Read Bad Radio for Free Online Page B

body, so headshots work pretty well, and of course you can always slow them down by hitting them in the knees and hips. Pain won’t stop them, but they need joints to move, same as we do.” I didn’t tell her about my preferred way of dealing with bags. She was upset enough already.
    She didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the trip. The both of us just went quiet and listened to the wind and the engine, trying to keep the fragile feeling of calm intact. We were both hit pretty hard by Patty’s death, and everything else on top of that just seemed to make things spin around out of control. We sat there trying to keep it together and hoping the other wouldn’t bring the whole house of cards down with the wrong words.
    It worked pretty well until we got within a mile of my farm. By then we could see the ruddy orange glow reflecting off of the low clouds overhead. It was a fire, and it looked like a big one. I could feel my heart clench up in my chest.

7

    W e slewed and bounced up the dirt driveway, the glare from the roaring house blinding us. When the car finally crunched to a stop, I threw the door open, letting in the continuous low thunder of the fire. As I got out, I could feel the heat pressing in on me, like it was trying to push me back into the car. My eyes and throat started to sting, even though there didn’t appear to be much smoke at ground level, just a kind of foggy haze, but huge ashy clouds of it were rolling out of the top of the house, made up of everything Maggie or I ever owned.
    I couldn’t look away. Every letter and picture, every scrap of cloth or furniture that ever adorned our lives, was rising up in a billowing black column full of cherry sparks.
    As they spiraled up and became cold and invisible, they took the weight of the incinerated bits and pieces of my life with them, leaving only the imprint behind on my soul, finally becoming the past in the way that I always imagined memories existed for everyone else.
    Weightless.
    I hadn’t been sitting in that chair with my gun because I was depressed, or not just that, but because that was the only thing left to do. My life was a single track, bounded and fenced by my past.
    I wasn’t just some guy named Abe. I was Abe, Maggie’s husband. Abe the old man. Abe who came back from the war. After losing Maggie there was nothing left in front of me, only a past and no future. That Abe’s track had only one stop left.
    But watching the things that defined me drift away into the forgiving sky, I felt myself getting lighter. In that moment of complete loss, I was free. For the first time in nearly a century, I felt like I did when I was a boy leaving the farm for the first time, seeing the future expanding out in front of me. A quiet bittersweet exultation, but exultation all the same, filled me and lightened my body from the inside out.
    I drew in a deep breath, full of scorching air and wood smoke, and when I exhaled, all my tired hopelessness seemed to flow out with my breath. It felt good. The east wall of the house crumpled just then, and a fierce bloom of heat tightened the skin on my face, pulling me back to the present.
    “Back up the car,” I shouted over the roar. “You need to get further back!” I heard the engine rev and the tires bite as I slammed the car door shut. When I judged that Anne was no longer in danger of having things melt off of her car, I ran towards the house, cutting a wide circle around to the side.
    My farm was built by my father in 1908, before electricity and refrigeration came to the countryside. That meant a big root cellar for storing preserves under the house. I hoped that the fire hadn’t eaten the foundation supports and let the house collapse into it just yet. I had things other than fruit preserved down there.
    I saw immediately that that the cellar doors set into the ground were thrown open, and the padlock was laying on the ground, reflecting red and copper against the scorched grass. The