by Winfred Wong
So, as I was then straggling behind Ryson, “Ryson,” I said.
We were moving in single-file, not because we intended to do so, but was a natural outcome when we found ourselves engulfed in darkness.
“Hmm?”
“Who are you, really?” I asked on a whim.
“You know that.”
“But who are you, like really really? Do you know Kriss?”
“Sure, I – ”
“I mean before everything, before everything happened.”
He remained speechless.
As a strange silence was about to humiliate him, “Ashton, you know, we are grateful for everything, Ryson and me,” Mack, walking in front of Ryson and behind Kriss, said. “We are grateful for being given a chance to get out of this country. We are grateful for their...sacrifices, and we will never forget their names. So why don't you just keep your lips sealed and be grateful for everything?”
He never looked at me when he spoke, but I did feel a timid sense of melancholy conveying in his tone. Maybe I was wrong about the connection between Kriss and Ryson, or maybe I was just being too sensitive. Either way I thought it would be better for me to stop being curious about everything.
So we moved all the way down to the shoreline quietly. And when we arrived, I expected to see something like a pier by the edge of the sea, or at least a crude facility for boarding, but instead there was only a beach slanted uphill to the right to a rugged cliff that looked like the beak of a white pigeon. The sand was coarse but fine, and at the junction where the lines of blooming bushes ended abruptly and the beach began, there was a big turtle lying.
Standing next to that turtle, looking around, “Come on. Over there,” Kriss commanded, and we headed left.
I could see there was a streamlined white speeder boat, a two-seater, which seemed to be able to go through a huge wave without difficulty, with almost no stern and a curved wide windshield right behind the V-shaped bow, floating steadily next to a short line of pillars projecting from the beach to the sea not too far away. I was excited. But upon approaching it, a man suddenly rolled out from behind the bushes to the beach in a way it seemed he had just been kicked out by an elephant. The man was seemingly fainted. None of us recognized him at first, but when Kriss pointed her torch at the face of him, we almost shrieked together.
“Jack!” I said, smothering my surprise just as my sense of danger pleaded me to, and hurried over to him.
I crouched down at his elbow and checked his breath. It was weak, much worse than when I first found him in the hotel and was like it would stop at any moment.
“What do we do?” I asked, as Kriss crouched down by my side.
“I don't know either. Is he wounded?” she said.
And I scrabbled his body and found nothing notable.
“No. There is no blood and no wound on him. I – ”
“R...n,” Jack suddenly whimpered, but I didn't quite catch that.
“What? What did you say, Jack?” I prompted.
Then Kriss suddenly grabbed my arm, leaned in and whispered with her eyes ablaze with justifiable fear that had somehow conveyed what she was going to say to me, “Run. Now.”
So when she hauled me up, I was able to react instantly. And we sprinted toward the boat like there were hungry tigers on our tails even though we didn't know what kind of a threat was looming. I never had a chance to look over my shoulder during the run, but on an occasion when I found Kriss staring at me, I did throw her back a petrified look, and from her calm facial expressions, I knew she wasn't bolting so fast because she felt dreadful. She was just there running alongside me because I was running. So, midway through the beach, I did intentionally slacken my pace a bit to see how she would react, and the result was exactly what I'd expected. Perhaps she just wanted to make sure I could make it to the boat safely.
And while I started sprinting, I assumed that Mack and Ryson would be just right behind us. It had only occurred to me that they weren't anywhere close behind us until we boarded the boat; I tripped over the gunwales but managed to regain balance when it swayed under the new weight I added. Then I looked afar at where Jack was, grasping that gunwales tightly, and saw the two of them engaging some fully geared soldiers emerging from the bushes with empty hands. I had absolutely no clue what they were thinking trying to take them down by force and of course, they were knocked down on the ground before I even blinked, but I was truly grateful for the extra few seconds they bought us with their lives.
“Hey, Ashton. Help me with the anchor. Pull it up. We won't be able to go anywhere with that thing sitting deep down in the sea bottom,” Kriss urged, taking the helmsman seat behind the windshield.
Her voice was like an alarm reminding me of what sort of a situation we were in. And I hastened and jumped over to the stern, found a metal anchor chain lying on the edge of the boat and tried to pull it up, yet I couldn't even make it move an inch no matter how hard I tried.
“Kriss! I think it's stuck!” I yelled anxiously when I saw a batch of stern-looking soldiers marching toward us on the beach.
“Hey! Kriss!” I shouted in panic and looked back at her.
But the seat was empty. I was tremendously frightened. It occurred to me that she had abandoned me for a split second.
“Idiot! Don't you see there is a red button beside your left foot? Press it down with force and hold until I tell you to let go!” Kriss, at somewhere on the boat out of my sight, shouted back, her voice made me feel glad to have her with me.
By the time I found the red button, bent down and jabbed it down with my middle finger, a mixture of vrooming engine sound and clanking metal sound appeared out of the blue.
“Are we good to go?” I asked aloud, my body shivering out of fear, while crouching.
“Wait! Don't let go.”
Sensing the finger-numbing vibrations transmitting from the moving metal chain through the button to my finger, “Okay now?” I thundered even I knew the anchor was still on the move, because yelling was a good recipe to ease my mind.
“Be patient!”
As I was about to shout out loud again, the clanking metal sound and the vibrations both ceased at the same time, and before long, a high-pitched, continuous noise produced by the rotating turbine blades rolled across the night sky. The boat started off with an amateur forward lurch that made me fell down before steadily sailing ahead fairly well. I stumbled clumsily when I tried to stand up, though, as to what I could see, the waves weren't really strong. So I deduced my stumbling was partly due to the relief that prompted me to let my guard down.
At my second attempt to stand up, I hunched over with my hands on the floor, leaned my body against one side of the boat, doing it all in one motion, and stood up when I was ready. Then when breezy wind began ruffling my hair, I looked back at the beach, which was already too far to be discernible. So I laughed triumphantly, feeling on cloud nine. But my blind happiness didn't last long as I soon realized I was the only one feeling good about the escape, so I pulled a scrutinizing gaze at Kriss when howling wind was racing past my ears.
“Kriss?” I said, my voice muffled by the strong wind.
And she didn't answer. She was just sitting quietly, with both hands on the outer edge of her thighs.
“Are you all right?” I continued, weighing her up, but not a word would slip out of her tongue.
She was only about two feet away from the windshield so I could understand why her hair wasn't flipping around like mine was, but her strange posture, her head resting on the top of the seat kept swinging left and right as the ship moved like a dangling rope, triggered my suspicion. Thus, I scampered to her.
And as I was close enough to see the front part of her torso, I gawked vacantly and had no choice but to sit down on the assistant seat in order to avoid a bad fall. She was stabbed to death by a kitchen knife that pierced through her heart, blood oozing out from the wound all over her chest, staining her clothes, and I could be certain she was dead just
by her pastel-colored lips.
Knowing there were only she and me on this boat, I dug deep into my recollections and tried to come up with one single thing that hinted she was becoming suicidal, yet there wasn't even a single trace. So, for an instant, I was actually convincing myself to believe her suicidal thoughts must had something to do with her bafflingly fickle emotions, but after giving it a second thought, I came to a conclusion that it's very unlikely she would commit suicide just because she felt gloomy suddenly. The main reason for that was if she would, she would've already done that a long time ago.
And then I deduced it was mainly because of the unbearable heaviness of the deaths of her friends; every one of them, like Mack, Ciara, Jack, were either captured or killed after all. But I cast away that thought right away as I happened to see she was holding something shiny in her right hand. And I became curious again. It occurred to me it must be something she desperately treasured for her to be clenching it even after she killed herself.
So I prised her hand open cautiously and placed it on my palm for inspection. And I was surprised to recognize it as the cumbersome-looking photo pendant I had once seen in Kaylen's car, though the tarnished look on the cover of it made me wonder if it was the exact same one I had seen before or it was another one. There was no way to know. But this discovery alone had further boosted up my curiosity. Then, I had for a hard time vacillated between teasing out a clue about what's under the cover and putting it back into her hand but not for long, as my spirit of enquiry prevailed very soon.
Sneakily, I upturned the cover like I was pickpocketing, angled my head to peep into it before it was fully opened and started suddenly. What came into my view was very shocking, so shocking that I knew I could have never guessed it right by chance. It was a picture of me.
Of course, I am now aware that she killed herself because she would rather die than to fall into the soldiers' hand; she knew there was no getting away on her return trip after dropping me off on that island that I'll come to later. And it's clear to me that she got that picture of me from her father, who had received it along with a watch from my father just before he passed. And I remember how Kriss explained this to me by the pond side, and this is what she said, “Your father was so worried about you and your sister that he had to give my father that pendant with your picture on it and another one with your sister's picture on it to Kaylen's father so that at least someone in the country would be able to recognize you and tell you to get out of there if we happen to come across you strolling down a street someday. And for that to happen, we did make sure every freedom-pursuers would be able to recognize you when they happen to see you. But anyway, when I first heard about this from my father, my first thought was it was kind of stupid for him to do so, because even if you have gone back there, the possibility that we would meet is close to zero. But after all, he's your father and he was just afraid that his children would somehow return to that place and get caught, and I can understand his feelings now. Anyway, somehow you did return to that place. But luckily – do you still remember the Chief of Police? That man in a red coat? On that day we met, I was there to assassinate him, and I was waiting for him to show up. But luckily, I saw you. And I immediately recognized you, that photo pendant had been with me all my life after all, and you looked very much like the picture.”
And then the three of us talked on and on about everything like, how too golden the hotel was, what happened to Kaylen's team, why did I go back there, but at a point, when I could no longer hold back my urge to ask her this question, “Why were you holding a grudge against me back then?” they both went silent as if I had gone too far by asking that.
After a minute or two, Kaylen finally said, “Do you remember the headband man who was killed in front of you?”
I nodded.
And he continued, “He's Shaman, her boyfriend.”
Then I remember I could only stare at Kriss for another minute or so while recalling how the headband man had stopped because he had recognized me before saying this, “I'm sorry. I didn't know.”
And perhaps this is why I have proposed to her directly instead of asking her to be my girlfriend on the other day. But the conversation didn't end there.
Seeing Kriss was in a deep thought, Kaylen then continued, “What about the man who was tortured and killed somewhere near the hotel? Did you hear his screams?”
I didn't nod, but he went on, “He was one of us. And he was caught when he was about to set fire to the hotel.”
I couldn't quite concentrate at that moment, maybe I was totally blown away by what he just said, but on a whim, I asked, “Why did he try – ”
“Because by setting fire to the hotel, we could kill two birds with one stone. To force you to come with us, and to create a window of opportunity for us to kill that Chief of Police,” Kriss pulled herself together and interrupted.
“But how did you know I would survive it? You couldn't have – “ I paused as something came to my mind. “That's why Ciara was there? She was there to make sure I could get out, wasn't she? But what about Jack?”
“Yes, she was there to help you escape, and we were all so worried about you when Ciara climbed down the ladder alone. But Jack, he wasn't part of our plan,” he said. “And I was honestly dazed when I saw him with you. It's the last thing I could have imagined.”
“So, who is he really?”
“He was there with your father in front of the tanks. The man riding a bike. And he was there with your father when he passed away as well,” she quipped. “And by the time you saw him, he was a professor working in one of the universities in the Port. But we, Kaylen and me, have known him since we were small. He was a friend of our fathers.”
“But did you ask him? Did you ask him what he was doing there?”
“Of course I asked, he never answered me though,” he said. “My guess is, maybe he knew they were going to close the border, and that's why he went back, to help us.”
And I remember on that day we had kept on babbling and chattering like we were suddenly old friends for more or less a day before we headed back to the house.
But anyway, at that time, I had no idea why she had my picture in her palm when she ended her life and felt disoriented trying to rationalize my findings when the boat staggered forward, disrupting my knotted thought, making me realize the boat, which had been moving as fast as a dinghy for the whole time, was currently sailing with no one in control. I was afraid the boat would run into some kind of a big rock that could rip it apart and get me killed, and so, I discarded that thought, returned the pendant to her, lifted her cold, pale-turning body up and laid her down on the floor with care, putting her head down first, then her torso. I didn't have the basic concept of how to maneuver a boat, but obviously, for me to learn it quickly was the only option I was given.
And I took the helmsman seat and, nearly shiveringly, put my hands on a small wheel, which looked more like the one in a car than that of it on a real boat I'd often see on the big silver screen, this actually uplifted my confidence because I'd earned my driver's license on day one after I had just turned eighteen on the first try, yet steering a boat that had a car-wheel-like wheel was not as simple as I'd thought.
It took me a couple of wild attempts of randomly changing the course of it; I, for once, had it turned halfway upside down before successfully reobtained balance, before I began grasping the most fundamental sense of how to use it, like how much should I turn the wheel when there was an obstacle up ahead, when should I apply the pressure, and something like that. And the idea of slowing it down a bit had never come to my mind before I happened to take a glimpse at a speed meter, which indicated the boat was proceeding with three-fourth the maximum speed, on a control panel to the right side of the wheel.
And instinctively, I looked down at the corner before my feet, trying to find a pedal-like thing for deceleration, assuming it was somehow identical to a car. Of course there was nothing noteworthy. Then I shifted my attent
ion to a short control handle that stuck out below the control panel; it was so short that it seemed to have been truncated and perhaps that's why I had failed to notice it until then. It's so short that I had to lean forward in order to get hold of it. But when I placed my hand on top of it and tried to tug it down, which I couldn't, then tried to lift it up fruitlessly, my fingers felt something like a lock from under the handle. I guessed maybe it was a protection gear, or some sort of that, working to prevent something bad from happening.
So I tried to move it left and right, up and down, in literally every directions I could think of as if it was a joystick of a game, it didn't even move a bit though. And I thought there must be an easy way to unlock it if whoever assembled this craft had ever intended to make it usable. Thus, on a whim, I tried to shove the handle inward into the panel, I couldn't, then pulled it outward, and then I heard there was a sound of cracking open something. And after that sound, I moved it like a joystick again and fathomed out that tugging it down meant deceleration while lifting it up meant picking up speed.
Everything went smoother after spending some more time on becoming more proficient in maneuvering it adopting a trial and error method, my experience in driving a car helped a lot, and as I thought I was ready, it occurred to me there were still two things I had to figure out before I could actually set off on my way home and they were my current location and a detailed map, which made me think of the cafe embellished with detailed maps of every countries. Then after trying to shake off my homesickness, a thought dawned on me as if it was the upshot of the shaking. There was no way Kriss wasn't carrying a map with her if she was supposed to be the one piloting this craft in the first place; after all, I thought she was the only one among us who had been involved in hatching up this escape plan.
Therefore, I pushed down the handle, letting the propeller did its magic, until it fully stopped with some dying engine sounds, left the seat, walked over to her, squatted down and searched her really nicely and gently by patting here and there, and frankly, searching on a corpse – hers, as I remember, hadn't started rotting or else I would've given up this idea straight away – was by no means a pleasant thing to do, and so I did it quite roughly. But, fortunately, when I got my hand over her trousers pocket, where people tended to put all sort of things in, I found her phone. And I slid it out and unlocked it by tardily holding up her right hand and kind of unwillingly pressing her right thumb against the sensor on the bottom of the phone; not because I found it disgusting to touch a corpse, but the spooky feeling I got when I realized she was still talking to me a moment ago.