Metropolitan Lines Issue 2 - Brunel University

limitless funds to finance them.
Chicken had never been one to tie
himself to one particular customer,
but Rollins paid twice the market
price for chicken. Problem was it all
had to be leftovers.
Chicken’s operations expanded
quickly with Rollins’ arrival. He
began to take greater risks. Time
from grooming to delivery became
shorter and shorter. Mistakes were
made. Some of those picked up
were not as expendable as first
thought. Paying off the cops and the
occasional politician had been part
of the deal from the outset and they
had come cheap, but they were
taking more heat and buying them
off was becoming more and more
expensive. One sergeant in
particular was beginning to turn
down more and more requests.
There was a momentum building
here. Chicken could see that at
some point in the future it would
come apart. Shit, they couldn’t even
keep him out of the courts. He had
greased so many palms he shouldn’t
even have come close to this. But he
couldn’t stop. The thought of saying
‘no’ to Rollins never entered his
mind.
A few months after their first
meeting, Chicken had asked him
what he did with the children and
the young men and women that he
sent him. He had expected to be
told to mind his own fucking
business, but Rollins merely smiled
and offered to show him. That night
he took him to an old warehouse
and Chicken watched as Rollins
methodically dismembered a young
woman to the occasional sound of
mewling and the faint whirring of a
video recorder.
When he finally stopped, he had
turned to Chicken and asked him if
he would be interested in seeing his
video collection.
34
postgraduate fiction
Chicken checked the rear view
mirror. The station wagon was
still there. The money sat in the
boot of his car. The final batch of
human cargo was due in the
afternoon. One last deal and he was
gone forever. It had been a hard
choice for Chicken but he couldn’t
bury the memories that had been
jarred loose by that night in the
warehouse. It wasn’t repentance or
any such shit like that. It was
survival instinct, pure and simple.
Chicken felt himself being
consumed, inside and out,
dissolving as if soaked in a foul toxic
brine, the diluted essence of Rollins
slowly eating him away.
His planning had been
meticulous and quiet. He was sure
Rollins suspected nothing. He had
only one more stop; everything had
been going like clockwork. Until
this idiot started tailing him...
Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008
Chicken Jack
Perry Bhandal