Ntshona

by Matthew A Robinson

  “It’s a little bit frustrating for us, you know?” Lon spoke on both their behalf. “It seems you’ve got something planned involving us, yet you’re not telling us anything about it”.

  Cat began to get agitated. “Look guys, I promise I’ll tell you lots of important stuff, just not right now”.

  “Then when?” Lon was getting more demanding, and rightly so, he and Eve were in an extremely dangerous state.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you this now: we’re meeting with someone else tomorrow, a woman who has the… connections that we need”.

  “Need for what?” asked Eve.

  “Well, you’ll find out in the morning, won’t you?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Lon, “when have you been making all these plans? We just met you today, and you’ve already schemed something highly secret involving us, and arranged for us to meet someone else, all without leaving our sight; we’ve been with you all day”.

  This instilled a sense of pride in Cat. “I’m good at what I do. Also, it would help if you paid more attention to the things going on around you”.

  Lon had the feeling he was being criticised. Rightly so, too, he felt, as he had apparently been brainwashed by the government so badly that he had believed masses upon masses of their lies and not noticed the truths of the world, even though he had hated the country’s leaders for many years.

  “Anyway, I’m going to take a shower. Lon, you can sleep on the couch, Eve can have the bed”.

  “That’s fine,” he said, and soon after both he and Eve retreated to their dreams.

  Chapter 8

  “Morning sunshine”.

  Lon heard Cat’s voice. Had she always been so sarcastic? A stream of light spilt across his face, and he covered his eyes with his hand for protection. “Ow! Give me a chance to react before you de-tint the windows!” He sat up on the sofa and slowly opened his eyes. “Ouch, so bright. What time is it?”

  “9am”.

  “9am?” he repeated, “9am on a Sunday?”

  “Yep”.

  “Are you mad?” he dragged himself off the sofa, and only then fully realised the after-effects of being chased through the city by armed police. He caught himself before falling on his face, and slowly walked to the breakfast bar where he propped himself up to release the pressure on his tender legs.

  “Shame man, are your legs paining?” asked Cat as she spread butter on a slice of toast.

  “Yeah, actually my thighs-” he cut himself off at the sight of what Cat had on display; she was adorned with a very low-cut, black nightgown bordered with small pink frills, which was so high at the bottom that he could just about see the whole length of her legs. This definitely was not a lady with issues of low self-esteem.

  “What?” she said.

  “What?” he replied.

  “You were saying something, then you just stopped. Does it hurt that much?”

  Lon’s face felt as though it had a radiator strapped to it. He turned ninety degrees to face the corridor off the living room. “Sorry, it just feels a bit hot in here. It’s probably because it’s the middle of summer, right?”

  “Really? I’ve set the apartment’s temperature low. Maybe it’s that thick bathrobe you’re wearing. You should take it off”.

  He had no idea how to react to her suggestion. Was this how confident girls came on to somebody they liked? “Sorry?” he had no idea what else to say. He needed to hear again what she had said, perhaps he had misheard her the first time.

  “Take off that robe; go and put your clothes on, they’re clean and dry”.

  He almost felt stupid for the misunderstanding. Fortunately he was not forward enough to have made the situation potentially stickier for himself. “Oh, yeah, I’ll get changed soon. I just need to get used to the pain in my legs”.

  “Right. Do you want any toast?” offered Cat.

  “Oh, yes please”.

  “I’ll put you some in now, it’ll just be few seconds”.

  Eve, who was awoken by Lon’s loud voice, emerged from the bedroom at the end of the short hall, and walked, as if also in pain, towards the living room and kitchen area. She was greeted by, almost in her direct line of sight, the back of a very bare pair of thighs. Lon saw her eyes expand in a moment of disbelief before she span on her heel and quickly retraced her steps back to the bedroom.

  “Do you think Eve will want some toast too?” asked Cat.

  At this point Lon determined that the scenario was in fact rather comical, thus had to squeeze one of his little fingers hard in an attempt not to laugh. “I’m not sure, maybe you should go and ask”.

  “Do you think she’ll be awake?”

  “You’re worried about waking her up, yet you had no problem waking me up?” Lon could not help but feel that he was being treated differently.

  “I’m sure you don’t mind,” she said. She seemed to be in a very sarcastic mood.

  Lon frowned.

  Cat turned and walked in the direction of the spare bedroom in which Eve had slept. “Eve… Eve, are you awake?” she said through the closed door.

  “Yes, I’m just about to get out of bed,” was her reply.

  Lon felt a smile spread across his cheeks.

  “Good,” said Cat, “do you want some toast?”

  “Um, yes please, if you don’t mind”.

  “Okay, it will be done soon,” and she returned to the kitchen to finish buttering Lon’s toast. “There you go,” and she handed him a toast-filled plate.

  Eve came out of the room again, this time avoiding looking at anything of Cat’s except her face. She placed herself on a tall stool by the breakfast bar.

  Both girls were dressed in revealing nightwear. Lon was not displeased.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, trying with the utmost self control to maintain eye contact.

  “I guess. You?”

  “I actually can’t remember falling asleep,” he said. “Do your legs hurt?”

  “Yoh, they’re sore hey! I don’t get to do much exercise these days”.

  “Yeah, my legs are killing me,” he said.

  The conversation quickly dried up.

  “Here’s your toast,” said Cat as she handed it over to Eve.

  The following several minutes of uneasiness were filled mainly with the sounds of chewing and nothing else.

  “Oh, listen,” Cat remembered something, “do you know what the live citizen profile database is?”

  “Yeah,” responded Eve, “isn’t it where the government keep all our information?”

  “That’s right. Well, it turns out that your brother,” she faced Lon, “thought ahead and hacked into your two profiles to delete all your family links. Apparently he’s more worried about this than I am”.

  “That’s actually a relief,” said Lon, “I wouldn’t want Chris’ company to be linked to terrorism. Hopefully that means my parents are safe now too”.

  Eve sighed in respite, “That’s a lot less to worry about now. But why couldn’t he delete the ‘Terrorist’ bit?”

  “Apparently the way the program was written makes it easy to change the links between relatives, but not other information. So now you’re officially terrorist orphans”.

  “Have you thought of what you’re gonna do about checkpoints?” Lon asked Cat after they entered the car and closed all the doors.

  “Actually, I’m already way ahead of you. I had Strys hack the police servers again to find out where the checkpoints have been set up. I already sent the locations to my car’s GPS”.

  “Wow, you really are good at what you do,” said Eve in reference to what Cat had said the night previous.

  “How many checkpoints are there?” asked Lon.

  “I didn’t bother counting”.

  “Are there so many?” he began to worry.

  “Ja, there are a lot”.

  “Aren’t you concerned at all?” asked Eve.

  “No,” said Cat, “there are more roads in this city than there are checkpo
ints; it’s still easy to get in and out of the city centre. If you know where the checkpoints are, that is”.

  This return to Cat’s usual chilled, confident self came as something of a relief to Lon and Eve. They were beginning to see her as a strong, reliable person.

  The car descended through the floors of the car park until they were at ground level, and then exited and drove away from the building.

  It was difficult to tell with Cat, but Lon and Eve were still very on edge. Every time they discerned a police vehicle or police personnel among the traffic and crowds, they felt inclined to hide, despite the windows of the car being deeply tinted when viewed from the outside.

  “I’ll give you a warning about this girl we’re going to pick up,” said Cat breaking the paranoid silence, “you often need to take her with a pinch of salt”.

  “That sounds like a fun person to be around,” said Lon.

  “Could you be more specific?” asked Eve.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” stated Cat.

  Not much else was spoken until the car arrived at some neighbourhood not too far from the city centre. Here there were a mixture of accommodation blocks and office buildings, with the odd retail outlet. The traffic was not thick on the roads this early on the country’s day of rest.

  Cat drove slowly so as to make it easier to keep an eye out for who they were looking for. Thankfully the buildings here did not completely blot out the sun, therefore giving rise to fewer shadows, and fewer pedestrians frequented this place than other streets near the city plaza. Due to these reasons, determining which person was the one Cat was looking for was, in reality, very easy.

  The car pulled up at the side of the road close to where stood a young woman, attired in summer clothing of a style not too dissimilar to the nightgown Cat had worn to bed the previous night, with a comparatively large holdall bag slung across her left shoulder.

  The girl walked up to the car and opened the back door. “Hey, howzit?” she directed at Lon, who was sat at the opposite side of the rear seat, as he had become accustomed to in the previous twenty-four hours. “How you doing Cat?” she asked as she threw the holdall she was carrying into the centre of the back seat and got into the car herself.

  “Not too bad thanks, just a bit stressed after what happened to us last night”.

  “Right, hey! I saw on the news, was it you guys who they said were blowing up the roads last night?” said the girl.

  “Ja,” Cat replied, “but actually they were firing rockets at us or something”.

  “Yoh, that’s pretty hectic, hey! I heard quite a few people were sent to hospital in pretty serious condition,” said the girl.

  It was beginning to become apparent to Lon and Eve, or at least seemed to be, that each person involved with Cat was generally very casual and took extreme and heavy things very lightly, almost as if, in some way or another, they were accustomed to these sorts of matters. Was this a good sign or a bad one?

  “Yeah, and after that,” Cat continued, “they had a tracker on us and we were chased down the streets by two coppers on bikes and ended up having a gun fight with them”.

  “Is it? Man, that shit’s crazy! How did you get out of it?”

  “Well, it turns out our hero back there,” she pointed over her shoulder at Lon, “is a hotshot with an automatic”.

  The girl faced Lon. “Is it? Where did you shoot them? Was there a lot of blood?”

  The excited look on her face unnerved him. “I shot the front wheel of each bike”.

  “Why did you do that? You were supposed to hit the pigs that were on the bikes,” said the girl.

  “I’d rather not kill anyone,” he said.

  “Hey man, you’re lucky they didn’t kill you! That’s what they’re like, you know?”

  “I know they’re violent, but I’m…” he intermitted in order to consider how ironic he was about to sound, “I’m a pacifist”.

  Cat let out a short burst of laughter. “You are funny Lon!”

  “Yeah man,” added the girl, “you don’t sound like a pacifist to me!”

  The car pulled off from the side of the road and began towards the group’s destination.

  “My name is Lin, by the way,” the girl held out her hand for Lon to shake.

  “Lon,” he said, taking Lin’s hand.

  She laughed. “That’s pretty funny, hey? And what’s your name?” she asked Eve.

  “Eve,” is all she said, in a slightly cold manner.

  “Hi Eve, pleasure to meet you,”

  “Pleasure,” she replied.

  “Which part of China are you from?” asked Lin.

  “I’m not from China,” Eve responded in an even icier tone.

  “You know what I mean, which part of China are your family from?”

  Eve rapidly became annoyed. “They’re not from China”.

  “Then where are they from?”

  “They’re from Taiwan”.

  “Oh, okay… so they’re from Southeast China”.

  “No, they’re from Taiwan”.

  “Yeah, I get it, you mean Fujian, right? In Southeast China?”.

  “No!” Eve was fairly angry by now. “Fujian is part of Taiwan!”

  Lin laughed at her. “No no no, sweetie, Fujian is clearly part of mainland China, so you’re Chinese”.

  “No it isn’t! Besides, my family are from Taipei!”

  “Taipei Island? That’s nice; you’re a Chinese islander”.

  “No I fucking am not! Fujian has been a part of Taiwan since the second Chinese Civil War, and what you call ‘Taipei Island’ has been its own country since the Japanese left it in the mid-twentieth century!”

  “Girls, let’s calm down,” said Cat, “we don’t need to start hating each other right away”.

  “I’m just trying to educate her on the facts,” stated Eve.

  “The facts?” said Lin. “It looks like you’ve been brainwashed by the government far more than most people. I pity you”.

  “Why the fuck would the government brainwash me into thinking that?” asked Eve.

  “Because this country has strong economic ties with the Taiwan region of Greater China, and it’s in the government’s best interest to make impressionable proles like you feel connected to it”.

  “What the fuck kind of logic is that?!” said Eve.

  Lon hated it when Eve was angry like this. She was usually very calm and even-tempered, but was fiercely protective of her heritage, as was Lin, it seemed. “It doesn’t matter because neither of you are Chinese!” Lon shouted at them. “If you were born here, then you’re the same nationality as me”.

  “He’s got a point,” said Cat in concurrence, “using your argument, I’m American and Brazilian”.

  American and Brazilian? That was unexpected.

  “Whatever,” said Lin, “let’s just get to where we’re going and sort this business out”.

  After a short while, the car pulled up in the car park of a familiar diner set beside a long, dusty road, spanning a large sandy expanse close to one of the city’s boundaries. The place was as void of activity as the previous day.

  “How does this place manage to stay open?” asked Lon.

  “It’s only coincidental that it has been so empty both times you’ve been here. During the week it’s usually very busy with the amount of people passing through going from the city to the suburbs and vice versa. Luckily for us not many people bother on the weekend,” said Cat.

  “Why are we here again?” asked Eve.

  “Because there are important topics to discuss, and it’s nice and quiet here,” said Cat. “Oh, and for the apple pie, of course”.

  All four people exited the car.

  Lin dragged her huge holdall from the backseat.

  “Do you need a hand with that?” offered Lon.

  “Oh, what a gentleman,” she said as she passed it over to him.

  His arm gave way as he grabbed the two side handles with one hand, and he almos
t dropped the bag. The contents were very hefty. “What have you got in here?” he asked.

  “Oh, sorry, is it too heavy for you? Let me take it back”.

  “No, that’s okay!” he quickly said, he threw the shoulder strap around his neck and began to walk away quickly, trying hard not to be emasculated by this small woman.

  Cat grabbed a parasol from one of the diner’s outside tables, then the group crossed the road and found a flat area of sand near the lookout point on which Cat planted the large umbrella.

  “Just throw it down there, hun,” Lin instructed Lon, and he dropped the bag by the parasol’s central pole. She then unzipped it and pulled a large beach towel off the top of what was in there, which she spread across the sand, only partially shielded from the sun. “Come, sit,” she said as she did so herself, and Lon, Eve and Cat joined her.

  Lon and Eve removed their shoes, and Cat her flip-flops. Lin went further, however, and removed nearly everything she was wearing, and left herself with only a revealing bikini.

  Lon was sure he saw Eve mouth the words ‘Fucking slut’.

  “Okay Lin, my dear, what have you got for us this time?” Cat inquired.

  “Well, hun, it’s not the most comprehensive collection,” she began to ratch through the bag to for the initial display item, “but there’s definitely some firepower here,” and out she pulled a pistol, rather similar to the ones Lon had acquired the previous day.

  “Guns!” shouted Lon before Eve had a chance.

  “That’s right Lon, make sure everyone knows,” said Cat.

  “Sorry! I just didn’t expect that”.

  “You’re lucky nobody’s actually here,” said Lin before carrying on with her weapons exhibition. “Here’s another one,” she pulled out another pistol of the same design, “and another,” she removed one more and started passing them around. “There’s another one somewhere in here. Anyway, an automatic,” this weapon was slightly more impressive than Lon’s rifle. “I could tell you the names of them, but it’s not important. Here’s another,” she handed it to Eve, who hesitated before removing it from Lin’s hand. She then continued, “a shotgun-”

  “A shotgun?” Lon evinced his surprise. “What the hell will you need a shotgun for?”