Greasing the Piñata (23 page)
Sally pressed against the wall as she moved away from the window.
The catwalk was wide enough for two people to walk abreast along the perimeter of the shed, but Sally preferred staying in the shadows. A waist-high railing with evenly spaced supports ran the length of the catwalk, which was a grilled surface of wrought iron. It afforded an unobstructed view of the tenants below.
The first impression was of a single organism, a seething mass of pink and brown that might have oozed out of a 1950s horror film. It took Sally a minute before she could distinguish individual pigs from the undulating sea of flesh.
The animals were enormous, prize pigs one and all, no runts in sight. The smallest would outweigh Sally by fifty pounds, the biggest by two hundred. The collective animal stench tore through her scarf like a razor dipped in shit.
The shed looked bigger inside than she expected, half as long as a soccer field. She scanned the room for other signs of life but it seemed empty. Just her and the pigs.
She moved down the catwalk. At the peak of the roof directly across from her was a giant tube flared at one end and covered with a screen. The open end was aimed at the pigs. The back end connected to a central pipe that ran along the center beam of the shed until it reached another flared tube about ten yards away. Sally counted five such tubes, the last mounted on the far wall of the shed, where it followed the curve of the roof until it disappeared through a hole. Sally visualized it connecting to the massive tank seen from the hill during their surveillance.
The workers must wear some type of filters or masks. Sally stopped every few feet and tried to control her breathing. Her scarf wasn’t up to this. She fought a rising sense of vertigo whenever she looked at the pigs through the grill between her feet, even though she never had trouble with heights.
The pigs crashed together in thunderous packs, many snorting in anger or frustration over a lost position. The sound was deafening. A wave of hunger surging toward the catwalk.
A memory crawled out of Sally’s subconscious, images buried for many years. Twelve years old, still in school but already hard at work to pay for her tuition. Triad schools were very expensive, and most girls spent their entire lives working off the debt.
She was sent to the estate of a local gangster named Shun, high in the hills overlooking Hong Kong. The house had a spectacular view of Causeway Bay from the front of the house, but in the backyard Shun had erected wooden pens to keep chickens, goats, and pigs. Not because he needed to raise livestock but to remind him of the miserable farm where he grew up. He wanted the life he had left in his backyard, behind him at all times as a reminder of what he stood to lose. Too bad for Shun he never looked out his kitchen window anymore, only through his front windows toward the city beneath his feet.
Shun had taken something that didn’t belong to him—the daughter of a banker who sometimes did business with the Triads. She was ten years old when Shun molested her after coaxing her away from friends and into his Mercedes.
The leader of the Triads, a man known only as
Dragonhead
, was very clear about the punishment. Sally’s instructors had decided to turn the mission into a training exercise. Her job was to distract Shun until one of the older girls from the school named Dandan could sneak into the compound.
It wasn’t a difficult job. Sally arrived in a school uniform and pig tails under a false pretense. Shun wouldn’t have opened the door any faster if she’d been delivering a pizza. She was supposed to let him
play
with her until her backup arrived, but when he put his hand on her thigh, Sally decided to demonstrate her initiative.
Dandan entered the house thirty minutes later accompanied by two
forty-nines
—male foot soldiers—and found Sally reading in the living room. Shun was unconscious on the floor with a livid bruise on his cheek.
Sally and Dandan sat on the second floor balcony eating rice cakes and admiring the view while the foot soldiers disemboweled Shun and threw him in with the pigs.
The police never found the body and the rival clan assumed he had skipped town. Pigs had voracious appetites, especially once they tasted blood. Sally remembered feeling sorry for the pigs.
If she closed her eyes, she could still recall the sounds from the backyard.
She was halfway across the catwalk when she turned to look back the way she had come. She was standing at the mid-point between two of the flared intake pipes, so her line of sight was clear. Her eyes found the window where she had entered and moved past the railing, onto the floor and finally to the main door.
Sally froze and cursed herself for not checking the door first. She could have hung upside down over the railing, but it was too late. She hoped Cape hadn’t reached the refinery.
She started to run, her feet clanging against the metal grill of the catwalk as the pigs thundered and roared below.
Cape crawled through the mud looking for corpses.
He tried to be stealthy and managed to stay low, but he was moving too quickly and making too much noise. If he was right about Salinas then he wouldn’t find Rebecca here, not in the ditch with the others. She would be part of a bigger message, a witness to a show that hadn’t occurred yet. Cape believed that rationally, but emotionally he was a wreck. His hands were shaking as he scuttled forward on his knees, praying he wouldn’t see her face half-buried in the mud.
He practically rammed the first body, banging his head into the poor bastard’s knee. Cape fell back against the side of the ditch, tasting bile in his throat. It was a man, middle aged with black hair and olive skin. He wore a guard’s uniform.
Cape took a deep breath. He found an LED penlight in his vest and leaned over the body. There were no signs of violence around the face or neck, just some minor scratches that could have been caused post-mortem by getting dragged across the ground, or even cuts from shaving. A billy club, radio and stun gun were still clipped to a utility belt, none of the straps loose. He had been taken by surprise, very quickly.
Cape moved the light across the torso and stopped right below the heart. A stab wound had bled out, the shirt tacky with blood. He switched off the light and crawled further down the ditch. This time he saw the body before he reached it.
Another guard, same uniform and equipment. This one had his throat cut. A professional job, the windpipe severed so he couldn’t cry out. The wound was ragged, scraps of flesh trailing into the collar and onto the shirt. Someone who hadn’t seen this kind of thing before would swear that a wolf had torn the man’s throat out.
Cape squeezed his eyes shut for a minute before putting his head down and crawling forward.
Ten yards.
Twenty.
Nothing.
The compound wasn’t that big. Two guards on night duty could probably handle it under normal circumstances. Cape stood until he could see over the edge of the ditch, looked back toward the refinery building. He wondered if Sally had finished searching the sheds.
Hoisting himself over the edge, Cape decided to abandon caution and jog back to the refinery building. If anyone was watching the compound with night vision goggles they would have seen him by now. Maybe not Sally, she was a ghost, but Cape had no illusions about his own lack of grace.
Still, he wasn’t completely reckless. Once he reached the door to the plant he braced against the wall and stood perfectly still, listening as hard as he could.
Humming from inside. Lights, maybe a generator. Clanging in the near distance, as constant as a metronome. The door was metal, the walls stone, but neither seemed very thick. Cape pulled the handgun from his belt and flicked off the safety with his right thumb as he grabbed the door handle with his left hand.
He crouched as he spun inside the door but was stunned by the glare from the lights. The entire plant was lit up like a stadium, countless 100-watt bulbs inside wire mesh hanging from the ceiling. Pipes, motors, and pumps grew from the floor and walls, twisting and turning in an industrial maze that seemed to lead toward a series of giants vents mounted on the far wall.
The noise was disorienting, funneled toward the open space in front of the door. There was a generator near the center of the room with a circular motor spinning like clockwork, clanging every time it completed a rotation. Humming came from every direction at once. And directly in front of Cape there was an insistent beeping, a manic high-pitched chirping that sounded like an alarm clock in a cheap hotel. He hadn’t heard that sound before he opened the door.
Cape stood slowly as he tried to see what was making the noise.
A three-legged stool sat twenty feet away from the door, set against the wall next to a small desk. On top of the stool was a lumpy bundle of plastic, tape, red putty, and wires, one of which led from the stool to the wall, over the desk and along the door frame, where it was attached to a magnetic trigger that Cape had broken when he opened the door.
On top of the bundle was a red LED screen flashing in time with the beeps. Then the beeping stopped—and so did Cape’s heart—until it was replaced by a shrill whine. Cape tried to get his feet to move but they wouldn’t, and suddenly the countdown started.
The lights had been nonsense during the beeping, all the LED lights illuminated at once. But now they resolved into numbers.
Someone had a sense of humor. Instead of numbers, letters appeared, and instead of counting down, the timer was counting upward.
Uno Dos Tres
Cape tried to remember his high school Spanish and wondered how high he could count before he died.
Sally heard the explosion from four buildings away.
She skidded to a stop on the catwalk and gripped the railing.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
When she reached five she heard a second explosion. Closer.
The explosion was igniting the methane in the pipes, working its way through the buildings.
One second. Two seconds. Three—
She felt the next explosion before she heard it.
Sally whipped around to watch the intake vent at the far end of the building, the countdown still going in her head. Six buildings, counting the refinery. Three to go, less than five seconds apart and getting closer.
Sally looked toward the front door and the window where she entered. She would never make it. A dull roar was building in the pipes, the sound of gas expanding, getting hotter and looking for a place to burn.
One second. Two—
The walls shook as if hit by a hurricane. The catwalk jumped. Pigs squealed and trampled over one another trying to find a way out. Two explosions to go, and then the air would turn to fire.
Sally jumped onto the railing.
The pigs were in a frenzy. Butting heads, biting. Sally saw blood mixed with manure and mud on the floor. It was a mosh pit from Hell.
She almost lost her balance when the next explosion hit, the blast wave shoving superheated air through the walls. The roaring in the pipes had become a scream. The lights flickered and went out.
Sally closed her eyes and reversed her footing, so she was facing the catwalk and the wall. The pigs were behind and below her, churning the mud, their backs shifting like waves.
One—two—
Sally spread her arms and tilted her head back as her heels slipped off the railing and she fell backward into space.
“Shit.”
The sound of his own voice shocked Cape out of his stupor before the timer reached
Cinco
.
He crashed through the door and leapt for the drainage ditch. He landed hard, twisting his ankle, just as the walls of the refinery building turned into shrapnel.
Blue flame erupted into a mushroom cloud that turned yellow and then orange as it expanded into the night sky. The metal door screamed past like a discus thrown by an angry giant. Cape wrapped his arms around his head as flaming bits of metal, stone, and plastic fell like meteors.
He felt something hit his leg, a napalm hailstone, and his pants started to burn. Cape rolled in the mud and tried to scramble backward but it was raining fire all around him. The second explosion took off the roof of the adjacent shed. The walls disintegrated into splinters that flew like darts.
Cape wondered where Sally could be, hoping she was still in the first building. Then the next shed erupted in a fireball and he realized that she wouldn’t be safe in any of them.
A shard of two-by-four plunged into the earth only three inches from Cape’s ear. Another one narrowly missed his foot. By the time a third penetrated the ground between his legs, he felt like Dracula being hunted by angry villagers. He got his legs under him and pushed backward. Only a dead man could help him now.
He reached the first corpse and pulled the body on top of his own, careful not to leave any extremities exposed. Cape was slightly taller than the guard so he bent his knees and angled his legs.
The next building blew up. Cape held his breath and hoped it was over.
It wasn’t. The next shed exploded and Cape saw pigs fly. A two hundred pound sow landed only a few yards away, bursting on impact in a shower of entrails. A three hundred pounder followed, a porcine asteroid big enough to kill the dinosaurs.
A pig’s head complete landed with its snout only inches from Cape’s nose. A pair of smoldering pig’s feet bounced off his sneakers. He heard squealing and the thunder of cloven hooves. The last shed went
ba-boom
, the gas explosion followed immediately by the sound of the building cracking apart like an egg.
Cape counted to three and threw the corpse to the side, scrambled up the side of the ditch and started running toward the building where he’d last seen Sally.
He ran headlong into a stampede and had to dive back into the ditch to avoid being trampled to death. Thousands upon thousands of terrified pigs were running in every direction. Some were horribly maimed but most were surprisingly unhurt. A few were smoking along their backs where their wispy hair had caught fire and burned itself out.
Cape ran along the ditch until it began to fill up with panicked pigs climbing over one another. He put his head down and shoulder forward, assuming a linebacker pose as he tried to redirect the scared animals. He rolled out of the ditch and tried to hold his ground as the herd parted around him, too terrified to be aggressive. He dug his heels into the mud, straining to see into the darkness, desperate to keep moving forward.
In minutes that seemed like hours, but eventually the pigs had fled to all points of the compass, scattering across the broad valley as fast as their stubby legs could carry them. Cape’s legs gave out and he collapsed into the mud.
He managed to get his hands under his chest and crawled for several yards before stopping and sitting back on his knees, panting heavily. He felt blood running down his face and snot pouring from his nose. His hands were bleeding, half the nails gone.
He stood up and almost fainted, then stumbled forward. Ten yards. Another ten. Shapes started to emerge in the darkness, his finally eyes adjusting to the moonlight after flame had lit up the sky forever.
A lone figure stood twenty feet in front of him. Sword drawn and covered in blood, her clothes shredded. Her hair matted and torn. Mud and manure smeared across her face and hands.
Cape had never seen her look so beautiful.
Sally smiled and slid her sword into its scabbard.
“Can we go home now?”