by Andrew Post
A moment later when she was halfway down the page, a large man entered the recruiter’s office. Nectar looked over her shoulder, and her shock was clear. Despite the footage being grainy CCTV, Brody could see her face drain of color.
Titian stepped into the frame. “What are you doing in here, dear?”
“H-how did you—?” Nectar stammered.
Titian approached Nectar, put a hand on her bicep, and lifted her out of the chair. He took the clipboard out of her hands and set it down on the desk and leaned toward the recruiter. “I’m sorry about this, but my daughter is under the impression that the military is a good way to get out of taking care of her family. My apologies.”
Nectar struggled against Titian’s grip until she seemed to notice something that made her calm down all at once. With Titian standing behind her, using her body to block the knife he had to her back from the recruiters, he shook his head at them as he backed out of the office with Nectar in tow.
The two recruiters stood, ready to take action. But once the double chime sounded again, they looked at one another and slowly took their seats and returned to work. “Sit. Stay.”
The TV went dead, the screen crackling with static electricity. A few motes of dust tumbled around on the screen’s glass surface, chasing one other.
“Where is she?” Brody asked.
“Here,” Hubert said. “Getting prepared for what she’ll do for us. She’s like you. She never actually fired a weapon on anyone before, so we’re taking a different tack with her—the same we would’ve eventually taken with you. Of course, this means longer exposure to the wavelength, more possibility of ruining her, but possibly worth it, even if she just ends up yielding data for us.”
“She never technically joined. She never got sent anywhere or killed anyone. What the hell will you have her do?”
Hubert grinned. “Don’t need a lot of training to press a button.”
“You’re going to have her … ?”
With an indifference Brody had never heard from human lips, he said, “Everyone has their uses.”
Brody was stunned to the point of muteness. He began three times to form a pithy retort, but nothing came to him. His mind tumbled end over end, never grasping any semblance of logic. He spat at Hubert, his words coming to him fumblingly: “I e-mailed all your project files to a friend of mine. He’ll take one look and start tracking my phone. I’m on probation, and they tend to keep close tabs on me. They’ll find me, find us.”
Hubert regarded Brody’s phone on the earthen floor. He bent down and touched the screen to wake the device and went into the e-mail out-box. The change in Hubert’s demeanor was easily recognizable, his expression dropped when he had seen the enormous e-mail that had been sent to Detective Nathan Pierce.
Holding Brody’s phone out so he could read from it, he placed a call with his own. “Again, relying on someone else to fight your battles.” He brought the phone to his ear. “Hubert Ward to speak to Mr. Axiom, please.”
He waited, continued to scroll through Brody’s e-mail. “I have some troubling news … We need to dispatch an individual to Minneapolis. Seems one of our silver foxes made a call for backup. A detective, Nathan Pierce. Yes … Last night, so it probably hasn’t gotten very far yet … A local one will do it, I think … Okay, thank you, sir.” He hung up and sneered at Brody.
“Axiom, huh? Even you have a boss. What is he, Hark’s CEO?”
“Quiet,” Hubert said and stepped to the door. Opening it a crack, he called out, “Denny, would you mind assisting me for a moment?”
There was the sound of scuffling steps approaching, and Denny entered.
Hubert pointed at Brody. “Would you mind wheeling him into the main room? I want to show him something.”
Denny went behind Brody, switched off the wheelchair’s brakes, and spun him toward the open door.
Across the dirt floor, Brody felt himself glide on the rubber wheels. There was a slight bump. Brody glanced down and saw that the chair’s right wheel had just run over the sonar. He watched, despite the rapidly reducing digits in his eye, as the sonar swung past again and again with each revolution of the wheelchair wheel, held in place by its everlasting adhesive.
Into the next room he was carted, this one a wide-open space with thirty feet of air above them. The entire dank factory lit solely by one enormous arc light, its brightness tangible on Brody’s skin. Looking around, he saw this was a place where freighter ships would be worked on and then immediately run down the massive ramp into Lake Michigan’s waters. Rusty steel on every wall, unused catwalks, and temporary walls made of two-by-four frames sheeted with clear plastic pulled as tight as drum skin. Makeshift laboratories, complete with worktables and instruments and miles of cords and cables running from monitors to databases.
They continued through the factory, passing numerous defunct pieces of machinery. Denny struggled when they came across a thick band of cables, tipping Brody back in the wheelchair from its front wheels for clearance. The addict grunted, his arms too weak to be pushing around anything heavier than his own weight.
Brody didn’t fight. He took the tour through the shipyard to survey his surroundings, to try to estimate a means of escape. He didn’t see a lot of options.
A long hallway stood off to the side, made of the same patchy, rusty wall of the room they had just brought him from, except the metal looked a fraction newer and haphazardly thrown together, stitched at the edges with bolts and haphazard welds. At the end of the hallway, an open doorway shone to Brody’s bleary eyes as a flashing rectangle. After his eyes adjusted he saw an array of parked vehicles, mostly ruined and ancient cars from the last century and one nestled among them, gleaming black and immaculate. Ward’s, without a doubt.
Beyond, Brody caught a glimpse of Titian Shandorf standing back as a group of men tried to wedge Rice’s corpse into the narrow slot of a slag smelting stove, intense black smoke boiling out from around the body’s dangling legs. Wheeled along, the sight was cut short. Brody faced forward.
Denny pushed Brody to the middle of the central room alongside two rows of large spools of black wire and parked his wheelchair at the end of the aisle. Something struck him and made the world feel tilted, as if vertical had suddenly shifted. Vertigo stirred in his head, and his ears began to ring. His head suddenly felt heavy and hard to keep balanced upon his neck, as if he were suddenly missing multiple vertebrae; his limbs fell slack in their bonds. He felt his bowels loosen. Like hands under his skin feeling about, the sensation permeating from the spooled wire gripped and caressed him like a drunken lover. In his neck, in his skull, fingering his brain.
At the other end of the aisle Brody spotted two wheelchair-bound people sitting side by side. Both figures were secured with tape, and their faces were bloody. More tape was wrapped messily around their heads holding their gags in place. Thorp and Nectar.
Brody couldn’t bear the sight of his friends bleeding and weakly struggling, but he felt looking away would seem like he was giving in. He continued to stare, making himself hold eye contact with each of them in turn. Another rush hit him. Nausea and ears ringing made him involuntarily let his head roll on his neck. He looked at the dirty rubber of his chair’s wheel. The sonar was stuck facing him on the apex of the tire, camouflaged under a fine layer of rusty red soil.
“I will prove to you,” Hubert Ward said, coming around in front of Brody, “that a candidate can never do anything outside of his bounds of experience. A doubleedged sword. In one way beneficial because none of the subjects can ever do anything unpredictable—and yet it limits them as to what you can ask them to do.” He turned to Denny, who still gripped the handles of Brody’s wheelchair, and gestured at Thorp. “Cut him free.”
Denny approached Thorp, drawing a small key chain knife from his urine-soaked pants.
“Oh, and your sidearm, please.”
Denny switched the knife to his other hand and removed the Franklin-Johann and held it out for Hubert.
Hubert took the gun in one hand and flipped the lid on a nearby ordi resting on a plastic storage barrel with the other. He set the gun aside to type with both hands.
A second later, one of the giant spools of humming wires began sending out a different, higher pitch of white noise.
Parked in relative proximity to it, Brody felt a strange heat come over his mind—as if a funnel had just been jammed through the top of his skull and warm milk was slowly being poured in.
Denny cut the last of Thorp’s bounding tape from about his ankles. Brody was surprised that Thorp didn’t immediately spring out of the chair. He sat there, released, staring ahead with a tepid look on his face. Eyes dull.
“Mr. Ashbury?” Hubert asked.
Thorp focused on Hubert.
Nectar went into a riot of thrashing. She screamed, muffled beneath the band of tape across her face. She stared at Brody, urging him to do something. The metal parts of her chair brattled.
He could make out only some of her words. But it didn’t matter. There was nothing to be done. He looked away.
Hubert turned the gun around until he held it by the barrel. He extended the grip toward Thorp. With some duct tape still clinging to the sleeve of his nylon coat, he took the gun, looked at it for a moment, then at Hubert.
“Stand up so Mr. Calhoun can see,” Hubert suggested and Thorp obediently did so. Hubert smiled at Brody as he whispered in Thorp’s ear.
Thorp listened with his eyes half-closed. Then he pointed the barrel of the pistol at Nectar’s face.
“Stop,” Brody howled.
“You see what happens when you interfere, girl?” Hubert shouted at Nectar. “Try and challenge innovation and this is what happens.” He faced Brody. “Pliable and docile and tame. Securely on the leash, with absolutely no threat to anyone that his handler does not deem dangerous.”
Under the barrel of the gun, Nectar stared at her brother with tears steadily streaming down her face. She had ceased fighting and pulling at the restraints, trying to work her jaw to loosen the gag. She was quiet. She begged with her eyes and her eyes alone.
00:03:59.
“Don’t make him do that. Please. Stop. I get it, okay? Just stop.” Brody pulled with all his strength at the tape wrapped in thick bands around his arms, his wrists, dug in deep into the crooks of his elbows, across his knees and ankles, even across his waist and neck. He squirmed and fought and roared, but the tape wouldn’t give.
“Draw back the hammer.”
“Make him stop. Make him stop!”
“Now flip the safety catch.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Stop. Please. Just stop.”
Hubert stepped away from Thorp, but the gun was not lowered.
“It’s all about the journey the signal makes. Entering right through the layer of bone encasing the brain.” Hubert felt around on Thorp’s head as if he were pointing out locales on a globe. “Through the external acoustic meatus here”—he tapped behind Thorp’s right ear—”the signal goes right in, finds the memories of experiences best suited to the command, and—just like that—it’s all pinched, set, usable. In your case—without a confirmed kill, without that experience for the signal to find and utilize—you’re condemned forever to throw punches. You are Early Man, using your fists, whereas Mr. Ashbury has evolved.” He patted Thorp on the shoulder. “What do you think? Have we had quite enough of Mr. Calhoun, or does he need another example?”
Thorp said nothing, stared languidly at his sister at the end of the barrel.
Nectar had her eyes closed, head bowed resolutely. Her face from the cheeks down were soaked with tears.
“Denny, cut Mr. Calhoun’s right arm loose.” He met Brody’s eye that was rapidly counting down the remaining minutes and asked with a winning smile, “That is your dominant hand, right? You are a righty, yes?”
Brody just sat there.
“Are you sure about this?” Denny asked, sawing through the threads of the duct tape with the inch-long blade of his key chain knife.
Hubert didn’t answer. He rested his hand on the back of Thorp’s head, gently stroking the shaggy hairs that hung over the collar of his shirt. “Please give me the weapon.”
Without hesitation Thorp reset the safety on the pistol, turned it around, and handed it to Hubert in the same way it had been handed to him.
Nectar gave no indicative change in her sunken posture that she felt better having the gun taken away—she was limp, possibly unconscious. Brody couldn’t tell.
Hubert took the slide of the handgun and worked it back repeatedly until he realized the safety was on. He clicked it, jerked the slide, and then reset it. Taking one long stride toward Brody, he extended his arm and placed the loaded gun in his now-free hand.
Hubert was illuminated by the buzzing arc light directly above, his peaked face creating deep, strange shadows in his cheeks. He threw out his arms to his sides as if he were about to break into a joyous song. “Go ahead, Mr. Calhoun. Shoot me. Shoot Denny behind you. I will show you that your inability to kill goes beyond the puppet strings of conscience. Your restraint isn’t just what makes you a great pugilistic thug, but what I have done for you has made you into someone who cannot pull the goddamn trigger.”
00:01:57.
00:01:56.
00:01:55.
Maybe it was the exposure to the pounding amounts of Hark’s signal within such close proximity or the beating Brody had endured by Rice with his own knuckleduster—something stirred in Brody. The layers of dust covering his memories of that day in the Cairo alley cleared in one gusting blow. With the weight of the loaded gun in his hand, he felt pulled as if it were not just a seven-pound piece of metal and plastic in his hand but something far heavier. He was being dragged down by it, mile after mile, straight down where no light had ever traveled, into impenetrable darkness. He held the gun. He remembered.
34
It was nearly time to return to base to hit up the mess hall for the meat loaf promised every Thursday. It had been an uneventful morning doing patrols, steering the wide Terrapin through the narrow streets of Cairo and trying to avoid bowling over people on bicycles, which were more common than cars in the parched desert city—only to turn around and do it again.
Brody remembered adjusting the vent on the air conditioner above him. Inside the Terrapin, it only took seconds after pulling the back door ramp up for the space to grow sticky with humidity.
“So this is it?” Across the aisle, strapped into his seat and his helmet sitting low on his head, gloved hands on the controls, Thorp took his eyes from the road and repeated his question when Brody didn’t answer.
“Yeah,” Brody said. “A few more of these runs and that’ll be it.”
“They’ll be lucky to have you,” Thorp said.
Brody chided him for his momentary show of sincerity, something commonly sought by fellow soldiers but stamped out at once. First you said you cared about someone or liked having them around, and the next thing you knew they were dead. So it was better to keep stuff like that to yourself.
“And what about after that?” Thorp asked.
“I’ll have level three clearance, and I’ll be able to be part of the sweep team instead of doing this shit the rest of my life.”
Steering the Terrapin through a wide turn—it wasn’t exactly what you’d call nimble—Thorp brayed incredulously. “And what’s wrong with doing patrols with your good buddies, huh? Ceramic Groom was just about the most fun this old boy has ever fucking had in his whole fucking life. You calling that boring?”
The rest of the unit joined in heckling Brody.
Brody put up his hands in mock defense. “All right, all right, it’s not so bad with you guys, but being stuck in this damn thing with the heat and the stink—that’s what I can’t stand.” He adjusted the vent to blow the air away from him.
Everyone laughed.
That was when the call came in. Their unit was to report to the edge of the market district to help a man who
was caught in a bear trap. This incited a laugh from most of the men, Thorp especially.
“Please repeat,” Thorp told dispatch.
“Market district, east end. A man is caught in a bear trap.”
“We’re on our way,” Thorp said and hung up the receiver. “Bear trap. That’s a new one.”
“Think it’s Tanner’s unit trying to prank us?” Brody suggested.
“Might be,” Thorp said, throttling down. “But we better go have a look just to make sure.”
They made a quick turnaround in a vacant lot and rumbled east, the dry pavement scratching and crunching beneath the massive tires.
Two dozen people in flowing loose garments stood bunched together at the mouth of the alleyway; the men watched with unabated curiosity while the women peeked between fingers.
Someone had to remain in the Terrapin, and of the six in their unit, Thorp and Brody were among the ones to get out. They pushed through the crowd and went to the man at the end of the alley, doubled over with his lips peeled back from his teeth, sweat dripping from his bearded face, howling in agony. The translator in Brody’s ear couldn’t keep up with what the man prattled—only pinches of interpreted pleas came through in deciphered monotone: help, tricked me, it hurts.
“You’re going to be okay,” Brody said. The metal maw had swallowed half the man’s arm, the teeth biting in on the front and back of the elbow. Brody tried to pry the jagged jaws with his free hand, but someone had added screws, broken glass, razor blades, nails, and inch-long lengths of barbed wire inside. He looked at Thorp. “I have to put down my rifle.”
Thorp nodded and took a knee next to them, keeping the gun in the crook of his arms, watching the morbidly curious spectators crowded at the end of the alleyway.
Brody pressed his boot heel beside the man’s pinned arm and pushed down with his weight, the hinges of the trap creaking. Nearly as soon as the serrated jaws were open wide enough Brody realized the man’s arm wasn’t bleeding at all. The chewed divot glinted with alloy—there were wires, half-crushed servos, and whining electronic muscles. The man seemed to be washed of his pretend agony, and he reached up into the sleeve of his shawl to unbuckle the bionic appendage.