Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  Brody joined Thorp in the next room and found a mattress, stained and old, in the corner.

  They turned to the remaining room with their sights trained on the closed door.

  They were within inches of the door when they heard it. A single electronic chirp. They stopped, listened. The two men kept their breathing as calm as they could, their nostrils flaring with every breath. They took another step forward, and the chirp came again, this time two notes.

  Thorp suddenly shouted, “All right, come out. Whatever you have ready to blow, just put it on the floor, okay?”

  In reply came a scared yelp. They heard a metallic clunk of something heavy dropped on the floor.

  Thorp lurched forward and shouldered the door aside, his gun held out.

  At the back corner of the room crowded with empty aluminum shelves and decorated with more burlap banners was a young man with a mangy beard dressed in a destroyed trench coat. His hands shot above his head, his face screwed up into tearful fright, and he yelped again. His hair was long and matted and mostly contained within a baseball cap, the bill of which was threadbare.

  Brody looked down at the thing resting on the warped wooden floor. It was a large device painted a cautionary yellow, a dial with its needle flicking from zero, then clear across into the red every few seconds, in sync with the mechanical bleats. It looked hodgepodge, with new electronic additions spliced in with wires knuckled with black electrical tape, naked circuit boards clotted with dust that were hot glued in place.

  “What is that thing?” Brody snapped, pointing.

  “It’s a Geiger counter,” the man said, his voice shrill and alarmed. “Please don’t kill me. I haven’t done anything. I’m leaving town tonight. I won’t say anything to anybody about anything. I swear to God. You already torched the files. You already got Abby and Nectar—”

  “What did you say?” Thorp pushed an arm against him and ground the barrel of the Franklin-Johann to the man’s temple. “Do you know what’s happened to Nectar? Did you kill her?” He leaned in, using the length of his forearm to bracket the bearded man against a fiberboard filing cabinet.

  “Stop,” Brody said, putting his gun away.

  “Do you know where she is?” Thorp blasted.

  Brody had never seen Thorp look that way. He rested a hand on Thorp’s arm, and, as if hit with a poisoned dart, Thorp immediately calmed.

  He released the man, who took a step backward and straightened his duct-taped lapels.

  “Well?” Thorp said.

  “N-no,” the man stammered. In the light filtering in through the thick, dust-choked air Brody could see that the man was in his early twenties. “All I know is from the news—about Abby, about Alton. Now you want me? I fucking work here part-time. I was just an associate member, basically an assistant.”

  “You must know something.” Thorp raised his gun. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t care if you aim your dick at me. I’m still not going to say a single thing.” The man leaned close to Thorp’s face. “I don’t know if you can see me, you assholes.” He produced his middle finger.

  Thorp batted the man’s hand out of his face and shoved him.

  He stumbled, stepping into an empty file box, his decorative sneakers getting caught in a tangle in torn, wet cardboard. He kicked it away. “Fuck the both of you. You think you can do this shit to people and get away with it and—fuck it, I’m gone.”

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” Brody explained. “We’re looking for Nectar.”

  “Funny, that’s the same thing they said.” He skipped sidelong toward the door.

  Brody blocked his path. “Who said they were looking for Nectar?”

  “I’m not saying shit,” the man hissed. “Abby said that if and when they come, the Geiger counter will go off. You guys showed up; it went off. It means you’re playing for the other team. So, with that, I bid you assholes adieu.” He tried to bolt for the door.

  Brody caught him across the chest with his arm, dragged him into the room, and closed the door to remove the temptation. He flung him back with ease. The man couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds.

  Desperate and clearly feeling trapped, the man shrieked, folding at the waist to press out maximum volume as he screamed, “I’m not going to say a goddamn thing. I made an oath to The Mothers.”

  “We better quiet him down,” Thorp suggested. “He’s making a lot of noise.”

  The man went on screaming, his belting call of refusal reaching an unspeakable pitch as it dissolved from words into one long peal as if he were duetting with the Geiger counter.

  Thorp growled and raised his gun again. “Shut up. Just shut the hell up.”

  “Thorp, come on,” Brody said. “Enough with the gun.”

  The bearded man suddenly fell silent. He cleared his throat and asked, “Thorp? You’re Thorp Ashbury?”

  Bending down and clicking the Geiger counter off, Brody said, “Okay, let’s hear it. Who are you?” His voice echoed now that the screaming machine—and people—were silenced.

  “Mateusz McPhearson. I always asked Nectar to bring you by, so we could show you everything we were doing, but I never thought I’d actually get to, like, meet you.” He shook Thorp’s hand.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mateusz stretched out his arms to showcase the room of empty shelves, as if each one held a magical treasure that one had to have an ironclad belief to see. “A lot of this is for you. Well, when this room was worth seeing. But, yeah—you were a big inspiration to continue the fight.”

  Brody moved forward. “Listen, let’s cut to the chase here. You trust us now and that’s great, but we need to know if you can tell us what’s happened to Nectar.”

  Mateusz consulted Thorp. “Is he cool? He’s got a fixer’s eyes.”

  “They’re carotene lenses,” Brody said through gritted teeth. “We came here because we read her jigsaw profile, saw she was affiliated with a group called The Mothers. We put two and two together from another jigsaw profile and saw Abigail Schwartz owned this place. Wasn’t much of a stretch figuring it out, the name of the shop and the name of the group.”

  He laughed brusquely. “Yeah, Abby never was much good at shit like that. The woman had a cat named Meow for crying out loud.”

  “Are there more of you here?” Brody asked.

  “More of who?”

  “The Mothers.”

  Mateusz smiled. “That’s funny, but no. It was just the three of us.”

  “You said you were an associate member.”

  “It just meant I was only allowed to get half the inside jokes.”

  “Wait, wait.” Thorp said, hand held out, his other arm clutching the Franklin dangling at his side. “What do you mean this is all for me? I don’t really like the sound of that. What fight?”

  “All the shit they were doing to the troops and everyone else and hiding it all.” Mateusz brought out a shrink-wrapped pastry from his trench coat. He unwrapped one end and sniffed the thing before biting into it, his hands shaking. “Sorry, but I’ve got to do something about my blood sugar—otherwise I’ll keel over.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m prediabetic, I think.”

  “No.” Thorp groaned, “What you said. About the shit they were doing to the troops, the hiding—what were they hiding? How does it involve me, exactly?”

  Mateusz held his thousand-yard stare, talking into the bitten end of the jam-filled crust. “You sign the waiver: you’re a candidate for their tests. We brought in dozens of guys who just got back from overseas. We found out that a good half of them have it, one version of the wavelength or another, still ringing around in them like a bell. We had all kinds of records, test results. Guys going on tape telling us what it was like. That being, you know, before.” He gestured at the space around him again, albeit this time with less dramatics.

  Brody noticed that each aluminum shelf held the outline in dust where
a box had been. Each shelf on ten different racks filling the entire length of the room had once held an awful lot of information—packed boxes, judging by how bent the shelves were in places.

  “Maybe you should start at the beginning,” Brody suggested.

  20

  After Mateusz swallowed the final mouthful of his prepackaged pastry, he took a seat on the floor. “Last July. Some of the soldiers from the area were allowed to come home, and everywhere you looked there they were. They kind of stand out in a crowd, with those tragic hairdos they inflict you guys with. Anyway, we were here. That being Abby, Nectar, a few others, and myself. The air conditioner was broken, and it was, like, sweltering in here.

  “So, we decided to go out for drinks. We piled into the van and headed down to Brentley’s Pub up the road apiece. Even though it’s only two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, I think, the place was just crammed with soldiers. All in their uniforms and shit, drinking and carrying on. We decided to stick around, despite it being crowded and loud—and that’s when our little Abigail fell in love.”

  He paused to light a cigarette. “So, it was Abby and Alton, Alton and Abby—day and night with those two. We still did protests, but it often ended up being me and Nectar and a few of the others going instead. Abby was spending more time away. And when she did spend time here, progressively we began to see a sort of—you know, way about her. Nectar and I took her aside and asked if her new soldier-boy boyfriend was hitting her or something. She said he was sick all the time. Headaches, nosebleeds, violent outbursts. Never toward her, mind you, just wrecking his apartment and stuff.

  “I talked to him, and he said he couldn’t quite put a finger on what was going on. He mentioned he had done some bad shit overseas, and I suggested he might have post-traumatic stress. Well, Abby got wind of that and made it like her life’s mission to fix him, bought him a holo-camera to document his thoughts and work shit out. Anyway, he wasn’t getting any better so she started watching his tapes. Shitty move, I know. But she found out what was really eating at him.”

  “What was it?” Thorp asked, his voice dry.

  “Nectar was the one who told me, who had heard it from Abby. I never saw his holo-videos.”

  “Well, what did she say?” Thorp urged.

  Mateusz flicked ashes, wrapped his arms around his knees, and said, “He moved out of his apartment to live in the basement at the Y, because he claimed it was ‘safer that way.’ He recorded the videos more often, and Abby kept watching them. He was antsy, feeling like he was being watched all the time. Abby couldn’t take it any longer, so finally she confronted him about what he had said on one of his videos: he had worked as an information technician while on tour in Malaysia. He’d been assigned to set up equipment for the base.”

  “What sort of equipment?”

  “That’s just it.” Mateusz grinned. “What Nectar described to me sounded like it was just a hub for wireless networks. Probably so the troops could use their ordis in the barracks. Malaysia still doesn’t have the blanket yet. She wouldn’t go into much more detail because she was freaked out. It wasn’t like Nectar to be so direct, but she said that you”—he pointed at Thorp with his cigarette—”were stateside and, no offense or anything, you had kind of … changed.”

  “She thought I had changed?” Thorp said. “I’m the same guy I’ve always been.”

  Mateusz frowned. “I hate to be the one to tell you, but Abby rigged up that Geiger herself, specifically for the wavelength that Alton had in him. And it rang the same way with him as it did when you walked in here.”

  Brody’s gaze fell upon the hodgepodge Geiger counter. He wondered if it would make that same trill if he was alone in the room. He had been getting a lot of headaches lately, but he figured it came from switching from lenses to sonar so often. And back home, he chalked up the occasional nosebleed to allergies or the notoriously bad air of downtown Minneapolis.

  “What happened to him?” Thorp asked.

  Mateusz and Brody both looked to the floor.

  Mateusz muttered, “Apparently you don’t watch much of the news.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  Brody filled him in. “About a month ago he shot ten people at a shopping mall in Minneapolis. Then himself.”

  Mateusz ground out his cigarette on the floor. “We did some scans on him as we did more research. We asked him if he knew or remembered anything, but he’d get in this really weird, hostile way. We could ask him questions for only fifteen minutes max before we had to stop and let him cool off.”

  “Nectar received letters from Probitas, a security team, saying they should stop making a fuss with their clients,” Brody said. “Do you suppose it could be connected to Alton?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe Alton told Nectar something that sent them on the trail of people they shouldn’t have been chasing, the ones who’d used Alton.”

  “I can’t say. They kept me in the dark about a lot of what they did. Whatever they’d dug up, they knew they had to take it underground, keep it quiet.” Mateusz glanced at the empty shelves. “This room used to be where Abby made her flower arrangements. Obviously, you can see she ended up devoting more time to digging into stuff other than her business. When the place went belly-up, the building got condemned. I figured whoever they’d pissed off was behind it, and I offered to use my own savings to keep the joint alive, but Abby insisted they take it as an opportunity to go off the grid, become squatters in a building she used to own.”

  Mateusz stared at an old green and red plaid sleeping bag in the corner. “She used to sleep over there. Nectar, that is. She had your stuff—the research specifically for you, Thorp, over there. She didn’t have as much as Abby had collected, but she was trying.”

  “What happened to it?” Thorp asked.

  “We were getting groceries one night. Came back, everything was gone. The place next door? I’m sure you saw that. Yeah, same night our place gets broken into, a fire just ‘accidentally’ starts. We picked through it, and, sure enough, some of our shit was in there. We got a couple of sheets, though, nothing major. Here.”

  Mateusz got to his feet, dusted himself off, and stood on the seat of a chair. He reached into the bare rafters and brought down a shoe box, then brushed the yellow powder from its lid and opened it. Inside, a few half-melted CT scans printed on transparencies. As Mateusz fanned them out, Brody could plainly see the progressive degeneration. The first looked normal. The colors in the second were a bit shifted, the black and gray swirling slightly. The third looked like a twisted mess, a grayscale tempest lodged within the cross-sectioned head.

  Mateusz held the first transparency at arm’s length against the light. “Alton. Good old Al Christmas. Never had I seen such a bad case of the world totally fucking someone over.” He shook his head and put the transparencies away. “Shame. He was an all right dude.”

  “Why’d he do it?” Thorp asked, his voice quiet.

  Mateusz scoffed. “If Abby was here right now, she’d slap you silly talking like that.”

  “Why?”

  “When you were in this room, talking about Alton and what happened in Minneapolis, you were to strictly say: ‘What he was made to do.’ But sometimes they’d get on a roll and forget I was around. They had code for everything, but there was one person they never used a code for.”

  “Who?”

  “Elizabeth Lake. The wife of Thomas Lake, the president of DRN Engineering. She was one of the people Alton shot. Abby and Nectar fixated on the idea that she was the key to everything. I mean, Minneapolis was kind of a haul for Alton. Why not shoot people here in Chicago if he was so compelled? That’s one. And then have some engineering bigwig’s wife killed, two. I have to admit; even to me it sounds fishy.”

  “So you think Alton was being blackmailed or something?” Thorp murmured. “Was he a moonlighting merc and you guys just didn’t know it?”

  “If you knew Alton, you’d know he joined up because
he didn’t know what else to do with his life. He never had a shred of interest in hurting anyone. He wanted to learn a trade, get married, have a mess of kids. I think Abby and Nectar found out the exposure to the shit he worked on overseas was associated with the shooting.”

  “The same stuff that I was apparently exposed to?” Thorp asked, glancing at the Geiger counter. “I honestly don’t remember feeling anything.”

  “You don’t feel it,” Mateusz said. “It gets in you and that’s it. I saw the CT your sister got from your medical history. That’s why I was so surprised to see you here.”

  “What’s wrong with his—?” Brody asked.

  “So that’s what I can expect,” Thorp said, cutting him off. “That I’ll be going about my way, minding my own business, and suddenly I’ll become hypnotized and feel the urge to shoot a bunch of people?”

  “See.” Mateusz gave a miserable laugh. “This is where I always end up losing my audience. They take what I’m trying to tell them and throw it back in my face. It’s a whole lot different from hypnotization—they’re creating tumors in the brain to shift things around, crush certain things out while amplifying others by adjusting the brain’s topography, the hardware itself. They’re promoting cancer growth in order to—”

  Thorp took a weak, shuffling step backward. “My fault. It’s my fault my sister’s dead.” His knees buckled, and he caught himself against the wall. He withdrew the stubby butt of a cigar and lit it, shaking his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. “If I hadn’t been such a kook and jumped down her throat whenever she told me she was going to tour Europe or take night classes to become an auctioneer or whatever … My sister’s dead. Because of me … Nectar is dead. She got somebody pissed off by poking into shit thinking she was helping me.”

  “I blame it on Alton,” Mateusz said. “Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but if it wasn’t for Abby hooking up with him and becoming interested when he got nosebleeds all the time—all this could’ve been prevented. We could’ve all just been cruising along, none the wiser. But you know. C’est la vie.”