This Machine Kills

by Steve Liszka

  Rudy shrugged again, ignoring the pain, “Big deal, the boys in the lab will grow me a new one… Now do as you’re told and die.”

  Despite his injuries, he still managed a smile as he aimed his weapon at Taylor’s prone form.

  “Put it down Rudy!” a voice shouted from the entrance of the building.

  Taylor looked back to see Doyle dressed in a shiny, new SecForce uniform. His weapon was directed at Rudy’s head.

  “Doyle,” the man who now looked more like an extra from a horror movie, said. His voice carried a distinct lack of surprise,

  “I should have known you’d turn up. Come to fight Taylor’s battles again?”

  Doyle had a look on his face that made him look a formidable opponent to any adversary.

  “They’re my battles too now. You got me involved when you tried to kill me, remember?”

  Rudy gave out a weary laugh, “Why don’t you just put the gun down son. We both know you’re not going to use it… You haven’t got what it takes.”

  He turned his attention and weapon back to Taylor, disregarding Doyle, “Just like you Sarge. You taught him well.”

  Tilting his head towards the rifle’s scope, Rudy was struck by three bullets in the chest. The force of the shots sent him careering into the mirrored wall behind. He stared at Doyle with wide eyes, trying to work out what had just happened to him, then slumped to his knees, letting out a heavy sigh. As his lids slowly began to close, Doyle spoke; making sure Rudy heard his words,

  “And just so you know,” he said, “ I never liked you either.”

  This final insult amused Rudy. He smiled at Doyle, then shut his eyes and slumped forward in a heap.

  Too exhausted to get up, Taylor waited for Doyle’s assistance to be dragged back to his feet.

  “You took your time,” he said as his helper did his best to lift him.

  “Yeah well,” Doyle answered, trying to avoid contact with Taylor’s bloodied shoulder, “I can only save your ass so many times in one day, old man.”

  It was only the pain that stopped Taylor from laughing.

  Chapter 31

  Doyle had to catch Taylor to stop him from collapsing as they stepped into the lift. He leant the bloodied man against the gold lacquered wall of the tiny room and punched the button that would transport them to the top floor.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Taylor gave a tired nod. He looked like he had been involved in a car crash,

  “Tip-top.”

  After taking out Rudy, Doyle had done his best to dress Taylor’s wounds. Muscle and tendon were exposed and a fragment of bone sat dangerously close to an artery. Doyle had had to skilfully use his knife to remove the offending object. The pain he could just about bear, but what really frightened Taylor was the blood loss. The bullet may have missed the artery, but from the dark red liquid that continuously seeped from the wound, it was clear a vein had been severed. By applying a tightly packed dressing made from his new SecForce jacket, Doyle had been able to slow the flow of blood enough for them to continue.

  “So how did you do it?” Taylor asked, trying his best to stop his eyes from closing.

  “Piece of cake,” Doyle said, “as soon as I got back to the City, Milton and his cronies were waiting for me. I told him you’d gone rogue but got the feeling he didn’t believe me. I had to make out I had internal injuries from the beating you gave me just to avoid getting sent to the interrogation suites. The fucker wouldn’t buy it until I pretended to pass out in front of him.”

  He was interrupted by Taylor breaking into a violent coughing fit. After using his hand to stifle the outburst, he looked at his palm and saw it was painted with dark, bloody specks.

  When the coughing subsided, Doyle started again,

  “Luckily they bought it and transported me to the hospital where I took out the guard and stole his uniform and swipe-card. After that I went to SecForce headquarters, shut the security system down for the entire city and opened the gates for you boys. Like I say, piece of cake.”

  It was a conversation with Mason that had made Taylor realise the City’s new security system had one monumental flaw. Whilst the place would be almost impenetrable to infiltrate from outside, it would still be relatively easy for anyone already in the City to destroy the wall’s defences, should they have the right information. Luckily for Taylor, he did. He knew that from the newly created room on the top floor of SecForce’s headquarters, the operation of each of the four doors to the City could be overridden. It was a failsafe system that had been introduced in case the doors were stormed before the guards manning them could react. Milton had personally insisted on their installation.

  “And what about HQ?” Taylor asked, “did you get in ok?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Doyle said nonchalantly, “like I said, I had a swipe-card. The place was like a morgue; everyone must have been at the gates. The only people I did see were in the control room. I went where you told me and when I found the room, I shot a few holes in the door and walked straight in. The guys inside shit themselves when they realised I wasn’t joking. I got them to open the east and west gates first, then they opened yours.”

  Taylor couldn’t help but look at him with admiration. Without considering the consequences, Doyle had quietly done everything asked of him with a bravery he was pretty sure he didn’t possess himself.

  Doyle shook his head, “What I can’t understand is why would they make it so easy for us?”

  Taylor forced himself off the wall so his feet bore all his weight,

  “Because they never believed any sane person would ever want to open the gates.”

  “Perhaps they were right,” Doyle answered, “we may have just done the stupidest thing ever.”

  The lift made a pinging noise when the doors opened. As Taylor stepped out, he glanced across to his friend,

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  The lobby in Milton’s penthouse was deserted, its usual collection of guards having long disappeared.

  “You stay here,” Taylor said when they got to the entrance, “call me if anything happens.”

  Doyle nodded.

  “And thank you,” he added, “for everything.”

  Doyle looked to the grand doors his friend was about to walk through,

  “You better go, I don’t think we’ve got much time.”

  Taylor nodded then started forwards, stopping after only a few steps,

  “I’m going to need your gun.”

  Freddie Milton stood with his back to Taylor, staring out of the huge glass windows of his apartment. If he heard footsteps approaching, he didn’t react, focusing his gaze instead on the fires that were springing up across his ruined city.

  When Taylor was nearly within touching distance and able to share the apocalyptic view, Milton turned to face him.

  “Ah Taylor,” he said, his voice lacking surprise, “it’s you.”

  “You were expecting me?”

  Milton sighed, “I had a feeling you’d turn up at some point.”

  As he spoke, his eyes moved to Taylor’s bloody shoulder.

  “You’re hurt,” he said with a genuine look of concern, “let me help you.”

  Milton moved absently towards the kitchen.

  “No,” Taylor answered sternly.

  “But it will get infected. I need to take care of it.”

  Taylor stepped into Milton’s path, stopping him in his tracks, “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “No,” Milton replied, “I don’t suppose it is.”

  “Why?” Taylor said as the two men studied each other, “Why did you do it?”

  Milton said nothing back, his expression hardening as Taylor spoke.

  “How could you kill your own wife. I thought you loved her.”

  When Milton replied, his voice was measured, but only just, “You think it was me… you think I killed Charlotte?”

  “There’s no point denying it, it could have
only been you, you son of a bitch… You didn’t need to kill her, she wouldn’t have left you.”

  The sudden look of fury on Milton’s face took Taylor by surprise. Even though he was armed, and even without a gun could have killed the man in a dozen different ways, he took a half-step backwards.

  “So that’s what this is all about,” Milton said, “you’ve destroyed my city, everything I ever worked for, because you think I killed my wife. What on earth do you think would make me do that you idiot?”

  A sickly smile appeared on his face, “Not because of what the two of you were doing?”

  The smile turned to a look of disgust.

  “You think I killed her because of you,” he cast his eyes down the length of Taylor’s body, looking at him like a wealthy man whose daughter had brought home a boyfriend of a different race.

  “You don’t really think you were the first of her playthings do you?”

  His laugh cut straight through Taylor.

  “I knew about you and her all along. Why do you think I hired you? You don’t think I believed in those ridiculous self-defence lessons do you?”

  “You knew?”

  “We loved each other, and so we tolerated each other’s interests. Mine was my city and hers… well hers was her men. Sorry to bruise your ego but you weren’t the first man she slept with behind my back.”

  “Bollocks,” Taylor answered half-heartedly, “she loved me.”

  Milton was smiling again, “Is that what she told you?”

  Taylor thought back to the night Charlotte had come to his apartment and he had told her he loved her. He’d thought she had said she loved him too as she cried in his arms, but now, he couldn’t be so sure.

  His silence only encouraged Milton, “I’m sure she made you feel like you were special, she was good at that. That’s what brought us together, back when she was a whore.”

  The crassness of the word coming from a man like Milton made Taylor grimace.

  “She made me feel like I was special too, that’s why I married her…. Do you know how hard it was for me at first, with my friends and colleagues laughing behind my back? I could hear their whispered conversations, ‘Look at Milton, all that power and he marries a prostitute.’ Most of them had fucked her for Christ sake… But I ignored them because I loved her, and I know she loved me too.”

  Taylor wanted to argue with him. He wanted to tell Milton that he was wrong, that Charlotte had loved him and was ready to leave her husband so the two of them could be together. He wanted to tell him what they had done in his bed and how the two of them would have been happy together in different circumstances, but he didn’t say any of those things. Instead he felt his hand rise to the waist of his jeans where his fingertips brushed the handle of Doyle’s pistol. Now all he wanted to do was repeatedly smash the butt of the weapon into Milton’s face until his features collapsed into a bloody mess.

  “If it wasn’t you, then why did you send my men to kill me?”

  Milton shrugged, “I had nothing to do with that, perhaps there’s someone else you’ve upset? You do seem to have a knack for it.”

  He remembered Mason’s words about how he would not tolerate being made a fool of under any circumstances. So much for the old man loving him.

  Milton looked down and saw where Taylor’s hand was resting.

  “You know I thought it was you who killed her until now,” he said with a sigh, “I guess we were both wrong.”

  The absence of fear on Milton’s face made Taylor move his hand away from the pistol and back to his side. With the beginnings of a smile on his face, he nodded through the window to the burning city below.

  “Then it looks like I did all this for nothing.”

  Milton turned and looked out of the window, taking in as much of the City as he could.

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” he said quietly.

  Taylor laughed, “You can’t mean that, I know what this place means to you.”

  Milton tried to laugh back but he didn’t have it in him, “Things are different… now that she’s gone.”

  When he turned around, he was wearing a look of serene calm on his face. It was like a completely different person was now in the room. Taylor suddenly realised what it was that usually made Milton appear so edgy. His mind was always racing; thinking about the issues affecting the City and their most appropriate solutions. But now, it was like all those things had been wiped clean. For the first time he felt like Milton’s mind was there in the room with him, not elsewhere, working through a myriad of problems.

  “When I first came up with Triage,” he said; his voice flat and smooth, “I ignored all the negative things they were saying because I knew I was right. I was only doing what had to be done, I was-”

  “Responding to the demands of the market,” Taylor interrupted.

  “Exactly,” Milton smiled, realising he had given the same speech to him before,

  “I’ve always stuck by that too, never wavering in my belief that what I did saved us from a much worse fate. But since the wall went up….”

  Milton walked away from Taylor, staring out at his dying creation. After a dozen steps he spun on his heels, looking like he’d forgotten to mention something,

  “Tell me,” he said, “why did we build it?”

  The obviousness of the question surprised Taylor.

  “To protect the City,” he answered, deliberately keeping his answer simple.

  Milton seemed not to register the response as he continued his walk around the periphery of his home.

  “One of the biggest advantages of Triage,” he eventually said, “was that it dealt with the energy problem we were facing. With so many less consumers of our raw materials, it meant we were in a pretty secure place. And then of course, when we got hold of the oil in Canada and the new reserves in the North Sea, it meant we were home and dry. We’d have enough to last us for hundreds of years.”

  He reached the corner of the room and took a right turn in order to continue his walk.

  “It was a good thing too, as no one was interested in nuclear power anymore, not after what happened at the power plants, and as for renewables, well they were just too expensive and inefficient.”

  “I feel a but coming on,” Taylor said.

  Milton momentarily stopped walking and gave him the briefest of smiles before continuing.

  “But,” he said, placing special emphasis on the word, “it turned out that things weren’t going to be that simple. You see, Canada was nowhere near as productive as we thought it was going to be, and as for the reserves in the North Sea… well, they simply weren’t there.”

  Just before Taylor was going to have to start following him in order to hear his words, Milton turned and walked towards him.

  “Our oil people deliberately lied to us. They had massively over exaggerated the amounts we had left in order to get our endorsement. I also have a strong feeling it was them and not the Chinese who were responsible for the mishap at the nuclear plants. The situation with gas isn’t much better, there’s only a fraction left of what we first thought. If we’re lucky we’ve got six months, maybe a year or two at the most before they’re all gone. I mean obviously the Chinese have got their stores, but we’re nowhere near strong enough to try to acquire them. They know it and so do we.”

  “But why,” Taylor said, as Milton closed the space between them, “why would your own people lie to you. You all work for the same company now, surely they realise they’d be cutting their own throats?”

  Milton shrugged, “They had their own empire to protect, no matter what the cost… I can’t blame them really, I probably would have done the same thing myself if I was in their position.”

  Taylor looked around for someone to share his disbelief with, “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well,” Milton said, shrugging, “that’s just the way things work.”

  “So what happens now?” Taylor asked.

  Milton stopped a fe
w paces from him, “Oh, you know, just the end of life as you and I know it. There’ll be no fuel for the production centres to build the products that run our lives. No power to run our homes and all the amazing things we have in them. Do you know that oil is an essential ingredient in the creation of plastic? Just think about the consequences of that for a moment. It’ll be like the industrial revolution never happened.”

  Taylor raised his eyebrow, “Shit.”

  “Exactly… But fortunately,” Milton reassured him, “some things will stay the same…You see we realised that this need not spell the end of the way we do business. We just needed to reassess our priorities, to reorganise the markets. We did it once when I created Triage, there’s no reason we can’t do it again, if you follow my meaning.”

  Taylor shook his head, “I don’t.”

  Milton almost huffed at his ignorance before carrying on, “Look at the Romans for example. They didn’t have plastics and televisions, yet relatively speaking they lived really rather splendid lives. They had plenty of money, plenty of food, large villas and so on. Triage was all about shrinking the economy; the next stage is to simplify it. From now on, it will be the basic things in life that will be the most valuable commodities. Forget entertainment systems and technological wizardry, it’s the simple things like food, clothing and shelter that people are going to desire.”

  Taylor smiled, “Like in the Old-Town.”

  “That’s right,” Milton answered, “and just like in the Old-Town, it will be ClearSkies that people will have to come to in order to get hold of those products.”

  Taylor laughed, “You think the people in the city can make things for themselves? Most of them can barely wipe their own asses. I don’t think you need to worry about them being self-sufficient.”

  Milton let out a sigh, “And therein is where our problems lie. You’re right when you say people in the cities have become stupid and lazy. They have lost the ability to do things for themselves anymore. And don’t think I’m complaining about that, it’s exactly how we wanted them…. But the thing that worried us, is that it would only be a matter of time before they realised that all they needed was a patch of land and a few seeds before they could start to look after themselves. This, as I’m sure you can understand, is something we could never tolerate. It’s the reason we treat the co-ops with such prejudice. We couldn’t have our good citizens looking to the other side and getting ideas.”