Kung Fu Factory

by Crimefactory

  “Back at the club.”

  Good, Echo thought, she’s safe like we discussed. “American Boy?” Her mouth cottoned.

  “Works for me,” So Long said.

  Echo nodded and shut the door. “What do you want?”

  “You,” So Long said.

  She watched drool sluice down a channel of scars. “You don’t have that much money.”

  So Long laughed.

  Echo pointed at White Teeth. “Him? He won’t need as much.”

  White Teeth showed Chiclets. “Your father is Sho Fukasaku,” Johnny said.

  “Fuck if I know,” she lied.

  “He is.”

  “And?” Echo shrugged to hide her shaking hands.

  “You don’t recognize that name?”

  “I’ve heard it,” she said.

  “Yakuza Boss—Oyabun,” So Long said. “I should have been Oyabun.”

  “I should have been a princess,” Echo said. “He’s nothing to me. Not as Yakuza and not as a father. He donated sperm, that’s all.”

  “That’s good,” So Long said. “Because you’re nothing to him.”

  “I—“

  “He doesn’t know you exist.”

  Echo blinked.

  So Long sucked spit. “No idea you’re even alive.”

  Her stomach began to churn.

  “Is that not what Ohashi told you?”

  She swallowed something hot and painful.

  “Did he tell you Fukasuka killed your mother?” So Long laughed. “He didn’t. I did.”

  “Kenji—“Her voice broke. She fixed it with a Blue Devil.

  “I killed your mother to prove my allegiance. My dedication. Fukasuka never knew.” So Long shrugged. “But now he will know about you. I will use you against him. I will give you to him as a peace offering. An acceptance of his position. And then I will take you away.”

  Ponytail moved toward Echo. “You’re gonna come with us,” So Long said.

  Echo rubbed her palms across her jeans. She felt a hard, candy ball in her right pocket. “No,” she said.

  Ponytail snatched her arm. “You’re scared.”

  She blinked. “I am.”

  “Then come along,” he said.

  “No.” She spat the Blue Devil at his face. He blinked and she grabbed his ear and yanked. His head followed. She clawed neck and leapt. Ponytail killed the juji-gatame, grabbed her midflight and pitched her backward. Echo crashed into the wall, careening down onto the nightstand.

  Sex toys scattered across the floor.

  Ponytail skipped forward. His lead leg shot out. It thudded against her chest, returning her to the table and pinning her against the wall with a big, black boot. Her sternum compressed. She struck blindly at meaty legs.

  “Yakunitata nai,” Ponytail said.

  Echo gasped for air. She tugged at his shoe. Rough tread skinned collar bone. Boot crept toward throat.

  “Keep her there until she calms,” Johnny said.

  Echo reached for...anything.

  “Or passes out,” Ponytail said.

  “Same result,” Johnny said.

  Her fingers found pink cylinder. She flung it. The vibrator smacked Ponytail in the mouth. She pushed off the wall, off the nightstand and grabbed his foot as her lungs expanded. She pulled up and kicked his standing leg.

  He wobbled and wrenched. A shoelace came off in Echo’s hand. She snapped it at Ponytail’s face. The plastic tip stung his eye.

  “Fuck!”

  Echo spun and drove her heel into his gut. Ponytail stumbled backward. A Lube Tube burst under his bulk. Raspberry scented goo shot over the floor. Ponytail slipped. Echo kicked him on the way down. The recoil set her on her ass.

  Ponytail reached for foot. Echo scooted, slid and found chin with her right leg. Ponytail ate tongue before his head bounced off the floor.

  White Teeth shuffle-stepped, switched legs and whipped a roundhouse toward her face. Echo caught the kick in the V of her crossed hands. She tugged and twisted. White Teeth spun. His teeth cracked on sticky handcuffs. His mouth tasted of blood and raspberry. Echo scrambled and slid in lube slick. She kneed him in the ass, surged to her feet and stomped his hand.

  Baggy Pants swung. Echo retreated while he threw crosses like a zealous missionary. She found his rhythm, caught his hand and punched him in the throat as she pushed his arm across his chest.

  She shoved him away and turned in time for Silver Caps’ flurry.

  His punches battered her forearms. The Delinquent Girl Detective tattoo took the bruising. Echo kicked low. Silver Caps jammed it with the arch of his foot. Echo jabbed twice left, feinted right and then slammed her left elbow across his chin. He reached and she grabbed.

  Harai goshi sent Silver Caps flipping across her hip, both his legs cracking—one two—across Baggy Pants’ face.

  Shiny Shoes snaked his arms around her throat. Before he synched hadake jime, Echo pushed her head back, grabbed his hair, and leapt. Her feet slammed into Baggy Pants’ chest, knocking him into the wall and then out. Shiny Shoes crashed into Silver Caps like a rough lover.

  Echo spun from ass to hip to hands. Her back leg hooked, her heel sledge hammering Shiny Shoes’ temple. She followed the spin, letting it carry her up to her feet.

  Silver Caps groaned. Echo arced her leg into the air, axed it down onto his nose. It shattered and she stepped back with a flourish of hands and a raspberry glow.

  Johnny So Long sat.

  Echo waited. She breathed. Her heart pulsed and her sternum ached. Her skin felt sticky.

  So Long reached into his coat, removed a folded handkerchief and dabbed the drool in the corner of his mouth.

  Echo remembered to breathe from her nose. Her body didn’t obey.

  Johnny’s head twitched. He planted his braces and pushed himself up and out of the chair, swinging on the crutches like a pendulum, his twisted legs crashing into Echo’s chest.

  His feet thudded onto the floor. He locked braces and swung his right crutch like a staff. It cracked her on the skull, the jaw, and the ear.

  Her face throbbed.

  You don’t cry, Echo thought.

  She stumbled to her feet and ate more crutches. Her forehead split. Her right tit ached. She gagged as a rubber point jammed into her suprasternal notch.

  So Long slammed a brace into her stomach. She wretched and fell back against the wall.

  Echo blinked blood. She threw a punch and he threw the crutch. She caught it and his next kick, backed by Frankenstein boot and two metal rods, hammered into her thigh.

  She collapsed.

  Her muscles spasmed. Her right eye twitched.

  So Long monstered his way over to her, all popping joints and squeaking metal. “You are a cunt,” So Long said. “And after Fukasuka meets his daughter, I’ll split you open with another wet gash.”

  Echo exploded. Her knee slammed into So Long’s solar plexus. She smacked him openhanded across the face. Staying with the momentum. She rocketed a side-kick to his face. He daddy-long-legged it backwards, but she pulled the blow mid-fire and changed direction. Her roundhouse unplanted his right crutch and she switched feet, cracking another knee against his face.

  A porcelain bridge flew out of his mouth, skidding across the lubed floor. Johnny grimaced and grabbed for crutch. She up-kicked, knocking the second free. The tip landed on the bed.

  Echo whipped her leg around. Johnny’s face kissed Minnie’s shoes. She torqued her body. Her hip popped and her heel re-broke his forearm.

  Johnny screamed.

  The door knob shook.

  She stared at him.

  Voices hammered through the door.

  Unhooking one of her straps, Echo jumped onto the bed. She fastened the clasp onto the thin post. She grabbed railing, held the strap and leapt backward through the tinted window. Glass shattered and she tumbled. Her pants ripped and the bed crashed into the window.

  Echo hit sidewalk. Her arms pin-wheeled. She found balance and balance broug
ht pain. Fire rolled up her ankles. She hobbled toward the scooter.

  American Boy said, “Hold on there.”

  She stopped.

  “I like your panties,” he said as she turned. American Boy had found the gun she kept on the Enola Gay.

  “I buy them in Akihabara,” she said.

  He nodded and eyed the thin band around the bruised hip. Echo watched the gun. “I almost missed it,” he said. “But…I figured it out. Enola Gay? Little Boy? You must really amuse yourself.”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “Your English has gotten better.”

  “I learn very quickly.”

  “And you lie very badly.”

  “Everything in this world is but a lie, death is the only sincerity.”

  “Talking some samurai shit now?”

  Echo blinked.

  “What is this, a P-3AT?”

  She nodded. “8.3 oz.”

  He pulled the hammer back. “I fucking hate sushi. Don’t you people know how to cook shit? We discovered fire a long time ago.”

  She laughed. “I’m ready to die,” she said.

  He fired.

  It clicked.

  She walked to her scooter. “Don’t you people know math?”

  He pulled the trigger again.

  “8.3 oz plus magazine,” she started the Enola Gay, “equals 11 oz.”

  As she drove away toward her father, the hammer clicked for a third time. The American Boy was left with only an echo.

  Killer of Convenience by michael s. chong

  “Your mother has yet to regain consciousness,” the doctor said.

  Mark Cho watched his mother breathing shallowly through a respirator, lying in her hospital bed. Her gown had opened revealing purple-green bruises along her neck. Her left wrist was taped over the needle from the dripping IV bottle beside her. Her blackened eyes were shut with small stitches beside her left lid.

  The doctor told him there were police at reception, wanting to talk.

  Through a blur, he remembered mumbling his mother’s age and the details of the last time he saw her. Of course, the last time he saw her, they had a fight over his working hours at the family store.

  The cop talking said they had a description of the perps. A streetcar driver was the only witness. Stopped at a light, she saw the boys, she described as ‘b-boys,’ running from the store.

  Mark knew who the boys were, kicking one of the gang out earlier in the week for pocketing a candy bar. They were the local creeps, a few years younger than Mark, who never seemed to work nor go to school.

  Back at the store, the security cam video confirmed his belief despite the baseball caps and hoodies. In the grainy video, he saw the one known as Skag knock his mother to the ground then start to punch her in the head as she lay prone, covering her head until she went limp. The other two visible Mark pegged as Joey and Tucker, laid kicks as they scooped cartons of cigarettes from behind the counter into garbage bags. He spent the rest of the afternoon mopping up the blood by the counter that had hardened into a dark brown stain.

  Putting up a sign with ‘Closed due to a family illness’on the front door, Mark shut Parkside Convenience for the first time since his father died 5 years before of cancer. Church members from his mother’s congregation had left numerous messages on the phone upstairs in their apartment, but Mark ignored them as he had his mother’s wish that he keep attending services after his father passed.

  Mark walked to where he had seen the gang hang out, smoking pot and drinking beer outside an apartment building on the edge of the neighbourhood. Mark assumed that at least some of the five shits that made up their posse lived there.

  Reaching there just before noon, the sun was high up near the top floor of the crumbling graffiti-festooned exterior. No one was about except for an overweight teenager pushing a pram with her overweight baby. Mark was about to question the fat mommy when the boys who beat up his mom came from around the building.

  Mark felt some of his old training kick in. Born in South Korea but coming to America as a child, Mark had studied taekwondo for as long as he could remember, competing at tournaments with an eye to international competition until high school with its girls, booze and partying took his discipline away.

  The first time he demonstrated any of his skills in front of his high school friends was at a streetcar terminus in the middle of the night after many beers. Stolen from a nearby produce depot, a wooden lettuce crate held about seven feet in the air exploded after he did a spiraling roundhouse kick to it.

  His teacher was an old Korean dude who worked as an interpreter for the US Army during the war. Moon was tough, all 5 foot 4 of him, but pure muscle and leathery skin. The old guy always said “natural life was about patterns, people are not so different.” Fighting was about patterns too. But not that Wushu animal crap. Attack and defend came in forms. Find the right groove and your opponent was merely a training exercise.

  There was that time in Grade 7, when after being called a “chink,” he punched a bully in the nose, breaking it. Moon had given him hell, making him train to the point of exhaustion for months.

  “The whole thing about it is not fighting,” Moon said, “It’s about not fighting. Discipline, strength with humility.”

  Mark thought this right as he threw his hammer fist strike against Skag, who had a few inches on Mark, stopping either of them from speaking. As Mark hit Skag’s cheekbone, he felt it give. Crossing with a punch, Mark felt his knuckle move to where he knew it would be swollen later.

  As hard as he could, Mark threw a snap kick to the throat of Tucker, a thick ox, and could feel the windpipe crunch. Tucker went down clutching at his neck. Joey got successive spinning back fists in the face and Mark felt his knuckle give all the way but it brought no pain.

  Within a couple of minutes, all three of the boys who beat up his mom were on the ground, only Skag making weak movements on the patchy grass. Mark straddled Skag’s shoulders and started using ridge hand, the top part of his hand, thumb tucked in, to strike again and again at Skag’s neck. Through it all, Mark wanted the damage to be far worse than the injuries to his mother.

  Mark walked away as the overweight mother was calling someone on her cell phone.

  After a sympathetic visit from the cops who told him the perps were now in the same hospital as his mother “just a few floors below,” but under police guard, Mark showered and fell asleep in his bed above their store. A cough woke him up, his own, coughing due to the smoke coming from the store downstairs. Running down the stairs past only flames and smoke where canned goods and potato chips should have been, dressed only in boxers, Mark ran out the side door by the drink case. Exiting the door, Mark felt something hard hit him across the head and went down, occasionally coming out of it to feel flashes of pain and incoherent screaming, wondering if it was his own.

  Mark knew how extremely difficult it is to knock someone out without giving them a concussion or worse. He thought this right before he went out.

  The first time he came out of it, he was in shock. The next time, the cop’s face from before was hovering over him. “Your mother has succumbed to her injuries,” he said. Mark closed his eyes, squeezing them shut, forcing tears out.

  The next time he remembered anything was his teacher Moon in a suit sitting at the foot of his hospital bed. “Mark, how are you?”

  As Mark spoke he felt the tightness of stitches along the length of his lips. “My mother is dead,” Mark said with a dryness of mouth that surprised him. “I want to see her.”

  “That would not be a good idea right now,” Moon said. “You need to heal.” Moon stood, came to Mark’s bedside, pushing Mark back down and said “I knew your mother back in Korea. You never knew that.”

  Mark tried unsuccessfully to hide his tears to his teacher by putting his hand over his eyes.

  “I knew your dad,” Moon said. “You knew that, but your mom and I had been friends before. She had introduced me to your father
when we all ended up on this side of the world.”

  “They killed her,” Mark said.

  “I understand that they’re in this very hospital and you helped them here.”

  “Mom, the store, it’s all gone,” Mark said. “I have to get them, the ones that destroyed the store.”

  Moon placed one hand on Mark’s head and with the other, he took Mark’s right fist and tucked it onto his chest. “First you rest and heal,” Moon said. “Then we train.”

  When he left the hospital, a week later, the cop paid him a visit at Moon’s storefront studio in an empty shopping plaza, the other tenant being a bar where people drank all day, the rest of the shop windows boarded up with sun-bleached ‘for rent’ signs. Moon had let Mark sleep on the couch in his office since his old home had burnt down. The cop told him they had leads on the perps who burnt down the store and to let them do their jobs. “These guys end up hurt,” the cop said, “other friends might seek revenge.”

  Under Moon’s watch, Mark worked the bag until his shins and knuckles found their calluses again. It had been years since Mark had trained. Moon had changed his methods, saying very little. His time with the US Army had given Moon a taste for Coca Cola and early rock and roll music Moon called rockabilly. Moon would sit there, sipping his Coke out of bottles, listening to his Elvis and Eddie Cochrane records, saying very little and almost not watching.