This Machine Kills (5 page)

   Rudy’s message had made him pause for a second and rethink his strategy. As he weighed up his options, he didn’t notice the injured man step into the doorway. His rifle was aimed directly at Taylor.

   “Sarge, look out!” Doyle yelled.

   He turned in time to see the man take a burst of shots to his right side, spinning him onto the wall of the building. Even though his injuries were mortal, the man still tried to right himself and re-aim his weapon but Taylor had already released a burst of fire from his own rifle, hitting the enemy square in the chest and dropping him to his knees. The man, who Taylor could now see was well over fifty, gave him a quizzical look like he had no idea how come such a shitty thing was happening to him. Before collapsing onto his face, he let out a strangled sigh that may have been an attempt to ask why.

   Taylor glanced at Doyle, whose rifle now hung idly by his side. He tried to think of something to say but the look they shared said it all; yes, you did just save my life, and yes, killing does get easier.

   He broke from Doyle’s stare to pull the pin from the grenade he was holding and throw it deep into the building.

   “If I were you,” he said, “I’d get down.”

  With smoke still burning their eyes, they stepped over the debris into the entrance of the building. Turning off the narrow corridor, Taylor and Doyle ventured into the first apartment on their right, the force of the blast having blown the door of the unit clean off. Lennox and Rudy were doing the same thing to the apartments on the left. They were easy to search as there was nothing left in the rooms. With no wardrobes for the enemy to climb in or beds to hide behind, they were nothing but empty carcasses.

  After quickly going through the first of the tiny areas
they met back up with the others in the hallway.

   Rudy shook his head at Taylor, “It’s clean.”

   As Taylor and Doyle entered the second apartment, a sustained roar of gunfire ripped from the area Rudy and Lennox had just entered. As Taylor retreated back to the corridor, he saw Lennox lying on his back with Rudy on top of him. They looked like two beetles that had been flipped over as they were involved in the act of copulation.

   From underneath Rudy, Lennox pointed to the door,

   “He’s in there.”

   Taylor remembered what Lennox had said to Doyle earlier and was tempted to quote him: ‘No shit, genius.’

   Rudy pushed himself off Lennox and released one of his grenades from its housing.

   “Shall I clean it out?” he asked hopefully.

   Taylor shook his head,

   “We need this one for questioning. See if we can find out who they are and what the hell they’re up to.”

   Disappointed, Rudy clipped up his grenade.

   With his back against the wall of the apartment
(the walls were concrete so he knew he was safe), Taylor reached forward and using his fingertips, gently pushed the door open. The response was a hail of bullets that careered into the opposite wall of the corridor.

   “Listen to me,” he shouted inside, “you’re surrounded with no way out. Give yourself up now and we can avoid anymore unpleasantness.”

   Rudy shook his head in disbelief, “Unpleasantness. The fucker just blew Rogers’ head off.”

   There was no answer.

   Taylor persisted, “If you come out now you will not be harmed, I promise you.”

   Again he was greeted by silence.

    “Come on Sarge, this ain’t gonna work. Why don’t you let me deal with this,” Rudy again nodded towards his grenades.

   Another sustained pause was interrupted by a rattling sound from inside the room. Before they could work out what the noise was, a sniper rifle slid through the door before bumping into the wall. Seconds later it was followed by a handgun and spare magazines.

   Taylor smiled at Rudy; “Sometimes you’ve just got to ask nicely.”

   When he entered the apartment,
Taylor’s first thought was that he’d been double-crossed with an ingenious piece of deception. Instead of a grizzled veteran of the troubles, he was greeted by the sight of
a
scared young girl no older than Doyle. She was hugging a filthy blanket that covered her tiny body. The girl had pushed herself as far into the corner of the room as she possibly could; anymore and she would have been climbing the walls. Her right hand was nervously playing with the ends of one of her blonde pigtails and as Taylor approached, she placed the hair into the corner of her mouth.

   He slung his rifle onto his back and opened his empty hands to show his intentions,

   “I meant what I said, we’re not going to hurt you.”

   The girl stared back at him. She was trying not to betray her emotions but the fear, and more dominantly, the anger emanating from her was impossible to ignore.

   “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 way the water cleansed them of the images they had witnessed barely an hour before.