Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

All strewn like a candy trail.

Hannah was perched stiffly on the bed like a guru , swathed in a green terrycloth blanket, her hair tousled and plastered to her neck. Arthur painfully took in the details and felt asphyxiated. He advanced with the intention to hold her, but it only made her pull the blanket tighter around her neck. She stared at him with catatonic eyes, her expression so frigid that he couldn’t read anything from it.

Poppy was lying on a bed of folded towels by a wall, drawing breaths in whistles because congealed blood had obstructed his airway and nostrils. He was so bruised and bludgeoned that Arthur couldn’t decide where to hold him.

Arthur’s eyes burned. His mind spun into an infusion of pure, white rage uninhibited by logic or reason or mercy. It compelled him to hate and destroy, and in the wake of the lurid discovery it made him a vastly different man.

From the kitchen came the roar of a toilet flushing. Like a chant it drew Arthur out of the room and Hannah made no attempt to stop him. When he got there he found the aluminium toilet door closed. As if on cue he stepped aside and picked up a stone charcoal stove that sat below the window. He lifted it over his head and waited. The toilet door swung open. Out came Khun, splendid and muscular, and down came the stove.

The first blow didn’t render him unconscious. It allowed ample time for Khun to identify his assailant. And it pleased Arthur that their eyes met.

Revenge—a dish served cold? Better if it’s piping hot.

Arthur delivered the second blow right across the face, splintering teeth and brutally dislodging the jaw. More blows rained, each liberating a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anger. Khun’s skull caved like a shattered eggshell. His arms fell to the side of his body and twitched convulsively at each successive blow.

When it was over the bloodied stove fell out of Arthur’s hands and rumbled across the kitchen floor like a millstone. Khun, his head pulped, lay unmoving. In an unrecognisable orifice near his throat blood foamed and frothed to faint breaths of air. Arthur twisted his bloodied hands in a dishtowel to stop them from trembling. His hair hung in greasy strands over his brows. Was there fear? There was certainly euphoria. He wouldn’t have mustered the guts to break a chicken’s neck but he’d gladly take up the stove and smash Khun’s head in all over again. The rush of adrenalin ebbed, and the conviction that he’d just committed a heinous crime stole in like an infusion of poison. He thought of lawful retribution, of justice.

But how could justice exist for someone like Khun?

He returned to the bedroom and Poppy tracked him with swollen eyes. Being inadequate in speech he made an unintelligible sound, and by its tone Arthur knew it wasn’t one of distress but relief. He composed himself, crouched by the child’s side and carefully felt his body for signs of trauma that would frustrate any attempt to move him.

Hannah sat erect on the bed, still wrapped in the blanket and with the same inert expression. Arthur did nothing either. Anguish held them both in a state of petrification, until Arthur found the strength to take Poppy into his arms. He did not know why he dithered, and his mind, brutalised by the events of the day, failed to conceive reason. He took a step towards Hannah and watched her stiffen.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

Her words put Arthur under a spell. They turned him around, walked him past a bloodied corpse, and spat him out of her door.

THERE ARE MOMENTS when you lie supine in bed trying to figure things out. Your limbs are flaccid. You divert all energy into your thoughts and believe that in doing so you’d eventually figure things out. And Landon, still reeling from the effects of a soporific infusion, falls asleep twice trying to do just that.

He is awake, on his third attempt, and still he has figured out nothing. He knows he is in a hospital but has no recollection as to how he got here. Only a morsel of memory remains—the one of him touching up the chalkboard behind the bar. He watches the ceiling fan and grudgingly lets his mind drift.

A nurse pulls the curtains aside. She is a large woman with short curly locks and smiling lips. Landon notices a large pink sportswatch on her wrist. Her name tag reads Nabillah .

“Good morning, Mr Lock,” Nabillah chirps.

He sits up and feels the stiffness of surgical plasters all over him. A saline drip leads from his left hand. “Is it morning?” “Still is.” The nurse looks at a wall clock above the ward’s entrance.

“How long was I out?” He expects days, even weeks.

“About eight hours.”

Just eight hours?

Nabillah straps the blood pressure monitor over Landon’s arm. “They brought you in about three am.” She starts the pump and the belt begins to inflate. “You lucky man,” she says, “only some light burns on the back, minor cuts on your head, a bit of smoke inhalation. Someone saved you. I think you will be on the news, we got police and reporters outside.”

“Really?”

The belt eases its grip on Landon’s arm. Nabillah stows her equipment and adjusts the saline flow on the IV drip. “We’ll leave this on for another hour or so.” She taps gently on the needle taped to Landon’s hand. “You want something to eat?” She brings her fingers to her mouth as if Landon can’t understand speech.

“Just water, please.”

She waddles over to a little rolling table, pours him a cup from a plastic tumbler, throws in a straw and hands it to him. The water tastes bitter and searing against his smoke-tainted, parched throat.

As the nurse leaves a portly man with a bald, meaty head enters. He has one eye that moves and one that is dead. An eager, younger looking man, likely to be an aide, stands with him.

Where is John?

The older man offers his hand to Landon, grinning very broadly and genially and revealing a gap between his central incisors. “I believe we’ve met.” He lifts his police pass clipped to the end of a lanyard. “Marco, from Police Intel.”

They shake hands and Landon finds something familiar in Marco’s deadened eye.

“Live birth notification and your missing IC?” Marco, still grasping Landon’s hand, tilts his meaty head. “Ring any bells?”

“Ah, yes.”

“Any luck with your missing IC?” Marco pulls up a chair and sits by the bed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do much. It’s handled by another department.”

“Can’t help that.”

“It’s amazing how we keep bumping into each other.” Marco’s tone is affable, his mannerism pleasant, almost debonair. “One of my men, off-duty, happened to be around the café when it blew up. It was he who got you out.”

“Really?” Landon wonders if it’d been John. “I must thank him in person.”

“He refused accolade.” Marco’s smiling face glows. “A fine example of the corps. We saw to it that he receives due credit.”

“Did he get my stuff?” Landon blurts in haste, thinking of his bag, which he had left hanging on a hook at FourBees. “I meant— was I carrying anything when he got me out?”

“Well, I wasn’t informed of it.”

“Did you salvage anything from the café?”

Marco draws a look of sympathy. “I’m afraid there’s nothing left.”

Oh hell, my journal. Landon draws a long, slow breath. When did he begin that one? That’s it. Another chunk of my life obliterated, never to return.

“Your employer didn’t make it,” Marco adds.

“R… Raymond?” Landon manages to catch the name before it slips into the precipitous gorges of his ruptured memories.