NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (9 page)

Two minutes later

Outside, the passengers stand nervously in a line as their captors encircle them intimidatingly.  Several of those at one end begin walking into the surrounding forest after being yelled at and prodded repeatedly to do so; near the end of the line, Sascha and Ikaros watch on with fearful speculation as several of the passengers in front of them disappear one by one into the dense undergrowth before either even get a chance to begin following.

Moments later, with the voices of the group fading in the distance, the bus driver and the 'tour guide' begin the drive back to the main road in reverse, unable to turn around in such narrow confines.  The drop zone is left deserted until the next date on their schedule.

Early the next morning

After napping lightly for perhaps twenty minutes or less in his small bamboo cage, Ikaros wakes up, still exhausted, to the sound of a prolonged and shrill scream; intermittent periods of this resumed just before dawn after a disquieting stretch of inactivity in the early hours.  He checks Sascha's cage ten feet away and finds to his relief that she's still sitting hugging her legs tightly and hiding her face from view.  He hears the whimpering of several of the ten remaining passengers and notices that the two other Europeans were taken away while he was sleeping, realising that it could well have been their screams that had penetrated his disturbing dream.  He shakes his head and, from under his legs, picks up the sliver of bamboo that he pulled off part of the cage around midnight after examining the whole thing thoroughly, desperately trying to find a weakness.  He quickly positions himself so as not to arouse suspicion from the roaming guards and resumes cutting at the leather bonds around his wrists that are so tight his hands have become bloodlessly pale.  He cuts frantically for around forty minutes without rest, trying not to get too anxious about the series of unlikely gambles involved in this last hope.

After finally breaking free, he rearranges the leather so that it appears secure at first glance, holding the ends tightly in his fingers, allowing him to release it and make use of his hands on demand: he practices this twice, then waits, hoping that he is the next to be taken, almost fooling himself that he can make it happen if he desires it strongly enough: it isn't and he can't.  He watches as one of the other passengers is dragged out of her cage and taken kicking and screaming into the nearby shed by four of the men.  Moments later, wild and desperate screams come exploding out of the entrance lasting in various forms for only thirty seconds or so before fading to fatigued and helpless whimpering; then, an abrupt silence cuts through the air.

The disturbing nature of the pattern being basically the same in the given context, all those still caged need no visual confirmation about the content of the proceedings.  Forty tense minutes pass before the four men exit again to collect another.  By this time, Ikaros is calm, poised and determined that whatever he is able to come up with will be enough.  The men head for one of the cages near Ikaros; he takes his only chance and yells, "Hey!  If you want someone to kill, come and kill me!"

The men react by laughing and point at him mockingly.

"You think that's funny, do you, you fools?!  TAKE ME!" Ikaros yells with even greater fervour.  He then violently throws himself against the cage, falls on his back, and starts kicking at the bars aggressively, careful not to let the bindings unravel.  He rolls over and spits in their direction as he watches them head towards his cage; they start abusing him in Thai and laugh heartily, thinking the whole scene is quite amusing and believing they've broken him.

"You want your turn, huh?" asks one as he leans down, unlocks the padlock and opens the door while two of the others point their machine guns into the cage, poking Ikaros painfully in the ribs.  Ikaros starts to exit, "I never told you not to screw with me.  Do you have any idea why?"  Ignoring him, one man without a gun grabs Ikaros's left arm, but, as he begins to stand upright, Ikaros releases his grip on the leather bonds, slips his left hand out and both hands race towards the barrels of the two guns, clasping them firmly and raising them into the air; the barrels are already above his head when they start to fire.  Sascha watches with surprise as Ikaros swings the ends of the barrels down towards the other two men who then fall to the ground dead before the guns stop firing.  In the struggle that follows, Ikaros commandeers a gun, pokes the barrel in an eye and smashes a butt into some teeth, finally shooting the remaining two with a few short spurts while they suffer their injuries for a brief but agonising moment.  Surprised by the result, but satisfied that they've been dealt with, he turns and races towards the shed only twenty paces away.  He leans up against the wall and waits with his gun pointing at the entrance.

The four remaining guards, alerted by the unexpected commotion outside, run out of the shed to investigate with their guns at the ready yet to little effect as they don't spot Ikaros before he opens fire.  Three of them are wounded and drop clumsily to the dirt; the remaining man spins instinctively towards Ikaros, spraying bullets in an arc along the shed wall as he does so, which quickly encroaches on his position.  Having the advantage, though, Ikaros takes careful aim and fires just a few well-placed rounds that result in blood and other debris spitting out the back of his target's head.

Ikaros walks towards the entrance firing at the other three on the ground until they stop wriggling.  At the entrance, he peers into the shed with his rifle at the ready and sees an operating table with the bloody body of the young woman on it and two blood-drenched 'surgeons' desperately racing for the back door in a futile attempt to abandon the scene.  With only a slight hesitation, he opens fire and shoots both several times in the back.  Dismissing them before they hit the floor, he walks through the entrance a few steps and looks around the room spotting several refrigerators and a collection of lumpy body bags lined up on the floor, evidently containing the harvested corpses of the already-perished passengers.  Shaking his head in disgust, he turns and runs towards the strewn bodies near his cage and picks up a set of keys lying in the dirt; he strides across to Sascha's cage, leans down next to it and looks at the lock then the keys, trying to work out what the system is, if there is one, but doesn't find anything obvious like numbers or colours, only a series of characters that, as far as he can tell, don't seem to have any discernable pattern to them.

Sascha looks at him with mixed surprise.  "Did you just do that?" she whispers, still not quite believing it.

"Yeah, I did.  It's gonna be okay now; we're gonna make it out."  He impatiently tries a number of keys — the fifth one clicks the lock open effortlessly.  He opens the door and begins to untie her.

"What if they came to me first?"

"Don't worry about that.  It didn't happen," he answers bluntly.

Once her hands are free, he quickly moves to the neighbouring cage, which contains a young Thai couple, and begins the same process.  Sascha races to pick up two of the canteens full of water attached to the dead guards and takes a well-deserved sip out of one before handing the other bottle through a nearby cage to a middle-aged man and woman, who snatch it eagerly and take it in turns to gulp it down.

Ikaros glances at her doing this while he puts another key in the lock; the third key fits and he flings the door open.  The two scramble eagerly out of the cage and run towards the forest without even waiting for Ikaros to undo their bonds. 

"Hey, where the hell are you going?!" yells Ikaros after them.

They continue into the forest and disappear without so much as looking back.

Ikaros darts to the next cage and tries yet another key, but fails again.  He hears some rustling coming from the forest on the other side of the clearing, stands up and scans the foliage for a moment with trepidation.  "Dammit!"

Hearing the now-unmistakable sounds of several men ploughing their way through the undergrowth, Sascha becomes instantly terrified.  "More are coming, Ikaros!  Quick, get them out!"

He tries another key as he looks at the six remaining captives still locked up in the cages, then glances over his shoulder and spots the outline of six to eight men's heads just above the undergrowth.  Realising he's not going to make it, he tries one more key, fails, then throws them into the cage at one of the two women, both of whom, realising his intent, begin to plead with him desperately to continue.  He stares into their fearful eyes for a fraction of a second, jumps up and grabs Sascha's arm as she stands there slightly unprepared for his speed.  "Let's go!" he yells firmly.

Jolted into action, she instinctively begins running alongside him but without fully accepting that they're leaving the others behind; she looks with horror over her shoulder.  "My God, what about them?!"

"Just run!"

She does.

Racing over the helipad, which is used for product collection, they get to the edge of the clearing and disappear among the trees heading eastward up a steep incline, which Ikaros believes is the way they came and is their best bet to get back to the track.  The reinforcements based atop a rise nearby to the west emerge out of the trees seconds later after being alerted to action earlier by the racket coming from below; some run towards the cages while others race into the shed.

On making an accurate assessment of the situation, one suggests they interrogate the remaining captives.  They point their guns through one of the cages and prod a woman aggressively with the barrels, yelling a few questions quickly and repeatedly.  The poor woman, who is in her fifties, knowing the situation is hopeless, acquiesces quickly, points in the two directions both pairs ran, and says a few concise words in an attempt to convince them that she's telling the truth.  Barely hesitating, all but one split spontaneously into groups and give chase.

Sascha and Ikaros trudge without rest through the dense undergrowth for several hours until they eventually come across the dirt track, where they do their best to walk briskly, despite their exhaustion, back to the main road.  After more than a dozen failed attempts, they hitch a ride back to Bangkok in an old truck transporting chickens to an abattoir on the outskirts of the city.  Without any money between them, they merely thank the driver who is incurious about the nature of their undisclosed situation, perhaps because the possibilities are no surprise to him.  They then begin walking in the general direction of their hotel, which they estimate will probably take them most of the day to reach if no one picks them up.

7 p.m
.

Dirty, tired and hungry, but not so thirsty because of two accessible taps they spotted along the way and a few muddy puddles they ravaged after the heavy rains that afternoon, Sascha and Ikaros stand outside their hotel looking considerably worse for wear and quite conspicuous.  They walk into the hotel nonchalantly, hoping not to gain any unnecessary attention but are seen by just about all the staff and several hotel guests who look them up and down with curiosity and in some cases presumptuous disgust, but otherwise they are left alone.  They collect new door cards while trying not to start or encourage unwanted questions or a conversation with the receptionists with only moderate success, then walk down the hall.

Sascha's room is number 106, several closer to reception than Ikaros's.  "Call me when you wake up," she says, swiping the card.  She knows exactly what she's  going to do as she ruminated obsessively for hours prior to finally arriving about immediately having a shower, eating the courtesy noodles waiting for her on the bar fridge, and going straight to bed with the room's temperature way down low.

"Yeah, sure.  I think we should check out as early as we can, okay?"

"Not too early, though," she replies exhaustedly.

Ikaros nods as he begins again to walk down the hall towards his own door, only turning his head briefly to watch her entering her room.

• • •

It wasn't their fault, of course, that they fell prey so easily to a well-developed operation that had been hidden from view for so many years, from a commonly known practice in the early years of the century to an all-but-forgotten phantasm; the traces had been long suppressed by the local authorities, the higher levels of which had been in cooperation with the associated international criminal networks for some time.  The creation of this elaborate underground programme was partly enabled by all the distractions of the century, but the emergence of genetically engineered, on-demand organ replacement technologies allowed the idea that organ transplants were made redundant to be perpetuated more convincingly.  It was the exorbitant cost of such medical treatment, however, that restricted the service to an elite minority in most countries, ultimately allowing the more economical and affordable traditional organ transplants to continue.  This allowed the underground illegal activities to thrive while being covered by sophisticated practices.

Among the most sought after in many countries, including Thailand, were the organs of Caucasians based on often spurious beliefs about their better health and fitness, thus creating a need for tourists to be targeted; covering up their disappearance was only achievable with the assistance of the authorities and convoluted paper trails that ultimately reported the tourists' exits from the country or their being victims of violent and deadly crimes that were all too common, the cases of which could be wrapped up neatly and were never really expected to be solved.  This deflection stonewalled any limited independent investigation that could have been undertaken but never was with any intensity or endurance.  Ultimately, it was due to widespread and controlled ignorance and complacency that some of the acquired organs made it onto the official international organ donor trading system and into the bodies of unwitting citizens of many developed countries who couldn't afford the more expensive options.