“I’m sure you will, but just in case, I’ve got my own contingencies moving into place,” Devon said. “No offense intended. I’m sure you can do your job, but I did not get to the place I’m at by taking other people at their word. We’ve got to plug these leaks, no matter what your familial concerns may be.”
“I understand,” the man replied, his voice still a muted whisper. Static and distance had stripped away all hint of emotion.
Devon’s first words had knocked Charlie back on his heels, but this second voice hit him even harder, leaving him perched motionless on his folded knees, his mouth hanging open in a lowercase “o.” Now he broke his paralysis and scrambled forward, his hands darting across the front of the radio. Finally, he managed to find the big red “transmit” button.
“Dad,” he called, his voice catching on the final note, the raised lilt that would have transformed the word into a question. “Dad, it’s Charlie. Is that you?”
The static continued for a couple of seconds—tense seconds—as we both waited for the voice to respond. Then the static stopped, and there was only silence. Devon and the mysterious voice—Charlie’s father, I thought. Is that even possible?—were gone, leaving behind the sound of mute wires.
Charlie sat still for a couple of seconds, and then he turned his ashen face toward me. His eyes were wide, and he looked stricken, shocked absolutely senseless.
“How could you be sure?” I asked. “It was a whisper. I could barely hear him. It could have been anyone.”
Charlie shook his head. “No, I know that voice. It was him.”
And then, more quietly, “It was him,” he repeated. He dropped his eyes back to the radio and stared at it expectantly, as if he were still waiting for it to resume speaking, waiting for it to morph into the face of his father. There was a lot there in that look: confusion, expectance, fear. Hope.
“Why would your father be talking to Devon?” I asked. “You said your parents were here, in the city. You’ve been looking for them. Why? What are they doing? What does this mean?”
He glanced back up at me, but his eyes remained distant. There was little there but shock and, just maybe—deep down inside—a dawning horror, a seed of understanding that was just now starting to take root. I could see it: a widening of the eye, a quiver in the lip.
And I wondered again, What does this mean? If anything, that look of horror on Charlie’s face said that his father’s voice coming from that radio meant something, something important.
“What’s his job, Charlie?” I asked. “What does your father do?”
He didn’t respond to my question. His eyes just slipped back down to the radio. And he continued to wait.
I tried to wait him out. I tried to wait for the shock to subside, for the answers to start coming, but Charlie remained mute. He just sat there in the middle of the room, fixated on that matte-black radio.
After a couple of minutes, a sound erupted in the quiet house, and it made me jump. It was a loud, prolonged creak, like a tight hinge slowly swinging open, and it came from downstairs.
I jumped to my feet and started toward the door. Charlie remained seated. He didn’t even raise his eyes. I didn’t even think he’d heard the sound. I left him sitting in front of the radio and quietly moved out into the hallway.
My nerves were frayed by the time I reached the top of the stairs, and my heart was beating hard. I had no idea what I might find downstairs. Maybe Devon, I thought. Maybe he heard us and he’s sneaking up from the tunnels, setting up an ambush, getting ready to deal with us. Maybe this is what he meant by “containment.” Or maybe it’s not Devon. Maybe it’s something else, something much, much worse. Amanda’s dogs or Weasel’s disembodied fingers. Ghosts. Monsters. Swarms of mutant spiders.
“Hi, Dean.” The voice was quiet and subdued, drained of all energy. It was the type of voice a sponge would have, if the sponge had been taking sedatives for a month straight. “I didn’t know you were here.”
It was Floyd. He was in the downstairs hallway, sitting with his back against the front door, the exact same spot I’d found him in the last time we were here, after he’d fled the tunnels in absolute horror. The cellar door stood open across from him, and a fresh trail of mud stretched from the gaping dark maw to his muddy boots.
I made my way down the rest of the stairs and stood over him for a moment. When he didn’t look up, I sat down at his side.
“I found a flashlight,” he said, lifting a large metal Maglite from his lap. After a moment, it dropped back down to his thighs, his arm collapsing under its weight. “Much better than your camera screen.”
“I thought it scared you,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and soothing. “I thought we couldn’t drag you back underground.”
He shrugged. “I had to. It was… calling to me.” He laughed, a cold and lifeless chuckle. “Isn’t that stupid? It called, and I came, again and again. And here I am, the king of running away. But I just had to see. I had to see him.”
“Who?”
He looked up from the flashlight in his lap. His eyes were out of focus.
“They aren’t working anymore,” he said, ignoring my question. He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pill bottle, shaking it upside down to show me it was empty. “I’ve taken, like, six now, and I’m perfectly sober.”
I nodded, humoring him.
His shoulders slumped even lower. “It was my brother,” he said. “When we were underground before, I swear I saw my younger brother down there, in those tunnels. He was sitting there, cross-legged in the middle of one of those offshoots—you know, the one I was looking down when you were taking your pictures? When you hit your flash, I saw him sitting there, in the dirt. And then the next flash, he was starting to stand up, heading toward me.” Floyd tilted his head back against the wall and sighed. I could hear energy seeping out in that exhausted breath. Pretty soon he’d be an empty husk, puddled on the floor like a deflated balloon. “So I ran. That’s me. I always run. But now… now I can’t stop thinking about it, about him. No matter what I fucking do, what I fucking take.”
“What happened to your brother?” I asked. “Why was he down there?”
Floyd tilted his head toward me and smiled. “I killed him, Dean—that’s what happened. I fucking killed him.”
There was a surprising warmth in his voice and a tiny little smile on his lips as he talked, as he tried to explain. And those two things remained even as his words turned to horrible things. Warm voice and tiny smile. They were a jarring contrast to the tears clinging to his cheeks and the pain and helplessness in his roving eyes.
“Byron. His name was Byron. And he idolized me. He wanted to hang out with me and talk like me and skate like me. And I tried to make time for him, really I did. I tried to look out for him. My father left when we were both pretty young, and my mom, she had her own problems—trying to support us and raise us right—and I wanted to take some of the weight off her shoulders. You know how it is, right?” He looked up at me, pleading, and I nodded. I could understand, even if I’d never had a brother, or a sister, or a parent who’d had to scrape and sacrifice just to make my life a little better. “I let him tag along when I went skating. Me and my friends… he was like a fucking mascot or something, and it kept us both out of my mom’s hair, so she didn’t complain. He was a pretty good skater. Not great, but good. I don’t know if he could have really gone pro, but being my brother and all, that certainly helped. The company reps took him seriously, and when we hung out, they always wanted to give him free stuff. I worked some consulting shit for a company called F*ckstick—kind of a poseur company, with a little fucking star instead of the ‘u’ in their name—but they had me testing boards, giving input on design and image and stuff. Hell, they were even going to release a signature deck under my name, put my face in the ads and the whole celebrity endorsement shtick. Bullshit like ‘Ride Pretty Boy Floyd’s pretty-boy stick.’ And God, man, isn’t that just about the most awful thing you’ve ever heard?” Floyd let out a little laugh. It ended in an abrupt, wheezing gasp, as if he’d just been punched in the stomach. “Byron would tag along whenever I went to their offices in San Diego. This was right after I dropped out of high school, so he couldn’t have been more than thirteen. He was there so much, they ended up making him his own board. Probably just trying to kiss up to me, really—buttering up my brother and all that—but he was so fucking proud of that board. Their graphic designer even did a caricature of him, in midflight, with wings sprouting out of his back, like a motherfucking angel—it was right there, blazed across the hardwood. It’s corny, I know, but really, I’ve seen worse. They probably could have sold it in stores. Anyway, they never did release my deck—I think they were just stringing me along, really, trying to get my expertise on the cheap—but Byron still loved that board. He kept it pristine, never wanting to ride it. He just kept it propped up on top of his dresser, standing there like an icon, like some type of religious shrine.” Floyd shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe it was his future he saw up there: flying through the air on a skateboard, fucking angel wings on his back. Just like his motherfucking brother.”