The Little Brother

The cold November rain covered the historic streets of Cheltenham in a sudden downpour. Late-season tourists huddled under umbrellas and in doorways to avoid the deluge. Here doing early Christmas shopping and the like. They vied to get into the town's tea rooms, pubs and cafes to dry off and acquire warming sustenance. A motorcycle and black leather-clad rider battled for position with the other traffic in the narrow streets of the picturesque large market town. The bothersome traffic consisted of Plodding robots and impatient taxis both extremely out of place with the regency architecture, more suited to horse and cart. The large quick seventies motorcycle slid competitively into every gap between cars as if the rider owned the road. They gave no quarter and seemed to have no fear.

The bike, a BSA Thunderbolt slid to a stop behind one of the aforementioned regency crescents. The rider rests the large immaculately maintained machine on its kickstand. shook what rain they could from their leather, opened the garage, and deposited the motorcycle within its confines, next to a sleek car with a rounded bonnet. Before drying themselves they dried the bike with a certain reverence, rain streaks came off the chrome and paintwork of the tank easily. Rain was just a professional hazard to the committed year-round motorcyclists.

They crossed a damp and forlorn-looking courtyard garden, down some steps and into a basement kitchen of a large house. Most of the houses in this street had been subdivided into flats. Not this one. It was the townhouse of some of the local wealthy aristocrats who never used it. Well apart from their daughter who was in the sixth form at Cheltenham Ladies Collage.

The rider removed their helmet and shook out their chin-length brown hair. An elven face, a certain mischievous twinkle in her hazel eyes. Charlotte Numan shook out her helmet hair, and pushed it back up behind her bandanna, and examined herself in the mirror above an antique welsh dresser. Lesley Fortescue was in Chuck’s year and let her live here rent-free in one of the seven surplus bedrooms. Chuck liked the peace and quiet to think, and the space and privacy to conduct her somewhat curious extracurricular studies without the scrutiny and interruptions of dorm matrons or teachers.

Chuck hung up her leathers and paced through the large empty home. in her big warm Thundercats logo socks. Wearing a Suzi Quattro t-shirt over her base layer. Les was busy with some netball practice or other in the school gym, The house was all hers until later this evening. Les’ father had bought her an Amiga 1000 for a recent birthday, The computer was lightning fast. So useful for any number of computational tasks. She turned the large series of white boxes that dominated the otherwise book-lined study and eventually signed into her account. She turned to a small Japanese television set depositing a tape with the tabs removed into a top loader VCR. Old Music videos recorded off-air began to play, Suzi Quatro, Joan Jet and the Runaways. The Amiga loadded it’s OS. Dialled for network access, and then multiple notifications from her bulletin board system popped up. Someone really wanted to talk to her.

What trouble had her kid brother gotten into now? Was the Spitfire Incident and being expelled from Cheltenham College, across town, not trouble enough for the next several decades or even a lifetime? She missed having him in the same town. It could be isolating sometimes. They were just a couple of kids from Coventry, normal compared to all these minor royals, and aristocrats they rubbed shoulders with. They’d only been sent here because their grandfather had been concerned for their education, he wanted stability for them not moving from base to base and posting to posting with their father's regiment.

Chuck sat in front of the glow of the screen connected via DSL and opened the message board she and her brother used to communicate. What with the time difference and their parent's and grandfather’s increased scrutiny, particularly of John’s criminal tendencies. They had decided to change things up. Technology was the answer. An unlisted number for the BBS known only by the two of them and individual log-ins and passwords.

*Glenbrook is getting even more weird, I wish I could come home, but there’s something going on at Dad’s work. Now it’s gotten deadly. I’m going to tell you everything, and hope that you’ll believe me. I promise I’m not cracking up.*

Chuck sat back and raised her eyebrows at her comment about things getting deadly, as the first paragraph arrived on the monitor.

*A kid we go to school with, a bit of a Jock jerk showed up as like a Kaled from Doctor Who, but in a TV a mate of mine had picked up from the salvage yard. He wasn’t a human anymore, looked like one of David Cronenberg's wet dreams, we didn’t know he was a kid like us, we thought it was here to kill us, for our snooping. So we tried to defend ourselves. Could have easily been a rage-filled creature escaped from one of the bio labs at the facility. It could have ill intent. So we armed ourselves.*

Of course, her Brother could never turn down an opportunity to fashion some form of deadly weapon in the name of personal defence. He could, and would fashion an explosive on a similar level to Gelignite in most domestic kitchens if the need arose. The case of the phoney heir had required an explosive climax, and that safe would have taken days to crack. Anyway back to Jhonny’s tale of mystery and suspense.

*Eventually, the creature revealed itself to us, apologies for his behaviour towards my weird karate-addicted chum. I’d hoped it was a turning point. He wanted to get back to a certain major electronics retailer off main street, we didn’t partially want to drag a monster through town, even this town. So my buddies tried to convince him/it to come back to the old building we hang out in, then we could smuggle him to where he needed to be. I got a bit carried away trying to work out how I could give the TV the voiced module capability from my Commodore.*

Yeah that checked out Chuck thought to herself, if there was a mechanical or technological element to any of their proper joint investigations her brother would get obsessed by it. He lacked the clarity sometimes to see the whole picture, that’s where she came in.

*I’m not sure what we did to make the monster all squirley, my mate whose TV it/he destroyed was still pretty pissed. But TV monster Jock he decided to turn his tendrils to grand theft auto, and skurried off and peeled out of there on the world’s fastest chicken, instead of waiting to take a ride in the coffin. I tried to stop it and it would have been pretty badass but I ended up getting thrown off. So we end up giving chase on pushbikes, but we knew where the creature was headed. Not that my pals should really show their faces around thereafter “winning” their NES there a while ago by deception.*

Jailbirds of a feather, she shook her head. Her brother wasn’t a bad kid. He just got carried away. He didn’t run with the wrong crowd or any of those other tired cliches. The younger kids he hung out with seemed nice, the older kids from auto shop too.

*Things go from bad to worse when we arrive on the scene, at the strip mall. The major electronics store was abandoned and has closing down sale signs, place was fully stocked, and all the doors are unlocked the back office that was empty. Then the Monster kid finds a secret subterranean lab, with … get this …his body, his human body in like suspended animation in some tube there. So we try and save him, get him back in his body.*

So this is when the body came into it. What were they up to in Rhode Island taking people's consciousness out of their bodies? They could do some amazing things over there. Like the nanobots that had repaired her own heart. Then she had heard the rumours via John of all the hideous experiments being conducted on an unwitting populace. Then she had looked into the stuff on the more fringe yet still public conspiracy bulletin boards online.

*My mate whose TV it was, gets a bit carried away. Somehow gets the idea in his head that breaking the tank will save our guy. Long story short it doesn’t. We try and perform CPR, there’s an advanced defibrillator thing there so I try to use it to shock his heart back into rhythm. It feels like an age, while one of my mates is doing the chest compressions then I try to shock him. Eventually, we have to give up. The Monster is gone. We can’t find a single slimy tendrils mark to show it existed, and the kid still has no pulse.*

Now a very dead body. Jhonny he might act like he’s mature for his age but this sort of thing wasn’t a thing a fifteen-year-old should have to deal with.

*My buddy the track star, who’s tried to be the voice of reason throughout this takes one for the team and calls the cops, he insists the rest of us make ourselves scarce. That they’re not going to give him grief before the big track meet or whatever. I’m reluctant to leave him to face this on his own, but we have a few other choices. We could have gone to see some shady guy with a limp and shitty dress sense up at the Loop, but then Dad gets even more involved in this than he already is. Did I do the right thing? A kid is dead, he may have been no angel in life but he didn’t deserve to die.*

How was an elder sister supposed to respond to this? John was supposed to be keeping out of trouble in that quiet little New England town, not blundering into cases of potential corporate manslaughter. Her brother needed answers, justice for the dead boy’s family. Knowing that he would feel just as she did. What advice could she possibly give him from thousands of miles away? Something was very rotten in the town of Glenbrook and she was probably the only adult that could believe a word of it. John wasn’t creative enough to create such a bizarre narrative. He was the simple one, the one who could enjoy life for its simple pleasures. Didn’t spend his days obsessing about what drives the criminal mind. Not the way she did. Not puttering about the attic space over in the garage laying down newspaper to study blood spatter using pigs' blood. Chuck was supposed to be the odd sibling, the one obsessed with crime and justice. Now her brother was embroiled in what could be the case of the century.