by Greg Dragon
A gust sent the wooden door banging against the fuel tank. The metal latch sent out a shrill clang. Straightening up, Angel pulled the door shut and gasped in surprise to see the figure of a tiny, shriveled man standing in the shadows beneath the station’s overhang.
“Fils de pute!” she muttered under her breath. Her heart was racing. “Where the hell did he come from?”
The man appeared to be watching her, and Angel felt her face grow red. Who was he? Why wasn’t he with the other villagers?
Angel waved, and the man shifted slightly, but didn’t return the gesture.
“Allo?” She immediately winced and regretted not having learned a few basic Mongolian words, not even the equivalent of a greeting. She should have asked Jian during their drive.
“Are you waiting for the train?”
Argh! Stupide!
She gestured up the tracks, but refrained from making chugguh chugging sounds. She already felt ridiculous enough as it was.
This was not like her, feeling so uncertain about herself like this. As a reporter, she’d learned to be confident, unapologetic. Her actions often rubbed people the wrong way, but they were always taken in the pursuit of truth. She’d earned her share of enemies because of it, enough to form a fan club large enough to fill a football stadium. Generally, she didn’t care. She had a job to carry out, and she’d do whatever it took.
But for some reason, she felt especially sensitive about not upsetting Jian’s people. She found that she sympathized with him in particular, torn as he was between two worlds, the traditional and the modern. In a distant way, she shared his struggle, or at least a similar one. The forces pulling at her were quite different than his, but the effect was the same.
The man still hadn’t moved. He looked — felt — as if he were waiting for Angel to move first. Did he want Angel to leave? Was that it?
Before departing for the burial ceremony this morning, Jian had once again reminded Angel to remain out of sight. He hadn’t explicitly told her that she was to stay inside the yurt, or even in the village, but that had been the implied message, hadn’t it? So why had she defied him?
“Allo?” she called. “I was just looking—”
Now the man moved, stepping and turning. Silent as a ghost, he drifted across the platform and entered the station through the open door, pausing only once to look back. He didn’t seem angry with her. In fact, it seemed the man wanted her to follow.
She hesitated a moment, then secured the panel and jogged back to the station, but when she got there, the building was empty.
“Allo? Anyone there?”
She stepped across the room and out the other side. The trail leading to the village was now in full sunlight, and it shone like an exposed white bone against the mossy ground to either side. But the man wasn’t there, either. Angel ran around the stationhouse. The wind whipped across the land, still cold though not as frigid as it had been. She brought a hand up to wipe the tears away from her eyes.
When she blinked again, she saw the old man walking away along the track. The distance he’d already managed to cover astonished Angel.
He stopped, turned, and beckoned once again, then continued onward.
Angel started to run.
Chapter Thirteen
Her feet were not used to the uneven ground, and more than once she stumbled as she tried to catch up. The air was too thin, still so cold that it burned her lungs and stung her eyes and made them fill with tears.
For a while Angel tried to jog between the rails, but the spacing of the ties was all wrong, either too close or too far apart for her stride. She called out several times to the man. Sometimes, the wind snatched her voice away, scattering her cries across the heath. Sometimes, they seemed to carry on forever. Either the old man didn’t hear her, or he ignored the calls.
He remained far ahead of her, never turning around to confirm that Angel was following. But it seemed he knew she was there. He was leading her somewhere, and there was only one thing out here that it could be.
Angel gave up trying to catch up, though she kept her pace at a brisk walk, amazed at how the man could keep going in such rarefied air. It didn’t matter what Angel did, how fast or slow she went, he somehow always remained the same distance ahead of her. It was more than uncanny, it was unnerving.
They walked on for the next forty minutes before the man stopped. Angel saw that it was at the point where the two sets of tracks merged into one. The man gestured, then stepped away from the berm and headed out across the grass, disappearing a few minutes later between a set of rocky knolls.
When Angel reached the spot where the man had stepped away, she could find no trail. The grass was neither broken nor pushed aside. Nevertheless, she set out, heading off in the new direction.
The ground rose steadily over rocky terrain toward a dip in a low ridge, and Angel climbed it expecting to see her quarry on the other side, but when she topped it, the grasslands fell sharply away, spreading out before her as empty as the land behind her had been, kilometer upon kilometer with nothing to break the dull monotony of the land save for a single road far below.
She felt something brush her hand and let out a yelp and stumbled back. The old man was standing there not a meter away. Angel had almost begun to believe she had followed a vision, but clearly she hadn’t. The old man was as solid and as real as anyone she’d ever met.
He gestured with his fingers for Angel’s hand, and when he had it, he placed a large stone into her palm. The skin on his hands was tough and wrinkled, yet warm. Bending stiffly, the man plucked another stone from the ground and added it to the first. He did this once more, then pointed to an outcropping on the adjacent knoll, grabbed Angel’s sleeve, and tugged her toward it.
Angel recognized the ovoo immediately, the ceremonial shrine to which the Buddhists gave thanks. The small oblong stone mound took the shape of the hilltop, and in the center was a tent of colorful ribbons tied to a desiccated branch and set precariously into its peak. The man nodded and gestured, throwing his arms forward in a casting motion.
The Tibetan lamas had taught her the custom of casting stones, and so Angel threw the rocks onto the shrine while the man closed his eyes with a look of serenity spreading over his face. Angel completed the ceremony by circling the ovoo three times in a clockwise fashion, just as she’d learned, stepping awkwardly over the unstable ground before coming to a stop once more beside him.
“Is this for the train wreck victims?”
The man did not answer. Instead, he bent down again and scratched a pattern into the face of an exposed rock with a sharpened point of stone. It was a circle with many lines radiating outward.
“The sun?” Angel pointed into the cloudless sky.
Once more instead of answering, the man grabbed her hand and traced a gnarled finger over the line of her veins on the back.
Sun? Lifeblood? Angel didn’t understand. She sighed and shrugged. “Why did you bring me here?”
The man jabbed his crooked finger once again at the drawing.
“I don’t understand.”
But this time the old man only raised a hand to silence her. Then he closed his eyes, indicating that Angel should do so as well. So she did. And they stood on the top of that hill while the chill wind spun around them and the strips of cloth fluttered. Angel didn’t know what she was supposed to do. She guessed maybe listen, but if the world whispered its secrets to the old man, it did not share them with Angel right then.
Finally, she opened her eyes and looked about her. The man was gone, and the ground at her feet was nothing but bare rock. The drawing and the ovoo were gone. Angel let out a cry of dismay and raised her hands to her numb face. Was she going crazy? Her fists were clenched, and when she opened them she found that she was holding a scrap of cloth, its edges torn and burned. She recognized it as being from the shrine.
Far below, a large truck rumbled along the road, the sound of its engine a thin tremulous whine fighting against
the wind. Unable to form coherent thought, unable even to breathe, Angel tracked the movement with her eyes until they came to rest upon the very edge of a scorched and barren piece of earth.
There was the crash site.
Chapter Fourteen
The track ran straight for another kilometer or so before curving gently around the base of a hill. Angel saw the first of the train cars there. It was lying on its side some ten or twelve meters off the rails to the right. The scar it had left in the land still bled with what appeared to be oil or diesel fuel. She kept on walking.
A second car emerged into sight, still incredibly attached to its neighbor by a single black cable. Only half of the car was visible, the rest blocked by a jagged edge of shredded metal. The car sat upright, though it had obviously flipped onto its side at one point before coming to rest again on its wheels. The windows were smashed, the empty spaces resembling gouged eye sockets marked by soot, telling a tale of a terrible fire. The paint had darkened and peeled away.
There were no more cars to see, nothing recognizable as cars anyway. What she found instead as she drew closer was bits and pieces, heaps of twisted and burnt metal spread out over an expanding swath of land. The cleanup crew had already begun bulldozing it into piles for removal.
Angel stopped and tilted her head to listen for the sounds of machines, but she heard nothing other than the lonely moan of the wind. It had died down somewhat in the past half hour that it took her to reach the site from the hilltop. The day was warming up, and she was sweating inside her parka. In that time, she had managed to convince herself that the man and ovoo had indeed been real, despite both having vanished. Perhaps she had walked to another hilltop while in some sort of trance state. If she went back, she was sure she could find them. After all, what other explanation could there be for the scrap of cloth in her pocket?
She shook away the distraction and focused once more on the scene before her.
Where are the people?
The place appeared deserted.
She drew closer to the train car, which loomed up before her like the hollow carcass of some ancient behemoth frozen in rigor, its insides completely eviscerated and dragged away by the carrion-eating machines. The latter now sat dormant nearby, as if in some hibernating state.
She realized the parallels here: the scene before her was, in a sense, a kind of sky burial in its own right.
One of the wheel sets had been wrenched away from the frame and now stuck out at an odd angle. Angel skirted the car to the side opposite the tracks and gasped to see that most of the base had been peeled back. A few passenger seats littered the earth ahead, their upholstery consumed by a fire now extinguished and cold. Little remained other than a few coiled springs and tangled metal tendons. The air stunk of burnt steel and plastic, a caustic chemical tang.
Her eyes drifted immediately to the ground, searching. But she saw no bodies. No body parts. They had already been systematically removed.
Not that there would have been much left, judging from the extent of the destruction. Much of what hadn’t been immediately vaporized would have been incinerated afterward by the fire that swept through here.
The vultures will not be eating well tonight.
She shuddered and chastised herself for having such a morbid thought.
The front half of the second car was gone, amputated by the force of the crash. It now lay on the cold ground, flayed completely open, everything not metal burned away. Many of the parts were warped beyond recognition.
Where are the people, the cleanup crew?
Just past a heap of rubble stood a crane, its arm extended out over a smaller mound, but its claw frozen open and still. It swung slightly in the wind, creaking eerily. The cab was empty. A dump truck sat inert beside it. Then several more vehicles, similarly quiet. Over in the middle of everything was a supply truck, a ramp leading up to the bed and a handcart leaning against the side. The door was rolled three-quarters of the way shut. A forklift was parked beside it.
Yet another truck had a refrigeration unit mounted above the cab. Angel wondered if it had held the bodies.
Parts, not bodies.
She placed a hand on the crane’s radiator grill and was surprised to find that it was still warm. People were here— had been here recently. But where were they now?
A gust of wind brought a strange, vibrating sound to her ears. Tracking it to its source she saw a tent staked tightly into the ground. The sides bulged outward, and its ropes thrummed in the stiff breeze.
Positive pressure enclosure. It was meant to keep the outside air from entering.
She edged around the site, moving toward the back of the tent, where she confirmed her suspicions. Over the hum of the air compressor and filtration units, she couldn’t tell if people were inside, but she had to assume so when the smell of coffee came to her. She had lucked upon the recovery effort during a break.
The scene on Huangxia flashed through her mind, the soldiers with their rifles intimidating her and DeBryan. She had been similarly threatened on at least a half dozen occasions over the past few years, been subjected to tear gas and immobilized by concussion grenades meant to disable aggressive protesters, so she was no stranger to the use of force. Once, while covering a story in Mexico City, she’d even been shot at with bean bags. A colleague of hers suffered a hit to the thigh, and while it hadn’t broken the skin or bones, the bruise stretched from her knee to her hip. In general, police and other security forces in an area tended to treat the media as non-hostiles, but it was never a guarantee, and the situation could become quite fluid very quickly.
It was the private security forces which scared her the most. They acted aggressively all the time, often without concern for the rights of the press and private citizens.
If it was any consolation, there did not appear to be any security personnel here, whether private or otherwise.
She didn’t have her credentials on her anyway. If she’d known she was coming out here, she would have been sure to bring them, along with her personal protective hazard suit.
The thought of not having her gear almost forced her to go back.
You’re here now. It would be a wasted opportunity.
Her eyes shot over to the supply truck, and an idea took shape in her mind. She’d need to get to it unseen, and the fastest way to it was over open ground. Circling around, using the piles of scrap and debris to conceal herself would be safer, but it would take much longer.
Quickly unzipping her parka, she squeezed it into a tight ball and shoved it into a narrow space between one of the air pumps and the tent, remembering first to fetch her phone and the ribbon from out of the pocket. The bright colors would easily catch someone’s attention, and anyway, with what she was planning, it would just get in her way. Then she sprinted across the field heading straight for the truck.
Ten meters out, fifteen, and the whine of the air pumps behind her changed. People had entered inside the airlock, the tunnel leading outside. In seconds they would be exiting. She didn’t bother looking back, just picked up her pace.
The ground was an open lesion before her, scraped and scarred by the bulldozers and made uneven both by the rocky composition and the tracks of the heavy machines. Large chunks of debris still lay scattered about.
Angel stumbled, flailed her arms and tried to catch her balance. But she was going too fast and her feet tangled. She landed hard, rolling in the dirt and scraping both arms. Spinning her head around, she caught a glimpse of the first people exiting the tent a hundred meters away. They were wearing the blue suits Jian had described.
Angel froze, instinctively pressing herself down against the dirt.
More men poured out, but they simply gathered by the exit and stood there talking. She could hear them, the muffled sounds of their voices. A few broke off, headed away from her, and disappeared around the far corner of the tent. The rest remained in a huddle.
Fifteen meters of ground separated her from the truck. Fi
fteen meters which she might be able to cover in about six or seven seconds.
Two more men peeled off the group. They turned and headed directly toward her. Angel was stuck. If she stood now, they would see her. If she ran, she’d look suspicious.
They’re going to find you anyway.
She started to push herself up when one of them stopped and grabbed the other’s arm. After a moment’s hesitation and a few words exchanged, they pivoted on the plastic heels of their hazard suits and headed back. Angel was on her feet and running before they’d even finished turning. She angled for the side of the ramp and swung her body onto it, then rolled beneath the lift gate in time to turn around and see four more men emerge from behind the side of the tent. Two had large silver tanks on their backs and long metal nozzles in their hands. The other two carried shovels. They all headed across the open field toward her.
Angel lay in the darkness panting, watching the men spread out. The ones with the shovels began pacing along the area she’d just crossed, their eyes cast downward, presumably searching for items important for furthering their investigation. They moved slowly, carefully, covering the ground in a grid pattern. Every so often they would stop and poke at something with their shovel or flip it over. Then they’d move on.
After a few minutes the familiar growl of the crane’s engine came to her, and soon after that came the crunch of the claw digging into the pile of scrap. There was a gut-wrenching crunch as it released its cargo into the bed of the dump truck. The low growl of the bulldozer grew louder as it edged closer, then drew away to the opposite side of the site. The cleanup crew’s work had resumed.
Angel sat up and looked around her. The supply truck was stacked high with metal crates, all painted light blue and labeled with their inventory. Each was latched tight with two snap clasps, but not locked. She started going through them, not sure if she’d find what she was looking for.
