THE FLENSE: China: (Part 2 of THE FLENSE serial)

by Saul Tanpepper

  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; unwilling 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 chan
ce 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 machines 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.

  He sighed. "Explain."

  There's no signal from the tracker in her phone.

  "It's possible she turned it off to conserve the battery."

  She was at the crash site when it stopped updating. We registered it with thirty percent power remaining.

  Alvin leaned forward. "She made contact? Already? I thought the burial ceremony was tonight. My boy was supposed to take her to the crash site tomorrow at the earliest."

  The ceremony is tonight, Al. We're not sure why she went early. With the villagers gone, it's possible she went off exploring on her own.

  "And she hasn't turned her phone back on? Can you try a remote startup?"

  We did try. If the phone were anywhere within the two kilometer range of the box, it would have powered up. It didn't. We're helpless and blind until she's either back in range or—

  "Hold on," Cheong interrupted, as his phone chirped again. "I've got another call coming in."

  He checked his screen, then returned the device to his ear. "Never mind," he told the caller. "It's her. Can you locate the signal?"

  There was a pause, then: Bairin Zouqi.

  Cheong's eyes widened in pleasant surprise. "Um, that's good. That means she's uncovered something. I'll call you back after I speak with her. Oh, and next time call sooner."

  He terminated the connection before a response could be made and answered Angel's call. "What have you got for me?"

  I'm not sure. The Americans were at the crash site and I couldn't—

  "Americans?" He shook his head. "No, the Ministry of Transport has custody of the site; they've already sent out a medical team to coordinate with the locals and put the proper health precautions in place. The Baarin representatives are overseeing the removal of the bodies for their religious rites; the crash investigation starts tomorrow, after tonight's ceremonial burial. You were to meet with a . . . ." He quickly pulled up a file on his tablet. "A Mister Wang Jingping, the chief accident investigation agent assigned to the incident. They'll be cataloging the collected samples and—

  Well, unless the Ministry is now operated entirely by Americans, I'd say your country's people have been— How do you say in English? Punked? And good luck finding anything now.

  Cheong sat stunned for a moment. "How did you— I don't understand, how did you end up going today? Jian was supposed to take you tomorrow. What changed?"

  That's what I'm saying, Monsieur Cheong, she replied, not answering his question. He could hear the urgency in her voice, which matched the new urgency rising up inside of himself. The Americans are there right now sterilizing the scene. Tomorrow will be too late.

  "Sterilizing?"

  Erasing evidence— not of the crash, of course, since it'd be impossible to restore the scene to its natural state. Instead, they're removing clues to what happened there. All of the wreckage is being dismantled, swept up, incinerated, and trucked away. They have men with flamethrowers combing the entire area, scorching the earth down to the bedrock. If I had waited until tomorrow to go, there wouldn't have been anything left to find. Your Ministry, once they arrive in the morning, will likewise find nothing.

  "No! That's not right!"

  I'm just telling you what I saw.

  "I'll send someone to check immediately, then."

  Go ahead, but I'm telling you, it'll be a waste of time. I overheard one of them say they were going to be gone by . . . by now, actually. In fact, I'd advise you to be very careful. I'm pretty sure if I'd been caught, you'd never hear from me again.

  "You think they'd hurt you? Don't be ridiculous."

  Maybe I am being ridiculous. I don't think so. In any case, it's a theory I'm not eager to test out.

  Cheong was silent as he mulled this over. "Then this suggests that we are correct, that there was some kind of biological factor associated with the crash."

  I don't think so. The men I saw weren't
decked out for biohazards, just standard chemical protection. Physical barrier suits with splash helmets. I managed to sneak one out. No self-contained air or filters. I can't be positive, but I don't think they even had decontamination showers, not unless they were inside the tent.

  "Tent?"

  Their command center.

  "If they were so dangerous, why did they let you go?"

  They didn't know I was there. I took some video.

  Clever girl, he thought, and smiled despite his surprise. He was beginning to appreciate her initiative.

  But they know now. Or that someone was there, anyway. I'm afraid they'll go to Baoyang Village looking for me.

  He frowned. "You think the villagers are in danger?"

  Yes, I do. That's why I'm calling you, Monsieur Cheong. I'm going to send you a couple video clips. I need you to post the first one everywhere you can find on social media, news sites, YouTube. See if HuffPo will publish it. I'm at a local internet cafe in Barin Zouqi, but I can't get past the government firewall to access the necessary sites to post the videos.

  "What's on them?"

  See for yourself. It's proof of the cover up. And Monsieur Cheong? It's very important that this goes live immediately.

  "Alvin," he told her distractedly. "Yes, I heard you. Okay."

  I'm sending them both now. The second video is for your eyes only, at least until I can figure out what it means. It's a short clip that DeBryan took while we were on Huangxia, and I need you to take a look at it.

  "Yes, yes. Of course. Okay. But—"

  I can't stay and chat, Monsieur Cheong. I'm in a bit of a hurry. I have to get Jian back before sunset for the burial ceremony. I'll call again soon.

  "Where are you going now?"

  To the hospital.

  The call disconnected before he had a chance to ask her why. He stared at the phone in his hand for a moment before realizing he was being scrutinized by the man in the seat facing him.

  "Was that her?" his companion asked.

  Cheong nodded.