Emerald Buddha

Chapter 36

Christine shook off the haze that clouded her ability to think and forced her eyes open. Bare cinderblock walls wept moisture, feeding the mold that streaked everything dark green. Consciousness had come and gone in waves, and she struggled to recall how long she’d been in the chamber. It might have been hours, or months. Time had ceased to mean anything to her ever since she’d collapsed by the plane after dragging Liu from the cockpit and crafted her pointless attempt to signal for help out of river rock.

Blurred memories tortured her during her few waking hours — that of Liu’s brutalized face, gashed from the broken windows, bright arterial blood staining his shirt. She’d done her best to fashion a tourniquet from one of the cables she’d salvaged from his laptop bag, but had drifted off, the shock too much for her system.

When she’d come to, she’d found herself baking in the harsh glare of the sun, and then a flat Asian face with a nose like a losing boxer’s had blocked it. And… and then everything was a blank.

But something had just awakened her.

A scrape outside the rusting steel door.

Voices drifted on the light breeze that wafted through what passed for windows, really nothing more than gaps below the ceiling where every second block had been skipped. She blinked and tried to sit up, but something was stopping her.

Her wrists were lashed to the frame of a wooden cot.

No. They were bound to something beneath it.

The door creaked open on its corroded hinges and two men entered. One, a short, squat man in his thirties, carried a leather bag. The other, tall and fit, also about the same age, stood back where she couldn’t get a good look at him.

The squat man adjusted his rimless glasses and eyed her with a small frown, as though she’d done something to disappoint him. She was reminded of her father’s similar expression, which was his customary response to most of her efforts, and felt her abdomen muscles tighten at the thought. The man opened his bag and removed a stethoscope, and she relaxed. He was a doctor.

She tried to speak, but the only sound that came from her mouth was a dry croak. The doctor shushed her and proceeded to examine her, probing her chest and then her shoulder, which sent a flare of pain shrieking through her skull. She moaned like a strangling animal, and everything went black.

Christine regained consciousness sometime later. The first thing she noticed was hunger. That was good. Hunger meant she was alive. Hunger meant her body was healing. The second thing she registered was the tattoo of rain on the roof. Corrugated steel, like a Quonset hut, she thought absently. And it was really coming down.

Her shoulder felt numb. No. All of her felt numb. Dreamy.

Maybe this was all in her mind, and she would wake up soon, and Liu wouldn’t be bleeding all over her as she held him helplessly in her arms, sobbing to the dark heavens, promising any bargain he wanted to a God she didn’t believe in if Liu survived.

The numbness washed away her concerns, and she was floating behind closed eyes, the world now filled with warmth, well-being… and… sleep.

An old woman spooned gruel into Christine’s mouth. The doctor was back, the same look of professional detachment on his face, his chubby hands gentle as they probed her. The warm sense of euphoria was less than… when? When had she last been conscious?

The doctor finished his examination and nodded with satisfaction. This time when he left, the other man remained, standing just out of her line of sight, in the shadows. The crone finished with her feeding and tottered off with the empty clay bowl and a sack filled with rags she’d used to clean Christine, and the man stepped forward. The first thing she noticed was that he had a cruel mouth. The second was his skin, so badly pocked from acne it looked like a shotgun had blasted him in the face.

He approached Christine and said something in what she guessed was Laotian. She looked at him with incomprehension, and he switched to broken English.

“You speak?”

Was he asking her to talk, or whether she spoke English? She tried to nod, but her neck refused to cooperate. She wet her lips and forced a few words.

“Yes. English. And Cantonese.” Her throat felt thick, and her speech sounded clumsy, like her tongue was swollen or coated with tar. “Where am I?”

The man nodded and switched to Chinese. “We rescued you. You’re in Myanmar at my… facility. My name is Lee. I run this place.”

“My friend…”

“Didn’t make it.”

She absorbed the news and everything went gray. Moments, or perhaps minutes later, she returned to her body. Lee was staring at her impassively. Even half out of it, she felt revulsion, as though he was violating her with his gaze.

“You are very beautiful for a round eye. Many will pay a top price to have you. Your clavicle is broken from the crash, and you have some other wounds, but they are healing. When you are presentable, I will sell you to the highest bidder. After I have verified your skills, of course.” Lee paused, studying her. “When the bruising goes down on your face, I will come for you. I prefer it if you fight me. I will enjoy it more.”

“You have no right.”

Her words clearly enraged him, and he moved closer, his proximity menacing. “No right? I take what I want, do what I want. I have every right. I am the law here, which you will discover, and now you are in my debt. You will pay as I wish, when I wish.” His lip curled into an ugly sneer. “I own you. I found you, and you are my pet, like a fat white dog that eats too much and soils itself. Look at you. You sicken me. And you dare to tell me what I have the right to do?”

The fury drained from his expression and his customary placid calm settled over him. When he next spoke, it was as though he were discussing the weather, and he reached out a grimy thumb and ran it along her jawline. “You will clean up well, and once the stink of your Western diet burns out of your skin, I think you will be serviceable. I don’t see the attraction, but my tastes aren’t important. There are many who will pay to abuse an imperialist princess. Now rest, because you will be popular.”

Christine’s scream echoed off the walls as Lee left her to visions of unmentionable degradation at the hands of sweaty men willing to pay for a chance at forbidden fruit. She’d been rescued to serve as a sex slave in a country with no law, and her savior was the devil.

She sobbed until her chest hurt, her throat burning with impotent rage, and when she exhausted herself, she began calmly calculating how she could end her life before it became a living nightmare in hell.