THE FLENSE: China: (Part 1 of THE FLENSE serial)

by Saul Tanpepper

  Breakfast consisted of cheese and a dense, dry flatbread. Soon after, the family departed for the daylong ceremony, leaving Angel to fend for herself.

  The rising sun was just beginning to breach the saddle between two low rocky hills rising a kilometer to the east, lighting them ablaze with a brilliant yellow glow. She wondered if that was where the villagers would go. Wherever it was, she knew that the charnel grounds would be among the holiest of places and probably kept secret from her. Their pain would be especially immense and raw at this time, given that so many friends and family members had been lost so tragically. The last thing she wanted to do was antagonize them with her intrusion. At the very least, it would close their minds to her as an outsider and prevent her from investigating the accident and looking into Cheong’s suspicion that it had been caused by the sudden spread of some mysterious new disease.

  She had challenged this claim during the call from the house in Lyon. He deflected it by asking her what had changed her mind, and she muttered something about curiosity but didn’t bring up DeBryan’s video.

  Now, standing here after her brief conversation that morning with Jian and his family, a medical connection made even less sense. If some sort of sickness had swept through the train, then why hadn’t it spread after the accident?

  The villagers likewise dismissed the idea, though for their own reasons. They believed the tragedy had been wrought because the Baarin had betrayed their own customs by going to work at the factory. “We herders, not making machines in modern factory.”

  “And what about you?” she asked Jian. “Do you think those people died because they abandoned their faith?”

  He didn’t answer her right away. She could tell that he had mixed feelings on the matter. On the one hand, he appeared reluctant to disagree with his family. There had been tension between him and his parents and siblings the night before, and Angel guessed that in their eyes Jian was guilty of a similar betrayal by leaving the village to live in the city to pursue a nontraditional path.

  After some hesitation, he finally admitted that it could be possible that a disease might be to blame, and he gave as his reasoning the presence of men at the crash site dressed in special protective suits.

  “You were there? You saw?”

  “Jian not supposed to be. Villagers not supposed to.”

  He described the suits as plastic and blue in color, covering the men’s bodies from head to toe. A small, clear plastic window permitted them to look out.

  They were hazard suits, she’d told him. It was standard protocol, both to avoid contact with any harmful chemicals which might have been spilled, such as diesel or gasoline, as well as biological fluids. They also helped protect the integrity of the crime scene. It didn’t mean anything and certainly wasn’t proof of a biological agent.

  “Besides,” she added, “if there really is some kind of disease, then why haven’t the yaschin shown any unusual symptoms? They would have had the most contact with the victims and thus been the first to be sickened.”

  “Yaschin protected,” he told her. It was clear that, despite his break from tradition, he still clung to some of the old beliefs and superstitions. “Cannot get sick.”

  It didn’t matter to Angel. Whether biological or not, she had come prepared. No way was she taking any chances. In her luggage was her own biohazard suit, and as soon as she could get to the accident site, she intended to use it.

  Just in case.

  Chapter Twelve

  The traditional fur-lined yurts outnumbered by ten to one the smaller, newer rectangular mud and clay houses, most of which had been recently built on the encampment’s perimeter or along the road Jian had driven them in on and which Angel now walked. The dried mortar had been sloppily applied, with much of it oozed out like warm wax between the stones before hardening. A few of the houses were painted, but most were not. The yurts, in contrast, were clean and bright, the pelts painted white with simple geometric patterns of blue and gold.

  Jian had told her that the village was growing, mostly from an influx of Baarin people from further west and north, and the newer structures were easier and faster to build. “Many elders not like them.” They worried that they would simply crumble and fall in a heavy rain.

  According to him, the only cinderblock building in the area was the train station, and it was not considered a part of the village proper. It had been constructed about a half kilometer past the last home along the road, and could be found at the end of a narrow footpath worn into the ground by the feet of the factory employees on their daily trek to and from their commute. The trail bent around a pair of low slung hills, which hid the station from view.

  Coming up over a rise, Angel spied the tracks for the first time, two sets of them. They ran along a raised seam of ground left to right, like an angry welt on the land. From her elevated vantage point, the rails appeared to slice through the grass with surgical precision, the thick, dark wooden ties suturing the edges together. It was an unending scar marring the flesh of the steppe.

  She headed across the low scrub toward the stationhouse, mindful of the occasional yak patties and the numerous smaller piles of shiny black pellets, which she guessed were pika. Other than a few birds, she’d not seen any wildlife.

  The morning breeze was still bitterly cold, raking its claws against her cheeks and bringing tears to her eyes. Where the sunlight could not reach the ground during its daily swing across the sky, shallow tongues of snow persisted. Elsewhere, tiny wildflowers were starting to bloom. Yet despite the chill, the short hike up the low rise winded her, so she unzipped her parka but left it on.

  The station stood alone, maybe three or four meters off the tracks, a small concrete block of stolid gray and a matching roof of corrugated steel. The covering extended over an area of compressed gravel, providing protection from the sun and rain. She was approaching from the back side, in which a single wooden door gave entrance into the building and a lone window provided some light inside of it. As with the rectangular houses, the station gave the appearance of having been hastily built. Hardened mortar bulged from the seams, and the walls were left without adornment.

  The door was unlocked. She stepped inside, found the room empty. The air was blessedly still but icy. The door in the opposite wall had been propped open.

  The structure was little more than four walls and a roof. The floor was smoothed cement, clean except for a few concentric blooms of rust which had dripped from holes in the ceiling. There were no chairs, no benches. Not even a rock to sit upon.

  Along the wall closest to the tracks, beside the second door, was a narrow shelf, and beneath it was a small package wrapped in paper and held together with twine. An army of Chinese characters marched over the wrinkled paper surface and tumbled over one side. Tucked beneath the string was a thin stack of mail. A lantern hung on the wall, and below it on the floor sat a can half filled with fuel.

  She straightened up and looked around. The doubt was returning, and she wondered once again what she’d been thinking agreeing to come out here.

  Cheong had tried to get her to commit to working for 6X on a more long-term basis, traveling to the other sites on the list for reasons he would only allude to but not provide any details on. He clearly expected her to do her own research. But she’d told him no. She was eager to get back out to Huangxia, though of course she hadn’t told him that and still had no idea how she would manage to do it. She owed DeBryan at least that much for the video he had taken. Coming here was a convenient launching point for another attempt at the island.

  Or so she’d thought.

  But now, standing out here in the grasslands hundreds of kilometers from the nearest airport and even further away from the coast, she felt more remote and separated from Huangxia than she’d felt when she was back home in France, as if that were even possible.

  It came to her that it might have been Cheong’s intent all along, to get her out here and away from Huangxia, and the thought filled
her with rage.

  She circled the room again. There was nothing here for her to investigate, no clues, no one to talk to. No reason for her to be here at all. Yes, there had been a terrible accident and lives were lost. Jian had confirmed that much. It was surely a tragedy, but not one with a medical cause. There was no possible link to disease. How could there be? It was a waste of her time and Cheong’s money, if he were genuinely interested, to send her out here to look into it. What he needed, if he honestly wanted to know the truth, was a mechanical engineer, a railway safety inspector or accident specialist, not a medical expert. Someone who could spot a mechanical defect or sabotage.

  With a shake of her head, she exited and circled the building. Some thirty meters up the track stood a small wooden shack, about the size and shape of an outhouse. A fuel tank, painted pastel green, was mounted on a short pedestal beside it, again on a base of poured concrete. Moving closer, she saw that a hose passed from the tank and into the side of the wooden structure. A squat chimney poked up out of the roof.

  Angel unlatched and opened the door and found the generator she expected inside. It seemed a bit out of place, out here in the middle of nowhere, and something of a puzzle. What did it provide power for? There were no crossing lights here for the tracks, and she had not seen lights of any kind inside the station save for the gas lantern. Not even any electrical outlets. No gate or warning bell. No switching station. No need for power whatsoever.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she spotted a small shelf above her head. The space was empty, but using the light from her cell phone, she saw from the absence of accumulated dust the footprint of something which had recently occupied the space, an object several centimeters wide and a quarter meter long.

  On the floor of the tiny shed, she found a loose power cord. One end plugged into a small voltage converter, similar to the one she had for her laptop, and this was in turn plugged into the generator. A second cord lay in a loose heap beside it, a communication cable by the looks of the free end. It trailed down the back corner and through the wall.

  Angel carefully followed it along the gravel and over to the metal track, where it was tucked underneath the metal lip of the rail and ran back toward the station. She lost it when it disappeared into a plastic pipe into the ground, but regained it when it reappeared out of another plastic pipe at the base of the station where two walls joined. This she traced up into the eaves to where it finally ended at a small satellite receiver she hadn’t noticed before.

  So, either Jian and Cheong had been mistaken about there being no mobile phone and internet service, or they had lied. She doubted Jian knew, but Cheong? The whole setup, from receiver to the generator itself, looked like a fairly recent addition, and perhaps Jian simply hadn’t been aware of it.

  But that begged several questions. What happened to the wireless transmitter? What purpose did it provide and for whose convenience? Who had removed it and why?

  Returning to the shed, she found a sticker attached to the electrical transformer. It was marked simply with the word QUANTEL and a serial number. Fumbling her phone out of her parka pocket again, her fingers now numb from the cold, she managed after a couple attempts to snap a clear picture of it. The name meant nothing to her, but she assumed it was a telecommunications company. She had some people she could send the image to who might know.

  A gust sent the wooden door banging against the fuel tank. The metal latch sent out a shrill clang. Straightening up, Angel pulled the door shut and gasped in surprise to see the figure of a tiny, shriveled man standing in the shadows beneath the station’s overhang.

  “Fils de pute!” she muttered under her breath. Her heart was racing. “Where the hell did he come from?”

  The man appeared to be watching her, and Angel felt her face grow red. Who was he? Why wasn’t he with the other villagers?

  Angel waved, and the man shifted slightly, but didn’t return the gesture.

  “Allo?” She immediately winced and regretted not having learned a few basic Mongolian words, not even the equivalent of a greeting. She should have asked Jian during their drive.

  “Are you waiting for the train?”

  Argh! Stupide!

  She gestured up the tracks, but refrained from making chugguh chugging sounds. She already felt ridiculous enough as it was.

  This was not like her, feeling so uncertain about herself like this. As a reporter, she’d learned to be confident, unapologetic. Her actions often rubbed people the wrong way, but they were always taken in the pursuit of truth. She’d earned her share of enemies because of it, enough to form a fan club large enough to fill a football stadium. Generally, she didn’t care. She had a job to carry out, and she’d do whatever it took.

  But for some reason, she felt especially sensitive about not upsetting Jian’s people. She found that she sympathized with him in particular, torn as he was between two worlds, the traditional and the modern. In a distant way, she shared his struggle, or at least a similar one. The forces pulling at her were quite different than his, but the effect was the same.

  The man still hadn’t moved. He looked — felt — as if he were waiting for Angel to move first. Did he want Angel to leave? Was that it?

  Before departing for the burial ceremony this morning, Jian had once again reminded Angel to remain out of sight. He hadn’t explicitly told her that she was to stay inside the yurt, or even in the village, but that had been the implied message, hadn’t it? So why had she defied him?

  “Allo?” she called. “I was just looking—”

  Now the man moved, stepping and turning. Silent as a ghost, he drifted across the platform and entered the station through the open door, pausing only once to look back. He didn't seem angry with her. In fact, it seemed the man wanted her to follow.

  She hesitated a moment, then secured the panel and jogged back to the station, but when she got there, the building was empty.

  “Allo? Anyone there?”

  She stepped across the room and out the other side. The trail leading to the village was now in full sunlight, and it shone like an exposed white bone against the mossy ground to either side. But the man wasn’t there, either. Angel ran around the stationhouse. The wind whipped across the land, still cold though not as frigid as it had been. She brought a hand up to wipe the tears away from her eyes.

  When she blinked again, she saw the old man walking away along the track. The distance he’d already managed to cover astonished Angel.

  He stopped, turned, and beckoned once again, then continued onward.

  Angel started to run.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Her feet were not used to the uneven ground, and more than once she stumbled as she tried to catch up. The air was too thin, still so cold that it burned her lungs and stung her eyes and made them fill with tears.

  For a while Angel tried to jog between the rails, but the spacing of the ties was all wrong, either too close or too far apart for her stride. She called out several times to the man. Sometimes, the wind snatched her voice away, scattering her cries across the heath. Sometimes, they seemed to carry on forever. Either the old man didn’t hear her, or he ignored the calls.

  He remained far ahead of her, never turning around to confirm that Angel was following. But it seemed he knew she was there. He was leading her somewhere, and there was only one thing out here that it could be.

  Angel gave up trying to catch up, though she kept her pace at a brisk walk, amazed at how the man could keep going in such rarefied air. It didn’t matter what Angel did, how fast or slow she went, he somehow always remained the same distance ahead of her. It was more than uncanny, it was unnerving.

  They walked on for the next forty minutes before the man stopped. Angel saw that it was at the point where the two sets of tracks merged into one. The man gestured, then stepped away from the berm and headed out across the grass, disappearing a few minutes later between a set of rocky knolls.

  When Angel reached the spot where
the man had stepped away, she could find no trail. The grass was neither broken nor pushed aside. Nevertheless, she set out, heading off in the new direction.

  The ground rose steadily over rocky terrain toward a dip in a low ridge, and Angel climbed it expecting to see her quarry on the other side, but when she topped it, the grasslands fell sharply away, spreading out before her as empty as the land behind her had been, kilometer upon kilometer with nothing to break the dull monotony of the land save for a single road far below.

  She felt something brush her hand and let out a yelp and stumbled back. The old man was standing there not a meter away. Angel had almost begun to believe she had followed a vision, but clearly she hadn’t. The old man was as solid and as real as anyone she’d ever met.

  He gestured with his fingers for Angel’s hand, and when he had it, he placed a large stone into her palm. The skin on his hands was tough and wrinkled, yet warm. Bending stiffly, the man plucked another stone from the ground and added it to the first. He did this once more, then pointed to an outcropping on the adjacent knoll, grabbed Angel’s sleeve, and tugged her toward it.

  Angel recognized the ovoo immediately, the ceremonial shrine to which the Buddhists gave thanks. The small oblong stone mound took the shape of the hilltop, and in the center was a tent of colorful ribbons tied to a desiccated branch and set precariously into its peak. The man nodded and gestured, throwing his arms forward in a casting motion.

  The Tibetan lamas had taught her the custom of casting stones, and so Angel threw the rocks onto the shrine while the man closed his eyes with a look of serenity spreading over his face. Angel completed the ceremony by circling the ovoo three times in a clockwise fashion, just as she’d learned, stepping awkwardly over the unstable ground before coming to a stop once more beside him.