It Came from Anomaly Flats Page 6

  Even at the end, it was baseball.

  Growing up, my bedroom was plastered in the green and yellow palette of the Anomaly Flats Aberrations. A green felt banner with yellow trim and two yellow streamers shouting GO ABERRATIONS clung to the wall next to the door like a compass arrow, the tip pointing toward the east, toward Gamma Field. Skip Botchless, the Hall of Fame pitcher, stared me down from a poster above my bed, leaning forward over one knee, a baseball hidden behind his back, clutched tightly in one hand. A green jersey signed by Tom Spectre, the Grey Ghost, hung over my dresser, ensconced in a wood-and-glass shadow box of my father’s own making. A line of plunky old bobbleheads stood like drowsy sentinels across the back of my desk, and even my bed sheets were Aberration green and gold.

  I guess a lot of kids’ rooms are like that. I guess it wasn’t all that strange.

  Until you consider the fact that I’d never seen a baseball game in my life. All those decorations were put there by my dad.

  I didn’t mind, of course. I wasn’t opposed to baseball. When Dad and I played catch out in the yard, I actually really enjoyed it, and he always told me how I’d be able to join the little league team in a few years, when I was just a little older. I was looking forward to it.

  I wasn’t very good at baseball, though, and I think that hurt his feelings a little. But it was something we had together, something he would drop everything else to focus on, and I was part of it. And I loved that.

  If he wasn’t talking to me about baseball, he wasn’t talking to me at all.

  He wasn’t around all that much. My mother threw him out of the house the day after my third birthday, when the sheriff brought him home drunk on beer and half-blind on that drug he always did, “scar.” He’d missed my birthday party to get high in the alley behind the Bijou, and it was the last straw of an enormous haystack. He was gone, and I didn’t see him much after that.

  I craved the time we spent together. I hungered for it like sugar.

  Then one morning, the summer I turned seven years old, he surprised me with two tickets to the Aberrations game. He’d always promised we’d spend a day at the ballpark together, and it was finally happening.

  How was I to know? How could I have known? When you’re seven years old, the world is a hidden place.

  The Aberrations were only a single-A minor league team, but you wouldn’t know it from the way my dad lit up when he rattled off their stats, boasted about the roster, the power of the hitters, the fluid twist of the pitchers’ arms. My father rarely roused himself before noon, and if he wasn’t high, he wasn’t happy, so his sober excitement that day was infectious. He even brought me a brand new t-shirt, the kind that was yellow with green sleeves down to the elbows and “Anomaly Flats Aberrations” written on the front in fat, green script. I say it was brand new because it was new to me, though of course it wasn’t actually a new shirt. It was stained under the arms; there were brown streaks across the bottom, like it had been dragged through mud and just couldn’t get clean, and there were a few small holes around the collar. But I didn’t care. I was used to hand-me-downs, and Dad was always bringing me clothes with rusty stains and saturated with weird, acrid smells. This one wasn’t nearly as bad as some, and Dad wore one to match. It was really something. Sometimes, when he was confused from the drugs, or angry with a hangover, he tried to distance himself from me, to walk three steps ahead with a long stride so I couldn’t catch up, even if I jogged, and sometimes he would even tell people I wasn’t his son, he didn’t know who I was, but he wished I’d stop tagging along. But on that day? That day we went to the ballpark, we were dressed like a pair, like a real father and son.

  There was some sort of magic in that.

  I remember my mother was sleeping when he came over and showed me the tickets. She slept a lot in those days. It took a lot of medication to even her out back then, and Doc Mason was trying her on all sorts of pills, just to see what would work the best. Some of them made her mean; some of them made her cry. Almost all of them made her sleep.

  I wanted to wake her up, to tell her that Dad was finally taking me to a game. That she’d been wrong all those times she said it would never happen, that it couldn’t happen. I wanted her to see that he could come through, that every once in a while, even if almost never, he could be relied on. But Dad grabbed my arm when I tried to run down to her room, and he held a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said, giving me a wink, like we were in on some sort of big secret together, and I just felt thrilled at that. “Let’s let her sleep. She might wanna go, and I’ve only got two tickets.”

  We hopped in my father’s old Chevy truck that only ran about 25% of the time, and I remember praying that it would start. If it could get us to Gamma Field, it wouldn’t ever have to start up again. Just get us to the baseball game.

  And it did start. On the first try. I knew it was a sign that it was going to be a good day.

  Children will believe any foolish thing.

  We barreled across town, my father chattering on about players and stats the whole way. You’d have thought the circus was in town, the way he beamed behind the wheel. I’d never seen him like that. Usually, when he was happy, it was because he was either high on his scar, or on his way to score some. But this was different. It wasn’t the nervous, jittery, catgut wire-strung energy. It was real excitement.

  We were really going to see something that day.

  He pulled the truck onto the road that led to the field, and I remember that was the first moment I felt a little nervous. There was a chain strung up across the asphalt, meant to block traffic, and it had been in place for a good long while; the links were coated with rust, and the posts that had been cemented into the crumbling blacktop were splotched with mildew and chipped with time. A battered tin sign hung down from the center of the chain, scraping the asphalt lightly in the breeze. It said KEEP OUT.

  But my father didn’t even lift his foot off the gas. He jerked the wheel to the right, and the truck veered off the road, bouncing through the grass and coming back out on the other side of the chain. “Aren’t we supposed to stop?” I asked, craning my head back to look at the blockade.

  “Hell no!” he said, that wildness blazing in his eyes. “That sign ain’t meant for us! We’re a couple of real fans!”

  We drove on down the road, and it was still as death outside the truck. There were no other cars, no other people, no animals that I could see. Even the trees were still and stiff. The farther we drove, the more sparse those trees became, thinning themselves out to ragged toothpicks, and the ones that stood had been stripped of all leaves, even the pine trees, which I knew were supposed to keep their needles all year ’round. The grass died away from the soil, too, and the dirt faded from brown and rich to gray and cracked. It was a place of death…even as a child, I knew that, like I knew my own name.

  The stadium rose up on the horizon over a hill, and my father let loose a string of wild whoops. “There she is, boy!” he hollered, beating his hands on the wheel. “Your first game.” His eyes misted over, and he shook his head with pride. “I’m doing right by you.”

  I don’t really know what I expected of the field. I’d seen pictures of other stadiums in my books, and most of them were grand, solid structures of brick and stone and concrete and steel. I guess I expected archways and columns and high, high gates, and a circular ramp that wound its way around the walls. I thought there would be a sprawling parking lot filled with cars, a line of ticket-takers ushering on mobs of boisterous fans, maybe a few huge banners streaming down over the entrance, declaring the victories of seasons past.

  But like the leaves on those trees, my expectations withered and died the closer we got to the field.

  There was a parking lot, but it was paved with gravel, and overrun with weeds. The only other car in the lot was an old, rusty beater set up on cinder blocks with its tires gone
and the windows smashed in. The stadium was little more than a cluster of bleachers jammed in together in a half-circle behind home plate. There was a full-body turnstile, one of the tall ones with ten or fifteen horizontal bars, but no ticket-takers, and no throng of fans.

  There was no one there at all.

  The field was surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with a twisting loop of rusty barbed wire. Two huge stadium light poles towered above the outfield, looming quietly, each one set with a couple dozen bulbs, most of which I could tell even at that distance had shattered.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, leaning forward and staring in amazement through the windshield. “Where’s everybody at?”

  But my father didn’t answer. He just plowed across the parking lot, still drumming his hands on the wheel, still sparking with that light in his eyes.

  The truck squealed to a stop right at the fence, somewhere along the first base line. My father popped open his door and hopped out, and I did the same, though it was clear by then that something was wrong. The KEEP OUT sign made sense now; the stadium was abandoned. There was no doubt about that.

  “I thought...” I started, but my father wasn’t listening. He was inspecting the fence, testing for weakness. I moved closer and spoke louder. “I thought there was a game today.”

  “There’s a game every day,” he said excitedly, running his hands along the fence. “Can’t you see it?”

  But I didn’t see it. I didn’t see anything, except for a rundown ballpark and the man who nature had made my father.

  “Bingo!” he cried. He pushed the fence in, and the bottom went high enough for me to crawl under. “Go on through,” he said, motioning down with his head. I was scared, and I didn’t want to go inside, but what could I do? I shuffled my feet in the gravel, trying to think of some excuse. “I don’t feel good,” I said, holding my belly for effect.

  My father just nodded sympathetically and said, “You’ll feel better inside.”

  So I crawled under the fence and onto the abandoned field.

  My father followed, letting loose a string of curses as the sharp tips of the chain links scratched down his back. But he forgot his pain pretty quickly. He jumped to his feet and stared out at the baseball field, shaking his head in awe. “Here we are,” he said with wonder. “Our first game together.”

  If the parking lot was disappointing, the field was a tragedy. Wildflowers and long, tangling weeds spread their fingers across the outfield, and the infield dirt was overrun with grass. There was a patch of sand at home plate, and a little hump of it at the pitcher’s mound, but the rest of the infield was covered with tall, sickly-pale blades. First and second bases had been stolen, and third base was askew, like someone had tried to pull it out but just gave up after a few hard tugs. The stands were littered with trash, and the dugouts were just glorified benches. A wooden box hoisted up on concrete pillars had been painted with the radio call letters KRAF, but the paint was peeling and flaked, and a few of the boards hung loose from the box, swaying gently in the breeze.

  “Dad?” I asked, and my throat felt tight, so my voice was more of a wheeze. “Dad? What’s wrong with this place?”

  He looked at me in the strangest way. “Wrong?” he asked. “Why do you think something’s wrong?”

  He took my hand and led me to the stands. They were splintery and cracked, and it hurt to sit on them, but he shoved me down. I bit my lip so he wouldn’t see me cry.

  “What a day!” he said, beaming out over the field. “And these seats. Can you believe it? Your old man know how to treat you right, or what?”

  I looked out over the field. There was a round patch of weeds just beyond second base that was taller and darker green than the other weeds in the grass. I didn’t really think it was strange at first. No stranger than the rest of it.

  I remember feeling afraid of the stadium, afraid of its ruin…but I was even more afraid of my father, because I realized at that moment, as he sat smiling out at the field, that he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see that the ballpark had been abandoned.

  “Dad,” I whispered. I was afraid to upset him, but I didn’t want to be there, alone with him, anymore. “There’s nobody else here.”

  He looked down at me like I was the crazy one. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. Then he laughed…it was a high-pitched, screeching sound. “We’ve got the whole team!” He gestured grandly out onto the field. But it was empty. We were alone.

  “Atta boys!” he cried. He stood up and clapped. “Lookin’ sharp!” He cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Aberration Nation!”

  I knew then that something was deeply, deeply wrong with my father.

  “Dad,” I said, reaching up and taking his hand gently, not wanting to anger him, but needing to anchor myself to him at the same time. “I want to go home.”

  He laughed at that, and he shook me off, pulling his hand out from under mine. “Let’s go, Aberrations!” he yelled. “Ha, ha!”

  I didn’t know what to do. I was helpless. We were out there alone, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought that maybe if I was quiet and waited, and if I tried not to be too scared, eventually it would be over, and he’d take me back home, and I’d be safe.

  I started to cry.

  My father turned back to me again, and his eyes were so big. I thought he was going to yell at me for not having more fun—that’s how crazy he was. I wanted to take his hand and pull him away, but he wouldn’t go…I knew he wouldn’t, and I shrank back from him, pushing myself back across the splintery bench, and it hurt, but I didn’t want to be close enough for him to reach me. I thought he was mad at me, but that wasn’t it.

  “Did you hear that?” he whispered. “Did you hear?” I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, that I hadn’t heard anything, that he was insane, that I was more afraid of him in that moment than I’d ever been of anything before. I didn’t want to say those things, so I just looked at him instead.

  But he didn’t really need an answer from me. At that point, he was already gone.

  “They want me to join them!” he said, his voice cracking with awe.

  “Who does?” I asked. But he didn’t reply, and I guess the answer was obvious anyway. He leapt down from the bench and ran onto the field, leaving me alone in the stands. “Dad!” I shrieked, my throat clogging as I screamed.

  I was scared to death, and now I was alone.

  He ran across the field, clapping his hands, pointing at people who weren’t there, trading jokes with imaginary ghosts. He ran out past second base, to the circle of dark weeds. He fell to his knees, laughing and smiling, and he began to dig.

  Later on, I learned some things about the Anomaly Aberrations and their ballpark. I learned that by the time Dad brought me out there for my birthday, the field had been abandoned for almost twenty years. And not just abandoned; completely cordoned off, for a radius of about ten miles in every direction. No one was allowed to get close.

  All because of that ring of strangely colored weeds out behind second base.

  Something terrible happened at the last Aberrations game. Something horrifying, and totally unexpected, but so completely right for Anomaly Flats. Sometime in the top of the fifth inning, with the Aberrations out in the field, a freak uranium well spontaneously opened up behind second base. The fact that uranium isn’t supposed to be found in wells—and isn’t supposed to be liquid at all—didn’t matter. It was a uranium well, and it just appeared, in a flash. The second baseman had been playing deep, and it opened right under his feet. He fell in, and they say his screams could be heard from the parking lot.

  The uranium was more unstable than normal. Way more radioactive. Doctors’ best guess is that his skin sloughed right off his bones, shucked away like giftwrap.

  The
whole stadium was in awe. The shortstop ran over to see what had happened. He looked down into the hole, and the skin started dripping off his face. He didn’t scream nearly as much. He must have passed out, because he just collapsed and pitched over into the well.

  The rest of the stadium panicked. The people in the stands clawed their way over each other, stampeding the exits. Dozens of people were trampled to death, but they were the lucky ones. They were already gone by the time the radiation seeped up and covered the field like a fog. It spread its hissing, burning fingers over the stands, past the concessions, through the fence, out across the parking lot. Car tires seared and popped; the metal gates softened and sagged. And every single person in attendance that day, player and spectator alike, melted alive.

  The screams must have been deafening there inside the walls of Gamma Field.

  That name didn’t come along until later, I learned. Someone’s idea of a joke.

  The mayor waited it out a few months, postured for re-election, then finally sent in a cleanup crew. They swarmed the stadium in their HAZMAT suits and set to work cleaning up the mess. They sprayed and scrubbed and scraped, working in double shifts every single day.

  It took them three months.

  On the mayor’s orders, all the remains were dumped into the uranium well, and the hole itself was filled in with dirt. Experts told the mayor that dirt wouldn’t hold the radiation back, not by a long shot. But she thought concrete would eat up too much of her budget, so she just roped off the ten-mile radius instead. “It’s cheaper that way,” she said. “Better.”

  I don’t know what it was that set my father to digging up that well. I don’t want to believe in ghosts, but it’s hard to deny them here, in the Flats. It’s likely as anything else that the dead roused him up, showed him what he needed to see, pointed him at the filled-in circle behind second base, and waited to be unearthed.

  Or maybe he was just insane.

  Either way, I sat there and bawled while I watched him dig into the earth. He flung dirt with his hands, clawing frantically at the ground, laughing the whole time. He hollered proudly about being part of the team, about being an Aberration, and the soft ground gave easily beneath him. He sank lower and lower, and little wisps of gas began to steam from the holes in the dirt. I could see the sweat breaking across his face even from where I sat, and as he dug, he scrubbed at his forehead with his arm, pushing away the sweat.