The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Who is she?” Ralph asked when she’d gone.

  “Works at Black Hole Central,” said Alex. “Give me a hand to put this stuff away.”

  A few minutes later, while they were arguing about what meat to put in the fridge and what to put in the freezer, the lights went out. Then they came back on again. Then they went off, and they stayed off for about ten minutes. Then they came back on and the vents around the base of the walls began to exhale warm air.

  “I don’t know who installed that thing,” Wendy said when she came back into the kitchen, “but they need to be prosecuted for crimes against engineering.” She looked at the thermostat on the wall beside the door, gave the dial a fractional twist.

  “Whatever you did, thank you,” said Alex.

  She shook her head. “Get a qualified engineer to look at it as soon as you can. Better still, call someone in from Des Moines and have a new one installed. Put it on Clayton’s tab.”

  “Well, the least I can do is cook you lunch,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” said Ralph.

  She took her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and checked the time. “Okay,” she said. “But I want to be out of here before dark; I still have to get back to the car.”

  Alex looked at Ralph, who clearly had no intention of going anywhere. “All right,” he said. “You too.”

  “I’ll find some plates,” said Ralph. “You got any beer?”

  HE COOKED THEM steaks and fried potatoes and made a green salad with the mortal remains of a head of Romaine lettuce he found in the fridge. They ate in the dining room, which was probably the first time the room had been used for anything at all since the unlamented Shanahans had moved out, and Ralph mercilessly interrogated Wendy about where she was from (Duluth, via Caltech and MIT) her marital status (divorced and currently single) and whether she would be willing to give the electrics in his house the once-over.

  “I’m really not qualified to do that,” she told him. “You need to get a proper electrician to have a look.”

  “What are you qualified to do then?” he asked.

  She thought about it. “I could make you an atom bomb,” she said. “If you could scare up the components.”

  Ralph beamed at her. Then he looked sad. “There’s nobody left to use it on. All my enemies are dead.”

  She laughed. “I’d call that a win.” She looked at Alex. “How about you? Anyone you want to nuke?”

  Alex imagined a fuming crater in the ground where the Boston Globe had been, but he shook his head. “I’ll pass.”

  “Ah, you’re no fun,” Ralph said.

  “Chief Rosewater was asking about you,” Wendy said.

  Alex cut a slice off his steak. “Was he?”

  “I bumped into him in town while I was loading the car. He said he hadn’t seen you for a while.”

  Alex wondered if this meant his company phone, issued to replace the one from the hotel, was off the network and no longer broadcasting his conversations. He also wondered whether it meant he could expect a visit from Bud in the near future.

  “It’s nice to know people are thinking about me.” Thing was, he liked Bud. He liked Stan. He hadn’t met anyone he didn’t like in the town since he’d arrived. Hell, he even liked Ralph. But the surveillance thing did nag. He understood why it was happening. Stan had secrets to protect and Bud didn’t want anyone rocking the boat and jeopardising the future of the county. But it still nagged. And that was before he even got to the other thing.

  Wendy must have heard something in his voice, because she frowned fractionally, then changed the subject and started to talk to Ralph about his late wife, who apparently had won a Pulitzer Prize, which Ralph hadn’t bothered to tell him about.

  Back in Boston, he’d taken the 007 Phone out onto the Common and used it to phone the number of the British Consulate in Minneapolis and ask for Colin. Kitson had come onto the line, sounding a bit miffed that Alex had taken so long to call. He’d used it twice more since he moved to East Walden Lane, both times to report that he had nothing to report. He thought it might be best not to use it too much, just in case. He hadn’t actually done anything yet, but the thought of facing Stan’s attorney in court with an industrial espionage charge hanging over him had been responsible for at least one sleepless night.

  A flicker of motion caught the corner of his eye. He looked over Wendy’s shoulder, out of the window, and saw dry snow blowing up into the air in lazy whirls. The trees on the other side of the green were beginning to stir sluggishly, snow drifting down off their branches. Alex tipped his head to one side.

  A shockwave went through the trees, blowing all the accumulated snow off them in a single huge exhalation. Then he couldn’t see anything at all outside, just a howling whiteness. He heard the house actually creak fractionally in the wind.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Wendy, who had turned to see what he was looking at.

  They all sat there mutely watching the storm for some minutes. Then Ralph said to Wendy, “I hope your car’s insured, because I think you just drove it for the last time.”

  AS NIGHT FELL and the screaming white blankness beyond the windows gave way to a screaming black blankness, Ralph became more and more restless, saying he wanted to go home.

  “It’s Homer,” he said. “He’s got food and water and I put a litter box in the downstairs bathroom in case he decides he wants a dump in the middle of the night, but he’ll fret over there on his own.”

  “Mr Ortiz, you can’t,” Wendy told him.

  “I can go straight from your side door to my side door,” he said. “It’s, what, a hundred feet? You’d walk that in a minute without even thinking about it.”

  “You mad old sod,” said Alex. “The wind’ll pick you up and when the thaw comes some farmer in Wisconsin’s going to find you in one of his fields.”

  “I don’t like to think of him over there on his own,” Ralph said. “He’ll fret.”

  For supper Alex cooked cheese and ham omelettes, and they sat in the living room with their plates on their laps, listening to the wind trying to pry the house off its foundations and send it bowling across the state line into Minnesota.

  They tried the television, but all the channels were dead. Alex had, though, found an old transistor radio on a shelf in the basement. He had no idea how much life the batteries still had in them, but he managed, amid static and white noise and automated country rock stations, to find a station in Des Moines, and while they ate they listened to reports of what sounded like the end of the world in northern Iowa. Half the state was paralysed. Hail the size of grapefruit had swept across Sioux City, destroying vehicles and damaging buildings and causing at least a dozen fatalities. Every airport north of Fort Dodge was closed. People were phoning in from places like Algona and Spencer and Emmetsburg and West Bend, places that might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy tonight, with stories of power blackouts and hurricane-force winds and blinding, impossible snow. Some of them sounded calm and fatalistic about it all—faintly amused even—and content to wait it out, but quite a lot of people sounded terrified. Loved ones hadn’t come home, windows had been smashed by flying debris. Around half past ten, there was a statement from the Governor to the effect that citizens should remain in their homes and try to keep warm. This was clearly a once-in-a-century weather event and emergency services were working as hard as they could, but everyone should be patient and under no circumstances go out. The Governor sounded tired, and Alex suspected from his voice that the emergency services had mostly had to give up until the weather eased.

  There was an airing cupboard stuffed with bedding on the landing upstairs, and Alex used some of it to make up the beds in the two spare rooms. He was just finishing the second one when he felt the air pressure in the house change suddenly and he heard Wendy shouting.

  He ran downstairs and found her in the kitchen, leaning against the side door. The floor, and one of the side walls, was covered with melting snow, an
d stuff had been blown off the worktops. “Oh, he didn’t,” he said.

  “He said he was going to the bathroom,” she said in a horrified voice.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid…” Oh, for fuck’ssake. He ran into the hallway and opened the door to the basement.

  “What are you doing?” he heard her call behind him.

  The Shanahans, whoever the hell they had been, must have enjoyed climbing or potholing or something, because there was a big canvas bag of climbing gear tucked away in a corner of the basement. Pitons, crampons, other bits of metal equipment he couldn’t recognise. There were also three neatly coiled climbing ropes. He grabbed two and carried them back upstairs.

  “You’re not serious,” Wendy said when she saw them.

  “I can’t just leave him out there,” he said, putting on his boots.

  “You’re as crazy as he is,” she told him. “Just a minute.” She went into the living room and came back a moment later with her vest, ski mask and goggles. “Here.”

  Masked and dressed in his warmest coat, Alex tied a wide loop in the end of one of the ropes and dropped it over the island in the middle of the kitchen and tied the other end around his waist. “Try and keep some tension in this,” he said, handing the rope to her. “If you feel me tug twice on it, pull as hard as you can.”

  “Stupid man,” she said.

  He turned and flicked the switch beside the door that turned on the intruder light on the side of the house. Then he pulled the goggles over his eyes, flipped up the hood of the parka, opened the door, and stepped out.

  The wind blew him off his feet the moment he got outside, tumbling him through a blinding gale and sprawling him on his face in foot-deep snow. He thought he could hear Wendy shouting from the open kitchen door.

  He managed to lever himself onto his hands and knees and then get unsteadily to his feet, leaning against the wind. The light on the side of the house was almost useless; it just lit up the howling storm around him. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. He steadied himself and set the light at his back and started to plod slowly across the space between the properties, arms outstretched in front of him, leaning forward against the tension in the rope.

  It was impossible. His left side was already plastered inches deep with snow where the wind blew it against him. His face felt raw even under the mask, and he had to keep stopping every couple of agonised steps to clean snow off the goggles. He’d barely gone a couple of yards before his feet started to feel cold, and after a few more steps he couldn’t feel them at all. He called Ralph’s name, but there was so much noise in the air that he could barely hear himself.

  Abruptly, the tension went out of the rope and he lost balance and the wind blew him over again. He scrambled to his knees and put out his hands to push himself up, and he felt them land on what felt like a body.

  “Ralph? Ralph!”

  Obviously it was Ralph. Who the hell else was out here? Alex felt along the body until he found an arm, and he tugged on it. Ralph didn’t seem inclined to move under his own steam, so Alex struggled him into a sitting position, then managed to get his hands under the old man’s armpits and lift him up enough to drape an arm around his neck and hold him upright.

  There was no way to tell where he was; he was standing in the middle of a howling illuminated madness. One-handed, he got hold of the rope and pulled at it, intending to follow it back to the kitchen, but it stayed limp and eventually—way too soon—he was holding the end of it. He rubbed snow off his goggles and held the rope close to his face. At a distance of an inch or so, he could just see that the end looked charred.

  The light was booming and directionless; there was no way to tell where the house was. He was already exhausted from the cold and from continually fighting the wind. He was going to die here, a few feet from his own home.

  Ralph shifted against him and he thought he heard the old man say something in a loud voice, but it was lost in the noise of the wind. They were both going to die here.

  There was nothing else for it. Alex shouldered Ralph’s weight, picked a direction, and staggered on.

  He fell several times, and each time it was harder to get up and to get Ralph up too. He thought, with growing horror, that he might be walking in circles. Every step was more difficult than the last.

  He stumbled again, and this time his face smacked into a hard surface with enough force to make him see sparks. Something warm and wet ran down inside the ski mask and he realised his nose was bleeding. He reached up and felt the wall of the house and he almost screamed with relief.

  Pressing himself against the wall, he pulled Ralph to his feet and managed to get his arms round the old man’s waist. Okay, if this was the house, which way was the door? Half supporting, half dragging Ralph, he staggered along the wall.

  His hand, outstretched against the house, encountered a change in surface, something that felt like tight-stretched metal mesh. Screen door. He didn’t have a screen door; this was Ralph’s house.

  Fine. Shelter was shelter. With burning lungs, he pulled back the screen door and groped for the handle of the wooden door beyond. He found it, tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t move. It was locked.

  “You fucker!” he yelled in Ralph’s ear. “You stupid old fart!” Ralph did not respond.

  Holding the old man up with one hand, Alex groped down his body with the other, trying to find the pockets of his snowsuit. At the second try, he encountered something. Putting his hand in the pocket he felt, dimly through his glove, what his brain could only decipher as being a bunch of keys.

  He rested his forehead against the door, trying to think. His mouth was full of the taste of his own blood and he kept having odd moments of what felt like weightlessness. If he dropped the keys, they were dead. Even if he could find the way back to his own house, he didn’t have the energy to get there. He tugged the ski mask up enough to expose his mouth, feeling the windblown snow flaying the exposed skin of his face. With his teeth, he tugged off his glove and let it fall to the ground, then he put his hand in Ralph’s pocket again, rooted around for a moment, found the keys, made sure he had a good grip, and took them out.

  There were six keys in the bunch. There was nothing else for it. He released Ralph and let him slide down the wall until he was slumped against the house. Then, working by touch, he found the keyhole in the centre of the doorknob and tried the first key. It didn’t fit.

  “Don’t be frozen,” he muttered to himself. “Don’t be frozen.” He tried the second key, and that didn’t fit either.

  By the fourth key, his fingers were so cold he could barely tell whether he was holding anything or not. He pulled off his other glove and used his other hand to guide it to the keyhole. This one went in, but it refused to turn. He wiggled it, but nothing.

  The fifth key fitted the lock and it turned smoothly. He screamed in triumph and turned the knob and decided that if Ralph had bolted the door from the inside he would use the last vestiges of his strength to throttle the old man.

  But the wind blew the door open with such force that it tore the knob from his hand. Alex reached down, grabbed Ralph by the hood of his suit, and dragged him step by step over the threshold and into the kitchen, and then his legs gave way and he toppled and smacked his face on the floor.

  He rolled over on his back, gasping and pulling off the ski mask, which was crusty with snow and frozen blood. And then he got a proper look at the kitchen and thought for a moment that it was on fire.

  Electric blue sparkles covered every surface. The walls, the floor, the fridge, even the ceiling. They were crawling in thick, wavering lines, like fingerprints, so bright they were hard to look at. Alex felt every hair on his body stand on end.

  “Oh, fuck off,” he said, and passed out.

  SOMETIME LATER, HE woke up in bed covered with blankets. He ached all over, his hands and face felt raw, and he couldn’t breathe through his nose. He lifted his head a little and realised he wasn’t in bed but on a c
ouch in a darkened room. There was also someone with him on the couch, hugging him from behind.

  “You were right,” said Wendy sleepily in his ear. “I saw his kitchen. It’s the worst thing in the world.”

  He went back to sleep.

  THE NEXT TIME he opened his eyes, a faint semblance of daylight was fighting its way around the edges of the curtains. He rolled over slowly, but there was nobody else on the couch with him. He pushed down the pile of blankets and duvets covering him and saw that someone had managed to get him out of his outer clothing and into a pair of sweatpants and a pullover.

  Gradually, he sat up. He felt as if someone had come into the room during the night and spent a happy hour or so hitting him with a length of scaffolding. He touched his face. His nose felt swollen and misshapen and his forehead appeared to be one large bruise.

  He swung his feet off the couch and tried to stand up, but he had another moment of weightlessness and he had to wait until it passed. The second time, he made a better job of it and when he was on his feet he limped slowly to the window and pulled back the curtain. The world was still a featureless driving screen of white. The wind didn’t sound as if it had dropped at all.

  In the kitchen, Wendy had cleared a small space for herself and she was frying bacon. “Hey,” she said when he came in. “You should lie down.”

  “Hm.” He dropped onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Ralph?”

  “On the couch in the living room.” She turned the bacon over in the frying pan. “Fast asleep. I don’t think he’s in any danger right now, which is a miracle, but he needs a doctor. Do you want some of this?”

  He could, just barely, smell the bacon, and it made his stomach growl. He got up and poked carefully around the kitchen until he found a loaf of white bread hiding under a stack of fast food containers. In the fridge… he closed the door after a single glance inside and wondered whether he would ever be able to forget what he’d just seen. “Margarine?” He said. “Butter? Anything?”