The survivor

Fifty-Five

‘I am glad that you know Sheung Fa,’ the old man said. ‘He is a good man to know. But this wound… the infection is very bad.’ He spoke the words softly, with a sense of practicality.

Red Mask heard them like a flutter of wings as he fell in and out of consciousness. He opened his eyes and glanced around the room. He saw shelf after shelf, each one covered with different-sized jars. Hundreds of jars. Containing roots, flowers, stalks, fermented creatures and many other things he could not even describe.

‘Very bad,’ the old man said again. ‘The arm may be lost.’

Red Mask felt removed. He looked from the flowers to the floor to the old television set, bolted high in the far corner of the room. At first glance it looked part of a video-surveillance system, all black and white and shoddy of picture, but then the BCTV News crest lit up the screen, and Red Mask realised he was simply looking at a very old television set.

The late-night news was on. St Patrick’s Peril.

Looking in that direction hurt Red Mask’s neck, and he had seen enough. He turned his eyes away from the screen.

‘Bullet… in shoulder…’ he murmured.

‘Rest, rest,’ the old man soothed.

Red Mask focused on the old man, who now stood at his side. He was thin, with a sickly pale face. As if he had been ill for a long time. As if he, too, had come from the camps.

‘The blood is dead.’ The old man pointed a long brown fingernail at Red Mask’s shoulder, then lightly dragged the nail around the perimeter of the wound.

Red Mask flinched at the touch, felt his entire body tremble.

‘Bad blood. Dead blood. It must come off.’

Red Mask shook his head. ‘It cannot.’

‘It must.’

‘No! I am… unfinished.’

The old man’s eyes roamed the room, as if he was staring at things no one else could see, dissecting things in his mind. After a long hesitation, he returned to his desk, which was on the far side of the room, under another large shelf of jars. He sat and read and talked to himself in a dialect Red Mask could not understand. The words sounded lost and rhetorical and far too fast — like the clucks of chickens.

For the first few seconds, Red Mask raised his head off the table and watched the old man, but soon his shoulder throbbed and his neck shook, and he gave up the struggle. His head dropped back onto the hard wood of the table, and he moved no more. His body felt as heavy and old as the earth itself.

‘I must be going,’ he said.

The old man laughed. ‘Are you in such a hurry to find your grave?’

Red Mask did not reply. His eyes roamed the room. On the wall hung several prayer banners. For Health. For Harmony. For Prosperity. He murmured them aloud, at the same time trying to find the source of the horrible smell that overpowered everything else in the room — even the strong stink of the ginger root. It took Red Mask several minutes before he realised that the stench came from him.

His body was turning rancid.

And all because of the gwailo. The White Devil.

‘Ahhh!’ the old man said, the word like a sigh. On wobbly legs, he stood up from his desk, then shuffled over to the sink where he gathered and mixed ingredients Red Mask could not see. When at last he turned around, he was carrying a large poultice, dripping with yellow and purple fluids, the colours of an old bruise. In the centre of the cloth, a hole had been cut. The old man draped that hole over the wound on Red Mask’s shoulder.

The coolness of the compress sent tingles up and down Red Mask’s neck and arm, and he shivered violently. When the old man pressed down firmly, Red Mask screamed. Thick, yellow fluid oozed out of the hole, and a deep bone pain radiated all through his body.

The old man shook his head. ‘It is still in there.’

‘Cut bullet out.’

‘This will cause much, much pain.’

But Red Mask barely heard him. His sole focus was now on the television set, because on the screen was a picture of the cop — the White Devil who had confronted him at every turn. The News was touting this man as the one who taunted death in order to save the lives of the children. He was a legend. A hero.

The sight caused Red Mask’s body to shudder, so hard it shook the table.

The old man washed his hands at the sink. When he returned to the table, a tray of crude steel tools rattled in his withered hands.

Red Mask turned his thoughts away from the pain of his shoulder, away from the tools that littered the old man’s tray, and focused on Detective Jacob Striker — the cop who had almost killed him twice; the cop who had almost prevented him from finishing his mission; the cop who had killed his loved one and sent a life’s worth of planning into ruin.

They would meet again. Red Mask knew this. It was unavoidable.

‘Are you ready?’ the old man asked.

Red Mask nodded, and moments later he began to scream.