Chapter 4 The Tower Light
The light on the radio tower blinked red through the dusk like a wound refusing to close.
Dane saw it from six miles out, appearing and vanishing beyond low hills and black stands of cottonwood, steady in a sky that had begun to clear at the edges while the earth remained wet, cold, and full of things that moved after dark.
At first he thought it was an aircraft warning beacon left on by accident, one more stubborn piece of the old world burning through whatever backup battery had not yet died.
Then Otto leaned across Rosa so abruptly that she shoved him back with an elbow.
“Tower,” Otto said.
Rosa glared at him.
“We all have eyes.”
“No, not just a tower. That’s a county emergency relay tower. Or it was. See how the light pulses? Two short, one long. That’s the pattern KZLR used to mark the relay site north of Holcomb.”
Dane kept his hands steady on the wheel. Tomber had begun to pull right again, not badly enough to stop, not gently enough to ignore. Each correction traveled up through his wrists and settled behind his eyes.
“You know where we are?”
“Emotionally, no. Geographically, maybe. There should be a service building at the base with a generator shed, backup batteries, possibly a VHF repeater, maybe a shortwave set if the county emergency manager was the paranoid kind.”
Elias’s voice came through the interior hatch from the cargo box, muffled but clear.
“Paranoid kind were the only smart ones.”
Otto pointed toward the blinking red light.
“If that relay still has power, I can scan westbound frequencies. Maybe Harbor Nine. Maybe National Guard remnants. Maybe road reports. Maybe just a man in Wyoming reading Bible verses to his goats, but information is information.”
Rosa looked out at the darkening fields.
“Stopping at night sounds like a good way to become information for someone else.”
Nell had been silent for nearly an hour, knees drawn up, one hand resting on the cooler as if checking its pulse. Now she lifted her head.
“If Harbor Nine is real, shouldn’t we try?”
There it was—the sentence no one wanted to be responsible for answering. Dane watched the red light blink again above the hills. The road ahead dipped toward a flooded low place where the last of the day’s light lay silver over standing water. Beyond that, the west disappeared.
The safe choice was to keep driving until Tomber’s wounded steering or his own exhaustion made safety theoretical.
The smart choice was to know whether the place they were bleeding toward existed before they spent the last of their fuel, ammunition, and luck chasing a radio rumor.
Unfortunately, the smart choice required stopping.
Dane turned onto the gravel service road.
Rosa sat back with a small, displeased breath.
“That’s your decision?”
“You wanted a meeting?”
“I wanted you to say the bad idea out loud so we could all hate it together.”
“It’s a bad idea,” Dane said.
Otto nodded.
“I feel included.”
The service road climbed between two fields where water glimmered in furrows and broken stalks scraped Tomber’s sides with dry, fingernail sounds.
At the top of the hill, the tower rose from a fenced compound, a tall black lattice stabbing the purple sky.
The red beacon blinked from its crown. A small cinder-block building sat inside the fence, with a generator shed beside it and a white county maintenance van parked nose-first against the gate.
The van’s windshield was cracked. Its driver’s door hung open.
No bodies were visible, which meant nothing good.
Dane stopped fifty yards short and killed the headlights but left the engine idling.
Nobody moved.
The tower light blinked. Two short. One long.
Rosa whispered, “I don’t hear anything.”
“That’s because the engine’s on,” Elias called from the back.
Dane turned the key.
The engine died, and the silence that followed seemed too large for the cab.
Wind moved through the tower, making the metal sing softly.
Somewhere down the hill, frogs called in the flooded ditch with absurd confidence.
Farther away, not close but not imagined, a low moan carried over the fields and faded.
Rosa checked the shotgun.
“We go in how?”
“Slow,” Dane said.
“That your whole plan?”
“Mostly.”
“I miss when plans had steps.”
Otto raised a hand.
“I can provide steps. Step one: do not let me die. Step two: allow me near the radios. Step three: continue not letting me die.”
Nell looked at him.
“Do you always talk when you’re scared?”
“Only when awake.”
That earned the smallest smile from her, so small it might have been a trick of the falling light. Otto saw it and looked briefly proud of himself, then frightened again.
Dane opened his door and climbed down before his knee could argue him into staying.
Pain flared anyway. He swallowed it and listened.
The compound lay still. No birds. No insects except the frogs below.
No human voices. No engines behind them.
The Milemen had not shown since Vesper, but Dane trusted absence less than he trusted strangers.
Rosa came down with the shotgun. Otto followed with a coil of cable over one shoulder and his screwdriver held like a religious object. Nell started to slide out after him.
Dane looked at her.
“You and Elias stay in the truck.”
She stiffened.
“No.”
“Nell.”
“You said I decide.”
“I said if we were dead, you decide.”
“You didn’t say only then.”
Rosa muttered, “She has you there.”
Dane gave her a look.
Nell climbed down with the cooler strap over her shoulder, standing on the gravel with her chin up and her face pale in the dusk.
“I’m not staying alone in the cab while all of you vanish into a building. That’s how people die in every story Otto probably knows.”
Otto nodded solemnly.
“She is correct. Building vanishing is a statistically troubling narrative stage.”
Elias shoved open the cargo hatch and climbed down from the back with a grunt, carrying his double-barrel and a canvas tool roll.
“I’m too old to babysit and too tired to argue. Everybody goes, everybody keeps quiet, and if the dead show up, we let Dane be unpleasant first.”
“Appreciate the confidence,” Dane said.
“Wasn’t praise.”
They moved toward the fence.
The maintenance van blocked the gate from the inside.
Dane looked through the fence before touching it.
The van’s interior was empty except for old coffee cups, a clipboard, and dried blood sprayed across the passenger-side window.
The gate was chained but not locked. Someone had looped it closed in a hurry and trapped the van inside as a barricade.
Rosa watched the building.
“There’s blood on the door.”
“Old,” Dane said.
“That supposed to comfort me?”
“No.”
Elias unwrapped his tool roll and cut the gate chain with bolt cutters, jaw muscles jumping as the metal gave. The sound seemed loud enough to wake the county. Everyone froze afterward, listening while the tower blinked overhead.
Nothing came.
They squeezed through the opening beside the van. Dane reached the building first. The steel door had been scratched by fingernails, not fresh, but deep. A handprint had dried near the handle, fingers sliding downward before disappearing.
Otto swallowed audibly.
“I would like to revise my earlier enthusiasm.”
“Too late,” Rosa said.
Dane opened the door.
The smell rolled out before the darkness did.
Not rot, exactly. That would have been simpler. This was enclosed heat, electrical dust, old blood, plastic insulation, and the sour human smell of fear soaked into concrete. Dane let the door swing wide and waited. When nothing lunged, he clicked on his flashlight.
The beam crossed a narrow room packed with radio racks, battery cabinets, folding chairs, a county map, and a desk buried under manuals.
A dead man sat beneath the desk with a revolver in his lap and a hole under his jaw.
His other hand had been zip-tied to the desk leg.
On the far wall, written in marker above the equipment, were the words:
DO NOT OPEN IF THEY COME BACK
Rosa read it and closed her eyes for half a second.
“Fantastic,” Otto whispered. “Deeply welcoming.”
Nell stared at the dead man.
Dane stepped inside, then stopped as the beam found the second body.
This one lay behind the radio racks, face down, wearing a county sheriff’s jacket. Its wrists were bound too. Its pant leg had been torn open at the calf, the bite black and swollen even in death. The back of its head had been destroyed.
Rosa spoke very quietly.
“They tied the bitten ones down.”
Otto looked sick.
“And then waited.”
Elias glanced at the message on the wall.
“For whoever came back.”
Dane crouched by the man under the desk without touching him. The revolver held one spent casing and five live rounds. The dead man’s name badge read BARTLEY, E. Dane took the ammunition and left the gun where it was.
Nell watched him.
“You take from dead people a lot.”
“Dead people don’t need bullets.”
“Do you ever ask?”
He looked at the man under the desk, at the zip tie around his wrist, at the message written for people who had not arrived in time.
“Sometimes.”
That answer quieted her, though it did not satisfy either of them.
Otto moved to the radio rack, fear giving way to concentration as soon as switches and labels entered his world. He ran his fingers over dials, tested a breaker, and flinched when a panel light glowed amber.
“Batteries are alive,” he said, voice changing. Less chatter now. More breathless wonder. “Repeater’s on standby. Shortwave receiver too. Generator feed is offline, but the battery bank is carrying low draw. Whoever shut this down knew enough not to kill it completely.”
Elias grunted.
“Can you transmit?”
“Not at full power without the generator. Maybe low power. Maybe receive only if the antenna line is damaged.”
“Find out fast,” Dane said.
Otto gave him an annoyed look.
“I was planning to savor our stay in the corpse closet, but your urgency is persuasive.”
Rosa stationed herself at the door. Elias went to the generator shed with the tool roll and his shotgun. Dane did not like splitting even ten yards apart, but Elias had survived Vesper alone longer than most men survived anything, and someone had to get power before the battery bank died.