didn’t go after Piotr the first time?”

“Maybe. Is it the fireman’s fault if your house burns down or the guy who struck the match? Maybe we could have done more the last time, but maybe we did all anyone could have asked. You can lose a whole lifetime second guessing your past. It’s over now, and that’s good enough.”

“I saw ‘em, Henry. Tonight. I tried to stop the ritual by killing the vessel, me, and I think it worked. For a few minutes I was dead. But instead of going to the next thing, or just fading out, the boys showed up and kept me here.” My eyes prickled, but no tears fell. “Patrick, Shad, Frank, even Don, all of them just surrounded me and kept me in one piece until my heart knit back together and Anne could get it jump started. I think they saved my life, just like the old days.”

Henry turned to me and grinned wide and toothy. “Even Death better step out of the way when them boys are lookin’ to take care of business.”

I grinned back, that old love and pride breaking out all over my face like it was still 1943. “Fuckin’ A, Professor.”

A little later Chuck returned with the Rover and crunched to a stop next to us. After leaving the building, he had insisted on taking the prison bus back to the hardware store to retrieve it. We fought about his going alone, no surprise there, but we figured that everything that belonged to the Devourer had been consumed during its attempt to hold open the gate, so it was probably safe enough. Besides, everyone knew that Chuck was going back to bury Mazie and Greg, and that he wanted to be alone while he did it. I could understand that.

My clothes had dried stiff and foul after being soaked in the pit, causing flakes of dried gore to rain off of me as I stood up. Chuck got out of the truck and headed to the back to open up the rear door.

“I got that stuff you wanted. Sorry it took so long. I ended up having to siphon gas out of parked cars. The gas stations were either surrounded by mobs of scared people or on fire.”

The cargo area of the truck was filled with the supplies I had asked for from the hardware store. A dozen jerry cans full of gas, two big packages of those red cloth shop towels, a box of road flares, and two cans of soapless hand cleaner for mechanics. I stripped out of my blood-soaked clothes right there in the parking lot.

“Dude!” Chuck turned his back to me. “Do you mind? Like I survived the end of the world just to see some guy’s junk waving around in the breeze. A little warning next time.”

“Sorry.” I scooped out handfuls of the cleaner-it had the consistency of a loose paste-and started rubbing it all over my body, taking special care with my face and hair, and then scrubbing hard with the shop towels.

A short but chilly time later, I was clean enough to put on a fresh change of clothes from my duffel. I started unloading gas cans from the back and stacking them next to the curb.

“Well,” I asked Anne when the last ones were unloaded, “how do I look? Better?”

Chuck piped up, “Hell, yes, you look better. You looked like a goddamn tampon ten minutes ago.”

Anne threw him a look. “You are disgusting. Seriously.”

He shrugged.

She turned to me. “You won’t scare people who look in the window when we’re on the highway, but you’re still going to need a shower. Or two. Or three. Your hair looks like you rubbed chicken livers in it, and you smell like a dead cat that’s been soaked in nail polish remover. When we get back in the car, we’re rolling the windows down.”

“Fair enough. Let’s get to work so we can go.”

We carried the jerry cans to the gym and spent the next twenty minutes soaking the corpse-covered bleachers and wooden floor with gas. I added my bloody clothes to the mix while we were at it.

When it was done, we stood well back from the open doors and starting pitching in road flares until we could no longer see into the gym through the roaring, smoking inferno inside. Then we stood together in silence thinking about the people whose pyre we had just lit, wishing that things had been different.

We drove away into the brilliant sunrise with a rising column of black smoke at our backs, visible long after we left the city limits, and into a world that had changed in ways no one yet understood.