by Greg Dragon
“Who will? Tell me! I need to know.”
“Please!” She turned to Jian and started to babble. At first he frowned, then he backed away, his own eyes widening.
“What’d she say?” Angel asked.
The nurse called over at them in alarm, but remained at the other end of the ward.
“Méiyou!” Jamie screamed. “Méiyou!”
Now the nurse was hurrying over, whispering loudly and gesturing with her free hand for Angel and Jian to leave. Jian went over and cut her off, speaking to her quickly in Mandarin.
Angel felt her arm being grabbed and she looked down. “Don’t tell them about me!” Jamie pleaded. “They can’t know! Please!”
“Why not? Who?”
“They don’t want anyone to know the truth! They’ll kill me! And they’ll kill you, too! The dark man told me!”
The nurse was arguing with Jian, getting angry.
“What truth?” Angel hissed. “What do you know?”
Jamie’s eyes flicked fearfully over toward Jian and the nurse. They widened, and Angel’s heart skipped a beat as she realized why. “Jian!” she yelled. “Don’t tell her anything!”
He turned and blinked uncomprehendingly at her.
“Don’t tell the nurse her name. Don’t tell her anything about the crash!”
“But—“
“Please,” Jamie begged, pulling Angel’s arm and squeezing it. “You have to protect me. He’s going to come for me!”
“I can’t do that,” Angel said. “You’re injured. You need care.”
“You don’t understand! It’s inside of me!”
“What is?”
“I know what they did to those people,” Jamie growled. “They put it in them, but not me! That’s why they skipped me!”
“The other people on the train? Who? I don’t—“
The girl screamed then, and the sound of it curdled Angel’s blood. The scream faded, and Jamie started to babble, sending the bed skittering away from the wall with her paroxysms. Angel had to hold her down to keep her from falling out.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, her body went rigid. A hand snaked out from beneath the sheet and latched onto Angel’s wrist and squeezed it so hard that the bones ground against each other. Angel cried out in pain and tried to pull away.
“They’re inside of me!” Jamie groaned. “I told them to take it out, but they didn’t do it fast enough! They were too late!”
“Take what out?”
“DOWN THERE!”
Jamie kicked off the blankets, reached down and pulled up her gown. She was naked underneath. “Here!” And she tore away the bandage from her thigh, exposing an ugly gash. The edges were blackened and peeling away, exposing new flesh underneath, bright pink with healing. Angel tried to cover her back up.
The nurse was pushing on Jian, appealing to him in a voice that was getting louder and louder. But in his shock he blocked her way, which only made her angrier.
“The bone! They took out the bone and threw it away! But they got inside of me! Doing things to me! Get them out! Get them out of me NOW!”
She clawed at the wound with her fingernails, digging them into the muscle until the delicate new skin tore and fresh blood bubbled out and ran down her leg, soaking into the sheets.
The nurse tugged at Angel. “Líkai!” she shouted, pointing toward the door. “Líkai!”
Angel felt Jian dragging her, pulling her away from the bedside. “She want us to leave now!” he said.
So she let him take her, leaving the screaming, shaking, terrified—
insane
—girl behind.
Chapter Twenty
Angel couldn’t seem to shake the intense dread that had fallen over her since leaving the hospital. Even now, more than an hour later and the city of Bairin Zouqi far behind, the encounter with the accident survivor affected her deeply. It had clearly left Jian shaken as well.
He was driving now, had not even offered her the option of taking the wheel, and she was grateful to just sit in the passenger seat and let him deal with the mechanics of getting them back to the village.
Anyway, she had too much to sort through in her mind to focus on the road. For example, had the video been posted? Was it going viral? Was Cheong sending someone out to investigate the cover-up? But despite all that, her mind kept drifting back to the girl in that bed and the way she’d acted. Had it been insanity or terror?
Was there really a difference?
A couple of times the uncertainty nearly prompted her to tell Jian to turn around. Twice, she got as far as opening her mouth and saying his name, but she stopped herself before going any further. It was unfair to ask him to sacrifice more than he already had. And she doubted he’d listen anyway. There was no way he was going to drive her all the way back now and miss the final part of the burial ceremony.
But she also felt horrible about leaving Jamie there, and in such an emotionally fragile state, even though she really had no choice in the matter. The hospital wasn’t going to allow them to stay. In fact, the nurse herself had told Jian that she was going to call the police unless they left immediately. The last thing Angel wanted was to attract anyone’s attention, much less the wrong people’s, to the fact that Jamie was there.
You could have brought her with you.
Not in her condition. Not with that nasty leg wound bleeding all over the place and all those other cuts and bruises. It was obvious that the one on her upper thigh had gotten infected at some point. Though the skin around it had a healthy shine to it, there were darker lines radiating away, up toward her abdomen and down toward her feet.
Angel hadn’t seen any IV, so she wasn’t sure how she was getting antibiotics, but she had to be. The wound would also require continued therapy, including debridement to remove the dead and burned tissue, removal of the drain, suture removal . . . .
The other injuries, individually, did not appear to be nearly as bad, but cumulatively, they suggested the girl had suffered a great amount of trauma. She needed rest, liquids, and food to recover. Most of all, she needed a stable environment with some form of psychological help. It was doubtful she’d receive the latter, but perhaps as her body mended, her mind might also find its own way out of whatever dark labyrinth she seemed to be lost in. Some of the things she had been spouting just sounded—
“Crazy,” Jian muttered to himself, almost as if he’d been aware of Angel’s thoughts. “She crazy.” They sped along the empty road, skidding slightly over a drift of fine sand carried there by the wind. Dust rose into the air behind them. “She say thing not make sense.”
Angel looked over at him, frowning. “She’s been through a lot.”
“She say crazy thing, say bad spirit inside her body, come through her leg.”
“I think she meant shrapnel. From the accident.”
“She not say that, she say bad spirit inside, all over now, growing.”
Angel sighed. “She’s in shock.”
He turned his disappointed stare at her, but didn’t answer. He wasn’t ready to forgive her yet. And, frankly, Angel knew she didn’t deserve it. But if they hadn’t gone into the city, they never would have learned about her.
The situation at the hospital had, unfortunately, gotten much worse before they left, and Angel knew she was partly to blame. Jian had dragged her nearly out of the ward when she stopped and pulled away from him and stepped back inside. She hadn’t wanted to leave the girl. Something inside of her told her not to.
She spoke Jamie’s name, but at the sight of Angel standing there, the girl immediately resumed her screaming, forcing the nurse to come over to calm her again. And then, when she didn’t settle down, to resort to sedating her.
Jian had tugged at Angel, begging her to just leave, but in her horror, her feet had seemed nailed to the floor. She didn’t know what was worse— the screams that gushed out of Jamie’s mouth or the incomprehensible babbling and accusatory finger being pointed at them.
The screaming, now joined by the frantic cries of the nurse, had triggered some of the other patients to begin shouting out as well, raising a cacophony that still rung in Angel’s ears. Then, suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, Jamie’s body went slack and she fell back to the bed as she succumbed to the sedative. Almost as quickly, the ward likewise quieted. The nurse, now red-faced and disheveled, told them once and for all to leave.
The sun was now straight ahead of them, blinding them with the glare off the car’s faded and dirty hood and the surface of the road ahead. To Angel, the diffuse white orb seemed to be slipping out of the sky with alarming speed. Jian was affected by it, too, as with each passing minute his mood grew more dour. Judging by their speed and the distance left to cover, Angel guessed that they would make it back to Baoyang Village in time, but only just, and that was assuming nothing slowed them down.
The memory of Jamie lying comatose in her bed came to Angel’s mind, her head lolled to the side. Instead of looking peaceful, she’d looked dead. Angel shuddered at the memory as another wave of impending doom swept over her. What would happen once Jamie woke? Would the nightmares and the screaming resume? Would she try to flee from—
the dark man
—the hospital?
There is no dark man, Angel.
If not, then how had she come to be there, well over a hundred kilometers away from the crash site?
Even more troubling was the sudden certainty that she would never see the girl alive again.
“You told the nurse nothing, right?” she reconfirmed with Jian. “Not her name or anything about the crash.”
He scowled out through the hazy windshield and nodded. “I don’t say those thing. You tell Jian not to, I listen. I listen to Missus Angel. Missus Angel not listen to Jian.”
By now, the sun’s bottom arc was hovering a finger’s width above the horizon, and they still had an hour left to go.
Angel reached over and laid a hand gently on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “You’re right.”
He gripped the steering wheel tighter, but didn’t reply.
“Everything will be okay. I promise. We’ll get there in time.”
She hoped she was right on both accounts.
Chapter Twenty One
The sun had already set when they arrived at the village, though daylight had not yet fled entirely from the sky. As Jian feared, the yurts were empty and dark inside. He quickly lit a lamp, his movements conveying the bitter anger inside of him.
“I’m sorry,” Angel apologized yet again. “They probably only just left.” She pointed to the glowing heap of charcoal in the pit in the middle of the floor. Smoke curled from the embers, and the water inside the clay pot next to it was still warm. “I’m sure you can catch them if you leave now. Just drive—“
“I not drive to burial ceremony!” he snapped.
He stomped around the yurt, managing to look deeply affronted by the suggestion, and gathered up his parka and a handful of flatbread.
“I didn’t think we’d be so late.”
He grumbled something, then pushed out through the door without a warning for her to stay inside the yurt. At this point, she thought, he probably figured it’d be a waste of breath. But even without it, she had absolutely no intention of going anywhere. Out here in the darkness, without street signs or other markers, she’d likely get hopelessly lost. And besides, where was she going to go?
In the deepening gloom, she watched him jog a hundred meters or so down the road, then cut off between yurts in the direction of the hills. After a few minutes, she thought she caught his shape out past the edge of the village, a slightly darker form bobbing away across the gradually sloping plains. She strained her eyes, but the distance and poor light eventually forced her to give up.
“It’s not your fault,” she told herself in her native French, and went back inside the hut. While she knew it to be true — even believed that Jian didn’t blame her for the delay, either — it didn’t stop her from feeling a pang of guilt. She had pushed her luck once again and lost.
Their way had been blocked by a logjam of sheep nearly twenty kilometers up the road. If anyone might have predicted such an unlikely event, it should have been Jian. Maybe he had; it would explain the depth of his anger with her, as he’d already resigned himself to the fact that it would be too late by the time they arrived. The herd must have numbered close to a thousand, and the shepherd had been in no hurry to move them off the road, despite Jian’s impatient honks.
“Not my fault,” she muttered to herself again.
She spent the next ten minutes or so restacking the wood in the fire pit and getting it burning again, as well as igniting another pair of oil lamps. She hung one on the central pole and took the other to situate by the door.
Nearly all of the light had fled from the sky by then, though a thin smear of orange and blue streaked over the distant hills, illuminating an approaching bank of clouds. She noticed that the wind had picked up, coming from the north, and it was bitingly cold. She hoped Jian got to the burial grounds in time, and she wondered how long the ceremony would take. She feared it might begin to snow before they returned.
* * *
It was sometime later when a rumbling sound filled the yurt and shook the ground beneath her, rousing Angel from a deep sleep. It quickly passed, so that in her state of mental and physical fatigue, the disturbance slipped out of her mind as quickly as it had intruded. Just thunder, she thought as the noise faded away, and she drifted off again.
She’d been dreaming of her childhood. The memories this time were of a happier period in her life than the more typical dark days of her teenage years. In those days, her father’s security firm was still growing at a manageable pace. The money had been good and steady. Their lives had still been happy, as it was before he’d taken on the major government contracts that would eventually drive him into the ground from the stress, creating a monster along the way that preyed on the soul of the family.
They had taken holiday in Marseille, renting a villa right on the Mediterranean coast for nearly the entire summer. Her father, Gaétan, was flying back and forth to Paris and the United States, working on several new projects, and his comings and goings became welcome disruptions to the blissful but otherwise unrelentingly repetitive routine of lazy days filled with sunshine, rich food, and bathing in la mer. That was the summer Angel turned so brown that the tan remained with her all through the following cold and dreary winter, so that it almost seemed as if her skin had permanently assumed the darker hue. She was eleven, which made Jacques four and still in his socially outgoing and lovable phase. He was the apple of everyone’s eye. Or, as the French prefer to say, the plum.
In the dream they were on the beach with their mother, all of them seated in the shade of a lime green umbrella and eating watermelon soaked in lemonade from a crystal bowl. Her mother had had those cats-eye sunglasses, the ones that had been ever so fashionable back when her grandparents were kids; the style was staging a major comeback. White-rimmed and studded with plastic rhinestones that gathered then scattered the light into a million prisms. Angel could remember thinking how she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and that she was the luckiest girl alive to be her daughter.
She watched Jacques waddle down to the water’s edge with a plastic pail half his height banging against his heels. He was still sporting the majority of his baby fat, which he wouldn’t lose until he was a year shy of finishing école at seventeen, when he did nothing but grow, both vertically and intellectually, as well as emotionally, from the linear boy he had earlier been.
From their vantage point up the slope of the beach, the waves appeared to tower over him. In fact, the waves in this memory were even higher, the sea colder and grayer than they had ever been in real life.
Pourquoi es-tu inquiet, ma cherie? her mother asked.
She was reading a book. In her mind, Angel could see the cover, a Simone de Beauvoir, though
in truth she couldn’t recall if her mother had ever read anything more profound than Sylvie Lainé.
I’m not worried, mama.
But she was, at least in the dream. She watched Jacques as he built his sandcastle, hoping that it was far enough above the waterline to avoid a rogue wave which might come and wash his masterpiece away. A kind of anxiety roiled just below the surface of her mind, as if she knew something bad was about to happen, yet was resigned to the truth that there was little she could do to prevent it.
The castle grew higher and more elaborate, with turrets and ramparts and a thick sand barrier protecting Jacques from the marauding sea. Protecting him from everything. The walls circled around and enclosed him, and the day wore lazily on.
Eventually, the sun went down and night came, and the heat seeped away from the beach and left her shivering. Yet they all remained, her mother’s nose buried inside the pages of that scandalous book. Jacques piled the sand higher and higher. Angel could no longer see him at all. The stars were out and the sea beyond the castle glowed with a cold green fire. And out on la mer was a massive black shadow, silent and still upon the waters, just sitting there as if it were waiting for morning to come before it showed its true form.
The sudden pop! of a piece of wood in the fire yanked her once more out of the dream, and she lay there for a moment panting in the darkness. The yurt had grown cold, and both lanterns had burned through their supplies of oil. The distant drone of the wind filled the night.
Angel stood up and checked her phone for the time. It was close to midnight. Surely the mourners would return soon. She was frankly surprised that they hadn’t already.
Aware of the mess she’d made from her impromptu meal of boiled potato, yak cheese, and mutton jerky, she added wood to the fire in preparation for tidying up. She gathered her belongings and placed them into her pack, pausing to check her phone again on the off chance that a signal had mysteriously appeared. But of course there was no connection, and she regretted once more not having remembered to check in with Cheong before they left Bairin Zouqi. She had to trust that he had done as she’d asked and that the video she had sent him was now spreading throughout the Internet. By morning, there would be no way for the Americans to deny the accident or the cover up.
