His rifle’s crosshairs sweep across a rusty wall of wrinkled flesh. Magnified with the scope, the beast is so vast he can’t miss. He switches the rifle to full automatic, exhales, and lets the gas chamber unleash.
A haze of darts leaps from the rifle. Blaze orange dots pepper the megodont’s skin, marking hits. Toxins concentrated from AgriGen research on wasp venom pump through the animal’s body, gunning for its central nervous system.
Anderson lowers the rifle. Without the scope’s magnification, he can barely make out the scattered darts on the beast’s skin. In another few moments it will be dead.
The megodont wheels and fixes its attention on Anderson, eyes flickering with Pleistocene rage. Despite himself, Anderson is impressed by the animal’s intelligence. It’s almost as if the animal knows what he has done.
The megodont gathers itself and heaves against its chains. Iron links crack and whistle through the air, smashing into conveyor lines. A fleeing worker collapses. Anderson drops his useless rifle and yanks out the spring gun. It’s a toy against ten tons of enraged animal, but it’s all he has left. The megodont charges and Anderson fires, pulling the trigger as quickly as his finger can convulse. Useless bladed disks spatter against the avalanche.
The megodont slaps him off his feet with its trunk. The prehensile appendage coils around his legs like a python. Anderson scrabbles for a grip on the door jamb, trying to kick free. The trunk squeezes. Blood rushes into his head. He wonders if the monster simply plans to pop him like some blood-bloated mosquito, but then the beast is dragging him off the balcony. Anderson scrabbles for a last handhold as the railing slides past and then he’s airborne. Flying free.
The megodont’s exultant trumpeting echoes as Anderson sails through the air. The factory floor rushes up. He slams into concrete. Blackness swallows him. Lie down and die. Anderson fights unconsciousness. Just die. He tries to get up, to roll away, to do anything at all, but he can’t move.
Colorful shapes fill his vision, trying to coalesce. The megodont is close. He can smell its breath.
Color blotches converge. The megodont looms, rusty skin and ancient rage. It raises a foot to pulp him. Anderson rolls onto his side but can’t get his legs to work. He can’t even crawl. His hands scrabble against the concrete like spiders on ice. He can’t move quickly enough. Oh Christ, I don’t want to die like this. Not here. Not like this…. He’s like a lizard with its tail caught. He can’t get up, he can’t get away, he’s going to die, jelly under the foot of an oversized elephant.
The megodont groans. Anderson looks over his shoulder. The beast has lowered its foot. It sways, drunken. It snuffles about with its trunk and then abruptly its hindquarters give out. The monster settles back on its haunches, looking ridiculously like a dog. Its expression is almost puzzled, a drugged surprise that its body no longer obeys.
Slowly its forelegs sprawl before it and it sinks, groaning, into straw and dung. The megodont’s eyes sink to Anderson’s level. They stare into his own, nearly human, blinking confusion. Its trunk stretches out for him again, slapping clumsily, a python of muscle and instinct, all uncoordinated now. Its maw hangs open, panting. Sweet furnace heat gusts over him. The trunk prods at him. Rocks him. Can’t get a grip.
Anderson slowly drags himself out of reach. He gets to his knees, then forces himself upright. He sways, dizzy, then manages to plant his feet and stand tall. One of the megodont’s yellow eyes tracks his movement. The rage is gone. Long-lashed eyelids blink. Anderson wonders what the animal is thinking. If the neural havoc tearing through its system is something it can feel. If it knows its end is imminent. Or if it just feels tired.
Standing over it, Anderson can almost feel pity. The four ragged ovals where its tusks once stood are grimy foot-diameter ivory patches, savagely sawed away. Sores glisten on its knees and scabis growths speckle its mouth. Close up and dying, with its muscles paralyzed and its ribs heaving in and out, it is just an ill-used creature. The monster was never destined for fighting.
The megodont lets out a final gust of breath. Its body sags.
People are swarming all around Anderson, shouting, tugging at him, trying to help their wounded and find their dead. People are everywhere. Red and gold union colors, green SpringLife livery, the mahouts clambering over the giant corpse.
For a second, Anderson imagines Yates standing beside him, smoking a nightshade and gloating at all the trouble. “And you said you’d be gone in a month.” And then Hock Seng is beside him, whisper voice and black almond eyes and a bony hand that reaches up to touch his neck and comes away drenched red.
“You’re bleeding,” he murmurs.
2
“Lift!” Hock Seng shouts. Pom and Nu and Kukrit and Kanda all lean against the shattered winding spindle, drawing it from its cradle like a splinter pulled from the flesh of a giant, dragging it up until they can send the girl Mai down underneath.
“I can’t see!” she shouts.
Pom and Nu’s muscles flex as they try to keep the spindle from reseating itself. Hock Seng kneels and slides a shakelight down to the girl. Her fingers brush his and then the LED tool is gone, down into the darkness. The light is worth more than she is. He hopes they won’t drop the spindle back into its seat while she’s down there.
“Well?” he calls down a minute later. “Is it cracked?”
No answer comes from below. Hock Seng hopes she isn’t caught, trapped somehow. He settles into a squat as he waits for her to finish her inspection. All around, the factory is a hive of activity as workers try to put the place back in order. Men swarm over the megodont’s corpse, union workers with bright machetes and four-foot bone saws, their hands red with their work as they render down a mountain of flesh. Blood runs off the beast as its hide is stripped away revealing marbled muscle.
Hock Seng shudders at the sight, remembering his own people similarly disassembled, other bloodlettings, other factory wreckage. Good warehouses destroyed. Good people lost. It’s all so reminiscent of when the Green Headbands came with their machetes and his warehouses burned. Jute and tamarind and kink-springs all going up in fire and smoke. Slick machetes gleaming in the blaze. He turns his eyes away, forcing down memories. Forces himself to breathe.
As soon as the Megodont Union heard one of their own was lost, they sent their professional butchers. Hock Seng tried to get them to drag the carcass outside and finish their work in the streets, to make room for the power train repairs, but the union people refused and so now in addition to the buzz of activity and cleanup, the factory is full of flies and the increasing reek of death.
Bones protrude from the corpse like coral rising from an ocean of deep red meat. Blood runs from the animal, rivers of it, rushing toward the storm drains and Bangkok’s coal-driven flood-control pumps. Hock Seng watches sourly as blood flows past. The beast held gallons of it. Untold calories rushing away. The butchers are fast, but it will take them most of the night to dismember the animal completely.
“Is she done yet?” Pom gasps. Hock Seng’s attention returns to the problem at hand. Pom and Nu and their compatriots are all straining against the spindle’s weight.
Hock Seng again calls down into the hole. “What do you see, Mai?”
Her words are muffled.
“Come up, then!” He settles back on his haunches. Wipes sweat off his face. The factory is hotter than a rice pot. With all the megodonts led back to their stables, there is nothing to drive the factory’s lines or charge the fans that circulate air through the building. Wet heat and death stench swaddle them like a blanket. They might as well be in the slaughter grounds of Khlong Toey. Hock Seng fights the urge to gag.
A shout rises from the union butchers. They’ve cut open the megodont’s belly. Intestines gush out. Offal gatherers—the Dung Lord’s people, all—wade into the mass and begin shoveling it into handcarts, a lucky source of calories. With such a clean source, the offal will likely go to feed the pigs of the Dung Lord’s perimeter farms, or stock the yellow car
d food lines feeding the Malayan Chinese refugees who live in the sweltering old Expansion towers under the Dung Lord’s protection. Whatever pigs and yellow cards won’t eat will be dumped into the methane composters of the city along with the daily fruit rind and dung collections, to bake steadily into compost and gas and eventually light the city streets with the green glow of approved-burn methane.
Hock Seng tugs at a lucky mole, thoughtful. A good monopoly, that. The Dung Lord’s influence touches so many parts of the city, it’s a wonder that he hasn’t been made Prime Minister. Certainly, if he wanted it, the godfather of godfathers, the greatest jao por to ever influence the Kingdom could have anything he wanted.
But will he want what I have to offer? Hock Seng wonders. Will he appreciate a good business opportunity?
Mai’s voice finally filters up from underneath, interrupting his ruminations. “It’s cracked!” she shouts. A moment later she claws her way out of the hole, dripping sweat and covered with dust. Nu and Pom and the rest release their hemp ropes. The spindle crashes back into its cradle and the floor shakes.
Mai glances behind her at the noise. Hock Seng thinks he catches a glimpse of fear, the realization that the spindle could have truly crushed her. The look is gone as quickly as it came. A resilient child.
“Yes?” Hock Seng asks. “Go on? Is it the core that has split?”
“Yes, Khun, I can slide my hand into the crack this far.” She shows him, touching her hand nearly at her wrist. “And another on the far side, just the same.”
“Tamade,” Hock Seng curses. He’s not surprised, but still. “And the chain drive?”
She shakes her head. “The links I could see were bent.”
He nods. “Get Lin and Lek and Chuan—”
“Chuan is dead.” She waves toward the smears where the megodont trampled two workers.
Hock Seng grimaces. “Yes of course.” Along with Noi and Kapiphon and unfortunate Banyat the QA man who will never now hear Mr. Anderson’s irritation that he allowed line contamination in the algae baths. Another expense. A thousand baht to the dead workers’ families and two thousand for Banyat. He grimaces again. “Find someone else then, someone small from the cleaning gang like you. You will be going underground. Pom and Nu and Kukrit, get the spindle out. All the way out. We will need to inspect the main drive system, link by link. We cannot even consider starting again until it has been checked.”
“What’s the rush?” Pom laughs. “It will be a long time before we run again. The farang will have to pay the union bags and bags of opium before they’re willing to come back. Not after he gunned down Hapreet.”
“When they do return, we won’t have Number Four Spindle,” Hock Seng snaps. “It will take time to win an approval from the crown to cut another tree of this diameter, and then to float the log down from the North—assuming the monsoon comes at all this year—and all that time we will be running under constrained power. Think about that. Some of you will not be working at all.” He nods at the spindle. “The ones who work hardest will be the ones who stay.”
Pom smiles apologetically, hiding his anger, and wais. “Khun, I was loose with my words. I meant no offense.”
“Good then.” Hock Seng nods and turns away. He keeps his face sour, but privately, he agrees. It will take opium and bribes and a renegotiation of their power contract before the megodonts once again make their shuffling revolutions around the spindle cranks. Another red item for the balance sheets. And it doesn’t even include the cost of the monks who will need to chant, or the Brahmin priests, or the feng shui experts, or the mediums who must consult with the phii so that workers will be placated and continue working in this bad luck factory—
“Tan Xiansheng!”
Hock Seng looks up from his calculations. Across the floor, the yang guizi Anderson Lake is sitting on a bench beside the workers’ lockers, a doctor tending his wounds. At first, the foreign devil wanted to have her sew him upstairs, but Hock Seng convinced him to do it down on the factory floor, in public, where the workers could see him, with his white tropical suit covered with blood like a phii out of a graveyard, but still alive at least. And unafraid. A lot of face to be gained from that. The foreigner is fearless.
The man drinks from a bottle of Mekong whiskey that he sent Hock Seng out to buy as if Hock Seng was nothing more than a servant. Hock Seng sent Mai, who came back with a bottle of fake Mekong with an adequate label and enough change to spare that he tipped her a few baht extra for her cleverness, while looking into her eyes and saying, “Remember that I did this for you.”
In a different life, he would have believed that he had bought a little loyalty when she nodded solemnly in response. In this life, he only hopes that she will not immediately try to kill him if the Thais suddenly turn on his kind and decide to send the yellow card Chinese all fleeing into the blister-rusted jungle. Perhaps he has bought himself a little time. Or not.
As he approaches, Doctor Chan calls out in Mandarin, “Your foreign devil is a stubborn one. Always moving around.”
She’s a yellow card, like him. Another refugee forbidden from feeding herself except by wits and clever machinations. If the white shirts discovered she was taking rice from a Thai doctor’s bowl…. He stifles the thought. It’s worth it to help someone from the homeland, even if it is only for a day. An atonement of sorts for all that has gone before.
“Please try to keep him alive.” Hock Seng smiles slightly. “We still need him to sign our pay stubs.”
She laughs. “Ting mafan. I’m rusty with a needle and thread, but for you, I’d bring this ugly creature back from the dead.”
“If you’re that good, I’ll call for you when I catch cibiscosis.”
The yang guizi interjects in English, “What’s she complaining about?”
Hock Seng eyes him. “You move about too much.”
“She’s damn clumsy. Tell her to hurry up.”
“She also says you are very very lucky. Another centimeter difference and the splinter cuts your artery. Then your blood is on the floor with all the rest.”
Surprisingly, Mr. Lake smiles at this news. His eyes go to the mountain of meat being rendered down. “A splinter. And I thought it was the megodont that was going to get me.”
“Yes. You nearly died,” Hock Seng says. And that would have been disastrous. If Mr. Lake’s investors were to lose heart and give up the factory … Hock Seng grimaces. It is so much harder to influence this yang guizi than Mr. Yates, and yet this stubborn foreign devil must be kept alive, if only so that the factory will not close.
It’s an irritating realization, that he was once so close to Mr. Yates, and now so far from Mr. Lake. Bad luck and a stubborn yang guizi, and now he must come up with a new plan to cement his long-term survival and the revival of his clan.
“You should celebrate your survival, I think,” Hock Seng suggests. “Make offerings to Kuan Yin and Budai for your very good luck.”
Mr. Lake grins, his pale blue eyes on Hock Seng. Twin watery devil pools. “You’re damn right I will.” He holds up the bottle of fake Mekong, already half gone. “I’ll be celebrating all night long.”
“Perhaps you would like me to arrange a companion?”
The foreign devil’s face turns to stone. He looks at Hock Seng with something akin to disgust. “That’s not your business.”
Hock Seng curses himself, even as he keeps his face immobile. He has apparently pushed too far, and now the creature is angry again. He makes a quick wai of apology. “Of course. I do not mean to insult you.”
The yang guizi looks out across the factory floor. The pleasure of the moment seems drained from him. “How bad is the damage?”
Hock Seng shrugs. “You are right about the spindle core. It is cracked.”
“And the main chain?”
“We will inspect every link. If we are lucky, it will only be the sub-train that is affected.”
“Not likely.” The foreign devil offers him the whiskey bottle. Hock Se
ng tries to hide his revulsion as he shakes his head. Mr. Lake grins knowingly and takes another pull. Wipes his lips on the back of his arm.
A new shout rises from the union’s butchers as more blood gushes from the megodont. Its head lies at an angle now, half-severed from the rest of the body. More and more, the carcass is taking on the appearance of separated parts. Not an animal at all, more a child’s play-set for building a megodont from the ground up.
Hock Seng wonders if there is a way to force the union to cut him in on the profits they get from selling the untainted meat. It seems unlikely, given how quickly they staked out their space, but perhaps when their power contract is renegotiated, or when they demand their reparations.
“Will you take the head?” Hock Seng asks. “You can make a trophy of it.”
“No.” The yang guizi looks offended.
Hock Seng forces himself not to grimace. It’s maddening to work with the creature. The devil’s moods are mercurial, and always aggressive. Like a child. One moment joyful, the next petulant. Hock Seng forces down his irritation; Mr. Lake is what he is. His karma has made him a foreign devil, and Hock Seng’s karma has brought them together. It’s no use complaining about the quality of U-Tex when you are starving.
Mr. Lake seems to catch Hock Seng’s expression and explains himself. “This wasn’t a hunt. It was just an extermination. As soon as I hit it with the darts, it was dead. There’s no sport in that.”
“Ah. Of course. Very honorable.” Hock Seng stifles his disappointment. With the foreign devil demanding the head, he could have replaced the stumpy tusk remainders with coconut oil composites and sold the ivory to the doctors near Wat Boworniwet. Now, even that money will be gone. A waste. Hock Seng considers explaining the situation to Mr. Lake, explaining the value of meat and calories and ivory lying before them, then decides against it. The foreign devil would not understand, and the man is too easy to anger as it is.
Windup Girl Page 4
