by Grace, A. E.
“Yeah?” Liam murmured, nodding at the boastful beast. He remained unimpressed, however, and even felt a pang of pity. The man had forgotten how to shift. Liam believed that something like that must have been due to a terrible trauma. It simply didn’t seem possible unless a part of Leon’s brain or psyche had been damaged, and from the way he spoke of time frames, it might be something quite permanent.
“I’m a celebrity around here,” Leon continued, his voice like two knife sharpeners grinding against each other. “I’m the thing that goes bump in the night.”
Liam kept his eyes level with the beast. “Yeah,” he said quietly.
“So, no, I wouldn’t want to be able to shift again. Being a man or a wolf? It doesn’t appeal to me. Nobody would talk about me!” He laughed, but it sounded like more of a series of rapid exhales and wheezes. “I do miss it, though. I miss the freedom sometimes. I definitely miss the smells, and all the information they held. I miss being unable to process it all. And yes, I miss the prowl, the hunt, the kill. But that is all lost to me now.” The wolf-man sighed. “Forgotten to time.”
“It’s not something you simply forget,” Liam pressed. He had interrogated the half-wolf before, and many times at that, but the creature’s story always remained the same. “That’s like forgetting how to ball your fists, or how to jump.”
“How would you know?” Leon asked, extending a yellow-brown claw toward him. The finger trembled. “Have you forgotten?”
“No,” Liam said. “That’s how I know.”
“That’s how you don’t know, boy,” Leon growled. He blew out air, turned and walked away. Though his back was muscular, it curved, and Liam was surer than ever of his trauma theory. The wolf-man was obviously carrying an invisible weight. The foliage crunched beneath Leon’s feet, and Liam was once again amazed at the silence in the rainforest. There was not the chirp of an insect, the call of a bird, the croak of a toad, or the cackle of a monkey.
“How are you even still alive?” Liam asked. He struggled to imagine what Leon looked like on the inside. “How is everything still connected properly?”
“You think anything ever disconnects?” Leon asked. The wolf-head shook, and from his snout he choked out a raspy laugh.
“How old are you, anyway?”
“I’ve also forgotten that. I attribute my longevity, however, to this.” Leon lifted up his arms, gesturing at the lifeless rainforest around them. “She gives us life, Liam. She restores; rejuvenates. I am stronger than I look, and I could kill you in a heartbeat.”
Liam didn’t know what to make of the threat, and so he said nothing.
“Want to test me?”
“No,” Liam said, a hard look in his eyes. He sensed a wildness in Leon, something unhinged. “Why would I want to do that?”
“For fun?” Leon mused with a chuckle.
“You are a strange man, Leon.”
“It’s been a long time since I was last a man, Liam, as you can plainly see. And I mean that in more ways than one.”
Liam wasn’t sure what he meant, and so he studied the beast for a while. He couldn’t place why Leon made him uneasy, outside of his physical appearance, trapped mid-shift. It wasn’t just that. There was something more to it. Liam’s instincts told him that Leon was up to something, though whether or not it was simply the pointless plans of a lunatic, or something else, he wasn’t sure.
“I’m leaving,” Liam said. “I’m leaving Borneo.”
“Good.”
“I’ve been hearing talk of someone looking for me.”
“Marcus. That’s why you were in the bar.”
“Yes. I asked Keegan, too, but he said he hadn’t heard anything.”
“That was years ago,” Leon said, sounding bored. “Marcus could have come between then and now.”
“He probably did. I only just heard from one of the fishermen yesterday.”
“Ah,” Leon murmured with a slow nod. He turned back to face Liam, framed by two trees. He looked up toward the forest canopy, and Liam followed his gaze, seeing nothing but small patches of blue sky through the dark green thicket. “That news is old. It takes a long time for rumors to reach this deep into the jungle.”
“Yeah, and that’s why I’ve got to leave. He might be close already.”
“But you are safe in here,” Leon said. He touched a tree next to him, ran his clawed fingers up and down its trunk, peeling off light brown shavings of bark with ease. “He’ll never find you in here. He lost your scent at the edge of the rainforest, most likely. Many trails end in this jungle”
“I expect so.”
“So you have nothing to worry about, then.”
“He’ll stick around, try to find me. So I’m leaving. I don’t want to see him, and I don’t want to fight him.” Liam wasn’t sure why the beast was trying to convince him to stay. But almost immediately Leon proved that little theory wrong.
“Do what you must,” Leon said, waving a dismissive hand at him. “I don’t care.”
“Really?” Liam asked. “Sounds about right.”
“Go,” the wolf-man growled. “I am fine here with Her.”
Liam shook his head. Her was Mother Nature for Leon. He often blabbered about having ‘returned to the womb’. Senility had gotten the better of him.
“Watch yourself,” Liam said. “Marcus is dangerous.” He turned, beginning to leave. He’d go to the river, get a ride with one of the fisherman to the nearest town where he’d pay for passage on a barge going to Kuching, the coastal capital of Sarawak.
“Where are you going?” Leon asked him.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why?”
“If Marcus finds you-” Leon erupted into laughter, cutting Liam off. “You don’t know him like I do,” Liam said, his voice steady but with the hard edge of anger. “You don’t know what he did to me.”
“Don’t know?” Leon bellowed. “I know everything! Do you think that I never knew? Did you think you were hiding it from me these past years?” The wolf-man spat, and then growled. “And I know Marcus. Don’t worry about me. If Marcus comes to me, and he won’t, he’ll have a safe place to stay.”
“He’ll kill you,” Liam said. “You’re a blathering idiot if you don’t see that. If you know what he did to me like you say, then you’ll know he won’t stop until you, I, and the rest of our kind are dead.”
“He won’t kill me. He can’t.”
Liam shook his head in disbelief. “How can you possibly know that?”
“I should rephrase,” the beast growled. He chuckled then, but descended once again into a fit of gravelly coughs. “He won’t kill me yet.”
“Goodbye, Leon.” Liam left. He didn’t want to hear any more of the contradicting crap that came out of Leon’s mouth. As he walked away, brushing to the side bushes that stroked him, he quieted the turbulence of his emotions. Talking about Marcus had awoken old and unwanted memories he thought he had purged a lifetime ago. He wondered if what Leon the half-man, half-wolf had said was true. Why wouldn’t Marcus kill him if he found him? That didn’t make any sense.
But it didn’t matter anymore. The breadcrumbs would end in the jungle, and with Marcus off his trail, he’d leave. He already had a place in mind. It would be tricky to get there, and he’d have to stow away on a trawler to get across the sea border, but once he got to Hong Kong, he’d have no trouble moving across the land into southern China. From there, it would only be a couple of train trips, and then he’d be in Vietnam.
Liam smiled as he left the crazy old thing behind him. He figured he would stay in Vietnam for a while. Possibly for longer than he’d stayed in Borneo. He’d been before, and had loved it back then. He wondered, idly, if Sammy was still around. It had been a long time, but there was a chance that he might be.
And that was enough.
The air smelled like crap, and that wasn’t in the least bit surprising to Terry. At the front of her train carriage were two pigs, two sheep, what looked like
a young buffalo, and a dog. She wrinkled her nose, and turned to her neighbor. She was an old Chinese woman, her life spelled out in the bend of her spine, with lines carved so deeply into her face she looked like she might be a thousand years old.
“Yuck,” Terry said, gesturing with her head at the animals populating the front half of the carriage. She made a face, then smiled. The old woman’s expression didn’t change one iota. She simply looked away, disinterested.
Great, Terry thought, shifting sideways so that she could look out of the window. The train carriage, nothing more than a wooden box on the verge of falling apart, was narrow, and only three people could stand shoulder to shoulder comfortably across its width. There were no seats to speak of, but lining each side were benches made out of rotting planks of wood, and supported on uneven logs of wood with rusty metal brackets securing them to the floor.
The train was filled to bursting with people (and livestock), and Terry sighed, wondering why on earth they were crammed in the same carriage. Being one of the first to climb aboard, she had managed to secure herself a space on one of the benches, but it meant that her back was against the window and she was staring into the crotch of a man she guessed was a farmer. He looked a little less ancient than her neighbor, but seemed to only consist of skin and bones, and she wondered how he even managed to lift the wicker basket at his feet filled to the top with unusually large turnips.
The man looked down at her occasionally, she had noticed, as though she were an odd smell that he continued to sniff. It wasn’t a curious look, or even a judgmental one. It was just a look, vacant eyes every now and then meeting the top of her head, flicking briefly down to her face, before returning to their previous position, looking out of the window.
Terry grew used to it as the minutes rolled by. She was, after all, a foreigner, and one who stood out at that. Her carriage was full of local people only, and she wondered if she’d missed some kind of first-class carriage that all the other backpackers and travelers were riding in. She fumbled for her train ticket, but saw no indications that she had paid for anything special.
It was about twenty minutes into the two hour journey that Terry decided it would be better if she could look out of the window. It would at least offer more interesting scenery than the sea of waistlines in front of her. But the window was behind her, and though she could get up and stand, leaning over her bit of the bench, it wasn’t ideal, and she had the distinct impression from a couple of people eyeing her that if she did, they’d squeeze in beneath her and knick her seat.
Aha, Terry thought, coming up with a great idea. She reached down in between her legs, and picked up, with some difficulty, her large backpack. Sidling off her bench, she put her backpack where her bum was, and then swiveled on the spot so that she was facing out the window. Green whipped by in a blur while she struggled to get her knees onto the bench, straddling the backpack.
It was awkward work, and she felt a little embarrassed doing it, but swatted that silly feeling away. She was stuck in a train carriage in the middle of rural Guangxi, southern China, jammed in with about a hundred people, not to mention a collection of farm animals. Any sting she felt about her behavior, or by simply being a tourist doing something a little unorthodox, was worth it.
“Mei guan xi,” she said, knowing that her Mandarin tones were probably awful. It directly translated to ‘no problem’, but apparently could also pass for ‘excuse me’. At least, that was what her travel guidebook told her. “Excuse me,” she said in English automatically as she shifted her right knee a little, digging it into the old woman beside her. After a bit more shuffling, scooting, wriggling, and writhing, she accomplished what she had set out to do. With her backpack on the bench, she was straddling it, leg on either side, knees pressed up against the wall of the carriage, and her head out of the window, the wind roaring past her ears. She got her elbows up and over the half open window, forced it down a bit into its sheath so that she could lean on the edge of the dirty glass comfortably. She lay her head down, cradled in the nook of her arm, and watched the countryside and farmland whizz by.
Grinning and feeling rather pleased with herself, her quiet moment of victory was nullified by a distant wondering of what the rest of the passengers were thinking about her. Were they thinking that she was ill-mannered? Well, judging by her experiences so far in rural southern China, she wasn’t particularly convinced that manners mattered all that much.
A stray thought, rogue and evil, flitted through her mind, and Terry grew cross with herself. Were they contemplating her size? When she had landed in Hong Kong, her first ever visit to China (though people had been quick to point out that though Hong Kong was technically part of China, they were entirely different culturally, and she had blamed her guidebook), she had become extremely aware of how slight everybody was, especially the women. Terry was a big girl, even by standards back home, and standing at nearly five feet and eight inches, she was also a couple of notches past the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI chart. She reconciled that particular factoid with the knowledge that the BMI chart put body builders in the unhealthy range, too. Still, drunken lads had called her names while they sped by in their cars many times before, and her memories of school were not as fond as she would have liked.
Terry reprimanded herself internally for letting such a harmless little worry prick her like that. She was a confident woman, and ninety-nine percent of the time she didn’t suffer from self-esteem issues. But even then, sometimes her mental toughness wavered. Nobody was tough all the time. Everybody had a little downtime.
Forget it, she thought to herself. For years now she had been perfectly at ease, and very comfortable with herself. She felt sexy, and knew that men found her sexy, too. She summoned up that self-confidence she knew she had, even though it had been weakened the last few days.
Arriving in Hong Kong, and seeing that she wasn’t actually much shorter at all than the average guy, and almost certainly bigger and heavier than the average girl, had done a number on her self-esteem, and all that confidence she had molded simply didn’t fit into the slot presented anymore. She found it hard, at first, to plug that hole, to stop worrying so much because of the sudden change in relativity. It was a ridiculous comparison to make, too. Ethnic genetic differences alone meant that it couldn’t possibly be apples to apples, it couldn’t be useful in any meaningful way.
Those dark clouds of insecurity had faded quickly, though. If there was one thing Terry was proud of, it was her resilience. She was strong mentally, and she had to be, growing up with crazy parents, crazier brothers, getting a crazy job with an even crazier boss. Yeah, it hadn’t been all peaches and cream back home in London.
But even being as strong as she was, even having the mental fortitude to beat her inner demons most of the time, it didn’t always immunize her against that waifish, random thought, the one that somehow made it past all her psychological defenses, snuck past the mental barricades, and flitted its way right into the center of her consciousness where it then proceeded to chirp and screech and call attention to itself. Those were the kind of doubts and worries that were the hardest to eliminate.
Terry sighed. This was a hurdle that she was going to have to clear – and the sooner the better – if she was going to spend any considerable time in Asia. She laughed for a moment, considering the thought. Asia. That giant continent full of dozens of countries, and yet, until she had arrived in Hong Kong, it had all sort of seemed the same to her.
Her encounter with a man quick to tell her that Hong Kong was not the same as China had been the first time Terry had really come to grips with the idea that within Asia – heck, even within China – the cultures were diverse, different, individual in their own ways, and, most importantly, proud. The last thing she wanted to do was leave a trail of people offended by her ignorance as she traveled from place to place. She didn’t want to be that kind of tourist. It mattered to her, not because she was easily harmed by the barbed words of others, but b
ecause she held herself to a high standard. Tourists were often ignorant of the complex culture back home, and they always came across worse off for it.
Terry awoke from her brief moment of reverie, looking up the front of the train. It was rattling on its rails, only five carriages long, each one sounding as barebones as hers. The engine car was huffing out great, leathery plumes of smoke, and there was enough of a crosswind to pull them to the side, so that they did not spoil the view on her side.
The weather had changed overnight, from grumbling clouds and annoying intermittent showers to clear skies, humid heat, and harsh sunshine. Far off in the distance, back toward the city of Nanning, she could see the city’s gray smog hanging in the air, and it looked like a murky plastic bag floating on the surface of the sea when seen from beneath.
Terry grinned when she remembered that she had thought that the train ride would be like ones she had seen photos of in India, with mountains of people holding on for dear life on the sides and tops of the cars as the train sped loudly along its way. But that again had been just another assumption, something she was quite glad to be wrong about, especially since the train wasn’t stable at all. People would be falling off left and right. It would just be a total disaster.
In front of her, four windows up, she saw a hand poke through the gap. She desperately hoped that the person wasn’t going to open the window. But the person did. The hand shot down as the window slid into its recess (but not without making a creaking complaint), and Terry’s nostrils were flooded with the smell of manure again.
“Fuck,” she said quietly to herself. Oh well, it was better than having her head inside the train. A small farm shot by, and Terry got a brief glimpse of a young girl picking vegetables out of the ground. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. Having spent the last two days in cities, she hadn’t really been confronted by the staggering poverty in China yet, though it was unlikely she would ever get an accurate sense of its scale. Hong Kong had been rich, prosperous, civilized, and easy. Guangzhou, a little less so, but the city planning had done a good job of hiding the impoverished, relegating them to the outskirts. Nanning was a little direr, a little less glossy, but was still nothing like the bleak image of a child picking vegetables when she should really be in school.