The Chop Shop (2 page)

The lift pinged,
and the doors slid open. Michael followed the major inside. Harris pushed the
button for the top floor. His stomach lurched as the lift began its ascent, and
the lights flickered. He watched his reflection warp in the stainless steel.

“I'm sorry to
hear about Croydon Station. I saw some of the footage they recovered from the
cameras, nasty business. I have to be honest with you, though. We won't catch
the guys who did it. Too many militant groups running riot, not enough
resources to fight them. It's never ending.

“Don't know what
it was like in your sector, but here, we get a lot of smuggling on the old
railways. The underground is off limits completely; go down there and you won't
be coming out again. I'd give them and their families an acid bath if we caught
them, but it's not happening. They're probably not even in the city anymore.”

“Nothing new
there, sir,” Michael said with a nod.

“I read your
file. Very impressive compared to the usual rabble I get.”

The lift stopped
and pinged again as the doors opened. They walked into another corridor. A cold
breeze blew against his exposed skin and stood hairs on end. The lights were
here dim, giving everything a dull yellow tint, and a strange silence hung in
the air.

“This way,”
Harris said.

Their footsteps
echoed off the hard floor. The ugly turquoise covering was scuffed with shoe
rubber and filth.

"22
Engineer Regiment, British Army of the Rhine? Heard you were at Berlin."

"I
was."

“Bad fight,
that. I led an infantry company at the battle of Dresden and came out with just
a platoon when it was over. I'm glad to see you have some detective experience.
Tanks and muscle only get us so far; most of the guys are trigger happy, and
we've got a chronic lack of people with the experience needed to do the job
properly. They'll shoot first and ask questions later. Makes for bad headlines
in the papers and pisses off the underclass like hell.

“We've got an
understrength company manning this station, and the streets could really do a
number on this place if they wanted to. There's too much heavy ordinance
floating about on the black market and never enough god damned people to do
anything about it.”

A loudspeaker
crackled to life. “Corporal Hill's team report to armoury three immediately,”
the female voice said.

Major Harris
stopped at a wooden door shedding white paint chips over the floor. A name
plaque marked it as his office. He tapped a six digit number into the keypad,
and they went inside. Harris gestured to the chair opposite his desk. “Have a
seat.”

The major
slumped in his leather chair, flicked the switch on his desk lamp, and plucked
the packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. The office had a lone window
with the blinds shut, and the desk lamp gave off an ochre glow like a wilting
candle, barely enough to keep the darkness at bay.

Several framed
photos sat on the desk, but they were turned away, and all Michael could see
was the cardboard backings. He wondered if the major was a family man, if he
had children, or whether his wife was the job and his child the .45 strapped to
his hip.

“I'm sorry, sir,
but it's better for both of us if you don't smoke in here. Chemical weapons
burned out my lungs in Berlin; there's not much left of them.”

Harris gave him
a wry smile. He nodded and returned the cigarettes to his pocket. “That's fine,
but I don't know how the hell you manage around other people. I expect they all
light up anyway. I'll cut to the chase. I've got a hole in my detective unit,
and you'll be plugging it.”

“What happened
to the last guy?”

The major
adjusted the monitor on his desk. It was pieced together from multiple parts,
crude and bulky with a beige tint like the screens of old. He slid the keyboard
tray out. “He got shot point blank in the face; they have to feed him through a
tube.”

He tapped at the
buttons and slapped the enter key. A wireless printer in the corner stuttered
to life. It shook violently as it spat five sheets of paper into the wire tray.

“You'll be
working alongside Richard Lanning. He's competent enough, but still green. I
think you'll get along with him okay,” Harris said. He collected up the
printouts and handed them to Michael. “These will get you up to speed on
everything you need to know. For now.”

Harris' radio
hissed with static. “Major, we need you in the control room. There's trouble
going down.”

He pressed the
radio to his cheek. “Be right there.”

Distant voices
echoed off the walls. A lone policeman watched him from the other end of the
corridor, face hidden behind visor and balaclava. Michael stopped outside the
office he'd been directed to. Somebody had taped a sheet of paper to the door,
with “Do Not Disturb,” written across it in bold letters. The window blinds
were open.

Michael peeked
through a gap, eyeing the detectives at their desks. It was too dark to see
them properly. The policeman was still watching him, lifeless as a statue. He
opened the door, and a chorus of chatter greeted him, and then died an instant
later.

They turned to
study him, five of them in all. Two women, three men and an empty desk still
adorned with personal possessions. An air purifier hummed in the background.
The room felt colder than the corridor, lit by the glow of CRT monitors and
their green command prompts.

He glanced in
turn at each of the name plaques on the desks. David Brown raised an eyebrow
and leaned back in his chair. “Who are you?”

Brown was the
tallest of the lot. He was lean, with blond hair gelled back and dressed in a
sharply cut suit.

“Are you the
replacement?” Maria Taylor said. There was a hint of South American heritage in
her face, but he couldn't quite place it.

“Yeah, that's
me,” Michael said. He walked to the last desk and seated himself. Framed photos
of a man, his wife and children were placed around the edges. A toy penguin
acted as a paperweight for a crayon drawing.

“Here,” David
said, “let me help you with that.” He rose from behind his desk, tall and
athletic, and picked up one of the bins. He knocked the possessions off the
desk and into the depths of the bin-liner with one clean sweep of his arm,
before dumping the bin back in its original place.

“Jesus, David.
You can't just throw his stuff away like that,” Maria said, rubbing her temples
with a finger and thumb.

David shrugged.
“He's sucking food through a straw. What does that tell you? It tells you that
most of his face is missing. His wife is still young and pretty, and she can do
much better than him, so she'll file for a divorce and find somebody who
doesn't look like the rear end of a horse. His face will give his children
nightmares; they'll never want to see him again.

“They're also
too young to have formed an emotional attachment. In a few years they'll forget
about him and another will take his place, except for when they hear the
stories of monsters lurking under their beds, and then they'll think of
Detective No-jaw. Trust me, he's not going to want this shit. I give it a year
maximum before he finishes himself off.”

“I'm just saying
that maybe it's a bit much. Perhaps you should ask him before you bin his
stuff.”

“Oh yeah? And
what's he going to say? 'Hmph, hmph, hmph'? He can't even talk, for God sake.”

Helen Miller
rolled her eyes. She had her hair cut short. A scar ran down her left temple.
“Why don't you keep them if they're so important? Connor is wasted and he isn't
coming back any time soon. Time to move on.”

She turned to
Michael, smacking her lips together as she chewed on a stick of gum. “How much
experience do you have, new guy?”

Michael slid his
briefcase under the desk. “Enough.”

Helen gave him a
sour look. “Don't be obtuse; what's 'enough'?”

“Combat
experience in Berlin and two years as a detective. I'm not a new guy.”

Richard Lanning
leaned across from the right. “You were at Berlin? My brother was there. He's
still there now; what's left of him.”

“You see that
look of awe on Richard's face? Half the time he can't even tie his own shoe
laces,” Helen said.

“Okay,”
Archibald said. “Wind it up and get back to work. We're slumming it enough as
it is, and Harris doesn't need another excuse to come down hard on us.”

Archibald's dark
skin was starting to wrinkle. It had the look of worn leather, and his nose was
still crooked from whatever had broken it.

Helen groaned
and gestured towards the window. “She's already here. She's obsessed with that
window. Actually, I think it might be because she secretly likes you, Dave.”

A set of eyes
stared at them through the blinds.

“Get rid of her.
I'm trying to work; I can't deal with this shit,” Maria said.

The door handle
turned, and the woman entered. She was short, expression reduced to a permanent
squint by burns. The wig of dark hair on her head peeled away at the edges, as
she dragged a trolley of cleaning supplies behind her. She glanced at David,
rolled up the blinds, and sprayed the window with cleaning fluid.

Helen rolled her
eyes again. “Get rid of her,” she mouthed silently.

David stood up
and approached the woman. He pulled a grotesque face behind her back. “Hello,
Mary. We've got a present for you.”

Mary turned
around, glancing at each of them. Michael tasted sourness in the back of his
mouth, as David snatched a make-up mirror from the desk to his left. He flipped
it open at the woman.

“Here. Now you
can open it and remind yourself that your face looks it just came out of a
sausage machine. I guess the Russians left you blind as well as stupid when
they melted your face off, otherwise you would have seen the sign on the door
telling you not to fucking disturb us.”

Archibald
slapped his hand on the desk. “Christ, David. You are way, way out of line. You
rein it in right now, do you hear me?”

Mary sobbed. She
opened her mouth to say something, but the words lodged in her throat, and she
ran from the room, pushing past the woman behind. The woman shut the door. She
wore a white shirt and black trousers, with her blonde hair tied back in a bun.
Her face had a sickly yellow complexion about it, like she was ridden with a bad
case of malaria.

“That's
disgusting, David. I don't know what goes on in your head, but you are one
nasty piece of work. What's wrong with you? How can you even say something like
that to her?” the woman said.

“We're trying to
work, and all she ever does is interrupt us; that's how. All I want to do is
finish up my report. Can I do that? Apparently not,” David said.

The woman pushed
past him. “Maria, Archibald, I need your paperwork; the network has gone down
and I can't access your files.”

“Sounds about right.
I'm surprised it ever works at all,” Archibald said, handing her a card folder.

“I don't
understand how you can all just let him insult her like that,” she said.

David groaned.
“Oh, give it a rest, Samantha. All you ever do is bitch and moan. Maybe, life
would go better for you if your brain was bigger than your tits. I mean, you're
so flat-chested they could give you a fucking double mastectomy, and nobody
would be able to tell the difference.”

A look of pain
surfaced in her expression, sickly skin turning a slight shade of pink. “That
was uncalled for. One day, you're going to piss the wrong person off, and
you'll end up smeared over a wall. If you ask me, the world will be better for
it. And you know what? Major Harris will break your legs if I tell him what you
just said to his daughter.”

“Hey, do you
know what else he'd like to hear about?” David said. He pulled a ten pound note
from his wallet and rolled it up. He squashed one nostril closed with a finger
and stuck the tube up other. He began to snort, shaking his head about as
though riding an imaginary high.

“Go away, I
don't snort coke.”

“No? What about
all the other stuff? You're pretty fond of the pills.”

Samantha elbowed
him in the arm as she walked out of the office. She slammed the door, causing
the window to vibrate in its frame.

“God, I hate
her,” Helen said.

Archibald looked
across the room with a stern frown on his face. “Back to work.”

Michael sighed.
He stood up and went to the window behind him. The blinds were open enough for
him to look down on the suburban areas below; endless rows of ruined houses and
cars, and somewhere amongst it all the remnants of human society. He saw a man
at the window, gone in the blink of an eye.

He heard him
strike a car. The sound of shattering glass and crushed aluminium echoed
through the streets, followed by the wailing of the car alarm.

“What the hell
was that?” Richard said.

The corpse had
flattened the front half of the car beneath it, and tail lights flashed as the
alarm continued to shriek. Bits and pieces of glass and metal surrounded the
remains of the vehicle.

The others moved
to the window. Helen pointed to the yellow sports car beside it. “Looks like
the jumper nearly trashed your ride, David.”

David grunted.
“The paint work will still be scratched. What a twat.”

Blood began to
leak from the man's shattered skull. A trio of police officers gathered around
the remains. They looked up at the man-made sky. One of them shrugged.

Major Harris
opened the card folder and placed black and white photocopies in front of them.
They sat in a briefing room, walls once clinical white like the rest of the
building, but now slowly being gobbled up by shadow and mould. The chair was
hard, from where too many backsides had crushed the life out of it.

Michael's hand
brushed the underside of the table. He felt hardened lumps of chewing gum stuck
to the wood, and his hand recoiled. The photograph was of a man in his
mid-forties posing for some public event.

“Should we
recognise him, sir?” Michael said.

Harris returned
to his place at the front of the room where the whiteboard stood. “That depends
on whether you voted for him or not. He was an MP from Devon.”

“Was.”

“I expect you
all got a good look at him when he was plastered over that car. It's a long
fall from Upper London.”

“The guy who
nearly wrecked my car? There's a million places to jump off that platform. Or
he could've gotten somebody else to do the job for him. No shortage of
volunteers for that,” David said.

Harris paced
around the tables again. He laid out more photocopies. “Read this; it's a
preliminary police report filed less than an hour ago. His suicide isn't what
you need to be thinking about.”

“Jesus, what a
bloodbath,” Richard said.

“They won't like
it upstairs, but technically, Jim Belton died in our jurisdiction. I've pulled
a lot of strings, so you'll be going up there; not only that, but there's a
possibility of the killer being down here in Lower London. The police up there
will be doing their own investigation, but there will be time for you to
examine the crime scene. Corporal Hill and two section will be accompanying you
to the lift as security.

“I'm sure I
don't need to remind you all of the money at stake here. Put this in the back
of the net and you're all going to come out of it better off. The company
rewards success; bounties, perks, promotions, it's all there for the taking.
Gear up and get moving,” Harris said.

The others filed
out of the room.

“Nothing in it
for you, sir?” Michael said.

Harris gave him
a cold look. “I'm fifty-six, and I've seen a lot of wars. My wife is dead and
my daughter would probably be better off had she joined her. There's little
that interests me. Get going.”

Michael caught
up with the others before the lift doors shut. They rode down to the ground
floor.

“How long has it
been since you went topside, Ward?” Richard said.

“Longer than I
care to remember,” Michael said.

David smirked.
“God damn rent prices. This piece of shit job wouldn't even get me a room and a
floor to sleep on up there. I bought my sports car cash in hand, but that
money? It's nothing to the people up there.”

“Do what
everyone else up there does and get a corporate sponsorship,” Maria said.

“I'm afraid I
lack the required network of business connections. They might as well just give
London over to the Africans or Chinese. They bankrolled all the
reconstruction,” David said.

“And did a piss
poor job of it. They threw enough money at that project to rebuild half of the
south and look what there is to show for it; more holes than a lump of Swiss
fucking cheese,” Helen said.

They got off at
the fourth floor, picked up two satchels of equipment and took the stairs the
rest of the way. Corporal Hill's section was waiting for them out front, stood
in front of two infantry fighting vehicles painted high-visibility white.

“Are you ready?”
Corporal Hill said.

“The bacon
effect, huh?” Michael said.

The corporal
nodded.

“Let's go,”
Helen said.

 Richmond pillar
lingered at the limits of his view. Signal lights and neon advertisements
flashed high above the surrounding areas. Michael checked his watch. They
climbed into the back of the closest vehicle through the small door and seated
themselves inside the cramped interior.

“Mind your
heads,” Hill said.

The seats were
the colour of faded green and felt as hard as wood. Three soldiers from the
section sat opposite them. Michael inhaled; the air was thick with the scent of
the engine and old hydraulics. An electric motor whined, and the rear door
slammed shut, entombing them inside a coffin of metal and appliqué armour
panels.

He listened to
the radio chatter, lurching sideways as the vehicle jumped into first gear.
Spare ammunition rattled about in tin cans hidden beneath the seats. The
vehicle had no vision ports, and he found himself staring at the policemen
seated opposite. One pulled down his balaclava to wipe the sweat from his
forehead.

Corporal Hill
nodded at Richard and leaned forward. “You're looking a little pale, Richard,”
he shouted over the drone of the engine.