She headed for the square, the destination of whatever was in store. Taxi, still giddy with the morning, paused at every puddle and shiny smell along the way. She inhaled the wet air and the wind filled her nostrils with pinpricks. She was thankful to be alive. A glorious feeling that didn’t discriminate between a gifted athlete or a legless cripple. Or a thirteen-year-old girl and her dog, excited to start the rest of their lives. Then the wind threw in her face the scent of sweat and leather. She saw them surrounding the square from all sides, in no apparent hurry. They wore purple overcoats, as if paying homage to their comrade she had killed. Li-Mei hadn’t seen these men in Jenli – dark men with the rugged skin that only the sun of open horizons could forge. They formed three lines around her. She counted fifty of them.
“This village is Jenli,” she said. “You may stay if you come in peace.”
One of them stepped forward. “We come in peace to everyone but you, Li-Mei Gao.”
Taxi arrived by her side, his rapture with the beautiful morning forgotten. “You’ve come here in error,” she said. “The Purple Servant was the final test.”
Without a reply, ten of the men attacked. The others fell back, in the absurd scenario that she survived the initial assault. With an elbow sweep, Li-Mei broke the nose of a six-foot tall Mongol whose face was covered with tattoos. Then, with a sidekick, she crushed the jugular of a turban-wearing mulatto. The other eight attackers flanked her, pummeling her feet with long bamboo sticks. She evaded the first dozen hits with high jumps but as they kept coming, both the hits and the men, she fell down, her heels littered with cuts. The rest was a travesty. Four men, each holding an arm or a leg, pinned her to the ground. The end. Her earlier pledges of unending resistance seemed like a lifetime ago. So be it. She owed it to herself to regroup and collect her wits. She sought Taxi with her eyes. He was dazed, too, entangled in mesh and trying to chew his way to freedom. The heavy rope damaged his gums more than his teeth damaged the rope, but he pressed on, and would have broken free if the men had left him unattended. Their intentions were different. One of them threw him in a sack and tied it to the branch where the Purple Servant had hung the previous day.
Li-Mei looked at the sun, so inviting before, yet unwarming now. Two birds chasing each other scuffled in the air above and danced on, discussing something important. Her ribcage rang with pain. Someone had just stabbed her right side, above the kidney. “Are you prepared to die?” said the man who had addressed her before. A blade, dripping with her blood, hovered an inch from her chin.
“You don’t scare me.” She thumped the ground with a fist in the most movement afforded by the men holding her down. This new Purple Servant – she realized there would always be a new one, no matter how many she killed – leaned over her head. A mask hid his nose and mouth. His eyebrows formed furry upside-down grins and the mask over his month puffed and fell with each breath. She cracked a thin smile. If this was the view that preceded death then the act itself couldn’t be that bad.
“This is the sword that will take your life,” he said, “a weapon superior to your entire being.” The blade swung above her face. “Observe its unremarkable steel.” His eyes moved from her to the sword, and back. “All your hopes, all the roads you’ve taken, will end with this blade. You’ve marched toward its steel since the day you were born. Take a moment and welcome it.”
Li-Mei sensed the sword split her stomach apart, the shearing of muscles and nerves. White snowflakes exploded above her eyes but didn’t fall because it wasn’t snowing. Blood gathered, hot and sticky, in her belly button then spilled over her sides. She closed her eyes. Keeping them open was useless because the snowflakes had blanketed her vision white. In a way, this new Purple Servant was right: she was thankful to know the blade that would kill her. Humans were hard to kill – their deaths took time. It was right they understood what was going on. The searing pain burned on as the blade sunk deeper in her stomach, pausing its slow descent once and again then resuming.
The voice of the new Purple Servant came in waves. “Welcome it and claim your place among the souls who fell to this steel. Unless…” he paused and she knew she didn’t want to hear him again. She didn’t want to hear anything. Please, push the blade in and cut the theatrics, she thought, but he continued. “Unless you think I should give you a chance.”
Her eyelids rose halfway. The sky seemed brighter and with a resolution several times sharper than what she remembered. “Take your chance and shove it…” she wanted to say. Instead of words, blood trickled out of her mouth.
“I know.” His voice sounded like the voice of a smiling man but the eyes above the mask remained cold. “Isn’t hope wonderful? We can’t quit it, even if it quits us. Even with a sword stuck in our gut, we cling to it. I’ll give you one chance to live.”
Someone thrust a kinjal in her hand and the man who sat on that arm pressed her fist against the ground with doubled strength.
For a moment, Li-Mei considered fighting through the fifty men, but dismissed the thought. Instead, her head fell to one side. A sack sat a foot away from her face. A Servant cracked it open and inside she saw Taxi, his front legs tied together. He lay on his side too and his eyes blinked to adjust to the bleached morning. Then he saw her and barked once, with unmissable joy. His voice filled the air and made everything OK for a moment like back when they were kids.
The new Purple Servant crouched between her and the dog. “How does it feel to have a second shot at life?” he said. “Wait… Don’t answer or I might reconsider. The sword that’s tearing your abdomen is in my hand, but the knife that could save your life is in yours.”
Taxi had drawn closer, his hind legs paddling inside the bag. She raised her neck to see him better - the tarp over his torso lay flat. He had covered about a foot, leaving a bloody trail in his wake, bright against the gray square pavement. She closed her eyes and when they opened, Li-Mei was crying for the first time in her life. Her neck swung around looking for the new Purple Servant and her hand squeezed the kinjal until her fingernails bled. “What did you do to him? I’ll kill you and everyone else you brought along; one by one. I promise.”
“Honesty is the purest gift I have for you,” he said. “Maybe the second purest after death. Your abdomen is pouring blood. And at this rate, you’ll die in minutes.” Then he looked at the Shiba and shook his head with concern that almost seemed genuine. “Poor Taxi – broken pelvis and a cut-off tail. I guarantee he won’t survive the blood loss.” The new Purple Servant leaned and caressed her hair. She pulled away from his hand. “Your dog is gone, but if you kill him before he dies, I’ll spare your life. Look at my men, if it helps you, study their faces and, years from now, come after us to claim revenge. Or leave them out of it and come after me. Break my pelvis to get even and watch me bleed to death. But first, you’ll have to kill your dog to save him from his pain.”
Li-Mei’s tears spilled down the sides of her head. She turned away from the Servant and looked at the sky. Taxi’s nose had almost reached the fingers of her hand. She screamed at the clouds and wished for death. She strained, as if giving birth and emptied every breath from her lungs then raised her stomach against the blade, begging the steel to sink deeper. Another inch should be enough. More men fell upon her, pushing her torso to the ground.
She inhaled through clenched teeth then sobs ruptured her breathing into hiccups. She felt like a rebellious mare who had run to the ends of the earth, only to find out that the saddle remained on her back. The sensation of defeat poured into her chest with pain that made her minced abdomen feel like a paper cut in comparison.
She had fought against Jenli and landed her punches as hard as she could for longer than she could remember. But Jenli had come back stronger after each blow she gave it. She was done... Jenli wanted her with a bond she couldn’t break. In return, the least she could do was be its loyal daughter.
Her brain registered Taxi’s tongue licking her fingers. He had reached her palm, at last. How
long ago, she couldn’t be certain. She squeezed the kinjal and lifted her hand and sunk the blade in Taxi’s neck. He didn’t have time to react. His tongue licked her fingers one more time, in a mechanic sequence that took his brain a second longer to process. His eyes stayed fixed on her face.
The Servants loosened their grip, the blade exited her stomach and pungent oils took its place. The last thing Li-Mei saw before the blood loss extinguished her consciousness was Taxi’s eyes. They had on them his last sentiment before death took his soul from his body: his eyes were full of love for her.
two days till defiance day (64
Sylvya had almost found him and it was time to tune in to the Get-a-Grip channel. She counted to a long thirty. On the job, she had seen how doctors who panicked in the face of urgency lost every time. She breathed in and out through her nose, closed her eyes and as much as she itched to rush into whatever came next, forced another thirty out of her.
The first item on the agenda had to be to find her bearings. She opened her eyes and located the Jetta, a folded green accordion in the distance, then looked around. She had to be in Seattle’s SoDo district somewhere - at a higher elevation than the flood line. Sylvya catalogued the string of buildings up and down the street to decide which one would make a good holding cell for a felon. She had no clue. Nursing school hadn’t taught her how to deal with cops and Special Ops teams, unless they were bed-ridden and in a coma.
Across the prowler, a two-floor structure with its front door cracked open, beckoned her to take a peek. Her hands hugged her sides and she took two steps forward and shivered in the night breeze. What if someone stood on guard behind that door? Could she take them on? She became aware of how unfit she was for a physical confrontation in her scrubs. She had to go for stealth over brute force, which meant getting in through a side entry.
Sylvya walked around to the back of the building where the shadows were darker and undisturbed by the blinking orange from the street side. She stretched a hand and rested her fingertips on the porous back wall then walked in a straight line. Her hand traced the wall, until bouncing against something wet and metallic: an evacuation ladder. She looked up, but the black sky hid from her how high the ladder rose. It didn’t really matter. She grabbed the steel with both hands and climbed, placing a foot on each rung then bringing her other foot level. As she went up, she examined the surrounding wall and came across what felt like a window. Sylvya flicked the glass with a finger to check for cracks; it was solid and large enough for her to squeeze through, but after several minutes she hadn’t figured out how to get it open.
She climbed two more rungs and, with a swing of her right foot, kicked through the glass. The window broke with a noise that, to her, sounded as deafening as a fire alarm. She waited for a reaction from inside but other than warm air billowing from the broken opening, the black silence continued to hold the world like a cocoon. Sylvya pried the frame clean of loose shards, which she placed in the side pockets of her nurse gown – she’d rather swallow the glass than make more noise by throwing the pieces away – then poked her head through the frame and heard muffled voices from the inside.
She swung her right leg over the windowsill and inside. Smaller leftover shards bit into her thigh as she shifted weight and straddled the sill. She inhaled and lurched forward, hoping the glass wouldn’t cut too deep. She touched a ledge on the other side and padded around on what felt like a metallic plate. She tumbled over the windowsill and the plate accepted her full weight without a creak. An orb of feeble light coming from below grabbed her attention. She peeked over the ledge and pressed her palms against her face to suppress a scream. Colton sat in a chair. Alive. The cop sat next to him and a woman paced about in a way that left no confusion she was in charge.
Lying as low as she could manage, Sylvya shrunk behind the metal ledge. None of the three people below seemed aware of her presence. Colton and the woman were talking, and the policeman was listening. The words “quantity of life” and “fast death” reached Sylvya. A loud crack, something wooden against something concrete, shot up and she heard the woman’s metal falsetto: “You have ten seconds. Unless the next words out of your mouth give me a preference…” She had heard enough. Colton was right – she had delivered him to people bent on taking his life, unless she could do something to stop them.
Sylvya patted over the Ketamine syringes nestled in the front pocket of her scrubs. There were four of them. She took a syringe in each hand and pushed their plungers until two wisps of liquid shot into the air. Cocked and ready. She crept along the metal ledge, stopping above a large insulation clump next to the three people below. The woman was dragging Colton by the leg and the cop was sitting sideways. He turned and saw Sylvya, his mouth forming a circle. It was time.
Sylvya jumped with a syringe in each hand, like a surgeon entering a life-saving procedure. She landed hard, the insulation underneath her too shallow to cushion the fall. Pain inside her right leg bleached the surroundings for a moment and her body rolled over the floor, grinding one of the syringes in her hands and the two in her pocket into glass and tranquilizer fluid. Sylvya stood up, reeling with the pain in her leg and hobbled forward. A few yards separated her from the cop, the woman, and the love of her life, who she would never let go again. The woman turned, bewilderment painted on her face. The cop, a polar opposite, observed the attack frozen in his chair. Sylvya got to him first, the flesh of his neck gobbling the needle of her only remaining syringe. She pushed the plunger, screaming like a gladiator who had felled an enemy to gain her life, then pulled the spent syringe, its needle dripping cop blood, and turned to the woman.
Sylvya tomahawked her hand forward, gripping the syringe with a full fist. The Asian parried the attack then grabbed Sylvya’s hand and broke it at the wrist. She kicked Sylvya’s doubled-over body until the nurse stopped moving.
two days till defiance day (65
For the second time Li-Mei had let stupidity get the best of her. She turned to Natt, still sound asleep, then to Colton. In the lamp’s forty-watt glow, an empty chair stood where Colton had lain before the nurse’s grand entrance. The front door swung on its hinges, revealing the street with a yawn. Li-Mei sprinted outside and up and down the street – nothing but the blinking hazards of the prowler. She went back inside and closed the door. She locked it too, just in case, then walked to the center of the warehouse, closed her eyes and attempted to meditate. Useless... Instead, her rage flowed at the two unmoving bodies. And of course, most of all, it flowed at herself.
On the floor, Sylvya twitched. Her battered body oozed blood and her broken wrist had bloated like unnatural origami. Li-Mei looked at the nurse, this creature who had foiled the mission, when everything else was wrapped. With black spots dancing in front of her eyes, Li-Mei hit the woman’s face with a fist. The woman’s nose caved like a ripe fruit and her lips muttered a sequence of tangled sounds. Why bother, Li-Mei thought, the nurse couldn’t feel the payback.
She headed for the cop next, his half-open mouth snoring at uneven intervals. Li-Mei unholstered his gun, unbelted his uniform and pulled his pants down to his ankles, like a hammock connecting two hairy tree trunks. The Seattle PD Chief slept on, with the type of naked erection only the deepest slumber could sculpt.
Li-Mei dragged the nurse’s unconscious body to an open water pipe on the wall and let the cold water run over Sylvya’s head. At first, Sylvya didn’t register that she was drowning then a glimmer lit up inside her retinas followed by full-on sloshing underneath the rushing water. Li-Mei returned the coughing woman to the policeman and pressed the cop’s gun against the nurse’s forehead.
“Suck on him,” Li-Mei said.
A string of coughs bracketed Sylvya’s reply, “No.”
Li-Mei fired the gun at the ceiling, the warehouse groaning with a reverberating echo, then pressed the smoking muzzle against the nurse’s forehead, burning the skin with a perfect twenty-two-millimeter circle.
“I will not ask again.
Suck on him.”
Sylvya wiped her broken nose with her broken wrist. “I hope you die,” she said.
“Death comes to us all, darling… starting with you unless you put him in your mouth.”
In her good hand, Sylvya continued holding the cop. He was harder than before.
Li-Mei moved the gun to the nurse’s temple. “Now bite it off,” she said.
Sylvya shook her head no.
“You see how easy I pull the trigger. Don’t make me do it again.”
With eyes of a caged animal, Sylvya withdrew her lips and grinded her teeth. The cop’s unconscious eyes flew wide open, driven by agony that the human brain was not wired to withstand. Blood filled Sylvya’s mouth. “You are an animal,” she sobbed at Li-Mei.
“And you are welcome,” said the Asian. She caressed Sylvya’s temple with the gun’s muzzle and pulled the trigger. The nurse’s last thought in life was about Colton – how wonderful it would have been if he had met Sadie and Dallas and how much he would have loved them.
Li-Mei wiped the gun clean and tucked it in Natt’s hand then collected the syringe and needle from where the nurse had attacked, careful not to leave her fingerprints, next to Sylvya’s. She ruffled Natt’s hair, glistening with a sleeping person’s sweat and plunged the needle in the back of his skull. For a moment, she held the syringe still, then spun it for two rotations. A biology class memory from when she was six, washed over her, when she had lobotomized a dozen of unsuspecting frogs. Pithing was the correct scientific term, she recalled, and it worked as well on cops as it had on frogs. The syringe stuck out of Natt’s head like a plastic mullet. He rolled his eyes and died in his sleep. Defiance Day was two days away.
The Refugee Sentinel Page 20
