Disciple of the dog

THE WHATEVER FACTORY

Sometimes I see myself through the scope of a sniper’s rifle. Crosshairs parse me into sliding quadrants, pin me to the centre of the packed parking lot, the variety store foyer, the entrance to the motel office- whatever. I am oblivious. My gaze roams every angle except the one belonging to the lens.

Everything I do is soundless. Tim was only too happy to help me. He fairly fell over himself in his rush to betray his friends.

I was right about Nill and his techniques, the way he progressively implicated his recruits in various crimes, nurturing a sense of impunity even as he forged a sense of belonging-always invoking the false blood of gang-family ties. Tim was supposed to meet the others at the abandoned Hydradyne plant after his shift-to relieve one of the others if I failed to turn up in a timely fashion. God’s work never ends.

I told him this was precisely what he would do. Only forty minutes to go, as it turned out. The Kwik-Pik closed early on Sundays.

Another car pulled into the lot, so I took his cell and retreated to the magazine section, whiled away the time with Maxim, FHM, and finally the skin mags proper.

I was still staring at pussy when he locked up.

His Honda Civic was three years older than my Volkswagen Golf. Even still, I suffered a pang of shame driving a car in the same status range as that of a punk racist high school dropout.

Gave me second thoughts about poor Radulov.

I worked off my sense of material inadequacy by leaning forward and describing-in excruciating detail-the fates of those who had crossed me in the past. Two Baathists skinned in the desert. An unscrupulous coke dealer found hanged in his apartment. A mob hit man discovered in three different counties.

“You will wave hello,” I grated, “even though you’re shitting your pants in terror. You will smile, even though you’re shitting your pants in terror. You will do everything I tell you to do…” I reached forward to pinch his trachea. “Because if you fail, Dutchie my boy, you will die convulsing, you will gasp your final breath gnawing dirt. Do you copy?”

He blinked tears, blubbered something I understood as an affirmative. Tim drove down Highway 3-toward the Framer Compound, suggestively-before turning off on an unpaved service road. The little car rocked to the dip of parched potholes. Weeds and scrub scratched and brushed the fenders and underbody. Tim sat rigid, gazing out at the bobbing fan of illumination before him. Skeins of dried grasses. Tracks in the cool dust. Shadows in the dark.

We drove past an opened chain-link gate then turned down a slope. Sumac and other scrub fenced the lane. A wall of corrugated siding resolved out of the black, windowless and nondescript. Tim slowed, and I saw the gleam of a pickup truck and the hindquarters of another car flash through the headlights. He parked beside the two vehicles. I glimpsed a figure with a flashlight walking toward us. “Stay in the car until he comes,” I barked, pressing the muzzle of my gun against the side of his eye. “Leave it running…”

Then I slipped out into the night. The surrounding terrain leapt into view: swales of brownlands beginning a long regression to pre- Columbian forest. The factory’s main structure, I realized, was effectively shielded from the neighbouring subdivisions, which was why, no doubt, the Thirds had chosen it out of all the abandoned shells on offer in the industrial park. Tim had parked to the left of the pickup and car. I couldn’t duck in front of the Civic because of the headlights, and I couldn’t bolt behind because that was the figure’s direction of approach. My only alternative was to huddle in the overgrowth, risk the approaching flashlight. I fell prone behind a hump of grasses, peered between shredded threads…

“Heeeeey, Dutcheee-boy!” the figure called, kicking the dust tracks. Fucknut, I decided to call him.

He was one of the two guys from the picnic table. Junkie thin. Beard trimmed to the craggy contours of his face. Older, with a grey mullet dropping in strings around his shoulders. He looked like George Carlin at the wrong end of a hunger strike.

His flashlight swayed negligently, missed me altogether.

“Hey? Everything okay?” he said, sauntering around the Civic. “You remember to grab me a pack of Camels?”

He leaned into the driver’s-side window. “You forgot aga-” He heard my rush, but too late to do anything but grunt in abbreviated alarm. I clipped him as he turned, catching him on the notch in his orbital-just above his left eye. He dropped like a rolled carpet.

I retrieved the flashlight to inspect Tim. He sat there, as ashen as a heart attack, his hands clamped on the wheel. His Kwik-Pik name tag gleamed in the white.

“Drive home, Tim,” I said. “You weren’t made for this. You weren’t made to hate… “

There’s something about tears in flashlight illumination, the way they sparkle like rhinestones. Like something apparently precious.

“Do you understand?”

“Yuh,” he said, swallowing.

“Then go, kid. Get the hell out of here.” Surprise. We like it the way we like our pets-small and slavishly dependent.

Every heartbeat is an ambush, if you think about it. The key to success in combat is merely to remind your opponent of this fact at opportune times. To make weapons of his routines and his assumptions.

This was why I simply strolled toward the factory in the wake of Tim’s car, dandling the flashlight in an offhand manner. I suppose I could have done a bunch of Navy SEAL shit, diving and rolling through the shadows. But why take the scenic route?

I followed the side of the factory, kicking my feet through the weeds and grasses the same as Fucknut. I found myself glancing up along the looming plane of the wall-a relic of a time when I despised rooftops, I imagine. That’s the thing about war days: they never stop being yesterday.

The stars lent a chill to the air.

I saw Fucknut’s partner, Dipshit, little more than a silhouette leaning against the wall next to an opened door. He was blowing smoke and watching it, which meant he was either bored or scared shitless. The spark of his cigarette floated along an arc anchored to his elbow. I watched it swing up to his lips, burn bright, then swing down to his thigh, and flick…

I held the flashlight high enough to discourage any peering. Dipshit, I could see, was another chain-on-his-wallet fucker, just as skinny as Fucknut but with more of a Sid Vicious look. Anger as fashion.

“Where the hell did Dutchie go?” Dipshit said, finally turning toward me. “He forget your smokes or something?”

I raised the lamp to his face. He cursed, actually swatted at the glare. Then about a pace away, I tossed the light at him, kicked him square in the nuts. I tagged him with a strike on the temple as he doubled over. In all honesty, I’m not sure he was breathing when he hit the ground. The convulsions suggested a direct hit.

What can I say? They don’t make Nazis the way they used to, I guess.

With both Fucknut and Dipshit tucked in for bed, I figured it was time to draw my gun. I stood in the darkness of the door opening, ears pricked. I heard the drone of a masculine voice reflected off hanging metal surfaces. Reverend Nill, I decided.

This was about when the farting started. What was it about these dead factories?

I stepped across the cracked concrete of the threshold. I paused, my senses tingling at their limits. The air smelled of dust and the trademark Manning-family reek: shit and potato chips. Details of the interior resolved as my eyes adjusted to the absence of the flashlight: a strewn floor, the hint of cavernous walls, and a dim subterranean glow emanating from around a corner. I heard laughter sucked hollow by open space.

I was standing in what looked like a warehousing annex. You would like to think you could step into an abandoned factory and easily guess what it once manufactured, but the fact is, everything has become voodoo in this world. Precious little makes sense to the untrained eye anymore. Hydradyne, I knew, would be as much a riddle to me in broad daylight as in the pitch of night. Some shelving had crashed to my right-that was pretty much the best I could do, identification-wise. It made an obstacle course of my way forward, or so I imagined, because I couldn’t see jack shit.

With one hand out to paw the spaces before me, I moved to the left. I followed a track of rollers-like the kind they use to feed your groceries out to your car-along the wall, toward the truncated glow. My breathing was even, my steps measured, and except for the low, doggish whine of a second fart, I moved without making a sound.

The voice was clearer now.

“Can you talk now? Huh, bitch? Do you think you can talk like a sane, rational, fucking bitch? “

A moment of ain’t-no-such-thing laughter. Definitely Nill, but more winded-almost breathless.

A feminine cry pierced the dark, shrill with rage and terror.

Molls…

I would like to say that I remained professional at this point, that I behaved with cold, consumer detachment, but the fact is, I began running. Only dumb luck saved me from making a noise kicking or slamming into something, because I could see little more than the gleam of the roller track next to me. I whisked through the black, felt the aura of unseen obstructions fall away harmlessly.

I slowed to a creep as I approached the corner. The illumination was bright enough to airbrush the lines of my automatic. I always feel better when I can see my gun, for some reason. Never had much stomach for abstract instruments of murder.

A second or two passed before my eyes digested the complexity of the scene. It was a receiving bay of some kind. A series of catwalks and grilled floor platforms caged the air above the cluttered floor immediately before me. A single kerosene lantern on one of these platforms was the only source of light, casting fishnet shadows across the bare floor and rubbish below. I could hear its hiss hardening the silence. The greater factory fell into darkness beyond, another derelict arena blasted hollow by unfathomable economic forces.

I saw Molly, bound and gagged with tape, kneeling, burnt white in the glare of the lantern.

And I saw him, stripped to the waist, covered with a sweat-shiny array of comic-book tatts. Reverend Nill, the post-industrial demagogue. I imagine Brenda, my old sociologist girlfriend, would have some kind of interpretative paradigm to explain him. A kind of psycho-social parasite feeding off the resentment of the uneducated service castes. Something like that. You can only reform the economy for the sake of numbers instead of people for so long, I suppose.

That was when I wondered about Johnny…

My eyes clicked down, around. I noticed the unattended shotgun leaning against three stacked pallets.

Something scuffed something behind me.

The bat chipped the back of my skull, but I was already diving-an old mortar-attack reflex. Even still, it rang my bell hard enough to send my automatic skidding into the black. I crashed face first into debris. There was a bag of something in there, probably concrete mix or something, powdery soft and hard all at once. A jutting nail ripped the meat of my left palm, but I wouldn’t realize this until afterward.

I kick-rolled onto my back just in time to catch the next bat swing in the shin-a fucking stinger. But better than catching it with my face like the batter intended.

Johnny Dinkfingers loomed above me, graphed by lattices of light. A giant man out for giant revenge.

I had caught him pissing or something-away from his weapon, which was why he was still alive. Now, with me down in a crab defending myself with my legs, the best thing he could have done was simply leap for his weapon. He had the drop on me, plain and simple. But the thing was, he already thought he had the drop on me. After all, he had the bat and I was down on my ass. And more importantly, after his humiliation at the pig roast, he had something to prove to himself. The cheapest way to save face is to scar another.

So he came at me, swinging the bat wildly. Teeth clenched, eyes wild and exultant, he looked like something out of a Viking nightmare. I scrambled back, fending his strikes as best I could, but largely taking it on the shins, retreating into the gloom… to the point where I hoped I would find my gun.

We have this psychic connection, you see, me and my government- model Colt. One second I was clawing the floor blindly, then, Why hello there, little buddy…

I was up on my feet, depressing the trigger, plugging him in the face.

Bam-bam-bam. One-two-three… He teetered, held up by some residual brain stem activity, then crashed forward to the floor. Petals of blood bloomed across the dust.

Score.

He looked like a drunk licking up a spilled Caesar.

“Johnny?” Nill called from immediately above. “Sound off, brother!” With the light next to him, I imagine we must have looked like rats battling in shadows.

“He tripped,” I replied, my automatic still tingling in my hand. “Fell on three bullets.”

If you haven’t noticed, I tend to talk too much.

Rubbing the back of my head, I slowly backed out from under the platform to where Nill could see me pointing my Colt directly at him. He reflexively pulled Molly tight, using her as a shield. I have to admit, she looked hot, her mouth taped, her arms bound behind her, as sweaty as a cold beer on a humid day, wearing only a tank top and boxers-like something out of those boner detective mags I used to “read” when I was a kid.

Nill, on the other hand, looked positively desperado. I understood instantly: he was one of those guys with only two gears in his emotional transmission. Challenge him a little and he seems utterly invincible; challenge him more than a little and he starts putting with his driver.

“Who hired you?” he croaked with what was left of his voice. “Was it Leighton? Or the Mexicans, huh? Who’re you working for?”

“Jonathan and Amanda Bonjour.”

Crazed laughter, dry, as if coughed through ropes rather than vocal cords. “And here I thought I was cold!” he chortled. “Look. I know, man, so you can drop the fucking act!”

Ah, I thought. So this was where it was hiding. The Law of Unintended Consequences always rears its hoary head at some point, and here it was, bright and shiny and as deep up my ass as always.

“Un. Fucking. Believable,” I said in disgust.

I had decided to be aggressive at the pig roast to provoke some kind of incriminating response from the mad Reverend. Well, I certainly succeeded in provoking a response. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem all that incriminating…

“You’refaming us!” the Nazi cried. “We know you were at Nashron with that pussy Nolen! We know that you’re pushing his buttons!”

“Huh?”

He laughed and cried and sneered all at once. “Wh-what kind of fucking fool do you take me for, man? If you’re not the one who planted all that shit, then who else could it fucking be?”

“That’s what the Bonjours are paying me to find out.”

“No! Bullshit! Bullshit!”

I paused at this. One of the worst things you can do to some people- apart from being wronged by them-is to witness them in a moment of abject weakness. Nill was pretty much a human craps table at this point. I had to be sure I had all my bets covered before rolling.

“Listen up, Reverend,” I said with a marvelling smile. “We have three ways we can play this. In the first, you shoot Molly and I shoot you in a place where it takes a long time to die, because afterward, I shit you not, I will make you scream enough to shame the entire white race. In the second, I simply shoot you, in the mouth if I can manage it, in the hope of knocking out your motor cortex, and so save Molly. In the third, you simply set the gun down, and me and Molly here leave…”

“Yeah?” He cried. His screech echoed through the tin-pot hollows. It’s always embarrassing when men cover weak hearts with crazed voices. “How-how can I trust you?”

I shrugged. “Because I’m a chronic weed smoker… I’m too much of a slacker to dig graves. And I get too paranoid to cope with all the police bullshit. Afraid that I’ll fuck up. Afraid they’ll find my weed.”

All true.

“Buh-because you smoke weed?”

So far we had exchanged all these words around the fact of my gun pointed at his face and his gun held to Molly’s cheek. I’ve lived a good chunk of my life in the company of guns, and yet I will never get over the way they seem to vanish in the course of this or that. Here’s this thing, this tool that has been exquisitely designed and manufactured to bring about brain death in large mammals, and in the course of joking or negotiating or simply pissing away the time, we completely forget this mortal truth, wave them around like fucking Xbox controllers.

“Look,” I said, allowing more than a little impatience to leak into my tone. I realized that I had simply assumed all of Nill’s cronies were dead. “If we both fold our hands, split the pot, then we both get to rewind the clock. I don’t have to answer for your dead buddies. You don’t have to answer for abducting Molls here. We leave, you bury your flock, tell the rest of the congregation that they left to avoid the media attention, whatever. Sometimes people move away. Sometimes you never hear from them again… “

Especially junkies. Hard to keep tabs on junkies. But I didn’t need to say this because Nill was telling himself the same thing already. His balls had slipped out of his boxers-no doubt about that. He was dangling.

Debating.

“Hard to shoot a porno with good intentions,” I said. “Show us some wood, brother.”

Everyone breathed real hard.

You spend your whole life building this persona, this no-shit-no- way-no-how illusion that you somehow manage to cling to even as you talk Jesus or push those grocery carts across the parking lot. Then you bump into me. There’s nothing like someone who really doesn’t give a fuck to remind you how dearly-how desperately-you love your skin.

His crazy-ass eyes wide and shining, Reverend Nill stepped back from Molls.

He stood naked at that instant, in his own eyes as much as mine. I have no doubt the spin-doctoring would be quick in coming, that he would mythologize everything that had happened this night, that he would remind himself he had buried dead men in secret places. But for the moment, he stood utterly revealed: a fool clinging to all he genuinely owned, his skin colour and his hate. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think of tagging him.

Molly slumped to her knees. We left him there, alone and shirtless in the pale fire of his one light. Molly held me, held me tight, as we stumbled through the dark. She did not cry. At some point Nill began ranting behind us, or reciting actually, crying out a guttural German I’m sure he didn’t understand-some old speech I remembered from the History Channel. Hitler at Nuremberg.

The empty factory roared in reply, roared with the absence of collective will. Hydradyne. Makers of whatever.

He was still shouting as we stepped out into the night.

We had no wheels, so we had no choice but to walk the ruined service road to Highway 3.

At some point my legs failed me. I skidded to the weeded dirt, to my knees.

I could hear her voice. Despite the tsunami of crashing memory…

Like calls to like, you see, when it comes to the mind. I had killed three men tonight-bad enough. But over the years I had killed others, and so there I was, killing them, killing all ofthem, all over again. Fawk.

“Disciple? Are you crying? Disciple? It’s okay. I’m okay!”

She didn’t understand.

It ain’t easy, being an abattoir. Once we reached the highway, I called a cab and we began walking back toward town to meet it. The thought that Dead Jennifer had walked precisely these steps occurred to me, but the noise of recent events made the observation inaudible. The cabbie, some local fat-ass, said nothing, though I’m pretty sure he noticed everything-the gash on Molly’s forehead, certainly. But I wasn’t worried. Cabbies have a way of saying nothing. Too jaded to be surprised, just like me.

Our argument didn’t start until we found ourselves at the motel.

“Look,” I finally said. “The question you need to ask is whether you want to send me to the can for fifteen to twenty…” I have some pretty savage instincts when it comes to self-preservation. I admit I suffered a dark thought or two for a moment, watching her balance my future against her sense of violation.

“But Nill-”

“Didn’t. Harm. A soul.”

“But-”

“You’re thinking in common sense terms: I saved your life, so I gotta be good. But the authorities won’t give a flying fuck why I killed those guys. All they’ll care about is the who. As far as they’re concerned, I’m the murderer. How? How? Because I’m the one who violated the state’s monopoly on deadly force.”

It all came down to turf.

She gawked at me with a look halfway between astonishment and indigestion. “What happened to you?” she cried. The stress had caught up to her by now, and she was crying freely. “How does someone get so, so… fucking cynical?”

The blood had started to flow from the cut on her forehead.

“They remember,” I said, daubing her brow with a tissue. “We need to get you to a doctor.” As it turned out, the nearest hospital was forty-five minutes away, in a town called Innis. We took my Golf because she said she wasn’t sure if her car insurance would cover me. Can you believe it?

I took a roundabout way, stopped on one of the bridges, tossed my beloved Colt into the river. What a pisser.

“Why do you drive this piece of shit?” she asked as I climbed back in.

“Because I’m a loser,” I snapped back. “Ruly-truly.”

I get prickly about my car.

I began talking about the case, as a distraction as much as anything else-the way couples with rotten relationships find common purpose in slagging the friends they both despise. In a sense, the two of us found ourselves on opposite ends of the incentive spectrum. Everything had gone swimmingly for Molly-even her abduction would find its lucrative way into print somehow, I imagined. In the space of a weekend she had become the go-to girl for what was becoming America’s latest media crime fetish. I thought of the economic consequences. A million bottles of shampoo sold. Ten thousand Toyotas. Wild swings of market share… one, maybe even two points-who knew? Enough for Buffett to start unloading shares of Gillette…

The more I considered it, the more it seemed that everybody was making out like a bandit except me. I was even out my gun. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is finding an unregistered.45 automatic? How fucking expensive?

Her elbow propped against the door, Molly leaned into the towel she held pressed against her head. She had that struggling-to-stay-awake look you see on the faces of so many critical incident survivors.

“So if it isn’t Nill…” she said, gazing into nowhere.

“Who knows. Could have been one of his cronies, like I said.” This was my secret hope, but I was dubious.

“But then why would they help him abduct me?” she asked. “I mean, if the idea was to get Nill to self-destruct, you’d think they would’ve found some way to bail…”

I glimpsed Tim, his tears blue-green with reflected dashboard light. Did he have a role to play in all of this?

Nah.

“Maybe it was this Leighton guy he mentioned,” I said. “Or the Mexicans.”

Always easy to blame the Mexicans.

“Or Baars,” she said.

“Or someone who thinks they’re helping Baars.”

I glimpsed Stevie, watching me from behind the world reflected across plate glass.

“What do you mean?” she said, turning to study my profile.

“Tim told me that Nill and Baars had a sit-down. Well, what if one of the Framers thinks Baars made a mistake giving Ruddick to the Thirds? You know, like a Starfleet versus the Klingons thing…”

She almost laughed.

We tunnelled through the Pennsylvania dark. I found myself hating my poor little Golf. I hated the look of it. I hated the sour-milk smell of it. No power steering. No air conditioning. It even had manual windows, for fuck’s sake. I hated the fact that I was embarrassed that Molly had to sit in it. Tin fucking can.

Fucking Nazi car, that’s what it was.

So that pretty much summed up my situation. No leads. No gun.

Three more souls on my conscience (I had this fucked-up image of Nill braining Fucknut and Dipshit to make sure they were dead-dead). And a total shit-box for a car.

God hated me, the thin-skinned prick.

Oh well… At least I had saved the babe. Finding the hospital took some doing. I navigated the maze, wondering how heart-attack sufferers ever made it to the Emergency doors alive.

“I’ll just drop you off here,” I said, braking in front.

“It’s okay,” she replied, in the thoughtless way of couples, actually.

“I’m quite capable of walking from the parking lot.”

She looked at me in vague alarm when I didn’t release the brake.

“Sorry, Molls. Disciple doesn’t do health care facilities.”

Feminine Dismay slackened her expression. Another old friend.

“But… but how am I supposed to get home?”

“You have a credit card, don’t you?”

“Yeah…”

“I’ll catch you back at the motel, then.”

Cold, huh? But like I told Molly, me and hospitals do not mix. I got my reasons-specific reasons. But even in general, they’re anathema to people like me. Delivering babies on the top floor, stacking bodies in the basement. Hospitals are the one place where death and birth meet, where the human circuit, you might say, is closed.

Where only earnest voices have the wind to speak. Track Thirteen