Brew

by Bill Braddock

  Herbert laughed. "So I could." Then his smile fell a little. "And with that kind of money, I could buy anything. Any chemical, any gun."

  "Hell yeah!"

  Herbert looked suddenly dubious. "Wait a second. What’s to stop you from turning me in? Or killing me?"

  "And tear up my ticket to financial freedom? Fuck that. Look man, you get locked up or die, fuse dies with you. Sucks for me. Fuse is a gold mine."

  Back to nodding, Herbert said, "I hear you. Man, that would be sweet. I keep picturing woods, a high fence, and the dogs. Shepherds. A whole pack of them, running wild in there. A garden, an internet connection… I’d never have to leave. The rest of the world could just fuck off."

  "That’s the spirit. But don’t initiate hermit-mode until you’ve made me rich."

  They laughed again. Then Herbert grew dubious once more. "I see why you wouldn’t kill me or turn me in, but why not keep me as a slave, Mr. Keep-a-couple-of-chicks-in-my-shed?"

  "Fuck that," Joel said. "You’re a sociopath and some kind of genius chemist. Piss you off, then lock you in my basement with a chemistry set? That’d be suicide."

  "Yeah," Herbert said, nodding more enthusiastically than ever. "You’d be crazy to even try to enslave me." Then, grinning wide, he said, "To hell with it! You’re on, Joel, old buddy. Partners?"

  Joel raised one shackled hand. "Partners."

  They shook on it, and Herbert said, "Want to shoot some people?’

  Joel pretended to consider it. "Nah. Not my cup of tea. How about you set me free, and I call some chicks instead? Have them waiting for us." He laughed. "I got this brunette with perfect tits. I mean perfect, the nicest tits you’ve ever seen, and she’s a total cock-a-holic. Deep throat, anal, everything. Want me to call, see if she’s around?"

  Herbert bit his lip and cast a longing glance at the corpse-littered quad. "Not yet. I’m gonna shoot some more people. Watch this." He swiveled the rifle on its tripod, said "left knee", and pulled the trigger. Down on the ground, a dark silhouette dropped to the ground holding one of its knees. Joel figured it probably was the left one.

  "No shit. Nice shooting, Annie Oakley. So you’re a master chemist, an expert marksman, and a budding entrepreneur. What else do you do?"

  "Sometimes, I squirt acid on people’s legs." Herbert launched into another fit of keening laughter that grated up and down Joel’s spine and made it next to impossible for him to do what he knew he must: grin. Herbert’s laughter died away. "Sorry, buddy. I couldn’t resist. Besides, you have to understand, when I did that, I was figuring on killing you, so the acid didn’t seem like a big deal, really."

  Joel forced himself to nod, keeping the half-grin locked on his face, imagining what it would be like, jumping up and pushing this twisted fuck straight over the edge of the roof. "That’s all right," he said. "That shit did hurt, though."

  "I said I was sorry."

  "So you did. Forget it. Man, you should’ve shot that asshole Steve. He carries this little notebook with him, has all his contacts in it. His phone, too. Instant customer base. And after tonight, people are going to need some drugs."

  This got them both laughing. They sat side by side on the rooftop, the sniper rifle propped beside Herbert like a kid’s telescope, and talked about the business they’d start and different girls Joel knew. It was then, telling Herbert about the website he ran and the beautiful girls he’d corralled, that he actually began to believe he might be able to work his way free of this situation. The more Joel talked, mostly just telling the truth except making the girls sound a lot hornier than they really were, the more excited Herbert got, until, pacing around, he broke the conversation, motioning toward the rifle. "Come on, shoot somebody. Seriously, it’s awesome."

  Shoot someone? Watching Herbert, Joel had assumed it had been all his talk about girls speeding his pace. The guy would rather shoot someone than get laid? Joel figured that might be the best definition of a psychopath he could ever conceive.

  Though shooting Herbert sounded pretty awesome. Joel’s mind considered the possibility: accept the invitation, shoulder the rifle, spin, fire…but no; Joel knew better than to try. Dorky or not, the guy was quick and bristling with weapons. All of this came to Joel in a flash, and he dismissed both the rifle and the idea with a wave. "No thanks. Really."

  "Seriously. Give it a shot." He snorted, hunching his shoulders. "Get it? Give it a shot?"

  Joel laughed but remained politely resolute. Thanks but no thanks. He’d really rather not shoot anyone.

  "Pussy," Herbert said. "Oh well, more targets for me." He shouldered the rifle and scanned the quad with his scope, saying, "Best thing about meatheads is they never learn. Look at these assholes. Still crossing the kill zone. Pile the bodies two-deep, they’d still keep coming. Lordy, lordy, look at Lu-Lu."

  Joel craned his neck, followed the vector of Herbert’s barrel, and saw a girl limp into the quad from the shadowy gap between the Burrow Building and the library. A big girl, washed in blood, she swung her arm in wide arcs, slicing the air with what looked like…yes, Joel realized, squinting…a scrub brush.

  "Fucking weirdo," Herbert said, and pulled the trigger.

  She executed a ridiculous kick, flinging her lead leg to the side so hard that the rest of her followed, coming off the ground and rolling mid-air. She hit the ground crawling, most of one leg twitching in the short grass behind her. She still held tight to that scrub brush, though.

  Herbert laughed and leaned into the scope again. Joel tensed for the explosion and resulting carnage, but Herbert relaxed, lifting away from stock and scope. "Why waste ammo? She’ll bleed out soon enough. Bet she doesn’t even make the cement path."

  Off to the left, the sound of shattering glass drew Joel’s attention. He turned his head just in time to see a large shard fall away from an upper window of the library and drop winking to the ground below. He saw motion. Kicking. More noise, glass shattering, breaking away, and then he saw the silhouette of a person framed in the library window. The silhouette leaned out, surveying the ground below him, and Joel filled with an irrational fear that the guy was going to jump. Then he saw a long line of—What? Was it rope?—tumble away with surreal slowness, unfurling all the way to the ground, saw the guy feeding feet of it over the edge then looping it around his waist. What was he doing?

  Joel jumped as the rifle exploded beside him. He expected to see the guy in the window stiffen, fold, and drop like a bird winged in flight, but it didn’t happen. Herbert laughed, pointing down at the quad, where Joel saw the scrub brush girl, flat and dead, one arm jutting out in front of her, less than a foot from the cement path. "Whoop! Told you, Joel! Told you she wouldn’t make it to the path, the stupid bitch. Oh well, you know what they say: winners never quit, and quitters never win." He laughed aloud at that one. "Is this fucking awesome or what?"

  "Yeah, it’s pretty cool, I guess."

  Herbert swiveled the rifle toward the library, then said, "Get a load of the asshole coming out of the window. Is that a hose? That crazy bastard’s going to rappel with a fire hose? The man’s clearly dangerous. A lunatic. A menace. Watch this. All right. Here he goes. Wait. All right. Watch..."

  Chapter 20

  Across town, Professor Charles Milling said, "Something’s going on."

  He spoke, as had become his habit over recent months, both to his wife and to himself. Mary lay in her room across the hall, adrift in a foggy sea of morphine, succumbing to the final stages of a long-endured cancer. There was nothing left to do, and Charles felt as hollowed out and brittle as a shucked chrysalis litter.

  "Someone’s shouting," he said. He opened the window. Was it next door? It didn’t sound like Burt, but who else would it be?

  A window smashed next door. It was on this side, an upstairs window. The shouting came clearer now, louder. No words, just rage. It sounded inhuman. Charles thought of Robert Deniro, speaking tongues in the remake of Cape Fear, all that guttural gibberish and deep-throated anger. This sound
was different, spiked with shrieks and guttered with bellows, but it had that same, unearthly quality and hearing it un-knitted something in him.

  Up in the window, someone appeared, a shadow…two? Struggling? Had there been a break-in?

  Charles hurried to the phone and dialed 911. The line was jammed. He cut the call. Redialed. Nothing. All systems busy.

  Not good.

  He heard another voice then. Dianne, next door, screaming, begging.

  He tried the phone once more, met with the same result, and headed for the door, calling softly to his unconscious wife, "I’ll be right back, Sweetie. Something’s going on next door." He was a small man and an old man, but by the sounds of it, his neighbors and friends were caught up in an awful fight, so he had to try to stop it.

  Out the door he went, into the side yard…where he was almost struck by Dianne Kelting. She plummeted out of the darkness, crunched into the hedge, and tumbled to the ground.

  Dianne staggered to her feet, and in the light spilling from the opposite kitchen, Charles could see damage: a wide cut over a swelling eye; her lip, split and drooling a long strand of blood and mucus; her nose, flattened, the blood beneath it black-dark in the low light; and worst of all, her arm, its forearm shaped like a V, then a U, then a V again as Diane’s other arm raised and lowered the wrist above the break. Charles winced at the nub of raw bone jutting from her flesh.

  "Dianne, my God, are you okay?" he said, starting toward her.

  She shrieked and limped away on what appeared to be a broken leg. "Run," she said, her voice thick and labored. "Burt’s gone mad."

  Overhead, Burt leaned from the window through which he’d defenestrated his wife, and howled another disconcerting blast of insane rage. Charles blinked. What did one do when one’s neighbor had a psychotic episode? Talk them down, back to their senses? Charles watched as Burt leaned full against the broken window, shards like teeth protruding through the flesh of his hands, face covered in blood, eyes wide and rolling. No, Charles decided. There would be no taking Burt into his senses, not tonight. What, then?

  And Charles thought of the trains.

  To Charles, Burt had always seemed a calm, quiet guy. Burt managed the parts department of Cheery Valley Auto, drove American-made cars, and collected old toy train memorabilia for fun. Once, years ago, he led Charles into his basement, where, with the sheepish, hopped-up pride and embarrassment of a man who’d long harbored a boy’s hobby, he unveiled his masterpiece. Sprawling between the furnace and the Bilco doors was the largest toy train set Charles had ever seen. There they stood, Charles a little buzzed and more than a little sun-burnt; Burt, normally quiet and reserved, building a head of steam, and soon, Charles having given a few stunned encouragements—Wow, I’ve never seen anything like it—Burt the fairly boring parts department manager disappeared, and a new, impassioned Burt, the real Burt, Charles realized, emerged.

  "Painting the people took a long time," Burt had said, squatting down and picking a meticulously detailed miniature from a meticulously detailed sidewalk. "See, this guy’s bored. Maybe a little grumpy, too. Been waiting for the bus. See?"

  And Charles nodded, seeing it. Weird…the little guy did have a face, did look bored, did look a little pissed off.

  "He just stands there with his hands in his pockets," Burt said and returned the pissed-off figurine to his post.

  As Burt pointed and narrated, Charles nodded and wowed and even managed a smattering of insignificant questions, taking in the toy town, its streets and sidewalks and stations all dotted with miniature people, each of their painted faces with something to say. There were several trains snaking along simultaneously, spinning in wide loops around the outside of the basement, climbing foam mountains and riding ridges along the upper blocks of the basement walls. Little horns tooted, and automated switches shifted sections of rail so that converging trains avoided collisions, rattling off on parallel tracks at the last possible moment. These moments pleased Burt immensely, and he’d say, "Look," and point as one occurred. Then he’d laugh, and Charles would laugh, too, thinking, Burt, my friend, you are one craaaaazy bastard.

  When Burt had scrambled to the top of the stairs, telling Charles in a voice pitched with excitement to hold on just a second, Charles filled with a silly dread. Of what violent perversities was a fifty-year-old train freak capable? Then Burt cut the basement lights, and the little town glowed with a fuzzy blur somehow nostalgic. Little streetlamps gas-lit wide backstreets; house windows glowed warmly; even the headlights from little cars on the street twinkled to life. The demonstration went on for several minutes, by the end of which time Charles stopped questioning and wowing, just hoping to head upstairs. His beer was empty, and the damp cool of the basement was killing the joy of an unusual day—all that warmth and sunlight, a little pocket of summer, cropping up unexpectedly in mid-March—and so he was grateful when the door atop the stairs opened, the lights flicked on, and, after the briefest of pauses, Dianne had called down to her husband. "Burt?"

  Burt kept his lawn in shape, cleaned his gutters in the fall, and had a pair of little white Yorkies whose shit never seemed to show up on Charles’s side of the narrow strip of grass between the houses. Burt enjoyed the occasional beer on his back porch, especially after mowing the yard, but he’d never drunk to excess, not to Charles’s knowledge, and there’d never been any sign of spousal abuse or mental instability.

  "Garrslagatunuff!" Burt yelled overhead.

  Charles stared up at him, trying to make sense of the moment.

  Then the mad train enthusiast vaulted into the air, arms spread, like a panther springing from a ledge. Charles lurched backward, and Burt thumped into the ground and lay in a heap, breathing but no longer moving, no longer ranting.

  Dianne limped crying around the corner and hobbled across the grass to beat her prone spouse with the only weapon she’d been able to find: a three-foot section of flimsy aluminum downspout.

  Charles laughed. He couldn’t help himself. This was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, the strangest thing he’d ever seen. He laughed and kept laughing, even as she fixed him with an offended glare that somehow managed contempt. In fact, he laughed harder. But when she started to actually use her pitiful weapon, not as a club but rather pushing its end into the exposed flesh of Burt’s lower leg, slamming it into the white of his calf muscle, slicing the leg…Charles stopped laughing and went to her.

  "Stop," he said, but she wouldn’t listen. This wasn’t an action meant to subdue her husband; it was simply meant to hurt him, to cut and damage. "Stop," he said again, and grabbed her hands. "He’s moving."

  "Oh my," she said and dropped the downspout. Then she shouted, "Help!"

  "No," Charles said and couldn’t help but glance at the darkness of his own house, wherein Mary lay dying. For two long years, he’d hoped for a miracle and tried everything and anything he could to facilitate her recovery, but finally he’d been reduced to just trying to let his beautiful wife rest. It was all that was left to him, to her. And so, for the last two months, Charles had insulated Mary with as much calm and peace as he could. He hadn’t left the house, save for the briefest errands, for what seemed like a decade. He’d taken an early retirement and tapped without hesitation into their retirement savings. He’d made her a comfortable room, solicited the occasional assistance of the angels known as home hospice nurses, and that had been his lot, his only concern.

  When his friends and daughters called or emailed, suggesting he take a break for his own health, he politely declined. They didn’t understand. Here he was, pale and scrawny and un-showered, smelling of the Ensure canisters his wife was no longer able to drink. If anyone in the neighborhood looked the part of deranged lunatic, it was he; shower robe and slippers, tufts of gray hair jutting from his head, glasses hazed with dust and dander, all of it a testament to the long commitment he’d made to his wife. He’d be damned if he’d let this nutty bitch and her nutty husband disturb Mary. "Please, Dia
nne," he said. "Please be quiet. Think of Mary."

  "Help!" she cried again.

  He hit her. It was an open hand slap, but it was harder than he’d meant, and she fell to her side. At least she stopped shouting. Burt made a sound, shifted. Dianne propped herself on one elbow and blinked at Charles.

  Then someone answered her call.

  Down the street, someone else, another man, bellowed. And from the sound of it, the man was moving closer…fast. Charles tensed. Faintly, he could hear another shouter, further down the block…and, down in town, sirens.

  What the hell was going on?

  Burt lurched beneath him.

  Dianne burst into racking sobs.

  "Keep quiet," Charles said. He pointed toward the street, where the shouter seemed to be drawing nearer, and then took off his belt and used it to tie Burt’s hands together. One wrist was broken badly. Charles ignored this, cinching the knot tightly, and Burt made a low, huffing sound.

  "Don’t hurt him, you bastard," Dianne said, and Charles had to clap a hand over his mouth to restrain a new wave of laughter. It was all too much: the abruptness of the thing, the brutality of it, and now Dianne, flip-flopping from downspout torturer to passionate defender, just like that.

  Out on the street, the shouter ran past. Either he hadn’t seen them back in the shadows or hadn’t wanted anything from them, but it chilled the humor from Charles to hear that garbled ululation, the same, atavistic, sub-linguistic rage Burt had been spouting. What the hell was going on?

  There was no time to ponder. He had to get Burt restrained and had to get everyone inside. They couldn’t afford to drag the neighborhood shouter or anyone else into things. He kicked off a slipper, removed a sock, and tucked it into Burt’s mouth. It stifled the mumbling but increased the jerking.

  Charles reached out. Dianne flinched, but didn’t pull fully away, and he touched her gently on the bruised cheek. "You’re in shock," he said. "We’ve had an accident, but we need to stay together now so that we can be all right. Something is happening, and it’s important that we go inside now and not draw any attention to ourselves."