The Refugee Sentinel (12 page)

Li-Mei had learned to avoid the Servants. Early on, she used to ask for their names or if their day was going well, but each conversation would end with a stinging face slap, which in time taught her they were just guards, who monitored progress and enforced order.

He was a Servant like the others, except for the purple birthmark covering half of his face. A tall and quiet man, he practiced Jenli’s dress code of a grey top and black bottoms and if not for the birthmark, Li-Mei wouldn’t have recognized him in a police lineup. Until the Friday when she went home to check on Taxi during a class break. She was sitting in a bamboo chair, with the Shiba in her lap and the awning at the entrance of her building giving them shelter from the stop-and-go rain. She was rubbing Taxi’s back to keep him warm and when she saw the Servant, approaching with a straw bag on his shoulder, thought Taxi had gotten in trouble.

Li-Mei cleared her throat, as the man came within a few feet, and addressed him in Mandarin. “This is my dog, Taxi. I’m sorry if he chewed on something you own,” she shouted as if her voice could erect a sound wall to block the man from advancing, “or if he’s peed inside your house. He likes people and means no harm.”

Those were her first words to the Purple Servant, as she would call him from then on, and the most words she had traded with anyone other than Taxi or outside of class.

The man reached Li-Mei’s chair, the invisible sound wall unable to stop him. “The Shiba Inu is another matter,” he said. “I take issue with your hair.”

“My hair?” Hair trouble was preferable to Taxi trouble. “I take issue with it too. It takes an hour to comb each morning.” She pulled at a black curl to demonstrate. “I bet short hair like yours is easier. What’s your –”

The Purple Servant hit her left cheek with a fist, triggering the wail of an air-raid siren in her ear. Her teeth clanged shut, biting into her tongue. She hiccupped.

“I want you to cut it,” he said.

He grabbed Taxi by the neck and threw him inside Li-Mei’s room, closed the door and turned toward the girl. In a moment, the Shiba reappeared at the window, pushing against the glass but unable to break through.

Li-Mei stood up, chin pressed against her chest. “Who are you?” she said. Her left eye brimmed with post-impact tears, which she wiped away with a fist. He struck her again, with an open palm in the same spot. She howled – a mixture between a cry and a curse – covered her head with both arms and leapt forth, like a heat-seeking missile. His lungs emptied with a surprised gasp as she crashed head-on against his abdomen. He fell over backward then scrambled to his feet. Li-Mei rose with him, the left side of her face crimson-red and her eye swollen into a purple crater. He went for a third strike, but this time she was ready. She bent away from him, at the waist, and did an overhead backflip. As her body turned mid-air, her extended foot hit his face, as hard as a six-year-old foot could. The sound, more damaging than the impact, felt like sweet music to her ears, especially the swollen one.

She fell into a defensive stance, wishing her Jujitsu training was further along. Taxi kept bouncing off the window pane. The Purple Servant took a fishing-net and a kinjal out of his bag. He threw the kinjal at her. Li-Mei dove to the ground. Her face buried in the squishy mud and the knife screamed through the air where she had stood, failing to connect. As soon as she fell down, she realized she had made a mistake; the kinjal was a decoy. The fishing net, her real enemy, was flying toward her now. She rolled to one side but stood no chance on a ground so thick with rain. The steel net blanketed the girl, the ends falling first, followed by the mesh.

Li-Mei looked up at a sky perforated by steel wire. Her mind raced. This must be an exercise, she thought, Jenli was home. Jenli had a higher calling for her and a better destiny. Better than being slaughtered under a steel trap like an animal.

The Purple Servant squatted by her head. As hurt as she was, she couldn’t hide a smile, seeing the bruise where her foot had kicked his face. Go ahead and explain that to your buddies tonight, she thought. How a six-year-old kicked your butt… and your face. The Purple Servant grabbed her hair through the wire and lifted. She closed her eyes as the net sunk into her neck then his kinjal flew at her again. This was it, she thought, but his blade cut the net surrounding her head. When the knife was done cutting, Li-Mei was wearing a gown made of steel wire. She had been right – they weren’t planning to kill her in Jenli. But then she looked at the Purple Servant’s eyes, as lifeless as roadkill, and her hope sank. And the first haircut in her life began.

The long black hair fell around her, severing the last link to a life she would never remember. Tears followed then rage and she shook like a racing horse that had galloped to exhaustion and her heart would have burst and killed her on the spot, if she were fifty years older. If loving fathers, she thought, like the one from the book existed, then why didn’t they help? Instead, her severed hair fell in the mud and the Purple Servant’s feet stomped on it as he circled around, again and again, careful not to miss a spot. With eyes brimming with rain, Li-Mei looked at the window of her room. Taxi was still trying to break through.

In a parallel universe, the Purple Servant had stopped cutting. He wiped his kinjal on her shoulder and helped her untangle from the net. The sky above had turned as black as the girl’s murdered hair on the ground below.

Natt’s mouth gaped in a silent scream for oxygen. No sound, despite the effort of every cell in his body. His lungs craved air, both to breathe and scream, and dark stains of sweat pooled around his neck and armpits. For some reason, he felt self-conscious about the stains, as he watched his reflection, in front of the reflection of the woman, in the wall-to-wall mirror. He could swear the mirror somehow magnified his sweat.

The woman’s hands crushed his throat like roots of a blackberry forest, ripping his trachea away from the esophagus. Natt swung as far behind as he could reach, but only peddled air. His jaw opened and closed, and his nostrils bloomed, seeking oxygen that wasn’t there.

“Stick your tongue out,” she said with the same tone as one would order a latte, “it will help you breathe.” Natt obliged, but no oxygen followed. His face turned purple and he felt freezing cold despite the sweat raining from his pores. The woman must have lied. She wasn’t interested in helping him, she was waiting for the end.

When she had attacked him at first, in the men’s restroom of the Seattle Public Library, he was certain he could overpower someone with her physique. He had just finished taking a leak, and was washing his hands along a row of sinks in front of the restroom mirror, and thought she was a downtown prostitute looking for work in all the right places. Protocol mandated he wait until the last second before issuing the arrest, for the solicitation charge would stick. And Natt had waited until she touched his back, to offer a blowjob or whatever her repertoire was. An attractive guy like him had been propositioned before, what could he do?

Instead, the woman grabbed his throat with both hands, her steel-cage abdomen refusing to budge against Natt’s elbow punches. She absorbed his prepared blows then returned the favor with rapid undercuts to his kidneys. Always a step or two ahead, she chop-blocked his hand reaching for his holstered gun. Then she spun around and clung onto him, like a child playing piggyback with her father. Natt’s fists flailed above his head then he lunged back, at the opposing wall, to shed her from him, but she remained out of reach. In the interim, her fingers were unpeeling Natt’s life, one breath at a time. With the last spark of his fading consciousness, the cop mouthed a plea – his final Hail Mary, and a poor one at that.

His brain entered a shutdown mode, sending spams along his body… then the woman’s fingers parted. Air ushered down his mangled throat with the noise of a freight train whistle. She dismounted from him.

The Chief of the Seattle PD fell to his knees, his face pouring tears.

“I’m the Seattle PD Chief and my Police Department will do anything you wish,” he said again, this time with audio.

She stared at him for a moment, going over some unknown options in her mind. She tossed an old Nokia phone at him and he caught it before it hit his face. “We’ll meet twice a week,” she said. “You’ll receive texts with the location and the time before each meeting.”

Natt sensed an impending inevitability about this woman, as if he was thrust into a Discovery Channel special where a tiger was licking the forehead of a captured gazelle in the African savannah, the two looking like best friends. Then, without warning, the tiger’s jaws mangled the gazelle’s neck and she accepted her death with everyday banality. If this woman wanted him dead then Natt guessed dying would work. And in the interim, he would play with her for as long as she wanted.

“Deliver me Victor Saretto and Colton Parker. Alive,” she said. “Otherwise, I’ll finish what I started.”

Natt’s head nodded like a metronome. She walked out of the men’s restroom. Not a single other library patron had walked in.

Colton’s mind swam up, underneath the surface of reality and the blue walls around him. Then the agony of torn up flesh, as if his hand was caught inside a meat-grinder, pulled him down again. His brain took several tries to start and grasp the good news: there was no meat-grinder; then the bad news: he didn’t have a right hand.

Colton didn’t know why, but the blue walls gave him comfort. They were a sign that the world was still going on and he was fighting, with the final bell at least a few rounds away. “Where am I?” he said.

Mitko leaned over. “You tell me, kid. You’ve been out for a day.” Unlike the meat-grinder pain, Mitko’s voice was a welcome chaperone into reality.

“Have they been looking for me?” Colton said and bit his tongue to muffle a groan.

“Were you expecting anyone?”

“My passport is no longer connected. Give them another day and they’ll come knocking.” Colton attempted a smile, until the pain in his right stump wiped it from his face. “You’ve done more for me than anyone else but my mother. It says a lot about the quality of my other relationships, I guess.”

“You judge yourself harsh, kid.”

Colton ran a dry tongue over his chapped lips. “My cut-off hand. Did you save it like I asked?”

“Next to the beef tongue and the chicken hearts, in my freezer.” Mitko laughed.

“When the scans from my dead passport lead them to you, tell them I forced you to keep it.”

“And why should I do that?”

“I don’t know... because you didn’t save my life to throw it away with a “Return to Sender” sticker on top. And because you’ll go to Heaven as—” Colton grunted and kicked the wall at the fresh onslaught of pain in his severed limb. If this was a boxing match, pain was ahead in technical points and he was running out of rounds to catch up. Now he had to tell Sarah, too, and somehow, telling her he had voted Sacrifice, made him feel more uncomfortable than taking on her rage that he wouldn’t. He sat up, despite the blue walls pirouetting in front of his eyes then called her number.

“Colton,” Sarah sounded like a rattlesnake, “now is not a good time. Work’s in the toilet.” The algae were refusing to lie down without a fight. “I’m restarting Project Atlas, but I’m sure you don’t care. You only want to talk about Yana without wanting to save her. What about her, Yana-boy? This morning, she threw a fit over some purple jeans I destroyed in the laundry. And she has the mumps. So, whatever you called to fight about, can you call later, or better yet, next year?”

“I did it,” he said.

“You did what, Colton? Jacked off in the shower this morning? Hired a prostitute? Let me guess, you got your unemployed ass off welfare?” Sarah’s screams echoed like she had put him on speakerphone. “Why the hell should I care about what you did?”

He imagined she had been swimming in an ocean of pain for years, alone and without a lifeline, his Sarah, who had served him marshmallows in bed and given birth to the most special girl in the world.

“I did it, baby.” He wondered how she must feel having achieved her innermost wish. What would he do in her shoes? If his most sincere dream had come true? What would he do if Yana gave him a hug and called him Dad? Would he take her to the Point Defiance Zoo and get her chocolate ice cream? Would they laugh at the penguins until their faces hurt and ice cream came out of her nose? Colton smiled… it felt good being alive.

Sarah’s voice pulled him back into the blue kitchen. “I don’t know what to say. Is there…” a pause, “anything I can do for you?”

“As a matter of fact there is,” he said. “I’m asking you for it after I’ve given you what you wanted, which makes me a terrible negotiator, but I’d like both of you to visit me in Seattle… before Defiance Day. It would mean a lot.”

“I don’t know.” She seemed incapable of saying more than a couple of words at a go. She was also hyperventilating. He had shut her up, for once. “The ULE Ministry of Science is collapsing,” she said, “the project, too. But I’ll see if we can come see you.”

Colton looked outside. The city was falling asleep under cloud-infested skies. “I should go,” he said.

“We’ll talk soon, yes?”

He had to tell her now or he never would. “And, Sarah...”

“Yes?”

“Sorry it took me this long.”

“You’re fine, Colton,” she said then added, “Goodbye,” before hanging up.

“Goodbye… my love,” he said to the disconnected cell phone.

During the call, Mitko had been scrubbing the kitchen of Colton’s blood from a day earlier. “Being around you is an education, son,” Mitko said. “Life is a sketch drawn with a stick in the wet sand. But it’s all we have anyway. Go hide. I’ll help you how I can. Saving lunatics like you beats playing the hotel piano.”

“Wherever heaven may be, old man, I hope I see you there, before the devil knows I’m dead.”

“You’ll be dead in a couple of days, unless I take you to a hospital,” Mitko said. “I’ve cauterized your wound, but you’ll need stitches and professional treatment.”

“I didn’t plan this cutting business as well as I should have, did I?” Colton said. “If you could have seen her face you’d understand.” He rose like a drunken man, his feet somehow absorbing the weight of his body. “You’ve done enough. Hide my passport and I will deal with the rest of me.” He put a foot forward then the other, waddled towards the blind man, and gave him a one-arm embrace. Then he left the apartment without saying goodbye, ashamed he had nothing else to give to Mitko other than more empty words of gratitude. Outside, it was about to rain.