The Chop Shop Read online

  The Chop Shop

  By Christopher Heffernan

  Text copyright © Christopher Heffernan

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 1.

  Michael tensed up, leaning over the side of the bath to grab the pistol on the floor. He checked the safety and climbed out. A patch of mould growth spread over the plastic blinds, which he tweaked open and peered down onto the street below.

  A platform of dark concrete blocked his view of the sky, lit by the flashes of searchlights as they swept back and forth across the ruins of Lower London. Hazardous waste dripped past the window from a leaking sewage pipe hundreds of meters above. His car still sat in its parking space, newly adorned with the remains of broken bottles and surrounded by chain fence and barbed wire.

  Michael removed the plank of wood propped up against the door handle. He walked into the lounge, still clutching the gun in his clammy hands and switched off the alarm clock. His heart rate quickened as he removed the second plank from the front door. A draft crept under the door and turned his toes cold.

  Memories of the previous night resurfaced in his consciousness. Michael raised the gun, gritted his teeth and opened the front door. The hallway was empty, complete with the scent of the same decomposing body from one of the empty flats. Fresh gang tags marked the wall opposite him, sprayed on with pink paint.

  He sighed to himself and shut the door. It was seven-twenty in the morning, and it was going to be a very bad day. He moved to the shadows to dress in his suit, and then used the hand-pump to force water through the purifier and into the waiting glass. He popped three tablets from their blister packs, each one shaped differently, and dropped them into the water. He shook the glass gently and watched as they dissolved into a white haze.

  Michael drank it down to the last drop. He had decided it tasted like rat poison left to melt on the tongue, only instead of killing him, it kept him alive.

  He slipped on his belt holster and let the .45 lodge within the depths of the leather. Three pockets carried spare magazines. It was seven-forty when he finally stepped out of the flat with a plastic carrier bag of foil wrapped sandwiches, still cold from the night they'd spent in the fridge.

  A searchlight swept past the shattered window at the end of the hall, and he felt a gust of chill wind blow against his face and ruffle his tie. The stench of death was stronger in the air now, so strong that he gagged. One converted warehouse, forty flats, thirty-eight of them deserted, and one home to the corpse of an old man. He wondered which ailment had killed him, and then decided that he didn't really want to know.

  Now he was the only living thing for nearly two hundred meters in every direction. He lingered in the hall for a moment, wondering if there was anything worth salvaging from the flat. Probably not.

  He walked through puddles of water formed by leaking pipes, reflecting the crimson glow of LEDs, and took the stairs down. The sight of ruined cars greeted him. They had turned to rust, those parts which had not be scorched black by fire, untouched for a decade since the war ended.

  Bleached skeletons sat slumped in the remains of their seats, as tattered newspapers drifted down the road, riding on the wind. Michael went around to the back where his car sat in its security pen.

  He fumbled with the orange and brown padlock and opened the gate. Broken glass bottles crunched beneath his shoes as he slid into the driver's seat of the navy blue car. A mangy fox strolled past the fence, pausing to look up at him before it continued on with its head bowed low.

  Michael keyed the ignition. The radio came on after the engine, playing him the last five seconds of an old song he'd heard a dozen times before. It changed to the news. A female reporter launched into a monologue about the Basingstoke Butcher and a rise in cases of uncontrolled cannibalism amongst the surviving population.

  Then she started on a story about an airliner crashing under mysterious circumstances. He sighed, turned the radio off and drove onto the road.

  His hands were clammy with sweat as he remembered the war and those memories of Berlin; long nights of burning ruins and smoke that blocked out radioactive green skies, moving through sewers that shook under the weight of tanks above ground, and all those people convulsing and vomiting as they died from nerve gas.

  He remembered lying still under corpses, pretending to be dead, with only a gas mask between him and the nerve agents. Russian gunships loitered in the air, hunting for survivors with their thermal sights. He'd feel the vibrations of approaching tanks in the rubble, waiting for the helicopters to move on, and then he'd see the soldiers approaching, dressed from head to toe in CRBN equipment. They'd move slow, marching alongside the tanks, sometimes stopping to kick over debris and corpses as they checked for survivors.

  He'd wait, trembling from fear, and they'd always come closer. He'd reach for the detonator, flick the switch and watch as they vanished in a flash of fire and smoke. Then he'd have to run, and it was the part he always hated the most, praying he'd get back to the manhole cover before the survivors found him.

  It was late enough in the morning now for people to walk the streets in small groups. People with jobs, sometimes drug dealers or car clamping gangs. Sometimes he saw other cars or a bus. An aerial drone flew past at low altitude.

  Croydon pillar emerged from the darkness, towering over nearby buildings; a mass of concrete, steel and advanced composite materials, with navigation lights that flashed from top to bottom.

  Michael turned the corner. Croydon police station occupied the compound to the south, where a security checkpoint stopped him a hundred meters away. Concrete blocks walled off the approach, guarded by a machine gun nest and an infantry fighting vehicle.

  A policeman stepped forward as Michael lowered the door window. He raised the visor on his helmet, face hidden by balaclava and dressed in a black combat uniform sporting the Assurer corporate logo on its sleeve.

  “Morning, Detective. You know the drill.”

  Michael reached inside his coat's interior pocket and fished for the identity card. He listened to another policeman complaining about security for a construction team. His accomplice laughed with a cocaine snort and suggested that they should have shot them all and dumped the bodies in the ditch. Law enforcement through superior firepower.

  He couldn't find his card. The policeman leaned closer, and his eye twitched, out of focus for a moment before it returned to normal. He blinked it away. One of the others was selling drugs to a trio of addicts inside a doorway.

  “Give me a minute. It's here somewhere,” Michael said.

  The policeman sniffed to clear his nose and shifted his rifle to the other hand. “It's okay, take your time. I've been here all night; I'm not going anywhere soon.”

  Michael checked his other pockets. He found the card in his trouser pocket. The policeman took the card, held it up so the hologram caught the light, and then swiped it through the card reader he held. A red light flashed. The reader gave a buzzing sound.

  “Shit,” the policeman muttered. He turned to the others. “John, it's broken again. Come and fix it.”

  Michael sighed and slumped in his seat. He could see some of Croydon station's
array of armoured vehicles just beyond the checkpoint. A trio of policemen patrolled the parking area. Somebody was screaming, and one by one the policemen turned to look. People burst through the station's main entrance. A woman fell, and the people behind trampled her to death.

  Croydon station exploded in a flash of flame. The fire consumed it, lashing out at those fleeing before it was snuffed out by an advancing wave of black smoke that sent the checkpoint guards stumbling to the ground. Bits of metal, concrete, bone, and flesh rained down on them.

  A severed arm landed on his windscreen. It still moved back and forth, given life by the rumble of the car engine. The dust cloud swallowed him alive.

  Michael stopped his car at the checkpoint. The policeman tapped his knuckles on the window until he lowered it. “ID.”

  Half a dozen others watched him. Two sat behind sandbag emplacements, gripping the handles of machine guns. Michael handed over his identity card. The policeman ran it through his scanner, and the light flashed green.

  He glanced up at Michael. “The replacement? We've been expecting you, Mr Ward. Go on through. Park in section A. The desk officer will get you to where you need to be.”

  One of the others slid back the chain fencing and raised the barrier. The sign once said, “Richmond Station,” but had since been changed with thick, red paint, so that it now read, “The Chop Shop.”

  The paint had trickled before it had dried, and it seemed as though the sign had been bleeding. He drove forward, finding the surrounding houses boarded up with wood and metal. One had collapsed inwards on itself, now a mess of whitewashed brick, broken glass and shattered roof tiles, taking part of the adjoining buildings with it.

  The winds sucked pieces of rubbish across the street like tumble weed, and distant tower blocks loomed over urban decay. Past the checkpoint was the old high street, formerly a bastion of economic prosperity with four takeaways, a café and a launderette.

  Tables and chairs were still set out. The umbrella shades had rotted, leaving rusted metal spokes exposed to the open air like spider legs, and beneath them skeletons slumped in their seats, still garbed in the remains of their clothes. Their bone smiles suggested they were still laughing from a joke shared a decade ago.

  One of the takeaways was called The Chop Shop, and Richmond station piggy-backed onto it like an architectural tumour of metal and glass, induced by a toxic case of lax planning laws. The rest of the area had been bulldozed, concreted over, and walled off to make room for police facilities.

  He parked his car where the policeman had told him to. A perimeter wall topped with razor wire and patrolled by lone policemen separated the compound from the rest of the world. Concrete bunkers shaped like angular aircraft hangers housed the armouries. One policeman stood beside a doorway, oblivious to the no smoking sign bolted to the wall as he puffed away on a cigarette.

  Two more stood guard by the main entrance, cradling rifles as their postures sagged with the weight of boredom. Michael left his car and entered the building, setting off weapon scanners as he passed through. One of the policemen leaned around the corner to stare at him. A finger inched over the trigger guard of his rifle.

  He handed his identity card and .45 over to the policeman hidden behind a screen of armoured glass in the security booth and passed through again. Silent. The policeman slid them back over the counter, nodding towards the reception area.

  “Go on through.”

  Plastic trees decorated the corners of the reception area. A television screen hung from the wall, displaying footage of the nine o'clock news. The chairs were losing their covers to wear, and clumps of yellowed foam spilled out of the gaps like human fat.

  A man stood in the middle of it all, a little over six feet tall, holding a roll-up between two fingers as he exhaled smoke through the nose. He had grey hair and a moustache, dressed in black police fatigues, with the trousers bloused at the boots.

  Michael exchanged a stare with him. The man's lips curled upwards at the corners. He stubbed the cigarette out in a glass ashtray that hadn't been emptied for months and approached. Up close, Michael could see a weariness in the man's expression. They shook hands.

  “I'm pretty sure I know who you are,” the man said in a Scottish accent. He glanced at his watch. “You're also one minute and thirty-five seconds late, but seeing as it's your first day here, I'll cut you some slack. Come with me. We'll get you briefed and set up.”

  The man swiped his security card through the reader and led Michael through a corridor once pristine white, but now yellowing and beginning to turn brown. “I'm Major Harris, commander of Richmond station, but we like to call it the Chop Shop.”

  “I saw the sign out front, sir.”

  They stopped at a pair of lifts. Harris slapped the button. “These things take a while. Everything breaks here sooner or later.”

  Two policemen stood guard a little further on, backs turned.

  “I don't understand it, Corporal. The corpses never fit the body bags. It's like trying to lift a sack that keeps sagging.”

  The corporal nodded knowingly. “It's what I like to call the bacon effect. You go to your local supermarket, and sometimes on those rare and precious occasions, they have a supply of bacon. Long and streaky bacon rashers, and you think to yourself, 'yum, that bacon sure looks tasty. There's enough of it to fulfil my dietary requirements for today, and I really want to buy it,' right?"

  “I suppose so.”

  “You remember the last food riot and decide that starving for four days on the trot is unpleasant, so you buy it at the rigged price, get home and put it in your frying pan. The smell makes you salivate; your stomach rumbles. Disaster strikes. Suddenly those huge rashers of bacon that looked so tasty start to shrink and shrivel up. Now they look tiny, and you feel like you've been ripped off. You're angry. Do you know why that happens? It's because the supermarkets pump it full of water.”

  “I never really gave it much thought.”

  The corporal shrugged. “Well, Private, the exact same principle applies to people. Like bacon rashers, we are mostly made of water, and when we are incinerated by fire the moisture is removed from our bodies. We shrink and shrivel up until we look like an anorexic on a sun bed. Body bags are made for stabbings and shootings, not cases where Jimmy accidentally blows up the entire estate because he smells gas and forgets to turn the pilot light off. So you see, it's the bacon effect.”

  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 c
ame 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.”