Vending Machine Lunch (11 page)

Killing Eliza
would probably do it.

Government still
ignorant over The Requiem.

The headline
blazed across the newspapers on the newspaper stall attached to the
side of the grubby looking off licence. Probably didn’t sell
knives, but Jack thought it was worth a try anyway. That aside, he
wanted to get off the packed streets.

Unfortunately,
the small shop was also jam-packed. The small pitiful excuse of an
off-licence had one aisle with shelves packed full of cheap sugary
confectionary, small meaningless bits of tat and magazines
recommending everyone spend hard earned rupees on something that
sounded amazing, but didn’t guarantee it. Filled with enticing
pictures of the blossoming youth of women, but not acknowledging
that five children down the line, the young beauties would be the
size of small planets and will be abraded and eroded from years and
years of hard work. Everything went sour in the end, Jack
thought.

He pushed his
way through the amass of people in the small shop. A few people
protested as he barged his way through, but they fell upon the deaf
ears of Jack and the buyers around him, who were either looking at
magazines or shouting for some drug of some sort at the store
assistant.

Jack was now at
the cash desk.

“A knife.
Sharp. Foldable,” he demanded at the assistant.

“Hold on
buddy,” he said over the noise of the other demanding customers,
before turning his audience to the entire store, “Everyone please!
We are fresh out of all psychophysiological palpating drugs! That
means no Happy, no Excitement, no Nostalgia and no Forget! We are
clean out, so if you are after consumer PP drugs, can you please
leave and go elsewhere!”

There was
uproar in the store as many disappointed customers cursed over the
lack of cosmetic drugs. A few customers left however, many of them
prevailed.

“You’re the
only shop open! Get some more!” Jack heard someone shout.

“Your drugs
killed my husband!” yelled someone else.

“Listen! I
can’t get any more and I’ve got news, death isn’t a side effect,
it’s an overdose. I’m not at all sorry to say I just ran out of
care for you guys. I hope you see what I did there.”

There was
further uproar which the assistant ignored.

“You want a
knife buddy?” said the assistant, “Get it somewhere else. I’m not
being responsible for someone’s death.”

“Do not assume
you understand,” said Jack, narrowing his eyes, looking rather odd,
“I am much more than the normal rioter. I am worth much more than
that. And in being so, I become something that isn’t one of these
riotous morons. That aside, you need the money.”

“You look like
you could do with some Happy,” said the assistant, “Shame you’re
not getting any. Give me one reason I should sell you a knife,
Mr-the-world-revolves-around-me.”

“Because the
world revolves around me. Or at least, the world revolves around
what I’m going to do with the knife after I’ve bought it.”

“You’re yet
another hopeful out to kill our land’s father,” sighed the
assistant, “On the unlikely chance that you do succeed, do you
really think it will make a difference? Nothing will change; we’ll
just have no leader to blame the state of the land on. I’ll still
have a lack of produce to sell and I will still have the threat of
my business being looted or blown up every night by either angry
protestors or these damn neo-terrorists,” he handed over a
switchblade knife, “So go ahead and kill our land’s father. It
won’t do any difference to anything. The only people winning from
this mess are them who manage to smuggle illegal weapons here from
Union. And the guy who came up with the idea of cosmetic PP drugs.
That will be fourteen rupees please.”

“Do not assume
you understand,” repeated Jack in the same tone, handing over the
money, “You assume it is the Leader I seek to destroy. I can tell
you now that the person this knife awaits to penetrate is far more
important than our Leader.”

“Whatever
buddy,” the assistant had lost interest now, “Next please!”

Some desperate
looking woman pushed past Jack, “Bliss! I need some Bliss! Please
tell me you have some! The Requiem they’re after me-“

Jack was almost
at the door to the street outside, his pride rather damaged at
being snubbed by the assistant, when he heard the assistant shout
again that he had no PP drugs. He strode into the packed street,
pocketing the naked switchblade knife. He was about to resume his
thoughts of hatred when the shop he had just left behind him
exploded.

An
ear-splitting bang propelled him forwards. He stumbled, being
showered by a haze of dust and blood. There was a momentary silence
as shocked onlookers looked upon the wreckage that a moment ago was
probably the only open shop in the area. Jack leant against a metal
bollard, gasping for breath. An alarm sounded, probably a smoke
detector. Someone female screamed.

Coughing, Jack
glanced upon the wreckage and the small scattering of bodies
around. If he had spent another second in the store he would have
been killed. If the assistant hadn’t snubbed his proud speech, he
wouldn’t have been able to complete the day’s goal.

Eliza.

The thought of
her re-entered his head, and spread like fire across oil. Oh how he
had tried removing her from his mind. But to no compromise, his
heart refused to pump the other way. Even Happy wasn’t a good
enough compromise anymore. Not that he’d be able to get any if he
wanted. He knew for a fact that nearly everyone wanted a supply of
some drug of some kind in this day and age.

There was an
incisive ringing in his ears as he began walking again. Was it the
alarm? No, it was a higher pitch than that, everything sounded as
though he was under fluid. It was the cells in his tympanic
membrane slowly dying thanks to the noise of the explosion. Jack
continued his walk of hate, now assumingly heading to where Eliza
would be.

He stumbled
along angry streets and back alleys, walking closer and closer to
his goal. Somewhere, there was another explosion, but Jack didn’t
see it. It must have been a few streets away. Military action only
had to be a few days away now. The public were getting far out of
control. They were angry. Angry at the apparent failure of Deimos,
angry at the government’s lack of response to the Requiem, angry at
the tax raises, angry at the floodings, angry at the decrease of
the overall quality of life. The omnipotent leader or land father
of Elision was increasingly becoming less omnipotent as peoples’
rage grew. Every day, more people took to the streets, every day,
more people were infected by the Requiem, every day, more stories,
rumours, shenanigans were spread about the Ninety-Nine killing
innocent civilians.

Even rumours of
people finding a way to Union had circulated, although, it was
still debatable whether Union was a better place. According to the
government, it wasn’t. Although according to the government, the
Requiem was a figment of peoples’ imaginations. Propaganda was
nothing new. According to the people who had apparently been to or
come from Union, it wasn’t either. However, the fleeting hope and
dream that the grass was greener on the other side remained in
peoples’ hearts. Although getting to Union was practically
impossible. Jack had heard rumours, as always, rumours, of a way
through an old underground Metro link that had once connected Union
and Elision together. But Jack wasn’t stupid. He knew such was
unlikely to exist.

And that is why
he knew that it would only be a few days until the public got way
too out of control for the Enforcers to handle, and military action
from the government would commence. Swift and Voltaire would fail
and the process would repeat. As it always had done.

Jack’s solution
was just to ignore it all. Focus his mind on things that actually
mattered. Of course, now, the only thing that had mattered had
betrayed him, and now the only thing that mattered was to repay the
favour. To show her how much she had hurt him. It had hurt. It had
hurt. It had hurt. It still did hurt. It had been an awfully bitter
pill for Jack to swallow, and no matter how much he had tried to
swallow it deep, no matter how much Happy he took to block the
painful misery away, the pill came back and chocked him. If
ignorance was bliss, Jack should have been in heaven right now. He
knew after killing Eliza that this would be the case.

He turned onto
a quiet alley and passed what looked like a Requiem eating the
remains of some ex-mortal thing. The Requiem looked up at Jack with
a mouth full of blood and guts, dripping down its chin. Jack
paused, frozen with terror as the Requiem inspected him in its
dreamlike consciousness. He was just about to grab for his new
switchblade knife, when the Requiem turned its head back to the
remains of the feast before it.

Breathing a
large sigh of relief, Jack continued his hate rampage, wondering
why on earth the Requiem hadn’t attacked him. Jack had so far had
to kill five Requiem, if you could call it killing them. The
‘official’ term was disabling, although, that wasn’t really
official. It was just what everyone called it. Disabling their
movement by removing the head. Or making them practically useless
by damaging the legs.

The last time
he’d had to disable one had been a close call. He had been in bed
when one unexpectedly shattered its way through his flat’s window
and attacked him. It took several battered looking items from his
cutlery drawer and an ancient looking vase that had been on his
shelf for what seemed like an eternity to stop it. He then threw
the damn thing out of the broken window, where it landed and
continued to find life again and begin its attack of terror on
someone else.

How dare she?
How God damn dare she ditch him? How dare she even consider leaving
him? How could she? Why? Why? Why, why, why, why, why?
Whywhywhywhywhywhywhy!!?? His mind had fumed on the word why so
much, he had lost the meaning of it. It felt alien on his tongue,
as though the word had lost its meaning, as though the word was now
not of the land’s native language, but of gibberish made from the
figment of his imagination. It became the pinnacle of his hatred.
Why had she done this to him? Why!?

Off the lone
back alley and back onto a busy street. This one appeared more
chaotic than the last, Enforcers attempting to control the masses
surging angrily to the Leader’s large residence with their riot
shields, stun weapons and actual guns. Jack thought that there may
have been a day when people were proven guilty of breaking the law
before killed, as he saw a six year old girl’s brains get blasted
from hear head by a high speed bullet from the gun of an Enforcer.
He stared at the Enforcer who had committed such an appalling act
of heartlessness. He appeared not to have noticed; maybe he had
been aiming to shoot someone else. The amount of mistaken killings
of innocents before the riots and rebellions really began was what
Jack considered to be insane. So the amount now was clearly going
to be disastrous.

Six year old
female blood sprayed across his face. Jack closed his eyes and
heard the unmistakeable potato-sack thud of the girl’s corpse
hitting the ground. She had probably been on her way to the
education offices. What the selfish world was doing to children
infuriated Jack even more.

Surely a better
system of just instantaneous killing would be better, Jack
pondered, stepping over the child’s body and into the packed
street. Surely a system where you were held in an Enforcer cell for
a while whilst they gathered proof that you had committed such a
crime would reduce the number of unnecessary killings. Jack knew a
system like that was already in place, however it was only the
seriously wanted criminals who get to benefit from it. It was
something Jack found hard to believe, that Neo-Terrorists such as
that guy who liked to be known as the letter ‘J’, who killed many
of the lands citizens for no apparent reason with bombs, kill
streaks and most recently, floods weren’t short on sight. And yet
an ordinary civilian who was thought to be doing something
suspicious by an on looking Enforcer would be shot immediately.

He knew the
problem with retaining everyone under suspicion of a criminal act
would be that it would cost a hellishly large amount of money to
achieve. Highfields Enforcer Centre wasn’t exactly a big place,
another few buildings would have to be built and maintained,
resulting in yet another tax raise and probably a decrease in
allowances. But why did the supreme criminals deserve such money
spent on them when everyone else was just blown to pieces with a
single ball of metal on sight?

“Stay back!
Stay back!” the riot Enforcer shouted at him through his protective
gear, “Stay back or I will have to stun you! Do you
understand?”

“Please,” said
Jack, over the noise of the riot into the Enforcer’s ear, “I just
need to get to work. I work at the Valve Offices, I’m late enough
already.”

“I said, get
back!” the riot Enforcer yelled at someone else, raising a fist at
an angry crowd. A surge behind him pushed Jack forward, the riot
Enforcer turned to him, “Right show me your identification
card.”

Jack’s head
cursed. ID card. For the love of God, let him not have left it at
his flat. He checked his pockets in hope that he’d find it. His
hands came into contact with the new knife, and a thought of
absurdity entered his head. He eyed the riot Enforcer, now
distracted with the rest of the masses as Jack searched for his ID
card. It would take less than a second. Rip the knife out and
plunge it into the Enforcer’s neck before disappearing into the
crowd after the riot barrier. He was out to kill someone anyway,
who was to care if a couple more bought it on the way?