CB Radio

I was quite young back when we were fooling around with my dad's old CB radio system. If I recall correctly, I was sixteen when I pulled it down from the attic in the house and found myself asking about it at the dinner table that night. He explained what it was, that I could communicate on short wave radio around the area. He offered to set it up and show me how it worked.

Now this was the age before the internet so my friend, Tom, and I were fairly excited to be using it. The unit sat in my bedroom for a few months and we had fun trying to talk to the truckers out on the highway or the various farmers or herders nearby. Many just ignored us or jumped frequency, we'd jump through them all and speak to anybody who would answer.

On channel twenty nine, we began talking with somebody who seemed to be around our age. He said his name was Bobby. We hardly got further than cracking jokes and talking about playing pranks and giving fake traffic reports at first, it was all pretty exciting, but eventually, after a month or two, we agreed to meet up with Bobby. We asked for an address and he told us he lived on a farm just off Harris Road, around fifteen or sixteen miles out of town.

So Tom took his parents car one overcast Saturday afternoon and, as the rain broke out, we made our way down the Highway and pulled off where we'd heard Harris Road was. Nearing a split-country road, we spied the name of the farm on an old wooden sign that Bobby had told us about over the radio. We pulled up through the drive and took the car right up to the farmhouse, expecting to see him waiting for us.

Instead we were faced with a run-down, dilapidated farm house, towered over by what appeared to be a barn falling over it's struts. Common sense should have told us to leave but despite initial confusion, we were convinced that Bobby merely hung out here, that he had found the old radio system in the barn, where he usually told us he was when he talked to us.

We got out of the car and crunched across the old stone pathway to the barn, pushing the huge doors open with a deafening creak. We called out Bobby's name, heard nothing and debated looking further. Eventually we decided to head in, Tom leading the way. Upon rounding the first corner, we found the old radio system sitting up on an old work-bench, still online, with the number display lit up and the receiver still crackling away with static.

But it was the rotten human bones, laying across the workbench that made us run. (Credited to Scotty from Terror Tortellini)