Kung Fu Factory

by Crimefactory

  Moon taught Mark to relish pain and it became a drug. Training harder than he had ever before, seeing the faces of his mom’s killers in front of each punch and kick.

  One night, after Mark had trained until he could not move, lying on the mats, Moon showed him an old glossy b&w photo of Moon standing with his mom, both of them in their teens. Moon said, “You can have this,” and handed the photo to Mark.

  Mark held the photo close to his face and said, “Did you date my mom?”

  “No, we were just friends. There might have been more but we were just friends. Back then, around the time this photo was taken, your mom was dating a boy named Ji Sung.”

  “Never heard of him,” Mark said.

  “No, your mother would not have mentioned him. He was the type of guy that would only hit on girls that others showed interest in. He wore cheap clothing but had expensive teeth.”

  “Expensive teeth?”

  “I knocked them all out once.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “He wasn’t very nice to your mother once. Once. After that she never saw him again. What I did was not revenge or punishment, it was making things right.”

  Mark felt that this was Moon’s way of telling him that he gave his permission to go after the boys who burnt down his home.

  The next day, Mark found the rest of the gang still standing around that same apartment building. There were about six of them. One of them, Armstrong or something, had some martial arts training, Mark had heard from a friend. “Dude’s a wannabe ninja with a fetish for shuriken.”

  Mark ran right up, before the boys knew what was happening, and broke Armstrong’s jaw with a jumping four-knuckle strike. He heard the crack as the jaw slipped loose and Armstrong went down for a second then foot swept Mark’s legs out from underneath him. Kicking back up into closed stance, Mark blocked a fast hook kick from Armstrong, ducking under, palm heeling right into Armstrong’s groin, who went down for good this time after an axe kick to the middle of his face. Taking a quick look at what his heel had done, he saw only a bloody dent.

  The other five boys rushed him, none of them with any training, but these were pretty big boys who had both height and weight advantages over Mark.

  The slow motion kicked in, as it should, anticipating and counterstriking as if his opponents were moving through mud.

  He had enough of it. His fists burned and teeth had sheared skin and flesh off his knuckles. He piled the bodies together.

  From nearby bushes, Mark got an old gas can that he had hidden earlier. Dousing them with gasoline as they had his home, he lit a match, flicking it at the closest body, which was Armstrong, who wasn’t breathing. They went up fast like torches, Mark reeling, then stepping closer to the heat until there were just charred shards.

  Christ, if it didn’t smell like roast pork, he thought.

  Last thing his friends got was via email from an unknown account. The email had neither subject line nor any text, only an attached photo of Mark amidst a huge outdoor grow-op, probably on the west coast, but who really knew? He could be dead.

  four fists of the zygote by Cameron Ashley

  1. Yet More Roadside Corpses

  It’s Fu Gee Yuan, as always, who notices it first. A subtle tilting of the wheat against the breeze. He shifts his feet wide against the dirt and forms Angry Demon Stance. A small dust cloud rises around his ankles – brimstone for this hell-thing. Fu Kwan Wong sees Gee Yuan strike the pose and follows suit, up against his brother’s back in a classic Bow Stance. Kwan Wong is the martial, he leaves the art to Gee Yuan.

  Back-to-back, the brothers wait for their attackers. Faced on both sides with swaying stalks of wheat, upon a trail of dirt that bisects the crop, under a sun that cooks the straw of their hats, they smile – aware that soon they will add to the trail of dead half-siblings left in the slipstream of their violence.

  Their attackers, discovered, exchange clandestine stealth for ferocious assault. One leaps high, a mid-air somersault catapulting him in front of Fu Gee Yuan. The other merely ploughs forward, bull-like, through the crop at Fu Kwan Wong. Kwan Wong notes the weapons strapped to the thick frame of this muscle-bound half-brother. Fourteen of the Eighteen Arms of Wushu adorn him, yet despite his body mass and his lethal accessories he moves like a thin man denuded.

  Gee Yuan is relieved the assailants are not female. He finds the murder of his half-sisters distasteful and depressing, the only moments on this journey where he questions the righteousness of his actions. The next battle, on the horizon, is with yet another pair of sisters. It is a weight on him. Gender is not an issue for Kwan Wong, who finds his twin’s reluctance to destroy their sisters a weakness he must get over. Their father’s daughters will show them no mercy, so the females must expect the same in kind.

  Gee Yuan’s lithe assailant strikes the Three Battles stance, betraying his favour of Wuzuquan. Gee Yuan pushes forward, a blur of improvised strikes culled and melded from a dozen differing styles. His unorthodoxy is legendary, yet no-one he battles is ever remotely prepared for his baffling flurries. Perhaps this is because no-one ever survives him to pass on to another exactly what has been learned. In any event, Gee Yuan leaps into his assailants attack; bounding up off the man’s own thigh and landing a thunderous left knee, followed immediately by a right, to his face. His assailant hits the dust, head split from chin to forehead, everything in-between pulpy and ruined, blood-spurts turning dirt to mud. He looks like a spoiled melon caved in by starving rodents.

  Gee Yuan, as always, bows, says to the corpse, “I am sorry, my brother.”

  Kwan Wong back peddles as his large attacker unleashes a steel whip – numerous chain-linked metal rods, dart-tipped. Kwan Wong leads the big man into the wheat, hoping to obfuscate his own movements as much as possible. The big man twirls around Kwan Wong, the whip out and lashing. A mown-down circumference follows the motion, a battle-space created. Kwan Wong realises distance must be closed. He listens for the clinking of chain as the whip strikes forward, then ducks under, and thrusts a clenched fist upright into the big man’s armpit. Kwan Wong feels the arm come free at the shoulder and he whirls, spin-kicking his attacker’s sternum, feeling heart-protecting bone crumple against his heel. He lowers his leg as he scoops up the fallen whip, whirls again. Chain and metal rod unfurl, the dart at whip’s tip lodges in the big man’s left eye. Kwan Wong yanks hard, freeing both dart and eyeball. Rolling forward through the cut-down wheat, he rises again, snatching a metal talon from the thrashing man’s belt. He swipes with it, feeling the metal blades briefly lodge in larynx before pulling the entire throat free. The big man falls, his blood spurting, fountain-like, into the air.

  Gee Yuan stands beside his twin. He bows to the corpse. “I am sorry, my brother.”

  Kwan Wong spits on the corpse. “You need to stop that. You need to stop showing them such respect and remember what it is they represent. Would these two bow to you? Would these two call you ‘brother?”’ Kwan Wong heads back towards the track, shaking his head. “They were sent to stop us from getting to Jiaxing Zhang and the twin she has secreted away. They were sent, as the others before them, to drop our severed heads into Hessian sacks and send them back to Father.”

  Gee Yuan follows his brother, as always, remorseful. They are five miles out of Yangshuo, where they will find the Zhang twins, their half-sisters, next on their list of those who must die.

  2. A Father’s Love

  The man who would be known as The All-Father of Binary Horrors was birthed some ninety years before the bloodbath described above, to a man expelled from a Shaolin monastery for the repeated buggering of his peers and the worshipping of the demon Huangdi. The heretic cut his child free from his whore mother and, from the first breath, took the boy deep into the forest to commune with animal spirits and man/beast hybrids. It was a successful effort to show the boy that there was no human worth fearing or respecting whilst such phantasmagoria existed. He also schooled the boy in various forms of m
artial arts, learned from, and perverted by, fellow heretics similarly fallen from the paths of their chosen disciplines.

  Born into violence and chaos, travelling with a wild pack of bandits led by his father, wet-nursed by a rotating roster of women abducted from plundered villages until they were suckled dry, corresponding with devils and hermit sorcerers, the boy grew into a man. On his nineteenth birthday, promised eternal virility by a witch he seduced, the boy brained his father with a Chui, took his place as leader of the bandit pack, and vowed to do as the demon Huangdi did – bring untold chaos into this world.

  He had learned his lessons well.

  He would teach his children the notion of undying loyalty to their father. The idea that no man was to be respected save he who gave them life.

  The witch’s gift worked almost too well – every woman he raped birthed not one child but two for their father’s cause.

  A compound was built. An army constructed. A harem assembled.

  The All-Father of Binary Horrors sent his children out into the world. One pair of grown up twins at a time, to take a town and make it theirs. And by making it theirs, they made it his.

  It would’ve all been perfect. Except a woman named Yu Yee Mun managed to escape, carrying her unborn sons through forest and over mountain. Yu Yee Mun, selected by the All-Father for her beauty, not her hidden resourcefulness, gave birth to Kwan Yong and Gee Yuan in a small town far, far away under the watchful eye of a kindly farmer named Fu Ng Chun.

  3. The Blade Has Two Sides, Yet It Is Still The One Sword

  “Will you please stop your sulking.” Fu Kwan Wong, tired of his brother’s sullenness, throws orange peel at his head.

  The brothers sit under a tallow tree. A small fire between them, a rabbit roasting on a makeshift spit, the stars spilling ever-onward above them.

  Gee Yuan brushes peel off his shoulder. “One day, there will be children we will have to kill. And babies. Unable to defend themselves, innocent of all wrongdoing. What will we do then?”

  Kwan Wong rips free a hunk of roasted rabbit, boiling fat dribbles down his fingers. He feels no pain. “If you do not have the stomach for it, I will do the killing.”

  “They are our family.”

  Kwan Wong takes his time chewing, swallowing anger along with meat. “They are no family of mine.”

  Gee Yuan leans forward to take some meat. He has no appetite any more, however, so he shifts back to his seated position.

  Kwan Wong wonders if his brother’s heart is so large because Gee Yuan, in some weird monozygotic twin anomaly, somehow ended up with his own and that he himself is only alive because his heart beats alongside his brother’s, safe in Gee Yuan’s chest cavity. He reaches over, touches his brother’s shoulders. “You are my family. You are my heart. You are my everything. We are charged with freeing the land from The All-Father of Binary Horrors and expunging the duel fruits of his loins wherever they are found. And this is what we must do.”

  Gee Yuan says, “But we are the same fruit.”

  Kwan Wong shakes his head violently. “No. We are not.”

  Gee Yuan meets his brother’s gaze. It is like looking at his own image in the curvature of a dao blade – identical to his own but slightly warped. The brothers are two sides of the same sword, and Gee Yuan is thankful that Kwan Wong’s side is sharper than his own. His brother is the warrior, the disciplined, textbook fighter, flowing through different styles, aggression and hate channelled through technique. Gee Yuan’s doubts and sorrow manifest themselves through an unwillingness to conform to the scriptures of style. He rebels against his cause by fighting like an artful lunatic. His frustrations with forms and the strict teachings of his master and his hatred of killing lead him to fight in a style all his own. It is a style that recognises his own acquiescence to the mission, but simultaneously demonstrates his disdain for it. Perhaps it is because of this that Gee Yuan loves his brother for being all that he is not.

  Gee Yuan nods, says, “You are my everything too, brother.”

  4. Two Dozen Assassins, A Half-Dozen Hunters.

  So the twins were raised as farm-boys, working their step-father's paddies. Their innate talents for violence were, however, keenly apparent. They in fact, beat up children much older and much more practised in the martial arts than they. Children who called them bastards and whore-sons. Antagonists who sensed the twins' specialness and wanted them crushed for it.

  At this point, indeed, the twins had no formal training whatsoever, just a natural skill to meet violence with greater violence and superior size with superior mettle.

  By the time they were seven, they were village outcasts.

  It was clear that a village so small could not contain them and, even if it could, it should not. It was obvious to Yu Yee Mun and her new farmer husband, that her boys, clearly special in a way denoting a touch of the uncanny, were meant for greater things than mere rice farming.

  Fortunately, so did a travelling monk named Bing-Fone Hui.

  Two dozen monks from the temple that expelled The All-Father of Binary Horrors were charged with ending his growing influence over the land. While the All-Father’s offspring slaughtered these brave warriors, another half-dozen monks were charged with scouring the land, searching for the folk tale that was Yu Yee Mun and the twin foetuses she took with her. Raised right, trained right, these kung-fu demons could be metamorphosed into kung-fu angels, able to meet their siblings and, eventually, their father on equal ground.

  From town to town, city to city, these clandestine seekers travelled, finding twins of appropriate age, watching them from afar, evaluating them, approaching their mothers if it seemed at all possible that the children could be the All-Father’s.

  It took Bing-Fone Hui ten years of wandering to find Gee Yuan and Kwan Wong Fu. The monk was sixty-five, a life of kung-fu study behind him, two vassals to fill with his knowledge in front of him.

  Hidden from the world, deep in the forests of Dayao Shan, the boys learned of their origins, trained and grew into men.

  5. Kung-Fu Blizzard

  A familiar pre-showdown sight:

  Streets bereft of activity save All-Father-sanctioned thugs hassling dishevelled and down-trodden occupants.

  Yangshuo:

  Just another tiny dictatorship ruled by twin sisters, Zhang Jiaxing and Zhang Jinjing, each as black-hearted and ruthless as the father who made them and who oversees their tyranny. Jiaxing was noted for her beauty and feared for her mastery of the most unlikely arts of Da Shen – Drunken Monkey – and Zui Quan – Drunken Fist. Jinjing, however, nobody has ever seen, but it was widely believed that it was this shadowy sister who was both the true power and the true evil of the pair.

  The word was spread quickly – strangers were not tolerated here – that Gee Yuan and Kwan Wong had arrived. Notoriety was as much of a curse as much their identical features: you do not kill as many as they had and maintain any anonymity. The twins did not care, however, confident in their abilities, they lived their lives in the open. Hiding one's features, sneaking around, pretending to be what they were not – these things only delayed the inevitable conflicts and killing. Killing that both of them, but Gee Yuan particularly, were keen to have done with. It was a brashness they shared, a confidence in death-dealing their bloodline leant them.

  So when Zhang Jiaxing and Zhang Jinjing sent their footsoldiers out against their brothers, it was no surprise to Gee Yuan and Kwan Wong. Indeed the sight of these brainwashed fools, spilling out from barracks and public domiciles was welcomed. A Kung-Fu blizzard, descending upon them quickly and suddenly, gave Gee Yuan no time to do anything but strike a Hellfire's Descending Ash pose and Kwan Wong a smile and a belly laugh.

  The Fu twins had cut through so many of their bloodline's stooges in the past that they understood the underlings only purpose was to tire them. An impossible feat. You would fare as well tiring the seasons from changing, the sun from shining. Such was Gee Yuan and Kwan Wong's endurance. Their attackers were f
odder in the purest sense, animated hunks of meat and sinew, sent forth to the slaughter.

  And slaughtered these fools were.

  Gee Yuan pitied them as he struck out with chi-focused, limb-shattering, heart-stopping, brain-death-inducing blows. These men did what they did to feed families, families no doubt huddled and sheltered within nearby run-down shacks. Kwan Wong had no such pity, his smile fixed as he ripped hearts, throats, genitals and limbs free in a fury of concentrated, textbook lethality.

  Blood flowed and bodies mounted as Jiaxing and Jinjing looked on from on high, their brothers destroying their well-trained servants like absolute monsters, like unholy things, like the father they shared.