Asian Pulp

by Asian Pulp (retail) (epub)

  The windows banged open and the cabin became a makeshift fort. Zhan Fu kicked open the door and they shot all of the Red Brotherhood dead. Again. To the credit of his fellow countrymen, they didn’t balk when the skeletal army appeared. They simply changed their aim to shoot at the skulls and breastbones and other large targets. Throughout the exchange, Reyes screamed and barked orders in Spanish.

  As soon as the men cleared out their windows, they closed them again. Zhan Fu and his helper managed to get the door closed and bolted. Once the cabin was secure, he turned to the men and said, “Okay, go.”

  They didn’t need to be told twice. As the last one jumped down into the trap door, he paused and said, “Remember. Five minutes.”

  Zhan Fu nodded. The brotherhood member left his rifle and disappeared, leaving the trap open. Zhan Fu picked up the rifle and checked his line of sight at the windows. He couldn’t see Reyes, but the undead army had completely surrounded the cabin now. There were enough bullet holes to see from every direction, so Zhan Fu checked each side until he found Reyes, facing the door, at the top of the rise, near the water. Between him and the door of the cabin were about fifty undead soldiers. Zhan Fu didn’t have a clean shot, nor could he chance opening the door. Somehow the general was still moving, even though his shirt was soaked with blood from two grievous axe wounds. He was pale, and his eyes stood out from their darkened hollow sockets as he raved and swore.

  “General Reyes!” Zhan Fu shouted. “My men are more than a match for your peasant army! Surrender and no one has to get hurt!”

  “Who are you?” Reyes screamed. “You are no one! And you’re not going to stop me!”

  “I’m Wang Zhan Fu. They call me The Celestial Kid.” As Zhan Fu said it, he stuck his pistols in the cabin walls and fired until the cylinders were empty. He reloaded them again and picked up the rifle next. The army was now in motion, pressing against the walls, beating on the door, pushing against the wooden shutters on the windows. Zhan Fu methodically circled the room, shooting any bullet hole with a body in front of it.

  Outside, Reyes was delirious. “You see? We won’t be stopped! Your bullets slow us down, but do not kill us. Again we rise up! We are of the Earth. We till the Earth. But we do not consign ourselves to the Earth until our crusade is at an end!”

  “Your crusade dies tonight, and so will you!” Zhan Fu shouted.

  “Tear the door down!” Reyes screamed. “Kill him! We take the tunnel now!”

  Zhan Fu moved to the door as the cabin’s walls thudded and groaned against the onslaught of the undead army. He stood in the middle of the room, covering the windows with his Colts. There was no light in the cabin, and the smell of rot and decay hung in the air. Now the incessant hammering on the windows was causing the wood to buckle and splinter. He stepped over to the North facing window and shot the corpses at point blank range as their heads filled the gaps in the shutter.

  Behind him, the other window gave out and glass and splinters exploded inside the confined space. Zhan Fu turned to address the new threat and was seized from behind by a pair of grasping hands. The shutter he’d been defending finally gave out, and then they were all over him. His Colts were useless, so he dropped them and managed to get an axe free. He swung wildly until he cleared a path for himself, then he drew the second axe and spun in a dizzying arc of death, steel, and muscle, cleaving heads from shoulders, snapping arms, whisking away legs and through it all, he never stopped moving, flowing from one monster to the next.

  Eight, nine, ten corpses lay in various states of dismemberment, but there were more coming and even as Zhan Fu reached the end of his attack, the door burst inward and in they came.

  It was time. Zhan Fu flipped backwards and dove for the trapdoor. He passed through the opening, headfirst, as the cabin above him disintegrated in a fiery blast.

  The Benevolent Celestial Brotherhood had wired the cabin with crates of explosives in all four corners. The force of the explosion pushed Zhan Fu down the forty foot shaft, increasing his velocity. His back was to the ladder and there was no way to get a handhold. The bottom of the tunnel rushed up to meet him with sickening swiftness. With a second to spare, he took his axes and jammed the heads into the opposing walls, where they dug huge gouging furrows in the wood. It was just enough to slow his descent and allow him to flip forward and land on his feet like a cat in the Water Tunnel.

  The tunnel was a bleak affair; narrow and dark, held together with wood beams and stones from the river. Despite the depth and the engineering that constructed the tunnel, the walls and ceiling were slick with water and mold. The Water Tunnel was only wide enough for two men to walk side by side. And now it was a gauntlet the invading horde would have to navigate.

  Zhan Fu looked up the shaft and saw Reyes peering down at him. “Still alive, General?” he called.

  Reyes fired his pistol for an answer. Zhan Fu jumped out of the way, but one of the bullets ricocheted and caught him in the left leg. He cursed and crawled out of the line of fire and leaned against the limestone wall. The bullet was deep in the muscle of his thigh. His belt buckle concealed a small knife blade, and he retrieved it and cut a hole through his pants. The blood wasn’t helping matters. If he tried to take the bullet out, he’d render his leg useless. Instead he cut off his left sleeve to make crude bandages and tied them tightly in place.

  No sooner did he finish than the ladder began to shake. Someone was coming down. Zhan Fu didn’t hesitate. He limped over to the ladder and began hacking at the struts with his hand axes. After a few good whacks, the ladder split in two and he threw his shoulder against the support.

  The bottom portion of the ladder shuddered and then gave way, leaving a ten foot drop from above. He moved out of the way just in time to see a body fall and hit the ground. It was Reyes. He was flat on his back, one leg twisted under him at a strange angle. He was awash in his own blood. But his eyes moved and his mouth tried to form words.

  Zhan Fu stood over him. “What is keeping you alive?”

  “Hate,” he whispered. “You’ve done nothing but delay the inevitable. They don’t need me. They have been told what to do. Rasputin leads them. They will kill the world.”

  “Goodbye, General Reyes,” said Zhan Fu. He brought the axe down and the general’s head rolled to one side, free of his neck.

  Unfortunately, the general was right. The ladder was shaking and now came one corpse and then another. Zhan Fu backed off, heading down the tunnel. The skeletal soldiers piled upon one another, creating an obscene parody of a ladder with their bones and dead flesh. They were falling down the shaft now, and standing up again. He tightened his grip on his axes, but the fire in his leg was a warning. Cursing, he turned and ran.

  The tunnel floor was treacherous due to the water and slime, and Zhan Fu lost his footing several times and had to rest while his leg burned and spasmed. Unable to sprint, he settled for a lurching limp, dragging his leg behind him, which was bleeding freely through the silk shirt bandage.

  He could hear them coming. The monsters filled the tunnel, which magnified the clatter and rasp of bone on wood, bone on stone, bone on bone. It was a discordant, percussive sound that filled the tunnel with noise and heightened his instinct to flee.

  Zhan Fu’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He began to scan the overhead beams, looking for the sign that indicated he was halfway through the tunnel. At last he spied it; a turtle, carved and painted into a large, wet wooden beam. There were wires and other things crammed all around the carving; another warning. He pushed those thoughts out of his head and picked up the pace.

  His strength was quickly ebbing. The skirmishes and the bullet had done their work. Again and again he stopped to rest, and each time, the monsters crept ever closer, and the noise was unbearable. Zhan Fu didn’t notice that the tunnel up ahead was widening into a storage room—the end of the Water Tunnel. He was back in Chinatown. Every step was agony, and he could feel the bones and the rot behind him, threatening to overtake hi
m. It wasn’t until he saw a familiar figure in the light up ahead that he realized where he was.

  It was his sister. Their eyes locked and he smiled and nodded. Mei Ling turned away without a glance and he heard her say, “Blow it.”

  Something behind Zhan Fu rumbled and again he was knocked to the ground. The explosives the Benevolent Celestial Brotherhood had packed around the central support reduced it to rubble and the tunnel was now collapsing on top of the undead army.

  Without bothering to get up, he crawled forward, into the store room, and looked behind him at the mouth of the Water Tunnel. A clawed hand grabbed the stones that bordered the tunnel’s mouth, and then twin red eyes cut out from the gloom. Rasputin walked into the store room and stood over Zhan Fu, his mouth working, speaking dim things that no man could hear. He was dragging one of the Cossack’s sabers behind him, and he raised it up over his skeletal head. Zhan Fu laughed. There was no escape from what came next.

  The tunnel mouth billowed fire, and smoke, and dust. It poured out over Rasputin as Zhan Fu rolled out of the way. He tried to stand up, grabbing the ladder for support, and braced himself against it to face the Mad Monk. Now on fire, Rasputin lurched forward, swinging the saber in front of him, shrieking in agony as the flames overtook him. Zhan Fu ducked. The saber embedded in the wooden ladder. He lashed out with his axe, but Rasputin dodged backward faster than Zhan Fu thought possible.

  Now a great roaring filled the room, and Zhan Fu knew exactly what it was. Zhan Fu had one chance to stop the monster before he would be granted another reprieve. He grabbed the monk’s robe and pinned him to the floor. The monster laughed, and Zhan Fu struck down with his axe, once, twice, and that was when the roaring sound became the massive gout of water that shot out of the tunnel and filled the store room in a violent, turbulent swirl. Zhan Fu was picked up and slammed into the outer wall, but he never let go of the monster’s robe. His leg was numb, and he felt heavy and sluggish and the weight of the water forced the air out of his lungs. But he held on to the robe. He couldn’t see anything in the muddy water, but he could feel the monster attempting to pull away. Rasputin reached out, groping until he felt Zhan Fu’s neck under his hand.

  Zhan Fu let go of the robe and grasped the monster’s throat, squeezing, applying pressure, until the bones snapped under his grip. He yanked back, pulling the monster’s head free, and tried to find his way out of the water. But the lights were so bright, and there was a ringing sound. Maybe if he just rested for a second…

  * * *

  Dou Shu pulled the body up out of the flooded store room through a trap door in the back of the Turtle House restaurant. Several members of the Benevolent Celestial Brotherhood grabbed the body and pried the grisly trophy away from it. They turned the body over and Dou Shu pounded on its back, once, twice. The body came back to life, vomiting up water and coughing and gasping.

  “I thought I’d lost you, Nephew,” Dou Shu said.

  “I’m too stubborn to die,” gasped Zhan Fu. “It’s my family’s greatest weakness.”

  Dou Shu laughed heartily. The brotherhood members picked up Zhan Fu, the Celestial Kid, and bore him back to the Wang house, talking amongst themselves about what they had seen that night, and what Wang Zhan Fu had done for them in the name of his father.

  The Turtle House soon moved its restaurant to another part of Chinatown. The Wang family drained the store room, and filled it with sand and laid a new concrete foundation over that. But the smells, and the sounds of something tapping on the floor, trying to get out, continued for many years afterward.

  DEAD WEIGHT

  A Ken Tanaka Mystery story

  by

  Dale Furutani

  — :: —

  I don’t know how I get myself into these predicaments.

  I was hanging by one hand from an eight story balcony, one foot propped up on the edge of the balcony to help support my weight, and waiting for my target to appear. I’ve seen hundreds of detective movies and read thousands of detective books; in not one of them did the detective find himself in the position I was in.

  My name is Ken Tanaka. I had some success solving some murders a few years ago and decided to change professions and become a full time detective. In some states this means printing up a few business cards with your name and the title Detective. It’s often harder to become a barber. At least for a barber there’s usually some type of testing or license.

  In California, however, to get a PI license you have to put in thousands of hours doing some kind of police-like work before you can apply for a PI license. As usual for California, everything is harder. This requirement gives a tremendous advantage to ex-cops or MPs going into the detective business, which may be the idea, but it’s not impossible for others to get a license. In my case I was doing my hours of investigative work under the supervision of a lawyer.

  I was hired by Enrique Velasquez. Yeah, that Enrique Velasquez. Working for a famous lawyer looks great on your resume but it could also be stressful because of Enrique’s high standards.

  My idea of PI work was a lot of running around town, wearing a trench coat, and cracking wise. (Do they still use that phrase? It comes from reading too many old detective stories. It means talking like a smart ass.) I soon found that modern investigative work really means hours spent behind a computer screen. You’re looking for addresses, criminal records, property ownership, credit history, records about money, and things like that. Most people have a very long electronic trail. Since I was an ex-computer programmer that wasn’t so difficult, but I was really itching for fieldwork. Not everything is digitized. If it was, I’d go back to programming because it paid a lot more than detective work.

  It didn’t take long to realize I was naïve about fieldwork. In front of your computer you’re in a nice air conditioned office with clean bathrooms and a coffee shop usually no more than a block away. Most fieldwork involves sitting around in a stuffy car, eating junk food, and telling yourself you really don’t need to go to the bathroom. As soon as you take a bathroom break the person you’ve got under surveillance will probably pick that exact moment to jump in a car and leave. More experienced PIs carry wide-mouth bottles on surveillance just for this situation, but I still have problems with that. I’m convinced that if I avail myself of the relief offered by a bottle, there will be a rap on my window and I’ll look up to see a cop standing next to my car, asking me why I had my junk stuffed into a bottle. Some guys could handle this situation with aplomb but I’d just as soon avoid this scenario, if I could.

  The saving grace of surveillance was if you were patient enough, there would be moments of pure exhilaration. The quarry would leave the nest and the chase would be on. Often it would lead to nothing—a trip to the hardware store or grocery store or something like that. But sometimes you could nail the object of your surveillance doing what you were hired to catch him or her doing. I guess it’s a lot like fishing: any little nibble keeps you interested. Click, click, a few snaps with a digital camera and your job is done. That part, completing the assignment, is tremendously satisfying.

  My current assignment was following a rich guy who liked to have both a wife and a girlfriend. I suppose a lot of rich guys (and more than a few poor guys) like this, but California is a community property state so this is, to say the least, problematical. And potentially expensive. Just as critically, he wasn’t good at juggling a wife and a girlfriend. It seemed the wife always found out. He had three very expensive divorces to prove it.

  Now he was on marriage number four—soon to be divorce four if I had anything to do with it. The guy had learned something from his past experience, though. For wife four he had a prenuptial agreement. Wife four wasn’t a dummy, though, so she had her own lawyer insert an interesting clause in the agreement. If the guy cheated on wife four the agreement was null and void and wife number four was free to go after as much as she could get. I don’t think the actual legal language said this, but that was the gist of it.

&nb
sp; All this explains why I was hanging off an eight story balcony trying to take a picture of hubby and his girlfriend. I trailed him to a bar where he popped in and immediately came out with a very good looking brunette. Except for his money, this guy was no prize so the woman was obviously someone he knew and not a quick pickup. They sped off to an apartment building in the Westwood section of Los Angeles and parked. Then they entered the building and a few minutes later a light went on in a seventh floor apartment.

  I noticed the building was eight stories tall and that there were balconies circling the top floor. That’s when I got the not-so-bright idea that I could hang off the top floor balcony and take a picture through the windows of the seventh floor apartment. I made my way up to the roof, slipped the lock on the door to the roof (one of the many new skills I’ve learned since pursuing a detective career), and went to the edge of the building. Then I hesitated. From eight floors up it’s a long way to the ground.

  Below me was a parking lot. If I fell I could aim for a Fiat with a canvas top or the sedan next to it. The sedan had a glass sunroof. If I could hit the Fiat, I decided that canvas would make a better landing than glass. After a moment’s reflection I decided that hitting the Fiat after falling eight stories was really the difference between an open casket or a closed casket service. Unless the Fiat was filled with pillows I wasn’t going to survive the fall no matter what I hit.

  Still, that picture was worth a lot of money. A lot of money to wife number four and a lot of money for the law firm I was working for. It was also a lot of money for the guy I was trailing, although not in a positive way. I didn’t have any sympathy for the guy—if he cared about the money he should have kept his zipper up until he was divorced from wife four. The only person involved who wasn’t looking at big money from this photo was me. Of course, no amount of money is worth falling eight stories for, even if you hit the canvas top of a Fiat.