23. Big Trouble in Yang Tsung Quarry No 3
The burn phone in his pocket vibrated once, briefly. Cho Fat Kai Tung, "Sammy Cho" as he was more commonly known, quickly pulled it out of his pocket, flipped it open and looked at the incoming text message. Not the words, which he assumed would be some innocuous irrelevant message like 'Please call me this at home this evening, darling' or 'Can you bring some noodles home with you tonight?', but the sender, which should be one of three more burn phones, the numbers of which he had memorised. The fact that one untraceable phone on the Kowloon side had texted another untraceable phone on Tsing Yi island to ask whether the recipient wanted the sender to record the Adrenna Lynne re-run on Channel Twenty-Nine tonight was of no obvious import. But as Sammy was texting back a pre-prepared "Yes please!", he knew that the sender was sitting on a beer crate on the roof of 'The Craphole', as home was endearingly called by residents and non-residents alike, with a pair of powerful binoculars, and that the text meant that the latest MTR Airport Express train had just entered the tunnel portal on Lantau Island en-route to Tsing Yi station. He snapped the cheap flip-phone shut and dropped it back into his pocket, threw the half finished cigarette down onto the asphalt and ground it into a smear of tobacco leaves and ash with the ball of his foot, then donned his sunglasses, opened the door of the Mercedes diesel 'taxi' and dropped quickly into the driving seat.
He pushed his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose, took another glance at the A4 sheet of paper which was currently double-sided taped to the front of the taxi-meter, and tried to commit the grainy image of one Shin Po Shek, whose face he was looking to pick out of a crowd, to memory. Then he started the engine and nosed the car out of the lay-by on Sai Tso Wan road. He had timed this run enough times to be reasonably sure that if he drove so as not to attract any attention, he'd be driving past the side entrance to the station at about or slightly after the time that a harassed passenger on the train that he knew even now was rattling through the long tunnel under the Ma Wan Channel might emerge from the concourse and try to hail a cab. The only major imponderable, once they knew that Shin Po Shek's flight had landed, was 'which train will the target catch'. They usually ran the same sequence three times, with three different pairs of burn phones, for each of the three trains they thought it most likely that their target would be aboard. Run one had been a bust, so Sammy had driven straight past the station and then followed the North Coast Road back round to his stand-by position, and waited for run two. He didn't need to tell Billy, his spotter, that he had come up empty - he could be clearly seen parked up through binoculars from the roof of The Craphole.
'Second time lucky!', he thought.
Past experience told him that he had about a three in ten chance of it all working out today. If it didn't come off, they had three more pre-arranged 'chance' opportunities to pick the guy up over the next two days, with the cash on him. Overall, that gave them a six or seven in ten shot at hitting pay-dirt, and that made all the effort worthwhile. They could have gone for more direct approaches of course, but that would have been self-defeating, because from the circumstances of the robberies it would have been very obvious to their targets, after the fact, that they had been set up by somebody who knew they were coming to Hong Kong and would have cash with them, which would have meant that the police would also soon know. This less assured approach meant that whereas they missed a few juicy pigeons, they had so far remained very much below the radar, with both the mainland police and the Hong Kong force still blissfully unaware that there was an on-going and lucrative criminal conspiracy afoot. If they were careful, reasoned Sammy, they could run this profitable side-line pretty much forever!
It would work today, if it did, because the chances of a real taxi passing the side entrance of the Tsing Yi station plying for hire were realistically, next to nil. No cabbie would want to take the long drive back from or out to the airport without a fare on board, not when they could keep the meter ticking over ferrying people around Hong Kong island or Kowloon. Even the Lantau cabbies who started each day on the airport rank would not return to the airport empty if they could help it. The local cab drivers based on Tsing Yi all used the rank on the concourse at the front of the station, and it was considered poor cab-driver etiquette, a form of queue jumping, to drive round the station touting for trade instead of lining up on the rank and taking their turn.
No, anybody flagging down a passing cab within the hour on the drag past Tsing Yi Station would have to be pretty lucky. Not that a naive nouveau rich business man from one of the newly industrialised economic development zones inside China would ever know that, on their first trip to the 'Special Administrative Zone'. Especially if they had been warned by the high-powered business contact they were meeting in Hong Kong that the airport rank never had enough cabs, and if it had been suggested to them that they should hop onto the Airport Express and hop off at Tsing-Yi and flag down one of the "many passing taxis" to avoid a long wait…
Sammy flipped the jury-rigged switch under the dashboard to switch on the taxi-light as he turned into the service road past the side entrance to Tsing-Yi station, and cruised towards the point opposite the station exit where a harassed passenger might try to hail a cab, eyes on the swivel. As he approached he could see a slightly portly middle aged man, with a wheeled suitcase at his feet waving hopefully. 'Could be…', thought Sammy. 'Looks like it is…'. He stole a quick glance at the A4 sheet as he closed on the target; 'Yes!'. He snatched the A4 sheet down with his left hand and screwed it into a small ball, throwing it under his seat as he cruised smoothly towards the relieved looking man. Winding down his window as he drew alongside, he asked "Taxi?".
"Yes please. Kowloon, the Golden Dragon Hotel…" said Shin Po Shek, a ruddy faced and very well fed looking middle aged man in an ill-fitting suit.
"No problem, Sir!", said Sammy Cho, every inch the dutiful taxi driver as he slid the transmission selector into 'Park' and hopped out of the cab with the keys in his hand. He made his way to the rear of the car and opened the boot, but then, as he turned back to pick up the suitcase he heard a mobile phone ring. Shin Po Shek had his suitcase in his hand, frustrating Sammy's intent which was to pick it up and dump it into the boot, but worse than that he was now talking on the phone.
Sammy stood dutifully by with his hand out, hoping that his impending victim would hand him the case so he could stash it in the boot, but the man was apparently engrossed with some crisis back at his factory.
"Well shut it down!", he was saying, turning away from Sammy with the suitcase still in his hand. Sammy made to reach for the case, but the man took a step forward, speaking animatedly into the phone; "Put Lu on. Put him on now!... I don't care! Put him on!".
"Sir…", said Sammy, plaintively. He had nothing in his script for this. If he could get the guy into his cab, he could get the hell out of here, and then he'd have to hope that the guy finished his call before they got onto Kowloon side, otherwise he'd have to drop him at his hotel and call this target a bust; they only had the Mercedes ready and the guy would certainly make him if he picked him up a second time and
then bopped him on the head and dumped him in a ditch in his underwear. But if he couldn't get him in the cab in the first place then he was going to have to drive away and leave him. The guy had barely looked at his face, nor had he been inside the externally generic looking Mercedes 'taxi' and he was wearing shades so if he called it off now, he'd still be good tomorrow if he slicked his hair back, had a clean shave and stuck on a false moustache for the second pass at the man's hotel in the morning.
Reluctantly he turned back to the taxi, just in time to see a blonde western kid hefting an antique wooden trunk into the boot of the car! Sammy was aghast as the smiling freckle-faced youth said "Fung-Mat Road Waterside, please!" in English, with an American accent.
"I'm sorry Sir, this cab is taken!", Sammy replied in English, slightly desperately. The blonde kid looked crestfallen and Sammy really thought he was about to turn back to the boot to retrieve his luggage when he heard a voice behind him. "Let him take it, I'm sorry, I must handle this now. I'll hail another cab…", said the businessman. From the look of the gawky American teenager, who was looking with no comprehension at the fat businessman, he hadn't understood a word that he had just said. Then Mr Shin added "OK… OK.." in badly accented English, forcing Sammy to imagine the hand gestures the perspiring factory boss was making to wave the kid towards the cab. The kid smiled and said "Thank you, Sir! Thank you very much!", throwing his voice loudly enough that he was obviously speaking to Shin Po Shek. Quickly, desperately, Sammy interjected in Cantonese; "No it's OK Sir, you were first, I can wait!", not wanting to look around and give the man another look at his face in case he was going to have to drive off and try again tomorrow. Which he really wasn't going to do with this blonde kid aboard the Mercedes, whatever happened.
"No, no, I must handle this call now. Take the kid… hello? Lu? Shut the line down. Shut it down now, and clean the nozzles…. I don't care. Shut it all down, strip it, and clean the nozzles. Do it now…", and as he spoke, Shin Po Shek's voice receded into the background. He was obviously walking away, and Sammy risked sneaking a quick look; Shin Po Shek was walking back towards the station concourse, suitcase in hand.
'Damn… so near and yet so far!', thought Sammy. 'Still, tomorrow is a new day…'. "I'm sorry, kid, I can't take you. You'll have to take your luggage out of the boot", he said in Mandarin. The kid was still smiling and looking expectant, and Sammy realised firstly that he should have spoken in English, and secondly that the blonde American youth didn't speak a word of Chinese. He tried again in English, "I'm sorry kid, I can't take you. You'll have to take your luggage out of the boot."
The gawky teenager looked crestfallen again, and pulled a decent sized wad of cash out of his pocket, saying "I can afford the fare, see? And I'll give you a really good tip. I'm running late, it's my first time in Hong Kong and I absolutely need to get to Fung-Mat Road on the dockside as soon as possible. Please?".
Out of the corner of his eye, Sammy saw the blue of a Hong Kong police uniform about 200 yards up the road, and suddenly arguing with a stupid
Gweilo teenager became the least important thing in the world. Dumping his trunk out on the street and driving off without him was also no longer an option - it would attract attention that would make using a fake cab again tomorrow impossible; there were CCTV cameras here, and any kind of scene might have somebody reviewing the tape and realising that the cab wasn't a real cab at all. If a fake cabbie turned over Shin Po Shek tomorrow then connections could be made and the whole scheme could unravel.
Quickly, Sammy shut the boot, opened the back door of the cab and said "OK, no problem!", then hopped into the driving seat and pulled away. He flicked on the jury rigged old meter and flicked off the taxi sign as he went, with the blonde American youth sitting in the back seat behind him.
'Shit. Now what?', he thought. He could take the kid where he wanted to go, except that he'd need to look at a map, he had no idea where whatever that street the guy had asked for was anyway. Plus this kid had just potentially cost him $6,000, his share of the pickings from the cash that he knew Shin Po Shek was packing.
It was supposed to be a sweet scam, a lucrative side-line on top of the chop shop and the fake Rolexes. So far it always had been sweet, as well. Hong Kong was the gateway to world markets and the epicentre of electronic trading with the world for small Chinese domestic manufacturers, and there were a number of companies in Hong Kong that specialised in providing direct e-commerce access for western consumers to emerging domestic Chinese industrial enterprises, especially those in the newer and remoter parts of the rapidly growing and developing heart of China. One of those companies was run by a former resident of 'The Craphole', and it did indeed provide global internet shoppers with access to goods from small factories deep in mainland China. But the boss also had an neat side-line in ripping off his potential clients. He knew that transferring large sums in Yuan into Hong Kong in Hong Kong dollars was beyond the ability of many provincial banks in the newly developed industrial regions of the Chinese hinterland, and that it was a fiendishly expensive way of moving money even if they could. So when he demanded a face to face meeting at his office in Hong Kong with prospective clients, along with a bond in Hong Kong dollars to cover his company against supply and quality problems, he was almost guaranteeing that the nouveau entrepreneurs, the naive small businessmen who beat a path to his door to gain access to the global e-commerce market from outside the Great Firewall of China, would bring the funds with them in cash, probably black market cash at that. Of course this was never suggested, and if and when it was successfully delivered the bond cash was placed into escrow with a local law firm and handled scrupulously; the legal shitstorm that would engulf the company and its boss if it wasn't would bury it and him alike, but after an unfortunate businessman had been relieved of all of his worldly goods, and a large sum of undelivered cash by Sammy and his comrades from The Craphole, the guy who ran the internet marketing company could express shock that the hapless victim had been carrying all those tens of thousands of dollars about his person, and warn him to use a bank to bank transfer next time. If the booty had been, as it often was, illegally exchanged black market cash, the victim often wouldn't even mention the theft to the authorities back in China, which is where he would be urged to report the robbery by the man who, unbeknownst to the victim, had actually perpetrated it.
Of course, every successfully executed robbery that
was reported was one more thing that would probably be hung round all their necks if the scheme ever went badly south, so every success raised the stakes for the next job. But the current situation was a definite first for him. He decided he needed to consult the brains trust back at The Craphole.
He fished the burn phone he had so recently been texted via out of his pocket as he drove towards the Tsing Tsuen bridge, and used his thumb to select the received text message and hit 'Dial' to call its counterpart, as he did so glancing in the rear view mirror. The blonde American kid was sitting back in his seat, eyes closed, seemingly a million miles away, completely oblivious to anything going on around him.
"Hello…", said a cautious voice through the handset. His co-conspirator, and also the chief operational planner of the so far successful robbery scheme, knew that if he actually called him, it meant that something had gone wrong, and something that Sammy couldn't cope with on his own at that. So far, in eighteen months, it hadn't ever happened; Sammy was well drilled and quite capable of playing any of the scenarios they had prepared for, so Billy Chin would have every reason to be concerned when one of the three phones at his feet rang. Not that either of them would use the other's name on the phone. "I've got a problem. I met the correct package, but there was a problem at the pickup and I had to leave with the wrong package!", said Sammy, piloting the Mercedes with one hand and holding the phone in the other.
"The… wrong package?", said the voice in his ear, uncertainly.
"Yes. The wrong package. I think I should deliver it to where it needs to go to get rid of it. But I need directions…", said Sammy.
There was a pause and then the voice on the phone said "Did you meet the original package?".
"Yes, yes, but I think it is OK. I should be able to try again tomorrow. I didn't handle the correct package for more than a few seconds.", said Sammy, reassuringly.
"But you did handle the correct package?", asked the voice in his ear again.
"Yes, yes, but…", said Sammy.
The voice in his ear interrupted him, "No, no, forget it. We will cancel this delivery. It's far too risky now! Can you get rid of the other package easily?".
Sammy swore under his breath. He was relying on that $6,000; his creditors had a late payment policy that hurt. A lot. And he needed a stake if he was to try to gamble his way out from under his current predicament; the Mah-jongg tables were where his trouble stemmed from, and they would surely be his salvation, he simply couldn't keep losing forever. Although he had been telling himself that for years. He knew that his kneecaps were on the line next, and he really wasn't looking forward to trying to talk his way out of losing them. He would have been willing to risk carrying on, but he tended to defer to Billy, who unlike Sammy or almost any other denizen of The Craphole had miraculously managed to make it to the ripe old age of 29 without obtaining a criminal record and was therefore demonstrably worth listening to, and if Billy was calling it off then off is certainly what it now was.
"No… I don't think so. Not unless I drop him… it where it is addressed to. ", said an unhappy sounding Sammy.
"Where is the package addressed to?", asked the voice in his ear.
"I think it was… err… Fung-Mat Road? Where is that?", he asked.
"Hong Kong Island. South End of the Western Harbour Crossing, down by the harbour. But wait a moment. Is he listening to you now?", said Sammy's disembodied voice, momentarily dropping the package motif.
"Yes, but he doesn't understand a word I'm saying. He's a westerner. American. A teenager. First time in Hong Kong, he said. Anyway he's paying no attention. He might even be asleep!", said Sammy.
"OK, well, perhaps we can use this for a bit of extra cover. Can you deliver the package you have got to the original address? ", asked Billy. Sammy could see the way Billy's mind was working; this scrawny American kid wasn't worth the effort, although Billy wouldn't ever have to know about that roll of cash the kid had flashed at the station and that would at least give him a table stake for tonight's game in the back room at Café Wu and a chance to win safety for his kneecaps for another month before next weekend. But if an American tourist got ripped off by a rogue cab driver it would help to further support the narrative that these were random robberies and not targeted attacks on business associates of one particular local company. Then again, as Sammy looked in the rear view mirror and appraised his passenger, he wasn't entirely confident. The technique he had successfully used on his five previous victims, all unsuspecting rotund middle-aged men, was to pull up in a different pre-selected spot on a back road in the country park on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong , tell his passenger that he had a puncture, step out and run around to open the door for them and then cosh them on the back of the neck as they climbed out of the back seat. All five had gone down like a sack of potatoes at the first or in one case second whack, and Sammy had quickly dragged them off the road, stripped them down to their underwear and then plasticuffed and gagged them; all four had still been out for the count when Sammy had driven away back to The Craphole. The idea was that by the time the hapless victim managed to attract somebody's attention , let alone report their predicament to the authorities if they chose to do so, the 'taxi' had already returned to the chop shop that created it and been completely disappeared, either into a pile of untraceable parts in a different colour, or into a re-sprayed ringer, on the way to be sold on a used car lot elsewhere in Hong Kong. The gawky blonde kid didn't exactly look like he'd give Sammy any great trouble, but on the other hand he did look young and fit, and if he didn't go down when Sammy hit him, Sammy doubted that he'd be able to catch him again in a foot race. Partly because Sammy hadn't run anywhere for ten years, partly because he smoked 40 unfiltered cigarettes a day, and partly because he was currently wearing snakeskin cowboy boots and the kid was wearing some kind of black footwear with rubber cleats that looked like it might be well suited to running. If the American youth did get away, Sammy might find that the police were looking for the taxi before he even got it back to The Craphole. And he would be in the open driving down the coast road about 2 minutes flying time away from that police helicopter that seemed to spend all day buzzing about the sky over Hong Kong island.
"I'm... not sure... ", said Sammy.
"Oh... Hard Man?", asked Billy. "Maybe I can gather the troops and come and meet you somewhere if you can keep driving around for a while?".
Sammy glanced in the mirror again. The kid was still sitting back, eyes closed, a seraphic smile on his face. He certainly didn't look like a hard man. In fact, based on his clothes, he looked like a geek. But Sammy also knew he was a geek in a hurry, and that if time dragged on he'd start taking an interest in where they were and where they were going. If he twigged that something funny was going on before he met Billy and whoever he had rounded up to help out... well, he was sitting behind Billy and he had his hands full driving the cab, so driving round in circles for a long time while Billy got the cavalry together really didn't appeal too much.
"No... Not a hard man. But could be slippery. And fast on his feet. I'm sure I can take him if I can catch him, but... Actually, he really is asleep at the moment I think...", proffered Sammy.
"Asleep?", asked Billy, surprise tingeing his voice.
"Well, his eyes are closed. I won't know if he's asleep unless I stop. I know he's in a hurry, though, so I don't want to drive him around for too long in case he gets restless. Maybe I should just take him to Fung-Mat Road? The junction is coming up…", said Sammy.
"No… no… wait a minute… ", said Billy.
"No time…", interjected Sammy as the 300 metre marker board for the turning sailed past.
"Right.. right, bring him here!", said Billy, assertively.
"What?", asked Sammy, incredulously.
"Yes, just do it. Bring him here! I'll make the arrangements. Don't wake him up, just bring him here!", said Billy, assertively.
"This is insanity!", muttered Sammy, changing lanes smoothly and heading North instead of South. Had Billy taken leave of his senses, Sammy wondered? Why take the risk of bringing him back to The Craphole? What on earth good could come of this? Billy was always the guy with the good ideas, but… and another thing; bang would go Sammy's chance of pocketing the wad of cash in the kid's pocket all for himself. Still, at least if they all ended up in jail when the kid led the police back to The Craphole, he'd still have his kneecaps next week.
"OK, listen…", said Billy. "If he starts taking an interest in where he is, tell him you had to take a detour to avoid a big jam or something and then take him back to Fung-Mat road. I'm going to get Big Lim to meet you here. The gates will be open, we'll close them behind you . He'll have a lump on his head and a sack over his eyes before he knows which way is up. We can tie him up and dump him wherever we like later. I'm going to set it up now. See you in about ten minutes…".
'Big Lim. Poor kid… hope he doesn't die of fright!', thought Sammy. He could see that this might work after all. And, he'd just realised, if they kept the kid tied up overnight, and changed the plates on the cab, then Billy could drive it tomorrow and they could still go after Shin Po Shek. It was about time that Billy got to do some proper graft while Sammy got to chill out at home. His kneecaps were feeling better already!
oOo
Ron centred himself and focused on his breathing. He'd not really experimented with letting his inner monkey meditate. It had been less than 5 hours since he had peeled off the cuff of Sosumiha in the dinghy service tunnel outside the airport terminal back in Japan and his own inner mystical monkey was still basking full force in the jump-start it had been given by the ancient artifact. But unfortunately for his supernatural simian soulmate, which wanted to float three inches above the back seat of the taxi in something approximating the Lotus position, surrounded by a bubble of existential serenity (not literally, obviously, but figuratively speaking), Ron's mind kept thwarting its ambitions by wandering in entirely random directions.
'Hmm… I really must ask Wade to check that out. It could be a huge scandal! It would certainly explain a lot if Rabbi Katz
was taking kick-backs from Big Lotion…'.
oOo
The taxi nosed its way smoothly into the tree-covered hills behind Sham Tseng, with Sammy nervously checking his mirror every ten seconds or so, but the blond haired youth was still seemingly oblivious to all. The risk was greatest now, both in terms of deniability, although Sammy would try and talk his way out of it if he could, and of the youth seeing enough now to be able to lead the police back to The Craphole later.
The last quarter mile seemed to take a lifetime, but eventually there was the familiar nondescript gap in the tree covered rocky slope, and Sammy carefully swung the taxi to the right, trying not to use the brakes or do anything else that might disturb his passenger's apparent slumber. True to Billy's word, the big, rust-streaked corrugated iron gate stood open, with its muscular and dangerous looking attendant, Lo Fung, standing ready to close it behind them. It wasn't until they were nosing through the portal that Sammy checked his mirror for seemingly the millionth time to find the blond-haired American kid looking around him.
"These docks don't look anything like I expected they would…", he said, absent mindedly. Sammy couldn't help himself from grinning but he kept his face front and head down to try to ensure that he kept his amusement to himself.
'The Craphole'. Hong Kong was once littered with abandoned quarries like this, relics of the drive during the 19th and early 20th centuries to extract local stone with which to build the infrastructure of the burgeoning economic powerhouse. The switch to reinforced concrete and steel had brought operations to a shuddering halt all across the colony (as it then was) some time in the 1920's. Most had now vanished in turn under further expansion of Hong Kong's infrastructure and population, many of the remainder had been cleaned up, landscaped and remodelled out of existence, and only one was still in operation producing dressed stone for building fasciae and lining imposing lobbies.
Yang Tsung Quarry No 3, as this one had once been known, closed down in 1924, and its fate would surely have been the same as that of all the others, had it not been for the brutal Japanese occupation of Hong Kong after Pearl Harbour during the Second World War. During that dark time, not only had the people of Hong Kong suffered the terrible privations of the Japanese occupation, but the Japanese occupiers and the industrial facilities they had commandeered had been bombed by the Americans and British in turn for the remaining duration of the war. The Japanese Imperial Army needed barracks on the north side of Victoria Harbour, where local insurgent forces had taken to attacking them and the harbour and then vanishing back into the unforgiving hinterland, and preferably barracks that were protected by concealment and topography from the daily rain of high explosive that the Americans dropped on them. Their answer was to build a horseshoe shaped multi-storey concrete and stone barrack block inside the conveniently shaped former Yang Tsung Quarry No 3.
After the surrender of the Japanese forces in Hong Kong, there were a great many other priorities for the new 'old' British administration, who had not only spent the last two years personally suffering malnutrition and horrific inhuman abuse in Japanese prisoner of war camps, but suddenly found themselves in charge of a traumatised population, that part of it that hadn't fled, and a ruined infrastructure, while London was an exceedingly distant place wrapped up in its own post war traumas. However, Hong Kong being Hong Kong, it bounced back with astonishing rapidity and was once again the economic jewel of the region within a handful of years.
They can have been forgiven for forgetting about an empty Japanese barracks hidden in the hills on the far side of the harbour. But by the time Hong Kong's population had recovered to the point where a coming lack of social housing started to become an issue, and the Hong Kong Housing Authority was formed, something unexpected had happened. Japanese Imperial Barracks Sham Tseng had become a haven for the dispossessed and those on the margins of society. People who did not play well with others, had been traumatised by the war, petty criminals ostracised by their own communities, those ravaged by addictions to opium or by mental illness, had gravitated to the abandoned barracks and turned it into a pre-hippy commune of sorts. And so, at a time when it might so easily have been blown up and replaced by a giant block of Housing Authority flats, it was left alone, filed under 'too much trouble to deal with all the problem people there who are not adding to our problems here right now'.
Over time, 'The Craphole', as people started to call the stained concrete former barracks, grew extra storeys, partitions, catwalks and balconies like topsy, unrestrained by any kind of planning regulation, out of sight and out of mind for Hong Kong's energetic rulers. Whenever the subject of The Craphole had come onto anybody's radar, often times they backed away, scared off by the downsides of fixing something that was… less broken than it ought to have been. One change, though, was that as the social safety net in Hong Kong became more robust, the vulnerable and the needy were gradually cajoled away from the place over many decades; it had started post-war life as a bohemian refuge for the dispossessed and distressed, whereas now… well, it was basically a den of thieves. The sick, the lame, the mentally ill and the honest poor no longer sought refuge in The Craphole. There were no children in the place any more, either - it had been considered by various agencies of the Hong Kong government to be no fit place for the children of even the most unpleasant of people to be born and raised well before the hand-back of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China. Getting pregnant, or getting your partner pregnant, was a guaranteed one-way ticket out of The Craphole and into a Housing Authority apartment, and a welcome one; The Craphole had been spartan and poorly constructed by the standards of 1943 Japanese military architecture, now it was a giant, damp, draughty monument to slum living and the power of improvisation . The majority of the residents of The Craphole today were halfway round a revolving door that would eject them straight back into the prison cell they had come here from, while others were hiding from creditors, or keeping their heads down while they worked hard to feed addictions through petty crime. The Hong Kong Police had long ago worked out that while the law applied equally to everybody, if they applied it with a little less rigour than they did everywhere else to The Craphole, all the scum tended to gravitate to one spot where it could be kept an eye on and locked up again if it got too ambitious. The Craphole was also self-managing to a basic extent; the Police turned, if not a blind, at least a blurred eye towards low level villainy, the chop shop that they knew ran in the courtyard of The Craphole, the minor scams, counterfeit goods, fake auctions, pickpocketing and boosted car radios that were the regular stock in trade of The Craphole's unpleasant but industrious criminal community, but in turn that community knew, partly because it had been explained to them in terms, that if the police did have to kick the gates down and come in mob handed because somebody inside those gates had 'crossed the line', which would have included so much as a sniff of guns, hard drug importation and dealing, violent crime or anything bigger than a few stolen cars, then everybody would be in the dock for every unpaid parking ticket, betting scam, pot plant, fake designer t-shirt and set of loaded dice that could be pinned on them. They could probably just put barbed wire round the perimeter and call it a new jail. Although they might need to upgrade the plumbing before they could get away with doing that.
The residents of The Craphole were of course entirely pragmatic about all this. They would come together en-masse to deal with any external threats, but an internal threat - such as somebody who had very obviously crossed that fuzzy, ill-defined 'line', the rapists and murderers, the people smugglers, would quickly find themselves outside the gate with a boot print on their arse, knowing that they had about ten minutes before somebody in there called the police and tried to claim a reward for turning them in.
As Sammy was nosing the faux taxi inside the gates and drawing to a halt near to a very, very large gentleman with a bald head, who went by the name of 'Big Lim' for very obvious reasons, it suddenly struck Sammy that he was playing around very close to that fuzzy line where he risked bringing down the wrath of the HKP on The Craphole and thus risked being booted out of the place. Bopping unsuspecting mainland Chinese ex-rice-farmers on the head and stealing their cash someplace well away from the Craphole was one thing, all be it not one thing that would sound good read out in court, but it was quite another to bring an American tourist on his gap year, or whatever the blond kid was doing in Hong Kong, back to The Craphole, club him over the head actually on the premises, then effectively abduct him and hold him incommunicado for a few hours before dumping him in a ditch somewhere. This was all Billy's idea, of course - and Billy was, typically, nowhere to be seen when there was anything that might involve getting his hands dirty to be done. But it occurred to Sammy that the quicker they got the kid bound, gagged and tucked up out of sight, the less chance there was of somebody deciding he had crossed that line, rather than just done a quick dance along it.
As the car stopped, Sammy slammed it in to Park and hopped out, but not quickly enough to beat the blond kid out of the back door, rather vindicating his assessment earlier that he might be a bit on the quick and slippery side for him to have taken him on alone.
"So… this doesn't look like the docks… where are we?", asked the blond kid in some confusion, looking at Sammy quizzically as Big Lim loomed over him. Sammy said "Well, it's like this, kid…", and moved around to position himself so that the blond youth had his back fully turned towards the man mountain that was Big Lim, who needed no further invitation, as he pulled his hand out from behind his back to reveal a large black rubber cosh which he brought down violently on the back of the blond kid's neck.
Or rather… he didn't. He brought it down sharply and quickly on the spot where the back of the kids neck had been half a nanosecond before, but somehow he had moved out the way and was now eyeing them both suspiciously. "Hey….", he said, uncertainly. "Is this some kind of shakedown or something? Because if it is, you really,
really don't want to do this. ". Amazingly, with Big Lim lumbering towards him frowning and waving the black rubber cosh menacingly, the kid didn't look remotely scared. Instead he said "Listen, seriously, just take me to Fung-Mat road now and I'll forget all this ever happened, OK?
'Clearly, he is too stupid to be scared!', thought Sammy.
The kid started backing away from the car and deeper into the courtyard, apparently pleading with Big Lim not to do anything rash and telling him that he really didn't want to do what he was trying to do. Sammy left him to Big Lim's tender mercies as he went back to the driver's seat and recovered the keys, then trotted back round to the boot and opened it to get the teenager's wooden trunk out of the boot; he needed to make quickly room for his erstwhile passenger in there.
'Who goes anywhere with a wooden trunk these days?' he wondered, as he opened the boot and inspected the intricately detailed mahogany, or was it teak, chest.
It was as he just started to lean forwards and into the boot to grab the trunk and drag it out into the daylight that he got the fright of his life, as the boot-lid slammed shut with a loud crash, passing the tip of his nose by a millimetre and rapping his knuckles as it went from open to closed in a moment. He staggered back in pain and shock, eyes like saucers as he was confronted by the blond youth, crouching like a chimpanzee on the now closed boot of the car, staring him in the face. A millisecond later and he surely would have had his head or neck slammed between the falling boot lid and the lip of the boot, which would have very likely been the end of him.
"Which part of 'You really do not want to do this' are you not understanding here?", demanded the annoyed looking youth. Had he really leapt 20 feet across the courtyard from where he was backing away from Big Lim to land on the boot lid? Nah, impossible… but anyway, looking past the kid, why was Big Lim sitting on the floor in the middle of the courtyard looking like somebody had just really, seriously annoyed him? Big Lim didn't get annoyed. He always worked with a smile on his face, laughing his way through life as he indulged in playful casual thuggery for fun and profit. Sammy had never seen an angry Big Lim before and he was quite glad of that!
Big Lim stood up and lumbered angrily away towards his cubicle, which was just inside the nearest entrance of the adjacent barrack block, but Sammy was barely paying attention to the movement out of the corner of his eye, as he was looking directly into the fearless and determined features of the blond
gweilo at very close quarters. This
definitely wasn't in the script! Where was Billy now, so full of bright ideas earlier? Probably still up on the roof watching all this.
Sammy shook one of his stinging hands and then reached behind him and pulled his own trusty black rubber cosh from the small of his back, where he had tucked it during the drive across from Tsing Yi, brandishing it in what he hoped was a menacing fashion at the blond kid. Who cocked his head to the left and said "So I guess that means you don't want that big tip, huh?". Then Sammy felt a stinging pain in his forearm, even though he didn't see the unimposing looking American geek move a muscle from his position perched on the boot of the Mercedes, and the cosh toppled to the floor from his nerveless, numb, and entirely paralysed fingers. Had the blond kid punched his forearm so quickly that he didn't even see the movement despite Sammy staring right at him? Again, impossible, he thought. And yet, he seemed to be entirely numb below the point where he had felt the stinging blow and his right wrist and hand flopped uselessly in front of him. He stepped back again, in some confusion.
The blond youth pulled the car keys out of the boot lid, and said "You are going to drive me to Fung-Mat road, and you are going to get me there before half past five. If we go now, then your big friend over there isn't going to get hurt, and I'm not going to miss my boat. Everybody wins. Am I making sense here?".
At that moment, Big Lim stalked out of the doorway of the barrack block, hefting a baseball bat in his hands - although to be honest it did look rather more like a toothpick in his grasp. The blond kid glanced over his shoulder and sighed with what Sammy took to be exasperation. Then he hopped off of the boot lid and strolled round the side of the car, and reached into his pocket, pulling out… something small, pink and wriggling. Opening the rear door of the Mercedes, he placed the… thing… no, creature… on the back seat, then handed it the car keys and said "Lock the doors, Rufus, I'll be back in a moment."; Sammy was sure he heard the little pink thing say "OK…", but again that was impossible. Sammy decided he must be hallucinating or something. Except that a moment later there was a pink blur inside the car and all four door locks went down in sequence. A few moments after that, just as Sammy approached the car again, with the retreat of the blond kid, the ugly wrinkled pink thing suddenly jumped onto the rear parcel shelf and stuck its little tongue out at him, with its tiny pink hands stuck in its ears like moose antlers! Sammy, of course, jumped back again. This was clearly getting weirder and weirder.
He turned his attention to Big Lim, trying to ignore the hideous wrinkly rodent that appeared to be taunting him through the rear window of the Mercedes; Big Lim looked like he had 'crossing the line' very firmly in his mind. Anxiously, Sammy called out 'Don't kill him, Lim!', in Cantonese. He didn't much fancy being an accessory to murder, and killing somebody in the courtyard of The Craphole would bring the coals of hell down on the place if anybody ever found out what had happened. Maybe he could get out from under by testifying against Lim if the worst happened?
Maybe…
Meanwhile, the blond kid was walking directly towards Big Lim, at much the same speed as Big Lim was lumbering towards the kid, which Sammy thought was indicative of a serious death wish on the part of the idiot geek
gweilo.
As they closed to bat range, Lim suddenly swung the baseball bat (which never had, and likely never would strike anything as mundane as a baseball) violently and powerfully at the blond kid's legs. The kid hopped over the flying bat impassively. An even angrier Big Lim swung the bat back the other way as hard as he could, this time at chest height, and amazingly, rather than ducking under the swinging bat, the kid hopped over it again. Which was, again, impossible of course. But Sammy was definitely paying attention now, and he was sure that it had really happened. Finally, Big Lim cycled the bat round behind his head and started to bring it straight down on top of the blond kid from above; Sammy steeled himself for the geek's head to explode all over the courtyard, but instead, there was a sudden blur as what must have been a fist shot forward and upwards from the blond kid to hit Big Lim square on the chin.
The bat stopped in mid arc, just short of the vertical. Big Lim's eyes glazed over. The bat slowly toppled from Lim's nerveless fingers and landed with a clatter on the worn flagstones directly behind him, and then perhaps half a second later, Big Lim himself toppled slowly forwards like a falling statue; the blond kid stepped aside as he fell, landing full length with a loud smack as he face-planted on the cobbles, arms still outstretched above his head in striking position.
A small cloud of dust billowed around him.
The blond kid stepped over the prone figure and started walking back towards Sammy, looking entirely unmoved by what had just happened. Which is more than could be said for Sammy himself who was rooted to the spot in shock and disbelief. But he wasn't the only spectator in the courtyard, as Sammy remembered when Lo Fung bellowed belligerently at the blond kid, while stalking past Sammy .
To be honest, Sammy kept well away from Lo Fung. As did everybody else. He lived, ate, slept, exercised and trained in and around the little hut that the denizens of The Craphole had built for him just inside the gate that it was his 'job' to guard against any and all unwelcome visitors. A few years before he had been the All Kowloon Open Class Muay Thai champion and tipped for a glittering career in the ring as a professional fighter, before a drugs test had caught his steroid habit and had seen him banned from sanctioned competition. A second failed test after his (brutally victorious) comeback fight had seen that extended to a life ban, and these days the only time he wasn't at his post guarding the gate of the Craphole was when he was fighting, and winning, on the illegal underground cage fighting circuit. The man was both lethal and a walking case of 'roid rage on legs. He made an excellent humanoid guard dog, and an excellent no-rules cage fighter, but as a human being he had absolutely nothing to recommend him. It had been said, only half in unfunny jest, that the only reason he wasn't kept chained to a stake in the courtyard was because nobody was brave enough to try to get a collar on him.
Poor kid. He didn't deserve that. Still, if Lo Fung beat him to death, at least Sammy wouldn't be implicated; the police knew all about Lo Fung and his capacity for extreme violence without provocation.
Lo Fung started to sprint towards the blond youth, who spread his arms wide in an unthreatening gesture, as if to say 'I have no beef with you', but clearly he didn't know Lo Fung, who leapt into a flying kick at the blond youth's chest. Almost predictably, though, he flew over the kid's head when the youth dropped all the way to the floor a millisecond before the psychotic gatekeeper's foot connected. The enraged cage-fighter landed into a fighting stance, and rushed the kid again, and now the kid was still talking to Lo Fung, as he threw a breathtaking selection of rapid-fire kicks, punches and knee strikes at the comparatively wimpish looking teen. In fact, the only thing more amazing than the non-stop whirlwind barrage of powerful potentially bone-shattering assaults being aimed at one unintimidating blond geek by the out of control and rampaging Lo Fung, was the fact that not only were none of them connecting as the blond geek in question hopped, skipped, back-flipped, contorted, dodged and sidestepped the barrage, he was continually if futilely trying to talk the enraged gatekeeper down.
Clearly this couldn't go on forever, it was beyond Sammy's belief that it had lasted for more than two seconds, but when it did end, it certainly wasn't in the way that Sammy had steeled himself for it to do so.
After a while, the blonde kid opened a small gap between himself and his assailant and said "Now listen!", quite loudly. Lo Fung promptly closed the new gap by leaping in for some kind of jumping spinning kick. However, this time, instead of simply dodging the attack, the blond kid helped Lo Fung on his way through the air, and he landed in an untidy heap ten feet away . Lo Fung was evidently feeling no pain, though, as he bellowed in even greater rage and sprung to his feet. Again the blonde kid shouted "Seriously, dude…". As if that was going to slow down Lo Fung who was now sprinting towards the youth, screaming like a maniac. However, what certainly did slow Lo Fung down, as he left the ground running at full speed and spun at an incredible rate with the heel of his left foot outstretched to take the blond kid's head right off his shoulders, was a sudden blur of impossible to decipher movement where the kid had been standing a moment before, and then rather than spinning in the horizontal axis as he jumped towards the youthful
gweilo, he was actually heading up in the air in an arc over the blond kid's head, rotating end over end. He managed four complete piked somersaults as he rose to over eight feet in the air and then plummeted back to earth, although he was clearly already out cold as he flew. He landed head first on the stone flags in a tangle of arms and legs with a sickening 'splat'.
The blond youth turned sadly towards Sammy and begun trudging unhappily in his direction. "That
so didn't need to happen!", said the youth shaking his head. "Please, just drop me on Fung-Mat road, that really is all I ask…".
But Sammy was quite white and shaking like a leaf. He had just seen the blond kid contemptuously toy with and then, he thought quite likely kill with one kick, the most terrifyingly dangerous person he had ever previously met, right in front of him, and now the new most dangerous person he had ever met was advancing towards him. He realised that the feeling had returned to his right arm. Well, it was now painful and he could apparently move his fingers again. He fumbled desperately under the neckline of his T-shirt until his trembling hand closed on the whistle that hung there on a lanyard, pulled it to his lips, and blew as hard as he could for as long as he could.
The blond youth stopped, and for the first time, Sammy thought he saw fear flicker across his face.
"What did you just do?", asked the youth in an accusing tone.
Sammy said nothing, merely cringed.
Around him, he could hear the distant slam of doors, the sound of running feet and further whistle blasts. But none of those things would save him if this…
killer gweilo… decided to take revenge on him now before his own fate was sealed as it inevitably shortly would be.
"Did you just do what I think you did?", asked the blond youth, accusingly?
Sammy still cringed.
"Oh man… you
so didn't want to do that. And this is
so not going to end well...", said the blond youth, his shoulders sagging even further, as he turned round and started trudging miserably back more deeply into the courtyard.
This was not the reaction Sammy had been expecting. Out the corner of his eye, he spotted the pink hairless
thing on the parcel shelf of the Mercedes. It had its hand over its face and was shaking its little pink head equally sadly.
Did the
gweilo expect to take on the entire population of The Craphole and defeat them with his bare hands? Was there an army of equally dangerous
gweilo waiting outside the gate to come to his aid? Quarter of an hour ago he would have automatically assumed that the blond geek was delusional to the point of suicidal insanity. Now he was even more scared than he had been when the youth had started walking towards him after he had disposed of the raging Lo Fung so effortlessly and brutally .
By now the balconies and walkways of The Craphole were lined with people who had responded to The Craphole attack alarm, and looking to see what had provoked somebody to give the call to arms. The first to reach the blond kid, though, were the four men who had been working on ringing the two cars on ramps at the far end of the courtyard. They had apparently seen what fate had befallen Lo Fung, and were advancing on the
gweilo armed with the tools of their trade; crowbars, a lump hammer and the dismounted blade from a sheet metal guillotine. But apparently, the
gweilo was done trying to talk people down, because as the four burly armed men came at him, there was a blur of movement, and they all flew in different directions within a second of each other, the clatter of their weapons hitting the ground masking the noise that their bodies made as they too slammed into the ground at different points of the compass.
All at once, the vast audience ranged around the courtyard knew who their foe was, and there was a mass stampede of feet, some for the stairs, others back into their boltholes to arm themselves and
then head for the stairs.
"You can stop this!", yelled the blonde youth frantically, apparently talking to Sammy. But Sammy knew he couldn't. He had no idea what was going to happen now, but whatever it was it was terrifyingly completely out of Sammy's control, despite him having set the events in motion. Already the residents from the ground floor of The Craphole were gravitating towards the youth, and a couple of seconds after his plaintive cry, he was cut off from Sammy and the Mercedes by a heaving mass of humanity, and that was before the tide of angry young men running down the stairs piled in.
However, as the
gweilo vanished from his view, they clearly hadn't overwhelmed him yet, as Sammy could hear screams and the sounds of cries of pain and cracking bone from somewhere on the other side of the crowd. In fact, after a few seconds, the intensity and frequency of the screams grew, and suddenly the crowd started to flow the other way. As Sammy watched in some amazement, it thinned a little and expanded, and Sammy could once again see the lethal teenager, who had obtained a set of Nunchaka from somewhere and was twirling them about himself in very rapid and intricate patterns. Round him lay a large number of prone bodies, some rolling around in pain, others very still, some with limbs in very unnatural positions. The kid himself seemed to be standing on top of a small cairn of bodies, and every couple of seconds there was a 'thwack' as the free end of the rice-flail impacted some part of an assailant. But incredibly, for now he had opened some clear space around himself, and he started trying to make his way down from his mound of unconscious (or worse) bodies and head towards Sammy, who realised that he was still intent on getting his ride to the damned harbour!
Of course, the moment he began moving, the emboldened crowd, now reinforced by more people making their way down from the upper floors, tried to fall on him en-masse again. This time some amongst their number were armed with knives, meat cleavers and a variety of improvised clubs, and again Sammy didn't expect him to emerge from the melee in one piece.
He should have done, though. This time, Sammy heard the unmistakeable sound of the clash of steel on steel, the screams became louder and more frantic, and when the crowd pressing in on the blond
gweilo eventually broke and ran this time, it exploded much more quickly and in total disarray. A scene of carnage was revealed. The teenage geek's sweater and cargo pants were splattered with blood, and judging by the severed limbs (many holding lethal weapons still clasped in their lifeless hands) and maimed bodies which were strewn around him, none of it was his. For his part he was crouching in a low stance, a sword held in an aggressive posture over his head. As Sammy watched, numb with disbelief, Chet Lok Pak, who Sammy knew well as somebody who ran a fine crooked dice game around the back alleys and pavement café's of Hong Kong Island and was definitely a lover not a fighter, suddenly decided for no sane reason to charge headlong at the terrifying youth with a meat cleaver held over his head. Perhaps he had seen one too many of his own friends slain or maimed by this… this… Sammy didn't have the words… but whatever his reasons, it was the last thing he ever did, as the blond geek sliced him lengthwise into two pieces from shoulder to hip in a welter of frothing blood.
The blond kid shook the blood from the blade of the sword, and then resumed his stately progress back towards Sammy and the Mercedes. But he had only gone a couple of steps when a knife whizzed past his head. Within a couple of seconds, total pandemonium broke loose as the surviving residents of The Craphole who were now pressed back against the sides of the courtyard began pelting the blond kid with missiles from all sides. The kid was dodging as many as he could, and swatting others away, but at least one hit him, although luckily for him it didn't put him down, and it emboldened the rock throwers. When the first rocks and bricks started coming down from above as well, it looked like the kid was probably going to go down after all, and judging by what he had done to so many residents of The Craphole already, there probably wasn't going to be much left of him at the end of all this by the time the angry vengeful young men with the meat cleavers had finished their work.
However, the sword he was carrying suddenly morphed into a large shield, Sammy saw it happen, and recent experience had taught him that the impossible was the new normal. The rocks falling from above bounced off the shield like particularly lethal hailstones, but the more horizontal missiles continued to fly towards the kid, who continued to dodge them athletically, until at some point he appeared to lose patience with the fact that he was pinned down, and suddenly he was performing eye-wateringly rapid spinning kicks that caught the missiles in mid-air and fired them back whence they came in rapid succession. A dozen of the missile throwing crowd gathered around the perimeter of the courtyard were struck hard by very fast moving projectiles and sent flying, or in one case had his face caved in by a brick he had thrown moments earlier. The volume of projectiles thrown at ground level was immediately reduced, and some of the rock throwers were forced back into the horseshoe shaped former barrack block. Gradually the blond kid was able to clear the courtyard of anybody still able to move under their own power, while protecting himself from the rain of debris from above with the large shield. And then, still under a rain of missiles from above, he once again took a step towards Sammy, with an expression that Sammy could only describe as hang-dog on his face.
At that moment, Sammy was shocked to hear a loud percussive report from somewhere above him, and hear the echoing whining splash of a ricocheting bullet off of stone. 'A gun?', thought Sammy. 'Here? Idiot! Mind you, it might be the only thing that can stop him!'.
Sammy looked up, just in time to see his co-conspirator and ideas man Billy Chin, standing way up on the roof and pointing a revolver down into the courtyard, fire a second shot.
This time, Sammy saw the shower of sparks as the bullet hit the shield. Unexpectedly, given the apparently thin metal, it did not penetrate, or even mark the surface. However, it clearly did hit with the force of a giant boulder dropped from above - the blond kid was hammered to the floor by the impact and grunted in pain. At which point, Sammy heard Billy yell "Now!", and suddenly a burning Molotov cocktail landed in the courtyard directly in front of the terrifyingly lethal blond geek, and exploded into a ball of fire. Two or three more were following it, aimed at the spot where the kid was pinned down behind the fireball that may have already engulfed him, and there were a further four gunshots.
'Nicely done, Billy', thought Sammy.
But only for a second, as it became obvious that the kid was no longer where the Molotov's had landed. When the fireballs evaporated, he was revealed to be running as fast as he could, which was apparently very fast indeed, towards the chop shop at the other end of the courtyard. Gone was his shield, and in it place he once again held the sword. Rocks, bricks and bottles pelted the ground around him as he ran, but nobody had apparently quite got his range as he moved at lightning speed and with subtle changes of course and pace along the way, and he reached his objective within a few seconds, long before Billy Chin had been able to reload the revolver he had obtained from somewhere, or indeed before the Molotov throwers had been able to move their crate of ammunition to the other end of the roof.
Sammy found himself yelling "Noooooo" involuntarily when he saw, a millisecond before it happened, exactly what the blond geek had in mind. The blade slashed horizontally, and improbably, straight through the top of the two gas bottles mounted on the trolley that sat between the two cars that had been in the process of having their identities changed. In one smooth and unimaginably fast movement, the blonde kid had ruptured an almost full bottle of pressurised Oxygen and a similar one of Acetylene, but also in the process disentangled them from the hoses and regulators attached to the valves that had been atop them, so that when he continued the movement and kicked the very heavy bottle trolley in just the right place, it was free to fly straight through the adjacent doorway and into the ground floor of The Craphole. The blond kid, meanwhile had dropped into a crouch, was now glowing bright blue like a neon shop sign and was huddled behind a very large shield that he had, once again, seemingly conjured from nowhere.
Sammy saw all this happen seemingly in slow motion, as he himself was already falling towards the ground in terror. In truth, he had expected the bottles to blow in the open and take out the kid and anybody in the courtyard, including Sammy, but he had reckoned without the kid impossibly (there was that word again) kicking them into the building. What actually happened was worse. Much worse. The giant explosion occurred inside the ground floor of the old barrack building at the bottom of the horseshoe. The back wall of The Craphole was effectively the rock face of the old quarry and an indestructible blast wall. The front wall of the lower two floors were constructed using the already quarried heavy stone blocks that were left in the old quarry when it closed down; had The Craphole been built throughout with the sub-standard concrete typical of wartime Japanese construction in Hong Kong, it would have long since collapsed under the combination of its own weight and decay. A construction approach designed to make Japanese Imperial Barracks Sham Tseng resistant to any allied bomb that might fall into the quarry itself now conspired to trap the huge blast and deflect it around the horseshoe internally. Although a small fireball and a wall of rubble and dust shot back in the direction of the geek, apparently engulfing him (although the blue glow was still clearly visible through the smoke), by far the larger part of the explosion rolled around inside the building, destroying internal structures and sending fireballs and showers of debris, along with the odd resident, shooting out of window after window around the horseshoe, until finally twin fireballs erupted from the doors either side of where Sammy was now lying, which marked the end of the horseshoe shaped Barrack building. The flames from the two fireballs comingled above his head as he lay on the ground and then were sucked back into the building with a hideous 'whoosh' as the intense fireball consumed all the oxygen within the confined space. And then, with a terrible roar, starting at the base of the horseshoe, the seat of the explosion, the entire building began to collapse in on itself, as the lower two floors lost structural integrity and the improvised structures built on top of them over the decades caved into the void. There was a terrible rumbling roaring sound that seemed to go on for hours, but probably only lasted a couple of minutes, and then total, awful silence.
After a while, Sammy opened his eyes, picked himself up slowly and looked at a scene of total devastation all around him. Fires burnt freely all over the heaped horseshoe of rubble that had once been The Craphole. In the middle, scattered rubble, dusty and burnt bodies, body parts and gore liberally covered the courtyard. Choking dust hung everywhere. The silence wasn't just oppressive, it felt like it weighed a tonne and lay heavily upon him as he stood alone in hell. He realised that he could see Billy to his left. Billy was looking straight at him. Sadly, Billy could not see him - his sightless eyes stared, obviously terror-struck in the moment of death, from through the top layer of the smoking rubble.
Perhaps he was also dead?
Perhaps he just wished he was.
And then… movement. He knew what it would be. Perhaps this was now his time? Perhaps the many sins he had committed in his short life were about to catch up with him? Sammy didn't believe in gods or demons, being a rational sort of soul. Or… hadn't. He could feel his personal belief system evaporating and reforming as he watched a gawky American teenager glowing a neon blue and marching towards him through the carnage, silhouetted against the burning rubble around the seat of the explosion, a sword at least metaphorically dripping with the blood of most of the people he knew and all of the people he had called 'friend' for any of the last ten years still in his hand.
He was resigned to his death now. It would be a blessed release.
Instead, the
gweilo marched up to him and suddenly returned to his normal colour. Amazingly, although his clothes were covered in dust, blood and gore, his face, hands and hair were miraculously dust free; it must be something to do with the blue glow, thought Sammy numbly.
The blond demon held his sword in front of him and there was a loud pop as it transformed itself into a tiny shield, which the fourth horseman of the apocalypse dropped into his pocket.
"I told you that you really didn't want to do this!", he said vacantly. Then he added "Fung-Mat road. Now. Get me there before 5:30 or I'll be very unhappy indeed."
The demon pointed at the car, which seemed to be coated in dust and have picked up a crack in the passenger side of the windscreen and a dent in the bonnet, but was otherwise apparently unscathed.
'OK… not dead yet…', thought Sammy. On autopilot, he went to climb into the car, as the demon did likewise, surprised to see the ugly pink think unlocking his door for him first. He climbed in and started the engine, then reversed out with a clatter over the now horizontal and unguarded corrugated iron gate. Looking at the dash clock, he realised that if he was going to get the demon to his next appointment on time, and possibly not spend tonight in hell, he was going to have to floor it.
So he did.
As he drove as quickly as he could, oblivious to the far less significant risk to his well-being of attracting police attention, he could hear a bizarre conversation behind him, between the demon and the ugly pink talking rat-thing. He listened in, glad of the distraction. There were things he absolutely didn't want to think about right now.
"It really wasn't my fault, Rufus. There was nothing else I could do. There were too many of them and they were all trying to kill me. All of them. If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened. It was awful...", said the demon.
"Awww…Yup, awful… horrible...", said the ugly pink thing, sympathetically.
"All those people. Dead. I'm starting to understand why they hid the idols the way they did, though. Mystical monkey power , no love…", said the demon bitterly.
"Aww… no mystical monkey power, no Ron though…", chittered the ugly pink rodent.
"No mystical monkey power, no Yamanouchi, no mission to Hong Kong!", said the demon bitterly.
"Mmmm… true…", said the ugly pink thing…
To be honest, Sammy had been starting to tune out ever since he had heard the demon blame him for the carnage. The words of the evil
gweilo bounced around inside his head like a ricocheting bullet.
If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened. As they drove rapidly back towards Hong Kong island, police cars, fire engines and ambulances began to pass them travelling the other way, firstly in ones and twos, then great streams of them, obviously all rushing to the scene of the catastrophe at The Craphole. No wonder nobody was paying attention to Sammy's squealing tyres and take-no-prisoners overtaking style as he raced the devil (or the devil's watch at least) to Fung-Mat road.
All those people. Dead. He made it with minutes to spare, pulling up near a temporary marquee on the waterfront with gaudily coloured flags fluttering above it. The demon took the keys from him without a word, went round to the back of the car and fiddled in the boot for a few moments, and then leaving it open, began walking not towards the tent, but towards a gap between two articulated lorries just next to the car, without a backwards glance.
All those people. Dead. If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened. Sammy climbed out of the car to shut the boot and retrieve the car keys, sneaking a look between the trucks as he passed. The demon was nowhere to be seen. He quickly climbed back into the car and started the engine, heading away from Fung Mat road as fast as he could. It was only when he glanced in the mirror at the receding marquee that he saw an entirely different man dressed all in black carrying a trunk that could have been identical to the demon's towards the entrance of the marquee…
If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened. If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened. If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened.
oOo
It was 10:30 that evening when the police finally caught up with Sammy, parked in a dry drainage tunnel in Kowloon. He was plastered from head to toe in dust, sitting in the Mercedes as he had been now for several hours. His eyes stared intently into the middle distance, pain lined his face. A freshly purchased hosepipe led from the exhaust pipe and in through the slightly wound down rear side window, and the engine was still running.
All those people. Dead.
