This Machine Kills (27 page)

Part 3

"All of you cowboys, fight for your land."

Woody Guthrie

Chapter 21

   When he woke it was dark, not just the dark of night but pitch-black. After a few long seconds when his eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the blackness, panic set in. Taylor couldn’t get the thought out of his head that he had lost his sight as a result of the beating he had taken. It was only when he felt a gentle pressure against his nose, did he realise he had been blindfolded. He tried to work out what time of day it could have been; he had no clue how long he had been asleep. It may have been hours but could just as easily have been days.

   The room he was in was cold, so it was either night or he was being held in some underground basement where the warmth of the summer did not penetrate. Judging from the smell of damp and mildew that infiltrated his nostrils, he thought it was the latter. He hugged the thin blanket that had been thrown over him tighter to his body but he was still cold. They could have given him a shirt, he thought. Then again, at least he was still alive.

   When he was asleep, he had again dreamt of walking along the beach’s white sands with Charlotte. This time he’d had trouble imagining what she looked like. In the dream, her face kept morphing with that of his mother, until in the end he could not remember either of their true images. All he could see was this new hybrid woman that shared both of their looks. As he stared at her, she would subtly change and adopt more or less of each of the women’s features. The dream had unnerved him and he’d woken in a cold sweat.

    Taylor became aware of a rustling noise that may or may not have been nearby.

   “Doyle?”

   Hopefully whoever had taken him prisoner had taken the boy too and not given him the same treatment as Skinner and Lennox.

   “Sarge?”

   He breathed a sigh of relief, “Are you ok?”

   “I’m fine… I think.”

   His voice sounded distant, like he was in another room. Taylor felt a cold chill against the top of his aching neck and realised that he had been sleeping against a wall. He sat up slowly, using his legs to push him further up the wall until he was upright. The change of position caused his head to scream out in pain, making the frequent hangovers he experienced feel pleasant in comparison. Not only were his ribs in agony but so too were all the muscles that surrounded them as he tried to summon their help to keep him vertical. He brought his knees up and dug his feet into the ground to help stabilise him.

   “What happened?” he asked when he finally settled in a position of relative comfort.

   “After you blacked out, a group of hostiles appeared and brought us to this place. I was blindfolded but I’m pretty sure we were walking south. It must have been a good ten-minutes before we got here.”

   “How did they get me here?”

   “They carried you, they even managed to carry Lennox.”

   “Lennox is here too?”

   “That’s right Taylor. Didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily did you?”

   Lennox sounded even further away than Doyle was. Despite the distance, Taylor couldn’t fail to hear the pain in his voice.

   “How badly are you hurt?” he asked, catching himself off-guard.

   “What the fuck do you care?”

   Even though the sneaky son-of-a-bitch had tried to kill him, he did care. Lennox was one of his men.

   “So you finally plucked up the balls to take me out,” he said, changing tact, “I wonder whose idea that was?”

   “I only wished Rudy had persuaded us to do it years ago,” Lennox answered, “we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of your bullshit.”

   “Speaking of Rudy,” Taylor said, sounding friendly, “I saw how he left you for dead back there. You really know how to pick your friends.”

   “Fuck Rudy,” Lennox snapped, “fuck you, and fuck those assholes who killed Skinner.”

   His voice grew tender; “They didn’t need to do that… he never did them any harm.”

   None of them said anything else for a long time; it was like their minds had turned to thoughts of what was going to happen to them.

   It was Doyle who eventually voiced their concerns, “What do you think they’ll do to us?”

   Although his voice remained composed, Taylor could detect the fear in him. It reminded him of Doyle’s first tour with the unit, when he had doubted the new recruit’s abilities. It made him realise that even though Doyle had more than proved him wrong, he was still a kid.  He shouldn’t have been there; stuck in a dark basement in the middle of the Old-Town, clinging to the hope he wasn’t going to be put down like some dumb animal.

    “I don’t know what they want with us,” Taylor said, speaking not just to reassure Doyle but to try and distract himself from the pain.

   “But if they wanted us dead, we would be by now. Let’s just play things cool and we should all get out of this in one piece.”

   Taylor heard a sarcastic laugh coming from Lennox’s direction.

   “You’re so full of shit Taylor, you can’t even be honest with the kid now. Not even at the end. Listen to me Doyle…”

   When Lennox began speaking again, the sarcasm was gone from his voice; he had now adopted the tone of concern.

  “I know we shit on you back there and that was wrong, but now, you need to believe what I’m saying. They’re probably going to torture us to find out what we know about the Shepherd… After that, once they believe you’re not lying to them they’ll kill us… Don’t try and be brave, don’t let them do that to you for the sake of it. Just tell them what they want to know. It’ll be easier that way.”

   Taylor could feel himself growing angry at Lennox’s scare-mongering tactics. Why would he try and destroy the boy’s hope? It may have been the only thing he had left.

   “Don’t listen to him Doyle, you’ll be fine, I promise.”

   “Bullshit,” Lennox yelled back, “you need to stop lying to him… Let me tell you something Doyle, I know that your precious Sargent likes to make out that he’s so much better than the rest of us, but it’s all bullshit. He’s no better than the rest of the team, in fact the fucker’s worse, much worse. He just likes to pretend he’s a saint, that’s all.”

   “Shut-up Lennox!” Taylor shouted.

   “No Taylor, you fucking shut-up for once. Why don’t you tell him what sort of cold-hearted bastard you really are?  Then we’ll see how much he thinks of you,” Lennox took a sharp increase of breath at the stabbing pain in his gut.

   When nothing else was said, Taylor relaxed. Perhaps Doyle would believe in him enough to not bring up Lennox’s accusations.

   A cold tingle ran down his spine when Doyle finally spoke, “Sarge, what’s he talking about?”

   Taylor thought about feigning ignorance but it was too late, and he was too tired and in too much pain to lie. Instead, for the first time in five years, he began to tell the truth.

   “It happened when we were in Canada… Officially the war had already finished before I even got there, but defeating the army was only the start of it. Trying to suppress the people was a whole different ball game.”

   Taylor was surprised to find it easier to talk about than he’d expected. Maybe it had something to do with being blindfolded and alone in a room where no one could see him own up to his shame. He wasn’t a religious man, but he could see
now why confession
was carried out in a small dark room where the priest could only hear but not see the person pouring out their guilt.

   “When we first got there it was much simpler, back then the resistance movement were hiding away in the towns and villages. SecForce usually sent in the jets to bomb the shit out of them first, then we’d go in and mop up the survivors. But when they realised that wasn’t going to work for them, they gave up the towns and took to the hills and forests. That’s where they attacked us from in their raids. It was classic guerrilla warfare and it fucking well worked.”

   Taylor tried to straighten up from his slouched position, “I tell you something Doyle, their army may not have been up to much, but the rebels, those fucking Canucks, I’ve never seen a tougher bunch. They hid out there all winter in the freezing cold. We tried everything to flush them out but nothing would budge them. We napalmed the forests, poisoned their water sources, but nothing worked. They knew their own land and knew how to live off it, nothing we did seemed to have any impact. They didn’t even have sophisticated weaponry, they’d just come down and set a tent full of rations alight or pour sand in a few of the vehicle’s petrol tanks… Troopers were too afraid to walk around the camps in case they were shot by the fucking hunting rifles they were fighting us with.”

   “Why don’t you just skip to the good bit,” Lennox pushed, “he’s gonna love it.”

   Taylor ignored him.

   “We’d been there for nearly eighteen months when we got intelligence that a group of rebels had set up base in the mountains not far from where my unit was based. I was in charge of leading the attack and it was a job none of my men wanted. They were cold and tired from constant fighting and the last thing we needed was to go back into the hills... We attacked the camp at night and for once we seemed to have the upper hand on them. This time they hadn’t been expecting us. That was before one of my guys walked straight through a trip wire and both his legs were ripped off in the explosion… I’ll never forget his face as he tried to crawl towards me. He wanted me to save him but I couldn’t. He was a kid even younger than you and I left him there to die alone. We had to attack before we lost momentum.”

   Taylor took a deep breath before speaking again, “After two hours of fighting, we finally managed to subdue them. Of the twenty men
I started with, only nine were still with me at the end… At first we thought the camp was nothing more than a few tents but then one of my men found an entrance to an underground tunnel. I couldn’t believe it when I saw what was down there; it looked like a giant rabbit warren… We’d already killed eighteen hostiles and took three prisoners, but when we got underground, we realised that there were far more of them than we’d ever anticipated. There must have been eight or nine older men in the tunnels along with twenty or thirty women and children. They were cold and hungry and scared of what my men were going to do to them but I didn’t give a shit. I had just watched half of my unit be massacred and all I could think about was revenge. My boys wanted blood and I wasn’t going to stop them… They killed the prisoners and the other men first before turning on the women. Some of them were raped, some mutilated, but all were eventually killed… After that they finished off the kids… No one really wanted to hurt the children but we couldn’t let them go either. They’d seen too much…. We left them in the tunnels, then when we went back above ground each of the men took a grenade and threw it back into the hole. That way no one knew who actually killed them… The explosion was so powerful it felt like there was an earthquake going on beneath us. We never heard any screams so I don’t know if they died instantly or if they suffered first… not hearing anything definitely made it easier.”

   Taylor stopped speaking and the silence that followed pressed down on his chest, making his ribs hurt even more.

   He could sense Doyle preparing to speak long before he actually did.

“Sarge? Did-”

   “No, it’s like Lennox said,” Taylor had already anticipated his words,   “I’m far too good for that. I just stood back and let it go on. If I wanted to, I could have stopped it but I didn’t, I just let my men do whatever they wanted. I didn’t even have the guts to throw one of my own grenades in the hole so I could share their guilt with them. That’s who I am Doyle, a real hero.”

   “What happened?” Doyle asked.

   “A few weeks later I confessed. They couldn’t even trust me to keep my mouth shut. I implicated all my men just so I didn’t have to feel guilty anymore. SecForce covered it up of course… they always do.”

   Taylor sniffed, “That’s why I ended up back here. They knew I’d crack if they left me in Canada so they brought me back to work the Old-Town; somewhere they thought I wouldn’t cause any more trouble.”

   When Taylor said no more, Lennox saw his cue, “So there you go  Doyle. That’s what your brave leader is all about… What do you think of him now?”

   The question was punctuated by a grunt of pain.

   After a long pause, Doyle gave his half-hearted answer, “Shut-up Lennox.”

   Taylor could hear his voice was soaked with disappointment.

   A shuffling noise coming from somewhere in his immediate vicinity drew Taylor’s attention away from the others. It was close, much closer than Doyle was to him. He suddenly became sure there was someone else in the room with him and once the idea had taken hold, the more obvious it became. Taylor started to feel like this other person had been there the whole time, listening to his outpouring of guilt. He heard the shuffling noise again.

   “Who’s there,” he whispered, not wanting to alert Doyle to his fears.

   He now clearly heard footsteps walking towards him.