NaNoWriMo Day 9

Word Count: 17,615

Joseph


I keep wondering what poor son of a bitch got smacked down by Xu last night. He’s like Darth Vader, offing underlings for failing him. At least, that’s what it sounded like. Maybe I am letting my imagination run wild, it was spooky in there and I hadn’t had a drink all evening. My mind tends to race when I’m sober. Either way, I survived through the night, and I really need to get out of this place. There is a new guard at my door when I open it and I ask him to ask the General if I can head back to the hotel for a bit. He tells me, orders me actually, which I find a bit rude, to stay in my room until he gets back. I’ll have to tell Xu to have a talk with his men about simple manners when dealing with guests.

The guard returns a few minutes later and says I can go, but only with an escort. I tell him that I don’t want an escort and that I am perfectly capable of going on my own. No escort, no leave, he says, and the look in his eye tells me that he isn’t fooling around. Fine, I sigh. So that’s how things are going to be now.

The day outside of the Ministry is bright and hot as fuck. My shirt starts to stick to my back almost immediately. I look over at my escort, the same guard from the door to my room, and smirk. He’s decked out in full uniform, and I just know he’s got to be miserable. Serves you right, you pushy asshole. We hop into a waiting jeep and he drives me to the hotel quickly.

I am looking forward to a cooling dip in the pool but I have to go up to the room to get my swim trunks. Everything looks just as I left it, which is good. I pull my trunks out of a drawer and clear my throat with an awkward glare at my soldier buddy. It takes him a few seconds, but he finally gets it and steps out of the room so I can change. I put on the trunks, slip on a pair of flip-flops, grab a towel, and I am ready to hit the pool. I meet the guard in the hall and we start toward the elevator. Just before we get there, I realize that I still have my watch on. I don’t want to leave it laying around by the pool so I tell him that I’m going to run back to the room real quick to leave it there. He nods impatiently, and waits by the elevator.

I hustle back to the room and drop off the watch, and just as I am coming back out, who should I see leaving her own room down the hall but the cute girl, Candy. She recognizes me with a start and comes hurrying over with some urgency. She asks where I’ve been and where is Molly and before I can respond her eyes go huge when she spots something behind me. It is right then that I remember that Xu seemed awfully interested in her the day before and I realize the guard must have come back around the corner from the elevator. He shouts when he sees Candy and she takes off like a shot down the hallway in the other direction. I try to stand in his way as he runs after her, just to buy her a few seconds, but he elbows me in the throat as he runs right past and I go down like a bag of dirt. I’m still coughing and gasping for breath when I hear Candy screaming and cursing down the hallway. The sounds of struggle continue on for a few seconds until I hear a groan and a thump. Shit, I hope he didn’t kill her. I cautiously crawl to the corner and peek around to see Candy unconscious on the floor and the soldier grimacing while trying to bandage what looks like a nasty bite on his hand. I guess she went down fighting. He sees me and orders me over there with a snap, like I’m a dog. I don’t want another elbow in the throat so I meekly comply and join him. He pulls out a radio and barks something into it while I look down at Candy. She’s alive, which is good. It looks like he conked her on the head pretty bad. Her mouth is ringed with his blood, my guess of a bite was spot on.

Another group of soldiers arrive at the hotel and escort Candy and I out none too subtly. The other guests stare, I guess the site of a guy in swim trunks and an unconscious girl being dragged through the lobby by sullen soldiers is pretty eye-catching. They herd us into the back of a covered army truck and we zoom off, heading for what I assume will be the ugly end of the Ministry. Once we get there I should be able to clear this all up with Xu, I certainly didn’t do anything wrong. Whatever they want her for it’s got fuck all to do with me.

Xu isn’t around when we get there and they put me in a separate interrogation-style room. It is cold as hell in here and I still only have trunks and flip-flops on. They have one of those big mirrors like in cop shows, and I assume it’s one of those one-way deals. I examine my throat and see that there is a bruise already starting to form. That jerkoff could have crushed my windpipe, I’ll be sure to have a word or two with the General about that. It’s high time these guys realize that they are dealing with an American who is here representing a very powerful corporation. Nanodyne could buy and sell their laughable little government a hundred times over if it wanted to.

After what seems like hours, I really begin to wish I hadn’t left my watch in the hotel. Finally, someone unlatches the door and the noise makes me jump from the uncomfortable chair I am sitting in. General Xu comes in looking mighty smug, followed by my guard / captor. I launch right into it, you can’t treat me this way, do you have any idea who I am, how dare you lock me up, the whole shebang. Xu calmly reaches back and slaps me hard in mid sentence. I am too shocked to do anything but stare. He tells me to sit and sit I do, quickly. I’m beginning to think I should have played it a bit cooler.

The next few hours are a brutal affair indeed. Xu grills my every move since coming into the country, who I’ve talked to, where I’ve been, and what I know. He demands that I tell him where Molly is and will not accept that I still have no idea. He wants to know how long I’ve known Candy, what kind of dealings I’ve had with her, and why I arranged to meet her at the hotel. Once again, he is less than convinced by my answers. Things look very bad, and when the guard leaves and comes back with an ominous-looking suitcase, things look even worse.




Candy


God damn, that guy nearly kicked my head in. Who knew military guys knew karate? I’ll bet he’s gonna need stitches for that hand though, so I’ve got that going for me. They stuck me in a packed cell that’s too small to lay down in, so they crammed me in practically bent in half. My hips were killing me when I woke up, I think that might be what brought me around. Of course, everything is gone. My bag, phone, ID, I am pretty much screwed. I wish I knew what I was even in trouble for so I could start figuring out how I am going to talk my way out of it. Of all of the not-so-legal things I’m involved with, not one little bit of it has to do with Joseph or Molly. Or even Fred, for that matter, unless you consider the occasional bizarre fetish indulgence for hefty compensation illegal. It can’t be prostitution if there is no sex involved!

I have to pee like a racehorse and the tiny cell is obviously lacking in facilities, so I do the first thing that comes natural: I bang on the door and holler loud enough to wake the whole town up. There is a slot at eye level on the heavy metal door and it flies open with a shriek to reveal the angry eyes of whoever they stuck here to guard me. I tell him I have to piss in Chinese, just to emphasize the urgency and not to waste any time while he translates the English in his head, assuming he even speaks it. He says nothing and forcefully slides the slot shut again. Like that’s going to shut me up. I start up with the banging and yelling again and he wastes no time opening the slot back up. He holds up one finger, telling me to wait, then closes the slot. If he had just done that the first time, we could have saved precious seconds.

After getting approval from whomever, he finally opens the door and calls me out at gunpoint. We march down the hall and out into a courtyard, where he begins to motion at the ground with his weapon. Great, forced to pee like a dog in front of a soldier who is pointing a rifle at my face. As luck would have it, I have to go too bad to argue the point, so I drop trou and squat. The soldier seems appalled by the whole thing and he turns his face away, which makes me feel that much better about the whole situation.

After what seems like an eternity, I finally get it all out with a sigh of relief. He cautiously looks back over when I stand up, buttoning my jeans. He motions me back inside, and I give him a pout with some raised up eyebrows. He isn’t buying it though, so I walk back into the building in a huff. As we head down the hallway toward the cell, I notice a slight rumble in the floor. This is followed by another rumble, then another, each growing stronger. I stop and look back at the guard, and he seems a bit troubled by this too. Without warning, the floor buckles with a massive bang and we are both tossed violently to the floor. The guard starts screaming into his radio as what sounds like explosion after explosion hit the building, shaking grit from the rafters. Ladies and gentleman, it looks like we have a coup attempt. I’ve never seen one from the inside before. Lucky me.

The guard grabs me by the arm and tries to hustle me back into my cell. Nuh uh, no way buster, I am not going to hide in a closet while you assholes blow the place up around me. I struggle with him until his attention is diverted by the sound of machine gun fire from the other end of the hallway and I kick him in the nuts. He goes down with a surprised yelp and I run like the wind in the direction opposite the gunfire, which seems to be getting louder by the second.

The place is in chaos, squads of soldiers rush past me without a second glance as I try to find my way out of the place without getting killed. I hop up a stairwell two at a time and burst through the door only to stop dead in my tracks at the sight of General Xu frantically ordering his men to various positions. I duck back into the stairwell and peek through the window carefully. Xu shouts into his radio for a bit, opens the door to the room behind him with a little more shouting, then goes running off to join the fight with the soldier who was in the room on the other end of the shouting. After counting to ten to make sure they are really gone, I sneak out into the hallway and continue on, staying as low as I can. When I pass the door that the General was standing in front of I catch the briefest glimpse of a hairy white leg with a flip-flop and I stop with a gasp and double back. It’s Joseph all right, looking very much the worse for wear. He regards me hazily when I start to untie him from the chair he’s strapped to and tries to talk with a bloody mouth. Damn, Xu really working him over good. I wonder what they think he knows?

I get Joseph to his feet, barely, and the two of us stagger back out to look for an exit. The gunfire is everywhere now, coupled with enraged shouts and the occasional grenade blast. Joseph stumbles a few times because he’s still having trouble with his balance, and he nearly takes me with him more than once. He’s lucky I’m a nice girl, but he will definitely be rewarding me handsomely if we make it out of here alive.

After a few minutes of struggling, he starts to come to his senses enough to walk on his own. He asks me what’s going on and I tell him that it looks like someone wants to take over the government thing for a while. He seems nonplussed, like he didn’t think it could actually happen, but I’ve seen enough of these in my short life to know how alarmingly regular they are. We get close to an exit but there is a massive firefight going down in the lobby before the doors so we stop behind some rubble that came down from the archway in the door when something blew up and watch the action. The attackers look like they might be Pakistani, perhaps a rebel group. The symbol that some of them have on their uniforms doesn’t look familiar to me. They all have beards, I guess they may be a Muslim splinter group. Wherever they are from these guys are fearless and kind of crazy, but they are also winning. Xu’s men, what’s left of them, are pinned into a corner behind some overturned desks, vainly fighting for their lives from the approaching fighters. If we have any chance at all, this would be it. I grab Joseph’s arm and nod toward the door. He nods back that he is ready. On a silent three count, we bolt from the collapsed hallway and make a break for the glass doors across the lobby. Someone spots us and there are shouts and gunfire from behind but we make it just barely and burst through the doors at full speed. The battle has rendered the well-manicured grounds of the Ministry a smoking war zone. A Jeep with a dead body in the driver’s seat sits idling quietly from where is rammed into a tree. I tell Joseph to get in it and I haul the body out of the way. I jam the Jeep away from the tree and spin it out into the street, then gun it hard on the way to the anonymity of the ghetto.