The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  There was a silence at the other end of the line, as Kitson jotted all this down. “What was he doing?”

  “The first time I saw him, he was in a corridor chatting to Delahaye. They spotted me and Delahaye hustled him away. The second time he was down in the tunnel with a bunch of the particle scientists and one of the people I saw with General Bell that time.”

  Another silence. “Okay. Could you get a wee snapshot of our mystery man, do you think?”

  “I didn’t agree to take happy snaps for you, Kitson.”

  “You agreed to do as you’re told,” Kitson told him crisply, but Alex could hear a thin edge of excitement in his voice.

  “If I get the chance,” Alex said unwillingly.

  “Good. See if you can pick up any gossip about this chap, some bona fides perhaps. And call me if you see him again.” He hung up.

  Alex looked around the backyard again, and this time saw something half hidden in some bushes. He got up and walked over to it.

  There was actually an Indian high-energy physicist called N.N. ‘Tony’ Narayan, who had briefly become notorious a couple of years ago for hawking around something he called a Meson Gun, which he claimed could knock down supersonic aircraft at a distance of several hundred miles. Chubby chap with a beard and a taste for good suits. His claims had been mostly debunked, except on the wilder edges of military-industrial conspiracy theory, and he’d dropped out of sight, some said to work on particle beam weapons for the Russians. He was not, as far as Alex knew, at the SCS, or indeed anywhere near Iowa.

  The object in the bushes was covered with a green plastic tarpaulin, which was probably why he hadn’t noticed it before. He gathered a double handful and pulled the tarpaulin up and off, and found himself looking at a medium-sized gas barbecue.

  He had no evidence that Kitson was responsible for hacking his laptop and releasing his notes—although Wendy had asked one of her nerdier colleagues to have a look at it on the quiet—but it was just the kind of thing he thought Kitson would do, out of nothing more complicated than spite, for turning up at the consulate in Minneapolis. That it had almost got Alex thrown out of the SCS altogether probably never crossed his mind.

  Anyway, let him obsess over Tony Narayan for a while. It would give Alex some time to work out some other bullshit to feed him. And if it did turn out that Delahaye had been responsible, well, it wasn’t time wasted. He’d had enough of Kitson.

  The barbecue looked almost brand new, considering it had been out here in the worst winter the area had ever seen. In fact, it looked as if it had never been used. It looked as if it had been delivered, then just wheeled into the bushes, covered up, and abandoned. There was no gas bottle attached. He fiddled with the knobs for a while, thinking, then he went back into the house.

  AS FAR AS Stan was concerned, Alex’s status was unchanged—he was, after all, still working on the book—but for Alex everything felt different. There was the period Before Email Fiasco, and there was the period After Email Fiasco, and he was definitely living in post-EF times. He spent most of his time at home, picking away at the book. Most evenings, he went over to Ralph’s and cooked dinner—it was a way of making sure the old man ate at least one healthy meal—and in return received sound thrashings at chess. He’d managed to get his survival time up to twenty minutes, but he thought that was more because he was taking more time thinking about his moves than because his game was improving.

  A new phone had been delivered by Mickey Olive, who seemed to think the whole business was amusing in some distant esoteric and lawyerly fashion, but Alex hadn’t been back to the SCS since his flying visit to Chicago. BEF, he’d had quite a long wish list of interviews still to complete. Now, AEF, it was going to be trickier. Wendy had managed to get round his supposed exile from the Facility by getting some of the subjects to come out to the house and do the interviews there. Two of them had managed to get lost trying to find East Walden Lane, and he suspected several more had done the same but were embarrassed to admit it.

  Once a week, he drove into town for groceries and lunch with Dru Winslow, who was working her way through back copies of the Banner looking for stories of paranormal activity or static electricity. It was a long job—only the past five years or so of the archive were in digital form; the rest was in thick, bound volumes in a back room, shelf after shelf of them.

  One afternoon, he got back from Sioux Crossing, parked in front of the house, opened the back of the car to get his shopping out, and only then noticed something hanging on one of the supports of the porch. He stood looking at it, head tipped to one side, trying to work out what it was. It looked, he thought, like a teddy bear.

  He left the car open and walked up the drive, but he it was only when he was a few feet from the object that he realised it wasn’t a teddy bear at all.

  “WELL,” SAID BUD. “I’ve not seen that before.”

  “No?”

  Bud shook his head. “Nope. This is a new one to me.”

  They were standing by the porch, looking at the raccoon which had been nailed to the post which supported the porch roof. There was a long metal spike protruding from the raccoon’s right eye; it had been driven through the back of its skull and into the wood of the support.

  “That there is an old-style railroad spike,” Bud said.

  “Do you think that’s significant?” asked Alex.

  Bud shrugged. “And it wasn’t here when you went out?”

  “I’d have noticed.”

  “Anyone see anything?”

  “Ralph was having a nap; the house could have blown up and he wouldn’t have heard it. I haven’t had a chance to talk to the other neighbours.”

  “Mm hm.” East Walden’s peculiar legal status meant it sat outside, in normal circumstances, the jurisdiction of the Sioux Crossing Police Department, but Bud was the first person Alex had been able to think of to call and he seemed unwilling to hand this off to the County Sheriff. “Well, do you have any idea who could have done this? Anyone got a beef with you over something?”

  There were a couple of names Alex could mention, but he said, “Not that I can think of, no.”

  Bud looked up and down the shallow curve of East Walden Lane and nodded to himself. “It’s quite a thing to do in broad daylight, when you think about it,” he said. “This isn’t exactly Broadway, but someone could have come out of their house and seen what was going on. You’d have to be really confident to do something like that, or really angry.”

  “Neither of those possibilities is filling me with joy, if I’m honest with you.”

  “I’ll have somebody come out and recover it. Maybe we can get some forensics off it.”

  “You can dust a raccoon for fingerprints?”

  “We can certainly dust the spike. Also, you don’t see spikes like that very often nowadays, not outside of museums anyway.”

  “You seem to know a suspicious amount about railroad spikes, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “My mom’s grandfather worked on the Union Pacific for a while,” he said. “He left her a whole bunch of junk, including some spikes. I’ve still got them somewhere.”

  “I’d say that makes you the prime suspect, then.”

  Bud looked at him. “You sure you don’t have an idea who might have done this?”

  Alex shook his head.

  “You’ve not had anything else? Crank emails? People phoning you and then not saying anything? Hate mail?”

  “I haven’t had any mail.”

  “You’ll let me know, if anything else happens.”

  “You’ll be the first person to know, trust me.” Alex looked at the raccoon, a horrible thought occurring to him. “You don’t think it was alive when that happened, do you?”

  Bud grunted. “Nah. You tried to do that to a live raccoon, you’d end up losing your face.”

  “Did anything like this happen to the Shanahans?”

  Bud raised an eyebrow. “The Shanahans? Why do you ask?”

 
; “Maybe whoever did it doesn’t know they’ve moved.”

  “I think anyone who would take the trouble to nail a raccoon to someone’s porch would make sure the right people were still living there.” Bud turned and started to walk back down the path to his truck. Alex followed. “Good thought, but Vern and Pam never reported anything. I think the only time I ever spoke to them was when Ralph said their kids shot his dog.”

  “Did they? Shoot Homer?”

  Bud shrugged. “They didn’t seem the type. Quiet kids. Vern said they didn’t even have a gun. There was a mark on the dog’s back leg, but I couldn’t tell what made it. You could barely even see it, to be honest.”

  “You think Ralph made it up?”

  “Now that sounds more in character.” They reached the truck and Bud opened the driver’s door. “No way to prove it, though. And then they moved out anyway.”

  “In quite a hurry.”

  Bud looked at him. “Who told you that?”

  “One of the neighbours.” Alex waved vaguely down the street. “One of the Abrahamsons, I think.”

  Bud shook his head. “They’d been gone a couple of weeks before I even heard they’d left. Pam was ill, I heard. They wanted to be closer to her folks.” He climbed into the truck. “This is a small town, Alex,” he said. “Small town gossip is the worst kind of gossip; maybe best to take it with a pinch of salt.”

  “I’m a journalist. We love gossip.”

  Bud glanced past him, up the slope of the lawn, to the raccoon nailed to the porch. “I’ll have someone come out for that in an hour or so,” he said.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “And let me know if anything else happens.”

  “Will do.”

  Alex watched Bud drive off, then he walked back up to the house. Inside, he went down to the basement and unlocked the gun cabinet. He stood looking at the guns for a while, then he locked the cabinet again and went back upstairs.

  TOWARDS THE END of spring, the book stalled again, at just over fifty-seven thousand words, and he sat staring at the screen for days on end. He’d solved the problem of hacking by buying a new laptop from Amazon—the courier had got so lost trying to find East Walden Lane that he’d retreated to the New Rose and phoned Alex to beg him to come and collect it from him—and doing some research online. Then he’d gone into town and bought a bunch of tools from Stu’s Radio Shack, where Stu seemed serenely unconcerned about the possibilities of trade-name violation. Back home and following a YouTube tutorial on his phone, Alex had opened up the new laptop, removed the machine’s wireless card, wrapped it in tinfoil, and dumped it in the trash. The thing with the tinfoil was more symbolic than anything else, more a manifestation of his state of mind at the moment.

  The laptop was now isolated from wi-fi and remote hacking. To keep it secure, he bought a safe from Stockmann. The safe was the size of an old-style television and weighed more than the sun; it took three of Stockmann’s delivery men to get it down the stairs into the basement, where it would probably have to remain for the rest of human history because no lifting machinery known to Man would ever get it out again. If he put the new laptop in it diagonally, it just fitted. He copied his files onto a couple of memory sticks and let Wendy’s nerdy friend pronounce them clean of any infection, then transferred them over. He kept the memory sticks in the safe, just in case.

  All of which was jolly fun, and he learned more than he probably would ever need to know about the inner workings of the average laptop, but it didn’t help the book along. He wandered around the house indulging in displacement behaviour, which had helped in times past but didn’t help this time. He dusted and tidied, took apart the litter box he’d built for Homer and stacked the pieces in the basement, just in case. He went back to Stockmann, the eyes of whose staff now lit up the moment he walked through the front doors—and bought paint and brushes and some other bits and pieces, and one week he sanded and painted the front porch, somewhere in the back of his mind erasing the ghostly presence of the dead raccoon. Ralph came out, now and again, with helpful decorating tips and the occasional bottle of beer.

  And again, all this was jolly fun, but he couldn’t say he was making any progress with the book, unless you counted one evening where he spent two hours adding and removing a single comma. A couple of times, he stopped himself on the edge of getting in the Accord and driving over to the Facility and seeing if his sockpuppet ID actually worked.

  The garden offered less scope for displacement activity. Firstly, he had spent an appreciable percentage of his life avoiding gardening, and he wasn’t quite desperate enough yet to break that habit, and secondly there was very little to do. Someone came to tend the backyard and mow the lawns, but they always turned up when he was out and he could never detect any trace of their presence. He suspected he was subject to the visitations of elves or ents or something. He wandered around the garden anyway, looking for things that looked like weeds and pulling them up, and one day he approached the barbecue and took its cover off again and he stood looking at it, thinking.

  “Do your people even barbecue?” Ralph asked.

  “‘Your people’?”

  “Scottish people.”

  “I’ll have you know that at the first sign of spring sunshine the smell of burning meat hangs heavy over the back gardens of Kirkaldy,” Alex told him. “Sound systems are moved outside. Pallid, pasty legs are exposed to light for the first time since the previous summer. Much beer is drunk. Do my people barbecue? Pft.”

  “Remarkable,” said Ralph. “Is there footage of this?”

  “Oh God, yes. Just google it.”

  “I can’t remember anyone ever having a barbecue out here,” Ralph said thoughtfully. “I didn’t even know Vern and Pam had that thing.”

  “I’ll have to invite the neighbours. Can you bear not to insult anyone for an afternoon?”

  “I’m not going to make any promises I can’t keep. Check.”

  Alex moved his king, exposing his bishop. “Well, can you bear not to speak to anyone for an afternoon?”

  “There’s always body language.” Ralph brought one of his knights round in preparation for a pincer movement.

  Alex moved his rook. “Maybe we can sit you in a box and feed you through a slot in the side. Check.”

  Ralph sat back and looked at the board, a slow smile coming over his face. “You bastard,” he said. “I never saw that coming.”

  “No?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Not for a moment. Well done.” He moved his queen one square. “Mate.”

  Alex sighed. “Definitely put you in a box,” he said.

  HE STARTED IN the morning by putting two dozen chicken drumsticks, six at a time, into a plastic freezer bag, pouring marinade on top of them, and jiggling them about until they were coated, then putting them in the oven. By the time he’d done that, two deliverymen from Stockmann had arrived with a pair of big folding tables and two sets of garden furniture, which the store had rented to him on the understanding that he would buy anything that got broken.

  He spent an hour or so arranging the furniture and putting up a couple of big umbrellas and making sure they were properly weighted down. Then he dragged the barbecue out of the bushes and took the racks into the kitchen for a wash.

  Opening the fridge, he was confronted with a solid wall of meat. Trays of steaks, sausages, lamb chops, ribs, burgers. It occurred to him that he might have overdone things a bit. There was a box the size of a chest freezer in the hall, full of burger buns and hot dog rolls and loaves. Several catering-size bottles of ketchup and mustard, and, flying the flag, a single bottle of HP Sauce, bought from the Cost Plus in Mason City. There was a bucket, a literal plastic bucket, of barbecue sauce on the back porch.

  “You’ve only ever seen American barbecues in the movies, haven’t you,” Wendy said.

  Struggling to connect a gas bottle to the barbecue, Alex said, “I could really use a hand here.”

  She laughed. “I’m going t
o go visit with Ralph for a while. See you later.”

  He’d managed to get the barbecue lit by the time the first guests arrived, Rob Chen from the SCS, along with his wife and their two little girls. Conscious of East Walden Lane’s stealth status, Alex had printed out maps and GPS coordinates for the non-locals, but he suspected a percentage of the guests would still be wandering hopelessly around the countryside come nightfall. He fixed Rob and his wife up with beers, and the girls with juice, and put some food on the grill.

  People began to drift in over the next hour or so. Almost everyone brought food and drink with them. The neighbours brought home made pies and then stood in a group by the house, drinking beer and wine and watching the scientists and techs. Dru Winslow turned up with a bucket of home made potato salad. Officer Muñoz and his girlfriend, who turned out to be Wendy’s nerdy computer friend from the SCS, brought catering-size tubs of ice cream. Smoke and the sound of conversation and the smell of cooking meat hung over the garden. There were about a dozen kids running about and crashing through the woods and dropping bits of food all over the grass. At one point, a dimming of the sun announced the arrival of Bud Rosewater and his family with a truck full of beer.

  “Lot of folks turned up,” Bud commented, coming to stand beside Alex at the barbecue.

  Alex looked around the garden. At a guess, there were forty or so people here. “They’re not mixing much,” he said.

  Bud took a drink of beer. “A lot of the townsfolk are related to each other, one way or another, so this is basically a family gathering,” he said, raising his bottle in salute to Muñoz, who was chatting to the people from two houses down the Lane. “They’ve got gossip to catch up on.

  Give them time. Can I give you a hand?”

  Alex was sweaty and stank of smoke, and barbecue sauce coated his arms up to the elbows and was splashed on his jeans and tee shirt. He rubbed his smoke-stinging eyes. “I think the worst’s over, for now. Everyone seems to have something to eat. Did you get anywhere with the raccoon?”