Lost Signals

by Josh Malerman

  I will stay with the wire until the end.

  It is the end, indeed. Since 4 P.M. yesterday the fog has hung over the city. Following reports from the sexton of the local church, two rescue parties were sent out to investigate conditions on the outskirts of the city. Neither party has ever returned nor was any word received from them. It is quite certain now that they will never return.

  From my instrument I can gaze down on the city beneath me. From the position of this room on the thirteenth floor, nearly the entire city can be seen. Now I can see only a thick blanket of blackness where customarily are lights and life.

  I fear greatly that the wailing cries heard constantly from the outskirts of the city are the death cries of the inhabitants. They are constantly increasing in volume and are approaching the center of the city.

  The fog yet hangs over everything. If possible, it is even heavier than before, but the conditions have changed. Instead of an opaque, impenetrable wall of odorous vapor, there now swirls and writhes a shapeless mass in contortions of almost human agony. Now and again the mass parts and I catch a brief glimpse of the streets below.

  People are running to and fro, screaming in despair. A vast bedlam of sound flies up to my window, and above all is the immense whistling of unseen and unfelt winds.

  The fog has again swept over the city and the whistling is coming closer and closer.

  It is now directly beneath me.

  God ! An instant ago the mist opened and I caught a glimpse of the streets below.

  The fog is not simply vapor—it lives ! By the side of each moaning and weeping human is a companion figure, an aura of strange and vari-colored hues. How the shapes cling ! Each to a living thing !

  The men and women are down. Flat on their faces. The fog figures caress them lovingly. They are kneeling beside them. They are—but I dare not tell it.

  The prone and writhing bodies have been stripped of their clothing. They are being consumed—piecemeal.

  A merciful wall of hot, steaming vapor has swept over the whole scene. I can see no more.

  Beneath me the wall of vapor is changing colors. It seems to be lighted by internal fires. No, it isn’t. I have made a mistake. The colors are from above, reflections from the sky.

  Look up ! Look up ! The whole sky is in flames. Colors as yet unseen by man or demon. The flames are moving ; they have started to intermix ; the colors are rearranging themselves. They are so brilliant that my eyes burn, they are a long way off.

  Now they have begun to swirl, to circle in and out, twisting in intricate designs and patterns. The lights are racing each with each, a kaleidoscope of unearthly brilliance.

  I have made a discovery. There is nothing harmful in the lights. They radiate force and friendliness, almost cheeriness. But by their very strength, they hurt.

  As I look, they are swinging closer and closer, a million miles at each jump. Millions of miles with the speed of light. Aye, it is light of quintessence of all light. Beneath it the fog melts into a jeweled mist radiant, rainbow-colored of a thousand varied spectra.

  I can see the streets. Why, they are filled with people ! The lights are coming closer. They are all around me. I am enveloped. I . . .

  ***

  The message stopped abruptly. The wire to Xebico was dead. Beneath my eyes in the narrow circle of light from under the green lamp-shade, the black printing no longer spun itself, letter by letter, across the page.

  The room seemed filled with a solemn quiet, a silence vaguely impressive, powerful.

  I looked down at Morgan. His hands had dropped nervelessly at his sides, while his body had hunched over peculiarly. I turned the lamp-shade back, throwing light squarely in his face. His eyes were staring, fixed.

  ***

  Filled with a sudden foreboding, I stepped beside him and called Chicago on the wire. After a second the sounder clicked its answer.

  Why ? But there was something wrong. Chicago was reporting that Wire Two had not been used throughout the evening.

  “Morgan !” I shouted. “Morgan ! Wake up, it isn’t true. Some one has been hoaxing us. Why . . . ” In my eagerness I grasped him by the shoulder.

  His body was quite cold. Morgan had been dead for hours. Could it be that his sensitized brain and automatic fingers had continued to record impressions even after the end ?

  I shall never know, for I shall never again handle the night shift. Search in a world atlas discloses no town of Xebico. Whatever it was that killed John Morgan will forever remain a mystery.

  You like to listen to other people’s business, Mick ? Of course you do, it’s your fuckin’ job. You like to know things. But you, you Irish prick, you don’t know shit. You don’t know what they say about listening at keyholes. About what happens to guys like you.”

  ***

  “Two minutes !” The bus driver pushed through the milling passengers and banged out the doors, letting in a rush of frigid air. It looked like townsfolk escaping a rising river or something from an old newsreel about European refugees.

  All because there would be no dawn tomorrow.

  But I could feel the approach of night in my marrow even as I saw it in the wide eyes around me. Already the light outside was the orange of glowing embers.

  I closed the accordion doors of the phone booth to block out the chaos, people buffeting the glass in their passage. Vera, answer the damned phone.

  Ringing in an empty apartment three thousand miles away. How many rings meant I care ? At what point did that become I panic ? At nineteen rings I replaced the receiver in the cradle, resting my head against the cold metal of the payphone as it regurgitated my silver. The splinted fingers on my left hand made gathering the coins awkward, but I managed.

  A palm slapped against the glass and I looked into wet eyes glaring from an explosion of whiskers and wild hair. The man waved at me to follow and walked away without waiting.

  I fought down an urge to try one more call and crossed the station floor, avoiding the eyes of those who remained. Big men with sloped shoulders and narrow eyes. Razors did not play much of a role in this place.

  “All aboard,” an announcement crackled over the antiquated public address system.

  The bus belched a black cloud and took its people south.

  I went north.

  ***

  The maddening light of a plummeting sun. Snow fields transformed into molten seas of blood, the trees into black ink etchings. Alien. Not Chicago. Not even the planet Earth.

  I kept waiting for a comment on my black eye or the purple bruise on my jaw but my driver didn’t seem to notice. He pulled in at a log house calling itself a saloon and led me to a waiting Jeep with threadbare tires. A map of Alaska was unfolded on the hood and he rested a boot on the running board, showering the ground below with flakes of rust.

  “You push towards Wainright.” His words came in a series of grunts and I wondered how often he spoke to other people. A fingernail twice the thickness of a nickel traced the road until it reached a river. “You want this turnoff before Kuik and you’ll get a guide in, they’re expecting you. Give them this.”

  I took a wrapped, rectangular package. Cash. He gave me a grin as brief thoughts of flight crossed my mind.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said.

  I worked my bruised jaw and ignored the implication.

  “You miss it, you hit Wainright. You miss Wainright, you hit the sea.”

  “I won’t miss,” I said and he grunted again, plonking a rag-wrapped bundle on top of the map. I unwrapped the checked flannel and found a greasy .38 revolver, Smith & Wesson stamped into the metal of the barrel. A box double the size of a deck of cards was filled with bullets and held an envelope in place against the rising wind. Fuck, I hated guns. Never carried one in all my years as a private dick. My camera and a tape recorder did enough damage.

  I was in a new line of work these days.

  My contact showed brown teeth when I asked about a phone
and gestured around the side of the building. Salt and ice held the glass door of the booth shut and I had to hit it with my shoulder to get inside. More ringing. I dry-swallowed a couple of painkillers while I waited for the voice that didn’t come.

  The saloon was dark and windowless, smoke from a fireplace hanging below the ceiling and a woman’s voice crooning in French from hidden speakers. The only live female in the place was running drinks to the scattered tables of hard men, her eyes marked by fatigue and fists. I shucked off my parka and drew stares in my wrinkled gray suit, so I slipped the coat back on. Mutters. Sidelong glances. The men here were of a piece, those who remained behind when humanity fled.

  My broken fingers were still screaming so I said, “Bourbon, neat,” and slit the envelope with a thumbnail. Some scrawled details on my meet-up in Kuik and then a chilling sign off. With your shield or on it. Goombah prick liked to play the scholar, quote Socrates while your bones snapped.

  “No one does it like Edith Piaf,” a man’s voice crackled from the speakers and I heard my own Chicago streets in his accent. “According to the almanac, we have about three minutes of daylight left. It’s gonna be a long night, people,” and here the DJ paused for an uncomfortable laugh. “A real long night. Funny things happen. We start to forget about daytime, about brotherhood. The wolves will howl and we will huddle. And when you get down to the bottom and you’re choosing between the taste of a bottle or a gun barrel, think about this song and make it through one more minute, all right ?” He cackled again, the least reassuring radio voice I’d ever heard. “This is radio KZXX, music at the edge of the world with, ‘Here Comes the Sun’.”

  “That fucker,” the bartender said as the song filtered through the smoke and heads dropped a little lower.

  “Why do you have him on ?”

  “All there is,” the bartender said, smearing the bar with a greasy rag.

  I pulled a pack of Marlboros from an inside pocket and lipped a cigarette free, lighting it with my Zippo and then putting flame to paper. The bartender glared but gave me my drink without a word.

  The door bumped open and a man entered, stamping snow off his fur-topped boots. “It’s here,” he said quietly and conversation stopped. In ones and twos people rose and went outside. I followed the bargirl through the door.

  It was dark.

  “Everdark,” someone whispered and a ripple of agreement passed through the men, these dangerous men, who huddled closer together beneath the cloud of their breath. Some wit aimed a bright arc of urine at the building in a gesture of defiance and drew empty chuckles.

  “With your shield or on it,” I said.

  “Huh ?” the bargirl said, but I ignored her.

  Sodium lights around the building kicked in with a snap and pushed the darkness back. Big lights, humming yellow bulbs beneath metal half domes, but they weren’t nearly enough. The night was enormous overhead and all around us, far larger than the great expanse of land we stood on. Alaska is said to make a man small. It reduced me to a speck.

  I held up my hands, studying the details of knuckles and fingernails, the tape and splint. Making sure I was still here.

  Back inside a fight erupted and no one tried to stop it. I left without finishing my drink and was a half hour north before I realized I hadn’t tried to call Vera again.

  There wouldn’t be another chance until I killed the man on the radio.

  ***

  The Jeep’s heater produced more noise than warmth and my knuckles were numb on the wheel. I thought about that guinea fuck laughing while his boys broke three fingers on my left hand, nice and slow so Vera could watch me beg.

  A Square John in a long coat had studied me like a bug on a slide. With his matching Fedora and briefcase he looked like a centerfold from the London fog catalogue, whatever G-Men were jerking off to these days. I knew a Fed when I saw one.

  “You don’t mix business and pleasure, Mick, and you don’t eat another man’s pie,” he said as an Italian the size of a bank vault took hold of my ring finger. Vera was trying not to watch but the boss grabbed her jaw and made her witness my humiliation. “You done both.”

  To see her was to fall for her up on that stage under those lights. Backstage in her dressing room she said she was married and I didn’t care. She told me which monster she was married to and I told her, “I can set you free.”

  All the times I worked divorce cases, tailed cheating wives, philandering husbands, you’d think I would have become jaded. Maybe I was until Vera cut through my defenses like a searchlight through fog.

  You should have seen her.

  “Why you choose this lowlife ?” he asked Vera and laughed when she shook her head, disowning me. “I mean, what did you think you were gonna find listenin’ in on my business, somethin’ gonna make me give up my wife ?”

  The big man worked on my ribs until I puked in my lap. Vera was gone when the boss threw the water in my face.

  “You wanna live ?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You gonna eat my pie any more ?”

  “No more, Sally,” I said, hiccupping for air. “I won’t eat nothin’ ever again.”

  He leaned back and pulled a gold cigarette case from inside his jacket. That slick guinea suit cost more than six months rent on my apartment. “You gotta understand your station in life, Mick.” He flicked his Bic and inhaled a lungful. “You’re shit under my shoe. Girl like Vera ? Maybe she wanted to walk in the wild side for a moment but she needs someone who can keep her in style.” He snapped his gold cigarette case closed to make the point, the subtle fuck.

  “I understand, Sally,” I said, hating myself but groveling for all I was worth. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Well, you’re lucky because I might be in the mood to do a favor. You deserve a favor ?”

  “No I don’t but you’re a generous guy, everyone says so.”

  “That’s right, I’m so generous I agreed to do this thing for this guy, but I got no one wants to go.” He blew a smoke ring and screwed it up. “It’s cold and outta town. Way outta town.”

  “I don’t mind the cold.”

  He leaned over and sniffed me. “You didn’t piss yourself, mostly guys piss themselves when Baby Vincenzo goes to work. You stupid but maybe not a complete vigliacco. Maybe you can do this thing.” Sally glanced at the Square John who gave a barely perceptible nod.

  I took my chance. “Anything, Sally, anything you say—”

  He rocked my head with a slap.

  “Gonna send you to the asshole of the world, Micky.”

  The Square John approached Sally and handed over the briefcase. He left without ever saying a word.

  “Who was that—” I started to say when Baby Vincenzo hit me with a ham sized fist.

  I woke up on a plane to Alaska.

  ***

  I crossed a bridge over the great void with nothing on either side.

  Night. You don’t know what the word means when you live in a city. Even in the suburbs there are streetlights, the distant glow of town. But once the sun goes down in the nowhere, your world is reduced to the cone of light from your headlights. It’s insignificant, that light. As inadequate as all of your preparations.

  “That was ‘Ode to Joy’ by,” the DJ sucked in a lungful of smoke, voice strained, “by Beethoven man, dig it. Nothin’ to do in the dark except listen, that’s what I’m doing and I’m glad you are, too.”

  He took shape in my mind as I drove, growing long and lizard like in his studio, attached at the mouth to the serpentine hose of a Moroccan hookah. He’d be filthy. Uncombed hair the color of ashes and bad skin that never saw a bar of soap.

  “And now we’re gonna let our hair down with m’man Clapton and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.”

  “Are you kidding me ?” I said to the radio and he cackled back as if he’d heard.

  Rock, classical and then some tribal stuff with drums. In between he rambled and ranted about anything t
hat came to mind. Religion. Communism. A marriage, presumably his, failing. This guy was higher than a kite and the only radio station on the air. How did he get such range ?

  “They don’t know, they don’t know, man, lemme tell you, they know. Your new HD-TV with voice control ? It’s always listening, even when you turn it off. Think about that, man. You like to jerk off to Internet porn ? Man I hope you cover that camera with some tape because they can see you. Yeah, yeah. They say they don’t know how many people cops kill every year ? Of course they know, they don’t want you to know but they know. They know everything and they like it.” He took a breath to cough and I could hear the static-laden suck of a pipe. “Know what they don’t like ? I know what they know. I can hear them in their little bunkers and they hate it.”

  He was crazier than a shit-house rat.

  “This is gonna be a humanitarian gesture,” I said and Johnny Cash answered by singing he once shot a guy in Reno. I was getting squirrelly. Popping too many painkillers and doing everything I could not to think about the phone ringing with no one to answer. After two years of playing postman with Vera, I had enough dough stuffed in my mattress to get us down to Mexico where the dollar went far and the tequila flowed like liquid gold. I wanted dirt on Sally so he’d leave us alone but he found the bug I installed on his phone. Then he found me backstage with Vera.

  I was picturing her in the dressing room when the fire blazed up on my right and I flashed right past it, unaware until I hit the brakes that I was doing eighty miles an hour. I fishtailed to a screeching stop and threw the Jeep into reverse, backing up with a high whine of the engine into the crimson glow of taillights. I jerked to a stop in front of a collection of low structures surrounding a bonfire.

  The domelight came on when I shoved open the door, the loneliest nightlight on the planet. Squinting helped me make out shapes moving around the fire, wide and lumbering things leaking a high-pitched chant. Dogs were howling.

  “Hello,” I called out, reluctant to abandon the delicate spill of illumination.

  “Shit.” I headed in amongst the buildings—low slung things, wooden frames with hide walls that shimmered and flapped in a weird approximation of life. Some kind of Indian shit. I stepped close to one and touched it, wincing at the grease and stink. I thought I heard a rhythmic grunting from within when a hand slapped against the hide from the inside and I stumbled away, panting.