This Machine Kills

by Steve Liszka

  “What’s your name?”

  The girl remained silent as her focus shifted from Taylor to the figure that had silently followed him into the room.

  “Well, well,” Rudy said, “looks like we’ve got ourselves a girly terrorist. I gotta say Sarge, she’s a whole lot better looking than that asshole you boys took care of outside.”

  “I told you to stay put,” Taylor snarled as he looked over his shoulder.

  If Rudy recognised the gravity in his voice, he chose not to act on it.

  “He wasn’t an asshole,” the girl said quietly, “he was my father.”

  “Yeah,” Rudy shrugged, “and he was also a fucking terrorist, just like you are, you murdering little bitch.”

  The girl laughed, silencing him, “You kill your own people, but it’s us who are terrorists.”

  Rudy laughed right back, “You’re not my people. You’re nothing to me.”

  Taylor grabbed him by the shoulder; aware that Rudy’s words were destroying any chance he may have had of gaining information from the girl,

  “That’s it! Get the fuck out, I’ll speak to you later.”

  Rudy retreated towards the door with a shit-eating grin on his face.

  “No!” the girl shouted, “Let him stay. I want him to hear this.”

  As she spoke, Lennox and Doyle edged into the room, not wanting to miss out. At first the girl could only sit there, staring at her captors with a burning contempt in her eyes that made Taylor want to look away.

  “Look at you,” she eventually said, “standing there with your muscles and guns and uniforms.”

  She wiped the snot away from her nose, “I bet you think you’re real tough guys don’t you? Big and strong and able to kick anyone’s ass right?”

  Taylor’s stare halted any ideas his men may have had of answering her.

  “Well let me tell you something about what being strong really means,” despite the tears forming in her eyes, the girl managed to cling to her composure,

  “That man out there, that asshole as you call him, was stronger than the four of you put together.”

  Taylor began to speak, “I’m sorry about your father but...”

  The girl kept on talking like he wasn’t there,

  “He brought me up on his own. Can you imagine how difficult that must have been out here.”

  She shook her head and laughed, realising the futility of what she was asking,

  “My father gave his life for me. He made sure I had enough food to eat even if it meant he went without. He protected me from those piece-of-shit ferals and all the other men who wanted a piece of his little girl’s ass. He even hid me away when you were rounding up slaves for your factories. My father kept me safe through it all, no matter what... That’s what being strong means.”

  “But you,” she looked them up and down in disgust, the tears rolling down her face, “you’re not strong, you’re just stupid, ignorant little boys.”

  Rudy removed his helmet, slipping it underneath his arm, “Hate to interrupt you girly, but your old man don’t look so strong now.”

  “Shut up Rudy!” Taylor snapped, “I’m not telling you again.”

  He looked at the girl, imagining her all made-up and working in one of the City’s overpriced boutiques. With her elfin good looks she would have fitted in perfectly.

  “Why did you and your father attack us today?”

  She smiled up at him before continuing, “The other thing about my father is that he believed in something worthwhile. He believed in something worth dying for.”

  The girl’s voice went quiet, “He believed in the Shepherd.”

  “The Shepherd,” Taylor asked, instantly seizing on the information, “whose that?”

  Her eyes darted from one man to the next as she disregarded his question.

  “Tell me something,” she asked, “what do you believe in?”

  When none of them answered, she sat up, suddenly sounding more confident,

  “I hope there are people in that city of yours that love you as much as I loved my father.”

  “Really,” Rudy asked, “and why’s that?”

  As she spoke the blanket that was wrapped around her fell away from the girl’s body,

  “Because I want them to feel the same pain I have when they realise they’re never going to see you again.”

  Taylor looked down to see that the fallen blanket had revealed an ammo belt strapped across her chest loaded with grenades. Before any of them had a chance to raise their weapons, the girl had removed one of the pins and was waving it at them; a weak smile painted on her face.

  “This machine kills innocence,” she said in barely more than a whisper.

  Taylor spun on his heels toward the door, “Go!”

  Together with Rudy they launched themselves at Lennox and Doyle, who in simultaneously trying to get out of the door had almost managed to wedge themselves in. They fell out of the doorway in a bungled heap, scrambling over each other to get as far down the corridor as possible.

  The force of the explosion threw Taylor and Rudy through the air, propelling them clean out of the entrance of the building. Doyle and Lennox, who had just got out in time, watched as their colleagues crashed to the earth with a thud. Taylor, who had taken the worst of it, lay badly winded on the ground gasping for air. When the blinding light at the back of his eyes finally subsided, he summoned the energy to roll onto his back, then slowly to his knees.

  Bleeding from multiple minor gashes on his body, Rudy struggled to his feet and limped over to his fallen leader. Like an injured child, Taylor reached out to him but Rudy refused his hand, looking down at him like something nasty he had stepped on,

  “And you wonder,” he said to his boss, “why we treat them the way we do?”

  They sat in silence on the way back to the City. Due to there being no storage space in the Rhino, and Taylor not wanting the body in with the other men, reminding them of their own mortality, Rogers had been put into a body bag and strapped to the front of Skinner’s turret. As they pulled up to the perimeter of the City, he thought of the macabre sight the troopers on duty would have been exposed to.

  While their identity cards were scanned at the checkpoint, Taylor slid open his viewing-hatch and looked out at the construction site that lay all around them. Behind the wire mesh fence that currently acted as the City’s border, a huge crane was lowering the next section of the wall into place. Workmen waited impatiently for it to land so they could weld and bolt it before moving on to the next piece. They were working for a bonus and needed to hustle if they were to maximise their potential earnings.

  In a remarkable feat of engineering, the entire city perimeter was being walled-in by the huge slabs of concrete. The Israeli company that ClearSkies had brought in to build the wall had been more than good to their word. In the previous day’s newsbites they had stated it would be ready in six weeks, nearly a month ahead of their original one-year prediction.

  Once the wall was complete, the City’s inhabitants would finally be cut off from the Old-Town for good. Taylor only hoped that there would be no final complications and willed the time to pass as fast as possible.

  As the gates to the City opened, a voice rang out in the team’s ear-pieces, finally breaking the sombre mood.

  “Hey Lennox!” Spike shouted.

  “What?” Lennox grunted back.

  “You owe me fifty dollars, fuck-head. I told you my balls never lied.”

  Chapter 5

  Listening to the light-hearted conversations taking place around him, it occurred to Taylor that along with the dirt and grime of the Old-Town, the team were also washing away their collective memories of Rogers. Everyone’s spirits had lifted immediately upon entering the shower block. By the time they had rinsed the soap off their bodies, they were laughing and joking as if Rogers had never existed. Whether his men were doing it intentionally or not, there seemed to be something ritualistic, almost bordering on the religious, in the wa
y the water cleansed them of the images they had witnessed barely an hour before.

  As they were drying off, Lennox and Skinner gently poked fun at Doyle’s slight body. They both looked like they could snap him in two with ease.

  “When are you gonna start hitting the gym with us?” Lennox asked, “you need to beef up if you want to make it on this team.”

  Still dripping with water, Rudy approached Lennox and rested his hand on his shoulder,

  “If I remember right it was you who was breathing out of your ass on top of that pile of rocks today. You did fine kid,” he winked at Doyle then headed towards his locker.

  “My cardio may not be great,” Lennox justified himself to Doyle, “but there’s no one in the unit who can lift as much weight as I can. Ain’t that right Skinner?”

  Skinner nodded solemnly.

  “You know what that is, don’t you Lennox?” Spike shouted from the shower, “Mong strength, all retards have got it.”

  Lennox’s brain worked overtime as it searched for the response that never materialised.

  Standing next to each other with only their towels wrapped around them, it was possible to see just how big the two Goliaths of the team really were. Although broader, Lennox was at least six inches shorter than Skinner and much stockier in build. He had the shape of an Olympic power-lifter.

  Skinner however, looked more like a body builder, his frame packed with watery, bloated muscle. The huge veins that ran the length of his biceps were almost as thick as a man’s finger. Without his armour on, the full extent of his body art became evident. The patterning on his arms continued up his chest and right the way down his massive back; the result of many hours under the needle. But even combined with his deep brown tan, the tattoos could not disguise the painful-looking acne covering his body and the shallow, pitted scars that had once been the same thing. These were the result of years of cheap steroid abuse that had helped him gain the look he’d craved so badly.

  Leaving the showers, Taylor walked past the men and headed towards the lockers where he was met by the sight of Rudy buttoning up his jeans. His face may have been weathered, but Rudy’s body could easily have been that of a man half his age. Even though he smoked like a chimney and Taylor had never seen him take part in any form of exercise, Rudy’s slim, sinewy physique looked like it belonged to a man who had spent his life digging ditches and carrying out other tasks of hard labour. Minor lacerations that Rudy paid no attention to, now peppered his face and body. Taylor had been lucky, with the exception of a dull ache in his back, he had escaped the explosion injury-free.

  “You know what that shit reminded me of?” Rudy half-whispered so only Taylor could hear him.

  The usual vitriol he spoke to him with had disappeared. This was a very different Rudy from the one who had spent the morning antagonising his superior.

  “The fucking Uprisings,” he said, not waiting for Taylor to answer.

  Taylor patted himself dry with his towel, “Except there were thousands of them then, not just two.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Rudy went on, “it was the way that crazy bitch was willing to kill herself just to take a few of us out. It was how those assholes who followed Billy Nothing used to act.”

  “Yeah,” Taylor agreed, willing to bow to Rudy’s superior knowledge on the subject. Those things had taken place before he and his friends had signed up for SecForce. In fact, it was the Uprisings that led to Taylor leaving the Old-Town and permanently moving to the City. For that, he would always be grateful to them.

  Rudy ran a comb through his thick, grey hair, “You think this shit’s going to start getting heavy again?”

  “If they were going to try something,” Taylor answered, “they should have done it before the wall was up. It’s too late now for heroics.”

  “Let’s hope so. If Rogers was right about SecForce keeping us on, I’m looking forward to earning my money the easy way.”

  Taylor looked around the room for eavesdroppers, “Well it’s not like we don’t deserve a bit of down-time, you boys have had to take more shit than most.”

  Rudy pushed his locker closed, “Perhaps they’ll give us the Leisureplex as our new stomping ground. It’ll be bikinis and cocktails all round.”

  Taylor laughed, “Yeah and with our luck we’ll be guarding the men’s steam room.”

  As they continued to dress in silence, Taylor glanced at the mirror on the inside of his locker. He may have been indifferent about his looks, (he could at best be described as rugged rather than handsome), but he couldn’t help admire the reflection he saw of his own body. He was athletic looking rather than bulky and packed with functional lean muscle, every inch of it there for a reason. His torso looked like it had been sculpted with a chisel. What he really prized himself on though, was that unlike his muscle-bound colleagues, he knew exactly how to use his strength and power; years of training had taught him well.

  The locker room grew louder as the banter between the men steadily increased. Taylor was glad to hear them sounding happy, they had just suffered the first fatality in the Old-Town for months. He was surprised to see Doyle look so carefree as he laughed at Spike’s dirty jokes.

  As the laughter from Spike’s punch-line delivery died down, the high spirited boy yelled across the room to Taylor, “Hey Sarge, you watching the fights tonight?”

  Doyle’s words caused the noise in the room to quickly die down.

  Lennox looked at him and shook his head, “Don’t you know dude? Taylor don’t do prison matches.”

  Now they were off-duty, the team was free to address their leader by his name.

  Doyle stared back at Lennox blankly.

  “You do know who he is don’t you?” Lennox asked.

  “Yeah, of course. When I told my father I was joining your team,” he said, addressing Taylor, “he made me sit down and watch some of your fights. My dad was a big fan of yours.”

  Taylor smiled, accepting the compliment.

  “It was really funny to see you in those old files, you looked really young back then.”

  Spontaneous laughter broke out in the room.

  “What?” Doyle asked innocently.

  “Old man Taylor!” shouted Skinner.

  Spike was laughing so hard at Doyle’s unintentional slight, he could barely catch his breath.

  “Nice, rookie,” he finally managed to say, “I’m getting to like you more and more.”

  Doyle looked to Taylor apologetically, “I didn’t mean anything.”

  Taylor shook his head, trying to conceal his amusement, “And there I was thinking that you were going to become a valued member of the team.”

  “But Sarge…” Doyle’s voice was drowned out by the other men’s laughter.

  Skinner patted him on the back, “Don’t make it worse for yourself son, you’re in the doghouse now.”

  Taylor finally smiled, letting Doyle know no offence had been taken.

  “So Taylor,” Lennox said over the noise, “we thought we’d hit the City tonight and give Rogers a send-off. You up for it?”

  Taylor pulled his T-shirt over his shoulders, “I’d love to, but I’ve got something I need to do.”

  Spike jumped in before anyone could reply.

  “Hang-on Lennox, I thought you said you and Skinner were polishing each other’s helmets tonight?”

  Skinner let out a nervous laugh as Lennox dropped his eyes to the floor, avoiding the gazes of the team. It was a well-known secret that when they were in basic training together, Skinner and Lennox had become more than a little friendly with each other. They weren’t the only ones either, it had always amazed Taylor how only a few months away from their wives and girlfriends could quickly send a group of red-blooded men into each other’s arms. When they went back to their normal lives, these brief relationships were usually swept under the carpet but in Skinner and Lennox’s case, it was hard to tell if they had altogether given up on their feelings for each other.

  “Yo
u’re not saying you’re too good to have a drink with your team are you Sarge?” Rudy asked, undeterred by Spike’s attempts at distraction.

  Taylor shook his head, “No Rudy, I’m not.”

  He had wondered how long it would take his sparring partner to get back to his old self.

  “Then what’s more important than toasting a man who died serving beneath you?”

  Taylor sighed, “If you must know, I’ve got to go and tell Rogers’ wife and kid that he won’t be coming home tonight.”

  He picked up his bag and headed for the door, feeling guilty that his last comment would hang in the room like a bad smell.

  “I’ll see you all in a few days,” he said, grateful in the knowledge that his tour of duty had finally ended.

  As he walked down the corridor, Taylor heard heavy footsteps chasing him. He turned to see Spike approaching; he was red-faced and breathing heavily.

  “Thanks for walking so fast,” Spike panted when he finally caught his breath, “now I’m going to need another shower when I get home.”

  Taylor laughed, “Have you ever considered exercising?”

  Spike wiped the sweat from his forehead, “Nah, fuck that man, exercise will kill you, take my word for it.”

  If there was anyone who shouldn’t have been working in the security forces it was Spike. He was lazy, undisciplined (he often arrived late for duty with egg yolk or other food stuff staining the front of his uniform) and hated all forms of violence. Unfortunately for him he also had a terminal gambling addiction. When the debts he ran up lost him his wife, job and home, it was only his heavy goods vehicle licence that got him a driver’s post with SecForce and prevented him being permanently expelled to the Old-Town.

  “Listen boss, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job…”

  It was how Spike always began when he wanted to tell Taylor how to do his job.

  “I know they’re assholes an’ all but don’t cut yourself off from the team. Look at what happened today for fuck’s sake. You need to trust the man watching your back.”