by Greg Dragon
Besides, where would she go? There were too few roads in this remote part of the country. They’d find her sooner rather than later, since the only place around for fifty kilometers was the village.
She hated the idea of bringing attention to those innocent people. They’d already suffered so much.
It’s too late for such regrets.
She didn’t want to admit it, but once the men figured out the site had been compromised, they would come looking for her in Baoyang Village straight away.
Well, she’d just have to make sure they didn’t. It was as simple as that. But how?
She pressed her ear against the sliding door and listened. She could hear the man shuffling around back there, could feel the vibrations created by his movements. What was he doing? There was a sudden loud crash, and she froze as he cursed out loud. Then another crash, this one more deliberate sounding.
Slowly, Angel unfolded herself from her spot on the floor and inched her way forward between the seats. Her eyes gravitated to the key ring once more, but she suppressed the impulse to jump behind the wheel and start the truck up.
Through the passenger side window, the crane operator had turned his cab around and was facing the other direction as he worked the opposite side of the heap. It was the perfect opportunity for her to leave.
And there, between her and the crane, was how she meant to do it.
Without stopping to second guess herself, Angel reached over to the keys and slipped them out of the ignition, upsetting a pile of papers stacked in the center console. One sheet caught her eye, a familiar logo in the top corner. She grabbed the paper and quickly folded it up. Then she slid over to the passenger seat and pried the door open as quietly as she could.
No one was in view on the ground, just the crane and dump truck drivers, but neither of them was looking her way. She stepped out.
The next thing she knew, she was dangling half out of the cab, the back of the suit caught on the seat adjustment lever. The truck rocked. She scrambled to regain her footing.
Without waiting to see if the man in the back had noticed the movement or noise, she unhooked herself, then let herself down and quickly and silently guided the door shut behind her. She stepped briskly across the open field, hiding her ungloved hand, the keys, and the folded sheet of paper beneath her other arm. The hazmat suit shushed loudly in her ears, as if announcing to everyone, “She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!” But no one stopped her. No one called out in alarm.
She climbed up inside the empty cage of the forklift and prayed the key was on the ring she’d brought from the truck, but found she didn’t need it as a second set was already in the ignition. She could feel her body betraying her again as a wave of shakes threatened to fold her into a heap. Her heart battered against her ribs. Just keep going. You can do it. Almost there.
A twist of the key and a thumb jammed against the red button in the console fired the engine up. The exhaust stack belched several puffs of black smoke before the engine’s rhythm smoothed. She aimed for the gap between the two train cars. The forklift jerked over the rough terrain, forcing her to grab the controls with both hands.
Behind her in the dusty mirror, the crane operator continued filling the bed of the dump truck. Its driver sat slumped over in the cab and didn’t look up.
So much for picking up the pace, she thought.
Angel pressed harder on the accelerator, gradually increasing her speed. Fifteen long seconds later she angled the forklift toward the still-upright train car. Only then did she glance back.
The field burner was stepping down the ramp of the supply truck. He was limping noticeably and holding his leg. The tank was gone from his back. She couldn’t tell if he’d found what he had gone in there for, but he didn’t come out empty-handed.
As soon as his feet hit the dirt, he started to hobble quickly off across the field, a glove-shaped scrap of blue plastic in his hand.
Chapter Seventeen
Jian’s angry scowl kept flashing through Angel’s mind as she sped in his car over the unpatched road. She was heading for the city of Bairin Zouqi. After all he’d done for her, picking her up in Chifeng and driving her the two hundred kilometers to Baoyang Village, putting her up in his family’s tiny home, she felt bad for forcing him to act against his wishes and the wishes of his parents. Against centuries of his people’s customs and dogma. But she had no choice, not now. Not after the things she’d seen and heard just a few hours ago.
Hours? Has it only been that long?
It hardly seemed like it was even the same day.
Time was of the essence. She glanced up at the sky over the hood of the car, but the afternoon blue was completely unmarred — maybe a touch deeper in hue was all — and the sun was still too high overhead to judge the passage of time by any change in its location. Her cell phone was no help; she’d turned it off to save what little power remained in her battery. The charger in Jian’s car was just another thing that didn’t work.
But when she happened to glance out her window, she was alarmed to see how much fatter the car’s shadow had grown beside her. Time was slipping away much faster than she hoped.
Hurry, Angel. Vite!
The puddle of darkness sailing silently over the ground beside her seem to draw her eye. It felt almost predatory, like some rapacious thing ready to strike and inject its toxic venom. She shuddered and tried to shake the image from her mind and focused on a moving spot roughly a hundred meters down the road.
Despite managing to blunt the sharp edge of terror from her morning’s escapade, a vague disquiet remained deep inside of her. Danger, it whispered. Danger.
She pressed her foot down on the accelerator and clenched her teeth against the bone-jarring impacts as the tires slammed through the potholes. She prayed the car didn’t disintegrate around her.
She knew how lucky she’d been to escape the crash site without being seen, ditching the forklift as soon as she wrestled it behind the last intact train car.
Intact is a funny way to describe it, she thought distractedly, then winced as a swell in the road caused the bottom of the car to scrape the pavement.
She realized that escape had really only bought her a little time; it hadn’t diminished the threat to her at all. Sooner or later, those men would arrive in the village looking for her. That was why she needed to get to the city, not to escape or hide, but to go public with what she had seen. It was the only way she was going to get them to acknowledge the accident and come clean about what they were doing. By uploading the video she’d shot onto the Internet, she’d have an insurance policy against the men who would want her dead or those considering retaliation against the village.
You should have warned them before you left. They deserved to know.
And what, cause a panic? Or worse, turn them even more against her. No, she’d done the right thing by keeping it to herself. She’d created the problem and she was going to fix it. The villagers had enough to worry about tending to their dead.
She had only mentioned to Jian that she’d seen the crash site, omitting nearly everything else, including the parts about the old man and the rock shrine she’d seen along the way. She also didn’t tell him about the hazmat suit she’d stolen out of the supply truck or the jacket she’d left behind.
She had doffed the plastic gear at her earliest opportunity after slipping away, burying it beneath a pile of stones for later retrieval. The hill where she’d left it was unique enough to easily recognize, teeming with the prettiest purple flowers and topped by an odd shaped pillar of granite that looked a bit like a giant finger pointing upward. She was confident she could find it again when the time came. It and the paper in her pocket were all the evidence she had to prove the video’s validity.
For the dozenth time, she wrestled with her feelings over the old man and the ovoo. Was he real? Was he imaginary? It was strange how she kept flipping back and forth between those possibilities, unable to make up her mind; unwillin
g to fully trust her memory. Before arriving at the crash scene that morning, she’d convinced herself that both had been fully real, despite their disappearing without a trace.
Afterward, as she made her way back to the village along those very same tracks, the realization struck her that she’d been incredibly lucky to escape from the crash site. But she’d done it on her own by keeping her wits about her. There had been no divine provenance, no spiritual guidance. The visions had been nothing but products of her overwrought imagination and the high, thin air.
Except you knew where the crash site was. He led you there.
But that could be easily explained away, too. Jian had mentioned to her earlier that the location was a few kilometers along the tracks. He didn’t specify in which direction, but it seemed pretty self-evident.
The strip of fabric in your pocket. Is that a figment of your imagination, too?
Of course it wasn’t. Nor were the singed edges and the dark spots on it, which she now recognized as blood. But it was possible that it had blown along the tracks from the crash site and she’d merely picked it up along the way. Just some chance thing. And who was to say, maybe it had nothing to do with the accident at all. It was old and dirty. It could have come from anywhere, including some dumb tourist who’d spent a lot of good money to come all the way out here for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to milk a yak.
But then there had been a moment, as she was driving the forklift away, she’d looked into the mirror and for just a split second she thought she’d seen the old man standing there in the middle of the field. Now, thinking back on it, she was sure that’s why she’d turned around to look. But of course, all she’d seen was the flamethrower man coming out of the truck.
Such was the turmoil in her mind when she finally reached the village that it took her a moment to register all the people busily tending to their animals and preparing their midday meals. She’d assumed they would be gone the entire day, at least until after nightfall, but that had clearly not been the case. Her initial response, after getting over her surprise, was to feel grateful for her good fortune. Jian would be back, giving her a chance to ask about driving her into the city so she could upload the video.
But from the moment she entered the yurt he was yelling at her, accusing her of disrespecting him and his people. “Where you go? I tell you stay here, not go outside! I say stay in house, you go wander around like lost sheep!”
She had run long and hard from the crash site, and her lungs felt as dry and brittle as paper, so it took her a moment to catch her breath. She tried to tell him about the video, what it meant. “I need to go to the city.”
“No! I go to burial hill later. No time!”
Angel knew not to press him while he was angry, so she sat with them to eat and hoped the meal would temper his fury. But he seethed the entire time and tore his bread into such tiny pieces that most of it ended up on the ground in crumbs.
“Jian,” she told him, “they’re hiding something. I have video proving it. I’ll show you.”
But he refused to watch the clip, slapping her phone out of her hand before she had a chance to turn it on.
His mother’s attempts to calm him down only set him off again. He jumped to his feet, waving his arms about while she chased him around the yurt. “Miss Angel show disrespect! She—“
“Jian!” The old woman needed only to raise her voice a little bit to stop him in his tracks. He bristled at her intervention, but he held his tongue.
Angel had noticed the tension between them the night before, after their arrival, and she initially worried that it stemmed from their distrust of her as an outsider. It wasn’t the Buddhist way to judge strangers, but this was a community torn apart by change and tragedy.
At some point, she recognized that she was only partially correct. The strain actually had less to do with her personally than with the world she represented, the world which shunned tradition and embraced advancement, both of which were responsible for taking away so many of their neighbors. Because Jian was also a part of that world, much of his family’s displeasure was aimed directly at him.
Poor kid.
He had chosen a path that strayed from the one his family wished for him. He had set aside his customs to live in Chifeng, to study mechanical engineering. He wore Western clothes. He drove a car. He was a man with one foot in both worlds and probably felt he belonged to neither.
It happens in every culture, Angel thought yet again, as her teeth clacked together over an especially rough section of the road. She hoped the spare petrol cans in the trunk didn’t come loose and spill over her suitcase. Old ways get pushed aside, become obsolete. She had seen it before, the people she’d met in Mexico. It was that way even in the United States, the clash of old thinking and the new. Times of transition had a tendency to tear people apart.
“Jian not leave,” he quietly told her in a clipped voice, once his mother had finished scolding him. “Is time of grieving. Go to city tomorrow, after take to crash site.”
“There will be nothing left to see at the crash site, Jian. Don’t you see? It’s all being covered up.” She sighed, and when he didn’t answer, she said, “Fine. I’ll go alone then. You don’t understand how important it is that I post this video, and I simply can’t do it from here. Not just for me, but for the people in this village. Let me use your car.”
She knew she was backing him into a corner. She knew he’d never allow her to go alone. If not because Cheong had likely instructed him to give her what she needed, then because of his own calculation of the risks to her. There was always a slight chance she’d encounter bandits on the road. More likely, a mechanical breakdown would strand her out in the middle of nowhere. And then there was the fact that she knew neither Mandarin nor Mongolian. How would she possibly find her way around without a translator?
In the end, he had allowed her to drive, but not to go alone. Although, by the way he was sulking in his seat beside her, she might as well have. Just shy of two hours into the ride and he still hadn’t said more than a dozen words to her, despite her solemn oath to have him back in time for the burial ceremony.
And now they were finally arriving on the outskirts of Bairin Zouqi, and she could see the taller buildings up ahead. She swerved to avoid another pothole, and he reached out to brace himself against his door. His scowl deepened.
“You drive like crazy person,” he muttered.
Angel smiled as she picked up her phone off the car seat and thumbed it on to check for a signal. There was none yet, but at least he was speaking to her again.
Chapter Eighteen
We may have a problem.
Alvin Cheong raised his seat back and took in a deep breath as he considered the array of possibilities the “problem” might be. The exercise tired him, and he shut his eyes for a moment.
Al? You there?
He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at his feet stretched out before him while silently counting to ten. He hoped — really hoped — that this wasn’t about Missus de l’Enfantine. He liked the woman in a vague sort of way, and wanted her to succeed. From a more objective standpoint, he needed her to succeed. So he hoped that his suspicions about her were wrong.
Al?
He could still hear the caller’s voice clearly, even though he’d lowered the phone to his lap. It never ceased to amaze him how good the connection could be, even out here over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thirty-five thousand feet in the air. Technology had brought such wonders to the world, had changed it in so many positive ways since he was a child. And he greatly appreciated the vast majority of those changes. But not all were beneficial.
We bravely wield the swords of progress, he thought idly, and slay the dragons of constraint. Then he winced as the second part of the adage slipped unbidden into his mind: But in our reckless haste, we sometimes find ourselves impaled upon those blades.
His parents had been poor factory workers at a time when the most advanced mac
hines inside those factories still ran on steam and coal and belched poisonous smoke into the air, and the fastest way to assemble anything was by brute force manual labor. They had both died young, in their late thirties, when he was still in his early teens. Cancer had taken his mother, most likely caused by the high concentrations of benzene and phthalates she’d been exposed to, chemicals that were used to treat the synthetic fabrics which were then woven into clothes to be worn by the unsuspecting and unprotected poor of the world.
His father had been crushed beneath a colossal industrial punch press whose rotting wooden base had collapsed under its own weight. Lizhen, as he was still called then, had gone to live with an uncle fifty kilometers away in Suzhou. The man was a well-known celibate who spent his days in silent contemplation in the beautiful gardens of the Humble Administrator. At night, this seemingly placid man terrorized the hapless boy with an unending rain of blows from a bamboo switch soaked in vinegar. On especially warm days, the old scars still itched terribly. He escaped the brutality by finally running away. It was a preferable alternative to killing the old man with his bare hands.
At fourteen, Lizhen was back in Shanghai, living and dealing drugs on the streets and selling his body to tourists, the majority of whom were in town at the behest of their companies. It was the height of the tech boom and there was a lot of money being thrown around, a lot of drugs being bought, and a lot of lonely or drunk men seeking companionship. Technology had brought the world so much good, but it had also ushered in so much bad.
Al? I think I may have lost you.
He cleared his throat and shook his head as he raised the phone to his ear. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
It’s about your girl. We believe she may be in trouble.