Chapter 9: The Alley
Chapter 9: The Alley
Chapter 9: The Alley
HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE
Volume 1: Risen from Suicide
***
The stairwell had never felt so long.
Four flights down. Marlo walked ahead, the baton man behind. Yun Zhou was sandwiched between them, shuffling with his head bowed, his left hand gripping the rail like a man afraid of falling.
Twenty-two steps per flight. Eighty-eight total. I’ve counted them every night since I woke up.
At step sixty, the landing light is broken. At step seventy-one, there’s a loose tile. The baton man weighs two hundred and forty pounds. He’ll hit it with his left foot.
He said nothing. He let his breathing go ragged, his knees tremble, and every few steps a small, miserable sniffle escape.
“Hurry up,” the baton man muttered.
“S-sorry.”
Marlo didn’t turn around. His thoughts were loud enough that Yun Zhou barely had to reach for them.
...alley, quick, three seconds. Baton to the back of the head. Throw him in the dumpster until night. Lin brings the van after dark...
...no, too risky. Tomorrow someone smells it. Take him to the river...
...stop. Think. After the meeting. Handle the meeting first...
A man falling apart in real time. Yun Zhou let it wash over him like warm water.
Panic makes the plan sloppy. Sloppy plans leave doors open.
At step seventy-one, a loose tile clicked under the baton man’s boot, and the big man stumbled half a pace. He cursed under his breath.
Yun Zhou’s eyes flicked toward him for a fraction of a second. Left foot. Weight shifted forward. Ankle slightly rolled.
Noted.
***
The side door of the building let out onto an alley barely wider than a delivery truck.
Gray light. Wet concrete. The smell of old grease from the restaurant next door, mixed with the sour tang of overflowing trash. A broken streetlight hung crooked from its pole. Halfway down, a green dumpster sat against the left wall, its lid warped and slightly open.
At the far end, thirty yards away, a white van idled with its engine running. Through the windshield, Yun Zhou caught the pale blur of Lin’s face, gripping the wheel with both hands.
Good. He came.
Marlo stopped in the middle of the alley and turned around. The baton man stepped back, putting himself between them and the street.
For a moment, nobody spoke. Somewhere above, a window slid open and a woman’s voice shouted something about laundry. Then the window closed again.
“Zhou,” Marlo said.
He’d put on a smile. It sat on his face like a bad toupee.
“Let me be honest with you. I like you. I really do. If circumstances were different, I’d...” He trailed off, rubbed his jaw, and let out a short laugh. “Hell. I don’t know what I’d do. Give you a job?”
Yun Zhou stared at the ground. His shoulders shook. A tear dripped off his chin.
“Marlo-ge,” he whispered. “Please.”
“I know.” Marlo’s voice cracked on the last syllable. “I know. It’s not personal. You understand that, right? It’s just... business.”
Business. Yun Zhou nearly smiled. Every murderer I ever met said the same word.
The baton man shifted his grip. The steel rod slid out of his sleeve with a small metallic whisper.
Now.
***
Oculus.
The thread slipped out, thin as spider silk, and wrapped around the baton man’s mind.
It was dull in there. A dim, sluggish place, full of simple wants: lunch, sleep, the lottery. He didn’t care about Yun Zhou. He didn’t care about Marlo. He cared about doing what he was told and going home.
...right-handed swing. Back of the skull. Do it clean. Don’t think...
Yun Zhou drew one slow breath.
Right-handed. The weight comes from the hip, not the shoulder. He telegraphs with his left foot. Two-tenths of a second between the shift and the strike.
I can work with two-tenths.
“Do it,” Marlo said quietly.
The baton man stepped forward.
The steel arced up, a shadow against the gray light, and began its descent toward the back of Yun Zhou’s head.
Yun Zhou dropped.
He didn’t dodge. A dodge would have been too fast, too clean, too impossible for a boy who couldn’t climb stairs. He simply collapsed, as if his knees had given out from terror. His legs folded, and his body folded with them, and the baton whistled through the space where his skull had been a heartbeat earlier.
Too close. A bare inch.
The big man’s momentum carried him forward, off-balance, his right arm overextended.
Yun Zhou was already moving.
On the ground, on his hands and knees, he lunged. His left hand shot out, palm flat, and slapped against the inside of the baton man’s forearm, two fingers above the wrist.
“Sever.”
He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to. It was just a word in the back of his mind, the old name of the old technique.
It wasn’t a pretty move. There was no light, no flash, no thunder. Just the precise, flat strike of a palm against a bundle of nerves, with a thread of pressure driven exactly where it would hurt the most.
The baton man’s fingers went slack.
The steel rod clattered to the pavement. His entire right arm hung from his shoulder like a wet rope.
“What the—”
Yun Zhou rolled. His shoulder hit the concrete, a bright burst of pain that made his vision flicker. But he was behind the big man now, a rat slipping between a bull’s legs.
Eye.
The world narrowed. For a moment, the baton man was no longer a man. He was a map.
A faint web of lines, glowing only in Yun Zhou’s mind, ran across his back. Spine. Kidneys. The cluster of nerves just below the shoulder blade. The soft spot where the ribs ended.
His hand drove up, two stiff fingers extended.
They struck the back of the baton man’s knee, in the hollow where the tendons met. Not hard. Not with any real force. Just precisely.
The big man’s leg buckled.
He fell like a tree, face-first into the alley, and landed with a heavy wet thud that echoed off the walls.
The whole sequence had taken less than three seconds.
***
Silence.
Marlo stood frozen, eyes wide, mouth open.
Yun Zhou, still on the ground, pushed himself up on one elbow. His chest heaved. Blood trickled from a scraped palm. His ribs ached where he’d landed, and a hot wave of dizziness rolled up behind his eyes, a warning that the body was rapidly running out of fuel.
Too much. Too fast. I’m about to pass out.
But Marlo doesn’t know that.
He let his expression crack. Mouth open, eyes huge, a wet sheen of terror over everything. His breath came out in sobs.
“I— I didn’t mean to,” he stammered, scrambling backward. “He— he swung at me— I just— I was trying to push him away— I didn’t know—”
Marlo’s gaze dropped from Yun Zhou to the fallen man. The baton man groaned, rolled onto his side, and clutched his dead arm with his good hand. His face was gray with shock.
“Lucky,” Marlo breathed. “You... you got lucky.”
Exactly.
Believe it.
“I’m sorry,” Yun Zhou sobbed. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t hurt me—”
Something in Marlo’s face hardened.
Fear is a strange chemical. For some men, it freezes. For others, it ignites.
Marlo’s hand dipped into his jacket and came out with a knife.
A short, black-handled folding blade, which he flicked open with a practiced snap. The edge caught the gray light and glinted.
“Stay down,” he said, in a voice that had stopped being friendly a long time ago.
There it is.
There’s the real Marlo.
***
Yun Zhou knew exactly what would happen next, because he’d seen it a hundred times. The man would step in. The man would raise the knife. The man would, in the second before the strike, glance at the street to make sure nobody was watching.
Marlo stepped in.
Marlo raised the knife.
Marlo glanced at the street.
And Yun Zhou, who had been lying on the ground with his face twisted in a silent scream, did something very, very quiet.
He let go.
Feign.
His breath stopped. His heartbeat sank, forty-eight, forty-six, forty-five, and the temperature of his skin followed it down. The cold film that had risen the other night slid over him again, thin and silent.
His eyes rolled back. His body went limp.
For an instant, the knife hung in the air.
Then Marlo, startled, lowered it.
“...Zhou?”
No answer.
“Hey.” The knife trembled in Marlo’s hand. “Hey, get up.”
Yun Zhou lay in the puddle with one arm flung wide, his face slack, his lips faintly blue. A thin thread of blood ran from his scraped palm and curled slowly across the wet concrete.
Marlo crouched. Reached out. Pressed two fingers against Yun Zhou’s neck.
Nothing.
Forty-five beats per minute is almost nothing. If he’s not a doctor, if he’s panicking, if he’s expecting a dead man...
A faint, almost inaudible choke came from Marlo’s throat.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Oh, shit. Oh shit.”
***
Four minutes of Feign.
Yun Zhou lay in the dark behind his own eyelids, a stone at the bottom of a pond, and listened.
He couldn’t read minds like this. The technique pulled his focus too far inward, closing the channel. But he didn’t need a mind. He had ears.
Marlo’s breath, rapid and shallow. The scrape of his shoes on the pavement as he stood and turned. The baton man’s low moaning.
“I didn’t do anything,” Marlo said to himself, his voice cracking. “I didn’t touch him. He fell. He fell.”
“You... you had a knife,” the baton man gasped.
“Shut up! Shut up, shut up!”
A thud. Something kicked against the dumpster.
“I just wanted to scare him,” Marlo said, almost sobbing. “That’s all. I was only going to scare him. He can’t be dead. He’s twenty. He’s twenty.”
A strange thing, guilt, Yun Zhou thought, cold and distant. He’s willing to sell a boy’s organs. But watching one die by accident, that breaks him.
Or maybe he’s only afraid of what the boss will say.
Footsteps paced. Marlo was walking in a tight circle.
Four minutes and ten seconds. Fifty seconds left.
Hold.
***
Four minutes and forty.
The cold in his chest had grown heavy. His lungs burned. The iron band around his ribs was tightening, and the edges of his consciousness frayed like cloth held too close to a flame.
Not yet.
Come on.
Come on.
He couldn’t see. He couldn’t feel his fingers. But from somewhere beyond the haze of his own failing body, a new sound reached him.
An engine.
Not the idle of Lin’s van. A different sound. Smooth. Low. Expensive.
Tires on wet concrete.
Then a door, opening and closing with a heavy, solid thunk.
Marlo’s breath stopped.
“...Gorman?” he whispered.
A man’s voice answered, calm, dry, and almost bored.
“Marlo. What exactly am I looking at?”
***
Four minutes and fifty-five.
Yun Zhou’s heart gave one painful, stuttering thump, a warning that the limit was close. He felt the technique begin to fray at the edges. A tremor ran through his fingers. His eyelids fluttered, almost imperceptibly.
Five minutes. A few more seconds.
“I can explain,” Marlo said, high and fast. “Boss, it’s not what it looks like. The kid attacked Dong, and I was just—”
“Quiet.”
The word was soft. Almost gentle. It silenced Marlo instantly.
Footsteps crossed the alley. Not hurried. Measured. Leather soles, striking the pavement with a slow, unhurried rhythm.
They stopped near Yun Zhou’s head.
A shadow fell across his face.
Five minutes.
Five minutes and five seconds.
It’s time.
The iron band tightened until it felt like his ribs would snap. His vision, behind the closed lids, flashed red, then black, then red again. His lungs screamed for air.
Hold. Hold. Hold.
A hand reached down.
It was a dry hand, with long, cool fingers and a faint trace of expensive cologne. It pressed two fingertips against the side of Yun Zhou’s neck.
For a long second, nothing happened.
Then the voice spoke again, in a tone that was somewhere between curiosity and cold amusement.
“Interesting.”
A pause.
“This boy isn’t dead.”
Yun Zhou’s heart gave a sudden, huge, painful lurch. The technique shattered.
He sucked in a rasping, desperate breath, and his eyes flew open.
Above him, framed against the gray morning sky, a man in a charcoal suit looked down at him. Fifty, perhaps. Silver at the temples. A thin, intelligent face with eyes like polished stones.
He was smiling very slightly.
“Hello, Yun Zhou,” said Gorman Tan.
***
To be continued in Chapter 10: “Punishment for a Thief”