Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  “Can you see me right now?” Titian asked, stepping forward. The lens charger slipped from his hand and hit the floor with a dry thud. He leaned down and peered into Brody’s face, so close Brody could smell the sharp rancor of Titian’s breath. A bloody finger nearly touched the surface of Brody’s right eye—Brody felt it brushing his eyelashes. He didn’t allow himself to flinch.

  “This one, right? This one you can see out of right now. Not the other one.” Titian’s right shoulder moved as he waved a hand in front of Brody’s blind eye.

  Brody nodded.

  Titian stepped back. “Ironic, you being the sightless sleuth and all with that whole thing about justice being blind. I suppose when they fish your body out of Lake Michigan, that’ll be what they put on the newspapers and everything. ‘Blind Detective Found Dead—Major Injustice’ or something.” He ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, flattening it down with a pomade of blood.

  “Where’s Nectar?” Brody asked, his voice slurred from his torn lip and his mouth readily refilling with blood each time he swallowed. “Is she dead? Did you kill her?”

  Titian looked at Brody as if he wanted to answer. He walked past him, then behind him and out of sight.

  Brody expected to feel the hefty chop of a machete going through his neck. He closed his eyes so it would be a surprise, possibly instant and painless.

  But instead of a rusty blade singing through the air, he heard the creak of wheels. He opened his eyes and saw Titian rolling an ancient TV set in front of him. It was one of the CRT variations, encased in wood with frilly fabric hiding its speaker.

  Brody glanced at Titian standing next to the dead TV.

  “Oh, this?” Titian said. “I don’t have anything to show you, but Hubert does. I just got it ready for him. I have to keep things busy up here.” He waved a hand next to his bushy head of wild gray hair. “Otherwise, I lose focus and I forget my orders and, well, I could forfeit a lot of money if I do that.” He found a folding chair across the room and sat down, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, staring at Brody.

  Brody gazed at his reflection in the gray TV screen and saw the door behind him, a long workbench of sorts with a variety of large wrenches and other tools. At the far end of the reflection, he could make out what appeared to be a mannequin head. It wore a dark and curly wig. He turned and glimpsed a flash of chestnut hair but couldn’t identify the face.

  “Can you see that behind you there?” Titian asked from the shadowed corner.

  “Is that Nectar?” Brody asked, fighting to keep his tone even.

  Titian got to his feet with a grunt and paced noisily across the room, all the knives and metal about his waist jangling loudly. Brody watched Titian in the reflection of the TV as he picked up the head and brought it over to him.

  Brody felt cold flesh pressed against his cheek. A soft lip, hanging loose, was mashed against his cheekbone next to his eye on his blind side. Brody twisted as far as he could away, but Titian held the rotting, grayed head of Abigail Schwartz against him. Titian laughed, made kissing sounds, and then set the head on top of the TV on its ear, where he rested a hand on the upturned, blood-spattered cheek.

  Brody’s stomach lurched. Abigail’s face looked drawn tight, the skin beginning to give way to decomposition. The cheekbones jutted and eyes hung open, dry and lifeless. Her jaw was slack, and it was evident that insects had taken up a home within. A tiny yellow worm made slow progress up the bridge of her nose.

  “She was a real fighter. Boy howdy did she kick. Man, that was an ambitious struggle if I’ve ever seen one. Most of the time you tell them what’s going to happen and they freeze, get that OMG look, and just lay there like they’re drunk on prom night and don’t make a peep until you have the knife actually in them. But her … she really did not want to die. She must’ve had a lot to live for, something important to do, a purpose. And I think that’s why a lot of these girls don’t put up a fight. They think, ‘This is the end of me and my sorry existence’ to themselves and they let it happen to them because, well, what else do they have going on? They’ll be a celebrity on a small scale for a while when the news folks run their picture and all of that—and what girl doesn’t want to be someone famous?”

  He picked up Abigail’s head by the ears, held it out before him, and stared into her lifeless eyes as he made his way to the corner of the room. He paused as if bidding her a silent farewell, then let the head fall into the burning barrel.

  The barrel had a few jagged holes formed into it from rust. Through its side, Brody could see Abigail’s cheek and bottom lip. Draped across her face, the hair curled and burned up in individual trailing embers like a thousand tiny fuses. He had to look away. He had to look away.

  “Burn them,” Titian commented blandly, watching. “That’s the rule. Yep. Have to burn them or break them up. Anything to get rid of the brain. The brain is where the fingerprints are, so to speak.”

  “You too?” Brody said. “I thought you were just a consultant.” He dared a scoff. Even to his ears it sounded pithy, his bravado sullied by his swelling disgust.

  “You have them, I’m sure. I have them. I know that. The girl, she has them. Yep, when Hubert’s through with you, that’s where you go—right in there.” Titian motioned to the barrel. “Got to clean up behind oneself. Can’t leave anything behind, got to stay tidy.”

  “Is she dead?” Brody managed, unable to keep his voice from shaking. “Just fucking tell me that much. I don’t care what you do to me. Just at least give me that satisfaction and tell me she’s dead.”

  Titian folded his arms. “Do you think she’s dead? If you’re playing detective with soldier boy out there, you must think she’s still alive and kicking. Did you lie to your war buddy and tell him you think his sister is alive?”

  “Yes, I told him that—and I do think she’s still alive.”

  Titian swooped down in front of Brody. He spoke so quickly that all his words ran into one long jitter. “That’s it. Hope. Bright, shining God-deliver-me-from-evil-please-oh-please-not-me hope. That’s what I want to see on someone’s face when I put them away—a glimmer of blind hope. No pun intended. Miss Schwartz had it. She really thought she could fight me off and make it out. Wrong. I took her by the hair just like this.” Titian wrenched Brody’s head back by his hair. “And I took out this little beauty right here.” He removed a utility knife from his belt, ratcheted the corner of the razor out, and held it to Brody’s throat.

  Just from the tiny fraction of pressure being applied, Brody felt the blade gliding easily into his skin.

  “And I’ll tell you what I told her. ‘Thanks for playing but good-bye.’”

  33

  Titian released his grip on Brody’s hair, but the razor remained in place.

  A voice, nearly so quiet it was inaudible, posed a simple request: “Titian, if you wouldn’t mind, would you go and assist your colleagues upstairs? They’re having trouble getting the other gentleman to fit into the garbage chute.”

  Titian nodded at Brody, still under the blade. “You got a handle on him? He has an attitude issue.”

  “It’s fine. Go and help the young men upstairs. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  The knife, much to Brody’s relief, moved away from his neck, ratcheted closed, and was clipped back onto Titian’s belt. Titian clattered out, slamming the door behind him.

  A man with neatly parted gray hair walked in front of Brody with his hands in the pockets of his suit pants. He looked as if he had been called from a night on the town following a harrowing day at the office: no suit coat, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, tie partly loosened. He inventoried the room, then finally acknowledged Brody as if it were easy to miss the sight of a profusely bleeding man cuffed to a wheelchair.

  “Hubert Ward,” Brody choked, red spittle flying.

  “I am.”

  “Mr. Ashbury must be a very dear friend for you to risk violating your probation to come all the way out here just on a p
lea to find his missing sister.”

  Brody remained silent.

  “You and him share a pretty ugly past. Well, your record is shining, but that one incident in an alleyway in Cairo—a moment like that really defines a person, doesn’t it? You didn’t shoot that child soldier but Thorp did. You witnessed it, and you wanted to shoot him to protect yourself and your friend. But you hesitated. Thorp went through with it, committed himself to an atrocity that would define him in order to save you. And moments like that, events where we have to go left or right, is what makes us who we are.”

  Hubert pulled his cell out of his pocket and pointed it at the TV. The screen hummed to life showing a test pattern featuring the United States Army emblem. A blast of static and Brody’s full name and military ID number appeared for a moment. Then, in an unceremonious edit, the viewpoint flashed to a gun barrel aiming across a muddy field of a firing range. At the end, paper silhouettes of armored men. Gunfire overloaded the speakers of the television as the camera watched the barrel flare with a muzzle flash, the target at the range splintering apart at the torso and head.

  “We have every single second of what your barrel-mounted camera saw while you were in the service. Every time you disengaged your rifle’s safety, the camera began rolling. On the practice field, you were a crack shot. But out in the real world, we saw a different man entirely. One who resisted, who was gun-shy, who may have knowingly or unknowingly hesitated. Of course, knowingly hesitating is the same as restraining, desisting.”

  The viewpoint from the assault rifle shifted to the cramped streets of Cairo and a handful of men they had assumed were insurgents. They were being held at gunpoint as one of Brody’s fellow soldiers patted each one down for explosives, detonators, weapons of any sort. Brody’s assault rifle shifted from one man to the next.

  Then it ended—safety reengaged—and the viewpoint switched to a man talking on a cell phone in front of an electronics repair shop. Brody remembered that day. They had gotten a call that a bomb maker was setting up a meeting place with a buyer, and they thought they had him. The guy turned out to be calling his grandchildren in America on a foreign exchange student program.

  The perspective switched again. To the man in the alleyway caught in the bear trap—the would-be ambush. The crowd at the mouth of the alley under the scrutiny of Brody’s barrel-mounted camera, not perturbed about a gun pointed at them, their curiosity too great.

  “You never fired upon anyone,” Hubert commented, standing beside the television set sizing up Brody as he watched his own gun-mounted footage roll by. “Not a single person. Not even here, when this young boy emerges with his full intent on killing you both.”

  The footage displayed the boy, stepping from the crowd with the assault rifle bundled in a blanket. Unwrapping it and struggling to raise the heavy thing to his shoulder. The boy, one eye closed, took quick but careful aim.

  A three-round discharge but not from the muzzle of the camera’s eye they were currently watching—from next to it, from Thorp’s assault rifle. The boy’s chest: a bursting blossom of red.

  The boy falling.

  The gun clattering to the ground.

  Thorp charged ahead to tend to the dying boy he had just shot. The footage went black. Brody’s safety had been reengaged.

  “There it is, the reason you won’t be going any further in our project, Mr. Calhoun. You see, to be a part of Project Silver Fox, one has to have had the experience we need before the wavelength was given to them. You can’t ask a chimpanzee to go onstage and play Mozart without a few piano lessons. I would’ve gladly let you continue to give the police someone to chase in Minnesota, but since you sniffed around and found some things out, I can’t let you go.” One eye clouded over with a gray streak of cirrus, while the other watched the dead screen of the TV, staring at his own warped reflection.

  “You look unconvinced. Let me show you something else.” A click on his phone’s screen made a CT scan arrive on the TV. “Every one of us goes to someone else for advice. Guidance is important, and with its hand on our backs, we feel comforted by making decisions on our own if that push is gentle enough.

  “Take this man here, this being Mr. Ashbury’s brain we’re looking at, by the way. You see this tomography image and how everything looks normal. This was when he first enlisted in the armed forces. He was making terrible choices with his life, floundering. And then …” Ward clicked his cell, and the fuzzy screen changed to a more colorful scan. It appeared the brain had been partly shifted around like that of a Doppler radar with a thunderhead moving in. “We rearrange some things, make more activity flow to one part of the brain. We helped him become a better man by changing the way his brain worked. He became a better soldier, and because of it he made quick decisions as a means of survival. You, on the other—”

  “That’s bullshit,” Brody said. “When we enlisted, it was before scans were done. All we had were physicals.”

  He turned to Brody, blinking behind his frameless lenses that flared in the harsh light. “Just because you didn’t stand in a plastic box doesn’t mean we never got your scan. You were a pacifist from the very beginning. Your personality test proved that you would hesitate in order for someone to pull the trigger for you. You had a hard time committing to anything, let alone doing what needed to be done to save your friend’s life. We decided on a different approach for your retirement.”

  Ward clicked the phone screen, and the TV display changed to an exploded schematic of what Brody recognized immediately as the intercom radio headpiece he’d worn underneath his helmet.

  “This, you surely know, is the Beacon headset, a product of one of Hark’s sister companies. It was the conduit to which you and your unit of soldiers were first exposed to the wavelength that would help you become better men and women of the armed forces. At least that was the intent until we realized we had the opportunity to do something different with Mr. Ashbury. The incident in that alleyway was a stroke of luck for us. We had just started tweaking the frequencies to adjust Mr. Ashbury to be more aggressive. We wanted to mold you to have more restraint. The impromptu test validated our decisions. Thorp was to be more forceful, a go-getter, self-aware, and confident—while you were to be inward, introverted, and cautious. Since adjusting brain waves isn’t an exact science, we not only got what we wanted but a healthy dose of other quirks as well. We got crippling paranoia from Thorp and a pugilistic misanthrope—albeit one that knows his limits—out of you. It was interesting how you both went in different directions than we expected but wholly interesting ones.

  “I was inspired by an article I read while in college about Dr. Lyudmila Trut of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics. She took over where Dmitry Belyaev left off with the astounding progress made over twenty-six long years. Their goal—to see if silver foxes could be domesticated. Similar tests on wolves had been performed by other scientists but with no progress. Taking the one percent of foxes from a group that showed neither fear nor aggression, they nurtured the animals to see if they could get a wild animal to become as docile as a common neighborhood dog. Over more than fifty years, this went on.

  “Dr. Trut and her team raised one generation after another in two separate groups. One to be tame, the other to be more aggressive. With the group meant to be more docile, a wondrous thing happened. The foxes developed dog stars in their coats, their tails and legs became shorter, the level of adrenaline—the hormone that’s most directly associated with aggression—was substantially diminished. They even began to have curly tails. They took wild animals and made them into run-of-the-mill dogs.

  “And the other group came out becoming even more vicious than those of their brethren living in the wild.” Hubert smiled briefly. “And naturally, I was interested if the same methodology could be applied to people. But I was a man who knew technology, nuts and bolts, and I wanted to see what I could do with that present knowledge of mine.”

  “Alton Noel never wanted to hurt anyone.”

&nb
sp; “He was our first and never before was there a man more perfect for a job. A man who had fired upon his enemies, who was strong and dedicated. And he exacted what we wanted out of him perfectly.”

  “You made him kill people. You made him shoot Elizabeth Lake—why? She had nothing to do with anything. She was innocent.”

  “An innocent woman associated with a very dangerous man,” Hubert corrected with an upheld index finger. “Thomas Lake would’ve ruined Hark Telecom, me specifically, if he could’ve proven I had sent moles to be hired at DRN.” He paused. “But that’s neither here nor there. Thomas Lake is ruined and Alton had his funeral—that’s all in the past. Let’s talk about the reason you’re here.”

  He clicked a keypad button and the TV woke up again, seeing through the electronic eye of the surveillance tape from the armed forces recruiter’s office. Two men in uniform, doing work at their stations, some tinny pop radio playing in competition with the white noise being stirred up by an oscillating fan. They both looked up in response to a chime signaling someone entering the front door.

  A woman dressed in a paisley sundress entered, sunglasses propped in her forest of strawberry blonde hair like a black plastic tiara. She approached their desks, flip-flops slapping her heels with each stride. “Hi, I’m, um, interested in signing up,” Nectar said, sounding as if she were speaking from a script she had neglected to memorize thoroughly.

  “Great,” the recruiter said enthusiastically, gesturing to the seat in front of his desk. She sat and he produced a clipboard of forms and a pen. “I’ll just have you take a look through these and—you are graduated from high school, yes?”

  “Oh yeah,” Nectar said. “Quite a while ago. I’m twenty-four. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Just fine. We turn people away at twenty-seven.”

  “Oh, good,” Nectar said and went to filling out the papers.