Apocalyptic Fears II: Select Bestsellers: A Multi-Author Box Set

by Greg Dragon

  He sighed. “Explain.”

  There’s no signal from the tracker in her phone.

  “It’s possible she turned it off to conserve the battery.”

  She was at the crash site when it stopped updating. We registered it with thirty percent power remaining.

  Alvin leaned forward. “She made contact? Already? I thought the burial ceremony was tonight. My boy was supposed to take her to the crash site tomorrow at the earliest.”

  The ceremony is tonight, Al. We’re not sure why she went early. With the villagers gone, it’s possible she went off exploring on her own.

  “And she hasn’t turned her phone back on? Can you try a remote startup?”

  We did try. If the phone were anywhere within the two kilometer range of the box, it would have powered up. It didn’t. We’re helpless and blind until she’s either back in range or—

  “Hold on,” Cheong interrupted, as his phone chirped again. “I’ve got another call coming in.”

  He checked his screen, then returned the device to his ear. “Never mind,” he told the caller. “It’s her. Can you locate the signal?”

  There was a pause, then: Bairin Zouqi.

  Cheong’s eyes widened in pleasant surprise. “Um, that’s good. That means she’s uncovered something. I’ll call you back after I speak with her. Oh, and next time call sooner.”

  He terminated the connection before a response could be made and answered Angel’s call. “What have you got for me?”

  I’m not sure. The Americans were at the crash site and I couldn’t—

  “Americans?” He shook his head. “No, the Ministry of Transport has custody of the site; they’ve already sent out a medical team to coordinate with the locals and put the proper health precautions in place. The Baarin representatives are overseeing the removal of the bodies for their religious rites; the crash investigation starts tomorrow, after tonight’s ceremonial burial. You were to meet with a . . . .” He quickly pulled up a file on his tablet. “A Mister Wang Jingping, the chief accident investigation agent assigned to the incident. They’ll be cataloging the collected samples and—

  Well, unless the Ministry is now operated entirely by Americans, I’d say your country’s people have been— How do you say in English? Punked? And good luck finding anything now.

  Cheong sat stunned for a moment. “How did you— I don’t understand, how did you end up going today? Jian was supposed to take you tomorrow. What changed?”

  That’s what I’m saying, Monsieur Cheong, she replied, not answering his question. He could hear the urgency in her voice, which matched the new urgency rising up inside of himself. The Americans are there right now sterilizing the scene. Tomorrow will be too late.

  “Sterilizing?”

  Erasing evidence— not of the crash, of course, since it’d be impossible to restore the scene to its natural state. Instead, they’re removing clues to what happened there. All of the wreckage is being dismantled, swept up, incinerated, and trucked away. They have men with flamethrowers combing the entire area, scorching the earth down to the bedrock. If I had waited until tomorrow to go, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. Your Ministry, once they arrive in the morning, will likewise find nothing.

  “No! That’s not right!”

  I’m just telling you what I saw.

  “I’ll send someone to check immediately, then.”

  Go ahead, but I’m telling you, it’ll be a waste of time. I overheard one of them say they were going to be gone by . . . by now, actually. In fact, I’d advise you to be very careful. I’m pretty sure if I’d been caught, you’d never hear from me again.

  “You think they’d hurt you? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Maybe I am being ridiculous. I don’t think so. In any case, it’s a theory I’m not eager to test out.

  Cheong was silent as he mulled this over. “Then this suggests that we are correct, that there was some kind of biological factor associated with the crash.”

  I don’t think so. The men I saw weren’t decked out for biohazards, just standard chemical protection. Physical barrier suits with splash helmets. I managed to sneak one out. No self-contained air or filters. I can’t be positive, but I don’t think they even had decontamination showers, not unless they were inside the tent.

  “Tent?”

  Their command center.

  “If they were so dangerous, why did they let you go?”

  They didn’t know I was there. I took some video.

  Clever girl, he thought, and smiled despite his surprise. He was beginning to appreciate her initiative.

  But they know now. Or that someone was there, anyway. I’m afraid they’ll go to Baoyang Village looking for me.

  He frowned. “You think the villagers are in danger?”

  Yes, I do. That’s why I’m calling you, Monsieur Cheong. I’m going to send you a couple video clips. I need you to post the first one everywhere you can find on social media, news sites, YouTube. See if HuffPo will publish it. I’m at a local internet cafe in Barin Zouqi, but I can’t get past the government firewall to access the necessary sites to post the videos.

  “What’s on them?”

  See for yourself. It’s proof of the cover up. And Monsieur Cheong? It’s very important that this goes live immediately.

  “Alvin,” he told her distractedly. “Yes, I heard you. Okay.”

  I’m sending them both now. The second video is for your eyes only, at least until I can figure out what it means. It’s a short clip that DeBryan took while we were on Huangxia, and I need you to take a look at it.

  “Yes, yes. Of course. Okay. But—“

  I can’t stay and chat, Monsieur Cheong. I’m in a bit of a hurry. I have to get Jian back before sunset for the burial ceremony. I’ll call again soon.

  “Where are you going now?”

  To the hospital.

  The call disconnected before he had a chance to ask her why. He stared at the phone in his hand for a moment before realizing he was being scrutinized by the man in the seat facing him.

  “Was that her?” his companion asked.

  Cheong nodded.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She . . . .” He blinked a few times at his screen as the two video files finished downloading. “She sent me a couple clips. One is from the crash site. She says that it’s being sterilized . . . by the Americans.”

  The other man gave his head a troubled shake. “So, they got there first. I told you it was a possibility. The guy at the Ministry was acting all dodgy.”

  Cheong nodded and sighed. “You did.”

  “And the other video?”

  Cheong thumbed it open.

  “It’s yours.”

  The man whom Angel knew as photographer P. Mark DeBryan, who had supposedly been murdered in Shanghai, nodded. “Good. It means she trusts you now.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The hospital was housed in a nondescript building of sand-colored brick located in an older part of town. The structure stood maybe three stories tall, though it was hard to tell, as it possessed only a single row of windows near the roofline. Long and narrow, it was indistinguishable from the surrounding structures, save for the small plaque beside the main entrance. To Angel, it could just as easily have been a warehouse, or perhaps a factory. In fact, from what she’d seen, most of the buildings in the city shared the same boxy industrial style characteristic of the 1940s and 50s, although she doubted these structures were built much before 1970. China’s growth boom hadn’t really begun until the very late 60s.

  If such a boom had happened here, then it seemed that many of the city’s residents had subsequently left. A good portion of the buildings stood empty and unused. Even the automobiles parked on the streets looked old and abandoned.

  Given all this, it seemed a minor miracle that they’d been able to find an internet cafe soon after confirming that the cellular service wouldn’t allow Angel to connect to the Internet. But luck was a fick
le mistress, for while the country’s firewall prevented her from uploading the video to social media and forced her to resort to asking Cheong to do it, it was while they were at the cafe that they learned of the possible crash survivor.

  On a whim, she’d had Jian ask the cafe’s owner if anyone in town had heard about a train crash up north. The man nodded and said something, and when Jian followed up for more information, he became quite animated.

  Jian relayed his replies to Angel as best he could. Apparently, there had been rumors of something happening, either a terrorist attack or explosion, though nobody could provide verifiable evidence or firsthand accounts. It was somewhere way out in some remote area, and nobody cared enough to make the long trek out there to check.

  “He say many American men pass through about same time,” Jian told her. “Maybe one, two day later— he not remember exactly . They tell him they not know anything about explosion.”

  Remarkably, when they were asked where they were going, they refused to say.

  “Doesn’t that seem rather suspicious?” she asked.

  The old man shrugged and muttered something. “He say men not like to talk,” Jian relayed. “Sometime see businessmen come, go to factory at Wenbai. But these men not like other businessmen, not wearing fancy suits.”

  “What were they wearing?”

  “Dirty clothes. Not drive expensive shiny car. Come with big machines and trucks.”

  “The demolition crew. They were heading out to the crash site already to clean it up.”

  The man said something else to Jian. They exchanged a few words, and Jian shook his head.

  “What did he say?”

  “He ask if we here to see woman at Buddhist hospital. Come in couple day ago, after men. Badly hurt, many cuts and burns. Bleeding a lot.”

  “A factory worker from the train? All the way here? That seems unlikely.”

  Jian shrugged. “He say she not Chinese, but speak Mandarin. I tell him she probably not from Goh Li Xhia factory. Maybe teacher kidnap from Chifeng and escape. Sometime happen to Westerner, especially women. Gangs sometime bad around there. Nobody know for sure because she not speaking.”

  Angel thought about this for a moment. It seemed impossible that this woman was linked to the factory or the crash, but the timing did seem a bit suspect. Jian could guess what she was thinking because he shook his head and reminded her that she promised to get him back.

  “I know,” she told him. “But we’re already here.”

  “Is too late already, Missus Angel,” he said, tapping the watch on his wrist.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes. Then we’ll head straight back.”

  She pushed until he finally relented, though it did cause him to become angry with her again.

  She parked up the street from the hospital’s entrance, slotting the car into a space barely large enough to accommodate it with an ease that surprised even herself. And when she caught Jian eying the job from the sidewalk, she knew he’d been impressed, too.

  They found what passed for a reception desk and asked about the woman. The attendant gave Angel a guarded look. She and Jian exchanged a few words and Angel feared that he might be telling her to deny them so that he could get back into the car and drive back to Baoyang. But the woman finally referred to a sheaf of papers. After a minute or so, she nodded, said something and pointed down the hallway.

  “She say woman with many cuts and burns come three or four day. She not know name. Nobody know name. Not know what happen or how get hurt.”

  They arrived at the door to a long and narrow room with a very high ceiling. A dirty yellow light filtered in through the windows, supplementing the paltry light given off by the dangling fluorescent fixtures. Jian nodded to indicate that it was the one the woman had noted, and they went in.

  Beds lined either side of a central aisle, their white enameled frames yellowed with age and badly chipped and scuffed. Garbage cans overflowed with paper, bandages with deep brown and yellow stains draped over the rims. The rank tang of infection hung in the air, mixed with the weaker scent of disinfectant and antibiotics. There were maybe three dozen beds in all, separated with movable curtain dividers; less than a third were occupied, most by coughing or wheezing bodies.

  A monk slowly walked down the aisle toward them from the right. A nurse in a white outfit stood beside a bed off to their left. She looked up at them, then returned her attention to the patient she was with.

  Angel turned to the right.

  In the last bed was a woman covered in bandages, her coal black hair cropped short. It appeared to have been cut without any consideration for style, and Angel realized with a start that it was because much of it had been burnt off. She did not look Chinese, though there was a hint of Asian in her features. She was very young.

  “Allo?” she asked, stepping over to the side of the bed.

  The woman — not much older than a girl, really — didn’t respond. Her eyes remained shut. Her breathing maintained its slow, deep, steady rhythm. But something about it felt fake to Angel. It was like she was pretending to sleep.

  “I don’t know if you can understand me, but I’m an investigative reporter looking into a . . . an incident about a hundred kilometers from here.”

  The woman’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Can you understand me?” And then, when she didn’t respond, “Were you in an accident? Did someone kidnap you?”

  The woman shut her eyes.

  Angel turned to Jian. “Ask her if she was on a train.”

  The woman’s eyes immediately flew open, and her face went from gray to white. Something passed over her visage, a darkness, like a curtain being drawn over a window, and her lips moved, forming words.

  She’s terrified, Angel thought. “Were you on the train?”

  Her lips moved again, but not a sound came out of her mouth.

  Angel turned to Jian. He shrugged. “I think she say méiyou,” he told her. “It mean no.”

  “She knows English. She understood me when I mentioned the train.”

  “Méiyou!” the woman said, this time louder and with greater urgency. She tried to shake her head, but winced in pain. “Méiyou!”

  “We leave,” Jian whispered nervously. The nurse looked up at them, a flicker of annoyance in her eyes. “I tell you, she not from factory. She not on train.”

  A clear plastic bag was tucked into a space in the bedside table. Angel pulled it out and opened it. The clothes reeked of diesel fuel and smoke. She reached in and extracted a pair of jeans, caked stiff with blood and mud. One leg had been cut off with scissors. There was also a jacket, sky blue. This was likewise in tatters.

  Angel removed the scrap of fabric from her pocket and held the two together. Jian gasped when they matched perfectly. Seeing this, the woman’s eyes grew even wider.

  Angel leaned down, and the woman cringed and tried to pull away. “It’s okay! It’s okay,” she whispered, placing a gentle hand on the woman’s arm. Her heart was pounding hard and fast at the significance of the girl’s presence. With the crash site gone, she was the key to understanding what had happened! “I’m here to help.”

  But her assurances weren’t calming the woman down any. She was clearly terrified beyond reason, perhaps still in shock.

  “Listen, you’re safe now. The doctors here—“

  “No! Leave me!”

  Her shouts rang through the ward and, for a few seconds, everything was silent.

  “If you were on that train, then I really need to talk with you. Were you an employee at the factory? Are you American?”

  Angel turned to Jian. “Did you hear about any Americans at the factory?”

  He shook his head, shrugged. “Some time ago, I hear about American come and live with woman name Nur Zetian. She live alone in one of new brick house on outside of Baoyang Village, no children or husband.” He shrugged. “Sometime I hear about American woman working at factory as interpreter, but I never meet her when I com
e back.”

  “I think you just have.”

  His eyes turned to the woman in the bed.

  “My name is Angelique de l’Enfantine.” Angel kept her voice low and soothing as she spoke. “I’m a journalist. You’ve been in a train accident. Do you remember that?”

  The woman’s shaking only grew worse. Tears slipped from her eyes. “Méiyou,” she moaned.

  “Shh,” Angel urged. “It’s okay. Do you remember what happened? Do you remember your name?”

  “She in shock,” Jian said. “She scare.”

  But Angel didn’t think it was shock, not entirely. She thought about the men at the crash site and wondered, Is she hiding from them?

  “Please, I’m trying to help. Can you tell me your name?”

  “J-jamie,” she finally answered. “Jamie P-peters.”

  “Okay, Jamie. Do you remember the accident?”

  She gave a tentative nod. “I-I was the only—“ Her voice broke into a sob.

  “How did you get here? Did someone bring you?”

  The girl turned away for a moment. The lump in her throat bobbed up and down several times before she spoke again. “I should be dead. The old man, he was supposed to touch me, but he didn’t. They were touching each other, but they skipped me.”

  Angel frowned. “What?”

  “I th-thought it was a game.” Tears ran down her face.

  “Game? I don’t understand.”

  “I c-can’t tell you! If they find out, I think they’ll kill me. He told me not to tell anyone.” She moaned and turned away. “But I think— I think it’s already too late!”

  “Who told you this?”

  “The dark man. He said he was saving me, but he lied.”

  “Dark skin? African? Is that how you got here?”

  “No! Not his skin! Dark inside!”

  Angel shook her head. “How did he lie?”

  The trembling had gotten so bad that for several seconds Jamie was unable to speak. Angel waited, then asked again.

  “He said he was saving me from something terrible, but he was wrong. He’s saving me for something terrible!”

  She sat bolt upright in the bed, causing Angel and Jian to flinch back. The movement slammed the headboard against the wall. “No,” she whimpered. “No! Go away! He said they’ll kill me if they find out. They’ll kill me!”