This Machine Kills (12 page)

   Although he had been a decent boxer himself, his father realised that if his son was going to be the best, he needed to be
proficient
in all aspects of combat. He took the boy to the nearest Jiu-Jitsu school to help him learn how to defend himself when the fight hit the floor. His father may not have been
well versed in
the art of submissions himself, but he’d seen enough of the cage-fights on TV to know it was imperative that Taylor had a strong ground game. For this reason, he also got involved his son in traditional free-style wrestling to help his understanding of how to manage a fighter when he was downed.

   For his stand-up, it was a mixture of traditional and Thai boxing. Whilst his father conceded that Muay-Thai, with its knee, elbow and feet attacks, was by far the most effective of all the up-right martial arts, he still maintained that nothing could beat the hands of a boxer. He had been proved right too; Taylor couldn’t remember how many times his solid boxing skills had helped him bring home a win.

   When his father was laid off from his job, he threw himself even further into his son’s fighting career. He was only thirteen years old, yet Taylor was taking part in two or sometimes three workouts a day. If there were no classes they would clear enough space in his garage and train at home.

The coaches at the various gyms soon began to despair of seeing his father turn up at their sessions. The man thought nothing of telling them how they should be training his son and he would sometimes take to the mats to show the boy the best way to do things. He was an intimidating man at the best of times, and it wasn’t too long before the instructors got fed up of him telling them what to do. After a while they told him to stop bringing Taylor to their classes altogether.

   His father was undeterred. He felt that the years spent watching the coaches had given him enough knowledge to train the boy himself. What he didn’t already know, his father learnt from magazines. The garage was cleared out of all junk and converted into a mini-gym. Mats were laid out on the floor whilst punch bags hung from the ceiling. His father brought in weights, medicine balls and other instruments of torture to help his son improve his physical strength and power.

   For his fitness, Taylor’s father came up with brutal workouts where his son would flip and drag large tyres he had scrounged from the bus garage or smash them with a sledge hammer until his arms turned to jelly. He could still remember the punishing hill-sprint sessions he had been put through that had more than once made him cry. The training worked for Taylor, and not only was he a far more accomplished fighter than the other youngsters of his age, he was also stronger, faster and far more powerful than they were. At the local tournaments he would be so dominant, many of the clubs would pull their lads out rather than face him.

   Taylor’s development as a fighter came at a price. In order to fulfil his training, something had to give, and his father decided this would be his education. When he was fourteen, he was pulled out of school for good. Apart from all the training he had to do, the cost of the boy’s schooling was quickly growing beyond his father’s means. He was existing on a measly pay-off from the steel works and an even smaller unemployment check from the government, which kept shrinking as the depression continued to grind the country down. With his school fees continuing to increase, he had little choice but to withdraw Taylor.

   His father decided the solution was to home-school his son but both parties quickly grew tired of this new development. Having very little education himself, he found it increasingly difficult to teach the boy, and most lessons ended with their roles reversed as Taylor instructed his father on the intricacies of grammar or long division. Deciding that as his son could read and write pretty well already, the home lessons were put on permanent hold.

   Taylor was seventeen when the depression almost destroyed the country. By then he was firmly establishing himself on the cage-fighting scene and the sport’s top promoters were already grooming him for stardom. His father had hunted down and secured the best manager in the business, and if things went to plan, he’d be challenging for the British middleweight title before he was twenty.

   When the violence started erupting all over the Old-Town, Taylor’s manager approached his father with a proposition. It was becoming too dangerous for him to stay at home anymore; all it would take was a stray bullet to hit him and his career would be over. His manager wanted Taylor to move to the house he kept for his fighters in the heart of the City. There, he would be safe from the stabbings and fire-bombings that were taking place all around him. The house had its own gym where he could train whenever he liked, testing himself against the other fighters in his manager’s stable. It didn’t take long for his father to agree. Even though it meant he would no longer be involved in his son’s career, or as the perimeter fence went up, his life at all, he knew this was the best thing for his boy.

   Moving into the house with the other fighters was like a dream for Taylor. He realised when he got there just how poor his father had been. Unlike the sparse conditions of his own home, the Dragon’s Lair, as the other housemates had nicknamed it, was positively state of the art. More importantly for him, he was suddenly surrounded by people of his own age and with similar interests.  Ever since he’d been taken out of school, Taylor had mixed with very few other kids. He’d spent virtually all of his childhood alone with his father, training how to be a man. Less than six weeks after moving to the City he received a message from one of his old neighbours. His father had died of a heart attack.

   By the time he finished his pad work, a light sheen of sweat covered Taylor’s body. He spent a few more minutes diving to the floor with his arms outstretched in front of him, then returning to his feet as quickly as possible. This technique was known as the sprawl; a way to stop his opponent from taking him to the ground. He threw a series of knees and kicks at the larger pad George was now holding before shaking his arms and legs out. He was ready.

   Just before leaving the room, Taylor stepped onto the scales; it was his only pre-fight ritual. He was 188 pounds, only three more than he had been when his fights were big news and still split into weight divisions. For this fight his weight was irrelevant, he was going to be fighting a man at least fifty pounds heavier than him. Taylor wasn’t getting much money for the fight, but combined with the earnings from his classes with Charlotte, the cash would help him get his gym off the ground. If things went to plan, he would use the gym as a platform to introduce to the world some of his father’s unorthodox training sessions that had worked so effectively for him.

George held the double doors open as Taylor stepped into the noisy and smoke-filled hall. All around him were tables filled with men in their best outfits as their mistresses sat next to them in dresses that would have paid his rent for more months than he cared to think of. Whilst the people at the tables barely noticed his arrival, he was met by a roar of cheers from the real fans wearing far less ornate outfits, who packed out the balconies above. They had come to watch the fights and support their favourite fighters, but for the suits on the tables below, the evening was purely business.

    It was a commonly held myth that ClearSkies carried out all the works that took place in Hope City. In reality, they only did the jobs they deemed worthwhile. Even though they won all the contracts the government handed out to develop the City’s infrastructure, many of them were beyond ClearSkies’ remit. When this happened, they simply contracted the jobs out to specialists. In many cases, if that company did not feel they were up to the task, they simply subcontracted the job out to the company beneath them in the pecking order and so on. Often the contracts that ClearSkies had been awarded for millions of dollars were carried out by firms paid only a few thousand, or in some cases, hundreds.

   It was in these halls, whilst the fighters in the cage were being ignored, that businessmen fought each other to earn their companies the invaluable contracts. They would beg, bribe and bully their way into the wallets of the ClearSkies officials they wined and dined. Some said that the violence in the cage was nothing compared to the ruthless business taking place on the outside.

   As he made his way to the podium, a huge, fat man stepped into Taylor’s path blowing cigar smoke straight into his face.

   “Sonny boy!” the drunken man shouted as he rested his hand on Taylor’s shoulder to help keep his balance.

   Taylor nodded, “Mr Fraser.”

   “Make sure you win tonight, I’ve got a lot riding on you.”

   “Don’t worry -”

   “Of course,” the man bellowed, “you always win, right?”

   Taylor half-attempted a smile, “I’m sure your money’s safe.”

   The fat man grinned and removed his hand, causing him to promptly fall back onto his chair. With his path now free, Taylor continued his journey towards the cage.

   “Remember, keep your chin down and guard up.”

  
Old George was giving Taylor his final words of advice before the cage door closed. It was the same thing he said before every fight. He breathed in deeply through his nose and immediately regretted it as the cigarette smoke violated his system. He coughed and spat out a parcel of phlegm just before George could wedge his gumshield into his mouth.

   “Do me a favour kid,” he yelled over the noise in his rasping tones, “knock this bum out quick. I ain’t going to last long before I need another piss.”

   Taylor laughed as the official stepped between them, slamming the cage door shut.

   He turned to inspect his opponent for the first time. He was at least four inches taller than Taylor, who was no shorty himself at six foot. The man was solidly built with huge arms and chest and virtually no neck to speak of. His shaven head appeared to be embedded into his shoulders. It amused Taylor to see that for such a big man, his rival had the skinniest legs imaginable. He thought a few low kicks would soon sort them out. As their eyes met, Taylor was sure the man snorted at him.

   His opponent called himself the Butcher, and had been drafted in as a potential candidate for the Prison Fights. He’d banged out a few of his rivals at the prison gym and had made a name for himself as a fearsome puncher. Before they exposed him to a pay-for-view audience, the TV guys wanted to make sure he could hold his own at smaller events like this. Taylor would have to stay away from his right hand, he knew all too well that a guy this size could easily send him for an early bath if he wasn’t careful.

   The TV execs knew Taylor would fully test their man, and with him being so much smaller, it was unlikely he would mess him up too bad. Plus, Taylor was well aware how things worked
.
If he beat the guy too badly and broke an arm or a leg in a submission, it would be the last time they used him. This is what it had come to he thought, testing out the chumps who were making millions for the TV execs, rather than for him.

   As he walked to the centre of the ring to receive the referee’s final instructions, Taylor thought how in the old days he would have made a witty remark in the post-fight interview about how the butcher was now just a lump of meat or some other lame shit like that. He decided not to bother working on it further, knowing the only people who may hear his words would be too drunk to remember them anyway.

   As the referee talked, telling the men how he wanted the fight to stay clean, Taylor impassively gazed at The Butcher who was staring at him so intensely, his eyes were beginning to redden. He remembered when he had looked at his rivals with the same intensity when he started out. Now though, he simply couldn’t be bothered. As they stepped back to their respective corners of the cage and waited for the referee to throw his hand down and tell them to fight, Taylor noticed that The Butcher’s shoulders were hunched in a way that could only mean one thing; he was going for the early knock out. A split-second later he had already decided how he would deal with the threat.

   The overhand punch was an interesting one. If landed correctly and in the right circumstances it could knock an opponent cold, but thrown badly (which it was in most cases), it was just plain ugly. It made the person throwing it look like a drunk lashing out at the imaginary friend that had been taunting him all night. The punch wasn’t straight and it wasn’t a hook, instead it involved a looping, over-the-top action where the arm stayed virtually straight, as the person throwing it tilted his upper body towards his opponent.

   Some fighters (particularly the wrestlers who weren’t always so clever with their hands), would throw it as an aggressive punch whilst they attacked their opponent. They liked the move because it kept them at distance from their rival, so if it didn’t land they were unlikely to get hurt. The problem was that if they were fighting anyone with even a nuance of boxing talent they would see the punch coming from a mile off and slip it all day long. What the technique was really design for, and what Taylor was so good at, was using it as a counter to his opponent’s attack. It took confidence, skill and timing, but if landed as the other man was throwing his own punch
,
the results were often devastating.

   He had assessed the situation correctly. As soon as the referee stepped out of the way, the man charged. Looking at him through his raised guards, Taylor stayed perfectly still, waiting patiently for his potential assailant. When he was within three feet of him, the Butcher let loose with a left jab; not a stinging stiff one that would make your eyes water if it landed, but a lazy, aimless one that merely served as a precursor to the massive right hand he was about to unload. With split second timing, Taylor pivoted so that the punch went wide and at the same time threw the overhand right, catching the other man flush on the nose. The Butcher staggered backwards with blood flowing as freely from his nose as the tears that ran from his eyes. Taylor knew he had taken the wind out of his sails and was pretty sure he wouldn’t try to storm him like that again.