by Lincoln Cole
No doubt, they hid from him as well, hoping he wouldn’t return them to their angry parents.
However, something about the situation made him worry, and even though wayward children seemed the likeliest scenario, something told him that this case differed.
Matt walked across the hardwood floor toward the front of the church and to the light switch. Wary and uncomfortable, he felt unsure what might be afoot but also afraid he would miss his dinner appointment.
He used the light spilling in through the open doorway to navigate between the wooden pews toward the front, keeping his eyes open for any trespassers.
He made it to the far side of the room and felt around for the switch. It took a few seconds for his fingers to find it in the darkness, and then he flicked it on.
Nothing happened. The room remained dark.
Suddenly, the door behind him swung closed with a crash, casting him into complete darkness.
A shiver danced across his spine, and he backed up against the wall, willing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Someone stood inside the room with him, and a tinge of panic rushed through his body.
“Who’s there?” he asked in Khmer. “Come out where I can see you.”
“Why would I do that?” a woman asked in English from across the room. She sounded young, with a sultry voice.
“Who are you? Why are you in my church?”
“Maybe I came here looking for God.”
She sounded closer this time as if she’d moved across the room toward him. He listened but couldn’t hear any footsteps tapping across the wooden floor.
“He does hide in the most unexpected places,” the woman said.
“What do you want?”
“I want you, Matthew. You have no idea how much you mean to me.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You make the last piece of my puzzle. The light at the end of my tunnel. Matthew. I like your name. So Biblical.”
He backed away slowly, one hand on the wall. He aimed to move away from the approaching voice and head for a door at the back of the cathedral. One he kept locked normally, and that exited into a back alleyway.
His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness, and he bumped into a pew while he scrambled through the church, knocking it sideways to scrape across the floor.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked, a few steps to his left. “Our fun has only just begun.”
“Stay away from me.”
“I couldn’t stay apart from you any more than a moth can from a flame.”
Suddenly, the door to the church blasted open, pouring bright sunlight in once more. A wretched-looking woman stood in front of him, maybe two meters away. She appeared of Indian descent, though pale. Pockmarks and rashes covering her skin and face gave her a sickly appearance.
The woman turned toward the door and let out a laugh when the light came in.
“I wondered when you would show up.”
Matt glanced over. Another person stood the doorway. This one silhouetted by the sunlight, which made it impossible to make out the features or see the face.
“Matt, run!” the person in the doorway—a woman—yelled.
The newcomer’s arm flew up, and a thunderous roar of gunshots filled his tiny church. On reflex, he covered his ears and stumbled backward, trying to get away from the sound.
He glanced back at the first woman, the scarred and sickly one. She dodged back and shifted behind one of the pillars that held up the roof. Gunshots thudded into the area around her.
The woman moved with unnatural speed, gliding as much as moving. Matt watched her in awe, not even sure if she qualified as human. More rounds blasted into the church. They buried into the pillar behind which she hid, shattering off huge wooden fragments that went flying through the air.
She turned, looked at him, and let out a hissing sound.
“Run, Matt!” the newcomer screamed from the open doorway before firing off more rounds at the Indian woman. “Get out of here!”
Matt ran.
Chapter 21
Matt felt unsure where he needed to head when he burst out of his church and into the back alleyway behind it. The only thing he knew? He needed to get away from the Indian woman who’d come after him.
He also felt the keen need to get away from the other woman because he had no idea who she was or why she had come to his aid just in the nick of time. Could he trust either of them?
His heart pounded out of his chest, and his terror made him nauseous. In the alleyway, he almost stumbled over a man lying on the ground. The guy looked injured and made gasping noises in his throat.
He looked to be of Indian descent like the woman who’d attacked him and had odd bruises on and around his neck. His eyes fluttered while he lay there.
Matt’s first instinct prompted him to check on the man and make sure he was okay, but quickly, he pushed that plan out of his mind. No time to wait, even if the man seemed about to die, because if he did, then he would probably die too. Matt had to keep moving, to get away from here as quickly as possible.
If he made it out of this alive, then he could come back and check on this man, but right now, he had to run.
The alleyway proved narrow, and he rushed out of it and onto the streets of Phnom Penh. He stumbled forward, off-balance, and barely caught himself before falling into the road. A motorcycle zoomed past, followed by a car that narrowly missed him as it swerved to the side.
The driver honked his horn and shouted at Matt, but he hardly noticed. He ignored the driver, trying to figure out what to do. The central market of the district stood off to his left, most likely brimful with people this time of day as they prepared for dinner.
The area to his right led to the outskirts of the city, toward the elephant enclosure and residential districts beyond. Though people would still be about, that district would hold far fewer than in the market, and they would prove more scattered.
So, the question: Should he run toward more people and try to disappear into the crowd? Or, should he run away from them to keep innocents out of harm’s way? Would the woman chasing him shoot through civilians to get him?
He didn’t have any answers. He did, however, know his way around the market like the back of his hand, whereas he rarely traveled to the city’s outskirts and didn’t know that section of Phnom Penh nearly as well.
In the end, he made his decision purely on impulse, hoping that he could disappear into a large group of people and find a good hiding place if he went deeper into the market. It might put more civilians at risk, but it seemed the likeliest way for him to stay alive.
That, he had to admit, made for his top priority right now. He had to get away and find somewhere safe as fast as he could. Plus, he remembered that a police station sat on the other side of the market, and from there, he might find help in dealing with this threat.
It would take a long run for him to get to that station, and he would have to cross many dangerous intersections, but he couldn’t see a good alternative, and it helped to justify his decision to endanger others.
Matt turned and sprinted down the sidewalk toward his left, heading into the market. He dodged through the crowds of walking pedestrians, eliciting quite a few insults and expletives in Khmer from the people he bumped into, and kept running along the road.
After a few minutes, he reached the first intersection and lights that he would need to cross. An enormous group of pedestrians stood waiting for the light to change, and in the roadway, cars, motorcycles, and tuk-tuks zipped past in both directions. He lay a good ways away from the church now, and the people out here didn’t seem to have heard the gunshots over the sounds of the traffic, and so hadn’t panicked.
Not yet, at least.
He considered making a run for it and trying to weave through the hectic traffic but then changed his mind. Drivers in Cambodia proved notoriously careless, and everyone drove far faster than what he would have considered a safe speed for the amoun
t of traffic. Even if they saw him and tried to brake, he doubted they would manage to in time.
Luckily, it looked as though the light was about to change. Matt waited at the intersection, glancing behind to see if anyone had followed. The image of the woman’s face, covered in scars and pockmarks, had burned into his memory.
What did she have wrong with her to make her look like that? Did she have some sort of disease? A contagious sickness?
Why had she chased after him? She’d said he had importance to her, but he’d never before met her. How could he have importance to someone he’d never met? Matt doubted that she’d meant important like she wanted to ask him questions or something like that. No, the look on her face had made it clear that what she wanted would prove considerably more dangerous for him.
What the hell was going on?
He turned back to face forward just as the light changed. The group of pedestrians moved as one to cross the street while cars came to a stop just short of the intersection.
He tried to forget his conspicuousness in the crowd, the lone white guy in a sea of Cambodians. Used to sticking out like a sore thumb, usually it didn’t bother him as much as it did right now. To live in Cambodia echoed living in a fish bowl, but normally without a hook dangling nearby to grab him.
Halfway across the street, he glanced back.
Behind him, sprinting down the sidewalk, came the Indian woman, who rushed his way. Her eyes glowed red, and she stared at him directly, barreling through the pedestrians and closing the distance between them at speed.
“Uh-oh,” he muttered.
Matt turned and tried to push his way through the crowd to hurry across the street.
Outside, now in the light of day, the woman appeared even more broken and scarred than he’d first thought. The burn marks and rashes looked more pronounced, and it seemed as if sections of her face had peeled away.
She ran with a limp, and struck him as almost ghastly; she looked so pale.
People shouted at him in confusion and anger when he forced his way through the crowd, but he disregarded them completely. He needed to get loose and run so that she didn’t catch up to him. Those eyes promised that terrible things would happen to him if she did.
Suddenly, a motorcycle came whipping out from between two cars and swerved to a stop in front of the group of pedestrians, straddling the crosswalk and cutting everyone off. A young black woman rode it, and she had high cheekbones and attractive features. She gestured toward the rear of the bike, looking at Matt. “Get on.”
“Who are you? What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain later; come on.”
He hesitated, glancing behind him once more.
The woman pursuing him had seen the motorcycle and rider. Matt watched as the Indian woman ran directly into the road. Smoothly, she stepped past a car and into the path of an approaching motorist.
It had to be doing at least forty kilometers an hour. Matt watched in horror when she stuck out her arm and clotheslined the driver. He fell back from the impact, landing hard on the pavement, and the bike skidded to a stop a few meters away. The man’s chest had to have hit her arm hard, but she seemed unfazed by it.
She turned back and moved quickly to the now-free motorcycle.
That gave all the convincing he needed. He turned back, gulped, and then climbed on the motorcycle behind the black woman.
She kicked it into gear and raced off down the road, heading west. Matt clung to her, shivering while they weaved through the traffic. Either she had supreme confidence in her abilities, supreme recklessness, or both. Most likely both. Narrowly, they swerved around parked cars, between a pair of trucks, and even up onto the sidewalk to get past a road jam.
“Where are we going?” he shouted, but his voice couldn’t get over the wind.
She drove at triple the speed he could have considered reasonable, and he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as they went.
The woman took them toward the center of Phnom Penh. The roads widened, and traffic intensified, but she showed no signs of slowing. He clung to the woman with his hands wrapped around her waist.
A glance behind showed that the Indian woman still pursued. And she drove just as recklessly and gained ground.
The motorcycle jerked to the left, and Matt clung to the woman. They swerved narrowly between two cars, and then made a sharp right turn, heading down a side street.
The maneuver didn’t trip up their pursuer, who gained ground. His driver and the motorcycle shifted, and then she twisted and swung her arm back over his shoulder.
He leaned to the side, glancing up at her arm, and realized that she held a gun. The woman aimed it down the road behind and pulled the trigger.
“What the hell are you doing?” he screamed, staring past her body and down the road. He had no clue how, but she managed to keep the bike straight while she shot.
The percussion of three shots reached him, and then the woman swung around, facing forward just in time to swerve away from oncoming traffic and turn down another side street. They’d moved away from the central market now, heading for the Mekong River and outside town.
Matt’s teeth chattered, and he kept thinking, this is crazy, over and over again. What the hell had just happened? Who were these women? And why had one tried to kill him? He remained just as afraid of the one he clung onto for dear life as the one chasing him.
They swerved down another street, and then sharply, she drove into an old shopping building filled with the carts of street peddlers. Pedestrians dove out of the way when they zipped through, heading around side shops and past food stands. They drove so close to the shoppers that he felt his clothes brush up against them.
His driver turned westward about halfway through the building and headed for a long staircase that led out of the shopping center and down to another street, which ran along the river. It took a second to realize what was about to happen, and then he panicked.
“Oh, no, no, no!” he screamed, but too late.
They reached the staircase, dipped over the top, and rolled down. Matt screamed, and his entire body vibrated painfully while they bounced down the steep stairs to the bottom, narrowly avoiding shoppers trying to climb to reach the center.
He closed his eyes, clutched the woman’s stomach, and let himself scream. It felt like they would never reach the bottom.
Then, suddenly, things smoothed out, and they reached level ground once more. She turned a sharp right down a sidewalk, and they exited the building, and then swung the bike around to face the other direction and came to a complete stop a few meters from the door.
She raised the gun in front of her, aimed it at the doorway, and waited.
“Why did we stop?”
“Quiet.”
“We need to go! She’s still coming.”
This time, she didn’t answer. He could hear the motor from inside the staircase as the other motorcycle came after them, and it grew louder. Matt thought to jump off the bike and make a run for it but felt too scared.
Suddenly, the second motorcycle came bursting out of the building. The woman driving his bike fired her pistol at their pursuer. She kept firing rounds at the Indian woman, and a few might have hit.
The other woman dove off the bike when the shots started coming and sprinted behind a parked car. She ran at an unnatural speed, and it seemed eerie to watch her, like seeing someone perform an inhuman feat of strength or bend their arm in an unnatural direction. It seemed just … wrong.
His driver turned and fired her remaining rounds into the discarded motorcycle, flattening the tires. Then she swung the motorcycle around and took off, heading into traffic.
Horns honked, but she weaved around the vehicles cleanly, turned down another side street, and then floored it. They came up to a bridge across the Mekong River, and then they reached the city outskirts and open terrain.
He glanced back but didn’t see anything behind. They turned another street, then another, and still
, he couldn’t see any pursuit. Once they got out of the city, he would find a good hiding place for them so that he could figure out what the heck was going on.
“I think we’re clear,” he shouted.
She nodded and slowed. “Did she touch you?” she shouted over her shoulder.
“No,” he said. “Why? What would that matter? What the hell is going on?”
“I’ll explain later. We need to get to a safe place.”
“Why did she come after me?”
“She wants your blood. Do you know somewhere we can go?”
“I have a few friends in the area. Cross the bridge up ahead, and then go about two kilometers.”
“We need somewhere she wouldn’t know about.”
“Don’t worry; I haven’t spoken to Pol in months. No way could she know about him.” He reached into his pocket, trying to grab his phone. “Let me give him a call.”
“No, no calls. I don’t know if she’s tapped your phone or can trace you. Toss it.”
“What?”
“Toss it somewhere. You won’t need it.”
He fished in his pocket and found his wallet, as well as something else. It felt like a little tack in his pocket. Frowning, he pulled it out and glanced at it.
The small rounded box appeared about the size of a thumbnail, and a tiny LED blinked a green light from within. It sure as hell didn’t belong to him, and he couldn’t identify the object.
He tried to think of where it might have come from, but nothing came to mind. Maybe when the man had bumped into him outside his church, he had put it there. But, why would someone put something into his pocket instead of taking his wallet? It didn’t make any sense.
“What’s this?” He leaned forward so that the woman could see.
She tensed. “Crap.”
“What?”
She opened her mouth to respond but didn’t get the chance. Suddenly, a car came swerving out of a cross street and side-swiped them.
The pain felt intense and sharp, and Matt flew through the air. The world flitted past, impossible for his mind to interpret, and then he hit the ground with force.
