The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Yes, you said.” One of the Charm team took their turn, but only managed to clip a couple of pins. Both teams booed.

  She looked at him. “You’re bored.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I was just thinking about Larry Day.”

  “Oh, don’t,” she groaned. “It’s been a perfectly nice evening so far.” After his flying visit a couple of weeks ago, Larry had departed again for parts unknown.

  “He must have some pull with Stan, to be able to get access. There’s no way Delahaye would let him into the Facility if it was up to him.”

  “I guess.”

  “So he must be doing something that interests Stan.”

  “I haven’t met Clayton very often,” she told him, “but I got the impression that he likes people like Larry. People who are, you know, a little bit off the beaten path.”

  “Like me, you mean?”

  She chuckled. “Yes, Alex. Just like you.”

  He decided to take it as a compliment. “I should try and corner him for an interview,” he said.

  “Yeah, well,” she said, politely applauding one of the Strange crew. “Good luck with that.”

  NOT LONG AFTER the official onset of spring—everyone in Rosewater County had already been wandering about in shirtsleeves for a couple of weeks—Alex finally got round to exploring the basement of his house. The book was stuck again, a series of disconnected chapters and notes, but he’d finally managed to place an article at the NYT, so he felt vaguely virtuous and inclined to indulge a little displacement activity.

  Apart from a brief look-see when he first moved in, his initial struggles with the furnace, and his raid on the Shanahans’ mountaineering supplies on the night of the storm, he had barely gone down into the basement, and it remained a vaguely mysterious cement-floored space lined with shelves and stacks of boxes. He had an idea that it extended beyond the boundaries of the house, out under the backyard, but it was hard to tell.

  He took a mug of coffee and a torch down the wooden stairs and stood at the bottom. The ceiling was a good three feet above his head, but sound down here felt dull and suppressed. It was warm and dry, didn’t smell mouldy, and was well lit by two twin rows of LED lights set into the ceiling.

  In front of him was the furnace, a completely unknowable metal box the size of a small car that sprouted metal pipes near the top to carry heat and hot water around the house. It might have been a modern sculpture or something left behind by a UFO for all the sense it made to him. On a plate affixed to the front, just above the little window through which one could spy on the flames within, was the word BANGER. Whether this was the furnace’s make or a warning about its nature, he couldn’t say. On Wendy’s advice he’d got an engineer to come over and have a look at it. The engineer, like engineers the world over, had sucked his teeth and shaken his head and given a couple of rueful chuckles and presented him with a bill which, before encountering Stan, would have bankrupted him.

  Anyway, now the weather was warming up the furnace seemed to be working okay, which was par for the course. Like the kitchen range, it ran on gas, which was periodically and entirely without any intervention on his part delivered by a small tanker truck, the driver of which ran out frost-encrusted hoses and filled up the tank beside the house.

  To his left was the near wall of the basement, lined floor-to-ceiling with well-made wooden shelves. On the shelves were toolboxes and various power tools, their cables neatly coiled. There were jars full of nails and screws and other, less obvious, small metal objects. Little cardboard boxes of brackets, the purpose of which remained unknown. Light fittings, some of them brand new, others obviously quite old. Alex opened a couple of the toolboxes and poked around inside. Just your usual collection of hand tools. The Shanahans seemed to have amassed a selection of every kind of screwdriver ever manufactured.

  Behind the furnace was a stack of plastic storage boxes with more tools and coils of electrical and coaxial cable, all neatly arranged and hand-labelled according to load and purpose. Under those was another box full of wall switches and sockets and junction boxes.

  To the right of the furnace, the basement stretched away for a surprising distance. Both walls were shelved, and a line of freestanding shelves ran down the middle, creating a pair of aisles. He went down the left-hand one, looking at the boxes stacked on the shelves against the wall. More tools, kids’ toys, odds and ends of camera equipment, an ancient photographic enlarger, a box of miscellaneous computer parts, old motherboards and components. He reached the end of the aisle, turned back along the shelves in the middle of the room. These were mostly stacked with old suitcases and steamer trunks. A couple were unlocked, and poking through these he found neatly folded clothes, underwear, shoes, coats. He took a mouthful of lukewarm coffee and looked along the shelves of suitcases. If they all contained the same thing, he thought, that was an awful lot of clothes.

  The final row of shelves was jars. Dozens and dozens of jars, of all sizes containing preserved fruit and jams, all of them labelled and dated in the same cramped, nearly illegible hand. Some of them were almost a decade old, which seemed, to Alex at least, a very long time to keep jam.

  At the far end, tucked between the end of the shelving and the far corner of the basement, was a narrow metal cupboard he hadn’t noticed before. It was almost as tall as he was, and it was, he saw, ballistic-bolted to the floor. He tried the handle, but it was locked.

  One of the keys Mickey Olive had given him fitted the door. He unlocked it, opened the door, and found himself looking at a rack containing a pump-action shotgun, a hunting rifle, and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

  He tipped his head to one side. Kim had grown up around guns, and to her it had not been out of the ordinary to keep a handgun, a somewhat aged Glock, in the apartment, but Alex had never quite managed to get used to it. It lived on the top shelf of one of the closets, in a locked case, and every now and again Kim had taken it out, stripped it down, cleaned it, and reassembled it. As she had said, there was no point keeping the thing if, when they needed it, it didn’t work. He’d tried to get into it; they’d gone to a range on the outskirts of Boston and he’d paid for a couple of hours’ instruction, but the first time he fired at a target the pistol’s recoil almost broke his wrist and he’d known guns and him weren’t going to get along. When she’d moved out, Kim had taken the gun with her, but sometimes, usually late at night, he’d still sensed its presence, as if the apartment was haunted.

  A shelf at the top of the gun safe had boxes of shotgun shells and rifle rounds, and a couple of magazines for the AR-15. At the bottom were three cases like the one which had once sat in the closet in his apartment. He picked up the top one and it was heavy enough to contain a weapon, but there was no way to check because it was locked and none of the keys on the bunch fitted it. There were, however, half a dozen boxes of 9mm ammunition in the bottom of the safe, like the ammunition Kim’s Glock had used.

  He stood there for quite a long time, looking into the safe. The fact that an American family kept weapons was essentially meaningless. He’d heard of perfectly normal, law abiding people whose personal armouries were larger than this. What did seem puzzling was that the Shanahans had left them behind.

  “THE WHO?” MICKEY asked.

  “The Shanahans,” said Alex. “The people who used to live in my house.”

  Mickey thought about it, then shook his head. “Don’t know the name, old son. Sorry.”

  They were having breakfast in the Telegraph. The place seemed busier than usual, for a weekday. A lot of scientists and tech types, some of whom he recognised but most of whom he didn’t, were sitting in the booths and bellied up to the counter. In fact, now he looked properly, he didn’t see anyone who presented as a local. It was as if Stan’s people had finally driven them all out.

  “I keep getting mail for them,” he said. “There’s quite a stack now.” This was true, but it was all junk mail.
/>   “I’d have thought they’d have got their post redirected.”

  “Maybe it slipped their minds.”

  Mickey thought about it. “It was quite sad, really,” he said. “She had a problem with prescription painkillers, if I remember rightly. We had to let them go.”

  “Well, their post is piling up.”

  Mickey shrugged and cut a slice from his ham and cheese omelette. “Their forwarding address will be on record somewhere. Let me have the stuff and I’ll see it’s sent on.”

  “I can do that myself,” Alex said casually, sitting back and taking a mouthful of coffee.

  Mickey glanced at him, then went back to his omelette. “Up to you, old son. I’ll email you the address.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Everything else going all right?”

  “Larry Day,” said Alex.

  Mickey winced, momentarily.

  “Is he actually working here?”

  Mickey chewed some omelette, swallowed. “I only do admin, Alex, as you well know. You’d have more luck asking about Professor Day at the Facility.”

  “No one there seems to want to talk about him.”

  Mickey chuckled. “That sounds about right. Have you met him?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  “He can be quite the nuisance, our Professor Day.”

  “Why do they keep letting him in, then? Just revoke his access.”

  A brief look of pain crossed Mickey’s face. “Professor Day is…” he searched for the right word. “Resourceful. Friends in high places.”

  “Brigadier General Bell?”

  Mickey gave him a long, level look before saying, “Quite.” He wadded up a piece of bread and butter and swiped it around his plate. “I’m not a writer, of course, but if I were asked for my opinion, I’d say that Professor Day could quite easily become a distraction.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s not an official member of the team; he’s not going to give you any insight into the project.” Mickey popped the wad of bread in his mouth.

  “It sounds as if you’re warning me to stay away from him.”

  Mickey washed his mouthful of food down with a swallow of coffee. “In my experience,” he said, “that’s more or less the default reaction to Professor Day.”

  “NO,” SAID MARGARET Owen. “Absolutely not. Are you crazy or something?”

  “Come on, Maggie,” said Alex. “Just five minutes.”

  “Delahaye’s told us not to talk to you,” she said.

  “I know.” This, of course, was Delahaye’s revenge for not being allowed to read an early draft of the book. It would be reasonably straightforward to pass a message to Stan via Mickey Olive and get Delahaye’s ban lifted, but Alex was interested to see how long the Administrator’s fit of pique was going to last. “Isn’t it worth it, just to wind him up?”

  “No.” Margaret, a tall, elegant Korean-American with a severe look and an astoundingly dirty laugh, was standing on a stepladder beside HELEN, adjusting something behind a panel on the detector’s side. “He’s told us anyone who talks to you will be thrown off the project.”

  “He doesn’t really mean that.”

  “You want to bet the five years’ work I’ve got invested in this thing on that?” Margaret came back down the ladder, put the tool she’d been using in a little plastic case, and closed the lid. About a dozen other scientists and techs were working on the detector, studiedly ignoring the conversation.

  “He’s a prissy little anal-retentive dickwad, but he runs things here, Alex.” She picked up the box and she suddenly looked up, behind him. “Nothing personal, but will you go away and annoy someone else, please?”

  He half-turned to see what she was looking at. Up on the catwalk that ran around the room, Larry Day was leaning on the rail. He appeared to be wearing US Army desert camouflage fatigues. “I think I’ll do just that, Maggie,” Alex said. “See you later.”

  Larry was gone when he got up the stairs to the catwalk, but he caught up in the airlock. “Hi,” he said.

  Larry squinted at him. “I know you,” he said.

  “We met at Livermore, about ten years ago.”

  Larry thought about it. “Dolan,” he said, as if excavating a particularly delicate fossil, although it wasn’t quite the prodigious feat of memory that it seemed. “I heard you were here.” He didn’t offer to shake hands. “You want an interview, yeah?”

  “Sure. If you have time sometime.”

  Larry thought some more. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get a drink.”

  GETTING A DRINK proved slightly more complicated than it sounded. It transpired that Larry had experienced a series of unfortunate reversals which had resulted in him being thrown out of every bar in Rosewater County and a large number in neighbouring Blackfish County. Escaping his personal exclusion zone required a two-hour drive over the state line into Minnesota. They took Alex’s car because Larry admitted to having snacked on a six-pack of Bud that morning. He climbed into the passenger seat of the Accord without bothering with the seatbelt, gestured in a vaguely northward direction, said, “That way,” and fell asleep.

  Leaving Rosewater County for the first time in more than eight months was something of a shock. Alex hadn’t realised the extent to which he’d grown used to the all-pervading newness and prosperity around Sioux Crossing. It had become so familiar that he’d stopped noticing it, but now, driving north, he could see his surroundings becoming progressively shabbier and run down, as if they were travelling out of a zone of fallout.

  The townships they drove through were increasingly worn out and depressed, storefronts either empty or boarded up completely, buildings old and decrepit. Foreclosure signs were everywhere, on the overgrown front lawns of houses and at the end of roads leading to farms. Everything seemed wilder and dirtier and more broken.

  He was just pondering whether to turn round and take the snoring form of Larry back to the SCS when Larry opened his eyes and said, “Here.”

  “What?”

  “Here,” Larry told him, gesturing at what seemed to be a large public lavatory set back from the road. “Ah, hell,” he said. “You missed it.”

  Alex drove a mile or so further down the road, made a turn in a farm road, and came back, pulling into the parking lot behind the building. It was a mouldering windowless single-storey cinderblock construction. What paint there was on it was flaking off, and larger pieces of the frontage had come adrift and lay on the ground. A dozen or so shabby pickups were parked in the lot, along with a line of four cheaply customised motorcycles. A sign outside proclaimed the building to be the BLACK COUGAR ROADHOUSE. Alex’s heart sank.

  “Maybe we should drive a bit further,” he suggested. “There might be somewhere better a couple of miles down the road.”

  “Nah,” said Larry, getting out of the car. “This’ll be great, Alex.” And he wandered a little unsteadily towards the front of the roadhouse.

  Inside, the Black Cougar was dim and stank of beer and tobacco smoke and bleach and greasy food. It was basically just one big L-shaped room. There was a bar down one side of the long arm of the L, with booths down the other side and tables arranged in the free space between. Most of the short arm of the L was occupied by a low stage entirely encased in a cage of chicken wire. Alex had no idea what the purpose of this was, but it was one of the most disturbing things he’d ever seen in a bar. A group of biker-types was clustered around a tatty-looking pool table in one corner, and there were a dozen or so large and rather unpleasant-looking men at the bar. The place was such a dive that it seemed it didn’t even have a jukebox. Alex had a very strong urge to flee, but Larry was already sitting in one of the booths and talking to a waitress.

  “Well,” Alex said, sitting opposite him. “This is nice.”

  “Pure Americana,” Larry said, smiling and looking about him. The waitress had gone to the bar and was talking to the barman, a skinny shaven-headed man with a black tee shirt and tattoos. “So, what
do you want to know?”

  “If you think I’m doing an interview here, you’re crazier than people say you are.”

  Larry pouted theatrically and said, “Aw. And I thought you really wanted to talk to me.” The waitress returned with a pitcher of beer and two glasses and set them down on the table between Larry and Alex. Larry filled the glasses, picked one up, and drained half of it in one swallow.

  Alex clasped his hands in front of him on the tabletop, then thought better of it. The tabletop was sticky. He sat back and rubbed his hands on his jeans. “What are you doing at the SCS?”

  Larry raised his eyebrows. “So we are doing the interview now?”

  “I’m just trying to make conversation.” Alex picked up his glass and took a drink. The beer tasted as if it had roughly the same alcohol content as a glass of Perrier, but there was a faint and completely baffling afterburn of what tasted like paprika.

  “I read that thing you did for the New York Times,” Larry said.

  “Oh?” Alex waited for him to continue, but all he did was sit there. “Thank you,” he said eventually.

  “And you’re writing a book too.”

  “Yes.”

  Larry finished his beer, topped up his glass from the jug. “I guess Clayton’s paying you a lot of money to do that.”

  “He’s paying above market rates, certainly.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “It’s going.” Alex took another sip of his beer and scowled. “And I thought I was supposed to be interviewing you.”

  Larry grinned a buccaneer’s grin. “Just making conversation. Shall we see what the food’s like in this place?”

  Alex shuddered. “Shall we not?”

  “Ah.” Larry looked sad. “You’ve got no sense of adventure.”

  “What I do have is a highly developed sense of self-preservation. What are you doing at the SCS? You’re not on any of the research projects.”

  Larry shook his head. “I’m just a tourist, taking in the pretty sights.” He drained his glass again, refilled it.