Roadside Picnic

After his release from prison, Redrick promises himself he will never again step foot in the Zone. That doesn’t stop the Vulture from trying to enlist him in a scheme to airlift the Golden Sphere out of the Zone using a hot-air balloon in return for $500,000. The Vulture visits him 20 times, and each time Redrick says no. Then one night, the Monkey and Redrick’s father begin emitting creaky, drawn-out cries at one another in a dire expression of their shared inhumanity: “And they kept calling back and forth in the dark—it seemed to last a century, a hundred years, another hundred years” (163). This sets Redrick off on a drinking binge that culminates in Redrick finally agreeing to the Vulture’s plan. He agrees not for the money, but in order to use the Golden Sphere to wish for his daughter’s humanity back.

Accessing the Golden Sphere requires a sacrifice. One must pass through a “grinder,” an invisible force that lifts a human off the ground and twists them horribly, almost always resulting in death. After the grinder takes its victim, a second human may pass by unmolested. In an act informed by cruelty and spite, Redrick agrees to bring along as his sacrifice the Vulture’s son, Arthur, a handsome law school graduate groomed to become a senator and possibly the president.