Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Drawing close to her own yellow-canvassed cart, Spider Girl checked again the blue canvas of her parents’ cart. Also in the distance she noted lines of low hills converging on their route from east and west. Which meant another valley would be approaching, like the valley they’d travelled through when they first joined the convoy, with everyone pressed close together and rushing on to reach the other side. Just the conditions Spider Girl needed.

  Arriving at her own cart Spider Girl ordered Tiger Eyes and White Devil to stop and attend her at the rear of the cart. She inspected them carefully. Both still stared at the ground, not a single sulky look from Tiger Eyes. She rewarded them with two mouldy potatoes. They were famished and their throats cracked with lack of water, but it took them some time before their fear the potatoes might be poisoned were overcome by their famine. They swallowed them down.

  She briefed them precisely on what they were to do. Together they were to find the run-down cart containing the whores. She gave them an exact description of what position it was in and what it looked like. They were to follow it from a distance in the crowds without drawing attention to themselves. As soon as someone approached the cart they were to note exactly what that person did and then White Devil (who she trusted more) was to follow that person when they returned to where they had come from. He was then to observe what it was – probably a cart – try to glimpse what its cargo was and then return here. Tiger Eyes was to stay watching the whores’ cart and see if anyone else approached it. If they did, he was to observe what happened at the cart and then, like White Devil, follow that person, or whoever they relieved, back to where they had come from. Then report back to her immediately.

  Before they went she ordered them to take off the loud, flashy clothes they were wearing and put on some peasant rags she’d found in the back of the cart – probably their original clothing. This caused a considerable amount of whining. Spider Girl reminded them of her powers and, dressed as peasants, they trotted off on their mission meek as lambs.

  *

  While they were gone Spider Girl sat silently. She did not allow her mind to become clouded by emotion or worry about her parents’ situation or her own. She just concentrated on what had to be done.

  For several hours now their cart had been travelling near to a large cart in which a group of stonemasons travelled with their work tools – ready to restart their trade in Wuhan. Spider Girl waddled over to them. Using the money she’d ‘inherited’ from the thieves and some of her own that she’d sewn into her clothing, she haggled with the masons for two of their hammers. Because time was now short she had to pay all they asked her for, but it would be worth it. Through the thickening crowd she returned to her cart.

  She placed the hammers in the cart then loosened its yellow canopy so it could be easily removed when the time came and tore a strip off it. This she tied to a pole which she then raised and secured as a pennant above the cart so everyone would know where she was when the action started.

  White Devil returned first. They’d found the whores’ cart without difficulty. After about half an hour a scruffy-looking man carrying a large gourd had walked up to the cart and shouted out. The curtain was drawn back quickly and a man with a greasy Western haircut and pencil moustache pulled in the gourd and at once closed the curtain. The peasant, looking round to see if anyone was watching – White Devil and Tiger Eyes were too far off for him to notice – then walked back through the refugees in the easterly direction he had come from. White Devil left Tiger Eyes and followed. The man went about a quarter of a mile til he came to an equally scruffy and quite large cart being drawn by an ox, with a woman leading the ox. The man spoke to the woman and then climbed back inside the cart. White Devil was able to spot inside more gourds and some food sacks before the curtain was drawn. He returned immediately to Spider Girl.

  Spider Girl thought about this. They were using the gourds to carry water – which meant that when they got it the water would be sweet and tasty. The man with the greasy Western hair and pencil moustache was almost certainly the angry male voice she’d heard earlier. The Pimp. She was surprised at how little security he’d given the cart carrying his supplies. He was obviously gambling that the less security it had the less attention it would draw. Spider Girl admired his bravado.

  The low hills were now crowding in from east and west and the refugees were starting to bunch together, their speed increasing.

  Tiger Eyes arrived back ten minutes later. Whereas White Devil had given his report in a quiet and factual way, Tiger Eyes’ eyes were flashing and he spoke in an excited, dramatic fashion. After White Devil had left to follow the gourd man he’d continued to watch the whores’ cart ‘like an eagle’. Pretty soon a tough-looking young man approached from a westerly direction and shouted up to the curtain which opened and a man dressed like a European, with a bright orange jacket and correspondent shoes, gave instructions to this new man. Tiger Eyes glimpsed a very sexy-looking young girl standing behind the man in the cart. Instructions given, the curtain then snapped shut and the tough-looking young man walked round to the front where he relieved the man leading the ox. The man who’d been relieved, also young and tough, walked back towards the west, in the same direction the man he’d been relieved by had arrived from. Tiger Eyes followed him, never letting him out of his sight. After about a quarter of a mile he arrived at another cart. He climbed into the back and immediately fell asleep on the floor. On both sides of him sat two rows of tough looking young guys – seven in number. They were pretty cool. They carried knives and clubs. Most were heavily marked with gangster tattoos – Tiger Eyes was really impressed with this – and all the refugees kept a safe distance from them. He watched them for a while, then returned.

  Spider Girl knew she could trust The Ox. She thought that she had instilled enough fear into White Devil with her talk of deadly poisons to enforce his loyalty. But she didn’t trust Tiger Eyes an inch. He was far too excitable and as likely to betray her or run away as he was to fight for her. She had to be certain he would do what she wanted him to do – exactly, precisely. Otherwise her plan would not work.

  She drew him aside. Spoke softly to him.

  ‘Do not forget how I can poison and twist and shred your body in a second if you disobey my wishes. I’ll start with your balls.’

  He gave her a quick glance. Behind his eyelashes she detected a flash of rebellion. No, not to be trusted. She thought, then remembered that he was the one who, when Wolf Man his boss had returned from raping and killing the girl, had asked him if he could join in his next rape.

  He fancied himself a swordsman.

  ‘I bet you’ve never fucked a woman in your life.’

  ‘I’ve fucked plenty of women in my life,’ boasted Tiger Eyes, not entirely convincingly.

  ‘Do you want to fuck that whore you glimpsed in their cart?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She moved really close to him.

  ‘This is my deal. You do everything, everything I tell you, without hesitation, over the next two days, and if you obey me, precisely, I will let you pick one of those whores in the cart. But never forget my poison is alive, stirring, deadly within you. I hold your balls in my hand.’

  His face was half fear, half lust.

  ‘Yes,’ he croaked.

  Spider Girl then briefed them exactly on what she wanted each to do. She handed White Devil one masons’ hammer, Tiger Eyes the other. She then sent each of them off in their separate directions.

  She herself wriggled onto the back of the cart, grabbed one of the iron hoops supporting the yellow canvas, and stood up. A full female warrior upon her chariot, pennant flying. For one last time she checked her family’s cart. Grandfather, in the back, was obviously telling a story to Baby Girl and Baby Boy Wei, who watched him mouths agape. Close behind walked her Mother and Cherry Blossom carrying her hedgehog in its cage. Both were engrossed in Grandfather’s story. Father and Eldest Son on either side of the cart also listened in affecti
onately to the ancient tale. Spider Girl felt sorry for Second Son, up there all alone leading the donkey, unable to hear it. She turned and told The Ox to pull their cart diagonally across the ever-quickening crowds in the direction of The Pimp’s cart. He did. Normally such an action would have caused much shouting and swearing, but one glance at The Ox and all fell silent.

  White Devil, gripping his masons hammer, reached his target first – the cart carrying the supplies. The woman was still leading the ox, the man was behind the cart, threatening all those in the tightening crowds to keep their distance. But, with the valley pressing everyone closer, he was fighting a losing battle. White Devil got quite close to the cart, and while the guard was trying to drive away people from the other side he darted in, raised his masons’ hammer and smashed it down twice, each time breaking a spoke on the cart’s wheel. The cart crumpled over and ground to a halt. White Devil ran off back towards where the whores’ cart would be. Behind him he left the guard shouting and cursing and desperately trying to work out whether he should run and tell The Pimp what had happened or stay guarding the supplies. The Pimp had always told him that guarding the food and water came first, so he stayed. As Spider Girl had calculated he would.

  In a few minutes The Ox and Spider Girl reached the whores’ cart. The Ox jammed his cart smack in front of it, the young man leading it cursed him and The Ox broke his neck. Simultaneously Spider Girl wriggled off the back of her cart, waddled round to the back of the whores’ cart, drew her pistol and ripped open the curtain. She meant to shoot The Pimp but it was gloomy inside, thick with incense and lit by only a single candle. What was worse it was filled with screaming, hysterical girls panicking at the sight of a wild woman waving a pistol at them. Where was The Pimp? Then she saw him lurking at the back and fired, fired again at him, missing him both times. Cursing, she aimed more carefully, but in that second he slipped beneath the canvas in the front of the cart and hared off through the crowds in his loud orange jacket and correspondent shoes. He was running straight in the direction of the cart carrying his thugs.

  She shouted to The Ox to pull the yellow canvas off their cart and throw it over the whores’ one as a makeshift camouflage and to fly the yellow pennant. She herself was clearing the cart of hysterical whores, waving her gun at them. They came out, screaming. The crowds were still pouring past but giving such violent maniacs a wide berth. The Ox grabbed the ox’s rein and began turning the cart. ‘Faster!’ shouted Spider Girl. The cart started lumbering back through the crowds to where the supply cart should be – provided White Devil had stopped it. And where in hell was that idiot Tiger Eyes?

  Tiger Eyes was sweating profusely. The hand grasping his masons’ hammer was so slippery that he could hardly hold it. There, only a few yards off, was the security guards’ cart, but the more he looked at them, violent, aggressive killers, the more he doubted. It was their glistening tattoos he saw most. Lions’ heads, snakes’ fangs, curved daggers, flaming pistols. And above all it was the human skulls that terrified him. Staring at him. He imagined the beautiful whore he could sleep with, but simultaneously imagined all of Spider Girl’s poisons writhing within his body. The cartwheel was right before his goggling eyes. All he had to do was dart in, smash two spokes, and run off. But these cut-throats would then be after him. Run him down. Slaughter him. Tiger Eyes, his sweaty hands slipping on his hammer, remained paralyzed.

  White Devil sighted Spider Girl’s pennant and ran up to her, excitedly jabbering about how he’d smashed the cartwheel. Spider Girl told him to lead their cart fast towards the cart he’d crippled while she and The Ox guarded its rear against the attack she expected any second from The Pimp and his gang.

  What Spider Girl had totally failed to foresee, and which added greatly to their difficulties, were the whores. She’d assumed they’d just sort of fade away into the crowds, disappear. Instead they were loudly pursuing the cart – their only home, their only source of food and comfort – and robustly and angrily, in all their eye-catching lack of clothing, demanding they be allowed back into it. People stared. Two of the girls, unable to walk because of their bound feet, were being carried by their sisters-in-arms. Spider Girl cursed them, aimed her pistol at them. To no effect. The Pimp would only have to catch sight of one garishly clad whore to see precisely where his cart was.

  They arrived at the stranded supply cart. Spider Girl’s hips and legs were on fire but she ignored them. She, The Ox and White Devil advanced on the guard, knives and guns drawn. He looked at them, they looked at him. Mercenaries are paid to fight, not to die. He ran. The woman leading the ox also ran. Spider Girl immediately ordered their cart to the back of the stricken cart and for everyone to pile all its supplies into theirs at once. She herself waddled in the direction The Pimp and his men would most likely arrive from and stood her ground, pistol in hand. The whores would not go away. Well, she thought, in that case at least turn them to use. She made a vague promise or two and the three beefiest girls immediately started helping in transferring the goods. Spider Girl looked back towards the crowds. Where the hell was Tiger Eyes?

  The war within Tiger Eyes over who he feared most was at last being won. By Spider Girl. Tattoos might be awesome, but were as nothing compared to Spider Girl’s horrific powers of witchhood, or the kind embrace of whores. The cartwheel was still just before him, the thugs preoccupied by a noisy game of cards. So dense had the crowds now grown that only three or so yards separated the people from the thugs. All he had to do was dodge in, two hard blows, and he’d have disappeared back into the crowds before the thugs even looked round. His hand was sweaty; he wiped it on his dirty peasant smock, then gripped the hammer’s handle and was about to… when he heard this sort of humming, whining sound. For a second he stopped, but then refocused, stepped forwards to deliver his blow, when suddenly the air above him seemed to be ripped and sliced through by slivers of silver steel and he heard people screaming and looking upwards as an aircraft roared overhead. Suddenly there was this awful crumping, groaning sound behind him followed by this roaring as through the crowds came an enormous iron tube scything and scimitaring people left and right before, with an enormous bang, it collided full-on with the cart just inches in front of him. And the cart seemed to implode and disintegrate with all the gangsters inside, butchering and ribboning and slicing them like some awful, unleashed sea monster. In front of his eyes! The huge bomb came to a rest in their midst. Unexploded. The playing cards, which had been blown into the air by its impact, now fluttered down on the carnage like snow. Tiger Eyes stared. The thugs were cut in half and cut in quarters, wholly eviscerated. Blood and guts and tattoos everywhere. Everyone else had run away but he still stood there, hammer in hand. Slowly he started to realize that perhaps something good had happened. Something to his advantage that he could make use of. He dropped his hammer. He picked up a knife that had fallen from an ex-young thug and dipped it in his blood. He was already leaving when through the crowd pushed this screaming, extraordinarily dressed young man. Tiger Eyes watched him, dressed in orange jacket and correspondent shoes, as he stared down on the bloodbath of his young thugs. As he slowly started to realize the death of all his dreams. One of his lads was still flapping about, his legs half sawn off at the hips. The Pimp grabbed him by his lapels, demanding he got fucking shifting to rescue The Pimp’s stolen whores. The young lad’s legs fell off and he died. The Pimp cursed him. He raised his eyes to heaven and cursed the heavens. Tiger Eyes left him, standing there, shouting, the blood slowly soaking into his immaculate correspondent shoes.

  (Thus did the bomb which failed to explode due to a young Korean slave daydreaming about having sex with an imaginary girlfriend – slaves were forbidden to have sex – both cause the annihilation of half the Wei family and almost simultaneously safeguard its survival. Such is war.)

  *

  The fatal bombing raid was not noticed by Spider Girl, who had her back turned to the mayhem and was fully preoccupied in trying to get their cart loaded
while warding off the whores and watching out for the arrival of The Pimp.

  It was nearly loaded when Tiger Eyes finally saw fit to arrive. He was walking, rather than running. In fact he was swaggering. Covered in blood, with a playing card stuck in his hair, carrying a bloody knife.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  He answered with some nonsense about an air raid and the thugs being hit by a bomb.

  ‘The bomb killed most of them but I killed the rest with this knife. Two or three,’ he boasted.

  She snatched the knife from his hand and told him to get the fuck into the cart and finish loading it. Tiger Eyes had obviously chickened out of smashing their cartwheels and invented some ludicrous story to cover it. She continued to hold her ground, expecting The Pimp with his gang at any second.

  The cart loaded she immediately ordered White Devil to turn the ox and head as fast as possible south-east through the crowds to take them in the opposite direction to that The Pimp would probably expect them to go. They all, whores included, heaved and shoved on the heavily laden cart to get it moving and then keep it moving at speed while Spider Girl, The Ox and Tiger Eyes took a rearguard position to shield it from any attacks. The crowds swallowed them up, Spider Girl nervously scanning them for any sign of pursuit. There was no sign. She concluded that The Pimp must be watching them from within the crowds and marshalling his men to attack them at their weakest moment. She understood what a ruthless, resourceful man he was.