She walked slowly into a dark room that smelled of cigarettes and the only visible lights were the signs on the exit doors. In the darkness, she saw threads of smoke. Her hand touched the rows of wooden chairs anchored to the floor. Peanut shells and candy wrappers crunched beneath the soles of her shoes

She saw a seated figure, a man who helped her draw the upturned theater seat downward to enable her to sit comfortably beside him. Chinese words appeared on the movie screen. Sneak previews of future Chinese movies flashed in front of her eyes. A Chinese female star, whose name she could not remember, sang on the screen.

He opened a bag of watermelon seeds and one by one popped the seeds into his mouth. He cracked them open with his front teeth and then spat the shells onto the floor. She held onto the ends of her skirt and tried to avoid being spattered with the shells.

Then, his hands, so much stronger than hers, removed hers from her skirt. He moved his hands up and down her legs. She tried so hard to keep her eyes on the screen, to read the English subtitles of the Chinese movie. The words came and went faster than her mind could comprehend them.

He whispered, “Beautiful, she is so beautiful. Ya sui.”

Something excited her, something she could not understand. She looked at the actress and wondered what made her beautiful. She portrayed a Chinese princess, dressed in a Chinese empress costume, and she could not see her face because his heavy arms blocked her view.

“Look at her jewelry, her tsiu siak. You want jewelry, too? How beautiful!” He whispered again.

She looked at the princess and thought she was decorated like a Christmas tree. She heard his voice but refused to look up. He repeated the words, “beautiful, beautiful,” until she looked up and saw the face of her Grandfather. She cried out loud.

***

The air inside Marlene’s dark room was hot and dry like fire in the kitchen stove. “Run away, ghost!” Marlene screamed. Then she waited until everything became clear. She walked into the bathroom and washed her face at the sink, allowing herself a tiny laugh afterward just to pacify herself.

She sat on the steps just outside the main door and tried to find the moon. When she was younger, her mother told her that the moon was kind. She heard the bark of a dog and the buzz of mosquitoes.

“What are you doing here?”

Marlene recognized Kang Atsi’s voice. She was Grandmother’s yaya from China.

Marlene didn’t look up. She still tried to find the face of the moon.

“It’s so hot, I wanted to cool myself,” Marlene said.

Kang Atsi unbuttoned her pajama bottoms, rubbed her stomach and fanned hersef briskly. She sat beside Marlene and rubbed her eyes.

“Another nightmare?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is your mother again?”

“Working in some other country. I know that Amah doesn’t want me here but I don’t have anyone else,” Marlene said.

Kang Atsi sat watching her for a while. “You seem anxious. Is it because it’s Auntie Ma’s birthday tomorrow?”

“I really don’t belong there. I don’t understand most of the things they say. There are just too many ghost stories.”

Marlene could not find the moon and finally looked down. She did not want to go to Auntie Ma’s party.

“Come inside. There are bad people around. It’s not safe.” Kang Atsi said.

Marlene nodded and walked into the house. She could make out the shadowy form of the altar table and the faded picture of the Goddess of Mercy hanging above the josspots. Several pictures of dead relatives stood on a wooden table covered partly with a cloth, embroidered with the design of a dragon. Joss-smoke rose toward the ceiling. Grandmother must have been praying this evening, she thought.

***

Marlene Ong always hid inside the ladies’ room. For her, it had become a familiar place of refuge, when Ong family parties became fashion contests amid high-pitched calls of admiration, with every guest hanging onto every bit of the latest gossip.

She had told Amah several times that she always felt out of place. She had never cared for the gossip because she never fully understood the stories. Still, her limited Fookien allowed her to guess meanings from context. She understood enough to catch the gist, but even if she wanted to make a point, she always remembered her mother’s words: “Less talk, less mistake.”

She sat inside a cubicle, fanning herself, until she heard several women enter the bathroom, whispering excitedly.

One woman said, “It was a hot summer night.”

Another: “It was almost midnight when it happened.”

The third voice mentioned a familiar name, “…the girl…Shirley Ong.”

Marlene held her breath. Shirley Ong, her mother. As the women continued whispering amongst themselves, she heard the zip of a purse opening and closing, loose change being tossed into a crystal bowl, the burst of a hand dryer coming to life. From her side of the cubicle, she heard a door being locked.

“Tsk, tsk. Shirley was only eighteen,” said one woman, clicking her tongue and sounding like a lizard.

“No sons, an only girl-child…who lived with her mother and father on the third level of a building in Nueva Street.”

Marlene covered her mouth to stifle a sneeze.

She caught a new voice.

“It was also the year of the tiger.”

And what did that have to do with Mother? Marlene thought.

Though Marlene caught only snippets and phrases, in her mind, she was able to follow their story down an old road, into a narrow stairway of an old familiar building.

“Shirley had been waiting for her father…”

***

Shirley did not know whether to stand or sit while she waited. Her earlier memories haunted her. She recalled the scrunching sound his feet made as he walked over peanut shells and candy wrappers in the movie house. This sound had since been upsetting for her. Her nightmares were of giant watermelon seeds fractured into two pieces, yielding rotting meat inside. She had not yet told anyone about his strong hands that moved up and down her legs, the evenings of unspoken madness inside closed quarters and on cold bathroom floors.

Shirley had been staring at a wall for several hours in the dark corner on the second-floor landing of her father’s apartment building in Nueva Street. She had been drawing circles on the wooden plank with her foot and swatting at the mosquitoes that attacked the backs of her legs.

Her heart skipped a beat when she recognized the sound of his footsteps. He was flatfooted so he shuffled as he climbed the wooden stairs, breathing heavily. She smelled liquor on his breath when she stood before him on the second-floor landing. He snorted and told her to mind her own business.

“Ah, Shirley, ano ikaw pakialam sa akin?”

Then, he shouted at her again.

“Ano gawa ka dito? Masyado gabi na!”

***

“She brandished a knife.”

“Ten times, she stabbed him.”

“Ah! Yo!”

***

Shirley was ready to meet his strong hands. She looked straight into his eyes, held up one of her mother’s kitchen knives and began stabbing her father.

***

“Ah! yo!” another voice repeated.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk…”

“He rolled down the steps.”

***

He shouted for help but lost his balance. She watched him roll down the stairs and felt nothing. Shirley proceeded down and looked at the body. She checked for signs of life.

***

“Why did she do it?”

“Nobody knows.”

“But even after he was stabbed ten times, Uncle did not die!”

***

When Shirley realized that she had failed to kill him, she dropped the bloody knife and ran as fast and as far away from Chinatown as she could.

***

Marlene covered her mouth with both hands. Her mother was nineteen years old when she was born. She had never heard this story before. She was scared to leave the cubicle. It must have been the heat that caused her to behave the way she did. She was breathing heavily now, confused, overwhelmed, and unable to think clearly. She threw up.

The Ong women heard someone flush the toilet in one of the cubicles. Their heads turned toward the door. Marlene walked out. The women noted her black t-shirt, a stark contrast to their red clothing.

Marlene walked toward the sink and splashed her face with cold water. She looked at the Ong women from the wide mirror. She returned their measured stares, staring at their short hair dyed to look like a rooster’s feathers. They had lined up their designer bags on top of the sink counter in an ordered line. They were either Ong women by birth or by marriage—she never could tell one from the other.

Marlene fixed her long straight black hair, and lined her lips very slowly with pink lip-gloss. She wanted to scream at the Ong women because she had the most urgent desire to say something about useless chatter: “If you have nothing good to say about anyone, I suggest you keep quiet.”

But she held her tongue. Instead, she turned her back to the tongue-tied Ong women and walked away. Their prattle resumed just before she shut the door behind her.

“Who is she?”

“She’s Shirley Ong’s daughter.”

Marlene heard laughter.

“Wrong move, too late.”

***

Even as a young girl, Marlene had heard rumors within the Ong clan about an incident that happened between her mother and her grandfather some nineteen years ago. Her mother had told her about it, in bits and pieces but she had never heard this version before. She thought about the nightmares and the ghosts that haunted her in her sleep. The silence came when she held her breath, always conscious of the man in the dark who looked like her grandfather.

“So many ghosts,” she said to herself.

She returned to the party to join her grandmother and grandfather who sat with other relatives at one of the round tables, all covered with red tablecloth, symbolizing an auspicious day for Auntie Ma, Grandfather’s sister; it was her seventieth birthday.

Marlene was uncertain as to where to sit. She felt a strong reluctance to stay at the table, at the party, but they had seen her approach.

‘Would you please sit down? I will get you something to drink. I’ll get you a Sprite,” Angkong said.

Marlene tried to control her nervousness as she sat between her grandparents. She watched Angkong turn the lazy susan, was shocked at how Amah’s hands crossed over her thighs underneath the table and clutched her grandfather by his shirt to stop him. He pulled himself from her grasp and the smile on his face tightened.

When he held the can of Sprite, he called out to Marlene softly, and touched her hand. “Look, Sprite, your favorite…”

He poured the drink into the glass. Marlene took it, held the glass with both hands and drank slowly.

“Wah, see that!” Auntie Ma said, “Now, you have to show your Angkong some gratitude,” she said.

Marlene squeezed the cold glass. He looked at her. She sensed his excitement but brushed it aside and thought: he is only Grandfather. She meant to kiss him on the cheeks but at the last moment he turned his face a little too much so her lips met his. She pulled away instantly.

“That’s a good granddaughter,” Aunty Ma said.

Amah sat up straight, staring down at the food on her plate. She rolled the corner of her red napkin between her fingers into a ball, held it hidden in her palm.

Marlene’s plate filled with small portions of fish, abalone, lettuce leaves and gabi paste, swimming in what appeared to be combinations of soy sauce and salad dressing, but she ate little. The story she had heard inside the ladies’ room left her with very little appetite.

“Your food is getting cold,” Auntie Ma said.

Marlene took hold of her chopsticks and ate slowly, trying not to pick at the food on her plate so that Aunty Ma would not lose face. Her grandmother nudged Marlene on the elbow. In response, she tapped her stomach so that Amah would know that she had had enough to eat.

Marlene had often considered confronting her mother about the rumors, but she knew how her mother artfully dodged any queries that involved her family. When she had become insistent, her mother always became angry.

“There are some things you cannot change even if you reason with them. You must know the difference.” Marlene knew that her mother adapted these quotations from her Christian fellowship meetings.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she would continue. “There’s just so much drama. It’s old news. Let’s throw it away. I was young and angry and what good did that do me?”

The next time they saw each other, would she dare to ask: “Is it true? Did you stab Angkong ten times?” But how can I ask such a thing if I’m not supposed to know?

Amah nudged her elbow again but Marlene remained quiet. Angkong burped, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the way he always did after meals.

***

This was her morning ritual: Amah stood in front of her red lacquered altar table, topped with two green urns, picture frames of dead relatives, three divine gods, and bowls of fruits and flowers; with lighted joss sticks in hand, she believed that each wisp of smoke would bring her petitions up to heaven. She prayed to her three gods– Hok, Lok and Siu-– representing luck, happiness and long life.

Amah also prayed to her dead ancestors, ringing her bell in between murmured prayers. During special occasions, Amah prepared three kinds of dishes to offer to her gods: The whole chicken, steamed with its neck and head still attached to its body; crispy pata; and a steamed fish. She did this at least once a year, during ghost month, or when her grandmother wanted to ask her gods for something really important, maybe a Christmas wish.

After her morning offerings, she prepared her breakfast of lugao and waited for Marlene to join her. Amah sat in an almost prayerful pose while she watched her granddaughter prepare her own breakfast from leftovers.

That morning, Marlene felt robbed when her grandmother took away her breakfast plate of leftover steamed rice mixed with mahu and mayonnaise. Grandmother sniffed at the shredded pork, tasted it, then spit it out. She threw everything that Marlene had put together into the kitchen sink.

Amah said, “Tapun, na! Amak na!”

Marlene said “Amak?” then realized she meant amag, spoiled. Her grandmother’s strong sense of smell had saved her. The powdery pork was moldy and her grandmother had the foresight to grab her plate away lest she fall ill from eating it.

Not for the first time, Marlene saw the beauty of her grandmother’s white round face, her thin eyebrows, high cheekbones and almond eyes, emphasized all the more with her hair pulled back in a tight bun–the elegant features of the Northern Chinese.

Her grandmother spoke in Chinese, which Marlene did not understand. Frustrated, Marlene remembered her own Mother’s words: “Just for two months. I have to do something important. Stay with Amah just for two months.”

Amah stood up and called Kang Atsi. They spoke in Chinese and her grandmother pointed to the plate on the kitchen sink.

“Ah, amag yung mahu.”

Kang Atsi patiently explained to Marlene that there was mold on the dried pork. In exchange for the breakfast plate that her grandmother had taken away, she offered Marlene a bowl of hot lugao.

“Just for two months,” said Mother, “stay with Amah.”

***

Amah brought Marlene to the Arangke wet market almost every other day to buy the best fish for her grandfather’s lunch. Each time, she watched the tindera splash water into her displayed catch, which to Marlene’s imagination looked like an assortment of dragons’ scales.

She always inspected the different kinds of fish. She poked them, stroked them, and inspected the eyes for clarity and sheen. But in the end, it was her nose that determined whether or not she bought that one special fish for Angkong’s lunch.

Yet it seemed strange that on this day, instead of just one fish, Amah bought two, one larger than the other, one cheaper than the other, one black Lapu-lapu and one red Lapu-lapu. Marlene could only guess that the more expensive black lapu-lapu was meant for Angkong’s lunch and the other red lapu-lapu was for her gods.

Marlene followed her grandmother, who then approached the poultry man. He brought out two live polka-dotted pullet chickens from his basket of live birds. She chose the chicken with a red crown and reminded the chicken man to give her some chicken feathers.

“Balahibo akin, bigay akin konte balahibo,” she said. The poultry man nodded.

They walked over to the vegetable section and gathered some ginger, leeks, dried mushroom and wansui. She smelled each item before it was weighed. The vegetables were individually wrapped in newspaper then gathered together with string and finally loaded into her bayong.

Amah reached for her coin purse and unfolded some bills, to give to the vegetable vendor. “Bigay akin recibo,” she said.

They boarded a kalesa that took them back to their house along Nueva Street. Kang Atsi met them at the side entrance of the building and helped Grandmother down. Marlene hefted the bayong that contained two fish, one chicken with the head still leaking blood, and vegetables. She followed Amah and Kang Atsi as they ascended the three flights of narrow steps to the apartment building.

Marlene counted her steps, “oro-plata-mata, and oro-plata-mata,” to see whether the steps landed with death. They did. Her mother did the same each time she ascended stairs, no matter where she was. She murmured gold, silver or death under her breath with eyes cast down as each foot landed on the step.

The bayong left drops of blood as she ascended. Amah called out to Marlene, “dugo, dugo,” pointing to the steps. Marlene took out her handkerchief and retraced her steps. She wiped the small trickles of blood from the bayong but the blood had already stained the area.

“How do I clean out the blood, Amah?”

Her grandmother threw several chicken feathers up in the air. Marlene followed them until they landed softly on the steps. Kang Atsi demonstrated what was meant. She called Marlene’s attention to each feather, with its numerous fine strands on either side of its hollow shafts. She used each feather to strip away the drops of blood. The impossible seemed to happen before her eyes.

“Blood stripped off by one’s own covering,” she thought.

Marlene noticed older, darker stains that also looked like blood. She inspected these and remembered the story she heard about her grandfather, stabbed ten times by her mother.

“Bilis, bilis. Linis, linis,” Amah said to Kang Atsi.

—-

Xin Mei is a published author with her book, “Afraid to be Chinese”. She has two pieces included in “When we were Little Women” edited by Rhona-Lopa Macasaet and Patricia Vergel de Dios.  She has one piece included in “Belonging, Stories of Relationships” edited by Erlinda Enriquez Panlilio.

Xin Mei started  writing when a group of women friends decided to come up with a writing group under the tutelage of Dr. Jing Hidalgo about ten years ago. Most of the stories she had written were about growing up Chinese in the Philippines. These stories were put together in “Afraid to Be Chinese”. In writing these stories she realized that family issues of honor, shame and being the other, meant confusion and contradictions.

After her first book launched in 2006, she enrolled in the University of the Philippines, Diliman for her M.A. in the Creative Writing Program.

“Less Talk, Less Mistake” made Ellen Datlow‘s Honorable Mention list of the Year’s Best Horror Vol. 4 for 2011. It was first published in print in The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories: Crime Issue.

The above image is by artist Josel Nicolas.

Listen. This is how I got the knife.

A couple years ago my sister said she’d pay for my plane ticket to visit our mother in San Francisco. Our mother was going blind, she said, and wanted to see us while she still had some vision left. My sister doesn’t have a United States visa. You know how hard it is for single Filipinas to get a tourist visa. The consuls at the embassy always think the moment you land in the States, you’ll go looking for an old American to marry so you can stay the country. Or become a TNT, tagongtago illegal immigrant. But that’s not fair. We’re not all like that. And it’s not like their economy’s what it used to be before the global bust they caused, trading in all those paper shares and fooling around with commodities.

Anyway, I had a multiple-entry tourist visa so my sister said, You go. At least Mom will be able to see one of us – while she still can.

I didn’t want to make the trip. There’s a gap between me and my mother that’s an ocean wide and an ocean deep for a lot of reasons, mostly to do with painful stuff that happened while I was growing up. I don’t want to talk about that right now.

I said, I don’t want to talk about it.

But I knew I was going, even if I didn’t want to see my mom. Family, you know. That’s really big for us Filipinos. It’s practically a racial imperative.

I made a deal with my sister. I told her I’d go if I could drop by Los Angeles and visit my old boyfriend. She’d have to pay an extra hundred dollars on the airplane fare, though.

Him? She scoffed. Your first boyfriend, from Leveriza, in Pasay City? The one who dumped you for no reason?

Yes, him, I said patiently. We lost touch and reconnected lately on Facebook. We haven’t seen each other in ten years. We could still be friends. We keep a great many of each other’s secrets.

All right, she said. Go. Get it out of your system.

I knew I’d have a bad visit with my mom, and I was glad when I got on that plane to Los Angeles. Ray was waiting for me at LAX. He looked the same as before – his face, I mean, except that he was heavier. As I was. Time changes all of us.

He crushed me in his arms. Is it really you, he said. I can’t believe you’re here.

Then he…

Yes, I am telling you where I got the knife.

Ray put me up in their apartment in downtown LA, near Beverly Boulevard. I stayed with him in his room. I met his mother and sister. They remembered me from before as Ray’s girlfriend, the tiny one with the big ears that she tried to hide with her hair. The one who’d always eat a lot of the tokwa’tbaboy Nanay used to cook in her kitchen in Leveriza.

Where’s Tatay? I asked. He always called me “Minnie Mouse” because of the ears. The last I heard, I told Ray, you were all here in the US, your entire family. Your brother Jay, too.

Jay moved to Sacramento, Ray said. He’s a cop there.

Just like Tatay? I said. Cool. Where is he, by the way?

There. Ray pointed to a large alabaster vase on the mesa-altar by the door. He died last year. Lung cancer. We had him cremated.

See, I knew you’d find this story interesting. Tatay used to work security for the late mayor of Pasay, the one who had a movie-star daughter. Oh, you’ve heard of Tatay? He was well before your time, I expect.

Anyway, Ray and I spent the days after his work taking in the sights. Getty Museum. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Grove. It’s a huge mall, better than our Mall of Asia. They have a Borders there. Or was it a Barnes and Noble? One of those chain bookstores with a Starbucks inside. I could stay for hours in there.

One afternoon, before his mother and his sister came home and we were back at the apartment early, I brought up the subject of Tatay again. I was curious.

How did he die? I asked.

He got sick. That’s it, Ray said. He died, gasping for breath. Emphysema. That’s the oxygen tank he used, behind the door. What else is there to tell? About his life? He spent it as a cop in Pasay before coming over here as a retiree. He had a desk job. But he had friends in the field. They did the dirty work. The stories they told me when I was a kid, I can’t shake them. They stay with you. They mess with your head.

Tell me, I asked.

No. They’ll mess with your head.

Please, I said. As a journalist, I’d pounded my share of beats, the police beat among them. I was assigned to the Western Police District for a while. Because I was a girl, the male members of the press corps tried to keep from me as much as possible the more gory crime stories, but I knew stuff. I kept an ear to the ground.

I bet there’s nothing you can tell me that I haven’t already heard, I said.

All right, said Ray. Here’s a story Tatay’s friend told me. You heard about the Silva case?

Yes, I said. He disappeared. His common-law wife reported him as a missing person to the Pasay City police, but they never found him. The police told the wife that maybe Silva had moved to the probinsiya to be with a girlfriend.

Pasensiyana, misis, they said, or something like that.We can’t find him. You’ll have to accept that he’s probably moved on and making babies now with some sexy chick.

She cried. Men. So insensitive. Chauvinist animals. But what else could she do? For the cops, it was case closed. She sobbed into her handkerchief. Her 13-year-old daughter, all skin and hair and bones, put an arm around her shoulders. Tama na, Ma, she whispered. Enough. Stop crying.

Hang on a moment. Can I have a glass of water, please? My throat is sore. No ice. Thank you.

So. The girl, I was told, was not Silva’s but another man’s – the woman’s husband. She had left him because he was beating her. Late one night she crept out of their shack carrying only a duffel bag of clothes and her young daughter; hitching up the skirt of her duster, she got astride Silva’s Yamaha motorcycle and off they sped into the night and a new life. Only for him to disappear mysteriously five years later.

Ray said, but that’s not what really happened.

You mean Silva didn’t run off with another woman?

No, said Ray. Tatay’s friend told me this:

Boyong Silva was a neighbor of theirs. He was a drunkard. He spent the days getting soused with cronies, who, like him, relied on their wives to keep them fed and sheltered in the barong-barongs, the shacks of scrounged wood and galvanized iron that littered their community like rat’s nests.

He’d come home late. The wife would be asleep. She took in laundry and would be tired to death after a day bent over a washtub, scrubbing clothes by hand, the chemicals in the harsh detergent bareta eating into her hands, pitting the rough brown skin with red wounds that stung when she immersed her hands in water. After that she’d iron the dry clothes. The damp, the heat, the hard labor, they take a toll.

Silva would come home and want sex. One night, seeing his woman snoring on the mat, mouth open, slack in fatigue, he wasn’t attracted to her as much as he was to her daughter, who was young, fresh, innocent. Defenseless.

He crept over to where she lay, and forced himself upon her, breath stinking of gin and beer and chicharon bulaklak. He clapped a dirty hand over the child’s mouth, waking her. He put a knee between her legs, and whispered, don’t tell your mother, or I’ll kill the both of you. Whimpering, the girl complied.

He used her over and over again that summer. Roughly. She had just turned 13. She lost weight; her eyes bore a haggard look. There were bruises on her thin arms. The women in the barangay began to notice. Some of them had heard the moans from their shack. They figured out what was going on. They told Tatay’s friend, the cop.

Ray, I said. The poor girl. The words stuck in my throat.

He said, you’d know how traumatic it was for her. You understand. Now do you want me to finish the story or not?

I waved at him, go ahead.

Ray said, Tatay’s friend took a couple of friends to Silva’s one day, picked him up in an unmarked car. I’d ridden in it. It was a blue Toyota Corolla DX with green security plates, not the red government plates. It was banged-up, nothing to look at twice. Nondescript.

Silva knew there was no use denying what he had done. He blubbered and asked the cops to have mercy. That he wouldn’t do it again, ever. That he’d go away, and the wife need never know what he did to her daughter.

Did they take him to jail? Book him and all? I asked.

No, said Ray scornfully. He was a child molester. Bubuhayin mo pa ba yun? Would you allow him to live? What if that was your child he’d raped? Imagine yourself as the mother or the child, both powerless to do anything. What if you had a chance to take revenge? To eliminate a monster from your life? You of all people should know the answer to that.

Shut up, I said. What happened next? Where’d Tatay’s friends take Silva?

To a motel, Ray said. One where they knew the manager.

What’d they do?

First, they told him what they were going to do to him and why, in great detail. He kept wailing, making a lot of noise. The people in the rooms beside theirs might have heard. So they gagged him. Next, they pulled down his pants and sodomized him.

I feel sick, I said.

Ray said, they used the handle of a mop they found in the bathroom. They wanted him to feel what he’d done to the little girl. They had daughters her age, you see. He bled from the rectum. There was a lot of blood. They must have pushed that mop handle farther in than they meant to.

Then one of the cops clubbed him in the head with a nightstick, knocking him out. After that they dismembered him in the motel bathroom, starting with the head. Then the limbs. I forgot what they did with the torso and how they got rid of the body parts. But the bottom of the trunk of that blue DX was always covered with newspapers; until then I thought it was for their muddy boots. It was then also I understood what they used the knives in their holster belts for.

But if he was merely unconscious when they began cutting him up – I said.

That’s what Tatay’s friend told me. Unconscious. Not dead.

But the pain…! He must have screamed –

He was gagged, I told you. Pay attention. They said sawing through the bones was the most difficult part.

It was a summary execution, then, I said. So that’s what happened to Silva. No wonder they never found him.

What? Are you calling me a liar? Look, I’m just telling you what Ray told me. It’s no use telling me cops don’t do that sort of thing. I wouldn’t know, would I? Why shouldn’t it be true? He’s a policeman’s son, after all. He should know.

Anyway. Ray said, Tatay’s friend told me that’s what they did to all the rapists and child molesters they came across.

Was Tatay ever with them, at all? I asked.

That’s it, Ray said. No more stories. I don’t want to think about them anymore. Let’s go shopping for your pasalubongs. What else do you want to buy while you’re here?

I said, I want a Lamy Safari fountain pen. We don’t have them in Manila yet. Maybe if I had one, I’d write better stories.

You don’t need all that! he said impatiently. You can write well enough. I wish I had half your talent. That’s your very own mojo.

Well, I still want one. And a Spyderco knife. A friend of mine has one and she uses it to whittle the bamboo chopsticks they give away at Chinese restaurants into dip pens. She dips them into ink and makes line drawings of robots and dragons. Sometimes their mouths drip red. I only want the knife, I said, because that’s the closest I’ll come to being like her. I know I’ll never draw as well as she does.

I know where there’s a fountain pen store in Westwood, and another in Monrovia, Ray said. We can go now. It’s still early.

I bought a lipstick red Safari for myself and a Lamy Al-Star for Ray, along with a bottle of blue ink for him. Then we had dinner somewhere. When we got back to their apartment, his mother and sister were asleep.

He opened the coat closet and rummaged inside, emerging with a battered blue knapsack in his hand. From the depths of the bag Ray pulled out a folding knife and handed it to me. There, he said. That’s yours now. It was Tatay’s.

I could not believe that what lay on my palm was real, and that it was mine. It was a Spyderco, an Endura with a partially serrated edge and a black handle of fiberglass reinforced nylon. The blade was ATS-55 performance stainless steel. It costs over a hundred dollars, rather too pricey for me, which is why I hadn’t bought one sooner.

Like magic, Ray had produced one just for me.

It’s beautiful. But I can’t take this, I said. It belonged to Tatay. I knew how much Ray idolized his father.

Shouldn’t you be giving this to your son? I asked Ray. It’s an heirloom of sorts. It’ll remind him of his grandfather.

No, he said. It’s not for Jake. I want you to have it. Put it away now. Just be careful what you use it for.

But….

I said, it’s yours.It’s not something for my son to have.

Thank you. I’ll always treasure it. If you’re quite sure you don’t want it for Jake…?

Huwag kang makulit, Ray said, which we know can also mean, shut the hell up already. He turned his back. The conversation was over.

I brought the knife back to Manila in my check-in luggage, wrapped in a sock and stuffed in a souvenir Starbucks plastic tumbler that says “Los Angeles” and that’s got palm trees on it. I also collect Starbucks tumblers, you see.

So that’s where I got the knife.

Ray told me it hadn’t been blooded before. Somehow I don’t think that’s true. You can tell this knife’s got history and it’s been through a lot, from the way the paint on the metal clip is almost all worn away. And there’s this the nick on the nylon handle – see? – like it came up against something sharp. What made the dull marks on the edge of the handle, I don’t know – teeth marks? I really can’t say.

Maybe Tatay kept the knife shoved anyhow into his holster belt? Pulling it out and pushing it in would wear away the paint on the clip.

Maybe Tatay’s friends crammed this knife into the mouths of the criminals they dispatched, to shush them while they were being carved into pieces. That would account for teeth marks, wouldn’t it?

Maybe Tatay was with them, after all.

I think that’s why Ray didn’t want Jake to have this knife.

But then I’ve used it myself. That’s another reason it looks worn.I always carry Tatay’s Spyderco in my bag, wherever I go. Taught myself knife-fighting, for self-defense, you know. Internet tutorials. Girls like me and my two daughters, we need to take care of ourselves. Times are bad. The past couple years,with that knife on me, I’ve felt pretty safe. Felt pretty capable of taking care of myself and my girls.

Yes, that’s the same knife I pulled on the man. He was harassing my eldest. Following her around, Peeking in our windows at her. Hanging outside our gate. She’s only 14. So when my youngest and I came home that night from picking up her report card, and I found him on top of her, and her struggling beneath him, screaming…

I know how it feels.

Stop the tape, I need to puke. Where’s the ladies’ room?

I’m fine now. Where were we? What’s that? The young man died in the ICU?

Good.

What? I’m not sorry. He deserved it.I’m just sorry you came along before I had a chance to cut him up.

I think that’s why Ray gave me the knife. I can feel Tatay’s spirit in it. He’d be proud I blooded it again.

May I have it back now, please?

—-

Jenny is a Palanca Award-winning writer (First Prize, English Essay, 2011). A multi-tasker, she writes opinion and horseracing columns in English for Manila Standard-Today and a horseracing column in Filipino for Bandera, co-hosts a weekly radio show on DWIZ, and works for a GOCC. She is halfway done with her PhD dissertation for the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Once in a while she gives spoken-word performances. This story is one of her few forays into fiction.

The above image is from here.

Between the bus stop and her apartment building, a tremendous gust of wind blows Dr. Vicente’s umbrella inside out and breaks the spokes, leaving her open to be drenched. When she gets home, she takes a hot shower then goes to the kitchen, cooking penne and heating up some amatriciana sauce. She eats standing by the sink. When she finishes, she mixes herself a strong drink and pours it into a coffee mug.

The students’ term papers are piled in four neat stacks on her desk. There is no rush to mark them now. Dr. Dimaano had drawn her aside and recommended a mandatory week off. Someone else could substitute for your classes, he had said. You take a break and get back in touch with yourself.

She knows she won’t be able to stand this.

The main thing is Lacey. Take Lacey down and she can finally have her peace and her students can get some real work done.

The difference between Lacey and the criminals she had broken is that people like Burgos and Elevado had always been on her side. Dr. Dimaano had been no help. What she has to do is to get Lacey alone, away from people whom Lacey could use against her.

She checks the university’s student information system online, her fingers tingling. Lacey has two classes tomorrow with a free hour in between. It would do. An hour means Lacey wouldn’t have time to go roaming around too far or leave campus. The girl would hang around the lecture halls, aimless, like everyone her age. At most she’d go to the cafeteria or fall asleep at the library. It wouldn’t be difficult. All it takes is a good head and clear intentions. Start out firm and polite, and if that doesn’t work, go for the jugular. Like teaching.

She could approach Lacey gently, tell her the whole thing had been a misunderstanding, say she’s sorry, bring the girl’s guard down. That’s what had gotten the girl, the other girl, the one from that night, to come out to the hallway. The girl hadn’t wanted to but she was compliant, almost to the point that Dr. Vicente had thought the girl could finally be taken away from that hellhole. The girl’s eyes had been skittish but that was understandable: she was so young and in so much trouble, and all she had ever needed was some good-intentioned help.

Like Lacey, who shouldn’t be going around directly addressing everyone in their minds. At that impressionable age, it takes only one rotten mind, which would usually be strong enough to be overwhelming, to take advantage of her. She shouldn’t be led to believe that exposing herself to people would bear no consequences.

If Dr. Vicente were careful enough to purge any thought of her real intentions by focusing on the leaves of the trees, the individual bits of gravel on the path, Lacey would be arrogant enough to think her apology is genuine. Lacey wouldn’t turn down a brag-worthy peace offering from her professor, like coffee at an imaginary faculty-only lounge found in that airless, claustrophobic alley behind the Arts building littered with Dr. Dimaano’s cigarette butts. Perfect for that sense of exposure, unfamiliarity, and isolation needed to dismantle the girl’s mind of its last defenses.

No transitions, no preambles, no grandstanding about moral righteousness. Let the girl feel the stress of experiencing sudden extremes. Lacey’s mind would open like a fresh wound.

Lacey would put up a fight, of course, but challenge makes it all the more worthwhile, like a good dissertation. A struggle that ends with a snap and a final, tranquil quiet.

***

The students stream out of the doors, a denim flood. Dr. Vicente stands across the hall. She is chewing at the skin around her fingernails as she hunts for Lacey’s dyed hair and eyeliner. Dr. Vicente has already forgotten how long she’s has been standing there. The tediousness of waiting is insignificant when there is a prize at the end. Silence. Absolution.

As the students pass her, a hundred of their voices erupt in her head and she fights them, represses each of them, looking only for that one metallic timbre that belongs to Lacey Saloma. Keep calm. Compartmentalize. If you get caught in the current of a thought, you’ll have to finish the ride, no matter how long or roundabout it is. Dr. Vicente has no time for that.

When you’re looking for a specific, buried thought, something the person’s not thinking of at the moment but you know it’s there, like a location, a person, a reason for an action, like murder, like rape, like suicide, like bullying a teacher, talking directly to her mind, why would anyone want to do that? it would take every bit of willpower to find it.

It’s the composed person who triumphs. Part of the skill is to avoid the temptation of taking a mass of images with you, an entire color palette held together by delicate, referential ink blots, and trying to sort it out in your own mind. You have to tease it out like a broken drawstring from a waistband.

There she is.

***

If you bring someone’s entire mental detritus into your own head, how do you expect yourself to keep it together?

***

The sight of Lacey makes Dr. Vicente realize how close she is to beating this and something in her lets go, a fist opens, a flower blooms, the anchor drops.

Suddenly Dr. Vicente can’t stop smiling. Tiny balls of light accumulate behind her elbows and knees, fighting to be released. The students’ lips separate and close, mouthing words she cannot hear. Their hands and arms move and make gestures towards heaven.

***

You might as well just hand your mind over, open like a fresh wound, and let the multicolored tide crash into everything.

***

A name demands to be allowed into her consciousness and she calls it out loud, Patricia Aning, Patricia Aning.

Lacey turns around at the sound and sees Dr. Vicente, a spasm of panic twisting the girl’s face the same way it had disfigured the prostitute’s.

***

If you want to know what death feels like, really, in the mind of someone dying, when it’s too late to pull out, to distract yourself, it’s like being in a tiny corridor, drafty / I want my jacket, please I’m not dressed, I / can anyone get me my / hands everywhere, never gentle / light bulb, flickering / why had no one fixed / flickering / screaming questions / brown belt on the floor / like a snake / like him / questions / don’t think of Endriga / don’t let it slip / hands / like everyone else / is that the one he used to hit me with, because / I’ve been hit by those too, police boots, as thick as / there’s four pairs / one pair of heels, where / like mine / but nicer, red, I would’ve / a woman / a woman in red heels / who’s she / can’t see in this light / questions again / boots /cold wall / blood tastes like metal / don’t think of him / no / Endriga / brown belt on the floor/ don’t say anything, no matter / brown belt on the floor / brown belt on the floor / stop / Oh God / brown belt on the floor / will they let me go back / please let me / who’s that woman / rich-looking / damn light bulb / been looking at me, she looks sick, what / I want a jacket / what do you want / what’s that / cold, drafty, jacket, please / Endriga / let me go back / how does she know / Endriga / what’s she telling / how does she know / what / what’s she telling them / Oh God / how / bitch / get me out of here / who is she / devil woman / let me go / over / no more of this, no / how does she know Endriga / who is she / that’s the only way / who is she / otherwise, everyone else / only way / metal / yes / take it / otherwise, everyone else would / heavy / how do they carry this with them all the time, so small but / Endriga had one too / so heavy / everyone else / this is where he used to put it, here on my / is this what he wanted, is this what I wanted / Oh God / everyone else / pull it / pull

***

Burgos is outside, his thumbs hooked on his belt and his arms hanging by his sides. The police car is parked next to him and Elevado is in the driver’s seat nursing a cigarette, the smoke spiraling out the open window and melting under the rain.

“Rosemary.” Burgos visibly relaxes when the glass doors open and she comes out. He leans his apple-shaped body against the granite wall of the university infirmary, adopting the same casual posture he puts on before a raid to put Dr. Vicente at ease – as if he were on his way to buy some milk, despite knowing that when they reach the supermarket, someone might get hurt and they can’t tell who it’s going to be until it happens. “I’ve been calling you. I finally came here and this is where I find you. What happened?”

Elevado gives a half-wave from the car.

“I had a bad headache,” Dr. Vicente says. “I passed out a bit.”

“Are you all right? What did the doctor say?”

Fantastic, Rosemary. We used a nut for interrogations.

“Just a dizzy spell, it’s nothing. A student of mine brought me here.”

“Oh, the girl who was waiting around some time ago? Long hair, glasses? Do you need to sit down?”

How many innocent people did we put away because of what you told us?

“Really, I’m fine. You said you were calling me?”

“Since morning, yeah, but you weren’t answering your phone.”

And that’s not even the worst part.

“I did tell you I didn’t want anything to do with this anymore,” but her tone is nostalgic, as if she is trying to remember what she had said before.

“I know. That’s why I came looking for you.” He rubs the back of his neck and she notices the dark rings under his eyes. “We found Endriga.”

A girl shot herself because of you.

Now that the adrenaline has completely worn off, she is adrift in its tepid, aimless wake, close to touching the sea floor. She feels as though she has no rib cage to protect her lungs and her heart, only a paper bag that’s been crumpled and thrown away too many times.

“We just need you to spend a couple of minutes with him,” says Burgos. “If you feel like it’s starting to get screwed up, you just give us a sign and you’ll be out of there in seconds. I’m sure whatever you would have gotten by then would be very helpful already.”

Gun in mouth.

“She looks quite similar to her.”

“Sorry?”

“Lacey, the student you saw earlier. Her and the other girl.” When he doesn’t answer, she says, “The girl who killed herself.”

Remember how loud it was?

“Patricia Aning, you mean.”

She lets the name in and it runs through her memories of the past week like a knife. The first time she had seen that name was in the newspaper the day after. The newspaper claimed that the prostitute, in an overwhelming fit of guilt, had committed suicide. She remembers quickly folding the paper up to cover the name and throwing it away into the trash bin. “Yes.”

If only you had been more discreet. If only you didn’t show the girl that you can read her mind. You just stood there and blabbed it all to Burgos, right in front of her.

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. They all look alike,” he answers. “Girls nowadays. I didn’t get a good look at her because she was on her way out when we arrived, but she seemed pretty worried. Your student, I mean. Seems like she was hanging around here for a while.”

You can’t get a damned thing right, Rosemary.

“I’ll have to thank her,” she says. She brings her hand to her face to massage her eyes and Burgos politely looks away. “You said you found Mr. Endriga?”

“Yeah. Roberto Endriga. Very minor league. He’s ambitious enough have a prostitution ring of his own but he’s just some bigger fish’s boy. We found him in a McDonald’s on the other side of town.”

You’re going to get someone killed again. Maybe Burgos. Or even a bystander this time.

“He used to threaten his girls by putting a gun into their mouths too and pretending the safety lock wasn’t on,” says Dr. Vicente.

Someone so innocent you can never just chalk it up as collateral damage.

“You told us before.”

A casualty of your incompetence.

She stands up, adjusting the collar of her white shirt. “It’s a confession you’re looking for, right?”

Your fault all over again.

Burgos waves at Elevado, who puts the cigarette out and starts the engine.

***

In his office, Dr. Dimaano might be pulling up her folder and reviewing her history in the university. Harassing a student is not something taken lightly. She might be asked to undergo a psychological assessment. They’ll find a fresh PhD to substitute her classes while she takes more weeks off. Dr. Vicente doesn’t have tenure. The fresh PhD might stay there forever.

a woman / the woman in the white shirt / who’s she / can’t see in this light / questions again /

But right now Elevado is driving and Burgos is next to him, talking about a new barbecue place he has found.

brown belt on the floor / brown belt on the floor / stop / Oh God / brown belt on the floor /

The marinade they use is excellent and the chicken is always burnt just the right way, so the skin falls off easily but doesn’t taste like ash.

what’s she telling / how does she know / what / what’s she telling them / Oh God / how /

Dr. Vicente knows they’re talking about the restaurant for her benefit and she’s grateful. She rides in the backseat and looks at her reflection against a backdrop of moving buildings that meld into gray and blue layers of steel and glass.

who is she / that’s the only way / who is she / otherwise, everyone else / only way / metal / yes / take it

The rain blurs the rust stains on the buildings, washing away the filth that had crept from the sewers to the walls to the skin underneath everyone’s fingernails.

Be quiet, she tells the window. I can do this.

***

Roberto Endriga is dressed like a real estate agent with his shirt and jacket. When they walk in, he smiles from the interrogation table but with the faint look of irritation of someone whose privacy has been intruded upon.

Elevado is brisk and almost show-offy. Omitting Dr. Vicente’s part from anything, he tells Endriga about the raid and asks him to explain himself. Endriga doesn’t answer. Like a kingfisher watching over a minnow beneath the shallow waters, he looks at Dr. Vicente on the other side of the table, a small, quizzical frown on his brow. He asks who she is. Elevado tells him to just answer his question. Endriga’s eyes leave Dr. Vicente and he tells Elevado he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Elevado answers that he doesn’t think so. Endriga glares at the one-way mirror where Burgos is watching.

Elevado gives Dr. Vicente the sign and she takes her pen and her paper out.

Despite his smoothness, Roberto Endriga is, as Burgos had said, still just someone’s henchman. The moment she had walked in, his mind had already been open, running through the list of his backers and reminding himself to stay away from mentioning anything related to them.

Then here, suddenly, a silvery coil of thoughts about Patricia Aning.

It’s fleeting but Dr. Vicente holds on to it, looks at how it’s woven with memories and shot through with threads of resentment and dull hate.

Endriga says he’s never heard of the girl then jokes that if he had he might have paid her little love nest a visit while she was still alive. He laughs alone. Elevado barely covers his grimace.

Dr. Vicente writes down the names of Endriga’s backers. As she passes the slip of paper to Elevado, she asks Endriga, Isn’t it a shame he was never drunk enough before to have killed Patricia Aning himself, during one of those evenings when the May breeze blew in between the curtains of the room at the Orange Suites and the summer heat and the beer in his stomach copulated to produce an oppressive miasma, and Patricia, his prize, his slut, rolled her stockings up in front of the mirror, smug and self-satisfied.

Endriga’s face turns white. Dr. Vicente stands up and walks out the room, leaving Elevado to take care of the confession.

***

She returns home by herself. Burgos had offered her a ride but she had refused.

Dr. Vicente chops lettuce and moistens the salad with vinaigrette, then eats by the kitchen sink.

She loads the laundry into the machine. She had done the same on the night Patrician Aning had shot herself, throwing the clothes in the wash because they smelled of blood and vomit. She listens to the machine run, luxuriating in its meaningless drone.

Now Dr. Vicente allows herself to replay the agitation on Patricia Aning’s face just before she had died. The girl’s last thoughts hadn’t been of the police or of the woman in the white shirt. They had been memories of Endriga putting a gun to her mouth to demonstrate what he would do to her family if she said anything.

Then the girl had pulled the trigger and the bullet had ripped through the ceiling of her mouth and into her brain, interrupting those memories forever, letting them hang in the charged air of the tiny corridor, abandoned, sparks dancing a jig of liberation one moment in the light that bled around them, in the rush of air stripped of pause, before vanishing into the smoke of spent gunpowder.

The washing machine growls and rumbles, trembling from the force of its movements. Dr. Vicente turns away as her face slackens. When the tears finally arrive, she welcomes them, surrounded by the stillness of no one’s thoughts.

—-

Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila and is currently working in Hong Kong. Her latest publications include short stories in First Stop Fiction, The Other Room, and Corvus Magazine, while forthcoming publications will be in the World SF Blog, Lauriat: An Anthology of Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction, and Philippine Speculative Fiction 7. She maintains a blog at http://swordskill.wordpress.com and a Twitter account @CrystalKoo.

The above image is from here.

So you compartmentalize. That’s always been the ticket. Keep boundaries. Focus on the color of his pants, the bit of spinach between his teeth, the flashing lights of his cellphone.

If you’re still picking up a thought when you don’t want to, then you’ll just have to read the damn thing and move on.

***

Dr. Vicente bursts into the auditorium doors and barely stops herself from vomiting. She staggers to the desk on her red heels, her umbrella leaving a wet trail to the podium. The undergraduates respond by opening their books liturgically to where they had left off days ago. A titter here and there and a general clicking of pens, and from somewhere at the back, Dr. Vicente picks up someone’s thought, I wonder how much she drank last night. It floats over a sea of How boring is today going to be, I hope Dr. Vicente finally throws up so we could get a class off, Why did Shakespeare have to write this damn long about everything, Dr. Vicente looks like my mother on Friday nights.

She shifts her students’ thoughts away from her mind. It’s easy to suppress each of their voices until they collectively become a static hum because she knows their thoughts are harmless and made only in passing. They’re nothing like the thought Dr. Vicente feels is coming towards her now, from that girl with long hair who always sits under the fire exit sign, her glasses reflecting the green photoluminescence. Its succinct, crystalline phrasing sticks out of the other students’ low-frequency realms of thought: Someone ought to report you, Dr. Vicente.

Safe in the silence of telepathy and in the unspoken covenant that no one should find out both of them are able to do this, the student continues. Just because university professors don’t need qualifications in education doesn’t mean you can’t do it wrong. I really should report you.

Dr. Vicente hasn’t come unprepared. This has been going on for a week. She makes a show of looking at the class list then spotting a name as if for the first time. “Lacey Saloma?”

Dr. Vicente tells her she’s made an appointment for both of them with Dr. Dimaano and would Lacey please stay behind at the end of class.

The girl’s immediate astonishment isn’t the smirk-wreathed reaction Dr. Vicente was expecting but she compartmentalizes anyway – let Lacey become someone else’s problem. Despite everyone’s studious scribbling and highlighting on the page, Dr. Vicente knows which few in the class still don’t understand the significance of what she’s about to quote next and she’ll have to work on getting everyone onboard without Lacey Saloma’s need for attention.

“Polonius is dead,” Dr. Vicente says, turning on the projector, “and Hamlet justifies himself with these words: ‘…heaven hath pleased it so to punish me with this – ”

Maybe I can ask Dr. Dimaano what is this going to be all for when we’re out working for the man, our salaries peaking when we turn forty? Lacey tells her. Tell us what life outside has to do with Polonius being dead. The tedium, the pigeonholing, when your metabolism slows and you slide toward death everyday. When you come to work with a hangover, Dr. Vicente.

“ ‘…and this with me, that I must be their scourge and minister.’” Dr. Vicente uncaps a red marker in the middle of Dr. Vicente, you haven’t answered my question. Should I raise my hand? and a five-day-old storm lashing against the whitewashed walls outside.

***

If you want to know what death feels like, really, in the mind of someone dying, when it’s too late to pull out, to distract yourself –

Actually Dr. Vicente doesn’t even remember what the prostitute was called. Doesn’t remember, doesn’t want to remember, doesn’t matter when the name is gone at the end of the day. Burgos had tried to catch the girl when she had crumpled on the floor, his gun still lodged between her mouth and her own hand. The corridor had turned suddenly silent, as though a door to a noisy eatery had slammed shut. Then the rain started, a quiet scurrying on the walls of Orange Suites that accompanied the police inspector as he checked for the girl’s pulse more for the sake of procedure than anything else because there was already a gaping hole in her cranium. Elevado took off his jacket and tried to stanch the expanding pool of blood before it could turn into something that would need to be hosed down. Some of the apartment residents opened their doors and the rest of Burgos’ squad told them to go back in.

What Dr. Vicente remembers is standing by the brothel door the girl had been leaning against a few minutes ago, listening to the storm, the muted thunder of everyone’s shock. It was only when the place was cordoned off and the girl’s body was bagged that Dr. Vicente realized she had vomited a little and her nails were scratching specks off the drywall. Below the slightly crooked OPEN sign of the door, the white sticker lettered with www.143love.com was now sprayed with blood, and underneath it were sobbing teenaged girls, their make-up smudged and garish.

Dr. Vicente had wanted to go home but Burgos said they should at least try to get what they could from those other girls before the media came. Elevado hustled all the girls back inside. He had a fresh cut on his upper lip from a small scuffle he had with the dead girl earlier, when he was trying to get her out of the apartment to answer some questions. Given the state of shock the girls were in, Elevado said it was a good time to get more information about their pimp, the one the dead girl had called Endriga. Elevado pushed the door open and immediately the heavy smell of sour fluids seeped out, as if a fruit had been left to rot in a corner and had been forgotten.

Dr. Vicente couldn’t move. Burgos assured her that everything would be fine; the girl shooting herself was unfortunate but a one-off. She wanted him to promise her that but she couldn’t find the words. Burgos took her shaking arm and gently moved her towards the door, which Elevado pushed open wider.

The couch in the middle of the room was made of brown faux-leather, each dark stain on every square foot illuminated by two tubes of white, fluorescent lighting above. Four girls were huddled on it, their twig-like, stockinged legs curled below them.

Burgos shut the door and sat himself down on a chair. He asked them gently who Endriga was and where he had gone. No one answered and Burgos asked them again, a little more urgently. When the same silence returned, he gave Dr. Vicente the sign.

Dr. Vicente couldn’t respond. She was imagining the dead girl huddled in with the rest of them on the sofa, telling the girls not to think of Endriga, to say nothing, to look at the floor, to put the barrel in their mouths, to point it at their brains or else Endriga would do it for them and their families. She wasn’t sure if the stains on the sofa were semen or blood. Dr. Vicente tried to stop herself. Compartmentalize. Keep it together.

One of the girls stood up. From the corner of her eyes, Dr. Vicente saw Elevado tense his body and suddenly the girl was screaming about them murdering the other girl. Burgos waved at Dr. Vicente, making bigger signs with his hand.

The girl tried to run for the door before Elevado leaped up and brought her down to the floor. A crack and cries of pain. Another girl moved to the window, opening it before two of Burgos’s men pulled her away. A strong blast of monsoon air blew into the room, slapping the sill with wet palm leaves.

Burgos gestured furiously at Dr. Vicente and she tried to focus. In the confusion, the girls’ thoughts had scattered, unguarded, like marbles dropped out of a bag. Flashing images of siblings and parents and grandparents in their own tiny, run-down houses, clients, so many of them, handsome men, fat men, short men, old men, boys, and underneath them all, holding them together like a net, she found Endriga.

An hour later, when Dr. Vicente was at home ready to fall into sporadic, alcohol-tinged spots of sleep on her bed, she would ring Burgos’s phone and tell him calmly that yes, she was fine, she was sorry for leaving without telling him, and also that she was quitting. But right then in that brothel, as she wrote down descriptions of Endriga and the places he frequented and gave them to Burgos, as she walked past the money exchanges and the telecom shops across the building and emerged into the latticed lights of Cubao, all she thought of was how she had deluded herself into believing she knew anything of what she was doing.

***

All of them are doppelgangers of each other at that age. Dyed hair, eyeliner, charms on cellphone lanyards, leggings that end with a pair of Mary Janes.

“I don’t understand what I’ve done, Dr. Vicente,” Lacey insists. Not one small, painful smile of bravado from the anxious undergraduate, who is frowning and tapping her nail-polished fingers on the podium with concern. The open microphone amplifies the sound through the empty auditorium.

For a moment, Dr. Vicente honestly thinks she must have been mistaken. Lacey isn’t demonstrating feigned innocence right now; Dr. Vicente’s seen too much of that from the other end of the interrogation table to recognize it as soon as she sees it. What she feels from Lacey’s mind is real bewilderment and a barely restrained dash of fear.

Dr. Dimaano hates meetings, especially the ones where nothing gets done. He wouldn’t mind a cancellation. Maybe it’s the wrong girl. Dr. Dimaano would be more than just irritated if it were. And anyway Dr. Vicente was never sure herself how she would explain the situation without giving herself away.

Lacey bites her lower lip. Then the thought lacerates the silence between them: You have no idea what you’re doing, do you, Dr. Vicente?

And here’s the rush of validation, sharp and sweet. Dr. Vicente is almost relieved she wasn’t wrong. She tells Lacey that she hadn’t talked to her about this behavior since she started doing it a week ago because she thought Lacey was just being childish, wanting attention like that.

“Like what?” asks Lacey, her voice catching, and at the same time: Do you really want to waste Dr. Dimaano’s time? He’ll fry your ass.

Dr. Vicente shoves all her papers into her leather satchel and picks up her umbrella. She tells Lacey to start walking.

This isn’t high school, Dr. Vicente. Should you be in this position of authority at all? Do you know the kind of power your position gives you over people?

“Shut up,” she tells her. The girl looks shocked, but if the girl can address her directly in her head, which no one has ever been able to do, then the girl can be capable of feigning anything. That’s the problem with female students, the passive aggression. Boys are easier because they’re straightforward about the trouble they’re causing. Girls just make martyrs of themselves, as though guilt were some cheap thing they had the right to induce in people.

Maybe someone else deserves that power, Dr. Vicente. Someone who knows what she’s doing.

Focus on the color of her shirt, the bit of cake between her teeth, the surface glare of her cellphone. Why do all these girls dress alike?

***

Once you figure out no one can do what you do, you realize how alone you are. You can take it two ways. One, you consign yourself to the reality that you’re a freak show and the media will be all over you if word gets out and that no one will ever understand why being moved from talk show to talk show isn’t a good thing, so you give up. Tune out. Try to avoid anyone’s thoughts altogether.

Or two, you figure that you’re special. This talent of yours ought to be used for something worthwhile, like part-timing as a special interrogator for the police. The downside to this is that the leaky faucet will keep you up at night not just in the usual way. You’ll hear the drip move from spout to basin to drain and you’ll think the tinkle it makes isn’t just telling you that the gasket needs replacing. Like every sound you hear, you’ll turn it into a conversation.

***

“Do you mean she shouts over lectures?” asks Dr. Dimaano. The Department Head is a large man in his late fifties with round corners and a pedantic accent. He is dressed in a dark, acrylic sweater. She has always smelled tobacco smoke off him, although the cigarette is never seen.

“Psychologically, Ted.” The question and Dr. Dimaano’s blaring, nasal voice irk Dr. Vicente.

Dr. Dimaano glances at the girl, who is wedged in her seat and shaking her head slowly. “We could really use some specifics here about how this girl has supposedly insulted your competence and disrupted the class.”

“I don’t know what Dr. Vicente is talking about,” says Lacey and Dr. Dimaano looks at Dr. Vicente, seemingly inclined to agree.

So are you going tell him the things I’ve said, so I can just flat out deny it, Dr. Vicente? Or are you going to go ahead and tell him that you can read my mind? What exactly did you think you can achieve, bringing me here? Did you think he won’t ask questions? Why are you even teaching us? You can’t get a damned thing done right.

The frustration swells in Dr. Vicente’s stomach like a wave of acid.

“Rosemary,” Dr. Dimaano says, “there’s no point bringing her in if she hasn’t actually done anything. Besides, class management isn’t really something I ought to be arbitrating on – there’s the Student Discipline Committee – ”

Makes sense because that’s always a fount of help. Are we done here?

“She’s doing it again,” Dr. Vicente says before she can stop herself.

Dr. Dimaano looks up from the desk drawer he has pulled out, his interest in her situation ebbing. Dr. Vicente knows it’s a pack of cigarettes that he had been looking at. “Doing what?” he asks.

Lacey stares back at Dr. Vicente with the indignation of the innocent. Dr. Dimaano shoves the drawer back in, runs his tongue over his teeth for a moment.

He asks Ms. Saloma to wait outside. Relieved, the student grabs her bag and rushes off on her Mary Janes. Later, Dr. Vicente, the timbre of the thought metallic, and the door slams.

Dr. Vicente swallows, trying to calm her heaving stomach down. “That was disappointing, Ted.”

“You’re not giving me much to work with here.” He looks at the jumble of triplicate documents on his desk. “You seem to be the only one who knows what’s going on here, which I’d really appreciate you telling me as soon as possible.” Where did I put that damn lighter? he thinks.

That student is talking to me in my head, Dr. Vicente thinks. Your damn lighter is on the carpet, below your desk, and I know you’re in a hurry to have your smoke, which you have to do in that alley behind this building because you think people here don’t like authority figures carrying on with a dirty habit like that and it’s bad enough they don’t like you that much to start with but you smell like it anyway and people think you’re doing something else there, in the same way I know you failed a student last semester for personal reasons.

She pauses in her private catharsis and would have gone on if not for the You can stop right there, Rosemary, you self-righteous little bitch that suddenly assails her.

Dr. Dimaano has hit the lighter with his foot and has bent down to pick it up with an exclamation of joy.

You didn’t like that girl either in your Medieval literature class last year, yes, that one, with the fake eyelashes and all the carrier bags she brought into class. She wasn’t a complete airhead but you made her out to be in the grades sheet.

Dr. Dimaano emerges from the desk, beaming and palming the lighter in his hand. “Eraser. Been looking for it for a while. Sorry, you were going to answer my question.”

There’s plenty more where that came from, Rosemary.

She grabs the thin, plastic arms of the chair. “I’m sorry?”

“Regarding Ms. Saloma.” Dr. Dimaano has his hand on the handle of the desk drawer, looking impatient. “Rosemary, are you serious about this accusation at all?”

Don’t you think people wonder why you sneak off so frequently in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of a meeting or a dissertation defense without even a paltry excuse we can all pretend to believe in? Do you think we won’t look kindly at the revelation of your working for the police at the same time? Or that you have the ability to know what we’re thinking? For someone so incompetent, you have such little faith in us.

“Rosemary?”

She stands up from the chair, telling him she’s late for a class. She doesn’t look at him so she won’t see the deep frown ridging his brow as she walks away and quietly closes the door, her hands shaking.

***

The last time her hands had shaken so violently hadn’t been on that night in Orange Suites. All she had done then was vomit because of the smell and the sight, which had been understandable. It was on the next day, the afternoon after she had told Burgos she was quitting. She was in the middle of a lecture and a persistent headache when Burgos started calling her cellphone. She let it vibrate silently for as long as Burgos was patient, which he was. He didn’t stop until she rejected her call. He kept ringing. It took him six attempts before she picked up and turned away from the microphone, her lecture notes in her other hand.

He asked her if she needed counseling to deal with what had happened. She said all she needed were boundaries before immediately hanging up. Then she realized her hands were shaking so badly, as though they wanted nothing to do with her anymore, that she dropped the phone and her notes at the foot of the podium and spent a few minutes crouched on the floor, picking up the pieces of plastic and sheets of paper and putting everything back together again. The whole class had turned silent, bewildered by the sight of Dr. Vicente’s professional severity being undermined by the frailty of her outstretched arms. It was then that Lacey started speaking to her.

—-

Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila and is currently working in Hong Kong. Her latest publications include short stories in First Stop Fiction, The Other Room, and Corvus Magazine, while forthcoming publications will be in the World SF Blog, Lauriat: An Anthology of Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction, and Philippine Speculative Fiction 7. She maintains a blog at http://swordskill.wordpress.com and a Twitter account @CrystalKoo.

The above image is from here.

This little experiment began a year ago with some hopes and more trepidation. Being the reading advocate that I am, the biggest thought on my mind was, and still is, “Would people visit the site and read?” I think that to a certain extent the answer is “Yes”, and I give credit to the names and reputations of my guest-editors. Their story- and author-choices, as well as their own talent in telling tales, carried PGS for well a year. I’m grateful to them, and to their writers, for what they’ve done.

The end of this first calendar year brings to a close the guest-editor project. I don’t wish to bring to others the same responsibility I brought to them these twelve months. Well, not yet, haha. Perhaps it may be worth another go in the future, if there would be those willing to take on a guest-editor stint. But once F.H. Batacan’s four stories are done, the editorship returns to me for the foreseeable future.

This is as good a time as any to remind you all of the call for submissions I made some months ago, the purpose of which is to find new stories for PGS (enough maybe for another year? I should be so lucky. In truth, I’m actually confident that I will be). I have no guest-editors with their names and reputations to carry Philippine Genre Stories, this brand of Pinoy genre fiction I’ve created, but I do have the hope and confidence that the stories of the Pinoy authors out there who will submit, will.

Again, my thanks to the guest-editors, and my constant, constant thanks to all PGS readers. Let’s all keep on reading, folks. And it’ll be my turn to see you all in a couple of months. Cheers!

The girl knocked on the door, which quickly swung open. He noticed a rusted lock hanging from the doorway. She walked inside and he followed, his eyes taking a moment to adjust.

Inside, he saw the house was almost bare except for a lone plastic chair in the middle of the dining room and a rusty gas stove in the kitchen. The sunlight from the front windows barely reached the other end of the house and a set of rickety stairs ran to the second floor.

But the place wasn’t uninhabited: a number of women carrying heavy firearms lounged around the place, barely looking up when the two entered the house.

The one slumped beside the door said, “Where’ve you been, Maia? And who’s your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Maia, bussing the speaker’s cheek and throwing a wave at the others.

“I think you people owe me an explanation, whoever you are!” he said.

The first speaker, who looked like a smaller version of Maia but dressed in a long black robe and shawl, looked at him up and down. She said with a smile, “I think we’d better introduce ourselves first.”

Maria rolled her eyes and turned to Vinci. “Fine. These are my sisters. The pipsqueak here is Delia.”

The shawled girl gave him a grin and a thumbs-up, unmindful of the AK-47 on her lap.

Maria continued despite the cat-calls from the various women across the room. “The one trying to cook is Enya, the one who looks like a school-girl with the M60 is Charisse, Teresa is guarding the backdoor, and Akuma is the one wiring all those explosives.”

She turned around and asked Delia, “Where’s June and the rest?”

Delia pointed upstairs. “They’ve got the second-floor covered. Felicity has sniper duty. If you weren’t who we thought you were, we’d be hearing the .60 caliber opening up even before you got to the door.”

Enya, who was tasting something from a pot on the gas stove, said in a pained voice, “And Sharon is out buying groceries. I swear, Charisse keeps finishing all the food we stock up.”

“I do not!” said Charisse, flattening out her skirt self-consciously

Delia looked at Vinci and shrugged, “Enya hates it when it’s her turn to cook.”

“That’s because no one else here can cook a decent meal!”

Maria sighed, sat down on the single chair and unholstered the Desert Eagle. She shucked the empty clip, put a full one in and chambered a round. “So Vinci– do you believe in the Matrix?”

Vinci goggled at her as the room erupted in laughter. Delia tsk-tsked, said, “Sorry, Vinci, but Maia loves watching 20^th century movies.”

“And don’t you just love how cheap DVDs are nowadays?” Akuma said, her too-large eyeglasses slipping from her nose.

“How did you know my name?” he said suspiciously.

“We know,” Delia said. “You’re a pretty important person, Vinci.”

“Huh?”

“Let me ask you instead: What do you know of Greek mythology?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything,” Teresa replied mournfully, “We’re in a middle of a war, Vinci. And you’re the ball.”

An exasperated Maia shook her head, said, “Don’t mix your metaphors, Teresa. Let’s start at the beginning. To put it bluntly, Vinci, we are the Nine Muses of Mount Olympus.”

“But—but you’re all Filipinos! How can you be Greek goddesses?” he blurted out.

“Technically, we’re not deities,” Akuma said, adjusting her eyeglasses. “We’re Muses. But you think we’re Filipinos because of some form of collective consciousness recognition. For example, June is more known as the guardian of Makiling Mountain.”

“What?”

“Well, some mountains are universal,” she shrugged. “But it also explains why June is always getting tangled up with your menfolk, since she’s the Muse of Tragedy.

Vinci sat down heavily against the wall beside Delia and said, “I think my head is starting to hurt.”

Maia made a face at Akuma, who pouted and fell silent. Maia said, “As I was saying, we’re Muses and we’ve taken an interest in you because of your comic strip.”

“My komiks?”

Delia, concern on her face, kneeled before Vinci. “Poor boy. Let me put it this way. In the Middle Ages, a man named Dante Alighieri created a work that would resonate through both time and space. That work was the Divine Comedy and it shaped your human view of Heaven and Hell.”

“Trust humans to come up with a systematic way to torture other people,” quipped Enya.

“Shut up, Enya!” said Teresa, Maia and Charisse.

Delia continued as she hadn’t been interrupted: “Did you ever wonder why people always think they’ll burn in Hell, or that Heaven is a cloudy place? It was never like that. That was Dante’s fault. Anyway, your work seems to be creating the same effect for the Filipino race.”

“How is that?” Vinci asked, desperately feeling like the ground beneath him was tilting.

“It creates a possibility for Filipinos that their three national heroes could have worked together during the Philippine Revolution of 1898,” said Teresa, sighing.

“Which is bad,” put in Maia, “because it’s drawn the attention of others.”

“Others?”

Delia looked at the others fretfully and said, “Well, the Moriae—the Fates—don’t like anyone else messing around with History and Time. Which is why they’re after you.”

“What, the two guys who were chasing us? The Japanese and the American? I thought the Fates were female. And a trio.”

“Sometimes they’re women, sometimes they’re men. It depends on the situation,” Teresa put in. “Serendipity just made it happen that they look Japanese and American.”

“And they may look human—but don’t make the mistake that they are,” warned Maia. “Yes, there are three of them but they’re Powers that not even the gods would go up against.”

“But you people are,” he said desperately.

“Us? Nothing can, and I definitely won’t bet on us if we do,” said a beautiful yet grim-faced woman who had come down the stairs.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, June,” said Enya wryly.

June shrugged, said, “Watch out, Sharon’s coming in and she’s running like Cerberus is after her.”

“If ever there’s a red pill and blue pill being given out now,” Vinci said, “I’d take the blue pill, if you please.”

Maia snorted. “You know, you’re making it very hard for me to think you’re worth the effort, even if the Fates are messing with our job.”

“Hey, I never thought drawing komiks would actually get me into trouble.”

“But that’s always the lot of the artist,” Delia said.

June looked up and said, “Do you hear that?”

There were sounds of sirens approaching. They rushed to the windows to look but they only saw a quiet suburban street outside.

“Felicity!” Maia shouted.

Vinci heard a voice from above shout back: “Nothing out here yet. But they’re coming.”

A beat later, they saw police vehicles swerve to a halt outside, followed by a flood of armed police and SWAT. At the forefront of the vehicles was a recognizable black Mercedes Benz.

“Oh shit. I think I just pissed myself,” Vinci moaned.

“I’m not cleaning that up,” Maia said.

There were hurried shouts outside and then the sound of pistol fire. A thunderous blast echoed from the second-floor, silenced by a crash that sent dust drifting down from the ceiling.

“We’ve got raiders on the roof, people!” shouted June before rushing back upstairs. Her shotgun soon rang out.

Teresa fired her Aug Steyr through the jalousies, breaking a couple of panes, “As if we hadn’t noticed!”

“Great. Shoot first, ask questions later. They probably think you’re terrorists and this is an Abu Sayyaf hideout,” Vinci said, seeing the police outside run for cover.

“Probably,” said Maia. “Incoming!”

Delia quickly unlocked the door and a blur rolled past them, clutching a .357 and a shopping bag. Delia said, “You alright, Sharon?”

Sharon, red-faced with exertion, swore in very eloquent kanto-boy phrases.

“In English, Sharon,” Maia muttered.

Sharon grimaced and said, “I got two on the roof before the rest blew in. I don’t think Felicity saw them coming.”

“Yes, I did,” said Felicity, who was being helped down by June. Blood had drenched Felicity’s shoulder but she was smiling triumphantly. “I was busy at the time taking out the SWAT team trying to tackle you.”

“Count later, girls,” scolded Delia. “We have to protect Vinci. Maia, it’s your job to get him out of here.”

“Why am I the bodyguard? I never even liked that movie.”

The police finally seemed to have had enough, their answering fire shattering the rest of the jalousies and forcing those inside the house to drop to the floor. That didn’t stop the girls from firing back blindly.

At that moment, Charisse said sweetly, “Excuse me” then she broke the rest of the jalousies with her M60 as she propped it against the front window pane and started firing. A full belt later and in the sudden silent aftermath, the rest could hear cries of the police: “Hindot! Retreat! Bilis!”

“Just laying some suppressing fire,” Charisse said giggling and daintily reloaded another belt of ammunition into the M60. There was no wasted movement, her hands flowing from ammo box to the chamber in one fluid motion.

“Let me guess,” Vinci said, “She’s the Muse of…. Erm, the Dance?”

“You do know your Greek mythology,” Delia said, clapping her hands.

Maia rolled her eyes and muttered, “Great, now we can call it a day and go home.” She took out another Desert Eagle from her side and fired both, the blasts of the handguns almost as loud as the M60 in the enclosed space.

Vinci saw a member of the SWAT team drop to his face on the road, a small canister spewing white smoke rolling to the gutter. Maia said, “I really don’t like tear gas. Making people cry is our job.”

It was then it felt like reality screamed in pain, the piercing sound like a thousand nails running against a thousand blackboards. Vinci cried out in pain at the noise and clamped his hands on his ears. Maia and the rest withstood the attack grimly.

Before Vinci’s eyes, he saw the front wall start to disintegrate: first the windows, then the door, then pieces of the wall. It was like some god-child had used an eraser to wipe out the wall out of existence.

“Show-offs,” he heard Teresa shout. “They’re fast-forwarding time so the wall would turn into dust.”

“Teresa isn’t happy because they’re her relatives,” Enya shouted back. “Maybe you can go talk to them, Tess!”

Once the wall had disappeared, Vinci was impressed upon seeing the havoc the girls had caused outside. As the tear gas smoke cleared, he saw uniformed bodies littered everywhere while police cars and jeeps were pock-marked with bullets.

He also saw three figures standing outside the street beside the Benz. All of them were dressed the same, dapper in their black suits. All of them radiated power and menace despite being empty-handed.

“Who’s the third guy?” Vinci asked.

“Knowing serendipity, that’s probably a Spaniard,” Delia said as she aimed her AK47. “In a way, the Parcae are predictable.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, “They look like Agent Smith copycats. Where’s Neo when you need him?”

“Stories are universal,” Akuma explained absentmindedly. “You could say that the Matrix movie tapped into something primeval.”

“Just don’t expect me to be anybody’s Trinity and do any of that kung-fu shit,” scoffed Maia.

“Damn it, I thought you lost them before coming here, Maia,” June said.

“They lost them coming here,” Akuma said, “But not coming here now. When History is their plaything, following footprints in Time is easy.”

Give us the boy, said the American. And live your life in ignorance.

“I don’t think so,” Maia said, bringing up both the Desert Eagles and firing again. “Go Vinci!”

Vinci got up to run but slipped on the bullet casings. Cursing, he covered his head as all the girls started firing at the three. He saw the American go down. He saw Felicity raise a humongous rifle (the .60 caliber, he thought inanely) and watched the Japanese’s chest explode.

To his astonishment, he saw the Spaniard turn somehow insubstantial so that none of the bullets hit him. He heard the Spaniard say, My turn.

Vinci heard something rattling above and when he looked up, he saw the ceiling was pockmarked with holes. He started when something sparked near his left hand, leaving only raised dust.

“Crap,” June said as she reloaded her shotgun. “They’re calling in a meteorite air strike!”

“Ha? Where? How?” Vinci said, looking around.

“Serendipity is a killer when the Fates are involved,” Maia said, cocking both Desert Eagles and targeting the Spaniard again. “Vinci, I told you to run!”

He bolted then, heading towards the backdoor so fast that he didn’t even stop to open it. With a crash, he shouldered the door aside and ran into the backyard. He looked around and saw the yard was surrounded by a low metal fence. He took a running start and hurled the fence with one jump.

Breathing heavily, he turned around after he put some distance between himself and the house. He could hear what seemed to be like rain but knew that what was falling was hard stone. He heard female screams of pain.

He thought about his life, about what his hero FPJ would have done. He started running back.

When he got back inside the house, he couldn’t take in what he saw. Half of the girls were down and the Spaniard was kicking Enya halfway across the room even as he punched Delia in the gut. He moved so fast, he managed to evade June’s pointblank fire and break her shotgun in half.

By this time, the Japanese and the American had both recovered and were steadily walking towards the fight as if they had all the time in the world. He knew June was right, that the girls were no match for the three. He didn’t know if Muses could die but in the little time that he had gotten to know them, he didn’t want them getting killed for his sake.

But what could he do?

He thought about his komiks, about the characters—the heroes—he created: Jack Boniface, Zauma Aginaldo, and MABINI. Or the others like the cashiered ex-Special Forces cyborg Dario Pilar and the infamous killing machines, the Luna Twins. He imagined them in his head: Jack standing tall and steady despite his enemies’ scorn, the giant Zauma who was a monster only in appearance, the cold intellect of MABINI constantly curious about humans, and the rest.

And he imagined them moving through the shadows of the house, stepping out into the light where he could see them.

“Ang tagal mo naman tawagin kami,” Jack said with a grin.

With his trademark sideburns, Jack held a six-shooter in his right hand while a bolo handle peeked from behind his head. Vinci gazed in wonder: Jack looked exactly like FPJ. More importantly, Jack looked as solid as Vinci could imagine him, as if the action hero had stepped out of a movie screen and into real life.

“After this, maybe we can finally pull Rizal’s ass out from prison,” Pilar said, his electronic eye-scope glowing.

Zauma grunted, the lasers on his neck whirring to life. “These bastards need to be taught a lesson to face real men, not children.”

As usual, Anton and Johnny Boy Luna were grinning maniacally while the renegade A.I. floated serenely beside them. But it was enough.

Jack’s pistol barked to hinder the Japanese’s progress while Zauma’s lasers cut the Spaniard down. Likewise, the floating sphere that was MABINI flashed past as its mini-cannons dropped policemen where they stood while Pilar and the Luna siblings left their own trails of violence.

Refusing to be stopped despite his wounds, the Japanese threw a kick at Jack who blocked it with an arm. But the Japanese was no match for Jack, the latter throwing punches faster and more powerful than the other could counter. In a final move, Jack slammed both palms against the ears of the Japanese that buckled his opponent’s knees.

Meanwhile, the American had come to the defense of the Spaniard. With a roar, Zauma caught his enemy in a bear grip and proceeded to squeeze. The American tried his best to break Zauma’s grip, pummeling him furiously, but the assassin ignored him. He kept on squeezing until he heard the distinct crack of the spine.

And with that, the battle seemed over. For now.

Seeing the situation well in hand, Vinci stepped over to Maia’s side.

“Are you okay?”

Maia grinned, said, “It’ll take more than this to keep me down. How’s everyone else?”

Vinci looked around and saw that at least half of the girls were looking over the rest who seemed battered but alive, “Not as bad as I thought.”

“Well, I think that’s our cue to get the hell out of here.”

With a little cajoling, Maia, June and the rest managed to get the rest on their feet despite their wounds. Vinci, who had been standing by the side, found himself looking up at the imposing presence of Jack and Zauma.

“You were lucky, little one,” Zauma said, “if the Blessed Ones were not here, you would not have been able to call us.”

Jack laughed as he reloaded his six-shooter. “Alam mo, luck belongs to those who take it.”

Vinci was speechless for a moment, seeing how faithful he had rendered Jack to look like FPJ. Jack grinned at him, his look seeming to say, You got something to say?

He did. But he only said, “Thank you for coming. You saved our lives.”

“It is logical. You are our creator,” said MABINI.

They heard more sirens in the air and Vinci looked around in alarm.

“We will hold them here while you and others can get away,” Zauma said. “Do not worry about it.”

Vinci glanced at Maia who now stood beside him. Her grudging slightly-respectful look surprised him and he nodded back. Shrug it off. Gotta look like I do this all the time¸ Vinci thought even though his knees still trembled with the adrenaline.

Jack offered his hand.

“Mauna na kayo,” Jack said as he shook Vinci’s hand. It was a firm, strong handshake—what a hero would give to another person, Vinci thought.

“And anak ng puta naman, finish the komiks already,” Jack said to Vinci as he was about to walk away. “Rizal doesn’t like being kept out of action for so long. She hates waiting.”

“She’s a girl. What do you expect,” muttered Zauma.

As Vinci and the girls left through the backdoor of the house, the only thing that Vinci could think about was: Rizal is a girl? I didn’t know that!

***

With the hover brig in their possession, the rebels get the vehicle moving into the air and away from the mini-battlefield they have left behind.

MABINI bleeps, says, “With the MMDA identity codes on this hover brig, we will be able to infiltrate the Tagaytay maximum prison where Rizal is being held.”

“About time,” Jack says, lighting a cigarette. “Trust me, Doctor Andrea Josefina Rizal is not a woman that I want pissed at me. Of course, with a name like that, I can’t blame her.”

And with that, the hover brig heads towards the sunset to rescue one of their own.

—-

Joseph F. Nacino is an internet editor of a shadowy mega corporation that runs the world wide web. He’s currently on hiatus from the Philippine Speculative Fiction scene but he’s hoping he can be back starting 2012. He’s had several stories published in Kenneth Yu’s The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, the Philippine Speculative Fiction series edited by Dean Francis Alfar, Vincent Michael Simbulan’s A Time of Dragons anthology, the online Fantasy Magazine, Playboy Philippines Magazine, and FHM’s Erotica Special. He also won first place in Neil Gaiman’s Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards in 2007. He can rarely be found at his blog http://estranghero.blogspot.com/ but when he is, he’s usually muttering Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias.”

The above image is from here.

When he heard that the movie icon Fernando Poe Jr. had died, Vinci del Rosario sat by his desk for an hour doing nothing. Coming after the debacle of Poe’s lost presidential bid in 2004, Vinci thought it was too much to bear.

Posters of FPJ’s past movies adorned the walls of the small room Vinci was renting from his aunt. These ranged from the first movie he watched, Isang Bala Ka Lang, to Maging Sino Ka Man where he saw his idol actually sing.

To shake himself from his grief, he decided to lose himself working on his latest komiks. The feeling that his deadlines were always looming over his shoulder helped a lot in distracting him from the real world.

***

Subersibo! A Revolution of the Future

Written and drawn by Vinci del Rosario

(Part 23, first panel: A man dressed in porter’s clothes is standing beside a giant shipping container. The scene around him shows a busy port despite the lateness of the hour. The man is smoking.)

When the authorities come for him, Jack Boniface is thinking of how to break someone out from prison.

He has been at the Manila port area since night fall, watching the star ship Last Stand at Bataan turn out off-worlder tourists. Dressed in porter’s overalls and an old leather jacket, he looks like a bystander but acts like he has every right to be there.

He is distracted by the constant whining of the fly-bots advocating hologram advertisements when he notices the rows and rows of geo-sync parasols—which had been communicating with the orbital habitats on the horizon—suddenly adjust one after another. As if something had blocked their panels.

He looks up, sees three cyborgs landing lightly down. A hover brig is floating above them, its flashing lights bathing everything in red and yellow. Two of the cyborgs surround Jack, the third approaches him with a quad core rifle pointed at him.

The ‘borg says, “Bonifacio Joaó Berroya! You are under arrest!”

Jack flicks away his cigarette, frustration etched on his face.

He mutters, “Anak ng puta naman. I swear, sometimes I get tired of being named after a national hero.”

***

“Vinci! Come on down for lunch!” Tita Mely shouted from downstairs.

“Sorry tita, I can’t!” he shouted back, drawing the last lines in a rush.

He stood up from the large architect’s table and rubbed his aching neck. Then with careful reverence, he rolled up the sheet and placed it inside a carton tube he used just for this purpose.

He had finished the next installment of his komiks series for RetroPulp, a local magazine, and all he needed to do now was to deliver the panel. Normally, he’d just scan and email his work to his editor. But he needed to pick up his pay as he was already past this month’s deadline for the rent.

“Are you going out today?”

“Just to the office, tita. Going to get my check from Mr. Verona,” he yelled as he put on last week’s jeans and a newly-washed t-shirt. Grabbing the tube, he jogged downstairs and found Tita Mely serving adobo and pinakbet.

“O, you’re finished working already?” his aunt asked who had already started eating ahead, her fat fingers sticky with rice as she ate bare-handed.

“Opo,” he replied, wariness automatically kicking in as he edged around the table. Uh-oh. Here we go again.

“What are you working on now?”

“Still the same, tita,” he said as he took one step farther towards the door.

“Which is?”

Vinci sighed. He always did this once a week. He said by rote, “I’m drawing komiks, tita. It’s about our national heroes Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Aguinaldo and Jose Rizal working during the revolution to kick out invaders.”

“But that’s not true! They never did!”

“I know, tita. But it’s a what-if story, something that might have happened.” Almost to the door, he thought with desperation.

“So it’s a fantaserye. It never happened,” she crowed in relief, her reading glasses slipping off to precariously hang on her stubby nose.

“Yes, tita. It never happened,” he agreed, smiling as he reached the door. Waving goodbye, he exited the house and closed the gate door with a bang in his rush to get away.

As he was waiting for a taxi in front of the house, he could not help but notice a black Mercedes-Benz parked at the corner with its tinted windows so opaque he wondered if anyone could actually look out of them. The Benz was sorely out of place: not too many rich cars spent time in their neighborhood since the streets were too narrow to accommodate them.

Nearby, the tambays drinking at the nearby sari-sari store were talking about it.

“Ganda ng kotse, a,” Vinci said by way of greeting.

“Kanina pa ‘yan eh,” said one of the neighborhood toughs.

“Talaga?” he said, glancing over his shoulder to peer at the car. It looked menacing and he remembered a song by The Breed about an evil black Benz that roved the city to prey on the poor.

He shrugged and put the idea away. He managed to snag the attention of the driver of a passing cab and jumped in before the man could hesitate. He gave the driver directions and sat back to relax.

The drive to Mandaluyong was uneventful except for the usual traffic, and it took him an hour to get through Ortigas avenue. To kill time, he thought about how he was going to pull off Bonifacio’s rescue of Rizal from the Tagaytay maximum penitentiary at the crater of the raging Taal volcano.

***

The ‘borg says, “I am Sergeant Bravo of the MMDA Robotics Guard. You are charged with violation of the Anti-Subversion Law. This is punishable by death.”

“Huh. I thought you only went after extremist squatters. ‘Di ko akalain na nag-aabang rin kayo ng tulad ko.”

“We are still authorized to make arrests of suspects. You have twenty-four outstanding warrants. These include exhortations of violence against government and military personnel and the general use of the outlawed Filipino language.”

“Ganun kakonti lang? Syet. I guess nobody told you I was also behind the bank robberies last year.”

The ‘borg continues, “A Leviathan Heavy Cannon is locked on your bio-signature. This is your last warning.”

Jack thinks about it while he lights another cigarette stick with his antique Zippo. When done, he peers at the ‘borg through the smoke and says:

“Eh kung ayoko?”

Bravo turns his head and addresses his men, “Units Delta and Echo, proceed with the arrest.”

The two ‘borgs stride forward, Echo taking out an electric-baton while Delta holds a tie-cord from his utility belt . Delta reaches for his arm.

Jack says, “Ang kulit ninyo, ha?”

***

When Vinci reached the Alarcon Publishing office, he didn’t even have to haggle with the cab driver over his change. He wondered if it was going to be his lucky day.

Just as he stepped out, he heard the buzz of a heavy motor piercing the air and turned around to see someone zoom past the street in a black Ducati motorcycle. Asshole, he thought. He hated those braggarts who zipped around in expensive bikes.

He managed to slip past the distracted security guard manning the door who was trying to talk in broken English to a Japanese businessman. Dressed in a somber-looking business suit, the Japanese didn’t seem to understand a word.

Inside, the young receptionist signaled for him to enter and he went straight to the editor’s office. Knocking at the door, he opened it slightly and called out, “Mr. Verona?”

“Vinci! Come on in!” said a disembodied cheerful voice.

As usual, his editor Nick Verona was seated by his desk behind a number of tall piles of magazine and digest copies that threatened to topple over. However, Vinci’s jaw dropped in surprise when he saw the visitor.

“Hello, Vinci,” Verona said, peering over his spectacles as he shook a sheaf of papers in his general direction. “Take a seat. Have you met G.D. here?”

“Hey man,” said Gerry Drilon or G.D. as he signed his comics. G.D. was one of the local industry’s top comic book artists. Despite the bristling moustache that gave him a fierce look, his voice was easy-going as he rose from his seat and clapped a hand on Vinci’s shoulder.

“Finally good to meet you,” G.D. said, “I’ve seen your stuff and they’re fantastic. They remind me of the works of old-timers like Alex Niño or Nestor Redondo.”

Gulping, Vinci found his voice and said, “Th—thanks, Mr. Drilon. Wow…I can’t believe it…I’m a real fan of yours!”

“’Sus,” G.D. said, waving away the compliment.

Verona said, “We weren’t expecting you today, iho. What can I do for you?”

“Huh? Oh, yes, I was just hoping to pick up my check today, sir. And to drop this off.”

With that, he handed over the tube. Verona took the tube, pulled out the panel and unrolled it on top of his cluttered table. G.D. whistled appreciatively.

“Incredible stuff, Vinci,” said G.D. “My favorite is that robot satellite, MABINI. And don’t you think Bonifacio looks like FPJ?”

“Vinci’s a die-hard fan of FPJ,” Verona said. Vinci winced. He used to hear that tone a lot from people who laughed over the idea of the action star running for president.

G.D. said, “Where did you come up with the idea of getting those national hero guys together? It reminds me of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman—and not the crappy LXG movie.”

Vinci shrugged and said, “I thought that if they had cooperated then, we wouldn’t have made such a mess of our country today.”

Verona said, “Just for your information, G.D., Vinci’s series is one of the best-selling komiks we have nowadays. The kids love it so much, the issues just fly off the shelves.”

G.D. grinned and said, “I’m not surprised. It’s good, and you can quote me on that.”

“Thanks sir,” Vinci said.

 ***

A bolt of lightning hits Delta and sends him sliding flat on his back. Another throws Echo against the far wall of a dock container.

“Warning! We are under attack! Terminate–!” says Bravo.

Before Bravo can say anything else, the ‘borg’s head explodes in a crackle of fire and flash. The two remaining ‘borgs on the craft hesitate, not knowing where the attack is coming from. An electromagnetic pulse knocks them down.

Jack watches as the figure of the assassin Zauma Aginaldo steps out behind the steel containers. Behind him he could see the small floating silver sphere that represents the renegade artificial intelligence that is MABINI, the electronic eyes of a Fourth World War-era hunter-killer satellite in space.

“What took you so long? Buong araw na ko naghinintay!” Jack says.

“Allahu Akhbar! Do I always have to save your godless ass, Jack?” says Zauma, the twin laser cannons coiled around his neck swing about as if they have minds of their own.

“And who said I needed rescuing, kalbo? I had the whole situation well in hand,” replies Jack, showing an antique six-shooter and a bolo under his jacket.

The metallic voice of MABINI intones, “Calculated odds determine a tactical withdrawal when faced with numerical and firepower superiority.”

Zauma laughs and says, “The soulless one is right. You were going to use that against them? You’re a fool, Jack. Who brings a knife to a gunfight?”

“Oh shut up,” Jack says. “So where’s everyone else?”

***

Thirty minutes later, Vinci was almost floating on air when he exited the office gate with his check in hand. Not only did he have money again but Gerry Drilon had complimented his work. Gerry by-God Drilon!

That was when he bumped into the Japanese businessman standing before him, dark shades glinting in the afternoon sun.

“Whoops! Sorry. “

Whatever the Japanese was going to say, Vinci never heard it over the vroom of a motorcycle engine. Turning to look, he saw the same Ducati motorcycle on the sidewalk behind him and its rider, whose face was covered with a midnight black helmet, pointing a gun at him.

He barely had time to realize that he recognized the gun—a Desert Eagle, having used it a lot when he played Counter-Strike—before the rider fired.

Vinci screamed and ducked. He felt the bullet whiz past his face as he did, his arms covering his head as he hit the pavement. After the fourth shot, he realized he was still alive.

“Come with me if you want to live.”

Vinci looked up and saw the rider extending one hand, the other holstering a smoking gun. He almost laughed hysterically at that particular line but didn’t when he saw the bullet-riddled body of the Japanese lying on the ground behind him.

When the Japanese twitched and sat up, Vinci revised the movie in his mind and jumped for the motorcycle’s backseat.

“Go! Go! Go!” he shouted as he wrapped his arms around the rider’s waist.

The rider gunned the engine, almost making Vinci slip from the motorcycle. They swept past the shocked security guard and the usyoseros but almost ran over an American in the same kind of dark business suit as the should-be-dead Japanese running towards them.

Unfortunately, a careening tricycle was not so fortunate and slammed into the American as if he were a brick wall; the crash threw the driver several meters away. The American shrugged off the wreckage of the tricycle.

As their motorcycle sped away, Vinci recognized the black Mercedes-Benz that screeched to a halt to pick up the Japanese and the American.

“Hold on tight,” the rider said, the voice coming from the helmet.

“Where are we going?” he shouted.

The rider answered, “Someplace safe.”

And then the Benz was there, charging out of the next street corner. The rider leaned hard to the right and they swerved to avoid being hit. The rider gunned the motorcycle’s engine again and they left their pursuer behind.

“Sino mga ‘yun?” Vinci cried as he looked over his shoulder. The rider ignored him.

They eventually managed to lose the Benz in the traffic on Shaw Boulevard and slipped onto the EDSA highway heading north to Quezon City.

Fuckshitfuckshit, he thought as he held on tight to the rider. He could still remember the feel of the bullet zipping past his face. That Japanese was dead. I know he was dead. He got shot so many times. And that American…He shivered.

After twenty minutes and too-many turns to count, Vinci didn’t know where they were. He knew they were in Quezon City, but having lived most of his life near EDSA, he had no idea where they were exactly. Then they stopped.

“We’re here,” the rider said, pointing at a house.

Vinci looked around and saw they had stopped in a quiet neighborhood, with trees lining the sidewalk. It was a small non-descript two-storey house, its small green rusted gate open to the world. It had an air of being abandoned, the closed jalousies covered with dust, brown curled leaves covering the garden, and the door solidly shut.

“You can let go now.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

He let go and with trembling legs, slid off the motorcycle. “Where are we?”

“Home for the time being,” the rider said and took off the helmet, leaving Vinci gaping for the second time that day.

“I hate wearing this helmet. Makes my scalp itch,” she said. She couldn’t be called pretty in the traditional sense, with her sun-darkened face, snub-nose and lined face. He thought she spent most of her life under the sun. But her looks were striking.

“Come on. Let’s go inside. You can meet my sisters.”

“You’re a girl!”

“Oh, so you finally noticed? I could barely breathe, the way you were mashing my breasts,” she said as she turned to go. At first glance, she seemed to be older but then Vinci realized she was probably as old as he was. It was the eyes, he thought, her eyes seemed to be an old woman’s eyes.

“Wa—wait!” he called out as he followed hurriedly.

—-

Joseph F. Nacino is an internet editor of a shadowy mega corporation that runs the world wide web. He’s currently on hiatus from the Philippine Speculative Fiction scene but he’s hoping he can be back starting 2012. He’s had several stories published in Kenneth Yu’s The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, the Philippine Speculative Fiction series edited by Dean Francis Alfar, Vincent Michael Simbulan’s A Time of Dragons anthology, the online Fantasy Magazine, Playboy Philippines Magazine, and FHM’s Erotica Special. He also won first place in Neil Gaiman’s Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards in 2007. He can rarely be found at his blog http://estranghero.blogspot.com/ but when he is, he’s usually muttering Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias.”

The above image is from here.

Brian looked up, sucked in his breath. His eyes were deep, red hollows. “We can’t let her stay there,” he said. “We have to get her out of there.”

Cedric turned and stomped all the way back to the house. Cleofe remained still.

“I dream about her,” Brian said suddenly. “I dream of her, and that needle rain she talked about. I dream of her eating the needles.”

***

Cleofe stayed with Brian for a while longer. She led him back to Cedric’s house, to the kitchen, and urged him to wash his face. She watched him leave. Then she went upstairs to talk to Cedric.

His door wasn’t locked, so Cleofe just pushed it open. Then she pulled it closed, swallowing a scream. She tried to stop herself from shaking. Cedric was cleaning a gun. He was sitting on one corner of his bed and was cleaning a gun.

“Cleo?” he said. “Cleo, calm down, it’s my mom’s.”

Cleofe opened the door slowly, slowly, and peered inside. “Cleo? There you are.” Cedric, who had been frowning, now smiled upon seeing her. “What, you think I’m going to shoot you?”

Cedric held it in his hands. It was small, and gray. It looked like a lady’s pistol.

“My mom bought this after my dad attacked her with a knife.” Cedric pulled the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet and took out a wooden box. “She told me to clean it regularly so it won’t rust.” He placed the gun inside the box and grinned. “Just how many mothers do you know ask their sons to do something like that?”

And just how many sons do you know comply? Cleofe thought.

“You store it assembled?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Loaded?”

“Of course, not. She keeps the bullets in a separate box.” Cedric placed the box inside the drawer and pushed it close with his foot.

“Why did you leave us back there?”

Cedric didn’t reply.

“It’s like Emily’s not your friend. Like you don’t care she’s dead. Like you don’t even mourn.”

He looked at her then. “Do you know what those two fought about?”

Cleofe frowned.

“Emily’s pregnant,” Cedric said. “They fought because Brian didn’t want her to keep it.”

***

“Hello, Emily.”

She was sitting at the top of the staircase, humming, dressed in white once again, with floodwater licking the hem of her immaculate gown. The entire first floor of the house was submerged in water, making Cleofe wonder if her parents were floating somewhere, dead. Emily was making paper boats. Cleofe watched as she folded them on her lap, her lips pursed with melody, before setting them to sail into the flood.

“Hello, Cleo.” She looked up, briefly, swallowing the music. Now Cleofe could only hear the water hitting the banisters. “Cedric’s talking.”

“I know,” Cleofe said. She didn’t know this, but now that Emily had mentioned it, it made perfect sense.

“He mentions my name.” Emily placed the paper boat on the water’s surface, making it bob with a swirl of her fingers. “I hear him.”

“I know.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

Cleofe didn’t reply.

“You are. You are worried. But not for yourself.”

The boats sailed on. One of them went between the banisters and disappeared.

“You’re worried for Brian.”

“Do you hate me, Emily?” Cleofe asked.

“Do you know,” said Emily, “that cooperating with the authorities is the best way to avoid a jail term?”

“Do you hate me?”

Emily dipped her hands into the water and pulled out a handful of muddy leaves and a tiny foot.

“It’s cold where we are,” she said.

***

It was not difficult to avoid them. Their Chemistry teacher reshuffled the class for the next project, and now Cleofe had new groupmates: three girls who couldn’t reflect, who adored TV, who thought death was still eons away. But she loved them. She loved their shallow jokes, their simple-mindedness. She loved them because they could make her forget.

Cedric and Brian were still around, eternally existing, raising a hand to wave at her when they felt like it. Sometimes she would wave back. No one in school asked about their falling out – why they didn’t eat lunch together anymore, why they didn’t talk, why they had abandoned Cedric in the big house – because they knew. It was because of the missing girl.

***

But one day, a week after the Chemistry reshuffle, Brian came up to her and said, “Do you know where Cedric is?”

It was five p.m., and the school was empty except for members of the Theater Club and the Rondalla, who had to stay for practice. Cleofe stayed late for a meeting with her group mates. They had all left – Miya and Sol and Patty – laughing all the way to the gate. Cleofe wished she had just gone with them.

“I don’t know.” Cleofe kept her eyes on the floor. Whenever she looked at Brian now she saw two bodies on a warm bed, and so she looked away. “Why do you ask me? I haven’t talked to him for days.”

Brian looked at her for a while longer, and then walked past her, down the length of the corridor and out of her sight. She decided to follow him, hurrying but not quite running, and saw Brian turn to the direction of the main grounds, where the flagpole was. Cedric was alone by the flagpole, copying notes from a yellow pad. Cleofe stood a safe distance away. She saw Brian approach, saw Cedric glance at him before returning to his notes, as if all he saw was an insect, an unimportant distraction. Then Brian whispered something that made him turn back.

What? Cedric mouthed, and Brian spoke with his mouth and his arms and his eyes while Cedric stared and stared and stared. He turned away. Brian stopped talking. Cedric raised his head and spoke one sentence. Please, Cedric, Brian said. Please. Cedric stood up and hit him across the face.

Brian fell on his back to the ground, and Cleofe ran. Cedric walked away, not hurrying, not glancing back. Brian sat up, covered his face. Brian was crying but Cleofe didn’t even look at him. She was looking at Cedric, at his fists.

***

A tall girl from the senior class was going to play Ariel. Cleofe would sit in the back row during rehearsals, away from the others, and watch her perform in the gown Emily had mended and danced in, in her dreams, and to Cleofe everything would start feeling so wrong, so wrong.

***

“Hello?”

“Cleo?”

It was Cedric. Cleofe dragged the telephone to her bed, shut the door.

“What do you want, Cedric.”

“Your father – “

Cleofe felt as if her insides had turned to cement.

“Maybe we could talk to him,” Cedric said. She heard his breath hitch; he was sobbing. “I think we have to—“

He was sobbing too hard to continue speaking.

“Are you in the house, Cedric?” Cleofe asked. Cedric sobbed. “I’m coming over, all right?”

***

Cedric was going to tell, she was sure of it. She would give a start whenever the doorbell rang, whenever she saw the top of the gate swing open. Please, please, Brian had said, but Cedric had struck him to the ground.

***

“I want to go to the pit,” Cleofe said.

Cleofe walked to the big house despite the cold weather and found Cedric in the living room, sitting hunched on a chair, alone. The sky was dark but he didn’t bother to turn on the lights.

“Cleo.” He looked pitiful. Cleofe wasn’t moved.

“I want to give her this.” Cleofe held out a cream-colored brochure – an invitation to the Theater Club’s production of “The Tempest”. “She had always loved this play.”

She waited for the mockery. It didn’t come.

“You want me to come with you?” Cedric asked.

Cleofe put the brochure back into her pocket. She could see the trees swaying slightly outside, dropping more leaves on the ground.

“Let me just get my jacket.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“But it’s upstairs.”

“That’s okay.”

Cedric didn’t fight. He simply resumed that hunched position, careful not to look at her face. What the – are you insane? she heard Cedric say from a time long gone.

She entered Cedric’s room. The jacket was hanging on the inside doorknob. Slowly, she felt its pockets, and pulled out a string of keys with a handkerchief. Right on the first try; if she didn’t find it there she was resolved to look through his closet, the drawers, the bed. Cleofe took the keys – cold, like cubes of ice – and knelt in front of his bedside cabinet. Right on the third try; three keys went in and out before the bottom drawer finally slid open. She took out the box using the same handkerchief and pocketed the gun. After a few seconds’ introspection, she took it out again and checked the barrel. Empty. Cleofe reached deeper into the drawer and felt her fingertips bump into another box. She flipped it open. Yes. Her father had trusted her enough to show her how to do this. Cleofe used the handkerchief to cover her fingers and loaded the gun as quickly as she could, glancing at the door every now and then. Everything she had touched, she wiped with the cloth.

“I used your washroom. Sorry.” Cleofe handed Cedric his jacket, and he accepted it wordlessly. She saw him pat the pocket containing the keys. Cleofe let her arms dangle at her side, trying not to stiffen, or to scream.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They went out, the wind blowing through her hair. Cedric walked ahead of her. When he reached the pit, he simply stood on the edge and looked down. Cleofe took out the gun and raised it.

She started to shake. The tears fell. I’m going to kill, she thought, wildly.

She was going to kill.

“Cleo?” Cedric was now facing her, eyes wide behind the glasses. Cleofe gasped and took a step back. A twig snapped beneath her shoe. She cried harder.

“Cleo?” Cedric had one arm slightly raised. “Cleo, what are you doing?”

He’s going to cry, Cleofe thought, quickly stepping into the sphere of silence that had protected her after Emily died. It would be hard to make an alibi if the corpse had tears.

I can’t let him cry.

“Cleo, for God’s – “

She pulled the trigger.

What followed was a moment of confusion: not only did she hear the gun explode, she also saw it – the perfect ring of burned flesh on Cedric’s forehead; his body falling back, back, back; the crackle of dried leaves as he sank into the pit. She screamed, but there was another voice screaming with her.

Another voice.

Cleofe turned abruptly to her left, and saw a child.

A girl, seven or eight, with dirty knees and a gaping mouth. She was seemingly rooted to the spot, but when Cleofe turned her head the girl jumped and ran away as fast as she could, as fast as the wind that was now hitting the trees.

“No!” Cleofe ran after her, crying, screaming. She dropped the gun. “It’s not what you think!”

Cleofe’s right toe snagged on an exposed root. Before she realized it, she was falling to the ground. Her left knee hit a sharp, protruding rock. She felt it sink in, felt the warm blood gush around it. She pulled her leg up, howling, and tried to cover the wound with both hands. She saw the girl dart around the trees and disappear.

With difficulty she heaved herself up and began walking toward the house, gasping with every step, dripping blood. She could almost see her tears sluicing through the mud on her face. She passed by the gun but did not want to pick it up. The wind blew, biting as if it had teeth. The blood flowed between her fingers.

She could only feel relief when she saw Brian sitting in the living room.

“Brian,” she sobbed. “Brian. Brian.”

He looked at her for a long time before saying, “Cleo?” His eyes studied her from head to foot and found her knee. “Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”

He made her sit down on the couch. He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a piece of cloth and a basin of warm water. Gently, he took off her shoes and socks and wiped the blood off her legs. The water in the basin turned pink.

“Cleo?” Brian said. “Cleo, where’s Cedric?”

The water was warm, nice, but the wind entering beneath the closed door and around the gaps in the frame of the windows made her legs tremble. The wound continued to throb and bleed.

Where is Cedric? Cleofe thought. He’s in the pit, but he’s not there.

“Cleo, why do you have mud on your clothes?” He looked toward the direction of the pit and turned back to her. “Cleo? Cedric told me to come here. He said he wants to say sorry for –“

“I shot him,” Cleofe said, staring at her foot inside the basin, at the water that was quickly turning red. “I shot him.”

Brian stared at her. “What?”

“I shot him in the head.” Cleofe looked up. Brian staggered back and sank into the chair opposite her, where Cedric had sat just a few minutes ago.

“What?” Brian’s face started to crumple, as if he were trying hard not to cry. “What?”

“He was going to tell on us,” Cleofe said. “He talks to the police. He said he wanted to talk to my father.”

“Oh God, Cleo.” And Brian did cry, the tears trickling to his shirt, to his hands. “Cedric would never do that. Oh God, Cleo. Oh God.”

“I saw him hit you.”

“He hit me because I killed his baby!”

Cleofe felt as if she had just been slapped across the face. The tears stopped.

“Cleo, I never slept with Emily,” Brian said. “That night you saw us fighting, she told me she was pregnant. I pushed her because she said it was Cedric’s, and I didn’t want to believe her, Cleo, I didn’t want to believe her –“

Cleofe didn’t want to hear the rest of it. She lifted her knees to the couch, trailing blood and water, burying her face into the upholstery. She saw Cedric’s wide eyes and the tears she had prevented from falling.

She saw the girl vanish through the trees.

“A girl saw me.”

Silence.

“A girl? How old?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Young?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think she saw everything?”

Cleofe cried.

“Where did you get the gun? Is it your dad’s?”

She shook her head.

“It’s Cedric’s?”

She nodded.

“Do you still have it?”

“I dropped it.”

“Okay,” Brian said. “Okay. If the girl didn’t see everything, if she only saw you pull the trigger –“

“Brian, please –”

“Listen to me,” he said, grasping her hands. “Listen to me.”

***

Your name’s Joanne?

Yes, ma’am.

J-O-A-N-N-E?

Ay, hindi po. J-O-A-N.

J-O-A-N. All right. Can you please tell your story from the beginning? I know these old men have been bothering you for the past few hours…

That’s okay, ma’am. They were nice to me. They gave me candy.

Okay.

Okay, um…I was playing with my brother on the sidewalk this morning, but we had a fight, so I just left him playing alone and walked toward the big house.

Do you always play near the big house?

Only on weekends, ma’am, and only on the lot near the road, because my mother doesn’t let me. She says there might be snakes there.

And were there snakes?

No.

Okay.

Okay. So I was kneeling on the ground, playing with sticks and rocks and some leaves, when I saw a boy and a girl come out of the house and walk to the right.

Your right, you mean.

Ah, yes, ma’am.

You were facing them?

Yes.

Were they talking?

No. Just walking.

Then?

Then they went someplace where I couldn’t see them. A moment later I heard the boy talking.

What was he saying?

I don’t know, ma’am. His voice was too soft.

Okay.

I decided to go see where they are.

And that’s when you saw the girl fire the gun?

Yes.

Did you scream?

Yes. The girl screamed, too.

Then?

Then she saw me and her eyes went big. Then I ran.

Because you were scared of her?

No, not the girl. She looked more scared than I was. She was crying. I’m…I’m more scared of the boy.

The boy? Why?

Because he’s…Because his shoes are sticking out of the pit.

Mm-hm. Did the girl run after you?

At first. I think she fell down.

And she’s crying?

She was saying something. “It’s not what you think.”

She said that?

Yes.

But you continued to run.

I was scared. I could have helped her when she fell – she was screaming so much – but I got confused.

Do you think the boy and the girl had been fighting?

I don’t know. Maybe. She was crying.

***

Are you comfortable on your chair, miss?

Yes, sir.

If you want, you could raise your leg on this –

No, it’s okay, sir, I’m fine.

If you say so. The boy’s name is Cedric?

Yes, sir.

Okay. You said you went to his house to give him an invitation to a play.

Yes, sir. That’s why I brought this brochure with me.

Then?

Then he told me to come with him to one of the empty lots. He said he wanted to show me something. So I went with him, and while we were walking I realized he was taking me to the pit.

You’ve known of this pit?

Yes, sir. That’s where he throws his garbage.

Then?

Then…then he took out this gun and pointed it at my head. He told me to take off my clothes. He said if I didn’t do it he’d kill me like Ann and Emily. When I heard Emily’s name, I just stared at him. What? I thought, and he said, I can take you to her if you like.

Is Emily also a friend?

Yes, sir. A very close friend.

And Ann?

We go to the same school, sir.

So what happened next?

I grabbed the gun from him and shot him in the head. I was on autopilot, sir. I had no choice, I was alone, and he could have easily grabbed the gun from me again if I just pointed it at him. So I – so I –

Okay. Okay. Do you think he raped Emily?

I don’t know, sir. But he did something to her. He said he killed her because – because –because she had their baby.

She was pregnant?

Yes, sir. Oh God. Oh my God.

Did he tell you where he buried her?

Oh my God.

Miss–

He said he threw her into the pit.

***

The journalists and the police came with the storm the very next day. They found the revolver buried beneath a layer of wet twigs, photographed the blood-covered rock where Cleofe had fallen. At the pit they spent hours, hauling up mound after mound of leaves and mud and empty wrappers before finally strapping themselves and going down the hole when one policeman caught a glimpse of white cloth. Emily’s body was found in the most disgusting state of decay, but it did not stop the hysterical Ka Cely from kissing the corpse, the maggot-infested face.

Mrs. Placido flew from Cebu in the darkest pair of glasses anyone in Sto. Niño had ever seen. She did not deny that the revolver was hers, or that her son had all the keys in the house. She did not try to defend her son. She did not talk to Cleofe. She did not speak when someone outside the police station called her a “mother of a rapist”. She did not press charges. She flew back to Cebu after
burying her son. She buried him beneath the rain, with the brown water hitting the sides of her son’s coffin. She buried him alone.

***

Somehow, nobody doubted Cleofe’s story, especially after the autopsy report showed that Emily indeed was pregnant. That Cedric Placido ought to be funny in the head, they told one another, living in that big house alone with a gun and a box of bullets literally at his fingertips. And so, to their eyes, two murder cases had been solved and the rape-slayer was dead. Sto. Niño went back to its
laidback ways. There was no more need to be frightened.

They did not shun Cleofe; they admired her. They took the liberty of breaking into the cemetery and defacing Cedric Placido’s headstone, spraying it with red paint one time and carving the word RAPIST into it at another.

***

She saw Cedric in her dreams. She’d tell him, “I’m sorry about all this, but other people’s hatred won’t hurt you now, right? Reputation is unimportant to you, but it still is to me. It’s better where you are, I’m sure. Quieter. No fear of jail, or of killing a child. So it’s fine, right? What I did? You forgive me, right, Cedric? Can you forgive me?”

But he wouldn’t reply.

***

She avoided Brian, who also didn’t exert any effort to befriend her once again. Cleofe had always believed she did what she did to save her own skin, but now she saw she had simply been stupid, and weak.

On Fridays, when the streets were empty, she would go to Cedric’s headstone and try to clean up its latest defacement. Sometimes she’d cry.

I got away too easily, she’d tell his grave. Maybe there’s a catch. Maybe I’ll die in a fire. Maybe I’ll kill myself one of these days.

***

Cleofe had only one recurring dream. She dreamt she was at the pit, Cedric and Emily sitting on its edge, their legs dangling. Ann Guillermo’s murderer was also there, but since Cleofe didn’t know who he was, he had no face.

But she could feel him smiling.

—-

Eliza Victoria lives and works in Makati. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications, including the Philippines Free Press, The Pedestal Magazine, Stone Telling, Story Quarterly, High Chair, Kritika Kultura, Expanded Horizons and the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology series. Her work has received prizes from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards. Visit her at http://sungazer.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter (@elizawriteshere).

The above image is from here.

***

The four of them – Cedric, Brian, Emily and Cleofe – would gather in Cedric Placido’s house, two blocks away from the town memorial park and surrounded by empty lots and trees. Little children gravitated toward the area because it was a perfect place to play hide-and-seek, and every day they’d have to make a quick stop in Cedric’s backyard to shoo the children away before entering the house. The four of them would bring chips and fish crackers and, if Cleofe happened to be in the mood, a container filled with her mother’s macaroni salad, and Cedric would break a six-pack of root beer (or sometimes real beer, if they were up to it), all of which they’d dump on the living room carpet while they dissected perennial topics like, Why The Theater Club Should Stop Staging “The Tempest”, or Will Brian Obina Ever Flunk Algebra? Brian would only shrug at the second and laugh at the first, which always made Emily want to drown him in the toilet bowl. Emily was a member of the Theater Club and tended to think that “The Tempest” was a brilliant production, even though most of the actors couldn’t remember half of their lines and they had turned the
character of Ariel into a girl.

But it was dreams they loved to talk about.

“Once,” Emily said, “I dreamt it rained needles all over Sto. Niño.”

“Needles?” they asked.

“Yes.Sewing needles. I was sitting in my bedroom in my dream, and when I looked outside the windows the sky was dark and it started to rain. I thought it was just ordinary rain – I mean, it looked like it – but I realized the drops sounded funny when they hit the roof. They sounded like tiny kettledrums, and they bounced off the houses. I tried to close the windows, but it rained harder and needles started to pour into the room. It looked like they were going to flood the floor so I just walked over them and closed the windows. There were needles poking out of my arms. My feet bled.”

“Wow,” Cleofe said.

Brian said, “I’ve had nothing but transformation dreams. You know, my father turning into a spider, my mother turning into water.”

“Your mom turned into water?” Cleofe said.

“For two weeks I couldn’t look her straight in the face.”

“I wish my mom would turn into water,” said Cedric.

Cleofe sighed. Cedric’s parents were separated. The Placidos were originally from Manila, but Cedric and his mother moved to Bulacan after he finished elementary school. According to Cedric, Mrs. Placido had a new Cebuano boyfriend. She practically lived in Cebu. She’d leave Cedric alone in the big house for weeks on end, sending him money through his ATM account.

“Your turn Cleo.”

“I haven’t had dreams in a while,” Cleofe said.

That was in April.

A month later, Ann Guillermo’s body was found sprawled in front of the Virgin Mary on the church patio, one white arm and a foot hanging over the side, her head resting on the lap of little Bernadette. She had been raped – brusquely, according to the reports – and then killed by a blow to the side of the head. Ann was found by an old man who swept the church grounds at four in the morning. She’d been dead for almost three hours.

Ann belonged to a different section, but she was their age. Seventeen.

Suddenly the Theater Club’s deterioration and Brian’s genius and their strange dreams seemed unimportant.

By June, all they could ever talk about in Cedric Placido’s house was murder.

“I wonder what kind of dreams that murderer has,” said Emily. “I’m already having bad dreams as it is.”

“Really?” Brian looked genuinely worried. Realization danced before Cleofe’s eyes. She knew something was up. She knew there was something between the two. Brian and Emily now ate lunch together.

“I bet whoever killed Ann has horrible dreams,” Emily said. “He’d be so guilty.”

“If he’s still capable of feeling guilt,” said Cedric.

He would, thought Cleofe, who still believed in the goodness of man. They were showing Mr. Guillermo on TV. He’d see the interviews and finally see Ann as Ann, as human. He’d realize that he had killed someone with a soul.

***

A mass of gray clouds had formed by the time they got out of the house to throw the trash into the compost pit. The sky grumbled, making Cleofe glad that she had brought an umbrella.

The compost pit was a hole six feet in diameter on the second empty lot from the rear part of the house. It had been there years before the Placidos moved in, back when the town mayor plundered the garbage collection funds and the people got tired of pleading with the barangay captain. It used to be used by the entire street, the neighbors said. Now Cedric was the only one who was trying to prevent it from turning into a deadly crater.

They made their way to it. The winds were strong last night, sending about three inches of leaves and branches to the ground. Cleofe thought they resembled undergrowth. The leaves that were still fresh cracked beneath their shoes, turning the soles green.

Cleofe knew they were not supposed to throw non-biodegradables into a compost pit, but Cedric seemed not to care anymore. So in went the potato chip wrappers, the empty beer cans, the plastic spoons they used for the macaroni salad. Cedric picked up the shovel he kept near the pit for the purpose and shoveled dirt into the hole to cover their garbage.

“What if someone fell into that hole?” Cleofe asked. She had been telling Cedric to at least put up a makeshift fence around it for the longest time. She remembered the children they would find playing on the lot. They would stay near the road, but they’re just children, little children. They might wander deeper into the lot and –

“He’d die,” Cedric said. He looked puzzled.

Cleofe shook her head while Brian and Emily smothered their laughter. They walked back into the big house to get their things.

***

Rain fell when they got out of the gates. Cedric watched them go. Brian and Emily shared Emily’s umbrella. It was pink, with Hello Kitty smiling at each corner. Cleofe’s was big and brown and lumpy, like an old woman’s. Brian and Emily crossed the street. Cleofe thought they were holding hands. She turned away, heaving up the plastic bag containing her mother’s Tupperware. She could have hailed a tricycle, but she decided she might as well walk. She needed to think.

Her house was two streets away, far enough to give her time to convince herself that she shouldn’t be jealous of Emily. Emily was a friend. She wouldn’t rub it in, she wouldn’t slap it to her face.

She wondered how it started. She wondered if Cedric knew. She somehow felt betrayed, even though Emily never knew that she liked Brian.

The rain had calmed to a drizzle by the time Cleofe reached her street. It was only six, but the place already looked deserted, the houses looking dead and empty. Ann’s rapist and murderer had scared everyone away from the streets. Sto. Niño was supposed to be a simple, quiet barangay, not home to a crime bad enough to earn a news spot on TV. They had only had one other murder, where a storeowner was killed with a hammer, and that was before Cleofe was even born.

***

Emily found out on Monday that almost half of the costumes for their “Tempest” production needed mending. She sought out Cleofe, and after Chemistry, their last subject, they trooped to the theater with thread and needles borrowed from the Home Economics department and attacked the skirts in Storage.

It had been raining on and off the whole day, and it began raining again while Emily and Cleofe were stitching the hem of Ariel’s white chiffon gown. It was a fresh downpour, hard, the sheets of water making everything else invisible outside.

“I suppose this was what my dream meant,” Emily said. “It’s raining outside, and I’m holding a needle.”

“So what, you’re Sybil now?” They laughed.

They folded the costumes into the boxes. “You want to get something to eat?” Emily asked. “I’m starving.”

“Aren’t you going with Brian?” Cleofe said without thinking. Then she realized that Emily and Brian didn’t eat lunch together that day.

“Oh,” Emily said. “Why would you say that?”

“Well, aren’t you two –“ Cleofe stopped, also realizing that she was on her way to making a grave mistake.

“Were we that obvious?” Emily chuckled lightly. “Hey, look, Cleo, it’s fine. I’m sure even Cedric knows.” Then the laughter faded from her face, and she was not smiling anymore. “Brian and I had a fight.”

“Oh.” They placed the boxes inside Storage. Cleofe felt unnaturally glad, and was ashamed.

“Um, Emily, how long have you been –“

“A year,” Emily prompted, not looking all too happy.

“Wow,” Cleofe said, thinking, A year.

“Snack?” Emily said. “I’d like a burger.”

“Sure.” They grabbed their umbrellas and walked slowly down the wet steps.

***

Cedric and Emily both bought cheeseburgers from the canteen. Cleofe got herself a bag of chips. Brian was sitting inside with his Math Club pals. Emily quickly darted away from the counter. Cleofe followed, but without first seeing that Brian was looking longingly at the back of Emily’s head.

They ate inside an empty classroom. It was an okay thing to do, as long as the janitor didn’t catch them. Unfortunately, they had to eat in darkness because the lights didn’t work. Even the wooden chairs were cold to the touch. Wind blew into the room, howling.

“Do you know we already have a Chemistry project to work on?” Cedric said.

“Really?” Cleofe said. “I didn’t hear that.”

“Of course, you didn’t. You two were too busy talking about some air spirit’s ruined gown.”

“Airy spirit,” Emily corrected.

“Whatever. Anyway, we have to pass a Chemistry crossword puzzle. Can we be group mates? Brian already said yes.”

“Sure,” Cleofe said.

“Why not?” Emily said.

Cleofe munched on a chip. Emily didn’t sound too enthusiastic.

***

Cleofe dreamt of Emily that night. Emily was wearing the white chiffon gown they had stitched together, and she was dancing. Emily was Ariel, the airy Spirit, though in the play she played Miranda. Emily danced in her dream, whirling like a ballerina, the white skirt billowing around her heels like clouds.

***

The rain worsened as the week progressed, and so did Brian and Emily’s mysterious cold war. Cleofe, for the life of her, couldn’t think of what they could have possibly fought over, and couldn’t bring herself to ask. Once, she caught Emily sobbing inside a washroom cubicle.

On Saturday afternoon, Cedric invited them over to the house to work on their Chemistry crossword puzzle. They plopped down on the living room carpet as usual, spreading the white cartolina on the glass-top table, and tried to figure out how to connect ALCHEMY (2 Across) with ALUM (2 Down) when there was not supposed to be a “U” in ALLOY (3 Across).

“This is stupid,” Cedric said. Brian and Emily, both unnervingly quiet, were busy cutting up black squares from a pad of art paper. The wind was very strong outside; they could hear the windows rattling in their frames.

“Did anyone bring paste?” Emily said.

Silence. Cedric slapped his forehead and stood up. A gust came screaming through the trees and banged a door upstairs.

“The art paper isn’t enough, too,” said Brian. “I think.”

“Might as well go out.” Cedric unfurled his jacket from the floor. “I need to get food.” The fluorescent lights dimmed and brightened. He sighed. “And batteries for the flashlights.”

Cleofe remained seated. There was a riddle here, a riddle that needed to be answered. She looked at Brian and got it.

“I’m coming with you,” Cleofe said.

Both Brian and Cedric stared at her in astonishment.

“What the – are you insane?” Cedric quickly put on his jacket and zipped himself up. “It’s raining like crazy out there. You don’t even have a jacket.”

“Yes I do.” Cleofe had been wearing hers and, as proof, lowered the hood over her eyes.

“No, no,” Cedric said. “You stay here. Brian can come with me.”

Cleofe stood up and stretched her legs, one after the other. “Do you think I’ll get blown away by the wind?”

“Are you sure it’s okay?” Brian asked her.

“Of course. I’ve walked in weather worse than this. Let’s go, Cedric. Or do you want me to go alone?”

Cleofe didn’t give him time to get even a word out. She pushed Cedric toward the icy front porch and slammed the door behind her.

***

The wind was so strong Cedric and Cleofe had to hold onto each other’s arms to prevent themselves from walking backwards. When they reached the cemetery, a piece of wet bond paper hit Cedric smack in the face. Cleofe could have laughed, but she was too busy covering her face with her arm. The wind was liquid; it brought rainwater with it, and it hurt her eyes.

The grocery store was virtually empty when Cleofe got there, so she had no trouble moving about the shelves. She took four Coke-in-cans, chips, several varieties of canned food, and a chocolate bar for herself, hauling all of this onto the counter.

The cashier was elderly and wore what looked like a self-knit gray sweater over her uniform. “Business is slow,” she said as she rang up the items. “You’re one of the few the rape-slayer didn’t scare away.”

“Maybe they’re just afraid of the storm.”

The cashier scoffed. “Houses here get submerged in floodwater every year. They’re used to storms. It’s murder they’re not used to.”

“Huh.”

“But I don’t think whoever killed that poor girl lives here.”

“Really.” Cleofe hadn’t heard this theory before.

“Truck drivers from Divisoria and Quezon City drive through Sto. Niño every day. Rough men, catcalling girls and such. That’ll be two hundred and four.”

***

Cedric was already waiting outside when Cleofe got out, a small package tucked under his arm.

“You go on home,” he said with a sour face. “The store doesn’t have a double-A batteries, can you believe that? Anyway, I made them wrap that thing twice in plastic. No trouble with the art paper.”

Cleofe shoved it into the plastic bag she was carrying and looked at Cedric for a very long time.

“Why do you think Brian and Emily are mad at each other?”

“I don’t know,” Cedric said, promptly enough, but the set of his face told Cleofe that he did know and would not tell.

“Okay.” Cleofe walked into the rain. It was so dark it might as well be midnight. “See you at the house.”

***

When Cleofe reached the Placidos’ gate, she wondered if Brian had done what he had planned to do and finally made up with Emily.

The wind blew, sounding like one prolonged scream. Cleofe turned the knob and stopped. She realized that it was not the wind she was hearing.

It was Emily.

Brian and Emily were having a very loud fight. Cleofe tried to understand the words, but they rode with the wind. Cleofe pushed the door open, and saw Brian push Emily toward the wall.

Brian had his back to the door. Over his shoulder, Cleofe saw Emily’s face as her head hit that sharp corner where the two walls met. Something cracked. Emily’s eyes glazed over. She sank to the floor, leaving a bright red spot on the wall where her head hit.

Cleofe dropped the bag. A can of Coke rolled across the carpet. Brian turned to her, wild-eyed, shocked and mute. Something inside Cleofe had plunged to an unknown depth, and she couldn’t scream. Brian fell to his knees. “Emily,” he said. Emily’s eyes were open. “Emily?” Brian began to cry.

When Cedric arrived, Cleofe was sitting on the floor near the door, shaking. Cedric first saw the spilt bag and said, “What’s this mess on the carpet?” before spotting Emily.

Cleofe bawled and covered her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to,” Brian said. “I was just trying to push her away. We had a fight. I didn’t mean to.”

Cedric sat on a chair. The minutes ticked away.

“Okay,” Cedric said, to himself, but didn’t move. Ten minutes later he said “okay” again and stood up and went upstairs. When he came back, he was carrying two old bed sheets. He was wearing big black leather gloves that were probably his
father’s.

Cedric placed one beside Emily’s left side. He pushed the couch away and squatted on her right, the other bed sheet draped over his arms.

“What are you doing?” Brian wailed.

“Shut up.” Cedric inserted his arms gently beneath Emily’s body and lifted her from the floor. He placed her on the first bed sheet, tugged on the second one, and draped it over her face.

Cedric wiped the blood from the wall and the floor with a large wet rag. Brian called his name five times during the process. On the fifth time, Cedric turned to him and shouted, “Do you want to go to jail? I’m cleaning your own mess, so shut up!” and continued to wipe.

When that was done, Cedric put plastic bags over Brian’s hands and ordered him to grab one end of the bed sheet. Cleo was to hold the flashlight. They were going to throw Emily into the pit.

***

“Cedric,” Cleofe said, the first intelligible word she finally managed to get out since Emily fell. “Cedric.” It was all she could say.

The flashlight Cedric gave her was big and heavy, and it cut through the gloom like a white knife, bouncing with her every step. The downpour was harder than ever, the water drenching the bed sheets and washing Emily’s blood to the ground and washing it away. Cleofe looked at her in agony – Emily, Ariel, the airy Spirit dressed in white.

“Cedric, please,” Cleofe said.

“Then what do you suppose we do, Cleo?” Cedric’s eyes are hooded. “Tell the truth?”

Everyone knew Cleofe’s father was a cop. “We’ll call the police and say she slipped! I can call my father! I can – ”

“Do you think they’ll believe that?”

“We can try!” she said, and realized that the blood had been wiped away.

“They’ll never find Emily here.”

“Cedric, I never meant to do this to her,” Brian said. “It was an accident.”

Mud and rainwater oozed into the pit. Cedric positioned himself at the edge.

“I can’t, I can’t,” Brian said. “I want to see her face.”

“Just let her go, Brian,” Cedric said.

They let go. Emily tumbled into the pit like a sack of rice. Dried leaved danced up, fell back, covered her. Cedric picked up the shovel and threw piles and piles of dirt onto the foliage. Emily was invisible in no time.

“Emily, I’m so sorry,” Brian said. “I’m so sorry.”

Cleofe was standing on unstable land. The soil broke away from beneath her feet, and she skidded down. Cedric called out her name. Brian caught her and pulled her up. Cleofe cried. It felt as if Emily wanted to take her with her, pull her into the bloody bed sheet, into the pit, with the rainwater and the mud.

***

Somehow they were able to muster the energy needed to return to the house. The house was dark. Cedric tried the lights, but they wouldn’t come on. A major blackout had apparently swept Sto. Niño while they were swinging Emily’s wrapped body between them near the pit. Up and down Cedric’s street the houses converged into a shapeless darkness.

While Cedric lighted the candles, Brian bumped into the couch and crumpled to the floor like an empty sack, right on the spot where Emily had died bleeding. He wouldn’t get up. Cleofe, tired and drained to the point of fainting, got sick of coaxing him from the floor and sank on a chair.

Cedric placed the flashlight on the glass-top table, its beam pointing to a spot above Cleofe’s left shoulder. “I’ll call your parents, tell them you’ll stay here for the night.” He took off his jacket. “You can’t go home looking like that.”

Silently, Cleofe agreed and protested. Agreed because they looked destroyed; people from the street would immediately be able to see that they had done something unforgivable. Protested because she wanted to be with her parents and sleep in her own bed. She wanted to get away from Emily.

“Hello po?” Cedric said into the receiver. “Yes, this is Cedric…It’s raining really hard, so I thought it’d be better if Cleo sleep here…Yes…Yes, ma’am, we have food…you want to talk to her?” Cedric glanced back, and Cleofe steeled herself. “She’s in the bathroom. But I’ll tell her to call you as soon as she gets out…po?…oh, yes, the project. Almost done. Okay, goodbye.”

Cedric said the same things to Brian’s mother. Then he dialed another number.

“Hello? May I speak with Emily, please?”

Here it goes, Cleofe thought miserably. Here it goes.

“Oh, she’s not there yet?…Opo, si Cedric…No, she’s not here…She left an hour and a half ago, said she had a headache. Brian and I offered to take her home but she…When she left, the rain’s not so hard, but it’s blowing…I don’t know, ma’am. Do you have medicine at home?…Then maybe she bought some…Yes, yes, of course…I’m sure she’s all right, ma’am…Yes…Goodbye.”

Cedric lowered the receiver and stared at them both, daring them to say something. When neither of them did, he sat on the couch and buried his face in his hands.

None of them moved for an hour or so. The rain continued; the wind hurtled things and garbage across the street. Cleofe thought she’d never be able to eat after what happened, but the hunger pangs came naturally. She glanced at the Mercury bag on the floor, and looked at Cedric.

“Cedric–“

“Don’t talk to me,” Cedric snapped, head still in his hands.

Cleofe bent over and slowly placed the canned goods inside the plastic bag. She took one large, lighted candle and shuffled to the kitchen. In the dim yellow glow, she measured three cups of rice and four cups of water and placed the kaldero on the stove. On a pan she sautéed garlic and onion, and emptied two cans of corned beef. When that was done and the rice was cooked, Cleofe placed all of it on a tray and took the food to the dining room.

“Are you guys hungry?” Cleofe whispered from the dining room door. She saw Cedric lift his head, and felt relief when he stood up and walked over to her. She couldn’t stand being alone; she kept seeing Emily’s white face peering through the windows.

“How about Brian?”

Cedric grunted. “He’ll eat when he wants to.”

And so they ate, just the two of them. Wordlessly, as though both of them had planned it a long time ago, they went back to the living room after dinner to continue work on their Chemistry project. Cleofe cut up the black squares; Cedric pasted them. When the sky dissolved into true black, Brian stirred beside the couch and walked into the dining room. Soon they heard the clutter
of china, spoon and fork. There were no snide remarks, no jokes.

They heard him gathering up the dishes from the dining room table; they heard him washing them in the kitchen. There was the soft whoosh of the dish rack cover hitting the lid, and then Brian was with them again, writing the clues on the bottom of
the cartolina with a black felt-tip marker, the letters and his face swaying in the dancing light. Cleofe stood up once to call her mother, and was surprised at the calmness of her own voice, at the ordinariness of her mother’s questions: Have you eaten dinner, Is it dark there, Do you feel cold, etc. etc. Yes. No. Not really. Etc. etc. At ten p.m. Cedric announced that the crossword puzzle was done. They accepted this in silence. At midnight, the phone rang, with Emily’s crying mother on the other line, saying Emily’s still not home, where could she possibly go, the barangay tanod couldn’t start a search because of the storm, can you please tell me what happened again? And so Cedric did, adding more details, weaving verisimilitude into the lie. Emily’s mother said thank you and hung up. Cedric offered them the guest room, but Cleofe and Brian refused, and so they ended up staying in one room together, in Cedric’s room, on the floor, on separate mattresses.

Brian and Cedric didn’t sleep before Cleofe; she was listening to their breaths. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt of Emily again, Emily and her chiffon gown, Emily dancing, but this time her gown was gray and torn, and there was sand in her hair. She was surrounded with dust, and with her every twirl Cleofe could hear the painful sound of dried leaves, cracking like skulls on the ground, like so many tiny bones.

***

Sunday morning was clear, and not wanting to waste time, the barangay tanod and a few men of Sto. Niño – Ann Guillermo’s father included – started the search for Emily. Cleofe heard about it when she returned home that day. The search did not start until after Emily’s parents had called every single acquaintance their daughter might have had, every single house she might have stayed in for the night. When the task proved futile, the men set out, pretending they were looking for a living, breathing girl but knowing fully well that the only thing they could ever find, if they’re lucky, was a body.

They searched the church grounds, the schools, the marketplace, empty lots. They searched around the Placido house, but did not think of digging into the pit. Cedric had told them that they had intermittently thrown trash into the pit throughout the night, and did not see anyone. The search team looked glad enough to leave that hole behind.

The police joined them by noon. The church bell rang for the four o’ clock mass, and it was offered to Emily.

It went on for two, three weeks. The girl was still missing. Emily smiled from photocopied papers posted on walls and doors.

—-

Eliza Victoria lives and works in Makati. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications, including the Philippines Free Press, The Pedestal Magazine, Stone Telling, Story Quarterly, High Chair, Kritika Kultura, Expanded Horizons and the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology series. Her work has received prizes from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards. Visit her at http://sungazer.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter (@elizawriteshere).

The above image is from here.

I placed a hand on the small of the pharmacist’s back, feeling the skin dimpling there, as she shifted nearer towards me. I slid my hand lower, and pressed my breasts to her back, hearing her hiss softly between her teeth. I was about to ease my hand to the front of her dress, when she stopped me.

“Let me,” she murmured.

I allowed myself to be eased onto the bed and undressed, her calm and calloused hands relaxing every inch they pressed into the mattress. Very easy when you’re sprawled across a 300-thread count king bed, in one of this city’s most expensive hotels. She kissed me, caressing my cheeks, tracing the shell of my earlobe, my breasts, dipping into my navel. Her hand slid lower and deeper, into the space between my legs.

She touched me there, warming my body almost immediately, flushing me with a heat that had, until now, been kept a low glow in my heart. She kissed me again, and her breasts pressed insistently against mine. My arms wrapped around her back, as I brought her mouth to mine, and from there, it seemed as if I moved to a synchrony that I had not known existed, let alone be a part of. Breath began to leave me in panting gasps, while her own breaths stuttered only occasionally against my skin. Her fingers stroked me faster, deeper, harder. I tried to breathe, my body tensing, trying to keep from losing the control I already wanted to surrender. Finally I shuddered, soaring on the peak of pleasure; her kisses on my lips are the last memory as I shut away the world around me.

Sexual ecstasy: the actual thing is the perfect drug, and none of the narcotics I could name like the children I will never have could compare. It was how I had managed dreamless sleep for a few hours. While the virus continued to ruin everything, it was the only free drug I could have. We both had not much else to do but keep ourselves occupied, together. It was safer, she said, as if she needed an excuse. It was, in a way, beyond the safety of having another living body lying next to you, not intent on eating you; it stopped me from being sucked into the void that being alone opened in my mind. It was her idea to stay at the Makati Shangri-la. Who was left to stop us? It was a small rebellion on our part, albeit a pathetic one. Back when things were normal and sane, I wouldn’t have even set foot in the Shang, the crown jewel of the capitalist crown of a city this country liked touting, even in the lobby. In a city that discreetly liked to put people in their place, this was not where we belonged.

That was not so long ago.

I’m in what’s left of the mega-shopping complex, the Ayala Center. This was the business district’s most important grid, and in rush hour, every square inch of it would be teeming with people. There aren’t many of the living left here. The few who are here don’t need tardants. Mercury Drug and Watson’s pharmacy are merely distribution points; the emergency governing body did not have enough equipment and supplies needed to make more of the pills, pills that nullified the effects. That was one thing that came to glaring focus amidst the crisis, the one thing that this country and I shared: it is never really enough.

I haven’t been a real doctor since I became an organ harvester. In a twisted way, it’s easier; in an ironic way, closer to what I imagined myself doing: scrubbing up, getting down and dirty, putting people together, saving lives. Except the actual job was brokering peoples’ parts in the backdoors of hospital transactions. It made me feel like the Igor to Dr. Frankenstein (and nobody remembers the ‘doctor’ title when they talk about the monster). Our “clinic” is small, on the second floor of a hardware shop, and if you didn’t know it was there, then it wasn’t. Oh, we’ve moved several times here and there, when some negotiation went wrong, but I could count them with the fingers of my hands. Yes, I do dream of being a “proper doctor” in a “proper” workplace, but the minute I set foot in a real hospital, I’ll be arrested for illegal practice. It’s a small industry in a bustling city; the white coats can smell who doesn’t belong.

And then the virus came, then the martial law order to stay indoors, the lock-down and the quarantine. The virus came, and like a vacuum it sucked up the future. Suddenly there was no time, not even to dream, not even to live. I had nowhere else to go and no relatives to shelter me. I didn’t want to be stuck in seedy Quiapo when the end came; I’d been there long enough. If I had to breathe my last, I thought, I wanted to do it looking at five-figure silk blouses draped on the impossible anatomies of shopfront mannequins, designer bags, and expensive Italian shoes. The things I never got for myself, passing them everyday to connect with the MRT, even when the business was as its height. There had been no time.

***

I awoke slowly, the daze of lovemaking softly lifted. She was still asleep, her gentle breaths pressing her back against my chest, my arms around her hips. I gazed at the sheathed Asian swords mounted over one of the drawers, at the foot of our bed. I wondered if they were real, or some interior designer’s clichéd approach to decorating “Oriental” themes with useless weapons.

I slipped away quietly and tucked her in, planting a kiss on her forehead creased with worry lines. She breathed softly, stray hairs stirring where they were pressed between her cheek and the pillow. She was breathing. I dressed, and, after a few silent minutes just watching her sleep, slipped away to the hallway and up the stairwell.

I headed to the top floor. It was dark in the building, even during the day, now that electricity everywhere was out. The elevators stayed stuck on whatever floor they were waiting to service. I trudged up the long stairs, breath starting to come heavy, but not stopping.

The helipad was deserted. I crossed it, and leaned over the ledge that overlooked the hotel’s pool, full of dirty water. There were white, people-like lumps scattered all along the sunning area, but none of them shuffled or crawled. All of them were inanimate, justifiably dead. The distance would suffice, and the ledge would make for a nice drop. A satisfying free fall, and a definite end. Good. It would be better to die my way, than through that virus. Broken in several major places (the more the better), and if I angle myself right, hopefully the neck would be the first to go in that split second before everything else followed. For a split second I felt what Rizal must have felt as he calmly (maybe with a small patronizing lilt) instructed his jailers how to position him in the firing range. A dry chuckle escaped inadvertently. Well, there’s something else I can do with knowing bodies.

At first I’d thought it was the wind blowing in my ears, but the whirring sound of blades cutting the air became louder, and interrupted my thoughts. A grey indistinct helicopter was weaving its way through the vertical maze of buildings towards the general direction of the hotel. It didn’t look like a businessman’s helicopter, but it looked much newer than the usual military helicopter. Search parties? my mind offered vaguely, but no, these had gone weeks ago, abandoning the stricken lot it could not carry to its fate. Not that it mattered at this point. It wouldn’t take us.

The helicopter flew directly overhead, and the wind of its passing whipped my hair around my face, making me crouch low and turn against it. A side-door opened, and several people in military fatigues jumped out, all with large guns strapped to their backs. They surrounded the helipad, making vague hand gestures to each other, clicking their tongues cryptically, then circled me. A girl (five feet two, possibly East Asian, forty-eight kilos give or take, sixteen to seventeen years old, possibly insomniac, currently caffeine-saturated my mind supplied, as if writing it down on a medical report), came up to me in a strut befitting soldiers bigger than her stature, her movements precise, her eyes wary. She did not even look a day past senior year high school. There were two guns holstered around her hip, and indents beneath her leather jacket suggested magazines fitted into some sort of body armor. The kid was armed to the teeth. How could she move in that, I thought. I felt suddenly very naked.

She came to a stop in front of me, intent written clearly on her face. They’d probably come after me, finally, locating me in the list of suspected black market organ dealers. They were here to apprehend me. In the middle of the pandemic that had trimmed the country’s population down, it would have been easier to locate rogues. A despairing chuckle surged up my chest. They were here to arrest me.

I backed up, felt the ledge against the small of my back. I could still tumble over, this fiasco be damned.

“Doctor Ertha Basilio?” Accented English, maybe Korean or Chinese.

I immediately raised my hands over my head. “I’ll come quietly…”

“I am not here to arrest you,” the girl said, frowning slightly. She looked at me as if I had gone mad.

Huh?

Maybe I had.

“I’m with the UN Auxillary Search and Rescue Unit, Southeast Asia,” she said, and there was a brief flash of an ID card beneath her jacket. “We’ve come to get you out of here, doctor.”

“United Nations.” I raised an eyebrow. I wished she hadn’t called me ‘doc’. “What would the UN want with me?”

She lifted her chin slightly, a light command to follow her into the chopper. “They want the brain who created the zombie tardants.”

I found it hard to believe they knew.

“You are Ertha Basilio, MD, aren’t you? Surgeon and general practitioner, working under Doctor Anton Sandimán, who runs a black market organ exchange business?” As if she could read my trepidation simply by the way I stood, the girl raised an eyebrow. “It was your clinic that shipped the thirty units to the Nuestra Señora—” her pronunciation faltered here, confirming what I thought of her ethnicity— “del Pilar Hospital in Cagayan de Oro in the last quarter of 2011, consigned to—” she pulled out some papers, which fluttered in the wind, reading aloud— “a Mister Norman Valencia?”

I remembered that shipment. Our small clinic had worked around the clock to fulfill the orders from the secondary hospital in the stricken region, our boss Sandimán breathing down our necks the promise of a hefty price. And by the time we had sealed the last padded crate with dry ice, there wasn’t an inch of me not covered in the blood of two dozen people I will never meet in my life. She had strained herself for my sake as well, and I remember her tired eyes welcoming me back home.

“Who told you…? Never mind.” I didn’t care anymore what they needed me for. I didn’t care if the UN was arresting me, actually. “That wasn’t me. It was Espinosa. She made them for me.”

“Who?”

“My…” Friend? Partner? Associate? “A pharmacist who works for me.”

We had none of the tardants at the moment, as far as I knew. Espinosa made them on a per-need basis, to avoid having incriminating excess stock. I didn’t know how we could be useful to them that way. I told the girl that.

“I’m just here to pick you up,” the girl said. She shrugged and put the paper away. “In any case, central traced it back to you.”

“Fair enough, Miss…”

“Tuesday.”

But it’s Thursday, I thought, before I realized it was a handle. “What kind of name is that for a girl?” I muttered. Unbidden images of childhood TV shows came to mind.

She cocked her head again, shifted her stance. Not a girl then, a soldier. Not much of a talker, that one.

***

Tardants. Retrovirals. Encephalic restorers. Anti-zombie drugs. I don’t care what they’re called now. They were cover-up pills. They helped mask a mistake before people noticed.

CDC and WHO calls the pandemic “zoonotic opportunistic myelo-bulbar invasive encephalitis”. The virus locks into the nervous systems and overrides rational use of the brain, leaving the victim—not patient, victim—with limbs moving without awareness. Beheading is actually merciful for them. It disconnects the body from the useless brain and brainstem, working as it does with virus-induced instinctive commands. The super-virus attacks by any means—close-contact airborne, oro-fecal, animal-bite, human-bite, serum-based, blood-based, transplant-based.

‘Transplant-based’. Emphasis mine. Transplanting seemed to create the most viral load, thus creating the most virulent sources of infection. It’s the reason I was forced to make the tardants, to stop the odd side-effects we never saw before as organ harvesters. We needed them healthy so they would not ask for refunds. Others, of course, here and abroad, were not as scrupulous.

The pills were black-market stuff. I was hardly the ‘creator’ as I was a klutz who had discovered it by accident. Not all the organs available for operation came from 100% healthy donors, in the same way not all the second-hands in thrift shops were clothes in mint condition. Human bodies were meant to wear down, but higher prices could be demanded from units that were fresher than most. I found that some solutions the organs were immersed into often preserved them, yes, but did nothing to prevent what was already spreading in them even prior to extraction. But if it were injected with something that stopped both the decay of the organ and the spread of the infection within it, then we’d pick a higher price for it. Then the person the organ would go to would actually be healthier, and not simply carrying someone else’s illness. Then we would have enough on inventory, and wouldn’t resort to pulling our contacts in the surgical room to make unnecessary extractions. Then I would feel closer to being a proper health practitioner again, not a capitalist with a scalpel.

But even that was not enough. I was a doctor, not a chemist. She was the one who eventually formulated the proper solution, in her off-hours and with what supplies she could salvage from stock. She was the one who actually condensed it to pill form, and I simply suggested the idea. Essentially, it wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.

I would tell this girl that it was an accident, that it was entirely selfish; that it wasn’t me, that never, in my wildest dreams did I imagine them being used for an outbreak.

***

Espinosa was not there when I returned with the girl. She left a note.

I’ll try again at CEU. Don’t do anything stupid. Back for lunch.

The Makati branch of the Centro Escolar had a pharmacy college. It was on Pasong Tamo (or Chino Roces Avenue, but I’ve been around long enough to know the older name), a bicycle ride away. We had gone there before and were sure there was at least a basic tablet-making machine. She probably went to look for raw materials now. We managed to move through the city we lived and worked in like fugitives, keeping to corners we knew were cleared by the military onslaughts that centered around Makati in the past few months until, resources depleted, they withdrew entirely. The various blocks that the military erected around the areas that led to Makati did prevent the undead from other areas of Metro Manila from accumulating, but it did not mean the city was clean.

“Do you have a weapon?” Tuesday asked. “Dagger, sword, knife, club, baseball bat, lead pipe. Doesn’t need bullets.”

I shook my head.

“Find one. Do you have any of those tardants on you?”

I didn’t, but Espinosa probably had some with her. I began to rifle through her things. The girl wandered in the room with me, eyeing me from the doorway and keeping watch.

I went to the bed where we lay together and found her backpack beside it, emptying the contents on the floor. A comb, a cellphone, a wallet with useless money, toothbrush and toothpaste, a very small beauty kit. A pocket-sized Moleskine, (half-full to me, half-empty to her), and to my relief, the last packet of her tardants. I gave packet and journal to the girl, who took it without comment. She examined the small transparent bag of the pills, opened it and sniffed it (they gave off a very faint dead-leaves smell), putting it away when she was satisfied. I didn’t need the medicine. I couldn’t bear to look at the journal.

My eyes wandered back to where the obnoxious sword décor lay parallel to the commode top. I grabbed the longest one, unsheathed it. The blade, albeit blunt, nicked my finger and drew blood as it slid. Impressive souvenir. It wouldn’t be missed.

“Dr. Basilio.” The girl made me remember our situation. “We need to go as soon as we can. We’re needed elsewhere.”

“I can’t leave without Espinosa.”

She glanced very briefly at the empty backpack, and snorted through her nose. “We can’t wait long, doc…”

“I know, I know.”

I dragged with the packing. There wasn’t much to pack, but I stalled for her sake.

She was there when the business—it was not the most legal business around, but it was work and it paid—when the business began to fold. She was there when Anton ignored my warnings about early-onset transplant rejection. She took my side, made and checked the slides for me, helped narrow down the problem to a then-obscure virus, and made the tardant drugs for me. She ran away with me, away from Quiapo, pulled me away from a boss who punched and kicked me, who knew I couldn’t report him since we all were illegal together. She stayed, when all I wanted to do was curl up and do nothing. She stayed with me.

But she didn’t return. The sun had set and she hadn’t returned. I had waited all day at the hotel lobby, lounging in one of those huge upholstered seats that seemed to swallow people whole, or pacing the shiny marble floors. My heartbeats increased in speed proportional to the number of hours I waited. There was little light that filtered in through the boarded-up glass front, and what little did reminded me that we were losing daylight.

Tuesday’s footfalls in the marble floor from across the room were clipped, impatient. “Dr. Basilio. We need to go. We’ve waited two hours.”

Two hours? It couldn’t have been two hours. I stood up straight. “I’m not leaving without Espinosa!”

My voice in the empty lobby sounded high and childish. The child-soldier crossed her arms and gave me a pointed look, the kind given to unruly children, and something angry and desperate flared up in my gut at that, making my throat tighten. Something occurred to me then, and I slumped my shoulders in feigned resignation, moving to where Tuesday waited. She nodded in approval, and walked back from where she came, almost sure I would follow.

A kid, I thought. I turned on my heels and ran the opposite way, dashing through the hotel’s entrance and squeezed in through the various blockades put against it. Running out in the open like this would have been risky, but I didn’t care, I just needed to find her, and my mind was now locking in on a familiar head of curly hair somewhere…

My little UN friend was not far behind, and I wasn’t surprised she hadn’t, I don’t know, shot me already. She seemed the type to shoot at things that ran.

“Stop!” Tuesday shouted, and there was a curse in another language as she lost me at the corner with the 6750.

“Like I would listen to a little girl!”

I continued my desperate sprint through the empty lane, the small voice in my head hopefully sure Espinosa could be just around the corner. I turned into the main road, Ayala Avenue. It was as if the map of the city opened up in my mind, a Foursquare bird’s eyeview that marked out places in the immediate area: no supplies and AVOID TRAIN STATION and she is here and she MUST be here. The avenue was completely deserted. No cars, no motorcycles, no people. The Manila Peninsula fountain had ceased flowing. The Makati Stock Exchange building, at the Ayala Triangle, was a burnt-out hulk, from when government forces bombed it in the early stages of the crisis. For all of Makati bursting its seams on a regular workday, it made a perfect ghost town.

Winded, I stopped to catch my breath at the intersection of Makati Avenue. There was still no sign of Espinosa. There were bodies unmoving where they fell either living or undead, but we had become so used to them now, that they were simply unsavory debris in the road. Tuesday and her soldiers were the last thing on my mind now, and just as quickly as the adrenaline-inspired omniscience overcame me, so did it leave, and for a long moment I felt lost, standing in the grey area of what I knew was a part of the city I passed through everyday, but a place that had become so alien to me and suddenly so… so… large.

I think I smelled it before I saw it. I know the dead scent better than anyone.

Humans were shuffling toward the intersection, several hundred of them, victims, like another of the rallies this country and its politics liked to incite. But there were no banners, no yellow ribbons, no confetti, nothing of the loud provocations we were good at. The movement was slow yet convulsive, irregular and persistent, and the silence, the silence. There were soft voices, guttural and unearthly, occasionally punctuating the march, the Death March, yes, this was what it should be appropriately called.

Another, closer horde appeared. Somehow this one had breached a blockade somewhere. So far, we’d encountered them in small groups of five at most, easy to avoid and to run away from.

Estimating the directions they came from, the victims probably came from the lesser-seen parts of Makati, the areas toward Pasay, Taguig, and Guadalupe. They were reached too late, bitten or sneezed at or kissed or attacked. This horde was probably started by a kidney donor or transplantee. I kept telling myself it was a case that did not pass through me, but with a mass of humanity that size, there was no quick way to tell.

Among the horde, I saw a yellow blouse and loose jeans, hair tied back in a loose ponytail, worn by a face melting at the cheeks, burning into blackness by infection, decaying as it begged for release, but a face I knew so well.

She never needed to take those tardants. Even in our line of work, she had no reason to be infected. I was the one in contact with the transplant organs, and I had taken her pills as a preventive measure. She made me take them, when she was sure they were safe. She never thought of taking them herself. I never thought of asking if she did, to save herself. Now she got herself caught by some transplant victim, and got bitten.

I backed away, one foot at a time.

Damn you, Espinosa. If you’re going to take their side, take me with you. Don’t leave me alone. Bite me, kiss me. Come get me. Just don’t leave me.

A heavy breeze, a loud vrrrooom of a motorcycle engine. I was lifted off the ground and seated behind a rider. I was brought back to the mall complex, yanked into the Mercury Drug. I had kept staring at the horde, had kept staring at her.

“This is what we get for waiting so long,” Tuesday grumbled. She stopped at the middle of the park, assembled her men, rapidly pointed to the rooftops and open points around us. Ten men scattered and positioned themselves at the UCC Park Café’s roof, at the Steel Parking, at 6750, at the Shang’s driveway, at the Glorietta 3. Their guns pointed in all directions, but primarily at Ayala Avenue.

She tossed a pistol at me. “Do you know how to use this?”

I trembled as I held the cold metal. “I’m probably a bad shot.”

She groaned and strapped the pistol with its holster onto me.

The volley of heavy artillery began on North Drive from Ayala Avenue. Tuesday pulled me into the Park Café. I cowered and covered my ears, but the gunfire, the bloodspills, and the groans couldn’t be muffled.

The girl took out her rifle and loaded it. She dashed into the landing, leveled her rifle, and fired. She took down two victims with only one shot. She felled another two with the next. The other soldiers kept firing as well. Soon North Drive and Office Drive filled with piles of bodies, their stale blood spilling on the asphalt. I kept hiding behind the girl, covering my ears, shutting my eyes.

The victim. The patient. The body. It’s how we white-coats stay sane. White-coats can be cowards. They’re just better-trained at hiding fear. I’m not even well-trained. I don’t care if I’m obviously frightened.

Yet, when I peeked through the carnage, the victim with the yellow blouse still advanced, behind several other victims. I don’t know how. She had always been tenacious, but this was not her.

This wasn’t the co-worker who believed me when no one else would, who helped me get away from a man who hurt me. This wasn’t the person who took me away from the darkness of the Quiapo streets to a world where it wasn’t always under-the-table. This wasn’t the person who liked instant coffee instead of the expensive stuff. This wasn’t the person who collected unique little boxes and scattered them throughout her apartment. This wasn’t the person who smiled when I began to touch her like the lover she never had. This wasn’t the person who kissed back when I put my tongue inside hers. This wasn’t the person who gave me more pleasure than I ever experienced in a lifetime of mistakes.

This was not her.

Yet it kept advancing.

I took the sword out of its sheath. It was single-edge, Japanese-type, sharp, not a show-sword. I wanted it done before I could stop myself, because everything about me wanted to stop. I stood, took a deep breath, and walked toward the horde. I had the sword in front of me, a long heavy knife I did not know how to use. I’d been using scalpels for too long.

Tuesday turned, pulled me back. “What are you doing!”

“The yellow blouse is mine.” What I said was true. She just kept using that yellow blouse so much we both considered it hers.

I stepped into the street, my arms trembling, my knees knocking together.

The unearthly groans and the gunfire filled the air as I staggered toward that yellow blouse I knew so well. I had the sword straight up in front of me, like the complete newbie that I was.

I stabbed and smashed through the bodies, like so many oversized gross bugs, that blocked my way toward that yellow blouse. I let Tuesday and her men finish the job. I did not know the victims, and they were better off out of their misery. I hacked and slashed stupidly through them, pulling the sword out of them, the old blood spilling all over me, the dead cells splattering on me. I did not care. I had to get to the yellow blouse.

Why didn’t I tell her this morning that I love her? Why didn’t I love her more? Why didn’t I say ‘thank you’?

She now stood in front of me, ready to pounce. I raised the sword.

Goodbye, Annie.

I shut my eyes and thrust as hard as I could. I hit the neck. Recovering from the shock, I pulled the blade away. I wore the doctor-face, tried to lose emotions for the case. Then I swung down over her head, once twice thrice, whack whack whack, until I broke through the skull and saw blood, cerebrospinal fluid, brain matter. But I couldn’t depersonalize completely. I screamed at myself as I angrily drove the sword through the heart.

Goodbye, Annie.

I hacked at the neck, and kept hacking madly until I separated the head from the body. I watched as dirty blood spilled from veins and arteries, staining my shoes and my feet, soiling my favorite yellow blouse.

Goodbye, Annie.

I dropped the bloody blade.

My associate, assistant, friend, lover…

“Doc.”

She had been with me when the insanity started. She was there when the beatings began. She was there, and now she is gone, and now she would not be there…

“Dr. Basilio. We have to go. Now.”

“But…but…”

“Dr. Basilio!” the girl said urgently.

I looked up at the hotel, looked up at its highest floor, high and inviting. It was too far and too tiring to go up there. But I had to be with her.

I took the pistol and raised it to my forehead.

The girl struck the back of my neck. I dropped and felt nothing.

***

The battle against the super-virus raged on, with me on the hidden frontlines. The girl brought me to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, in Alabang, and enforced my stay.

I guess they thought I talked sense. People came and talked to me about the tardants. For some reason, more and more people came to congratulate me. Something about a fighting chance against the zombie virus. Something about stopping the outbreak at last, before it killed every last human.

That was not me. It was her. Annie’s gone, and I’m still here.

***

The girl came more often. Until finally she gave the letter.

I looked down at the envelope she gave me, stern and official, stamped ‘confidential’ in too many places. I opened it. The timetable given would keep me busy for months, at least until the UN controlled this pandemic.

“You’re not running from this,” she said, holding the parcel in front of me. “You’re going to help us.”

“I don’t want to help you.”

“You have no choice.”

“I can choose to stop living.”

“You think you want it, but you don’t.”

I paused, stared at the girl. I saw in her eyes, a reflection of mine. They were wild and desperate.

“You want a reason to keep going. We’re giving you one.” She turned and left.

Oh, well. It was something to do. A reason to live.

—-

EK Gonzales is an insecure scribbler better known for the Haya Project stories in Philippine Speculative Fiction 4, Philippine Genre Stories, and Ruin and Resolve. Her more recent writing is at http://activatedseries.wordpress.com .  

The illustration is from the author’s friend, K, with grateful thanks.