Assured Destruction: The Complete Series

by Michael F Stewart

  “Have a good day, Mom.” I grab my book bag as if this is just a regular school day.

  “You too, hun,” she says, and grimaces. With her expression and the patch, she looks like she wants to run me through.

  I rumble down a floor in the elevator and flip the Open sign over. Jonny pulls in. I bite my lip and pinch myself, knowing that I deserve worse than pain.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I step out of the store and rub my arms in the chill air. He powers down the window. “I can’t come to school today.”

  He turns to concentrate on the steering wheel, holding the faux tiger fur cover in a white-knuckled grip. “Your mom?” he asks.

  He’s set me a nice excuse, so I take it. Much better than I’m the worst girlfriend ever and forgot all about you.

  “Yeah, sorry it’s so last minute. I can tell she’s not up to running the store today.”

  A silver sedan drives into the lot and parks beside us. I watch with Jonny as a gray-haired woman eases off her seat and throws all her weight against the car door in order to close it. She’s about a hundred and eight.

  “Janus Rose?” she asks. “I’m here for the interview? I’m Edna. I hope I’m not too early.”

  No, just early enough to blow my cover with Jonny.

  “Last minute,” he says. “Right.”

  He shuts the engine off and presses the keys into the palm of my hand.

  “I’ll bike.”

  “Jonny.” I grab for his sleeve but he dances away and over to his bike as I wobble on the crutches.

  “This is Assured Destruction?” the woman asks. Her shoulder pads remind me of the Queen Mother.

  “Yes, ma’am, yes, it is.”

  Jonny’s off, his butt wiggling with each pump of his legs. Something falls out of his backpack, and I’m about to call after him but it’s too late; he’s gone. I need a How to be a Girl Friend Manual.

  “Well, follow me,” I say to the woman.

  If I walked any slower, I’d grow moss. Eventually, I show Edna to the chair in the office and then imitate Peter, perching myself on the edge of the desk. I’m annoyed. This woman is simply too old for the job, and I don’t want to waste my time. Maybe that’s how Peter felt after I told him I wanted to keep looking.

  “Thanks for coming …” Her name escapes me.

  “Edna.”

  “Edna,” I repeat. Edna is not a name you hear much anymore. When I think Edna, I picture cows and churning butter. I bet she bakes her own bread.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” she begins. “I have nearly sixty years of retail—”

  “Wow, sixty years,” I say.

  Her jaw muscles peek through thin skin as they flex.

  “Would you feel comfortable lifting a large television?” I ask. She doesn’t look like she could lift a keyboard. Other questions come to mind. How’s your bladder because you can’t leave the cash every five minutes to pee? We have no way to blend your food, is that problematic for lunches? And, are you single because I know this old guy, Peter, who seems pretty handy—okay, so I’m not being fair. She’s even too old for Peter.

  Ten painful minutes later, the interview is over and I’m more than a little worried that it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. We never really made it past how much she could carry.

  “Sorry,” I say as she leaves. “It’s a manual labor job.”

  “The job posting said nothing about lifting televisions, young lady,” Edna calls back.

  “We recycle electronics!”

  She flips me the finger and roars out in her car.

  Never underestimate an Edna, JanusFlyTrap tweets.

  Her car tires miss by a few inches whatever fell from Jonny’s pack. I crutch out and bend over. A can of yellow spray paint. I have fond memories of creating stick figures with Jonny and the paint reminds me of everything I’m missing out on. If I could, I’d drive over to the legal graffiti wall Jonny uses to paint. But I have an ankle with metal pins holding it together, a cast up to my knee, and work to do.

  In my defense of the Edna fiasco, the next customer comes in with twelve mammoth desktop monitors. Edna’s bones would have shattered beneath the weight.

  After dealing with the monitors, I start in on the opening tasks of sorting through the material that came in yesterday. It was nice to have Peter keep the shop open but it’s like having someone cook for you and then leave you with a mess of dishes and burned pots. Nothing is where it should be and I’m not sure he charged anyone for destruction. I needn’t have worried about rushing, though. The ten o’clock interview is a no show. So far, I’m zero for two.

  At eleven a woman wanders into the parking lot from the road, and I can tell that she needed to take the bus to reach here. This would be fine, except that no buses run early enough to open the store. She has long multi-colored hair and big, pink earmuffs. Her head bobs and she pauses to hold the earmuffs tight to her head. Headphones, I realize, she’s wearing fuzzy pink headphones.

  As she nears, I estimate that she’s not much older than I am, maybe nineteen or twenty. She’s wearing a coat that doesn’t really match the rest of her outfit; it’s bulky and brown, while her shoes and jeans are funky with colors. Whatever—when you don’t have cash, you don’t have cash. I open the door and wave her into the warmth. This is someone I can work with.

  “Hi, are you Samantha?” I ask.

  She grins and taps the earphones, pulling them down around her neck.

  “Are you Samantha?”

  “Sure, sure.” As she walks to the door I note that there’s something odd about the way she moves, but I can’t put my finger on it.

  “Can I take your coat?”

  She shakes her head. Music continues to pound out of the headphones.

  “What are you listening to?” I ask.

  “Sorry.” She fumbles in her pocket until the volume drops and I can only just make out a tinny beat. “Rihanna. Um … do you mind? I really need to go.”

  She crosses her legs as she stands in the store.

  I crutch into the warehouse with her trailing.

  “How’d you hurt your leg?” she asks.

  “Ankle, actually. And it was jumping off a balcony onto a crazy chick.”

  “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

  “I’ll hunt you down,” I say and laugh. “It’s just in there.” I point into a tiny washroom. It looks like a gas station washroom but it’s clean. She turns around inside and needs to lean back to shut the door.

  While I wait, I survey the racks of gear we’ve collected over the years. The conveyor snakes in from the retail store to the staging area. At the loading dock are all the monitors from this morning, six television sets, a stack of twenty towers which I might refurbish for resale and some old stereo speakers. The hundred other computer towers stored in the racks mock my intention of fixing and reselling anything. To my right are the stairs to the basement and Shadownet. I want nothing more than to descend into the bowels of that universe and hide out.

  “That’s better,” Samantha says as she opens the door, still wearing her bulky jacket. “So, this is where I’d be getting my hands dirty?” Her hands are manicured with as many different shades as her hair. She sort of waddles for a second before straightening and continuing her weird shuffling. I raise an eyebrow, and she flushes as if I just caught her doing something wrong.

  “Yeah,” I point to the staging area. “Think you can lift something like those televisions?”

  Her lips flash a quick smile. “Sure, sure.”

  “Listen, Samantha,” I say. “Are you pregnant?”

  She pales.

  I probably wouldn’t have guessed if I hadn’t spent so much time with a big belly on Saturday.

  “It’s okay, it’s pretty obv
ious and I’d love to help a girl out, but I’ve really qualified people applying.”

  “Sure, sure.” She drifts back to the televisions. “If I wasn’t pregnant I could lift these.”

  “I bet. And don’t worry, we have pretty high turnover here. But we can’t really ask you to lift heavy things when you’re this far along.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  And you say sure, sure too much and can’t arrive here on time. Other than that, you’re perfect.

  As she waddles out—more noticeably now that the cat’s out of the bag—I wonder how many lawsuits we’re about to be hit with. At this point, Edna and Samantha are a class action for discriminatory hiring practices waiting to happen.

  I halt and nearly fall over when I’m struck by a realization.

  “Samantha?” She pauses with her hand on the door. “Your headphones, they’re wireless?”

  “Bluetooth, they’re awesome.”

  “Agreed,” I reply, but my mind is whirling in an entirely different direction.

  The key to the carding case was right in front of me the whole time. I start to crutch toward the phone to call Detective Williams, but then pause. I’ve taken that route before and what has it taught me? No. To tell is a colossal error, no more theories until I know with absolute certainty that I’m correct. Hadn’t Peter told me that too?

  After Samantha shuffles off the property without having her baby, I return to the office to call Trin—the job’s his. I surrender. The next person I interview would likely be missing their arms and legs or something. Not that missing limbs are reasons not to hire someone for a manual labor job. I would never say that.

  With my hand on the phone receiver, I squint at Peter’s legal pad in search of Trin’s number. The squiggles are illegible and it’s not a matter of poor handwriting. This is a different language. Even so, I should be able to pick out Trin’s name and number. Some of the symbols are definitely numeric, but the rest … Did Peter write in code? He did! The area code is simple to figure out. It’s all written backward and upside down. I stuff the pad into the hem of my pants and crutch to the washroom, holding the pad up to the mirror.

  What a freak. In the reflection, the writing is clear.

  He’s encoded everything. This isn’t something you idly decide to do, is it? Regardless, I take the pencil from behind my ear and transcribe Trin’s number and crutch back toward the office. In the store, another customer waits to grind up a few hard drives in Chop-chop. I hand over the certificates of Assured Destruction as the shredder chews the hard drives into mulch. At least dinner is paid for.

  I pick up the phone and dial.

  “Hey, Trin?” He answers immediately. “It’s Jan from Assured Destruction. Listen, if you’re still interested, the job’s yours … Cool … Eight AM, tomorrow.”

  I wonder if I should have looked at the finances before making the call.

  Back in the office, I boot my mom’s computer and check my email, texts, tweets and Facebook on my phone, all while eating a sandwich. Hannah’s emailed me, which is weird because I didn’t think kids did that anymore.

  Don’t worry about the whole, you know, ‘thing.’ I talked to him and he said he’d stop.

  Thing? The creepy-dude-stalking-and-blackmailing-girls thing. Don’t worry about Hannah—Hannah who is going to pop pills—that thing?

  I’m glad she’s feeling better about it, but I’m also a little suspicious. The guy didn’t sound like a nice man. He just agreed to stop? But I’m a script kiddie, so what do I know? Maybe I should accept her email and walk away. This is good news and I can scrub my hands of it all. I think. But, maybe I should talk to her face to face and see if she cracks.

  I shake my head and pull up a spreadsheet marked Assured Destruction Financials.

  Oh boy.

  I stare at line after line after line of numbers. I’ve never had to actually do the accounting. A few years ago when my mom was first diagnosed and my dad left us, I had to file the taxes and keep up to date on the bills, but never the actual accounting. We had an accountant for that. But that was when Assured Destruction made more money. It makes me wonder, why can’t we afford an accountant now?

  For the first time, I notice the stack of bills in the In basket on the desk and nothing at all in the Out.

  Since people do professional degrees in this accounting stuff, I guess that I can’t fudge this in a single day; so instead I sort through the bills and search for what’s past due.

  It’s two months worth of mail and soon I have individual piles for hydro, telephone, water and sewer, banking, and taxes. It brings back nightmares. When I stumble across my first late notice, I pause. Sure enough, another bill for last year’s snowplowing service is marked Sent to Collections. I realize then that what I need to identify is what is really, really past due. My mom dropped the ball on payments a long time ago.

  After tallying it all up, I discover that what’s owing doesn’t match the bank balance. My mom didn’t miss payments; she just didn’t have the money to pay. What’s worse, the mortgage payment is due this Friday—three days from now—and we can’t afford it.

  It’s like all the plates in the world are falling like raindrops to shatter on the ground around me.

  Chapter 12

  Hours of community service remaining: 1991. Still.

  <<@JFlyTrap You’re a #skiddie at everything,>> Heckleena tweets.

  @Heckleena Tell me something I don’t know, JanusFlyTrap responds.

  @JFlyTrap Queen to D7, Queen takes Knight, Hairy adds.

  Just what I needed, a geeky, virtual boy beating my real self.

  The elevator drags me back up to home. At least I can’t complain about the commute.

  As I step off into the living room, I proffer a box of steaming pizza covered in pineapple and cheese. My mom’s reading her Kindle on the couch. She never rolled downstairs during the day.

  “Hope there’s no fruit on that,” she says.

  It’s our little ritual—if I order the pizza, I put fruit on it—if she does it’s smothered in anchovies. Yuck. But I’ve bigger issues on my mind—like paying the mortgage.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any of grandma’s estate jewellery left?” I ask.

  Her good eye is piercing.

  “You know, for when I want to get married?” Am I being obvious, because I feel like I am? “Not like I’m hoping you’ll die soon or anything.”

  “That’s good to hear. Nothing but a couple of wedding bands, which wouldn’t fetch much. Definitely not enough to cover any dowry you’ll need, and, no, not enough for the mortgage either.”

  She can see right through me. I also see where I inherited my sarcasm.

  “So you know.”

  “I know,” she says, and I wonder if she’s given up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? And what happens if we can’t pay?”

  She lowers the Kindle to her chest and regards me with a lonely emerald eye. “If we miss the payment, we’ll have thirty-five days to pay off the entire mortgage, then the bank will be able to sell the land and building.”

  “The entire mortgage,” I say.

  “Almost a million dollars, honey,” she says it softly. “The bank has given us breaks in the past but those have ended.”

  My teeth wear away at my bottom lip as I struggle to fight tears. I can’t see weasel-face banker helping us. You’re lucky, he’d told me as I handed over the payment in the nick of time. We have to make that payment.

  “Trin starts tomorrow,” I say.

  “Peter said he probably would be.”

  That rankles. I slide the pizza box onto the kitchen table. I didn’t order a big enough pizza for him to share, but I’m not as hungry anymore.

  “Did you know Peter writes in code for fun?”
I ask.

  “Upside down.” My mom nods.

  “And backwards,” I say. “It’s weird.”

  “So did Leonardo da Vinci.”

  Evidently this is not enough to raise an alarm about his trustworthiness.

  “I interviewed more people, you know. I am trying as well.” I don’t know why I’m saying this but I’m so buried in work. I have this dream that one day I’ll wake up with two parents, a healthy mom, I’ll go to school, have a boyfriend I spend time with, friends … crazy thoughts.

  My mom turns. The deep purplish moon beneath her good eye waxes ever larger, as if it’s taken on all the strain of the other. Thin lips stretch taut across her face. “Thank you, honey; I’m sorry I’m sick. I wish I wasn’t.”

  I abandon the pizza and loop my arms around her shoulders.

  “We’ll get through this, okay?” she adds. “I just need a bit of time. Peter’s a good man; give him a chance for me.” She pats my head and I snuffle an affirmative into her sweater. “Go finish your homework.”

  I run my sleeve across my eyes and snag a piece of pizza before heading back downstairs.

  Before I hit Shadownet, I feed the strays out our back door, wondering if this will be the last bag of food I can afford for them. There are six felines, and I’ve named them all, so maybe they’re not really strays. Maybe they’re just my outdoor cats. I rake my fingers through their fur and the stress in my shoulders releases.

  Kitty kibble rattles as I shake it into a bowl and then I settle in to eat my pizza with them. Huddled around the bowl, the six cats form the petals of some strange flower. I snap a picture and tag it #beautifulthing, then head in to start my homework.

  As I jog down the steps into the basement, my sense of peace evaporates; there’s an interloper down here: Black Mamba.

  I clap my hands twice, and around me Shadownet bleets and whirrs into awareness. Yes, I have installed The Clapper. In my defense, I’ve reprogrammed it. Not only does it clap-on, but it also snaps-to-sleep and responds to verbal commands using speech recognition. Now I can send tweets spoken aloud. I can reply to emails, and if anyone comes downstairs I can shut down everything by rapidly clapping twice. This is only a six on my geek scale. I’m not sure anyone wants to see a ten.