This Machine Kills

by Steve Liszka

  “You ok?” he asked.

  Taylor tried to nod but it only made his head hurt, “I think so.”

  “You’re a lucky boy, I thought you were toast when that bomb went off.”

  Despite the bullets flying around his head, Warchild let out a laugh, “I swear it was the first time I’ve seen a man fly.”

  “You should have left me,” Taylor said, “that’s what I would have done.”

  Warchild ignored him.

  He raised himself onto his elbows just as his ears began to ring.

  “Where’s Jacob?”

  “I think he overtook us, you’ve been out for a little while.”

  Taylor rolled onto his front, pushing himself up onto his knees, “We need to move, now.”

  Warchild helped him complete the journey to his feet and together at a much slower pace, they pushed on towards the City. His head was hazy but apart from that he couldn’t feel any real injuries other than those he’d already sustained over the past few days.

  Up ahead, they could see fighting breaking out as the men clashed with the guards at the perimeter fence. On the ramparts of the wall he could almost make out the faces of the snipers as they took out the invaders below. When one of them spotted the two of them approaching, he could do nothing but watch as the sniper turned his sights onto the slow moving targets. They were sitting ducks, with no hope of surviving at such a range.

  The grimace, in readiness of being shot, was wiped from Taylor’s face when an explosion occurred on the wall, inches from where the sniper stood. It had done the wall no harm; it was only a grenade being fired from a home made rocket launcher, but some of the shrapnel had hit the sniper. Taylor watched as the man screamed and clutched his face before sinking out of sight. Before they moved forward again, he had time to see one of Jacob’s men lower the crude weapon fashioned from drainage piping down from his shoulder. The man grinned at him displaying a mouthful of rotten teeth before abandoning the launcher and pushing forward.

  By the time they got to the fence, the battle that had taken place there had already finished. All the guards had been killed; taking with them so many of the enemy, Taylor and Warchild had difficulty in climbing over the mountain of bodies. The checkpoint itself had been completely destroyed, leaving a twisted pile of metal and wire in its place. They were only twenty feet away from the open, steel doors when Warchild dropped to the ground, clutching at his leg. A cry of pain alerted Taylor to his friend’s situation.

  “Come on,” he yelled, trying to manoeuvre his head under Warchild’s armpit in a vain attempt to lift him. He had a hole the size of a golf ball in his leg where the bullet had exited,

  “We need to keep moving.”

  Warchild pushed him away with a strength he should not have still possessed, “Just go, I’ll see you inside.”

  Taylor took a step closer to the injured man, “I won’t leave you. You didn’t give up on me.”

  “Go,” Warchild shouted, “I’ll be right behind…You’re not the only one with a score to settle.”

  Without saying anything else, Taylor turned to face the steel doors once more. He felt the energy return to his body as he broke first into a jog, then an all-out sprint as he launched himself at the entrance to the City. Beyond the bodies that lay in his way, he could see the polished windows of high-rise buildings reflect the firefight that was taking place in the sky around him.

  Climbing over the corpses of a guard and prisoner locked in mortal combat, he finally made it through the doors. He knew he should have kept moving, but once inside he had to stop and take in the bedlam that had been dragged into his once perfect world. That was when it hit him; they were inside and there was no going back.

  Chapter 30

  In the past five years Taylor had succeeded in pushing the memory of Canada into a hidden part of his brain where he had managed to keep it locked down. Now, for the second time in a matter of days, he was reminded of the massacre that had delivered him back to Britain.

  It was hard to connect the carnage that surrounded him with the place that, until a few days before, had been his home. Hope City; the oasis of civilisation in a desert of hostility, had been overrun by the barbarians at its door. Not in the food lines in the Old-Town, not even during Billy Nothing’s Uprising, had he seen anything like this before.

  Virtually everyone in the City had come down to the southern gates to watch Freddie Milton press the button that would bring the doors to a close. It was the biggest event that had taken place in the City for years. Now, those thousands of terrified people trampled over each other in a desperate attempt to flee back to their homes as the men from the Old-Town descended on them.

  Taylor watched as the prisoners attacked the citizens with a violence that shocked even him. One smartly dressed man was being hacked down with a machete by a deviant, who laughed as he separated his victim’s arm from the rest of the body. Close by, a woman was being held down and scalped by the prisoner who simultaneously raped her. A child, who most likely belonged to the woman, cried hysterically as she viewed the scene. The few guards left on the wall were firing at will at anyone below, regardless if they came from outside the City or not. The air filled with the smell of blood and gunsmoke as the battered bodies of men, women and children lay all around.

  A huge poster of a smiling Freddie Milton with the logo ‘Your city is finally free’ across the bottom, now sported a pair of devil horns and blacked out eyes. Written across it in thick red paint were the words ‘This Machine Kills’.

  Straight ahead of him, Taylor could see the raised stage from where Milton must have commenced proceedings. Gathered around a large red button that would have taken both hands to operate, stood a terrified group of men wearing their most expensive suits. Taylor recognised a small bald man who tried to cower behind a larger colleague as Joshua Rand, one of Milton’s top men, responsible for healthcare in the City.

  The reason why these people were so scared was evident. Below them, scores of intruders tried to scramble onto the stage to get at the executives. All that was preventing their success was a handful of SecForce troopers desperately swinging their truncheons with vicious force in a final attempt to keep them at bay. Captain Mason was gallantly leading the defence, and none brandished their weapons with such brutal but controlled aggression as he. As a man grabbed his leg, only to be knocked immediately unconscious by an almighty blow from his stick, Taylor imagined what a great photograph the scene would have made for Mason to hang on the wall of his office.

  When he had regained enough of his wits to consider where Milton must have been hiding, he was answered by the unmistakable noise of fast-rotating blades. He looked in the air to see Milton’s private helicopter flying dangerously close to the ground in the direction of the Hourglass, his home residence and place of safety.

  Sucking the air into his exhausted lungs, Taylor started running in the helicopter’s direction of travel. As most of the spectators had already fled for their lives, his route was relatively free of obstruction. Even if he had not known its location so well, it would have been impossible for him to not find Milton’s home. He only had to look up to the skyline to successfully plot his course to the tallest building in Hope City. An unmistakable trail of destruction lay before him, leaving him under no illusion just how serious the situation he was solely responsible for, really was.

  As he ran down the almost deserted road, distant and sometimes not so distant screams rang around the City. A middle aged man sprinted past him as his wife struggled to keep up with her brave protector, whilst a petrified woman who was fleeing some unknown terror, ran straight towards the danger at the gates. Other people just stood in the street, open-mouthed and in complete shock at what was happening to them.

  Approaching what was normally a busy junction, Taylor saw four men in prison overalls dragging one of the City’s security officers out of his car though the broken windscreen. He looked up to see that the traffic lights were red. The fucking idi
ot must have stopped rather than risk breaking the law. As the men set about their screaming victim, Taylor told himself that there was only one thing he needed to be concerned with, and that was Milton. Stopping for anything else wasn’t an option.

  His thoughts were broken by the sound of breaking glass coming from overhead. He stopped dead in his tracks just in time to see a few clear fragments hit the ground in front of him, quickly followed by the body of a young man. Taylor looked up at the monorail high above. The man must have been thrown out of the window or else decided to jump, knowing the fate about to befall him and the other passengers would be even worse. Continuing in pursuit, he tried to ignore the cries from above.

  He was only a few streets away from the Hourglass, and for the first time allowing himself to imagine what he was going to do to Milton, when another SecForce vehicle appeared from a side street and screeched to a halt in front of him. A young trooper jumped out of the driver’s seat, and with shaking hands pointed his pistol at Taylor, who could only sigh with disbelief. He had got so close, only to have his revenge ripped from him at the very end.

  “Put your hands in the air!” the boy shouted, his face soaked in sweat.

  Taylor slowly did as he was told.

  “Listen son,” he said, “you’ve got the wrong man, I’m just trying to get home.”

  He knew that if the kid recognised him, there was no way he could escape. As things stood, he would have been public enemy number one.

  The boy pushed his gun forwards, “Just shut up, and walk towards the car.”

  Taylor obeyed, he knew the kid wouldn’t need much of an excuse to shoot. He had only taken a couple of steps when the young trooper pressed his hand to the side of his head as he listened to a message being transmitted into his ear-piece. As quickly as he had appeared, and without saying another thing, the boy jumped back into the vehicle and sped off in the direction it had been pointing, leaving only a smell of burnt rubber in the air. Taylor watched the car as it flew down the narrow street. The driver was going too fast to notice the petrol bomb being thrown in his direction. It showered the car’s bonnet in flames after smashing against the windscreen. He didn’t wait around to see if the boy would make the right decision that would save his life or not.

  When he reached the base of the Hourglass, Taylor’s heart was beating like a hummingbird’s. He could hear nothing else except its accelerated pounding in his head. It wasn’t just from the exertion it had taken to get there, but more the anticipation of what was about to happen. As expected, the building had been put into emergency lockdown. Where glass windows would normally be displaying the luxurious lobby of the building, bombproof metal shutters had dropped from the eaves. Not even a Rhino driven at full-speed would be able to penetrate it.

  Fortunately, this was not a problem for Taylor. Apart from Milton, he was one of the few people in the City who knew the code to open the doors; it was Charlotte’s birthday. She had confessed it to him in one of their post-coital moments of honesty. After punching the numbers into the panel on the main door, he watched as the metal shutters slowly made their way back into their housings. When they finally disappeared out of sight, he spoke his name into the small box on the panel. Recognising the friendly voice as a trusted member of staff, the door opened allowing him to enter the lobby.

  Once in the building, Taylor walked straight to the lift and punched the button repeatedly in a wasted attempt to speed up its descent. As he waited for its arrival, he gazed at the china vase sitting on the mahogany table in front of him. In all the times he had been there before, he had never stopped to look at the piece.

  On the vase was a magnificent design of a Japanese warrior with one hand brandishing the holster of his sword as the other clutched its handle, poised to draw the weapon and attack some unseen enemy. In the background, a woman he assumed was the man’s wife, stood wringing her hands in concern. When he looked carefully, he saw a single tear running down her pale, white cheek. Taylor wondered how something so fragile could have survived for so long in such a chaotic world.

  “You know for someone who thinks he’s so smart,” he heard a familiar but unwelcome voice say, “you’re an extremely predictable motherfucker.”

  When Rudy stepped out of the shadows, the sarcastic grin he usually met Taylor with was nowhere to be seen. Instead, his assault rifle was aimed at the centre of his former Sergeant’s chest. As he turned to face him, Taylor bumped into the table, hearing the movement of the vase as it wobbled on its axis. He felt relief when there was no further sound of smashing china.

  “Look Rudy,” he said, holding his hands up passively, “I don’t care about you or anyone else. I just want Milton, that’s all.”

  Rudy took another step forward, “I don’t give a shit what you want, it’s what I want that matters, and what I want is to finish off what I started at the co-op. It’s your fault Skinner’s dead.”

  Taylor took a half step back, placing his hand behind him to steady the table he had backed into once more,

  “Don’t pretend you care,” he said, “I saw the way you abandoned Lennox when the bullets started flying. He’s dead too in case you were wondering.”

  Rudy shrugged, “Well now you get to join them.”

  “Fine,” Taylor said, his hand sliding slowly back along the table’s surface, “but if you’re going to kill me, at least let me be honest with you for once.”

  Rudy laughed, “Be my guest. It’s nice to see you’ve finally got the balls to come out with it.”

  Taylor gave him a tired smile, “You know something Rudy, in my time in this game I’ve seen a few things…worked with a few different people. But I swear to you, none of them, not even some of the real bastards I dealt with in Canada, were as big a cunt as you.”

  As Rudy chuckled, proud of the honour that was being bestowed on him, Taylor’s fingers continued to stretch back until they came into contact with the vase.

  “Compliments will get you nowhere.”

  “Let me finish,” Taylor cut back in, “because the thing about you is you’re not just a cunt, you’re the worst type of cunt.”

  Rudy laughed again, “That’s it, get it all out.”

  “And you want to know why?”

  “Do tell me,” Rudy encouraged him, “please.”

  “Because, despite all your whining about how much you hated working for me, you never had the balls to do anything about it except when you were pointing a gun at my head. You never had the guts to take me on did you? So you know what else that makes you?”

  Rudy shook his head, his face having lost some of its playfulness.

  “It makes you a bitch. A scared, little bitch who likes to run his mouth but never back it up. That’s why Spike could never take you seriously, he saw you for what you really are. A gutless fucking coward.”

  Taylor’s fingers were now stretched around the vase’s base.

  “Even now, when I’m all beaten up, you still haven’t got it in you to put your gun down and do things the right way. Now take your shot and get it over with, you fucking pussy.”

  He paused, then smiled, “Unless you fancy a shot at the title that is.”

  Taylor could see the turmoil running through Rudy’s head. Part of him wanted nothing more than to lay the gun on the floor and have it out with him in an old fashioned fight to the finish. The more rational side of his brain however, knew there was a chance there may still be some fight left in the wounded dog, and was happy to put him down with a bullet.

  Having created the necessary confusion, Taylor took his opportunity, and bringing his arm forward like a baseball pitcher, launched the vase at Rudy’s head. The hurled object travelled at speed but Rudy had seen it coming; moving his head so the vase smashed into hundreds of pieces against the wall behind him. Even though the shot had missed, it had created the opportunity for Taylor to close in on him before he could start firing.

  He threw himself at Rudy with all the speed he could generate but he was fr
actionally too slow; the other man had already got a shot off. Taylor screamed as the two collided, somehow managing to wrap his arms around Rudy’s neck. The bullet had entered his shoulder, shattering the bone before exiting his body. He had suffered injuries before but nothing like this, it felt like molten metal was being poured into the wound.

  Rudy got off another couple of rounds. The noise from the shots almost deafened Taylor but they had done him no further harm. Their bodies were crushed together in such a way that the rifle pressed against both of their chests, leaving the shots to rip through the ceiling. As Rudy struggled to free himself, Taylor knew he was in desperate trouble. Although he had his right arm around Rudy’s neck, it was now useless. He could feel his power ebbing away, not even being able to make a fist to clench the man’s clothing. All he could do was try to hang on as Rudy fought to shake him off. Knowing that he only had seconds to spare, Taylor leant in and sunk his teeth into Rudy’s nose.

  He bit down with all his might, feeling his teeth going first through skin and flesh, then bone and gristle. Rudy let out a high pitched wail that sounded like it had come more from an animal than a man, but instead of making him wilt, the pain only seemed to energise him. With a roar of fury he head-butted Taylor, then as he stumbled backwards, slammed the stock of the weapon into his face, knocking him to the floor.

  When his head cleared, Taylor looked up to see Rudy’s rifle pointing at him once more. Blood poured down either side of Rudy’s mouth, completely saturating his shirt. In the centre of his face were now two holes that had once been the inner recesses of his nostrils. Dangling from his upper lip, connected only by a thin strand of gristle, were the mangled remains of his nose.

  “Too slow, motherfucker,” he said, the blood making popping bubbles in his mouth as he spoke.

  “Yeah, well,” Taylor managed to say, “I got your nose didn’t I?”