The Yong Yun Casino was a tombstone of a building, but it had one thing going for it—the chow. The cook was a mainland Chinese fellow named Ge Ming (葛明). He was a human stork, bald and scrawny with a thin strip of a mustache. Word was he'd started at the 'Sheng Ri Huo Guo' ( 圣日火锅) —the Holy Day Hot Pot—back in Nanjing. After a scrap with the head chef at the Thailand branch, Boss Deng shipped him here.
But it wasn't the Chinese food that sang; it was the western stuff. Ge Ming made a sandwich that was simple, sure, but perfectly balanced. And his bacon? No one could touch it. Everyone—the guards and the caged ones alike—respected the man's skill. Everyone except Big Brother Zhang. Zhang wouldn't touch a bit of Ge Ming's cooking. He lived on cup-noodles and boiled eggs, a man with a strange, restricted palate and a temper like a rattlesnake. No one had the guts to ask him why.
The kitchen was a fortress of cast-iron, fully stocked and still breathing. In this pissant hell-on-earth, the food was the only thing that kept the dark at bay for Lu Wen.
The world was turning to gray as the sun bled out of the sky. Lu Wen stayed outside, clutching the silence, not ready to face the machinery inside the building. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sandwich—smoked bacon, fresh greens, and tomatoes, all tight in plastic wrap. It was the afternoon ration meant for the guards, but Lu Wen was a valued grunt in the gang's machine now. He got the good meat.
Lu Wen moved slow toward the river-stones. There was one big rock, flat on top, just the right height for a man to sit and soak in the silence of the water and the trees. It was his special spot. But before he could drop his tail, he saw something bunched up on the other side. It looked like a pile of dried grass. But… it was moving.
The young programmer froze. In the dying gray light of the evening, he saw that the pile of straw was actually a man. He was wrapped in a mat so old and rotted it looked like part of the landscape. He was hunched there by the water, his body giving off small, shivering hitches. He turned his face to Lu Wen—a blank mask of a face—and began to stand. Slow. Very slow.
He was a walking skeleton, his skin a roadmap of grime. His hair was a wild tangle, his beard a bird's nest of filth. His nose was long and hooked, like the beak of a scavenger bird. His eyes were deep-socketed holes, empty of any human thought, glowing with a strange, sickly yellow light.
Lu Wen felt a sharp prickle of pity. The old guy looked like he hadn't eaten since the turn of the century; probably a few bricks short of a load, too. He reached into his pocket and held out the sandwich he'd just unwrapped.
'Here, uncle. Eat this. But get out of here when you're done. It's not safe.' Lu Wen kept his voice low, his eyes darting back toward the building. He was thinking of the guards—hard-eyed bastards who'd beat a man half to death for a laugh, then go have a beer. Some of them enjoyed the hurting.
The old man cocked his head, his expression as empty as a washed blackboard. He reached out a trembling hand and took the bread. Lu Wen figured the guy didn't know a word of Chinese, so he made eating motions and gestured with his hands. Go, the gesture said. Hide. Get the hell away from this place before the dark catches you.
The old man snatched the sandwich and began to gorge himself, his gums working with a wet, frantic sound that made Lu Wen's stomach turn. He started to head for the water, but then he stopped. He looked back, his mouth a dark, empty hole, and let out a sound that froze the marrow in Lu Wen's bones.
'Waaa... Waaa... Haccch!'
The sound hit Lu Wen like a physical blow. It was a baby's wail—high, thin, and lonely. The young programmer felt a mixture of shock and a sudden, hysterical urge to laugh. He had found the ghost. The 'spirit' that had those hard-eyed scammers pissing their pants in the dead of night was nothing but this poor, broken wreck. 'Just a cripple,' Lu Wen whispered to the rising wind. 'Maybe a few bricks short of a load, too.' He looked back at the casino where the lights were flickering on for the night, but when he turned again, the old man was gone. Just... gone. As if he had seeped into the very mud of the riverbank.
Lu Wen walked back into the ghost casino with a thin, secret smile. He had to bite his lip to keep from laughing when he saw the guards bunched up near the elevators, their eyes darting toward the river door like cornered rats. He wouldn't tell them. No way in hell. Let them stay scared; it bought him a little peace, and in this place, peace was a precious thing. He looked at the four men on duty—four bastards with souls as black as the pit:
There was Tie Shou Tai (铁手泰 : 'Iron Hand' Tai), a former Muay Thai pro from Harbin. A massive wall of meat with a temper like a rattlesnake, he was the Big Brother's designated knuckles. Then there was Dian Yan Ming (电眼明) a dark, skeletal predator. Women who fell into his hands came out broken. Aside from Big Brother Zhang, Darin feared this one the most. There was Shan Lang Biao (山狼彪 ) 'Mountain Wolf' Biao, a former ranger who handled a rifle like a second limb and could put a bullet through a man without feeling a single goddamn thing. And finally, Leng Zi Qiang (愣子强), the sadist. He had a thing for sharp edges—the kind that leave jagged, messy holes. He was the kind of nightmare you didn't want anywhere near your skin.
None of those four were saints. It was a rare thing to see a collection of hard-eyed bastards like that all in one place, and seeing these predators shivering over a ghost story—one that was actually just a pathetic wreck of an old man—was a joke that sat warm in Lu Wen's chest. He ducked his head, hiding a secret grin, and bit back a laugh as he walked past the guards whispering about their 'baby ghost'.
But the smile was a short dream on a summer afternoon. it vanished like smoke in a gale when a woman's scream sliced through the air—a jagged, high-voltage sound of pure agony coming from the hall near the stairs. Then came the thuds, the heavy, wet sounds of a beating. He didn't need to see her to know it was Darin.
Darin was forty-four, a Thai woman from the north who walked with an imperious stride, as if she were a queen and the rest of them were just dirt. Lu Wen had hated her on sight. He was a 'valued grunt' in this machine because he'd been played, a programmer who'd fallen into a trap. But Darin? She wasn't more meat for the machine; she'd signed up for the scamming life with her eyes wide open. She had come for the hustle, hungry for her own cut of the blood money. She wasn't a victim; she was a predator who had simply found herself in a cage with bigger ones.
But proximity is a funny thing; it breeds either a deeper hate or a reluctant kind of pity. As they talked, Lu Wen found himself feeling for her. Darin's English was a wreck—a stuttering, hitching jumble of sounds—but it was enough to bridge the gap.
She told him about the life she'd left behind in Northern Thailand. She was the daughter of a woman who'd built a small empire out of soy milk and fried dough sticks. They spent a good hour untangling the names—a linguistic knot that would've made a college don dizzy. What Darin called 'Patongko,' Lu Wen knew as 'Youtiao' (油条: Chinese fried dough stick) —those oily, deep-fried dough sticks. The real Patongko was supposed to be 'Bai Tang Gao, (白糖糕)' a spongy, steamed white sugar cake. Some old Hokkien or Teochew merchant must have botched the translation a century ago, and the mistake stuck like bad wallpaper. They laughed over that cosmic joke, and in this pissant hell-on-earth, that laugh was the first real thing to pass between them.
Darin's story sat in his gut like spoiled meat. Her old man had checked out when she was just a tyke, leaving her mother to fight the world with nothing but a street stall. The old lady had a back made of iron; she ground through the days until the stall turned into a shop, then a building with a payroll. When Darin got rich, she turned sour. She'd been looked down on as a kid, so she became a queen of the snoots, looking down her nose at everyone else just to even the score. When her mother got too creaky to run the show, Darin stepped into the driver's seat and drove the whole business into a ditch. To top off the fuckaree, her husband did a runout, leaving her with a mountain of debt that was now her only legacy.
She needed the scratch to salvage the family shop and keep the old lady and the little girl fed, so she signed up for the scamming life with her eyes wide open. They'd told her the money was easy—a fat cut of the blood money—but Darin was a lousy criminal. She had too much haughty bitch in her blood, and her 'attitude' didn't move the numbers. So they demoted her, then sold her from one outfit to the next like a dented can of soup, until she landed here at the Eternal Luck—the 'Green Building.' In this pissant hell-on-earth, the guards used her as a communal piece of tail and a human punching bag.
Lu Wen pitied her until his stomach felt like it was full of cold lead, but he was no hero. He was a scrawny programmer, a high-tech grunt with a backbone made of wet cardboard. He wasn't a player in this game; he was just more meat for the gears. All he could do was watch from the shadows and offer a few useless words of comfort when the coast was clear.
They were close, but there was no 'funny business.' Lu Wen liked her, but he was short on guts. And Darin? She lived in a constant, low-frequency hum of shame. She was terrified he'd look at her like spoiled meat, a vessel for the lust of every sallow-faced watcher in the building. So they stayed on their own sides of the line, two lonely souls sharing nothing but the stink of the place.
For twenty minutes, Lu Wen stood tucked behind a pillar in the hall, listening to the machinery of a nightmare. He heard the wet, heavy thuds of the beating and the high, thin wails of the woman being broken—a sound as sharp as a sliver of ice. He stayed rooted there, too scared to move and too sick to look, caught in a purgatory of his own making. Then, a phone jangled. Big Brother Zhang answered it, and the hall went as silent as a grave. A moment later, the lead dog and three of his grunts stepped out, moving with a focused, urgent haste, as if the devil himself was finally calling in a debt.
"Dàimǎ Nú (代码奴 : Code-Slave)! What the hell are you bird-dogging around here for?" Big Brother Zhang barked, his face a hard scrawl of fury before he swept past. One of his grunts, a scar-faced bastard named He Feng, looked at Lu Wen like he was spoiled meat and spat on his trousers without a second glance.
The other two were Zhang's shadows. There was Fang Mingzhe—the boss called him the 'Calculator Monkey.' He'd been a university professor once, before he'd been caught in the gears of the scamming machine. The last one was Yi Kan, a man with a mouth like a shut trap who Zhang used for the heavy lifting. They all hurried after their leader, their boot-heels clacking on the floor with a focused, urgent haste.
"Move it! We've got to handle the one in Cell 3," Zhang yelled. "His people haven't coughed up the scratch, and we've got a 'fresh meat' order that's a perfect match for him. We're going to process him for his insides instead! This damn business—coming in right when I want to eat my dinner! Scarface, go find the cook, Ge Ming. Fast!" Zhang led them toward the signs marked VIP, the gateway to the slaughterhouse in the basement.
Lu Wen felt a cold prickle of horror run down his spine. It meant someone was about to be a final meeting with the butchers.
The young programmer blundered into the hall and found her—Darin. She was a battered heap on the sofa, as naked as the day she was born. She was reaching for her clothes—nothing but a few rags scattered on the floor—trying to hide what the machine had done to her. Her lip was split, her nose was leaking blood, and her body was a roadmap of bruises. Most terrible of all was the bite mark on her right shoulder, a jagged red mouth weeping blood. She was crying big storybook tears, but she was biting them back, keeping the sound of her agony locked behind her teeth.
Lu Wen looked at the pitiful wreck of her and felt a cold stone settle in his gut. He scrambled to gather her clothes—nothing but a few rags now—and handed them over before helping her to sit up. Neither of them said a word. In a place like this, the most important things are the hardest to say because words just make them smaller. Silence was the only thing that didn't feel like a lie.
The quiet settled over the hall like a heavy blanket, but it didn't last. A moment later, Lu Wen's ears caught a sound drifting up from the dark, uncaring water of the river. It was a high, thin wail—the sound of a baby crying in the dead of night. It was a sound that belonged in a nightmare, not in the real world, but in this pissant hellhole, the two had become the same thing.
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