Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction

by Dominica Malcolm

  Her small teeth glittered in the shadows. “This way, we will go by the freight elevator.”

  “[Wait.]”

  Aran started a second time. He turned, the sudden movement making his head spin. He put a hand out on the wall to steady himself. He looked up to see Krit behind him, silhouetted in an open door.

  “Oh Krit, hi, um, I’ve a…” Aran winked, pointed a thumb back at the waitress, “I’ve got something to attend to.”

  “[Aran you need to get out]’

  “Get out? What do you mean?”

  Krit took a step forward, the light falling directly on his face. His voice was quiet. “[I’ve got a way out of here. Tonight. I know people who can remove the control core in your c-glyph, destroy the locater completely.]”

  The waitress moved next to Aran. She looked up at him, “What is going on?”

  Aran waved her away. “It’s nothing, I’ll be with you in a minute.” She looked at Krit, then nodded and backed away until she stood out of earshot.

  Krit glanced at the waitress, then back at Aran. “[You don’t belong here, foreigner. Time to go home.]”

  “How would I do that?”

  Krit pointed down the corridor. “[The basement. Behind the hydrogen generator there’s a grate that’s been removed, the pulse field around it deactivated. You can get through to the basement of the hotel next door, and from there back to the streets. We only have an hour’s window before it switches back on, any longer and it’ll be picked up in the hotel’s internal scans. This is your last chance.]”

  Aran nodded. “I’ll be there.”

  Krit squinted at him. “[You better be. One more hour and you’ll be chattel, a promotional tool for an illegal war.]”

  Aran didn’t know what chattel meant, but he assumed it wasn’t a good thing. He held his hands up. “Please. I’ll be there Krit.”

  Krit squinted for a moment longer, then walked past him down the corridor.

  The waitress waited until Krit was out of sight before moving to Aran’s side. He reached out and grabbed her hand. She pulled it away, took a step back. “What was he talking about? Don’t you want to fight for the Chinese? I thought you were a war hero?”

  Aran held out his palms. “Yes, yes, of course baby.”

  “Why is he talking about ‘getting out’?”

  Aran cleared his throat. A slender beam of light fell across her face, accentuating the smooth skin, the small mouth, the delicate ears. Her eyes were in shadow. She was pretty and Aran was feeling expansive from the expensive scotch he’d been downing all night. “Krit is a criminal, drafted into the Chinese forces. He’s been looking for a way out since we walked into the jungle a few weeks ago. I told him I’d meet him later just to get rid of him.”

  Aran moved closer to the woman, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her towards him. She let him. He looked down into her dark brown eyes. “What I really want is to be with you. Now let’s get out of here, okay?”

  She put a hand on his chest. “So you are a volunteer? You want to fight for the Chinese?”

  He felt the heat rising on his neck. “Um, yeah. Of course.”

  She smiled a small smile. “Good. I have a surprise for you.”

  §

  Aran was completely naked, sitting on the large plush bed in the centre of his suite. With the alcohol and the kissing and the game of getting him undressed, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the room. Maybe thirty minutes, give or take. Through the haze of single malt and lust he felt his stomach knotting. Krit was waiting in the basement to help him get out of this mess, and here he was in his hotel room wondering what sort of panties this woman was wearing.

  Aran rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, whispered to himself. “Idiot.” He shook his head and looked up at the woman. “What are you doing?”

  The waitress was setting up a Tai recording unit—a small bronze stand with a light blue crystal lens—on the dresser, pointing it at the bed. It would capture perfect three dimensional images of the room. She spoke over her shoulder, “Recording it.”

  He held his hands down over his groin. “Why?

  “For a—what’s the word in English? A memento.”

  “Really?”

  She turned and smiled, running her eyes over his slender torso and abdomen.

  He blushed. “Um, babe, I hate to rush things now, when it’s all getting so interesting, but is this going to take long?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “In a hurry?”

  “I have to meet someone,” he winked, “but I’ll be back of course.”

  She ran her hand down her shirt before hooking her thumb in her belt. Her pale slender fingers hung near the zip of her pants. “Don’t worry, I will make it quick.”

  Aran smiled. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Quick he could certainly do.

  The waitress had undone a few buttons down the front of her shirt, hinting at a white bra underneath. Aran looked down at his hands. “I’m naked here. When am I going to see you?”

  She tilted her head to one side, gave him a coy smile. “Now. Close your eyes.”

  He did so. He could hear her fiddling with something near the set of drawers, perhaps aligning the camera.

  “You promise to keep them closed?”

  “Promise.” As Aran said the word he opened his left eye a slit.

  She was coming towards him, something in her hand. She raised her arm. Aran saw the expression on her face then. Hate. That’s what it was. Hatred, undiluted. He opened his eyes wide, bringing up his arms as she brought down hers.

  “What the—” the loud snap of an electrical discharge sounded. Pain shot down his right arm, cutting through the haze of alcohol. Aran rolled sideways, falling off the bed. He pushed backwards along the floor away from the woman, then staggered to his feet. His arm dangled limp at his side, covered in blood. The smell of ozone hung in the air. The adrenalin had cleared his vision, he felt his good hand shaking.

  She stood before him, watching. In her right hand was a pulse blade. Blue lines of electricity danced along its edges. “What is my name?” her voice seemed different, changed; tinged now with malice and blood.

  “Huh?”

  She took a step forward. “What’s my name, war criminal?”

  “War criminal? What?” He stepped back, his legs brushing the side table next to the bed.

  “You never asked my name. That’s no way to seduce a lady now, is it? We often like it when men care enough to ask our names.” The knife hummed in her hand. “Names. Do you know the names of the Thai citizens forced to fight and die in the war against Vietnam?” She took another step forward. “Do you know the names of the innocent Vietnamese burned in nova strikes and paralysed by nerve sirens?”

  Aran, wide-eyed, said nothing.

  “Names. So many names. And men like you do not know a single one.” She held the blade up, in front of her face, looking through the hissing blue air into his eyes. She switched to Thai “[A present for you from the Thai resistance.]” She turned her head slightly, perhaps to make sure the camera had a profile of her mouth when she spoke. “[This is what happens to collaborators.]”

  “Wait!” Aran held up his left hand. He couldn’t feel his right arm at all any more. “Why don’t you stab a fucking general? They’re the ones doing all the killing.”

  She let the blade dip slightly. “No one knows who they are, not the ones in this hotel, anyway. How many thousands of generals are there in this war? But everyone knows you, don’t they? The foreigner, the Thai—”

  “But I’m not Thai. I just—I just wanted to get laid. I shouldn’t even be—”

  “—the traitor. The butcher.” She stepped forward again, speaking over him. Aran leaned back against the side table, the bedside lamp pressing into his buttocks. He reached down, grasped it as the waitress stepped forward, and hurled it. She moved her head to one side, but it wouldn’t have hit: his aim left-handed was terrible. The lamp struck the dresser in
stead, shattering on impact, knocking over the recording unit. The woman was startled for a moment, and Aran, fuelled by the fumes of whisky and death, ran at her screaming. She brought her knife arm back for the strike, but too late, his shoulder striking her across the forehead. She staggered back and crumpled into the wall next to the chest of drawers, dropping the knife to the floor. It hit blade first, setting off a charge that sparked and smoked against the carpet.

  Aran ran towards the hotel room door. His scream turned into a yell as his bare foot came down on broken lamp. He staggered, falling into the door head first, splattering blood on the white wood. He pushed himself up to his knees and looked behind. His foot was a bloody mess. He leaned against the door, breathing heavily.

  The waitress moaned. She was getting to her feet, blood flowing from a split on her forehead. She looked around the room for a moment, eyes glazed, until she saw him. Her face seemed to clear. She reached down for the blade.

  After dragging himself up, Aran turned the handle, and threw himself out into the corridor. He heard a buzz and crackle behind him as the woman slashed the air where he had been standing.

  Aran shouted down the corridor, toward the elevators, where two guards in storm armour were posted. “Help!” He backed away from the bedroom door. “Help—someone’s trying to kill me.”

  The woman burst from the room as the two black-sheathed figures began to move down the corridor.

  Aran turned and ran in the other direction, back towards to the freight elevator the waitress had shown him. He heard her screaming, “Stop, stop, stop!” Each exhortation higher and louder than the one before. Heedless he ran down the thick green carpeted corridors, splattering them red as he turned the corners, left then right, then left. There were shouts behind him, followed by the distinctive percussion and echo of shots fired. Aran ran faster, taking corners wide, slamming into walls with his shoulders. He got to the freight elevator, pounded the button for down, leaving bloody handprints across the control panel. He leaned forward against the clean steel doors, breathing heavily, head cocked to the direction he had come from. There were yells and the stomping of heavy boots. They were coming.

  “Come on,” he grunted, hitting the control panel again. Aran looked at his hand. It was shaking. He clenched his fist. A dull pain came from his lacerated foot. Blood was still trickling down his limp forearm. Aran banged his head once against the door, left his head resting against the cool steel. “I shouldn’t even be here.”

  The heavy footfalls were getting louder. People were yelling in Mandarin. He wasn’t getting out of this one.

  Aran looked up at the doors. “Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll…”

  PING.

  The elevator opened smoothly. He stepped inside, hit the button marked B. The doors were closing as the yells echoed through his c-glyph. “[Stop. You are ordered to stop immedia…]”

  He leaned back and gave out a long ragged breath. The elevator fell rapidly, barrelling towards the basement below.

  PING.

  Aran emerged in the twilight heat of the basement. Large, anonymous machines groaned and hummed. The dull plascrete floor warm against his feet. He padded through the shadows of the machinery, looking in the dusk for the hydrogen fuel cell generator. Belatedly he realised he had no idea what one looked like. The elevator pinged somewhere behind him and he knew it was streaking back to the floors above to pick up a delivery of black-armoured men and women. Women and men coming for him with blunt-nosed machine guns and force rods and the power over life and death. He ran.

  After a few minutes he realised the basement was too big. It stretched out into the dusk in every direction. He was dizzy, stumbling as he ran. He didn’t know where the ‘back’ of it was. He wasn’t even sure if his hour was up yet, whether the pulse field around the grill was reconnected.

  He came to a halt near an old plastic stool sitting in the shadows against a dirty steel wall. Aran slumped down in it, looking back in the direction from which he’d come. Blood shone against the surface of the floor, one bloody right footprint repeated every meter or so. He leaned back against the warm machine and laughed softly. Not the hardest fugitive to track down.

  Aran wondered if Krit was still waiting. “Krit?” He whispered.

  Nothing.

  He repeated the name, softly at first, then louder, over and over, until he was yelling. “Krit, Krit, KRIT!?”

  The name echoed briefly, but was soon swallowed by the noise of the machines. He sighed and leaned back, wiping the sweat from his face. Neat lettering was printed in both Thai and Chinese on a steel plate riveted into the wall in front of him. Aran stared at the plaque, thinking about what would happen when he was recaptured. Prison, death, or back to the war. He wasn’t sure which one he would prefer.

  The c-glyph interpreted his stare as a request for translation. After s few seconds the nanos on his optic nerves activated. A translation visible only to his eyes appeared in the air in neat glowing red script about three feet away:

  Hydrogen Fuel Cell Generator

  100MW Capacity

  Do Not Open Control Panel While Generator is In Operation

  Aran sat up straight. “Fuck.”

  A small, dark alley opened at the right of the machine. He staggered to his feet and down into the darkness. Soon he saw the dull gleam of a plascrete wall ahead. Behind the machine a grate sat on the ground, a black hole above it. He didn’t care any more whether the pulse field was active. He threw himself in.

  §

  Aran ran alongside the canal through the rain, slipping on the smooth slick stones from time to time. His knees battered, hands scraped, the wound on his foot opened up and bleeding. His right arm dangling uselessly by his side, bouncing in time to his balls as he ran through the dark and the wet.

  They would be getting in boats now, coming down the canal, following his locater chip. But sanctuary was nearby. Home was nearby. He banged on the gates of the embassy, screaming, until a burly Australian in a military uniform came to the gate. The buttons on the shirt across the man’s broad chest strained against the fabric.

  Aran pushed his arm through the bars, imploring the guard. “I’m Australian.”

  The man looked down at Aran standing there, shivering and bloody and naked, then back down the canal. Sirens were flashing in the night on a series of craft racing out from the hotel dock. The guard nodded. “Better come in then, mate.”

  §

  White room. Black, plasteel table. Mirrored window against one wall.

  Aran sat on an uncomfortable chair, staring at a young man in a grey suit standing across from him. Aran had on some crumpled tracksuit pants and a tee shirt they’d found for him. The shirt had the words, ‘I’ve been to Bali, too’ printed across the front. His arm was in a white sling—the wounds had been healed with a medical nano-spray, but the numbing effect of the pulse knife had yet to wear off.

  The man in the grey suit was holding a palm screen, looking at its contents. “Aran Sintawichai?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked up, gave a small smile. “I am John Borthwick, the consular officer here at the embassy.” His speech was crisp, unaccented. Aran knew the type. He had worked in IT support for a while, for a company that serviced the Australian foreign affairs building. Aran had heard the young man’s way of speaking there among the other diplomats. It was the sort of speech that formed after a dozen years at fenced-in international schools and a thousand conversations with diplomats from California and Northern Europe and India. The bumps and divots of cadence and tone buffed and smoothed to an unaffected sheen.

  Aran got up, walked around the table and held out his good hand. “When can I go home?”

  Borthwick grasped his hand for a moment. His grip was weak, his fingers soft. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  Aran lowered his hand slowly. “What?”

  The man cleared his throat. “How can I put this? It’s quite delicate. I guess I should be straight with you, M
r Sintawichai. In light of you aiding another country in an illegal military action, Canberra has decided to revoke your citizenship.”

  “What?”

  Borthwick held up the palm screen. “This decision came straight from the Minister.”

  “What?” Aran didn’t feel quite right. He couldn’t focus on the young man.

  “Sorry. But this is from the top. You understand.”

  Aran shook his head slowly. “But I’m not Thai, I’m Australian. We moved there a few months after I was born. During the Tribute Crisis.”

  “You have dual-citizenship. And according to our records—and several recent, very popular Chinese freewave broadcasts—you’ve rather unfortunately been fighting for an enemy of Australia.”