redRobe

Chapter Thirty-Three Build It Up...

He sprang the rest of his trap the next evening. After a day in which Kate had finally crept to the village because she couldn’t stand the conscripts lighting fires on the tiled floors of the monastery.

But it was only after some kid started to tag great 3-D bruises over a tapestry in the vast dining room that Axl decided to act, ripping the gloPaint gun from the kid’s fingers.

‘No posse marks.’

‘You what?’ Dressed in half-combat, kevlar flak but no shoulder armour or helmet, the conscript gaped at Axl. The man had to be mad. Civilians didn’t just march up to members of PaxForce and start ordering them around. Not if they wanted to keep both knees intact.

Except Axl was standing with arms folded across his chest and legs apart in the doorway of the dining room, staring straight at the soldier. And he obviously expected to be obeyed. Looking at the man’s tattered shirt and ‘fugee crop, the soldier couldn’t quite work out why.

The monastery was requisitioned. The man shouldn’t even have been there.

‘And get rid of this shit,’ Axl said and pointed to a pair of fourteen-buckle combat boots drying in front of a grate full of smouldering yak-dung. The leather boots were meant to be self-drying, self-sealing, self-deodorised… They weren’t, not even when new.

Anyone with half a brain bought their own pair and the fact that their owner hadn’t said nothing good. Getting too crippled to march wasn’t macho, it was just dumb.

‘Whose are those, anyway?’ Axl demanded.

‘The sergeant’s,’ replied the soldier as if that answered everything. And having met defMoma again that morning Axl figured maybe it did. She looked like a typical fuck-wit masochist dyke to him, not that he wanted to pigeon-hole her.

‘And those,’ demanded Axl, pointing to an expensive-looking pair of men’s ankle boots. No buckles, just a self sealing flap. If they were regulation issue, then it was senior ranks only.

‘They belong to the boss.’

Yeah, well that explained it. Though the pleasure of meeting their CO was still to come. He’d only just arrived and was choosing his bedroom.

It was 8 p.m., Wednesday, 14 September. Axl knew that because it was displayed in his left eye, just below the timecode that now read 160.59.59. He’d asked Kate to come down to supper with Mai at 8.30 on the dot. She hadn’t wanted to but Axl was reeling her in. And he still didn’t feel any better about it.

‘You going to get rid of those?’ Axl asked, pointing at both pairs of drying boots.

The soldier shook his head.

With a shrug, Axl opened a shutter and let cold evening air swirl into the smoky room. For the first time since he’d arrived in the high valley the night sky was deep blue, the wind mild and it wasn’t raining. Axl could look from the stone window to the village far below. And that was the direction in which he hurled the boots one after another. Straight towards a four-wheel Toyota cutting scars in the grass as it climbed noisily towards the house.

When defMoma stamped into the room with her spare boots clutched angrily in one hand, she found Axl sweeping his arm across one end of a long wooden table, knocking fag packets, medicare boxes and stripped-down gun parts to the tiled floor.

‘This is for food,’ Axl told her. ‘You or your little friend want to play strip-the-gun-naked go and do it outside. And get rid of this crap, too.’ He scooped up a box of combat rations and tipped the packet of enhanced grits onto the tiles in a rain of little foil squares. Everything the human body could possibly need, from essential amino acids to chelated minerals, minus texture and taste. He’d have swapped a crate of the fucking stuff for a single dose of MDA-4.

‘You’re not an observer.’ It was a statement not a question.

‘Well done,’ said Axl.

‘You told me…’

Axl didn’t care what he told her. Two people were talking in the hall and Axl was busy registering a voice he’d been half expecting, half dreading, ever since he’d recognised the sergeant that night in the stables exactly a week ago…

‘Well,’ said the voice, ‘have you found Father Sylvester yet?’ The words were utterly flat, without accent and yet they gripped Axl’s attention the way crocodile clips grip testicles. Party time.

The revolver was in his hand before Axl even realised that he’d drawn it. Three strides took Axl to the doorway and the crack of the barrel as it met Colonel Emilio’s head was louder than the thud the big man made when he hit the floor. Just nothing like as loud as the single drum kick that swallowed up the rest of Axl’s soundtrack and spat it out as echo.

Axl was feeling better about life already.

‘Freeze,’ he said loudly, and behind Colonel Emilio, the lieutenant did just that, like someone had dipped her in liquid nitrogen.

‘This is private,’ Axl told momaDef, ‘strictly between friends.’

‘You know the CO?’

‘Yeah, but he won’t remember,’ said Axl over his shoulder, as he turned back to defMoma who was still inside the room. ‘I looked different then.’

The fat sergeant had her hand hovering over the half-open, velcroed flap of her own holster, unable to complete the move without making that familiar ripping sound. The one that tells you someone is about to draw their weapon.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Axl and nudged the revolver in her direction. Choosing advanced weaponry then wrapping it in a neoprene container apparently designed to make it difficult to get at made no sense at all to Axl. He’d take a skeleton holster or a lanyard over a closed-top holster any time.

‘Come in,’ Axl gestured to the lieutenant, who did as he said, stepping over the Colonel.

‘You’ll find Clone in the kitchen,’ Axl told the sergeant, sweeping his arm across the other half of the long table so the last of the clutter hit the floor. ‘Tell him to bring supper.’

‘Get your own fucking ...”

The fat woman didn’t finish because Axl put a bullet into the wall behind her, showering her broad shoulders and cropped head with coin-sized chunks of plaster. The kind that knock normal people to the floor from shock if nothing else.

He got complete silence then. Inside his head and out. The ringing Silence that comes when human ears try to adjust from one extreme of noise to the other.

‘Food,’ said Axl firmly.

The sergeant wanted to kill Axl. Wanted it so badly the need was written in her blue eyes and in the muscles that stood out in her thick arms and knotted her jaw. He could almost taste the adrenaline sweating off her. But she wasn’t going to get the chance. None of them were.

‘Put your gun on the floor first,’ Axl told defMoma and waited while she did.

It wasn’t her white trash manners, wrong-end-of-the-bell-curve genetic coding, macho ignorance or what defMoma did or didn’t have dangling between her fat legs that fucked Axl off, it was her PaxForce uniform, pure and simple. The twenty pocket combats. The silicon dogtag. The sweat-stained dirty grey T-shirt stretched tight over steroid shoulders.

‘Thank you.’ Scooping up her gun, Axl flipped open the holder in a squeal of velcro and spun her Colt hiPower, Blackjack style, trying it for balance. Not bad, but not as good as the revolver held in his other hand. Where balance went, that was perfect.

‘At least I’m not in love with my fucking weapon,’ snapped the lieutenant.

‘Well, shit,’ said Axl, glancing between defMoma and momaDef. ‘Maybe you two just never met the right gun.’