A rapid series of metallic clicks and an abrupt slam jarred Brody awake. Naturally it made him think of his many visits to county lockup.
He blinked a couple of times and saw nothing before him, just limitless black. He heard scraping steps all around him, treading on dirt floors. He surmised; the charge on the lens died when he was out and now he was completely blind.
Brody struggled as much as his drug-fogged brain could perform. The cuffs were warm; he had been wearing them for a while. He twisted in the seat, metal biting into both wrists. Rope or tape or a combination of the two bound him at the ankle, knees, elbows, across his chest and waist.
Not just blind but blind and tied to a chair. Peachy.
00:14:59 lanced out of the dark.
No, blindfolded.
He heard a croaky voice. “Hey, man. Dude, hey. Look. He’s up.”
He felt the heat radiating off a feverish body and then the mirthless tug at his eyebrows as a band of duct tape was ripped away. In the action, the tape dragged his eyelids along, far enough to allow his lens to drop out. He saw it go, a flashing transparent disk tumbling away. He blinked and blinked, but his sight in the left died.
He still had one lens.
Brody looked up at his captors. A pair of young men, both with messily shaved heads. Patches of blond spiked off their skulls in places while a majority had been buzzed to pale flesh. They stood dressed in tattered jeans, threadbare T-shirts, and one of them wore Brody’s peacoat and his bandanna. Brody recognized the look in their eyes: a partly erased dullness. Something clearly was missing.
It took a moment, but Brody recalled seeing one of them before. Bait & Tackle, the rat-faced kid cutting onions with the nametag that read Rice. He decided it better not to say anything in case it set them off. They looked like the types that could easily switch from tepid to scalding.
Brody looked around him as far as his neck could crane. There was no sign of Thorp in the room. The walls were corrugated steel, weakened and patchy with rust. The ceiling low, also rusty metal with naked bulbs hanging from frayed wires. A barrel in the corner had a fire burning in it. The unmistakable reek of burning hair loomed in the air.
He looked down and saw two dirty, rubbery wheels astride his hips—a wheelchair. He was bound to a wheelchair.
On the dirt floor before him was a display of everything that had been in his pockets. The knuckleduster, his cell, his wallet, the sonar case, the lens charger, his cigarette lighter, his ring of keys—on which was still Nectar’s spare he had gotten from Paige.
One of the emaciated thugs held Seb’s jigsaw card. He was peering into it, his twig-like arms trembling from cold and/or withdrawal or just the excitement of the prospect of hurting someone. “Hey, hey,” he said, elbowing his partner, “I know this asshole.”
The second thug took the jigsaw and held it within an inch of his right eye. “Yeah, that’s the motherfucker hustled me one time. Said I’d get higher than I’ve ever been. I went home and packed the pipe and didn’t feel a goddamn thing.” He brought the picture of Seb’s unsmiling mug close to Brody’s face. “I was going to feel a little bad about killing you, but if you’re friends with this asshole, that changes shit.”
“He’s dead,” Brody said, hoping it would put him somewhat in their favor. If he had to die, he at least wanted it to be quick. He didn’t want to spend hours suffering, smelling junkie sweat, and listening to them slaughter the English language as they took turns sticking him with screwdrivers and sharpened pencils.
“Yeah?” the thug asked, looking at Seb’s face again. “Did you kill him?”
“No,” Brody said. “An Artificial killed him.”
“An Artie, huh? That sounds like bullshit. Doesn’t that sound like bullshit to you, Rice?”
Rice nodded.
“Yeah, it sounds like bullshit, man. Seb being taken down by an Artie. You know them plastic-faced bitches at AFA won’t lift no finger to nobody about nothing. They ain’t allowed.”
“Not in their programming, chief,” Rice added. “Want to try again?”
“Not an Automat Artificial, a farmer Artificial.”
“Shit damn,” Rice said, taking the lead in heckling Brody. “I didn’t realize there was farmer Arties. I always wanted to be a farmer. Raise cows, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks, and shit. Yeah, man. I’d love to be me a robot, no emotion and shit, no need to eat or shit or drink or get high—just do and do and do and do and do my goddamned job forever.”
“That actually sounds kind of shit to me,” the other thug confessed.
“Yeah.” Rice sighed, staring at Brody. “It does kind of sound like shit, doesn’t it?”
They lost interest in that notion and returned to Brody’s pile of belongings. They opened the lens case, poured out the enzyme water, cast it aside. Rice picked up the knuckleduster and slid it down onto his knuckles, fanned it out before him like he was admiring a bejeweled hand, then moved on to other things while continuing to wear it.
When they got to the sonar case Brody winced slightly, trying to keep his extreme discomfort under wraps.
“Denny,” Rice said, picking up the sonar case, “what in the hell do you suppose this thing is? His diaphragm or something?”
“His what?”
Rice chuckled. “Nothing. Before your time.” He opened the case and looked at the white disk inside. He turned it over, and since it had no buttons to push, he took it out of the case and started spinning it end over end, stopping when he realized the underside had a ring of adhesive on it. He applied his finger and peeled it off with fascination. Rice looked at Brody. “What is this thing?”
“Helps you concentrate,” Brody said.
“Oh yeah? How does it—work?” Rice touched the sticky pad, pulled away, stuck his finger back on, pulled it away—the sound a gummy thhhk with each pull.
He must’ve known or had seen something on TV about it, because after turning it around to look at the sonar’s plain front—Rice slapped it to his forehead. He stared straight ahead for a few seconds, blinking. A light flashed on the side of the sonar, and Rice’s posture shot straight. Crackles could be heard from the vicinity of Rice’s head. Synapses by the million overloaded and burst. He was dead before he hit the dirt floor.
Denny dropped Brody’s phone and scrambled over to Rice, patting him and shaking him as if trying to rouse him from sleep. He screamed his name into his lifeless face.
He sat back on his haunches. “Ah, man. You overdid it again. I knew you took more than just one, you fuckin’ liar. Stupid fuck.” After a few halfhearted slaps to his friend’s chest in an approximation of CPR, Denny stared into Rice’s somber face, defeated. “That sucks.”
Denny peeled the sonar from Rice’s forehead and examined it, angling it around and pinching it between two fingers. He glared at Brody and held out the sonar accusingly. “Did this do it to him? Did this fucking thing do this to Rice?” Anger swelled in his voice with each question. “Did you fucking do this to him? What the fuck is this thing, anyway?”
“I think your friend is just tired.” Brody looked at Rice brain blasted on the floor, his fiercely bloodshot eyes at half-mast. “Let him sleep it off.”
Denny reapplied the sonar to Rice’s head. “Come on. Wake up.”
Getting no results, Denny sneered at Brody. He slid the knuckleduster off Rice’s fingers. Approaching Brody and making a fist, Denny hissed, “I think you did this to him.” He was nearly impossible to understand; the teeth remaining in his head were tightly clamped together. “I think you fucking did something to him to make him die. What was it? Was it that thing?” He pointed at the sonar stuck crookedly to Rice’s greasy forehead. “Some kind of other brain-mixer trick that Mr. Ward can do? Tell me, you fuck. Tell me what made Rice go dead.”
Brody swallowed, preparing himself for the inevitable blow. “I did it.”
“How? Tell me how you did it.” Denny punched Brody in the face. He had surprising strength in his ropey arms, and the strike genuinely stung.
Before Brody could say anything, Denny hit him again, this time in the nose. The crunch of cartilage and bone beneath the metal was as audible as the fireworks that had gone off in Rice’s head. The knuckleduster bit into his upper lip and made his head snap back. He groaned, letting his ringing head loll to the side. He spat blood. He hadn’t been punched with the knuckleduster before—he now understood why it staggered the biggest of men.
As Denny pulled back to punch him again, the door behind Brody rumbled open, causing the junkie to pause his swing.
Brody glanced up and saw Denny shrinking back, apology rapidly spreading on his face toward the person standing out of view. He shook his hand, and the knuckleduster flopped to the floor. He tripped over Rice as he backed away, slinking to the corner of the room and reducing himself to a stooped ball with his knees held to his chest. His eyes transfixed on whoever was there—with esteem, trepidation.
“What happened?” a gnarled voice asked.
Denny pointed a crooked finger at Brody. “He killed him.” His voice was small, childlike.
“Take him out of here,” he said.
“Who, him or him?”
“That one.” A long-fingered hand, the nails caked in black, pointed at the corpse on the floor.
Denny did as he was ordered and got to his feet. Brody noticed when he stood, the crotch of his pants was dark. Ignoring it, Denny obediently took his friend by the arms and dragged him out of the room. As he drifted by, Rice’s body shifted and the sonar fell from his forehead to the floor, back among Brody’s other belongings, landing with its white plastic facedown.
00:07:59.
Eight minutes and he still had no idea whether or not Thorp and Nectar were alive. The place didn’t echo, and no sound came through the doors. He figured the walls were thick and they were being kept in separate rooms.
He watched as the man came around to stand in front of him. Blood dotted the man’s hairy belly and droopy chest, and his hands were slathered in red, dripping from the fingertips. On his belt hung a collection of long, rusty blades among other mundane cutting implements: a utility knife, a scalpel, a pair of hook-nosed shears intended for pruning tree branches.
Titian Shandorf searched Brody’s face, a small pink smile tucked into his bushy beard. He took a deep breath that hiked up his shoulders and let it out, as if bored. He surveyed the different items Denny and Rice had taken such an interest in and regarded them with indifference, all except for the lens charger. He picked it up and turned it over until the coiled cord that Thorp had grafted onto it unraveled. Titian looked at Brody. “You’re blind?”
Brody nodded. A steady stream of blood was pumping out of his flattened nose. The pain made his already burning eyes water all the more. He felt a steady drip land on his lap, falling from his collapsed nostrils.
“Can you see me right now?” Titian asked, stepping forward. The lens charger slipped from his hand and hit the floor with a dry thud. He leaned down and peered into Brody’s face, so close Brody could smell the sharp rancor of Titian’s breath. A bloody finger nearly touched the surface of Brody’s right eye—Brody felt it brushing his eyelashes. He didn’t allow himself to flinch.
“This one, right? This one you can see out of right now. Not the other one.” Titian’s right shoulder moved as he waved a hand in front of Brody’s blind eye.
Brody nodded.
Titian stepped back. “Ironic, you being the sightless sleuth and all with that whole thing about justice being blind. I suppose when they fish your body out of Lake Michigan, that’ll be what they put on the newspapers and everything. ‘Blind Detective Found Dead—Major Injustice’ or something.” He ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, flattening it down with a pomade of blood.
“Where’s Nectar?” Brody asked, his voice slurred from his torn lip and his mouth readily refilling with blood each time he swallowed. “Is she dead? Did you kill her?”
Titian looked at Brody as if he wanted to answer. He walked past him, then behind him and out of sight.
Brody expected to feel the hefty chop of a machete going through his neck. He closed his eyes so it would be a surprise, possibly instant and painless.
But instead of a rusty blade singing through the air, he heard the creak of wheels. He opened his eyes and saw Titian rolling an ancient TV set in front of him. It was one of the CRT variations, encased in wood with frilly fabric hiding its speaker.
Brody glanced at Titian standing next to the dead TV.
“Oh, this?” Titian said. “I don’t have anything to show you, but Hubert does. I just got it ready for him. I have to keep things busy up here.” He waved a hand next to his bushy head of wild gray hair. “Otherwise, I lose focus and I forget my orders and, well, I could forfeit a lot of money if I do that.” He found a folding chair across the room and sat down, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, staring at Brody.
Brody gazed at his reflection in the gray TV screen and saw the door behind him, a long workbench of sorts with a variety of large wrenches and other tools. At the far end of the reflection, he could make out what appeared to be a mannequin head. It wore a dark and curly wig. He turned and glimpsed a flash of chestnut hair but couldn’t identify the face.
“Can you see that behind you there?” Titian asked from the shadowed corner.
“Is that Nectar?” Brody asked, fighting to keep his tone even.
Titian got to his feet with a grunt and paced noisily across the room, all the knives and metal about his waist jangling loudly. Brody watched Titian in the reflection of the TV as he picked up the head and brought it over to him.
Brody felt cold flesh pressed against his cheek. A soft lip, hanging loose, was mashed against his cheekbone next to his eye on his blind side. Brody twisted as far as he could away, but Titian held the rotting, grayed head of Abigail Schwartz against him. Titian laughed, made kissing sounds, and then set the head on top of the TV on its ear, where he rested a hand on the upturned, blood-spattered cheek.
Brody’s stomach lurched. Abigail’s face looked drawn tight, the skin beginning to give way to decomposition. The cheekbones jutted and eyes hung open, dry and lifeless. Her jaw was slack, and it was evident that insects had taken up a home within. A tiny yellow worm made slow progress up the bridge of her nose.
“She was a real fighter. Boy howdy did she kick. Man, that was an ambitious struggle if I’ve ever seen one. Most of the time you tell them what’s going to happen and they freeze, get that OMG look, and just lay there like they’re drunk on prom night and don’t make a peep until you have the knife actually in them. But her … she really did not want to die. She must’ve had a lot to live for, something important to do, a purpose. And I think that’s why a lot of these girls don’t put up a fight. They think, ‘This is the end of me and my sorry existence’ to themselves and they let it happen to them because, well, what else do they have going on? They’ll be a celebrity on a small scale for a while when the news folks run their picture and all of that—and what girl doesn’t want to be someone famous?”
He picked up Abigail’s head by the ears, held it out before him, and stared into her lifeless eyes as he made his way to the corner of the room. He paused as if bidding her a silent farewell, then let the head fall into the burning barrel.
The barrel had a few jagged holes formed into it from rust. Through its side, Brody could see Abigail’s cheek and bottom lip. Draped across her face, the hair curled and burned up in individual trailing embers like a thousand tiny fuses. He had to look away. He had to look away.
“Burn them,” Titian commented blandly, watching. “That’s the rule. Yep. Have to burn them or break them up. Anything to get rid of the brain. The brain is where the fingerprints are, so to speak.”
“You too?” Brody said. “I thought you were just a consultant.” He dared a scoff. Even to his ears it sounded pithy, his bravado sullied by his swelling disgust.
“You have them, I’m sure. I have them. I know that. The girl, she has them. Yep, when Hubert’s through with you, that’s where you go—right in there.” Titian motioned to the barrel. “Got to clean up behind oneself. Can’t leave anything behind, got to stay tidy.”
“Is she dead?” Brody managed, unable to keep his voice from shaking. “Just fucking tell me that much. I don’t care what you do to me. Just at least give me that satisfaction and tell me she’s dead.”
Titian folded his arms. “Do you think she’s dead? If you’re playing detective with soldier boy out there, you must think she’s still alive and kicking. Did you lie to your war buddy and tell him you think his sister is alive?”
“Yes, I told him that—and I do think she’s still alive.”
Titian swooped down in front of Brody. He spoke so quickly that all his words ran into one long jitter. “That’s it. Hope. Bright, shining God-deliver-me-from-evil-please-oh-please-not-me hope. That’s what I want to see on someone’s face when I put them away—a glimmer of blind hope. No pun intended. Miss Schwartz had it. She really thought she could fight me off and make it out. Wrong. I took her by the hair just like this.” Titian wrenched Brody’s head back by his hair. “And I took out this little beauty right here.” He removed a utility knife from his belt, ratcheted the corner of the razor out, and held it to Brody’s throat.
Just from the tiny fraction of pressure being applied, Brody felt the blade gliding easily into his skin.
“And I’ll tell you what I told her. ‘Thanks for playing but good-bye.’”