Knuckleduster

by Andrew Post

  The demeanor of the crowd shifted—they seemed to understand. From them: gasps, alarmed cries. The concept was a contagion and it took the longest to reach Brody. He pulled his rifle to his shoulder and disengaged the safety. He held it on the crowd, watching. They all shifted, startled, scared, expecting …

  “What’s going on?” Brody murmured to Thorp.

  “No clue,” Thorp said.

  Brody glanced at the man, still working at the limb’s straps inside the billowy sleeve. He’d be brought in for questioning, probably slapped with a fine for wasting their time, detained over a weekend at most. He turned around.

  Gasps, shouts.

  A boy emerged. He stared at them with an assault rifle pointed in their direction. He lifted it to his shoulder; the gun was probably as tall as he was.

  Brody saw the boy push through the trigger guard. Brody mimed him, reaching, applying pressure but unable—absolutely unable—to squeeze.

  A noise as loud as thunder sounded next to him.

  The boy fell, his gun sliding from his limp hands and across the cobblestone street.

  Without a word, Thorp charged down that way.

  Brody crumpled into a seated position right there on the alley floor, gun across his lap, ears ringing. Everything was muddled, far away. His head swam at the sight before him: Thorp pulling the bloody boy to his chest and screaming into his headset, “Immediate assistance.” Tears in Thorp’s eyes. Blood smeared on the boy’s face and pumping freely from his cratered chest. Screaming. People running away. Some onlookers even threw rocks at Thorp. Brody remembered the boy’s face—eyes frozen saucers, skin ashen, soul gone.

  Beyond the confusion and noise, he heard the hollow clunk of an empty aluminum can glancing off concrete. He turned to see the one-armed man going through a collection of wooden boxes.

  Brody stood, approached the man’s back. Through the thin material, Brody could see the man’s muscles working feverishly. He used the nub of his remaining right arm to clear away debris. The man hoisted something out of the trash and shook browned lettuce from it. A revolver.

  Launching himself forward, Brody caught the man just as he turned with the gun in his hand—already taking aim at Thorp.

  The two wrestled. Despite the man having only one arm, he gave quite the fight, trying to wrench the gun out of Brody’s grip. Brody pushed the man against the alley wall, the rifle barrel shifting under his own chin. He shoved it toward the one-armed man.

  The translator in his ear gave a monotone rendition of what the man was saying through his gritted teeth: murderers, son, interlopers, my boy.

  They fought until the gun cracked and the man, half his face peeled from his skull, crumpled to the ground. He lay, struck dead immediately, next to his discarded limb still in the bite of the bear trap.

  A violent jerk in Brody’s hand—the flash snapping at the dusty gloom.

  Hubert fell back with a gasp.

  Nectar screamed out beneath her bonds.

  Thorp remained stock-still, catatonic and indifferent.

  Hubert slapped a hand over his chest where Brody had shot him. His eyes were wide, so much surprise. He looked to Denny, who stepped forward with the knife in his hand.

  Brody turned the gun as far as he could angle his wrist and fired. A black dot appeared on Denny’s forehead directly above his right eye. A riot of colors—pink, red, white, gray—sprang out and hit the wall behind him. He lurched forward in midstep and collapsed quietly. “Hey,” was his final utterance.

  00:01:21.

  Again, Brody aimed the pistol at Hubert. The man was now on his back, weakly kicking, trying to get to his phone. With each kick, Hubert began to slow. Halfway to the dirt-covered device he tried to roll over onto his front, still clutching his chest, but he made it only partway. He returned to his back, looking upward. Hubert grew still at the feet of Nectar, dying before he could reach his phone.

  00:01:17.

  Brody tugged at the thick band of duct tape over his elbow. He heard not the tape’s fibers breaking but the wooden arm of the wheelchair splintering. He kept pulling, never relinquishing the death grip he had on the pistol. The arm of the wheelchair made a solid snap, then came away from the metal body of the wheelchair on the next pull. His right arm was free.

  He set the gun in his lap and yanked the tape off his left arm. He broke the other armrest and pulled the linked cuff out. He began working on his legs, yanking and tearing as quickly as he could. Mind racing, the overwhelming deluge of nausea upon him. The warmed milk sensation clung. He felt both serene and anxious at the same time—scared mindless and yet perfectly in control.

  His mind was still in Cairo. He had never reported shooting the one-armed man in the alley. The event hadn’t been recorded on the barrel-mounted camera, never put into his file as a confirmed kill. As soon as Brody shot the man, he ran to check on Thorp. The sunglass lens put under the boy’s nose fogged. It was impossible to tell where the bullets had struck him; his rough-textured garment was heavy with blood. Brody helped load him into the back of the Terrapin, where they laid him on the floor. Someone else drove, because Thorp refused to let go of the boy’s hand.

  00:00:59.

  Brody looked at Hubert, the bullet hole right over his heart. He pointed the gun into the old man’s face. He inched back on the trigger. Hubert Ward stared at him, his eyes lifeless and empty. His mouth a perfect O filled to the brim with blood.

  00:00:45.

  The Terrapin rumbled on. The intercom was alive with distress signals. Similar surprise attacks had happened all over the city at the same time—an organized attempt to weaken the military presence. He sat at the Terrapin’s rear glass, watching the city slide by them, the general populous unsettled—pitching rocks, sticks, and hunks of spoiled meat at them as they passed. Everything bounced off the metal skin of the armored vehicle. Brody watched, disquieted. The sun was going down. He focused on the colors.

  He returned to base and the mess hall. He had the table to himself; everyone else was on their shift or out in the yard discussing what had happened. Brody ate meat loaf, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and let things go into the boxes they needed to be put in.

  It stayed gone for a long time.

  00:00:30.

  Brody turned the gun from Hubert’s slack face, pointed it at the screen of the man’s phone, and fired, the device shattering.

  He looked to Thorp. He still stood, seemingly frozen in place, staring into the empty middle distance.

  Brody pushed through the plastic curtain to one of the makeshift laboratories, going to the several ordis and their holo-displays. None of what the monitors displayed—endlessly scrolling numbers and icons and levels and fluctuating scales and dials—made sense to him. There was no clear way to shut any of it off.

  He took the handgun by its barrel and hammered the monitors, keyboards, open places where disks or drives could be inserted. One by one, the spools of wire beyond went silent. The ozone in the air seemed to fall away, and the tingly sensation Brody now realized had covered every inch of his exposed flesh was gone.

  Thorp fell forward onto his hands and knees, becoming violently ill, barely having time to peel the tape from his mouth before a flood of vomit rushed out.

  Brody went to Nectar, took the tape off her wrists. He studied her face as he worked, saw she had gone flaccid—her head had rolled back and her open eyes displayed nothing but the whites.

  Both Brody and Thorp pulled the wires from her body and removed the restraints. She was limp, malnourished, and pale. When they lifted her from the wheelchair, the sheet covering her lap fell away. She had been put into a chair equipped with a bedpan. A catheter tube ran to a hanging, swollen bag clipped to the seat back. She moaned, pawed at the fallen sheet.

  Shouts, whispers—Brody listened as Titian and the other men approached.

  00:00:15.

  “Get her to cover,” Brody said. “Stay there.”

  00:00:14.

  There
was shouting, the clatter of guns. Titian and his men filed back into the main room of the shipyard. Brody glimpsed them in the distance, a flash of an arm or a set of running legs, the approaching march, dodging defunct machinery and pillars of dead wire, trying to make their way through the rusted metal labyrinth.

  00:00:10.

  “Are you sure?” Thorp asked.

  “Go. Now.”

  Thorp removed the lock from his sister’s wheelchair and carted her away, holding one hand to her shoulder to keep her from tumbling out of the chair.

  00:00:02.

  Brody turned and saw the men. They all matched Titian’s general description: haggard and dressed in tattered clothing, wild, feral eyes, and unkempt looks. They charged, slapping and moving around and between looped wires—everywhere, wires.

  Brody hid behind a half-completed hull of a freight liner. He pinched the lens out just as the final second counted down. Blind, he listened for the buzz of the arc light above—aimed toward it—and fired.

  The factory was thrown into darkness.

  Brody, operating strictly on short-term memory as to where everything was, crept over to the wheelchair and found the sonar where it had been stuck against the tire. He slapped it to his forehead and the ping shot out.

  Confused shouts, blind fire ringing. Titian’s friends stood perplexed and blind, mapped in geometry. Puzzled polygon men. Even though they were behind cover, lying in wait, hiding, the sonar found each one of them in one ringing sweep.

  Brody stepped out from behind the rusty hull and opened fire.

  35

  Brody made his way through the first few men before they assumed where he was and their accuracy increased. He sought cover behind a massive reel wrapped in chains, feeling the tremble of bullets striking against its opposite side. Once there was a lull of silence, he immediately fired back and continued forward, shooting at them individually. Each shot expertly placed between their eyes, the sonar and his gun arm coordinated harmoniously.

  But they began to understand what was happening and trailed back to the hall to find more secure cover.

  Brody fired once more, missing the last one as he sprinted around the corner. He got to the entrance of the long corridor and saw they had thrown themselves into the doorways lining the passage. Brody could still see them, crouched boxy figures holding boxy guns standing within other, larger boxy shapes.

  Titian shouted, “He’s using sonar. Close it up. Close it up.”

  They heeded the command and one by one the men vanished behind closed doors to kill the sonar’s ping.

  Brody hunched down behind a tree trunk-sized mass of cables and let the sonar feel what it could. Despite the shipyard factory being rusty and dilapidated, the walls were in good shape and he could detect not a single man. He could hear panicked shouts and weapons reloading. He ejected the clip of his own gun and let the sonar feel down inside. Three bullets remained. He pressed a boot against the shoulder of a nearby thug to roll him over. Beneath the corpse was a gun, sticky wet with blood. Inside the magazine remained ten rounds.

  He waited not a second more. He rose from behind the crushed car and fired through the wall of the closest room.

  The sonar’s ping filtered in through the hole, and the men inside could be seen ducking in what looked like a coordinated reaction.

  Squaring up his aim, Brody fired through the wall again. The man fell and his companions in the room with him stared in awe. He fired two more times, taking them out as well. None inside had time to fire back.

  He advanced down the hall to the room where the first pack of men had been hiding. Entering, he surveyed them there, with their guns still gripped in their dead hands. He took up the closest one’s weapon, a combat shotgun with a snub-nosed barrel. As he turned it over, the shotgun’s inside lit up in his mind’s eye. The interior of the load was full—the previous owner had never gotten a single shot off.

  Wasting no time, he stepped into the hallway, estimated where the men were with the sonar, and fired into them before they could make it to the door.

  He fired into the opposite wall, found that room empty. He listened, everything still and silent.

  Down at the end of the hall, Titian came into view but out of range for the shotgun to do any sort of serious damage. Regardless, Brody brought the shotgun up and fired, Titian slamming aside to dodge the spray of buckshot. He pumped and fired again, moving forward. Titian raised his pistol, and Brody ducked into a doorway to avoid the fire. The shots rang off and came through the steel wall, one muffled thwap after another of the silenced pistol being hastily emptied.

  Both men took pause in cover.

  “Fucking Hubert,” Titian said as he reloaded. “What a spectacular mess this has turned out to be. Course, I can’t really be that surprised. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. One day with enough adjusting, I could’ve been an upstanding citizen with a new name, placed somewhere else. That idea had its appeal. Just imagine. You and me, walking side by side on the street, a couple of regular joes going to work, practically living like a goddamn Artie. Normal folks with all our desires put away—submissive and on the leash.”

  Brody leaned the barrel of the shotgun out the door and fired.

  Silence a moment. Then Titian continued. “Even though Ward had a pretty good argument, I always doubted there was a way, outside of a well-placed bullet, to fix bastards like us. We’re dyed in the wool. Our daddies beat us, we grew up on Tom and Jerry blowing each other up with sticks of dynamite, and he thinks he can take all the bad shit out as easy as unloading a dishwasher—”

  Brody jumped out, attempting to catch him off guard. He fired, dropped to one knee, pumped, fired again. The shots ripped through the steel wall of the room where Titian was hiding.

  The sonar slowly mapped the room Titian stood inside. His gnarled head of hair matted down from melted snow, his heavy belt of blades. Titian stood motionless, the pistol pointed upward.

  Brody remained crouched, holding the shotgun, ready to fire from the hip once the sonar settled. He had to be standing completely still for it to get an absolutely perfect fix on everything. He could miss with a gun just as easily as sometimes he missed his chair when sitting down too quickly.

  Titian stepped out with a machete in hand, pitched it outward, the blade turning end over end in the air, reducing the space between the two men with deep, plunging cuts.

  Reaction forced his hand, and Brody pulled the trigger on the shotgun and blasted the space before him. The machete was kicked back, where it hit the wall and slapped to the dirt floor, the blade perforated end to end. Brody pumped the next shell out and lunged forward, striking while Titian was choosing his next weapon from among his generous collection.

  The killer bounded out of the room and slapped the shotgun barrel aside just as Brody pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t fast enough. Although not a direct hit, the close proximity to such a sound and blast gave Titian an immediate burn across the side of his face, the flesh rendered red and black. Howling, he took the second of disorientating carnage to remove another blade from his belt and bring it down at his target.

  Brody turned the shotgun to try to block the blade, catching Titian’s wrist. The blade, a long curved knife intended for cleaning fish, sank into Brody’s shoulder. He shoved back, but the blade had already sunk in deep, nearly to the handle. Titian came forward low and grabbed at Brody’s middle to pull him to the floor. Brody kept his balance, and the two were rushed back to the wall, Titian grabbing the handle of the knife and driving the remaining length of the blade in. With the shotgun pinned between their bodies, Brody scrambled to grab a hold of anything he could.

  Titian’s black-and-white face, mapped for shape and minor calculable detail, showing his rotten teeth protruding from the gums. Their faces so close together, Titian’s breath, the smell of blood and cordite and violence.

  “I know that I am what I am, and if it means I don’t get to do shit like this to people like
you anymore, I don’t ever want to change. I don’t know why I ever wanted to give it up, honestly. But with Ward dead, I guess it doesn’t really matter. That right there is enough proof that God wants me to be a putrid bottom-feeder forever. And I will not argue. I can accept it. I will happily be what I am, play my part, do what I do, with a new skip in my step till the day I die.”

  Brody brought up a knee and managed to get the snub-nosed shotgun freed. He yanked it away, pumped in the next shell, and swung it, jamming it hard under Titian’s chin.

  Titian caught the barrel before the trigger could be pulled, pushed it aside, and simultaneously plucked the blade out and drove it again, this time into Brody’s abdomen. There was a distant pop when the tip broke flesh. Brody’s body came alive with pain, and a gasp escaped him. Along with it, his grasp faltered on the shotgun. Titian, with a quick sideways wrench, freed it from his hand and drew in close, pushing the blade in a fraction deeper. It was hitting bone, the blade grinding against a rib—the tip seeking something inside, thirsty to puncture more.

  “This is the part in the movies when my guy would say, ‘We’re just alike, you and I.’ And your guy says, ‘We’re nothing alike.’ But we both know that’s bullshit. In this case, we both know my guy’s right. The twoheaded Jack, connected in the middle, one end up and the other down. Flip us around and it looks the same. Just a matter of perspective, where you’re standing.”

  The agony flared as the knife dug in another inch, then was angled up, where the hand driving it sought to find the bottom of a lung or something else vital, soft, and waiting. Brody tried backing up to get free of it, but his back was firmly against the wall, the length of Titian’s forearm pressed against his throat.

  “I could be you. I know a guy who can rewrite jigsaws. Take a dab of my blood, wipe your information off, and just like that, I could be you. Easy as that. And this is better”—Titian nodded at his knife—”because if you do get out of this and you’re no longer getting what you need to be the upward Jack, well, that card would flip around pretty damn quick. And before long, your rap sheet would resemble mine.”