by Lu Huiyi
“I did,” Beng protested. “I went to this blood donation place—”
“You went to a what?”
“It was perfectly respectable,” Beng said, because he valued holding his own in an argument over telling the truth.
“Oh,” said Huat, his voice a mix of infuriating sarcasm and poorly-concealed hysteria. “Respectable. Of course. Is that why the bathroom now reeks of blood?”
Beng was (in his opinion, rightfully) defensive at once. “I totally used the air freshener before I came out,” he said.
“That can’s been empty for a month,” said Huat.
A pause.
“That might explain a lot,” Beng said at last.
“Beng.”
“It’s not what you think it is,” Beng said, and then sighed. “Okay, so, I went to that place, and they were crazy so I got the hell out of there. And I think some people were kil—um, punched, on the way out. That’s all.”
Huat looked at him for a long time. It was kind of like the look he had when he was trying to project his Professional Employable Archibald Face, only there was enough genuine worry there to war with the pomposity of his expression, and it was really somewhat disarming.
“You don’t have to be afraid to tell me,” he said, with sombre resignation.
“What? I’m not afraid—”
“The gangs will come after us anyway,” he said. “So it doesn’t matter if the family knows or not.”
The gangs? They had all heard rumours about it—youngish lawless delinquents, taking advantage of the chaos and worming their way into the thick of just about any disorder available, from petty crime to violent assault to turf wars. They had no name but this ambiguous label—no names known to the general public at present, anyway. In fact, Huat and Beng had begun to suspect that some of them had been behind Beng’s almost-kidnapping. Beng shuddered to think what would’ve become of him if they, with their growing reach and organisation, had succeeded in taking him.
How were they linked to this whole mess?
His confusion must have shown on his face, because Huat groaned despairingly.
“Oh my god, you don’t know anything,” said Huat, dismayed and stunned. “You’ve been running circles around the truth not because you wanted to protect us, but because you don’t know a single damn thing.”
“What am I supposed to know?”
“They’ve got their hands in many of the businesses,” said Huat. “Many, if not all. And the dodgier the business, the more directly they’re involved—like blood-selling, of course.”
“They didn’t come after me again, when I ran away the first time,” Beng argued.
“Well, you didn’t kill any of their people the first time, did you?”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“They don’t know where I live,” said Beng.
“It’s a small city.”
“Then what do we do now?”
“We need to start moving. Go somewhere new, lay low and then start over. It’s the only way.”
“That bad?” Beng asked plaintively. His brother nodded.
“Mother and Father are going to take this really badly,” said Huat.
There was a pause.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean to,” said Beng.
Huat nodded, a barely-there incline of the head.
“It was in self-defence. I get it,” he said with uncharacteristic mildness.
“No, as in—I don’t know what happened. It was like they were hurting me and putting so much pressure on me and I—I just cracked and when I came back to myself, they were dead—it sounds crazy. They were going to harvest my organs, Huat. I thought I was going to die. I know it sounds crazy.”
Huat blinked.
“It sounds crazy,” said Beng again, uncertain.
“It does sound crazy,” Huat agreed.
Beng felt a little self-conscious—perhaps even ashamed. He had spent so much time tiptoeing around the truth that he felt raw and vulnerable to the disbelief that seemed to be coming his way. Maybe he’d just blocked things out in his mind, in the mad panic of it all, or something—it was probably more of an ordinary encounter than it had seemed in his mind.
“It doesn’t matter; they’ll come anyway,” he said, carefully backtracking. But Huat wasn’t listening.
“It’s crazy,” Huat repeated, thoughtfully. “But it’s the kind of crazy that’s pretty damn useful. I wish you knew how to control it, but maybe then it wouldn’t be quite so crazy.”
Trust Huat to find a silver lining in all of this.
Beng looked over the simple furniture and peeling walls; this was his childhood home and last safe refuge. It seemed an awful shame to have to run away from it.
“There’s crazy and then there’s you, Archibald,” he said, but there was no hardness to his words. Huat shrugged in response, sensible, steady and stoic as usual, and went to double-bolt the door.
Chapter 3
Huat had been luckier than usual this week. A small, old-fashioned printing press had started up a few kilometres from their house, the first of its kind to grace the island—new and small enough that the gangs hadn’t taken an interest in it yet. Already they were producing blotchy little tracts and paperbacks, mostly religious material, but books were now a rare commodity and people, regardless of faith, devoured all that they could borrow or buy with an almost-visceral hunger.
“Just a bit of menial work,” Huat said. “Nobody will know it’s me. Let me get a hundred or two more before we move out.”
“Can’t they tell from the payroll?” Beng asked.
“I put my name down as Archibald.”
For once, the mention of Huat’s adopted name didn’t make Beng want to laugh; he felt horribly remorseful over having created the need to lie low to begin with.
“You are a way better person than I’ll ever be,” he said, too uncomfortable with his expression of sincerity to even meet his older brother’s eyes.
“Nah, Archibald’s a better person than you’ll ever be,” said Huat. “I for one still want to punch you for all this trouble, but I guess it’s better to have trouble than to have you dead.”
He looked over at Beng’s rueful expression, laughed a little and then shoved him, friendly-like, on the shoulder. His inky hands left a dark smudge on Beng’s T-shirt.
“Stop moping, Beng,” he said. “It’ll be fine—I’ve got a plan. I always have a plan.”
“Surely we don’t have to leave,” said Father, for the hundredth time that month. The house was an impossible mess, with clothing and things separated into complicated piles, and the windows blacked out with old newspaper.
“Pa said somebody was following him home yesterday,” said Mother. They had had this argument half a dozen times already.
“Every time I turn, he hide,” said Grandfather, puffing on his pipe. He spoke with such calm that he might as well have been talking about a playground game, but they knew that he, too, felt the strain. He had begun smoking more and more over the course of the week, till the habit had taken on epic proportions, even for him. Now he was pretty much the poster child for how not to cope with stress.
“We should’ve left sooner,” said Beng, who felt incredibly guilty and incredibly frightened all at the same time. “But Huat said to give him a week to scrape together a bit more money.”
“We’re little people,” Father said half-heartedly, while Mother made a big show of rolling her eyes as she folded and packed and put things away. “Surely they don’t care about us that much.”
Mother picked up a thin bundle of fifty-dollar notes and rolled them into a paper cigar. She eased it into the bottom of one of their backpacks. The room was briefly silent but for the rustle of paper and bags.
“There’s a scrap metal yard that they just started, not far from here,” Beng said, falling back on mechanics and realities for something to say. “Huat’s worked for the guy before. If we pay him a little, he’ll let
us stay in some of the unused vehicles for a while—just a while, Pa, till they forget.”
“Then we can come back here?” asked Grandfather.
“Well, maybe not here exactly. But somewhere as nice—”
“If I was twenty years younger—no hiding, strong men don’t need to hide. One punch and hoot—”
“You’re a strong man—we know that,” Mother said, in the placating tone she always reserved just for him. “But those people have weapons.”
Just then, the door swung open, and Huat burst in, much to everyone’s surprise. It was only a little past noon and Huat usually didn’t come back till much later.
Today, his hands were spotless.
“Did you get fired?” said Father, wide-eyed.
“Are they coming?” asked Beng.
“They’ve done it,” said Huat, as he entered the house, kicking off his ratty sneakers. He gave neither preamble nor context, but none were necessary. Everyone looked up at once, instantly alert.
“They’ve done it?” Grandfather asked in a tone of disbelief and wonderment.
“They’ve done it?” Mother echoed, almost disbelieving.
“What’ve they done?” Beng asked.
“The train,” said Mother and he vaguely remembered a fleeting mention of this at the dinner table a couple of days back. There was talk that the Society, a shadowy organisation that had sprung up since the City Hall shutdown, had promised to bring public transport back to Singapore.
Everyone speculated about the Society; it was all that was interesting enough to talk about. The slippery, vicious gangs that had held the public in terror for a couple of months had slowly begun to come together, and the Society was the first banner that the various groups had united under. The Society had risen quickly over the past few weeks, and was increasingly referred to as the political arm of all these illicit groups.
The Society at present was a growing spider-web of delinquents and criminal subgroups, loosely held together by little more than the shared desire to capitalise on the present state of chaos. As far as they had heard, it was mostly dominated by a small in-crowd of rowdy vicious youths who had made steady progress from mere mischief to outright thuggishness and political ambition, and whose chief danger lay in their adamant refusal to abide by any limits whatsoever.
But despite the Society’s ruthlessness, most people had been unsure of how much control the leaders truly had, and by extension, how many resources they had to achieve the grandiose things that they had so easily promised the public.
So everyone had thought about it and talked about it, but nobody had really expected anything concrete. Since the Deprivation had begun to chip away at everything in their lives, people had stopped believing too much in promises without solid proof. It had all seemed like wild talk from a radical organisation of foolish ragamuffins. The whisperings and rumours had reached their peak a while back, when the Society had seized the City Hall train station and barricaded it. But nothing had come of it yet.
And there were more whisperings and rumours about what had become of the Government, after they sent special forces to stand sentry outside the station for a week, and then suddenly withdrew all troops and let the Society rebels enjoy free rein over the place. At first, everyone thought the Government had simply realised that these people weren’t much of a threat. That line of argument, however, led them to the niggling fact that there had been civilian workers taken prisoner during the station takeover, and that there had been no sign of them being released, or of Government attempts to bust them out. But most people tried not to let their thoughts wander down such a treacherous path. Their Government was efficient. Their Government was strong. Or at least, they had to be. Most people didn’t think there could be any real danger that their leaders could not beat, or that they would permit in passivity.
By the time the people saw how much they had underestimated the Society, it was far too late to do anything about it.
Later that afternoon, Beng and his family went down to the station as one, a merry band of five. They couldn’t not see it. There would be tons of people there, they thought, and no fear of being detected in the crowd. But more importantly, Beng was driven by a morbid desire to find out exactly how powerful the people he had pissed off had become.
It was an arduous journey. They hitched rickshaw rides where they could and walked till their feet blistered, but this was something too monumental not to witness—assuming it was true.
“Maybe you should go back and rest, Pa,” said Mother, early into the excursion.
Grandfather looked outraged. His only pair of flip-flops was worn thin and the left one almost in pieces, his breathing was ragged and perspiration was dripping down his sunburnt cheeks, but he looked at Mother as though she had suggested something unbelievably stupid.
“There are trains,” he said.
“I can tell you about them when we come back,” Mother suggested.
“You tell lousy stories,” said Grandfather petulantly. Mother frowned, but he was right. Mother tended to talk about things (if at all) with succinct efficiency, so much so that her stories were more like mission briefs than actual tales worth listening to. When pressed to elaborate, she had an unfailing habit of choosing the most tangential and uninteresting aspects of her tale and fleshing them out in painstaking, unnecessary detail. Grandfather, on the other hand, lived by the belief that entertainment value mattered more than truth in a good story, and would always ensure a good hearing, if not a truthful account. Mother’s re-telling of a scintillating event held little appeal for him compared to the real thing.
“I want to see trains,” he insisted. Mother shrugged. They all plodded on.
By the time they arrived at City Hall, it was nearly four in the afternoon. The sun was at its most scorching, and Beng was parched with thirst and worn-out from the heat. The station was open again—but only one of its multiple entrances. A massive crowd had gathered. They had to push their way through the mass of sweaty bodies to get a better view. It was a relief to finally stagger into the relatively cooler shade of the station.
The station looked very different from before it had been seized.
There was a steam engine. A steam engine, monstrous and smoking and alive. The Society had really done it.
It was nothing like the subway trains they had been accustomed to. Rather, it was a glossy feat of engineering, brilliantly-painted in red and black. With its hissing boiler and huge tender filled with fuel, it looked like it had come careening right out of a history textbook—but with one exception. The wheels it was outfitted with were modern, presumably surgically detached from the defunct modern trains and transplanted onto this steam engine so that it could run on the existing tracks that spread across the island. Other than that little dash of dissonance, however, it was an old-fashioned behemoth that Beng never imagined he would see in the City Hall train station, of all places.
From the whispers of the excited crowd, Beng gathered that it had been christened the Dragon. He had to concede that the name was a fitting one. Its burnished front and ugly greatness spoke of power, of a certain restlessness and roughness as it waited to be released on its maiden trip.
The machine was flanked by men and women of the Society, all swathed in black. Their hair was matted and wild, and they carried knives and batons with casual freedom. The resulting effect was surreal and terrifying. As one, they turned towards the machine and launched themselves into deep bows of grovelling reverence.
For a moment, Beng thought, with incredulity, that the greatest breakthrough of the whole crisis had been achieved by several dozen crazy train-worshipping men and women. Then someone stepped out grandly from the cab, and he realised that she was the one they were all waiting for.
She was startlingly young and slender—almost waifish in frame. She was dressed like the rest but her black sack of an outfit was too big on her, hanging off her and giving the impression of a little girl playing at being grown-up. But t
here was a sort of savage energy in how she held herself, like she could strike at any moment, without warning or provocation. She held a great parang knife at her side with the sort of ease one might accord to an umbrella or a bottle or some other innocuous object. He wondered how long she had reined in this streak of casual violence and cruelty before society had fallen to pieces and allowed her to roam free in her wildest form.
Worse yet, he knew her. When he had first seen her, she had streaked her cheek with a single stroke of red. She had done it again, on both sides this time, double strokes of crimson like war-paint. She turned cold eyes upon the crowd before her, and a sharp, reckless grin spread across her face. Her eyes lingered on him for a moment and he saw a glimmer of recognition, but she had already moved on to survey the others around him. He wasn’t important enough to be a real concern at that moment. But he knew she had seen him.
“Who’s that?” Father asked, following his gaze. Her eyes passed over him again, flickering over to the rest to take note of who he had come with. Beng tried to shrink away from his family, so that nobody could see that they had showed up together, but it was impossible in such a tight crowd.
He knew she had seen and noted everyone in his family.
“Let’s get out,” he said.
“Shh!” said Grandfather, wide-eyed but unfazed. Excited, even. “The Chief is going to speak.”
He was right. The Chief’s attention had shifted away from Beng and back to the waiting crowd. Monkey-like, she clambered to the top of the cab and stood like it was a podium. The remnants of swirling heat around her did not seem to touch her; her feet were bare against unforgiving metal but that did not seem to bother her in the least.
“You have no leaders,” she cried out in ringing tones, with no preamble or greeting or any other sort of conventionally polite starter.
The crowd fell instantly silent; everyone was hanging on to every word. Their instant compliance was astounding, but not unexpected. A traitorous part of Beng’s brain pointed out the sheer ludicrous nature of the scene—a nation of people breathlessly hanging on to the words of mere teenagers—yet he too was under the spell of their power and accomplishment, standing in terrified anticipation of all that they had to say. In that moment, with the new train gleaming and smoking behind them, the Society members were magicians, gods, divine powers who had done the impossible. They commanded attention with their mere presence.