The Chop Shop Read online

  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.”

  Chapter 2.

  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.”
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  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.

  “Riding in these things always make me feel sick. I prefer a car.”

  “This isn't an airliner. We don't keep sick bags on board,” Hill said. He reached down and pulled out the empty ammunition can from under his seat. “If you're going to blow, use this. I don't want your vomit washing all over the floor and ruining my boots.”

  “Two minutes,” a voice said over the radio.

  “To be honest, I don't know how some of you even end up as detectives. You're all greener than the fungus between my toes,” one of the other policemen said.

  “Private military companies are buying up a lot of people. Assurer have to compete with them for personnel. There's only so many people in the pool before they have to start recruiting from further afield. PMCs are in hot supply; there's another flashpoint over natural resources every month. The pay is good, but I don't rate your chances of survival,” Corporal Hill said.

  “Is the pay good enough for a place on the plate?”

  “Maybe, but you probably wouldn't live long enough to enjoy it.”

  “Then I guess I'll stick with Assurer, even if they are a bunch of French bastards.”

  The vehicle stopped, and Hill slapped the button to open the rear door. They stepped outside and found themselves blinded by a spotlight.

  Hill beckoned to them. “This way, this way.”

  An electric perimeter fence surrounded them. Police snipers looked out from four guard towers, others patrolling the grounds. Richmond pillar rose upwards, thicker than a sky scraper and a hundred times uglier. Metal and concrete branched out at the top like a tree canopy to support Upper London. Polluted water and toxic waste rained down from leaking pipes wielded to the underside of the platform.

  They moved past a barracks building to the maintenance lift. Corporal Hill removed both safety chains and lowered the lift's access barrier. “I've heard it's raining up there today.”

  “God damn acid rain,”
Richard said.

  “It's less toxic than whatever it is leaking down on our heads,” Michael said.

  “All right, Private Taylor and I will come up there with you. The rest of my section will wait down here,” Hill said.

  They stepped onto the maintenance lift and secured the access barrier. Corporal Hill hit the button to raise the lift. A siren rang out; orange hazard lights flashed as they began to ascend. The police outpost shrank below.

  Michael felt a wave of dizziness overcome him. He backed away from the edge, gripping the guardrail with a cold and clammy hand. The wind grew stronger. Coats, ties and hair flapped violently. Private Taylor walked to the edge, leaned over the barrier and spat.

  “It's quite a view, as long as you don't slip,” Corporal Hill said.

  The city was a sprawling mess of darkness and decay, kept alive by small outposts of lights, advertisement displays and burning fires. One tower vanished in the blink of an eye like somebody had performed a magic trick with it.

  “Fucking power cuts,” Taylor said.

  Some of the city ruins were tall enough to nearly touch the underside of the platform, blocking his view to the east. Michael looked up, as a hole in the platform swallowed them. They passed through layers of metal. Bulging electrical cables and pipes crawled in and out of every crevice like wild ivy, and sparks flew from an electrical box with a noise that sounded much too similar to gunfire.

  Dim light filled the lift shaft, growing stronger. Michael heard the patter of rain and the sounds of electric cars. A chain fence and security checkpoint surrounded them on all sides as the lift came to a halt, and black clouds drifted overhead with unnatural speed. Puddles formed in the concrete.

  The policemen up here wore grey urban camouflage with a different company logo stitched onto the sleeves. One of them, a lance corporal, opened the fence and waved them through.

  “We've been expecting you. This way, the crime scene isn't too far from here.”