Radio Silence - Part 14

MACY

He came up out of the ground, blinking in the brightness like a mole. He squinted, shading his eyes. The sky was far too bright, even though the sun wasn’t shining.

Macy Simmons stretched his arms upwards until he felt his shoulders pop. He had felt so cramped underground for the past two months.

He felt different. Less real, less human.Like a dried up husk of his former self. Is that what being sealed up in an underground bunker did to you? Did you just wither and wilt like a plant?

~*~

Macy Simmons grew up prepared for this. Every Saturday he used to curse his parents when they would order him to go downstairs, with them into the bunker they had built underneath their large house. It happened every Saturday at 2pm like clockwork. If Macy wasn’t home at that time, man, would there be hell to pay. He learned very quickly that if he wanted to have something to eat for the rest of the weekend, that, come hell or high water, he better be home at 2pm on Saturday afternoon so that he could go down in the dark and musty smelling bunker under his house. He didn’t like the big fat spiders that had taken up residence in every corner except one, which is the only place he went to. His parents had put an old couch down there, one with lumpy cushions that always felt strangely damp and chill, despite the room being water and damp proofed. Against the back wall were rows and rows of shelving filled with every type of canned food imaginable: canned beans, peaches, cherry pie filling, ravioli, meatballs, meatloaf, pasta, peanut butter, soups of every kind, a whole entire row just for tuna fish. There were also packages of crackers that looked more like pieces of dried cardboard, Macy thought. He’d opened a package once, just to try one, and nearly choked on the flat brown square it was so dry and hard. And he’d incurred his father’s wrath then too.

“What’ve I told you about not eating any of the rations! We have plenty of food upstairs! This is only to be used when we really need it! When we’re down here for real!” His father had torn the crackers from his hands with such force that his fingers stung. A cracker fell from the pack and shattered on the concrete floor into pieces, just like glass. “Now look what you’ve done!” His mother chimed in with her own screaming at him, before stalking over to one of the spider infested corners and grabbing a broom and dustpan that looked more dust than broom, and began sweeping up the shattered cracker. “We don’t want to be attracting mice or rats or god knows what down here with us, now do we? We can’t afford to share our food with them!”

I don’t think they’ll probably even want to eat this food, Macy thought, and wondered if mice could even get through a tin of mushy green beans in the first place.

Macy brought a pile of old comics and books and stashed them next to the couch.

His father would look at his watch and when it struck two pm he would close the two heavy wood reinforced metal doors. They would clunk shut with a heavy finality that always made Macy shiver a bit, every time. When the doors closed, a light would turn on automatically above them. It was a large light that gave a strange, thick, ugly orange glow. The glass was trapped underneath a metal cage. Macy always wondered why but didn’t ever have the courage to ask his father or mother.

He’d hidden a flashlight next to his comic books as well, because the light in the ceiling never seemed to reach very far. His father was always scolding him for squinting while reading so he thought he would approve of the flashlight. He was wrong.

“You don’t want to use any more light than necessary!” his father said. “It might attract them.”

His father always put on a radio when they were down there. It was small, and staticy, no matter what the station. He guessed radios didn’t work very well under ground in concrete boxes. His father would move through the stations every so often, but always just stopped on channels without music, and only talking. Radio shows of bored people discussing boring politics, or perhaps slightly more exciting religion, though that bored Macy as well, but at least those conversations got a bit heated.

Attract who? Who’s them? Why would anyone be all the way out here? Macy thought. He’d look at the tightly shut double doors. There was not a single crack anywhere around them to shine out into the night. No one could tell that anyone was down there. He’d move the single armchair to the centre of the room, directly under the caged light which often flickered due to moths that somehow managed to find their way down into the bunker. Vaguely Macy wondered if moths could make it into here, could someone else? something else?

They’d stay there for twelve hours. Usually Macy would fall asleep, curled up in the corner of the couch wearing at least a couple layers of sweaters, even in the middle of summer, as the underground room was always cold. He’d wake to the sound of the big heavy doors being unlocked and pushed open, with a loud bang that rang out into the middle of the night. He always thought that noise would wake the neighbours, even though the closest neighbour was a mile away, he swore they’d be woken up at two am by the loud bang. And with eyes barely open and a strange thick head and usually a headache after being down underground for so long breathing in dust and, he shuddered, probably spider webs too, somehow, he’d trudge up the stairs and back into his own bedroom to fall asleep.

On Sunday he’d wake up late, without fail, due to not getting much rest on the Saturday night in the bunker after going through his father’s drills. He always tried to stay awake until 11pm for his father’s last drill. Usually he didn’t manage it, and needed to be shaken awake, his heart pounding in his chest.

His father would press a small air horn to signal the start of the drill. Even though Macy expected it, it was always a shock.

“Okay, go!” His father would say, after explaining the instructions of the drill. Usually they would involve moving the canned goods and building them up into a protective wall, and hiding behind them. Sometimes he had him practice loading the rifle and pistol that they kept down there, as quickly as he could. His father would have them do at least two drills every Saturday they were down there. At least it helped to pass the time. They’d count the bottles of water, and the packages of little water purifying tablets, making sure there were enough tablets for the number of bottles.

On Sunday Macy would meet up with his friends. They would be eager to hear about it, and listen to Macy’s complaining. They would laugh, and make fun of him, but Macy didn’t mind. He thought it was ridiculous too and laughed along with them. His friends would laugh and Macy was envious of them. Envious of their parents who didn’t make them spend most of their Saturday’s underground in a small, dark, musty room with them, and having to put up with boring people on the radio talking about boring stuff, while their mother sat and knitted up a storm so that their house was filled with knitted doilies and table runners and Christmas stockings and socks and scarves and hats for winter.

“You’ll thank us for this one day, son,” his father and mother would say every Saturday as 2 o’clock approached. His father would point out the best things to eat first, and what would be okay to leave until later. How to best ration the rations. Macy had thought he hadn’t really been paying all that much attention to his father’s rules and instructions, but he must have been, because when he had closed the doors behind him and shivered at their heavy clunk, it all came back to him as if his father were right there, standing beside him, telling him it all again.

When he was old enough to go to the bar, he realized it wasn’t just his friends that made fun of him, but it was other people in town. They’d say things about his parents, how they were crazy to have a bunker, practice every week. There wasn’t a war, there wasn’t going to be a war. There hadn’t been one for years. So many years that most people didn’t even remember what it was like. People whispered that his parents were conspiracy theorists. That they believed aliens had landed at area 51 and were plotting an eventual attack and that’s why they did the weekly run throughs.

Macy stood, his feet just outside the entrance down into the darkness he had just emerged from, like a butterfly out of a cocoon. But he didn’t feel very butterfly-like.

He looked around. Everything looked the same. Except, the sky. The sky looked different from what he remembered. It was…thicker somehow. And it was colder. Colder than normal for January anyway.

He remembered hearing the radio announcements in the beginning. It seemed non-stop, on every channel, even the music stations. He remembered hearing the planes for the first few weeks, the helicopters and the people shouting over microphones warning everyone to stay inside, stay in your houses, don’t go outside. It wasn’t safe outside. He remembered that. He remembered hearing it wasn’t safe outside. It was something to do with the atmosphere, people said. That it has been poisoned somehow, disrupted, changed. Tentatively he breathed in. It didn’t taste strange, and it didn’t smell weird. He felt normal. Nothing happened. No burning lungs or eyes or any of the other symptoms that he heard on the radio that people were getting.

He took another breath, this time deeper. The air in his lungs felt stale. He felt stale. “Hello!” He shouted, more just to hear his own voice again than anything else. It felt like forever that he had spoken anything above a whisper. Why would he need to, if there was just him down there.

He wished his parents were still around, so they could see how much of a success their little project was after all, but they had both passed away, a long time ago now. He was proud now, and didn’t feel foolish at all, like he used to. He took a few tentative steps away from the entrance. It felt strange, to be able to move in any direction he wanted, strange that he was no longer confined to one small room. Was the whole world like one big room now? he wondered.

“Hello?” He shouted again, this time to find out if anyone else was around.

He moved through the apple orchard, touching the spindly branches that looked like arthritic fingers reaching out toward him, as if he were a newborn, exploring, feeling, experiencing all over again.

The world was strange, eerily silent. He couldn’t see any cattle in the fields of Mr Horace’s farm across the gravel track that was used as a road that he could just make out through the apple trees. Usually they stood out like big lumps of brown and white. He liked to think of them as chocolates, those gross ones shaped like seashells that tasted disgusting but always looked so good, always lured you in because you thought they looked like they should taste good. Mr Horace’s white and brown mottled cows always reminded Macy of those chocolates.

A lone bird flew across the strange white-grey sky, and a single maple stood out vibrant red, dark and rich like wine. If the sun had been visible, it would have shone like flames, like a beacon. It brightened up the rest of the dreary countryside that had long since died. Yet this single maple didn’t seem like it had lost a single leaf. Macy moved toward it, drawn like a moth to a flame. He reached it and stuck his hand out toward it, stroking its bark as if it were a living thing. “I guess it is,” he said to himself, to the tree.

And he suddenly realized he was ravenous. But he’d had his fill of creamed corn and cardboard crackers and cans of tuna. He never wanted to see another can of tuna for the rest of his life, if he had a choice in the matter.

He turned and walked away from his family home towards the centre of town. The one place he knew, if there was any, that might still have some decent food. The Laughing Well, the town watering hole as some of the older men used to call it. The pub.

He walked into the Well. It was entirely void of life. Something that looked like it may have been alive once was slumped over the bar. Macy had seen many men like that over the years. It was nothing new. Except this time the man no longer looked human, his body distorted by death, twisted and gnarled and dried out into something else. He ignored the thing and moved behind the bar and through the door at the back that led to the kitchen. He headed straight for the massive silver freezer. “Please be good, please be good,” he whispered, crossing his fingers. He opened the door. It smelled a bit rotten. He could tell some of the food had gone off. The items on the top, closest to the door had thawed and had begun to turn. But he could see others were still frozen, even after all this time. Boxes of pre-made burger patties, bags of French fries. How he’d cook frozen French fries he had no idea. He ignored them and grabbed a box of burgers, a bag of rock solid hamburger buns and, strangely, a block of cheddar cheese that was nearly as big as he was tall.

He knew where there was some charcoal, and his father’s old barbeque.

Before putting the burgers on the grill, he went back down into the cellar, with nervous glances over his shoulder as if somehow the doors would suddenly close on him and he wouldn’t be able to get out. That was a recurring nightmare of course, one he had dreamt often when he was locked down there in the bunker. “Don’t be silly, Mace,” he scolded himself. “There’s no one around to even do that anymore.”

He grabbed what he came down for, his father’s old radio, that managed to still be working even though it looked like something that should’ve gone kaput in the 1950s. Maybe technology was better back then, he thought. And then he got out of there as quickly as he could. No aliens are going to trap me down there, he thought with a laugh and then switched on the radio. There was a crackle and hum and then staticky silence. He’d hoped maybe it was because it had been stuck underground that it had gone silent. That somehow the bunker had interfered with the reception. He scrolled through the stations, straining his ears for something, anything. No, he corrected himself. Someone.

But that was crazy. Surely he was the only person left. He was the one person that was prepared, who took the initial reports seriously and grabbed his ‘to go’ duffle bag he always kept under the bed ready for just such an emergency. Okay, maybe he was being naïve. Maybe there were other people who were like him. The other survivalists. Other doomsdayers. Maybe.

As he put two burgers on the grill and the smell of searing meat floated upwards, he spotted someone in the distance. His heart began to race, and he forgot about the burgers, dropping the rusty spatula on the dried grass. He ran towards the figure. “Hey!” He waved. “Hey! over here!” The person didn’t move and it was only as Macy got within a few hundred yards did he realize his mistake. His face grew hot as he realized his mistake. It was only Horace’s scarecrow waving oddly in the breeze. Strange, he thought, how human it looked.

~*~

The television was still on in the electronics shop. A tv show flickered on the screen, as if the television wasn’t entirely sure whether or not it actually still wanted to continue working. It changed between colour and black and white. Macy stood in front of the window, in front of the TV, mesmerized by the show. He’d never seen it before. Suddenly the show was replaced by a news bulletin.

The woman was wearing a bright red trench coat with large black buttons that ran up the front at an angle. She looked wan. “We’ve just received breaking news,” she said reading from a wad of papers in her hand that was shaking. “MeteoTech, headquartered in Arizona, are thought to be the cause of this …” she paused searching for the right word. “thing. Um, issue. Event. We’ve been trying to get an answer from someone at MeteoTech,” she said, the screen switching to show the large rectangular building seemingly made mostly of glass. The windows looked like empty eye sockets staring back. A reporter stood outside the front doors and tugged on the handles. Locked.

Macy Simmons watched the woman on the tv in the electronics shop with disbelief. What was this nonsense she was going on about? To check to see if you had a pulse? Of course you had a pulse! Despite the absurdity of her instructions, he did what she was asking and felt for his pulse. And there it was, as regular and normal as the sun rising in the morning, the beat of his blood running through the vein in his throat. What was this crazy woman talking about? She looked strangely grey. Maybe the colour in the tv had just gone wonky, Macy thought.

~*~

Macy Simmons was in the middle of serving his second burger when the static on his father’s radio turned into someone’s voice. “Mayday,” a man’s voice said. “If anyone is listening, I’m trapped in a hole just outside Flagstaff. In a sinkhole that’s opened up…I don’t know, somewhere along the Interstate heading east. If anyone’s listening, if anyone is in the area, please help. I’m like little Timmy, I’ve fallen down the well and I can’t get out,” the man laughed, a strange sound, on the verge of tears. “This isn’t a joke. If anyone can help me, well, that would mean I wouldn’t have to die in a hole, I guess.”

Macy didn’t believe his ears at first. He turned the dial on the radio forward, and then back, and didn’t get anything else. And then he jumped in his truck that was parked on his gravel drive and threw it into reverse and headed toward and the man trapped like Alice in Wonderland fallen down the rabbit hole.

~*~

He pressed the button on his radio and started singing. Even though he was never one for singing. Not with a voice like his. Like rocks tumbling over themselves in a creek. He was barely fit to speak on the radio! which is why he didn’t except when the station was desperate. “Rescue me, and take me in your arms,” he began, off kilter and off key. He hummed some of the tune and then repeated the ‘rescue me’ part.

But his song was interrupted by darkness overhead.

“’Lo down there!” a voice shouted. “Someone down there?”

Joe sat up, startled. Someone had heard his cry for help? “Yes! Yes! I’m down here! I’m Joe! Did you hear my message? Did you bring some rope?

“Sure did!” Macy replied with a cheerfulness that sounded strangely out of place. “I did better ‘n that. I brought a harness from my construction days. Good thing I never throw anything away, am I right? I can hook up my harness to the pulley on the back of my truck and then you just need to climb into it, just like putting on a diaper and make yourself secure and Bob’s your uncle!”

Joe was so excited he didn’t even stop to ask who the man was. For all he knew the man could be a serial killer. He could be another Frank. Not that the man would necessarily tell the truth anyway.

~*~

Macy Simmons got the nickname in college, due to his temper. One minute he’d be mild mannered Macy, the next he’d be a rampaging monster you wouldn’t want to get in the way of. That’s where he earned the name Jekyll. He liked it, if he was honest. Some people called him John Wayne Macy, but he didn’t like that name, and if people were smart, they wouldn’t say that around him and even smarter not to say it at all, especially not to his face. but Jekyll, Jekyll he kind of liked.

And people called him that until, of course, the day that his Jekyllness got him expelled from College permanently, and a black mark on his record that had banned him from every school in the country. As soon as he walked through the doors of the admissions office, they hadn’t even finished shutting behind him before he was on his way out again. And how do you think that made Jekyll feel? Macy wondered as he tore every dismissal up into tiny miniscule pieces before throwing them in the fireplace to disintegrate into nothingness.

~*~

Macy tied the harness securely to the metal hook at the back of his truck and walked to the edge of the hole. “Watch out below!” Macy called and then dropped the harness. “Give it three good tugs when you’re all ready to go and I’ll pull you up as gently as I can. No promises, but I’ll get you out alive if nothing else.”

Great, Joe thought. And with great difficulty he managed to strap himself in, crisscrossing the harness across his chest and over his shoulders, and then around his waist. He checked and double checked the clasps that tied him to the rope and then, satisfied, yanked on the rope three times, counting to five in between each pull so his rescuer would know for sure there was no mistaking three tugs.

And then he was moving upward. He screamed with the first bump into the side of the shaft as his injured arm hit against the hard packed dirt, and that started him spinning. He spun like a top , turning slowly and then suddenly faster and faster, so that before he even reached the top of the hole he had to squeeze his eyes shut to stop from getting sick. And then the sensation of hanging in the air ended and he hit the ground, sliding across the road with an uncomfortable grating noise that no one should make.

“Stop! Stop, I’m out!” he shouted. He opened his eyes and the white sky was almost blinding after the darkness down below. He squeezed his eyes shut again, strange patterns of blues and purples blossoming in the blackness of his closed eyes.

And suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder and Joe opened his eyes to find a man leaning over him. “You okay mister?” the man asked.

Joe sat up, slowly, because now the road had begun to dance, the yellow dividing line moving like a snake. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m okay now, thanks to you.” He looked his saviour over.

His saviour looked like nothing Joe had ever seen before. He wouldn’t have been more shocked if he’d actually seen angel wings and a halo on the man. But he was indeed looking at a man. A man that seemed strangely preserved. Like a living mummy. He was gaunt, skin stretched tightly across his face, making his blue eyes seem unnervingly large. And his clothes, they looked like something from the nineteen thirties, a dark brown pair of pants paired with a matching vest that hung loosely over a shirt that might have been white when it was first made about 80 years before but now was the yellow of a dirty tooth. The only thing real about the man was his boots. They were regular old cowboy boots, just what you’d expect in middle-of-nowhere like this.

~*~

An awkward silence filled the cab of Macy’s truck. “Say, you didn’t happen to see that crazy news broadcast, did you?” Macy asked Joe who sat staring out at the silent world as it streamed past.

“Huh? What?” Joe turned away from the blurring landscape and focused on his rescuer again. “Oh you mean just about everyone dying. The end of the world?”

Macy waved a hand as if he was swatting away a fly. “Nah, not that, I heard that, everyone heard that. No, I mean the other news broadcasts. The one about you should take your pulse.”

Joe had no idea what this man was talking about. Maybe he was crazy. He certainly looked crazy with his strange clothes, like he’d stepped out of some kind of time machine.

“What are you talking about?” Joe looked at Macy again. Suddenly he felt afraid being in such a confined space as this truck with him.

Macy glanced over at him. “I just saw the lady on the news just before I heard you on the radio. She was telling everyone to check their pulse, and not to be alarmed if they…” he laughed and shook his head. “It’s crazy, I know I’ll sound crazy, but she said not to be alarmed if you didn’t feel a pulse.” Macy shrugged. “I did it. I felt my pulse.”

“And?” Joe asked, suddenly nervous.

“And I had one of course! It’s crazy talk if I didn’t.” he laughed again.

Joe laughed along with him but his laugh was shaky, unsteady.

Silence fell once more, filling the small cab of the truck. After a moment Macy broke it. “Well?”

“Huh?” Joe was startled away from the outside world once more.

“Well? Aren’t you going to do it? Take your pulse like the news lady said?”

“And what happens if I do, and if I don’t have a pulse?” Joe asked.

“They said something about getting in touch with them. The news lady gave a phone number to call. Said they could help.”

With a shrug Joe touched his neck. His fingers froze. He didn’t feel any pulse. He turned to Macy and stared at him silently, his mouth wide. “I-. I don’t have any pulse.”

Macy turned to look at him with a shrug, and then switched on the dial of the radio, turning the dial to cycle through the white noise of the static. “I’ll see if I can find that lady from the TV-” he began. Instead someone Richard’s voice crackled through.

“Stop there!” Joe commanded. “Listen to this guy. He wants to start civilization again, in the San Juan Islands in Washington. That’s where I was headed when I fell down that hole.”

Macy turned the truck down a road heading back into town towards the store with the TV set in the window. He shrugged again. “Sounds like a plan, at least. But you need to hear this too, before we go. I thought the lady was crazy, so didn’t listen to her. She was going on about not having a pulse. and then,” Macy looked sideways at Joe again. “Here you are saying you don’t have one, which is just about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. So we should both listen to it again.”

~*~

Dara stood in her bright red coat. Feeling different, but at the same time strangely the same. She went to the spot where she did the broadcast last time. Before. Before everything changed. Warning people about what was happening, to stay inside.

This time, her message was different. Instructed by Allison, she had to let everyone, well, whoever was still around, know that they were changed, now. That they were half-dead, half-alive. For some reason the toxic soup of an atmosphere hadn’t killed them all - not entirely. But she still felt normal. Still felt like Dara. Except her skin felt a bit cooler to the touch, and had turned slightly off-pink. Like rotten meat, she thought before shaking that away in disgust.

She righted the camera that had tipped over onto the ground and pressed the button on the side. She could see the red light appear, indicating it was recording.

She moved a few feet away, until she thought she stood at the right distance to be in full view (in reality the top of her head and feet were cut off).

“This is Dara Deane of -” she was going to mention the news station then realized the futility of it. “Of Seattle. To whoever might still be out there, please listen. I want you to take your pulse. Two fingers” she placed two of her own underneath her jaw on the side of her neck, “and press. Count to sixty,” She instructed. “You’ll notice that you can’t feel anything. Those of us who are still alive…” she paused, unsure how to word it, but continued. “Aren’t really. Being alive means having a beating heart. And it turns out we...don’t, it seems. According to my friend, Dr Allison James.” Here she gestured off screen and a few moments later a tall, slim woman with brown hair tied back in a ponytail walked on camera.

“Hi,” Allison said with a small, awkward wave and a small awkward smile. “Yes, I’m a doctor. A research scientist, actually. I work in virology and genetics. I study the ways that viruses can alter our genes.” She paused, thoughtful. “Or, in this case I guess, stop our hearts but keep us alive.”

Dara nodded next to Allison. “Yes, exactly. So, we’re all kind of ...half zombies,” she said with a strange smile. “Except we don’t want to eat brains,” she glanced quickly at Allison. “Do we?” she asked for confirmation. Allison shook her head. “No. Not so far anyways, and it’s been…” she didn’t know how long it had been. “a while.” She concluded.

“So, you’re telling us that if we’re half dead then we can’t die?” Dara said with a mixture of hope and fear.

“No. We can,” Allison replied. “You just have to use more...extreme methods.”

“I...I see,” said Dara uncertainly, her voice shaky.

“Do you remember that TV show, Highlander?” Allison supplied.

Dara’s eyes widened. She remembered. The swords. There was only one way to kill a Highlander. You had to remove the head.

~~~~~~

Check out part 15 below to continue reading the story! (Or part 1 if you need to go back to the start).