This Machine Kills (35 page)

   “Wake up Taylor,” she said, “wake up.”

   When he was dragged back to the present, it was Warchild’s powerful neck that Taylor’s arms were tightly wrapped around. After taking the almighty punch, he had somehow managed to grab hold of the bigger man before any more damage could be done. As his opponent struggled to shake off the irritant, Taylor interlocked his fingers, adopting the clinch technique of a Thai-boxer. Warchild managed to get another couple of body shots off before Taylor summoned any remaining energy he could muster. With all his might he pulled down on his rival’s head and at the same time, brought his knee up, driving it into the man’s face.

   Warchild staggered backwards, almost losing his footing as he tried to reclaim his senses. His nose was smashed and he was bleeding profusely from a deep gash on his forehead. More importantly for Taylor though, his last attack had taken everything out of his rival; the man facing him was now spent.

   As he gasped for breath, Warchild’s hands hung at his side once again, and this time he wasn’t faking it. Taylor could see he was gassed. Taking a deep breath in, he launched himself forward, easily slipping the slow, desperate punches the heaving man was now throwing. It was more his inability to oxygenate his failing body, than the punches that Taylor was landing at will, that was having the worse effect on Warchild.

   Sensing his opponent’s desperate fatigue, Taylor threw a final one-two at his head followed by a perfect left hook to the kidneys, rotating every last ounce of his weight into the punch. In an instant, the longhaired warrior collapsed to his knees; buckled over as he fought in vain for air. Even if he’d wanted to get up and continue the fight, it was useless. It would be another minute before he could breathe properly again and in that time Taylor could do whatever he pleased to him.

   Whilst the shouts of hate rang out from the prison cells, Taylor looked down at his fallen opponent. Rather than attempt to finish him off, he stood behind him and rubbed Warchild’s massive back.

   “That’s it,” he whispered to him, “breathe.”

   When he was finally able to get to his feet, Warchild shook hands with Taylor.

   “I thought I had you then… at the end,” he said, his chest groaning as he continued to repay his oxygen debt.

   “So did I,” Taylor answered, meaning it too, “that was a hell of a fight.”

   A slight smile broke out on Warchild’s face, “Sorry about the ribs brother, I couldn’t help myself.”

   Taylor chuckled, “I don’t blame you. I would have done the same thing.”

   As Jacob and the others made their way into the pit to congratulate their new leader, Warchild spoke again; “I can’t speak for the rest of them but I would have helped you anyway, even if I’d won.”

   “I know,” Taylor said.

   “
But I needed to do that,” Warchild panted, “I had to feel what it was like to be in a real fight for once.”

  
He rested his hand on Taylor’s shoulder as he struggled for breath,

   “Can you understand that?”

   Taylor nodded at the bruised and beaten man.

   “Yes,” he said, “I think I can.”

Chapter 28

   The dust flew up from the road with each step the men took. Rather than fall back to the earth, it held in the air, creating swirling red clouds for the low-lying sun to hide behind before disappearing below the horizon.

   “So tell me,” Jacob said, “if someone had told you a week ago that you’d be leading an uprising against your employers, would you have believed them?”

   Taylor turned to look at the army behind him; most still dressed in their production centre jump-suits. He could only just make out the end of the line, and as he well knew, this was only one section of the attacking force.

   “To tell you the truth,” he answered, “I’m still not sure I believe it.”

   After a pause he turned to Jacob, “You don’t think it’s too late to pull out do you?”

   Jacob attempted a smile, “Not as long as you don’t mind telling them.”

   Taylor’s laugh quickly turned into a cough as the dust entered his throat.

   By the time they got outside the centre, the majority of the volunteers for the makeshift army were already waiting. Taylor estimated that close to two-thirds of the men had joined them, boosting their numbers by over two thousand. If the women had been allowed to go with them they would have had twice that number.

   As for the category A prisoners, their numbers turned out to be far higher. Of the three hundred men who had been jailed there, even at a conservative estimate, he reckoned that nearly ninety percent had followed Warchild’s demands and taken up with the resistance. He still wasn’t sure how sensible it was to let hardened criminals into their group but Jacob hadn’t made a wrong move so far. He decided to extend the trust that Jacob had offered, back to him.

   No one got much sleep that night. Whilst the women and children had been sent to the other side of the Old-Town, the men spread themselves around the empty rooms of a dozen or so buildings a few miles from the City’s boundaries. On hard, stone floors they did their best to deal with their own fears. Many of them would have laid awake with their eyes open, dreading the next day and the possibility that no sooner had they been released, they may just as quickly be killed. Some though, were more fearful of those that slept much closer to home.

   There had been so much unrest at the thought of sharing the same bed space as murderers, that Warchild decided it would be best if he took his men to one of the most remote buildings where they couldn’t upset the others. He quietly advised Taylor that it would probably be best if they kept an armed presence on the door, just in case some of them decided to take a wonder in the night to look for the women. It seemed that even when out of prison, these men could not be free.

   For Taylor, his biggest worry was that SecForce would launch a counter attack and try and take him and the other men out as they slept. He would have much rather used the element of surprise and stormed the City straight after leaving the centre, but then Doyle wouldn’t have been inside to do his job. He knew that as soon as they left the centre, Richardson would be in contact with SecForce headquarters warning them about what had taken place. They would have had a helicopter there to pick up Doyle within minutes. Milton would want to know if he had any information that could help thwart the resistance’s plans.

   Although there was still a risk, he thought it was highly unlikely that SecForce would risk sending their ground troops in to find them. He knew how much they detested risk-taking and the thought of a bloody engagement, with the loss of some of his own men would have been thoroughly unpalatable to Milton. It was far more realistic for them to send the drones in on bombing runs; targeting the buildings they thought may have been a temporary home to the centre’s escapees.

   This proved to be the case, and late that night they were awoken by the deafening sound of explosions taking place all around them. When the air was finally silent again, Taylor ventured outside to see that two of the buildings where the men had slept had been completely destroyed. Before the battle had even begun, they had already lost a significant portion of their army. In the morning, when the men gathered for their final briefing, a few more had vanished. The long night had sapped them of their bravery, leaving them to sneak back to the production centres or further out to whatever lay beyond.

   “They’ll see the dust cloud, long before they see us,” Taylor said when his throat had finally cleared.

   “It won’t matter, there’ll be nothing they can do to stop us. We’ve already beaten them.”

   Jacob spoke not like he was being arrogant, but that his words were fact.

   “We’ve got to get in first,” Taylor reminded him, “and that all depends on Doyle.”

   This was what had been bothering him most. They were relying on a number of factors that were far beyond his control. If SecForce had any doubts concerning Doyle’s loyalties, they would have promptly taken him in for questioning. If they’d not been convinced by his answers, it was likely that he may still be in their custody, making the plan doomed to failure from the start. If Rudy was aware of his return, Doyle would have an even more serious adversary looking for him, and although Taylor had faith in the boy, he was also fully aware what a ruthless bastard Rudy was. Either way he looked at it, and despite Jacob’s confidence, the whole thing relied,
to a large degree, on luck.

   “What about you?” Taylor asked, “how did it feel for you?”

   “How did what feel?”

   “The night of the concert…when the uprising started. How did it feel, knowing what was about to happen?”

   There was a pause before Jacob spoke again;
at first Taylor thought it was because he was preparing himself for the steady incline that now faced them, but it soon became evident that he had been trying to bring order to his words.

   “In a way, I’ve been lucky, history has been kind to me. At least in the Old-Town it has, I’m sure it’s different in the City… But here, people only remember the good things about Billy Nothing. They talk about how I pushed that SecForce officer off the stage and how I whipped the crowd  into a frenzy. They even add their own embellishments, where I did things far more heroic than what actually took place.”

   Jacob’s breathing became heavier as his feet took on the hill.

   “But the truth,” he said, “that gets overlooked
now that time has been able to change the facts, is that up until that night I had done nothing to help the Old-Town
.
The reason there were so few police at the concert is because they knew we were just a bunch of rich kids trying to get as much fame as possible. We weren’t really anarchists, we weren’t even punks for that matter. We were just fame hungry. We knew that the concert would make us so controversial, we’d be huge in no time, and that was all that mattered.”

   As the strain of the ascent began to tell on Jacob, Taylor took his arm and gently guided him forward.

   “You know the funny thing,” Jacob went on, “is that song; Reclaim the Streets, it wasn’t even ours. Our music company paid some burnt out pop star to write it. That’s how revolutionary we were.”

   “So what changed?”

   Jacob stopped for a moment to catch his breath.

   “As is so often the case,” he said, “a woman came along. It was her who made me see what really mattered.”

   “Who was she?” Taylor asked.

   Jacob started walking again, “Someone I met at an after-party a few weeks before… From the first moment I saw her, I was besotted. You know what the first thing she said to me was? That I was a fake, and an embarrassment to punks everywhere. When she said that I knew I had to have her… She woke me up, made me realise that I could make a difference if I wanted. Without her, the Uprisings would have never happened. It’s her the people in the Old-Town should be talking about, not me.”

   “Sounds a bit like us,” Taylor said, giving Jacob a gentle push to get him walking again, “you’re the brains of the outfit but it’s me who they think is in charge.”

   Jacob shook his head, “No this is different, it was you who got us into the production centre, you who beat Warchild and got the prisoners to help us. It’s your plan that will get us into the City. This is down to you, not me.”

   They walked on, all the while Jacob struggling to reach the near-approaching brow of the hill.

   “What happened to her?”

   A few long seconds went by before Jacob found the breath to answer,  “She died,” he gasped, exhausted by the effort, “just one of the many victims of the Uprising.”

   “I’m sorry to hear that,” Taylor answered. He hoped it had been sincere, but after what had happened in the past few days, he wasn’t sure how his words sounded anymore.

   “Do you still miss her?” he asked.

   “Every day,” Jacob said, then stopped talking as the gradient flattened out.

   At the top of the hill they were able to look ahead and see the grey concrete wall that wrapped itself around the shining lights of the City.

Chapter 29

   Taylor checked his watch; it was seven fifty-five. Moving at Jacob’s geriatric pace, it had taken them another half an hour to get to the ridge of land they would shelter behind until the attack commenced. In the short space of time, darkness had rapidly descended on them. Spotlights on the ground shone up on the wall, making it look even more imposing than it did in the light of day. It reminded him of a castle his father had taken him to as a child, the lights glaring up on it serving to emphasise just how impenetrable the stone fortress was.

   The wall’s very existence mocked the meagre perimeter fence that stood in front of it. A handful of troopers were located at the fence’s checkpoint and beyond that Taylor was able to peer through the wall’s open steel doors, allowing him the merest glimpse into the City. He could make out some bright lights from inside and the vague movement of people gathered closely together, but little else.