Winfred Wong: Son of the Tank Man

With constant eel-like wiggling motions, we glided blindly – all the flashlights ran out of power very soon except Kriss’s, so we were literally gliding blindly – forward for what I felt like an hour until the tunnel twisted up again. I believed we were all badly covered in dirt by that time, but no one whined a word, and we never rested and just kept dragging ourselves up – I’d love to know how far did we still have to go actually but just didn’t feel like speaking after what I’d been told.

“Almost there.” Kriss broke the long-sedated silence, her voice echoing through the tunnel in a way that if I didn’t know she was ahead of me in the first place, I wouldn’t be able to tell where she was. “I can smell a scent of roses from outside.”

And I could smell it too. It was reminiscent of something very popular back in the Port, something like a lavender sachet but was more intense and sweeter. My memory was hazy. But I did find this scent particularly refreshing.

As Ryson’s feet left my eyesight, I knew I had already reached the end of the tunnel. I felt like I was in a bear cave when I was trying to stick my weary hands out of the tunnel dumbly and when the view of the somber sky caught my eyes. The sky seemed to be so much smaller when you looked at it from inside a cave, so small that you had to use your imagination in order to picture what the rest of the universe was like, and that’s what pushed my imagination to its limit in a way that I’d never experienced back at the Port despite living in such a city with a great renown for the night sky view it had. Perhaps I had somehow developed a tendency to pay no attention to things I could enjoy at any moment. “Free sky,” I said to myself, and questioned myself if I’d for once really appreciated anything before. The answer to it does later become a source of shame that I have never disclosed to anyone, but at that time, I came to a conclusion that maybe that’s why people said the grass is always greener on the other side.

“Give me your hand.” Kriss’s voice broke my thought.

And when my hands were finally out of the cave, I felt a warm and strong hand grabbing my wrist pulling me up.

And after I pulled myself out of the tunnel, when I got to my feet on solid ground, “This way,” she said coldly and walked off at once.

We were in the middle of some bushes. There were no sight of modern buildings, nor hubbub of human activities, just some screeches from wild cicadas around us and some fragile red blossoms right besides my left foot. I felt like we were suddenly transported from the modern world back to the Stone Age. And the surroundings was so dingy that I wasn’t able to look clearly. But then, I heard a vague sound of waves hitting boulders along the shore from a particular direction, and that’s how I figured out where to go.

So, as I was then straggling behind Ryson, “Ryson,” I said.

We were moving in single-file, not because we intended to do so, but was a natural outcome when we found ourselves engulfed in darkness.

“Hmm?”

“Who are you, really?” I asked on a whim.

“You know that.”

“But who are you, like really really? Do you know Kriss?”

“Sure, I—”

“I mean before everything, before everything happened.”

He remained speechless.

As a strange silence was about to humiliate him, “Ashton, you know, we are grateful for everything, Ryson and me,” Mack, walking in front of Ryson and behind Kriss, said. “We are grateful for being given a chance to get out of this country. We are grateful for their… sacrifices, and we will never forget their names. So why don’t you just keep your lips sealed and be grateful for everything?”

He never looked at me when he spoke, but I did feel a timid sense of melancholy conveying in his tone. Maybe I was wrong about the connection between Kriss and Ryson, or maybe I was just being too sensitive. Either way I thought it would be better for me to stop being curious about everything.

So we moved all the way down to the shoreline quietly. And when we arrived, I expected to see something like a pier by the edge of the sea, or at least a crude facility for boarding, but instead there was only a beach slanted uphill to the right to a rugged cliff that looked like the beak of a white pigeon. The sand was coarse but fine, and at the junction where the lines of blooming bushes ended abruptly and the beach began, there was a big turtle lying.

Standing next to that turtle, looking around, “Come on. Over there,” Kriss commanded, and we headed left.

I could see there was a streamlined white speeder boat, a two-seater, which seemed to be able to go through a huge wave without difficulty, with almost no stern and a curved wide windshield right behind the V-shaped bow, floating steadily next to a short line of pillars projecting from the beach to the sea not too far away. I was excited. But upon approaching it, a man suddenly rolled out from behind the bushes to the beach in a way it seemed he had just been kicked out by an elephant. The man was seemingly fainted. None of us recognized him at first, but when Kriss pointed her torch at the face of him, we almost shrieked together.

“Jack!” I said, smothering my surprise just as my sense of danger pleaded me to, and hurried over to him.

I crouched down at his elbow and checked his breath. It was weak, much worse than when I first found him in the hotel and was like it would stop at any moment.

“What do we do?” I asked, as Kriss crouched down by my side.

“I don’t know either. Is he wounded?” she said.

And I scrabbled his body and found nothing notable.

“No. There is no blood and no wound on him. I—”

“R…n,” Jack suddenly whimpered, but I didn’t quite catch that.

“What? What did you say, Jack?” I prompted.

Then Kriss suddenly grabbed my arm, leaned in and whispered with her eyes ablaze with justifiable fear that had somehow conveyed what she was going to say to me, “Run. Now.”

So when she hauled me up, I was able to react instantly. And we sprinted toward the boat like there were hungry tigers on our tails even though we didn’t know what kind of a threat was looming. I never had a chance to look over my shoulder during the run, but on an occasion when I found Kriss staring at me, I did throw her back a petrified look, and from her calm facial expressions, I knew she wasn’t bolting so fast because she felt dreadful. She was just there running alongside me because I was running. So, midway through the beach, I did intentionally slacken my pace a bit to see how she would react, and the result was exactly what I’d expected. Perhaps she just wanted to make sure I could make it to the boat safely.

And while I started sprinting, I assumed that Mack and Ryson would be just right behind us. It had only occurred to me that they weren’t anywhere close behind us until we boarded the boat; I tripped over the gunwales but managed to regain balance when it swayed under the new weight I added. Then I looked afar at where Jack was, grasping that gunwales tightly, and saw the two of them engaging some fully geared soldiers emerging from the bushes with empty hands. I had absolutely no clue what they were thinking trying to take them down by force and of course, they were knocked down on the ground before I even blinked, but I was truly grateful for the extra few seconds they bought us with their lives.

“Hey, Ashton. Help me with the anchor. Pull it up. We won’t be able to go anywhere with that thing sitting deep down in the sea bottom,” Kriss urged, taking the helmsman seat behind the windshield.

Her voice was like an alarm reminding me of what sort of a situation we were in. And I hastened and jumped over to the stern, found a metal anchor chain lying on the edge of the boat and tried to pull it up, yet I couldn’t even make it move an inch no matter how hard I tried.