Hey Everyone,
New update time!!! I hope you all are ready to take a dive right into the sprawling slums of Hong Kong! This time, we're totally in the 21st Century. No flashbacks, no trips down memory lane. Welcome to Hong Kong circa 2016. As always, comments and questions welcomed. Enjoy!
© Paul Goodfellow and After the Scifi Apocalypse, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Paul Goodfellow and After the Scifi Apocalypse with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Chapter 11: The Wrong Questions
Kowloon Peninsula, New Territories
Hong Kong, Republic of Hong Kong
Twin Cities Federation
July 20, 2016
The ageing, bright red Austin Allegro cab sped away from a squat series of 1970’s buildings perched next to the cross-harbor expressway, the lights of Hong Kong Island blazing just across the harbor. The cab was old, prewar vintage complete with right-hand drive and patches of rust peeking through ripped side padding. The seat belts had long before broken, leaving the usually safety-conscious residents of China’s most prosperous city bereft of a harness in the ancient vehicle. Rather than plying his trade on Hong Kong Island, the driver stuck to his route between Kowloon City and the entrance to the Walled City. For him, that meant a group of patrons that did not question the state of his taxi cab. Most of his passengers were too far gone, either in a drug or alcohol-fueled haze, to care that the cab had no seat belts and smelled of leaking petrol and the driver’s stale sweat.
The ones that he picked up at one of the narrow alley entrances into the Walled City, the ones who were coming out of their heroin or opium stupor, they were the most dangerous. The driver had too many late-night visits to local hospitals and drug clinics to count. They were the reason why he carried a Tokarev pistol he’d bought off a Triad enforcer for a few hundred Hong Kong Dollars. They were also the reason why he had used it on more than one occasion. His wife lived in relative comfort up near the border with Shenzhen, relatively far away from the hustle and bustle of Kowloon City and the violence of the Walled City, which seemed to expand upward and outward every year.
His passenger, from a cursory glance, looked to be a third or fourth generation colonial. Dishwater blonde bordering on brown hair, green eyes, late twenties. In this area, he stuck out like a sore thumb. But, he had the muddled accent of someone who grew up in Kowloon City or maybe Butterfly Bay. A slight British coating over a thoroughly Hong Kong accent. His Cantonese was fluent, effortless. It was obvious that he did not come from the upper crust of the city’s elite. No taipans, business, or government elites in his family. Otherwise his Chinese would have been peppered with anachronistic pronunciations. He mixed his Mandarin and Cantonese sayings together, pigeoned with street English.
The language of modern Hong Kong business and government was upper crust British English, a holdover from the colonial era. The language of the city’s residents, however, was a hybrid Mandarin-Cantonese-Hakka-English that evolved in the Walled City after 1984. It spread out from there. By 2012, linguists from Hong Kong University had identified it as a new Chinese dialect. There were some who predicted that, if the federated cities ended up defining southern Chinese culture as it appeared they were already well on their way towards doing, they would end up replacing Cantonese and Hakka as the languages of the southern provinces with the new pigeon Chinese by the end of the century.
As the city’s judges and business elites negotiated deals while sounding like graduates of Britain’s prewar public schools, its residents shouted at each other in four tones (Mandarin), swore in eight tones (Cantonese), negotiated in six tones (Hakka), and set prices in English. Eventually all three would harmonize. The city’s reputation for being a melting pot was not overstated.
“So what are you doing all the way out here, eh laowai?” The cabbie asked in pigeon.
“Don’t go calling me old foreigner, uncle. I know my way around,” the passenger replied. The cabbie let out a loud belly laugh.
“Oh ho! A pasty white colonial who can muddle through our Chinese language without sounding like a museum piece,” said the cabbie.
“If I’m a colonial, then you’re the king of the walled city!” The passenger stated loudly in Hakka.
“Okay, okay, I won’t poke at your language anymore. Where to, again? I have a hard time finding apartment buildings around the Walled City. Too much expansion and too much construction around the area,” the cabbie said.
He slammed on the brakes as a bright green taxi merged onto the carriageway from the street. His balled-up fist met the horn. He reached his arm out the window of the cab and gave a very British two-fingered reply.
“Go roll back up your mother, pig-faced, shit eating hun dan! Diu nei lo mo!” The cabbie proclaimed, his head stuck out the window as well. [Hun dan: Extremely offensive form of the phrase ‘scoundrel’/’scumbag’ or ‘bastard.] [Diu nei lo mo: Literally translates to f*** your mother in Cantonese.]
The driver of the green cab returned the two-fingered salute and accelerated quickly, merging three lanes over and cutting off a fruit lorry. He returned his arm and head back into the cab and glanced back at his passenger, who was totally nonplussed at the encounter.
“You alright back there?”
“I’ve lived in Hong Kong for my entire life. You could roll the cab and I wouldn’t be surprised.”
The cabbie laughed even louder than before at that statement.
“Okay, okay xiao huai dan [literal translation: brat], sorry. I’m not used to getting colonials in my cab, especially not ones that speak like us.”
“There aren’t many foreigners who leave Hong Kong Island to begin with. At least, not unless they’re wearing a uniform or driving a military vehicle.”
“True, true. Alright. So, you’re going to the Kowloon Peninsula New Apartment Development just outside Sai Tau Tsuen, right?”
“Yeah. Apartment bloc 5115, building H.”
The cabbie nodded his head and took the Sai Tau Tsuen exit. Although the village technically still existed, the high-rise apartments had been swamped by the ever-expanding Walled City. Fifty story buildings rose out of a maze of cobbled together structures that stretched out in all directions. Formal architecture and informal met as the buildings spread like bacteria from their nucleus. At the heart of the settlement was its core, where shop keepers and hawkers lived under artificial lights. The water supply ran through old PVC and lead pipes connected to the city’s water mains and wells drilled by the triads. A nuclear apocalypse had come and gone without much notice. The Walled City was the Walled City no matter what happened outside to the world around it. At the heart of it all, in the fabled City of Darkness, streets that had not seen daylight since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation housed opium dens, bars, and prostitution houses and continued with the business of living regardless of radioactive fallout.
“I still can’t believe that they pulled eighteen thousand dead and dying out of there in ’84 and people didn’t abandon it,” the cabbie said, jabbing his thumb at a part of the settlement that ran adjacent to the new elevated carriageway.
“Tell me about it. I remember hearing my father talk about it when I was a kid. Population rebounded in five years. All those refugees from Guangzhou and Shenzhen that the city took in before the bombs, they had to send them somewhere. Even after the ’87 riots,” the passenger replied.
“That was a bad time. I was fifteen back then. Lived close enough to hear the gunshots. That was back before the police investigations and the purges. Still can’t believe how deeply the Triads embedded themselves into city government and how many are left now. It’s still a no-go for police in the red-light districts. You get hurt or OD in there, you’re taking your life into your own hands. All those unlicensed doctors, dentists who do root canals with opium as a sedative. That’s the last place I want to end up,” the cabbie explained.
“Still better than those villages up in Anhui and Hubei. Irradiated food, irradiated water, roving militias, a handful of old government officers heading up gangs of teenagers and children hopped up on amphetamines and opium, harems of abducted women from the villages. There’s a reason why we pay those private contractors to guard the railway up north to Xi’an.”
The cabbie silently nodded his head at that statement.
“I still can’t figure out how they let the Walled City take over everything around it. They used to have agreements with the government to keep the sprawl down. What happened?” The cabbie asked.
“After the war there were too many people and too little land. The ones that had made it south of the border before the Exchange ended up crowding around Kowloon City, which you probably remember. Government had to find a place to send them, and they didn’t want them taking up farmland near the border. So, they were limited to a fifteen-kilometer radius around Kowloon City. Cheapest place for them to go was the Walled City. After the population dropped by half, they figured there was enough room to stick the refugees there. Population boom after the war, together with refugees and migrants from across the border, meant people were funneled there. No one stopped the growth because they figured it was better than having them move out of the area and start trying to cross the harbor to Hong Kong Island.”
“You a reporter or something?” The cabbie asked.
“Historian. Finishing up my dissertation on the war at Hong Kong University. That’s why I live near the Walled City. Easier for me to find survivors willing to provide first hand stories.”
The cabbie nodded and turned down a dimly lit alleyway. Even though the area they were driving through was not officially part of the Walled City, they were now in its outer suburbs. Ramshackle houses and business fronts crowded the narrow street. Neon lights proclaiming twenty-four hour pharmacies, Chinese traditional medicine, medical exams, and all-night fish restaurants burned brightly; their green, orange, and blue glow gave the street a lurid feeling. Shadows fell on broken concrete under almost-industrial lighting.
The prewar street lights had all but burned out. A few locals had tried to replace the prewar sodium vapor bulbs with fluorescent lighting. Usually that resulted in burst bulbs and a shower of glass for passers-by. Sometimes they managed to make it work. Most of the time it meant leaving rusting street lamps up while setting up their own makeshift street lights next to them.
The deeper into the Walled City suburbs they drove, the more ramshackle the buildings around them appeared to be.
“Any reason why we’re cutting through this part of the W.C.’s suburbs?” The passenger asked. [Note: Usually used as a shortened term for the Kowloon Walled City. Also references ‘Water Closet,’ or toilet.]
“I know a few alleyways that feed into what serves as an arterial in this area. Don’t worry. I’ve worked here for twenty years; I know my way around.” The driver said.
“You’ve been driving since the mid-1990’s?” The passenger asked.
“I was working in a garment factory not too far from here along with my wife when they announced the lifting of the petrol ration for non-emergency businesses, specifically cab companies. Building super had this old car sitting in the back yard of the tenement I lived in out near Kwun Tong. He gave it to me in 1994 just after the announcement. I fixed it up and got it running again, managed to sign on with a cab company that had kept operating since ’84 on very limited petrol rations,” the cabbie explained.
“You must have made a fortune,” replied the passenger.
“That I did. I saved for a year and managed to get a small house for my wife and I up north, near the Huanggang Border Crossing, far away from the crime and the refugees and the misery. It had a small garden that she could grow food in, really make sure that our kids had the right sort of food to eat and the right kind of air to breathe. We thought that being out there would be a godsend,” the cabbie said in a deflated tone.
“What happened?” The passenger asked. The lights of the W.C’s suburbs seemed to fade in perception to the passenger as he focused on his cab driver.
“We found out that my wife and I were infertile. The doctors said that we had both been exposed to too much radiation during the war, like a lot of people my age. There were treatments, but not much else that we could do. My grandmother, who was still alive at the time, blamed it on our house. She said that we were too close to the Huanggang Border Crossing, that the yaoguai had cursed our attempts to have children. She kept telling us that when so many die in such a small place and in such a violent way that they would take revenge by denying us children. I didn’t listen to her. We never did have children,” he replied. [Yaoguai: Can translate to either ‘spirit,’ ‘ghost,’ or ‘demon’ depending on the inflexion and context.]
“Your wife still lives up there?” The passenger asked.
“She does. We are still married, though we see each other rarely now. I spent all my money on the house and medical treatments for us to have children. All the money I made as a cabbie was gone. I couldn’t buy a new cab, and I ended up mortgaging this to the cab company for one final infertility treatment for she and I about eight years ago. It didn’t work. I don’t even own my own cab anymore. She thinks I am an embarrassment. I send her my paychecks and tips. I keep a little for myself for food and rent on a closet in Kowloon City where I sleep on days off, and a little more now and again for a visit to the brothel.”
The passenger stared out the window at that statement. They had come out of the labyrinthine maze of back alleys and onto what appeared to be a main thoroughfare. There appeared to be city maintained streetlights as well, a sign that they were somewhat out of the suburbs of the W.C.
“I’m John, by the way,” said the passenger.
“John, I’m Chin. Good to meet you,” the cabbie replied.
John stared out the window and saw more familiar sights. Finally, after ten more minutes in the cab, they pulled up in front of his apartment complex. He gave Chin a wad of HKD through the metal bars that separated the back seat from the front.
“Drive safe, Chin,” John said. Chin smiled and gave him a mock salute.
“Good luck on your book.” With that, John got out and shut the cab door behind him. He walked up the stairs to his apartment complex and unlocked the front door, listening to Chin’s cab engine sputtering as it drove back towards one of the many entrances to the Walled City and his next passenger as he worked the lock.
John stopped on his way to the elevator, checking his mail in the process. There was a water bill and a notification from the History Department about an upcoming research grant deadline. Nothing pressing. He stuck the mail into his satchel and made his way to a small elevator. The claustrophobic metal box rose slowly, creaking and rattling as it rose to the fifteenth floor.
He heard a loud thump down the hall in the direction of his apartment. There had been a few instances when the Triads had come into apartments to extort money or demand payments from locals. He knew that his building super worked for the triads in some capacity; most of the residents in his neighborhood were employed in some illegal or extra-legal jobs. But he had never taken money from any triad affiliate. He hoped that they would leave him alone, as the last thing that he wanted to deal with was extortion from local gang members.
John slowly made his way down the hall. He could see that his door was ajar, a thin stream of light coming from his living room.
“Wo cao,” he muttered under his breath. [Translation: Equivalent of ‘fuck.’]
He crept towards his door, slowly moving towards the entryway. He pushed the door open, expecting to see a group of triad members gathered around a char in the center of the room. Instead, as he pushed the door open, the sight that greeted him was instead of his papers spread out across his living room floor. He could see his filing cabinet tipped over, hand written notes and typed transcriptions of interviews roughly spread across his living room.
“What the hell is this!?” He declared.
A shadow moved in his bedroom. Just as he walked down his hall towards it, a figure burst out of the room. The man grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him to the ground. Just as he was trying to struggle to his feet, the figure put his weight onto John’s shoulders.
“Get off me!” John screamed. The figure took out a needle, popped the cap off in one fluid motion, and jabbed it into his neck, depressing the plunger. He felt the effects of whatever the man injected into him quickly.
Just as he was losing consciousness, he heard someone call out from the bedroom, “Get him ready. We need to be out of here in ten.”
Blackness came over him. The last thing he felt as unconsciousness came like a wave was a pair of hands lifting him up off the ground.
……………………………………………………………………..
“Wake up, ong lan gau wanker,” was the first thing John heard upon regaining consciousness. He was rudely shaken out of unconsciousness by a slap across the face, a bucket of icy water, and the garlic-green onion breath of a man screaming directly in his face. [Ong Lan Gau: Dumb fuck in Cantonese]
John squinted his eyes and tried to focus on what was around him. The air was putrid, hot and moist, and smelled of rotting garbage and human waste. Everything around him smelled (and tasted) stale, as if there had not been air circulation in the room for years. His eyes slowly focused, revealing three figures. One appeared to be in a business suit. The other two were wearing blue shirts, black pants, and a black strap diagonally across their chest from left to right. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think that they were Hong Kong Police.
“Shake it off, John. We have some things to talk about,” the man in the suit said.
The cold water and slap across the face had returned some feeling to him. He shook his head a few times and forced his eyes open, blinking hard to try and return some clarity to his eyes. The more consciousness returned to him and the better his eyesight became, the less he liked of the room he was sitting in.
He was tied to an old wooden chair, the ropes knotted tightly against his arms, legs, and chest. After another minute or so of blinking and trying to focus on his surroundings, it became clear to him that he was in the last place anyone wanted to be.
“Do you know where you are now?” The man in the suit said.
John stared at the room, moving his head back and forth, and finally up at the ceiling. There was a crude series of wires, pipes, and hoses hung off what appeared to be an aged concrete ceiling stained by decades of water leaks. There was black mold growing in one of the corners, and the bodies of a handful of rodents scattered in the four corners of the room. The wall looked to have been metal siding at some point that was repurposed into a room divider. Half dissolved cigarette butts were scattered across the floor, along with old plastic bottles and old food wrappers. A few yellowed sheets of newsprint had been crumpled up and thrown on the floor as well. A prewar newspaper hung on the wall across from him, the glass had broken in half diagonally. The date looked to be 1968, but John could not entirely tell.
“Oh god,” he muttered to himself.
“God can’t help you down here,” the man replied.
“Why am I here?” John asked.
The man waved the two police officers off, directing them to opposite sides of the room.
“You started asking the wrong questions to the wrong people,” said the suited figure.
“We’re in the W.C.?” John asked.
“Observant. Yes, we are,” the man replied.
“Why here? I know survivor families that live in the Walled City. It’s not like I can’t find my way out,” John replied.
“Because this isn’t the nice part of the W.C. This is the part that even the locals refuse to come to. The heart of the Walled City, the City of Darkness,” the man replied.
“Are you nuts? Do you know how long it will take to find your way out of here?” John asked.
“Give the right bribes to the right people and it won’t be too long,” the man said.
John stared at him for a moment. He was colonial, that much was for certain. Purebred third or fourth generation British, like him. He did not have the Hong Kong inflexion in his English pronunciation. Taipan’s son most likely, John thought. They were the only ones that would put the effort into keeping their inflexion as close to Public School pronunciations as possible.
“What do you want?” John spit out.
“We’re going to have a little chat, you and I. And at the end of it, you’ll have three choices. One is good, and the other two are not,” the figure replied.
“If you’re going to threaten to leave me here, don’t bother. I can figure my way out eventually.”
“I doubt that very highly. Take note of your surroundings before making your decision,” the figure said.
John steadied his breath and looked around. He became aware of a rhythmic thumping in the distance. What sounded like a synth was blaring somewhere nearby. The floor vibrated now and again.
“We’re near one of the red-light districts,” John said.
“Good, at least you have the common sense to figure that much out. We’re just down the block from a strip bar and opium den run by one of the neighborhood militias,” the man replied.
“The mainland refugee militias?” John asked.
“I see you keep up with the South China Morning Post,” the man said with a small chuckle.
“It’s dangerous for us to be here, you need to get us somewhere safer! They’ll think we’re here on government business. They’ll kill us and sell our bodies to the local herbal medicine shop!” John exclaimed in a tone that bordered on desperation.
“Don’t worry about the guards, they’ve been taken care of for now,” the suited figure said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a pack of gum, shaking out a small silver stick, unwrapping it, and shoving it roughly into his mouth.
“You know, I heard that the traditional Chinese shops in the mainland have a grading system for human parts. Such and such a price for perfect vision versus near or far-sighted. Healthy liver or pancreas, that gets a decent price. Now thyroids, that’ll get you a steep price. They think that ingesting healthy human body parts will rebalance the humors and spirits, bring the chi back into balance. Some of them even believe that it’ll fight off radiation exposure. I wonder what they’ll pay for you?” The suited figure explained.
John shuddered mentally.
“Let’s get this over with. What do you want?” John asked pointedly.
“You’ve been talking to the wrong people, John. We were fine with you going up to Xi’an and talking to those barbarians who survived Su Hongshan’s directorate and the last fading remnants of the CPC out in the Western Provinces. We were fine with you going to Fujian. We were even fine with you talking to Captain Brown. You crossed a line yesterday, though,” the man said.
“You mean interviewing Caldeira? The GNR officer? He’s neck deep in the Triads and sounded like an old supporter of the Portuguese dictatorship. Typical Macauese politics,” John replied.
“You have no idea the hornet’s nest you stepped on when you went to Macau and interviewed him. There are things that you don’t know about that we would rather you didn’t go poking your nose into,” the suited man said.
“I’m a historian, I have a grant from the Hong Kong Recovery Administration and Hong Kong University to research this topic. I followed a lead.”
“You followed it too far and you stepped on a landmine. Now we’re forced to clean up the mess. We can do it with your help or we can do it without your help. With means that there won’t be any difficult questions that we’ll be answering. Without means that we’ll be keeping people from asking about your disappearance. Not hard, but not easy either.”
“My father…”
“Hasn’t talked to you since you entered the doctoral program. Your mother has been dead the past fifteen years. Your Filipino nanny that helped raise you has stage four leukemia and is dying in a nursing home. Your friends growing up have all moved on to prestigious law firms or medical programs. A few of them are up north in the Guangzhou Recovery Area managing reconstruction and decontamination, or middle management in the new semiconductor factories in Shenzhen. A few more teach school in Kowloon and the New Territories. Your ex-girlfriend hasn’t spoken to you in weeks since you two broke up. Your best friend is your co-author and we’ve already gotten him to agree to report you missing if we don’t call within twelve hours. His silence is guaranteed. Your only contacts are your mother’s two sisters, neither of whom talk to you on a regular basis,” the suited figure retorted.
“Why bother doing this at all if you can just kill me with no repercussions?” John asked.
“Because,” the figure replied, “we’d rather have your cooperation. There are things that you can do that we can’t. Things that you can write that will help our cause far more than just killing you and leaving you here to the wolves.”
“Like what?” John inquired.
“You can write. We want you to stay on Caldeira. In fact, we’re going to give you what you’ve been dreaming of since you started this dissertation: The lead of a lifetime.”
“What does that mean?”
“We’re going to give you Caldeira and his associates. They’re worse than you think and the bloody path they hacked goes back long before February 1984 and encompasses continents.”
“In exchange for what?”
“In exchange, you’re going to follow the Macau centric leads. Anything that leads back to Hong Kong, the Foreign Contingent, or the old British administration, you hand off to us and don’t follow it up. You’re free to follow any lead you find in mainland China. Any incriminating documents about the North Chinese People’s Directorate, or the Far Eastern Republic is open territory. You can do whatever you want. But, if during your investigations you find leads that bring you back to Hong Kong proper and to the government, we’ll make contact and you hand them off to us. Any notes you took are ours as well,” the suited figure explained.
“So you want me to play lackey for you? A friendly voice in the academy, a positive spin on the city government’s postwar administration that’ll keep prying eyes away from what you all did?” John asked in a biting tone.
A piercing scream echoed out from down the hallway, followed by a gurgling noise. He heard shuffling feet and a metallic clank. Someone had dropped whatever blunt object they had used to impale the man onto the filthy concrete and run off.
“I want you to listen to what is happening out there,” the figure said.
“What?” John replied. Terror began to creep into his voice.
“Listen to that man dying. That’s a punctured lung, right there. His lung is filling with blood right now. Soon he’ll pass out from blood loss. No doctor could do anything for him here. Even on Hong Kong Island, in the type of hospital that your father could afford, it would be a touch and go type of thing. Here, he’ll be dead in an hour and his body picked up by the local medicinal shop. No one will know his name, or why they rammed what sounded like a piece of rusty steel rebar through his chest. He’ll be another faceless corpse for the witch doctors to chop up. Waste not, want not.”
John felt the blood draining out of his face and, for the first time since the encounter began, he felt true terror. The room was no longer huge to him, it was a cell; small, dirty, oppressive. The filth of his surroundings was no longer just rotten food and discolored plastic bottles. It was covered in a layer of human flesh and blood. He was surrounded by death on all sides. The air was stagnant and smelled of decay. There were hints of iron that in the air, spilled blood that circulated in the Walled City’s air supply and never left. Death was in the very air that he breathed.
In the bowels of one of the worst slums in the world, he was tied to a chair in a filthy concrete room; surrounded by men who would accept nothing less than his total cooperation. Without it, his blood and flesh would color the City of Darkness, forever imprisoned in the slum he knowingly moved nearer to than most. The deal he struck with the Walled City, affluence and stability for him and an outlet for the residents to tell their stories, was fading; meaningless in its totality. The city had chewed him up; now it looked like it would spit him out too. There was nothing more he could do. Without agreeing to the suited man’s demands, the W.C. would extract its pound of flesh from him: Blood for metaphorical blood. The dead who he, in his intellectual curiosity, had tried to bring back to life would instead make him pay for his ambitions dearly.
“Before I agree, I want to know why you need me to keep my investigation away from Hong Kong,” John asked.
“We have certain friends in Macauese politics, elected officials in the All-Macau Parliament who want to initiate real reforms and follow through with the promise of the new Constitution. They want the Emergency Planning Commission (EPC) gone, the Macau GNR and police purged of the old security forces, and a Prime Minister who will oversee the new government. In short, they want to replicate our government model over there. They don’t have the ammunition, yet, to remove the EPC or to push through a full review of GNR and police activities for the last thirty years. We know that the Macau High Court will fall on our side and will fully cooperate with a parliamentary inquiry. We also know that the police and younger GNR officials would support stripping the EPC of its power. Our contacts with the triads indicate that they would stay out of it.”
“If you have all of that, why do you need me?”
“We need someone who can publicize this. The SCMP is good, but it’s not enough. We’ll give you the leads you need to follow this, even slip you some official documents now and again to reinforce your case. Once you publish, our contacts in Macau have indicated that they would use your book to formally indict the EPC and the GNR. We’d be in the clear and allowed to quietly pursue our own house cleaning measures that we have been working on since ’97. You would get a cushy tenured job at Hong Kong University, and the world would go on.”
John let the information sink in for a moment. He knew where he was and he had a guess of who was holding him.
“If I had to guess, I’d say that you are military intelligence, right?” John asked.
“Even if you were right, I couldn’t verify that information.”
“You don’t need to. I can figure it out for myself.”
John sat silently for another moment. He could hear the echoes of labored breathing somewhere down the street. The man was dying. Soon, he would pass out and what was left of his life would be over. A painful end in a dark alley.
“I don’t want to end up down here like that man out there. You tell me what to do, and I’ll go from there.”
“Good. We’re going to knock you out again. You’ll wake up in twenty-four hours back in your apartment. We’ll be in contact within a day or two to set up the dead drops,” the intel man replied.
“Wait! I didn’t agree to being knocked out again!” John yelled out as the two police officers grabbed hold of his shoulders and shoved them down.
“You’re going under again,” the intel man stated dryly.
“Please! I don’t want to die down here! Please!” He yelled desperately as a hypodermic needle was shoved into his neck. Unconsciousness washed over him again. The last external stimulant that hit his senses was the faint smell of iron, heavy in the air. The dying man was being cut up in the street. He heard a wet thump in the distance, and then nothing.
……………………………………………………..
John shot awake. He gasped for air, his hand moving immediately to his neck. He threw himself out of bed and onto his floor. The cold tile was unforgiving as his elbow slammed into it and shot ribbons of pain up into his muscles.
“Ah! Ta ma de!” He exclaimed.
He could move all his limbs and was no longer tied up. He ran into the bathroom and flipped on the light. He had dark rings under his eyes and at least a day’s worth of facial growth. The stubble was patchy and long. He ripped his shirt off and began examining his upper body. He had two long red marks across his chest and arms. His hand shot up to his neck and felt what appeared to be a needle mark.
“It wasn’t a dream,” he muttered to himself. His upper thighs were sore from where the rope had cut into the flesh. He unconsciously rubbed the inflamed areas.
John walked into his living room. All the papers had been put back in their places and the apartment returned to its previous appearance. There was a single hand-written note sitting on his glass coffee table. He picked it up.
“We will call you on the morning of the 23rd with a meeting place. Bring your notes.”
John put the note down and looked around his apartment. He looked out the window and onto the sprawling suburbs of the Walled City. The ramshackle slum was no longer just an object of pity to him. It was a place of fear. He put the note down and went into his kitchen to make a cup of instant coffee with a splash of whiskey. It was all he could think to do in that moment. He was no longer safe.
