“Give ya’ a bottle a water.”
It didn’t take ten seconds to gulp it down.
Donys stared at the bananas, and the apples, and the peaches. Oh, the peaches. The dawn light caught their chilled, dewy skins. He imagined licking them. Passing his tongue over their tiny hairs, sinking his teeth into their flesh, juice coursing down his chin.
“Two dollars a peach,” the hawker said, following Donys’s gaze.
He sighed, and limped away from the stand. He collapsed into a heap in the middle of the road.
“Pssst … mister.”
Donys felt a jab in his ribs, and flinched.
“What you want?” he grumbled.
“You the Brownie?”
He dried his tears, and glanced up into the shattered sunlight. The silhouette of a girl stood over him. “Yes,” he said.
“I know where she is – Cyan.”
Donys stood quickly, or as quickly as he could. “Where?”
“I need your help,” said the girl.
“Where is she?” he repeated.
“No, first you help me. It’s my brother. He’s sick. Mother says he needs a hospital in Shangri.”
It was only two days ago that he was a paramedic, but it felt like decades had passed. Something from that prior life stirred in him. “I can help your brother,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Two minutes from here. You help my brother, and I’ll tell you where Cyan is.” Her voice was all business.
“Yes,” said Donys, dizzy on his feet. “Where’s your brother?”
Two minutes became twenty, as Donys trailed behind the little girl. She couldn’t have been more than ten, but he could barely walk, and she skipped ahead of him, turning this way and that through the maze of shacks. After a while he leaned against a cool zinc wall, and panted. Every breath brushed the inside of his chest against a dozen razors.
“Need food,” he called to her.
She’d rounded a shack in the distance, but popped her head back to see what was keeping him. “What ya’ say?”
“Food,” he repeated. “Need food.”
“Oh silly. We’re almost there. Mum will give you something while you help Konner. Here’s a sweet for now.”
Donys sucked greedily on the candy, and felt a surge of energy. He pushed himself off the juddering wall, and followed the girl. Minutes later, she stopped at one of the more modest shacks. Corrugated metal was nailed together to form the walls, punctured with rust here and there. A woman waited by the makeshift door, her face swollen from lack of sleep.
“You brought him,” she said, her eyes dead, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. The girl stood beside her mother, and held a dangling hand.
“Ma’am, I’m a medic. I can help your son. But I ask that you feed me, and tell me where Cyan Rustikov is.”
The woman blinked, tapped her cigarette, and stared at him. Through him. She said nothing.
“Mum,” prompted the little girl, tugging at her mother’s dead hand.
“Yes,” the woman said, rousing.
“Come in,” said the little girl. “He’s inside.”
The room smelt of rotting meat and bleach. It was dark, with no windows in the walls. The only light that penetrated the smoky room was from the doorway, which the girl’s mother blocked, staring out at nothing.
A boy, about five years old (but it was difficult to tell precisely with starving Breeder children), lay on a pockmarked mattress. The blue patterns on the material had faded and blended to a rusted brown. The boy’s eyes were shut. He breathed intermittently. Long labored sighs.
The little girl pulled at a bandage on the boy’s side, and a black wound appeared just as the wave of its stench hit Donys’s nose. He lifted a hand to his face, and examined the lesion more carefully. A deep incision. It almost appeared surgical, but the edges were more jagged than any surgeon would have left.
Donys reached behind him instinctively for his medical kit, but his hand closed around nothing.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
“I don’t know the words … Mum?”
“Organ harvesting,” the mother said still looking out at the street, puffing on her cigarette. “Kidney.”
Donys gasped. “They took a kidney from him?”
The little girl threw Donys a puzzled look. “We all give parts of us to Shangri.” She lifted her blouse to show a scar on her chest. The skin that clung to her ribcage was gray. Lifeless. “It’s difficult to breathe sometimes since they took my lung, but Mum says we need the money.”
A maggot’s head appeared from the boy’s wound. It wriggled around, sniffed the air, and dove back inside. Donys tasted bile at the back of his throat.
“Your … Konner needs a hospital.”
“That’s what I told you, silly,” the girl said. “You’re a Brownie. You can take him.”
The boy inhaled a serrated breath.
“I can’t,” said Donys. “He needs an ambulance. Paramedics. Soon.”
“What’s an ambulance?”
“Isn’t there a hospital in the ghetto?”
Hahaha! The girl laughed. “A hospital in the ghetto! He’s funny, Mum.”
He felt the boy’s forehead. Hot as the Jacuzzi at BIGS.
“Antibiotics? Do you have antibiotics? Can you get?”
The little girl shook her head. “What are those?” She looked to the doorway, but her mother was silent.
The maggot gave another sniff at the air outside the wound.
“I’ll take Konner,” he said.
The girl’s face splintered into a smile. “Thank you! Mum, did you hear that?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice musty and dark.
He stood, and made his way to the woman. “Please,” he said, “can you give me money or food before I leave?”
“You’ll take him away from me?” Her wan face lifted. It was the first time Donys had seen any joy in her.
“I will.”
She turned the pockets of her apron inside out, and a few crumpled notes fell to the ground. “All I got left,” she said, and took another puff of her cigarette.
He bent over his broken rib, and grabbed the notes.
“Where is Cyan?” he asked the little girl.
“She used to live with her mum, two streets from the old factory, before she won the lottery.”
“Where’s the factory?”
“Oh silly!” The girl giggled. “What kind of Brownie are you? It’s over there.” She walked to the door, and pointed west to a barely discernible brown building on the horizon.
Donys placed one of the boy’s arms over his shoulder, and lifted him onto his hip. The boy was light. There was almost nothing left of him. He hobbled to the door, and brushed by the boy’s mother.
He peered back a minute later before he rounded a corner. She was still puffing on her cigarette, her expression vacant.
Chapter 13
I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do? They’re only saying I love you.
– Louis Armstrong
In his bones, Chokyong knew the Brownies would arrive soon. One way or another, he’d been preparing for this day for years. Ever since he’d been sent back from his service in Khartoum.
He’d returned half an hour ago from the Wall, from handing over Cyan and Anand to Milton. His head felt empty – as if there was only a faint static where his thoughts had been. His world was hollow as he climbed the stairs to his living quarters above BIGS. Was he really going to do this? Finally? He pressed the hidden panel on the wall behind his bed.
The headboard slid to one side. He shifted the mattress, and took a deep, stale breath as he peered into the hidden room. Black fluorescents bathed shelf after shelf of the armory. (When he’d built the room, there were fears that the rebels would use biological warfare, so the cleansing fluorescents were an obvious choice). Pistols, grenades, shotguns, gasmasks, laser-knives, scythes, percussion bombs, body armor, and bullets filled his vision.
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br /> He stretched his squat body as his wife had taught him decades ago. His hamstrings, his shoulders; forward- and backward-bends. Once he strapped on the Kevlar, stretching would be impossible. And he would be waiting, who knew how long.
Not too long, he thought. The Brownies will be here soon enough, looking for Anand. They’d realize that the last tracking location of Anand’s hedometer was at BIGS. And then they’d realize Chokyong had removed it. He’d disposed of the hedometers in a furnace on the way back from the Wall, but there’d be traces of the hedometer elements on him. The Brownies were skilled at finding hackers.
Chokyong unstrapped his belt, and replaced it with the combat girdle that lay on the shelf. It was already stocked with a laser-knife and two grenades, with room to accommodate a pistol.
He could have removed Anand’s and Cyan’s hedometers elsewhere, but he was tired of waiting. Waiting for the day he could make his stand. The memory of the little boy in Khartoum seeped into his mind as it often did. The way he’d placed the barrel of his pistol to the boy’s temple before his mother could react.
He lifted that pistol now. Felt the weight of it. The wooden barrel was stained – made no difference how much he scrubbed it. The magazine he loaded snapped into place.
His epaulettes and brown uniform sat, folded, on the top shelf. They were starched, pressed into impossibly sharp folds. He stroked the utilitarian fabric. Unlike the pistol, the Bhutanese had ensured that the fabric of their uniforms was impervious to stains. Blood and shame slid off those uniforms with equal ease. He unfolded the shirt, and inspected it. It was so much smaller than anything he wore today.
He remembered the shock in Anand’s eyes when Chokyong suggested they flee to the ghetto. Good young men and women were being herded into slums that could barely sustain them. No, he was done hiding, upholding The Law of Shangri. He missed his wife. He would never see her again, but she’d be proud of what he was about to do.
No. No more waiting.
He used the laser-knife to shred the uniform. The smell of burnt rubber filled the armory. It was time to take a stand.
The BIGS buzzer rang downstairs. The first customers were here, but he had no intention to open for business today.
Chokyong stuffed extra ammunition into the pockets of his Kevlar vest, grabbed the night-vision helmet off the top shelf, and checked himself. He was making too much noise.
He sealed the armory with a gentle click, and replaced the bed in its original position.
The BIGS buzzer sounded again.
It was difficult moving around in the Kevlar and army boots. The heavy rubber soles left prints in the carpet as he adjusted the mattress. He rubbed them out as he moved. When he reached the staircase, he glanced back at what had been his bedroom for over two decades. It looked much the same as the day he’d moved in. The walls were a shade grayer, the carpet less spongy. But otherwise, it was the same.
Chokyong liked to move through life without leaving footprints. Sometimes he thought about how history would have progressed if he’d never been born. He liked to think that after his death, the timeline in which he wasn’t born, and the timeline in which he was, would converge. He thought of his life as a mirage. It was easier that way. Mirages couldn’t kill children in Khartoum.
The wooden stairs creaked with his weight as he lumbered down to the bar. He studied each room for a moment as he moved through BIGS. The bar, with its stained-glass tiles he’d painted when he opened the bathhouse almost twenty years ago. He passed the bathrooms where countless men had preened after a sweaty afternoon. The wooden sauna and the Jacuzzis. The loss of the bathhouse, of his home, was a dull weight in his chest. After he was gone, would someone keep it going?
He extinguished the lights as he passed. And now he was in the change-room. He shifted aside the curtain to the staff area, and found his locker on the far wall. He reached under the Kevlar vest, and unlocked it with the key he always carried around his neck. There she was, Himalayan peaks jutting behind her. He removed a glove, and touched the creased image with his fingertips. Her cheeks were round and full, the smile spreading easily to her eyes. Kind eyes. He’d taken that photo the day after he’d proposed. “I just want one,” he’d begged as he’d lifted the lens to her. She’d said nothing, but hadn’t turned away.
He shuffled back to the main change-room, wondering how best to create cover. He shifted the long bench, which ran the length of the room, to one side. He overturned two lockers with a deafening bang. When he lay on his stomach, they were just the right height on which to place his shotgun.
Chokyong killed the lights, and donned his night-vision helmet. He was ready.
The Tax Man hadn’t been to a bathhouse. There was no need – he had his own harem of boys and men at his estate. He usually kept about twelve. Any more, and they tended to squabble. Any fewer, and he became bored. He liked to pleasure them, you see. To watch their eyes roll back in their heads as he fucked them to orgasm. And what kind of Brownie would he be, what kind of citizen, if he didn’t please as many as he could? As Master Dzogo said, “the more one gives, the more one has to give.”
He was intrigued to see what the bathhouse was all about. He waited until after the opening bell had rung, always at 6am, before he stepped into his Merc, and found his way to BIGS. It was the obvious place to start his investigation of Anand Nair. The young man worked there, and according to the tracking information that a jittery tech had placed on his Rhodesian-teak desk that morning, it was the last place Anand’s hedometer had sent out a signal. And, Cyan’s. He’d raised an eyebrow at that. So he was right. Anand and Cyan were an item.
There were already bikes and a handful of cars parked in the lot outside the large black doors to the bathhouse. But the patrons were standing at the entrance. “CLOSED,” flashed a neon sign. That was odd. And, more importantly, contravened business laws. All businesses had to operate from the morning bell till the evening bell. That was The Law, and The Tax Man was a stickler for The Law.
He pressed the buzzer. Pressed again. “No use,” said an older man wearing a silver moustache. “I’ve been pressing it the last ten minutes. Weird noises coming from inside.”
The Tax Man sighed. This investigation had been trouble from the start. Gemini and his low hedometer readings. Cyan’s truancy. And now this. Well, there was nothing for it. He was going to have to get some answers. He unholstered his pistol, and aimed it at the lock. Silver Moustache took an alarmed step backward with the growing crowd.
“Avalokiteśvara,” whispered one of the men, clutching an invisible necklace.
The pistol had a silencer fitted, so the round sounded more like a sneeze than a gunshot, but it did its job. The handle and its lock fell to the ground. The Tax Man nudged open the double-doors, as the crowd of men inched forward behind him. They held their breath.
“Is anyone here?” he called into the dark space. A black, silent corridor greeted him. The passage ended in a left-facing doorway. “This is Tax Man 16. Identify yourself.” He paused to listen for a response, but none arrived.
Men were popping their heads round the broken entrance-door. “Step back,” he warned.
The Tax Man raised his pistol, and advanced. His jaw clenched as the doorway came ever closer. He could call for backup. Bring Brownies for support. But this was his mess. If he’d handled the Gemini case better, none of this would have happened. His supervisor wouldn’t be pleased if he used extra resources to mop up after him.
“This is your final warning,” he called, hoping not to have to step through that doorway. The room beyond was as dark as the corridor. He removed his reflective glasses, and pocketed them in his PVC pants. “Identify yourself.” His raised his voice to cover the lump in his throat.
He took a deep breath, and swung his torso through the doorway, leading with his pistol.
He felt the shot before he heard it.
Part 3
Chapter 14
The best is yet to come and babe, won�
��t it be fine?
– Frank Sinatra
Through his helmet, Chokyong heard dulled screams from the other side of the BIGS doorway. So he’d hit the Brownie with his first shot. He’d seen a face appear, and then retreat as he fired. He primed the shotgun, ready for the next one to try its luck. There was probably a team of them. Brownies traveled in packs, like hyenas.
So he waited, his shotgun steady, resting on the overturned locker. The bottom of the Kevlar vest edged into his stomach, but he didn’t move. He waited for them to come, as the screams from the other side of the doorway quietened to labored breaths. He waited.
He lifted his helmet so his ears were uncovered, and listened to the darkness. The Brownie was still there. Behind the wall. Long, burbled breaths. There was probably only one of them after all. The Brownie had said he was a tax man before he’d broken in. Shit. This might have nothing to do with Anand and the girl. Might have been a routine visit from the Tax Bureau. But, he corrected himself, they would have come for Anand eventually. And when they did, there would be more than one of them. He’d done the right thing, but now he had to get out of here. Gunning down a tax man wasn’t something one got away with. The place would be crawling with Brownies in minutes.
Chokyong pulled down his helmet with its night-visor, so he could see the darkness. He stood as softly as he could, and made his way out of the change-room, deeper into the bathhouse. He unlatched the back door behind the bar, and slipped out into his private lot.
Chokyong was not a small man at the best of times. Wearing his combat gear, there was no way he could fit in the front seat of the old Bentley. He unslung the shotgun from his back, unhooked the utility belt and the Kevlar. They all fitted in the boot easily enough. Back in those days before the Collapse, they’d made cars big enough to actually carry things. They were solid, he thought, shutting the boot. Could drive through a brick wall no problem. Not like those Tatas that covered the roads nowadays. Plastic is all they were.
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