Ultimate Nails

 

 

When the salon on the other side of the traffic rotary changed its name from Resplendent Nails to Superior Nails, Juyen changed the name of her salon from Glorious Nails to Ultimate Nails.

“Let that tapir-assed bitch with her plastic nose and silicone tits and diseased hole top that,” Juyen spat.

Her husband Zam laughed and wagged his head. He had heard of men’s penises likened to a tapir snout, as an insult, but now he found himself trying to visualize a tapir’s rear end. “I actually think the name of our salon—both salons, really—sounded more important before.”

His wife swiveled slowly to train her eyes on him like black death rays. “Her title before was a boast about her salon. Now, it’s a statement against my salon. Are you too much of a grinning idiot to realize that?”

“And so now we have to pay for a new shop sign, and everything else that might bear our name?”

Juyen took a step closer to him and hissed, with a mixture of menacing and seductive fierceness, “Yes, we will—if you ever hope to visit my hole again.”

Juyen, with her huge smoldering eyes, and modernly styled short hair beveled in back to show off her long neck, was the most exciting woman Zam had ever taken to bed. She had honed her sexuality like a warrior would sharpen his sword edge. And Zam, uncommonly tall and rugged for their generally diminutive people, his head shaved down to a black stubble in the current tough guy style, had taken plenty of women to bed—including almost every nails technician in Juyen’s stable, at one time or other. He was sure Juyen knew about this, and that rather than being afraid it would undermine her stature in her workers’ eyes, allowed such frivolous affairs as a means of keeping her husband close to home, contented, and grateful. He was certain she reasoned that if he had to cheat, it should be in a way she felt she controlled.

They both turned to look out the open front of their salon again, across the bustling rotary with the bronze statue of the Ruby Empress stranded on the island at its center, arms outstretched, as she was orbited by motorbikes and occasional cars and trucks, all of them beeping their horns at each other incessantly. Through this vortex of chaos the husband and wife could see Superior Nails, and a delivery man climbing off a scooter out front. He was carrying plastic bags through which bulged stacks of white styrofoam food containers.

“Nice of Fai to buy lunch for her workers every Friday, isn’t it?” Zam said teasingly.

Juyen whipped her head around to glare up at her husband again, the muscles twitching in her hardened jaw. She whispered, “Speak a little louder so all my workers can hear, why don’t you? You, who are so concerned about us spending money.” But then she smiled. He was afraid to look at her smile, and gazed outside again. Juyen said, “Go out right now and buy lunch for all my workers. You’re going to do that every Friday from now on. But first, go over there and find out where he works.” She gestured at the parked scooter. “But don’t let those bitches in Fai’s salon see you. Buy our lunches from the same place. And pay that boy a nice tip to spit in their food every Friday, before he brings it by.”

“You’re going to pay that boy every week to spit in their food? But they won’t even know it!”

“I’ll know it!” Juyen said, widening her eyes.

Zam bit off whatever else he might have said. He only nodded quietly and began to cross the threshold.

“Hey, wait up!” Zam’s brother Frang came out from a room at the rear of the salon, adjusting his jacket. He wore a white suit, his hair greased back like a movie gangster. He said loudly, “Don’t you hate when you get finished wiping your ass, then another spurt of shit comes out and you have to start wiping all over again? You know what I hate worse than that? When the fucking toilet paper runs out when you’re still wiping! Who is it that looks after the water closet these days?”

Juyen jerked a thumb at her newest worker, who looked like she was trying to hide behind her white face mask and bent lower over the feet of a middle-aged woman whom she was giving a pedicure. Lavatory duties and pedicures were for newcomers.

Frang leaned down close to this girl and said sweetly, “Next time you don’t leave enough toilet paper in back, I’ll use your hair to wipe my ass. Got it, doll?” And he stroked his hand down her long hair.

“That’s enough crudity out of you,” Juyen snapped. “You’re going to upset my poor customers.” But the middle-aged woman was only tsk-tsking Frang and chuckling. “Go help your idiot brother run an errand, you shit-mouthed brain-damaged boil on my ass!”

“I would love to be anything on your ass,” Frang said, as he strutted past Juyen on his way to join Zam at the threshold. He was still adjusting his jacket, and in so doing exposed a revolver with a four-inch barrel, tucked in his waistband.

Juyen took him by the elbow. “Moron,” she said. “If the police ever catch you with that they’ll back you up against a wall for execution.”

Frang kissed his fingers and rubbed them together, signifying that he’d offer a bribe if such a situation ever arose. “You pay me for protection, don’t you, gorgeous? This is a harsh world, you know.” Then he slipped out of Juyen’s grasp, and he and Zam stepped out onto the sidewalk. There, Frang said to his older brother, “What, she doesn’t know you have a gun, too?”

“I don’t flaunt it the way you do,” Zam muttered, glancing back to be sure they were out of his wife’s earshot. Seeing they were in the clear, he confided, “She has my balls in her hand, Frang.”

“I’d kill to have my balls in her hand,” the younger brother joked, lighting a cigarette. “Actually, it’s more like she wears your balls between her legs. But don’t start complaining. Before you met her, you were just a punk on the street. Now you’ve got money in your pockets, a roomful of young beauties smitten with the boss’s husband, and a wife beautiful as a model. Or beautiful as a demon…either way. But you want a demon in bed, you have to make a deal with it. You have to pay the price.”

Lighting his own cigarette before they started across the street, Zam looked up behind him at the sign Glorious Nails. He sighed fatalistically, slapped his kid brother across the back of the head, and said, “Let’s go buy the girls some lunch, you tapir-dicked boil on my ass.”

 

***

 

That evening, when the salon had closed for business and the girls were all heading out to return home after an interminable work day, one of the workers, named Jha, knocked on the doorframe of Juyen’s little back office. Frang had already left, but Zam was slumped in an ornately carved and glassily lacquered wooden chair, a long leg slung over one of its arms, watching TV while waiting for his wife to finish scribbling columns of figures in a child’s school workbook. She kept stacks of these brightly-covered books, not trusting computers to store her records. Juyen looked up and called for Jha to enter. Zam sat up a little in his hard chair, only mildly curious, but then sat up even more when he saw the girl who accompanied Jha into the office.

Jha had worked for the salon for several years, and was pretty enough; he had slept with her a few times, but didn’t care for her unfortunate halitosis. The young woman beside her, though, was another matter. She was a little shorter than Jha, a little younger, and infinitely more lovely. Her teardrop-shaped eyes were poignant in their shyness, her small pouty mouth like a rosebud on the verge of blooming, the neat line of her bangs imparting a schoolgirl’s innocence. Despite her short stature, she was perfectly proportioned, her skirt showing off long slender legs. The mix of girlishness and sexiness made for a heady brew.

“Madam,” Jha said with her usual meek and respectful tone, “this is the sister I told you of—Ghoo.”

“Ah!” Juyen exclaimed, “and just as lovely as you claimed.” She smiled and motioned for Jha’s kid sister to approach. “Come here, child.”

Ghoo did as requested, shuffling closer to Juyen’s desk with awkward steps. She flicked a sideways glance at Zam. He had hoped the girl would notice his handsomeness, and he had been prepared for her, grinning at her broadly. What a sweet little pastry she was!

Even Juyen, he thought, looked like she wanted a taste, reaching to the girl’s smooth cheek and cupping it. “My oh my,” she said, “a flower, indeed.”

“Indeed,” Zam echoed aloud, unconsciously. His wife glanced his way, and his guts tightened their coils, but no jealousy flashed in her eye. Rather, her smile grew brighter.

“I had a thought recently,” Juyen said, “and your face has made that thought crystallize in my mind. Yes, yes…I think you’re exactly the girl I was waiting for.”

Jha smiled. “You’ll take my sister in, madam?” she asked.

“No,” Juyen said.

Jha’s smile fell like a bird that had struck an invisible wall. Even Zam was stunned. His wife prided herself on having amassed, she felt, the prettiest batch of nails technicians in the city. Ghoo was lovelier, in her delicate way, than all of them. Juyen had just called Jha’s sister a flower! Did she see Ghoo as too innocent-looking, then?

“I have another idea for you entirely, my flower,” Juyen cooed.

“What idea is this?” Zam spoke up.

“Well, my dear slow-witted husband, Ghoo is so striking and fresh a beauty I’m sure any salon would want to snap her up to grace their premises. Especially, our good friend Fai across the street.”

“Fai?” Zam said. “You mean—”

Juyen addressed Jha. “Don’t bring Ghoo in our salon again. I don’t want our hateful neighbors to see her here. Take her back home, Jha, and I’ll tell you more about my plan in the morning.”

“But,” Jha stammered, looking back and forth between her sister and her employer, “you are giving her a job, madam?”

“Yes, yes, don’t be so dense.” Juyen made a shooing motion. “I told you, I’ll tell you more when you return in the morning.” She smiled at Ghoo in goodbye, uncharacteristically gentle. “And you, my pet, I’ll be speaking with you on the phone.”

“Thank you, madam,” Ghoo said sweetly, as her older sister hustled her through the doorway.

Juyen turned to her husband. “The prettiest bullet I have ever seen.”

“You mean spy, don’t you?”

“I mean bullet. And I expect you, husband, to take her under your wing. Safely away from our shop, of course. Charm her, beguile her, make her yearn to do anything to please you.”

Zam grinned. What an agreeable assignment! “If you say so,” he replied.

“I say so. Now, this is what I’m thinking…”

Zam listened, until his grin withered and his face grew solemn with the effort of masking his horror.

 

***

 

At forty-four, Fai was a dozen years older than Frang’s sister-in-law Juyen. Frang had heard Juyen make much of Fai’s age, and Fai’s rhinoplasty to affect a more Western nose with tiny triangular nostrils, and Fai bleaching her face five shades lighter than her neck and body, and wearing such heavy dark eye makeup. Frang had to agree that Fai’s face looked a bit unnatural—too tight to stretch properly in a smile—but he highly approved of the breast augmentation that Juyen particularly liked to mock. He had gripped those huge, steely spheres only minutes ago while riding the woman. She had panted up into his face, exhaling an odd odor he didn’t care for, and he wondered if Juyen was right in claiming Fai had had all her teeth pulled out for being discolored and decayed, and wore dentures instead. Whatever the case, he held his breath whenever they kissed.

Yet Fai’s inky hair was still lustrous, her body still firm. Her curvy hips, widened by bearing children, supplemented the voluptuousness of her bosom. Frang actually found it extremely exciting that she was fourteen years older than himself…like a naughty auntie. He would never dare call her that teasingly, though, or bring up the subject of her age at all.

Despite their having just finished a loud, frenzied bout of lovemaking, Fai quickly pulled on a silk robe to hide her body demurely, or self consciously, as she left the bed to go shower. Frang stayed where he was, feeling lazy, and lit up a cigarette. Listening to the water run, he glanced at his expensive Western wristwatch to make sure he wasn’t too late returning to Ultimate Nails, where he would again lounge about lazily and smoke cigarettes in his role of security muscle.

He’d told his brother Zam he had bought the wristwatch himself, but in truth it had been a gift from Fai. Since they had begun seeing each—always secretly, always at her home—she had never let his cock or his wallet go hungry.

She had approached him, initially, with a phone call. He had been curious about her proposal to meet, and agreed. At that first meeting she had gone down on him, and sent him home with a wad of bills, which she tucked deep down into his trouser pocket while holding his gaze meaningfully. Their locked eyes had been like a handshake.

She returned from the bathroom, toweling her hair, and stood over the bed looking down at him with a taut smile, her beauty severe and weirdly wrong. Then, she reached for his pistol, which he had set down on a bedside table when he’d undressed, and turned it toward him at arm’s length.

“Hey!” Frang cried, covering his face with his arms. For one flaring moment he believed this had all been an elaborate trap, a trick to get him to lower his guard and trust her.

Fai laughed and returned the old, tarnished revolver to the table. It was difficult, and dangerous, to acquire modern firearms in their country. She said, “Oh, my poor boy…you don’t think I’d really mar your prettiness, do you?”

Frang clamped down on his anger, forcing himself not to explode. If he displeased her, he knew, there’d be no more bulging breasts or bulging wallet. So he grinned and chuckled. “Every gangster needs a gun moll.”

Fai ran seductive fingers down his shin. “My cute little gangster.” Her nails lightly raked him, leaving white trails of ploughed skin cells. “So what do you think about the globes?”

For a second he thought she was referring to her chest, but then he remembered the plot she had suggested before they went to bed. He sighed. “It’s so elaborate, Fai. Look, if you don’t want to worry about Juyen anymore, just let me kill her.”

“Men…always wanting to do things the men way. So brutish, no finesse. But I suppose you dream of a hefty prize for doing away with her, eh? Well, help me with these spirit globes and I’ll make you very happy, my hungry little pet.”

“You know I’ll do anything for you, gorgeous.”

“You amuse me with your offer, though. You could kill your own sister-in-law? And put your widower brother out of a job?”

“Maybe he could come work for you.” Frang shrugged his naked shoulders. “But if not, there are other jobs.”

“I sense some sibling rivalry between you two.”

“I love my brother,” Frang protested.

“You love money, and your prick.” Fai caressed his leg again. “But that’s all right…so do I.”

 

***

 

Zam had sat watching attentively during the first phase of Ghoo’s makeover. Normally when he came to this beauty salon—alone or with his brother—he’d have the works: haircut, eyebrows trimmed, wax cleaned from his ears, a massage and fuck in the back room. But he wanted Ghoo to feel she had his full, rapt attention. And actually, she did. If the girl had been striking before, in her fresh state, she was even more dazzling now…a gemstone polished to a luster.

“Look at you!” he crowed, standing up from his chair and clapping his hands together. “That color is amazing!”

Ghoo grinned shyly, like a child.

The stylist had colored Ghoo’s hair a dark coppery red. Beaming proudly at her work, the hair stylist said, “Next we give her a more sophisticated cut.”

“Not too short,” Zam advised sternly. He loved his wife’s short hair, but he wanted to demonstrate to Ghoo that he had an intense interest in preserving the beauty she already possessed.

“No, no,” the stylist reassured them both. “Then after the cut, we shape your eyebrows.”

“Not too thin!” Zam insisted, even more sternly. “Too-thin eyebrows make a woman look old and mean.”

“Not too thin,” the stylist promised. “We will make her sophisticated while still celebrating her youth. After shaping her brows, we do her makeup…and teach her how to reproduce that look herself.”

“You are so kind, sister,” Ghoo said softly, with a little half bow.

“And after that,” Zam said, reaching to Ghoo and taking hold of her small hand, “I bring you shopping for a new wardrobe. My own personal gift to you, my dear.” Though Juyen was really the one footing the bill today. “You must look your very best to be an Ultimate Nails girl, eh?”

Ghoo grinned bashfully again and averted her head somewhat as if to hide her smile behind her shoulder, but Zam saw how her eyes turned to the side to stay fixed on his own, glistening with a dark hunger that belied her innocence.

But then hunger always glistens darkly.

 

***

 

Every morning, before she unlocked the retractable shutter over the front of Ultimate Nails, Juyen brought her motorbike—as brightly red as varnished nails—to a stop at the edge of the traffic island at the center of the rotary. Here loomed the majestic and lovely bronze statue of the Ruby Empress, her arms spread wide, and cupped in each palm a red glass orb…symbolizing her gifts to her beloved pet, Cholukan.

To bring good luck for a prosperous work day, Juyen would leave a bright new coin in the grass at the base of the statue’s platform. Late at night, when traffic was sporadic (though it never entirely ceased in this busy city), beggars and the like stole out to the island and took the money, no doubt muttering prayers throughout, begging for forgiveness and pointing out the desperation of their situation. Juyen didn’t care what became of the money later; she knew the Ruby Empress, most gentle of the gods and goddesses, was charitable.

There were other offerings at the foot of the platform. Not just coins, but bills, prayers written on scraps of paper, a rotting melon, a bottle of rice wine with a sea anemone preserved inside, a pack of 777 cigarettes, a submarine sandwich swarming with ants, joss sticks stuck in the ground, several still smoldering, and a child’s tattered old teddy bear. Juyen figured the toy’s owner had died in an accident at this busy roundabout, and the parents or other surviving relatives were petitioning for the tiny soul’s straight journey to the Ten Heavens.

Juyen knelt in the grass, raised her hands to her forehead pressed palm-to-palm, and intoned, “Oh great Empress, as I love you, bring me good fortune and deliver absolute ruin to my enemies, for surely they do not love you as I do. I will devote my life to you, immaculate goddess, if you turn your benevolent face from the spiteful and unfaithful Fai and allow her just fate to smote her like a bolt of lightning.”

As Juyen opened her eyes, lifted her head, and prepared to rise she spotted something resting in the yellowed, overgrown grass that she hadn’t consciously noted before. It was another offering: an egg-like red glass globe the size of a melon, much like the spheres held aloft in the idol’s hands. But she shuddered when she saw it, for she knew that this glass orb contained a ghost.

She couldn’t actually see a ghost inside this ruby ball, but she knew it was there. When someone died in a violent manner, such as a murder or a traffic accident, a monk might be paid to place one of these spirit globes at the site of the tragedy. After the ball had rested at the site for ninety days, the tormented spirit would have been coaxed from the place of its body’s demise. Thus lured inside the consecrated sphere, like an animal into a trap, the spirit would be reunited with its fleshly vehicle, when the ball was interred at the body’s grave plot.

Juyen guessed this ball contained the soul of the child whom had owned that weathered teddy bear.

She raised her joined palms to her forehead again and whispered another quick prayer, urging the tiny spirit on to the Ten Heavens. She didn’t want to attract bad luck to herself by not acknowledging the soul in its transition. Like mortals, ghosts were touchy creatures.

 

***

 

“Did you go to nails school, darling?” Fai asked the angelic eighteen-year-old who had come into Superior Nails meekly inquiring about employment. “You can’t work here or anyplace respectable without certification.”

“Yes, aunt,” replied the young woman—who had introduced herself as Ghoo—addressing Fai in the respectful way of a small town girl. Ghoo came from the green rural outskirts of this city, Haikan. So did her sister, Jha, of course, but Ghoo made no mention of her sister. She rummaged in her handbag clumsily, spilling a few brand new articles of makeup to the floor. After apologetically stooping to retrieve them, she produced a folded paper and handed it over.

Fai gave it a glance. “Ah…a vocational program in high school.” She passed it back to Ghoo. “I’m not impressed with your certificate…but I am more than impressed with your loveliness.” She reached up to cup Ghoo’s face in her hand, much as Juyen had done a few days ago. But Ghoo was all the more stunning now, with her coppery hair and model-perfect makeup, her outfit smart and chic: a navy blue skirt and matching blazer, and a white silk blouse open just enough to show rounded cleavage produced by a new pushup bra. Despite her sophisticated veneer, Ghoo grinned like a nervous child, and Fai remarked, “You have the cutest, most adorable smile I have ever seen.”

A customer who was having her nails painted with dragonfly designs, listening in on the conversation, piped up enthusiastically, “If she wasn’t so young I’d swear she was Pe Dhu!” Pe Dhu was the sweet-faced actress who had played the character Laiki in the television drama B-2.

“Yes!” exclaimed the technician who was painting the miniature dragonflies, twisting around to see Ghoo for herself. “Exactly Pe Dhu!”

Fai took hold of Ghoo’s hand and squeezed it. “We can add to your nails skills…I have no concern there…but no one could possibly add to your beauty. At Superior Nails, we pride ourselves on having the loveliest nails technicians in all of Haikan. Yes, absolutely, you must join our family.”

Ghoo bowed deeply, and said, “Thank you, thank you, dear aunt.” She heard one or two of the other workers snicker at her peasant-like formality, and when she straightened, she could see a few of the technicians sneering at her with their eyes, though white masks covered their lower faces. It made Ghoo feel self conscious, even a little afraid that somehow they could see through her guise, could detect the plot of which she guiltily was a part. And yet, rationally she understood these few hostile women were merely jealous because Fai was making so much of her beauty. A simple matter of rivalry.

Still holding Ghoo’s hand, Fai raised it for close inspection, having noticed her nails: painted with delicate flowers boasting metallic silver petals. “Your nails are exquisite,” Fai said. “Your own work?”

“Y-yes,” Ghoo squeaked. It was a lie, and she hated lying, but it was all for Zam. She would do anything to make Zam hold her hand as Fai was doing now.

In reality, it was Juyen herself who had painted the ten silver flowers. It was like Juyen putting her signature on a piece of artwork.

 

***

 

Two walls of the apothecary featured floor-to-ceiling rows of little wooden drawers, labeled with yellowed index cards, while the other two walls were lined with shelves. These shelves were filled with glass jars containing powders fine or grainy, whole leaves and flower petals, strips of tree bark, dried insects and lizards, bird feet and mummified animal embryos. One large jar was stuffed full with monkey heads pickled in alcohol, their faces squashed and unhappy. The air smelled of all these things combined.

Yet this was only the main room, for the general public. There was another floor, above, that most customers would assume merely provided the owner’s living space. But Zam had made advance arrangements, and the elderly proprietor led his two guests through a curtained doorway and up a steep flight of steps to the second level, which was a special extension of his shop below. The old man was no taller than Ghoo, and his spectacles with their round black lenses suggested blindness, but from the way he navigated this place Zam couldn’t be sure. Maybe full blindness hadn’t yet descended, or perhaps it had long ago but he was just intimately familiar with his surroundings and their contents.

“There are two powders,” the proprietor began explaining, moving around behind a wooden counter like the one downstairs. He bent down, and they heard him open a cabinet on the counter’s far side. Then, a crash as a large bottle fell out of the cabinet to the floor. “Ah! Damn her! How many times have I told that stupid daughter of mine not to shift the items around down here!”

“Are you cut?” Zam asked, trying not to smile with amusement in case the old man wasn’t entirely blind.

They heard their host push glass shards out of his way with the side of his foot, muttering swears. “I’m instructing my daughter in my art, for lack of a son. But her mind is only on boys, boys, boys.”

“That’s the way of women,” Zam said, turning to wink at Ghoo.

His wink made her cheeks go hot with blood.

“As I was saying,” the proprietor went on, producing two vials from behind the counter, one in each hand. “This fungus,” and he raised his right hand, holding a vial containing a brown powder, “is a dangerous pathogen, which can cause rapid infection in a human host. In this dehydrated state, it is quickly activated when introduced to water.”

“What are the symptoms of the infection?” Zam asked.

“Swift necrotizing of flesh…even bone.”

Ghoo shuddered, hugging her arms tight across her chest.

“Obviously,” the old man said, “the person handling this fungus should wear a face mask so as not to inhale it, and rubber gloves.”

“Easy enough for you to do that, in a nails boutique,” Zam whispered, having leaned down close to Ghoo, so close his lips brushed her ear through her burnished hair. She shivered, but this time out of excitement rather than horror.

“Moreover,” the old man continued, “it is wise to swallow the contents of this other vial before handling the pathogen.” He held up the vial in his left hand, this one filled with a white powder. “It is an antifungal agent derived from bacteria. Should the pathogen be introduced into one’s body, this powerful agent will destroy the fungi cells, so that an infection will not take hold. I would recommend swallowing the entire contents of this vial, mixed in a glass of water, one day before handling the pathogen, so that the agent is fully dispersed through one’s system.”

“An antidote in advance,” Zam said.

“Yes. It may of course be used after an infection has begun, but by then much damage to the body’s tissues may already have taken place. So I stress again,” and once more he held aloft the vial in his left hand, “take this a day in advance.”

“Understood,” Zam said. “Thank you. We’ll take them.”

“Very good.” The proprietor reached under his counter again for a small cardboard box, filled with a nest of shredded newspaper, in which to safely package the glass vials.

Zam glanced at Ghoo, saw her unhappy expression, and steered her aside with a hand gently pressed to the small of her back. “What is it, my beauty?” he asked in a hushed tone.

“Fai is…she’s good to me,” she said hesitantly, in a tiny creaky voice, dreading his disapproval.

“Am I not good to you, dear?”

Ghoo’s cheeks flushed red. “Of course!” She looked directly into his eyes, her own wide and moist. “Oh, of course!”

He cupped her cheek in his palm, as Juyen had done, as Fai had done, but it was Zam’s hand she had been waiting for.

“Do you know,” he said, “how lonely my soul has been? My wife…you see how driven she is, how consumed with her business. Yes, I understand, one must be dedicated to one’s business to make it succeed. But she has neglected me more and more, Ghoo, until she no longer sees me. I have faded into the background, faded from her heart. I accept this sad fact, as I say, but I have been empty for some time. Until…until the day I saw you.”

His words were so earnest, he began wondering if he were speaking the truth…about the spiritual desolation at his core. About the excitement this girl had awakened, his jaded heart turned to a sack full of dragonflies when she first walked into the office with her sister.

He saw Ghoo’s plump lower lip trembling with emotion. “Me?” she said.

“Yes, Ghoo. You have filled that empty place inside me.”

Tears formed in her eyes, twin quivering menisci. “Oh, Zam. But your wife… Juyen has been good to me.”

“Yes. Juyen has been good to you. And Fai has been good to you. But it is I, Ghoo, who loves you.”

The tension of the menisci broke, and tears rolled down both Ghoo’s cheeks. But at the same time, she smiled that bright adorable smile of hers.

“Will you do this for me, Ghoo?” Zam said. “Let Juyen succeed with her plan. Let her business become even more successful, and fill her even more. Fill her so much that she won’t see us anymore. Won’t see us, won’t care, when we go off together to start a new life of our own.”

Did he mean that, he wondered? No, now he knew he was going too far…he had it too good with Juyen. And could even this angel excite him more than his demon did? But he would hold her like a stolen diamond in his hand, as long as he could, until it fell through his fingers.

She took his hand from her cheek, moved it to her lips, and kissed the center of his palm, while emitting a little sob.

The kiss and the sob made him start to go hard in his trousers. He wagered she’d be in bed with him by week’s end. How long had it been since he’d had a virgin? The dragonflies fluttered madly in his heart again, like the dried insects in one of the apothecary’s jars all come miraculously back to life.

The proprietor pushed the closed box across his counter, clearing his voice to regain their attention. “Young love,” he joked. “If only there were an antidote for that infection.”

 

***

 

What a house of horrors, Frang thought, looking around him. It was like a museum in hell; a collection of exhibits geared to frighten even the demons.

The black marketeer’s name was Whep. His head was entirely shaved bald, and his neck was blue with prison tattoos. It was from Whep that Frang had purchased his handgun and bullets. In one room of his house, Whep had dozens of pistols and rifles to offer, generally old military items. Also, swords, machetes, or knives for those who couldn’t afford a gun. But Frang had never been in this room of Whep’s home before.

Shelves on the walls and tables arranged around the room displayed Whep’s most unusual wares. Several prayer books bound in the leathery skin of monks. The toothless skulls of stillborn infants, which when buried at the corner of a field inspired fecundity. A leering stone demon head, broken from a statue guarding some ancient temple lost to the deep forest, which might be buried on the property of one’s enemy. A jar containing a number of human penises, bleached by the alcohol they were preserved in. A hinged glass box containing a dagger with its blade caked in old brown blood. Intricately carved ni-liq horns. And a row of red glass orbs, varying slightly in size but all of them seemingly empty. Except that each ruby ball had a label taped to its side.

Whep waved his arm at the spirit globes, smiling to show his few remaining teeth. “What would you like? Angry male ghost? Female? A child wailing for its mom for eternity?”

“Where do you get these?” Surely they weren’t exhumed from grave plots; by then, the spirit inside would have moved on to the afterlife. “Do you steal them from accident and murder sites, before the families can come back for them?”

“Friend Frang, you know better than to ask me that. I steal nothing.” Whep spread his arms innocently. “I only buy what my contacts bring to me, no questions asked. That’s the way I like to do things…please take note. No questions asked.”

Frang took a wary step nearer to the red glass spheres, arranged like a strange crop of fruit, afraid to look at them too long lest ghastly faces surface within them, but he saw only his own reflected visage. “Are you sure there’s a ghost inside each?”

“I will guarantee it.”

“And…it will be angry? If released from the globe, it will haunt its location?”

“It will be furious to be denied its proper resting place, trust me. It will take a whole monastery of monks to exorcize it.”

Frang brought out his wallet, brimming with Fai’s money. “Well, why not make it a female ghost, then? That seems appropriate.”

 

***

 

Zam rejoined his wife late in the evening, at their two-level house, after having been away from the salon for so many hours that she had gone home without him. She was chopping scallions for soup when he sauntered in. Looking up at him, she asked, “So?”

“Everything’s ready for tomorrow. She drank the protective potion. Almost vomited at the taste.” He chuckled at the memory.

“And?”

“And what?” Zam nonchalantly opened the refrigerator for a 777 beer.

“Where was it you took her to drink this potion?”

“A café.”

“Ah.” Juyen smiled. “You took her to a hotel. If it was really a café you’d have told me its name.”

“Juyen…you hurt me with your accusations.” He took a swig from his can.

His wife stepped close to him, reached up and took hold of his ear with one hand, and—stretching it out—placed the edge of her knife’s blade behind it. “Don’t lie to me or I’ll add this to my soup.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Zam said, but not with too much alarm. It wasn’t the first time she’d put a knife’s edge to him, at one part of his body or another. “You know I’m devoted to you, Juyen!”

“You’re devoted to that tapir snout you call a cock. So, how was it when you kicked down her door for the first time? Did she cry out that she loved you?” Juyen lowered the knife, released his ear. “Did she whimper and moan as if you were torturing her?”

“Such talk, wife,” Zam sighed, raising his beer again.

Her face stretched in a blade-like grin. “I see it in your satisfied eyes…I saw it in your swagger when you came in. She moaned and sobbed when you lapped her young pussy.” She set down the knife, with bits of scallion clinging to the blade, and cupped his crotch through his trousers, still grinning up at him. Zam looked down at her then and realized she was excited about visualizing him in bed with Ghoo. Was this part of the reason she let him frolic with her staff?

“What is it that you want?” he asked casually, as if he had no clue.

“Show me what you did to her,” she whispered.

So they went up to their bedroom, and though he didn’t admit that these were the same acts he had performed with Ghoo at the hotel, it was understood between them.

He buried his face between his wife’s legs, gradually worked his tongue down lower, teasing her perineum. “Yes,” she hissed through her teeth, lifting her head from the pillows to watch him, “that’s your world, right there. That’s where you live…on that little strip of real estate between my pussy and my asshole.”

“Mmm,” he grunted, in what might pass for agreement.

“And you never want to leave that little island, do you?”

“Mm-mm,” he grunted.

“Lick my asshole,” she commanded, resting her head back on the pillows again. Staring at the ceiling, she asked, “Did you tell your brother about our plot with Ghoo?”

“Mm-mm,” he grunted in the negative again.

“You don’t trust him?”

Zam lifted his head, gazing at her along the length of her body. “It’s just, the fewer people who know about this, the better. What we’re doing tomorrow…it might lead to death. We might become murderers.”

“Stroke me with your fingers while we talk.” He obeyed, and closing her eyes, in a shuddery voice she went on, “All I care about is that no one will ever dare have their nails done in Superior Nails again. No one will risk working in Superior Nails again. There will be no more Superior Nails!”

“Whatever you want,” Zam muttered, as if this put it all on her, and exonerated him.

“Can our country girl really do this? Is she nervous?”

“Of course she’s nervous. She’s afraid they’ll realize she’s the one who’s responsible. I told her of course they’ll make that connection, but before that happens we’ll pull her out of there. As far as Fai is concerned, Ghoo will have vanished without a trace.”

“But can she be trusted later, or will it be too much for her poor conscience? What should we really do with her when she’s completed her mission?” When Zam stopped working a finger in and out of her, Juyen opened her eyes to study him. He was looking at her with an expression like the one he’d worn when she’d first told him the plan about launching a biological attack on her rival. “Ah…you’re worried about her, huh?”

“She’ll do whatever I say, Juyen. You don’t have to be concerned about her loyalty.”

“If she were loyal to me, she wouldn’t be fucking my husband.” Juyen smirked. “But don’t worry…I won’t hurt your little pet. And you’re my little pet, aren’t you? Get up here and fuck me now.”

Zam climbed up her body as instructed, and tucked his cock into her. Propped above her on stiff arms, he began churning her insides dutifully. Staring with fierce eyes at where they were joined, Juyen said huskily, “I’m like the Ruby Empress, and you’re like my good little monkey, Cholukan. Oh…yes…fuck me, monkey! Fuck me, Cholukan!”

 

***

 

Where Ultimate Nails had five whirlpool spa chairs, Superior Nails had six. Fai had ordered the sixth chair only a month earlier, after sending a friend pretending to be a customer over to Ultimate Nails to report back on what she reconnoitered. The friend informed Fai that Juyen had just bought a fifth chair. Fai ordered her sixth the same day.

Despite being gushed over for her beauty, as Ghoo was the new girl it was her responsibility to clean the foot spas at the start of the day before the boutique opened for business. She got down on her knees to do so. No one asked her why she wore her face mask in addition to gloves as she wiped out the spa basins, but she half-heard a few giggling comments behind her back.

Bent low over the first empty foot tub, Ghoo sprayed a solution of water and bleach (though she had cut back on the amount of bleach Fai had instructed her to use), then wiped down the inside of the basin with a sponge. When she had finished, with her hunched back hiding her actions, she shifted a hand to her front jeans pocket and surreptitiously palmed a small glass vial containing a brown powder. After uncapping the vial, she sprinkled a dash of the powder into the tub, as if lightly seasoning a soup…not so much that it would draw attention to itself. She then tucked the vial into her jeans again before rising and moving on to the second foot spa chair.

Water, the old man had told her and Zam, would activate the potion.

Ghoo trembled throughout all this. Her fear at being discovered in this act of sabotage made her nauseous. She was sure guilt added to the stew burbling in her guts. Poor, trusting Fai! But just when Ghoo considered spraying and wiping clean, again, the foot tubs she had contaminated, Zam’s handsome face manifested before her mind’s eye like the image of a god in a rapturous vision.

He had mused aloud that if the women who used the whirlpool spas had shaved their legs recently, the fungus would have a better chance to enter their bodies through tiny abrasions in their skin. But when he had seen that Ghoo’s eyes had gone wide with dismay in reaction to his musings, he had taken her head soothingly in both hands and pressed his lips to her forehead. Then her eyelids. The tip of her nose. Her lips…

From there, they had ended up in the hotel room’s bed. But even as inexperienced as she was, Ghoo had never believed they had only gone to a hotel so that Zam might coach her and help her prepare the protective elixir.

When she reached the sixth and last chair, Ghoo had to hold onto one armrest as a wave of sizzling blackness passed over her vision. Her gorge rose, but sank away again, like a roiling ocean wave. She moaned aloud.

Was this something more than just fear and guilt? Was this sickness a consequence of love—not just emotional, but physical? When a man first entered a woman, was some fundamental change triggered in her system? And though he had quickly withdrawn from her at the moment of climax, spurting onto her belly, she wondered if one of his microscopic snakes had still managed to find its way inside. Her mother had once sternly cautioned her that these snakes might reside in the tear that first wept from a man’s tool before he even penetrated his lover. Might Zam’s child, infinitely small, already be clinging to the inside of her womb?

“Dear? Ghoo? Are you all right?” The familiar voice, so near, caused Ghoo to gasp and snap her eyelids open. She hadn’t even noticed she’d squeezed them shut—having gone from blackness to blackness.

It was of course Fai’s familiar, oddly wrong face hovering there…seemingly too close, as if to eclipse all else. Ghoo blinked up at her speechlessly for a moment, thinking Fai had said something entirely different, such as, “What do you think you’re doing there? What is that dust you’ve sprinkled in my foot spas?”

Instead, Fai took Ghoo’s arm and helped her to her feet, helped support her. She said, “Poor baby, are you sick?” She gently pulled the mask from Ghoo’s face to see her better.

“Maybe,” Ghoo managed to get out, “maybe it’s the smell. The nail polish. The acetone.”

At the hotel, Zam had joked to her that he believed the fumes in nail salons drove all the workers crazy over time. Ghoo had wondered if that explained a few things about Juyen and Fai both, and probably that was what Zam had been implying. His words about the toxic fumes had come to her aid just now.

“It can take some getting used to, dear, but—” and here Fai paused to sniff the air through her pinched little nostrils “—we haven’t even begun working yet. Do you want to step outside and get a breath of air?”

“I feel like…like I need to lie down.”

“Of course. Maybe it’s waking up so early for work; it’s new to you.” Fai wagged a finger in the young woman’s face. “Don’t you be staying up late at night. Come, now.” Still supporting Ghoo, Fai led her toward the back of the salon, where a staircase led to a second level. “I have a cot in my office, remember? You can rest up there till you feel a bit better.”

“You are too kind, auntie,” Ghoo whimpered.

Fai looked down at Ghoo and saw that her eyes had filled with tears. “Oh!” Fai exclaimed, obviously touched.

Stifling a sob, Ghoo said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the problem I’m causing!”

Fai put her hand to the girl’s cheek, which was filmed in perspiration. “Oh stop it. You’re such a sweet, dear child!”

 

***

 

Frang donned a full-head motorcycle helmet, with a dark-tinted face shield. He had never cared to use a helmet with a face shield before, and most people didn’t, but it would conceal his identity…as would the nondescript motorbike he sat astride. He had borrowed it, for a fee, from the black marketeer Whep.

Frang had told his brother he wouldn’t be coming into Ultimate Nails today because he was suffering a debilitating hangover. A plausible enough story, since he had frequently taken days off for this reason. So frequently that an angry Juyen had often questioned to his face whether she really needed him for security at all, when she already had her husband to dissuade street gangs and gangster types from trying to wring protection money from the salon. She would then go on to say she had only really given him a job for Zam’s sake. Though she always relented later, her threats to cut him from the payroll had much to do with Frang having gotten into bed with Fai both literally and figuratively.

Several blocks away from the rotary in whose orbit both Ultimate Nails and Superior Nails faced each other, like the constantly tipping plates of a scale, Frang started the rented bike and set forth. Adrenaline flushed through his system.

Hanging between his legs in a double layer of plastic shopping bags, like the fresh produce families brought home from the market each day, was the red glass spirit globe.

He grew increasingly nervous as he approached Ultimate Nails. He didn’t want to stop his bike in order to perform his task, lest he be recognized somehow despite his disguise and in case anyone should attempt to detain him, and yet he knew he couldn’t fulfill his mission while maintaining a high rate of speed. So his best bet, he calculated, was to slow down but not stop, deliver his package, then gun the motor and disappear back into the anonymous throng of bikes.

Frang entered the wide roundabout, and it swung him in its gravitational pull, like the hand of a clock turning toward a predestined hour, finally slinging him out toward Ultimate Nails directly ahead. Even from here, within the salon he could make out a few of the familiar girls who sat nearest to the building’s open front, and moreover, Juyen herself working the front desk.

Frang removed his right hand from the handlebars, reached forward into the doubled plastic sacks and drew out the crimson sphere, like a giant crystal apple. He cradled it against his thigh. Closer to the boutique…closer.

Was it just his imagination, or did Juyen look up and meet his eyes for a moment through his dark face shield as he came parallel with the front of the salon? But she dropped her gaze again to the foreign fashion magazine spread before her atop her counter, and in that moment Frang hurled the globe like a grenade through the open front of Ultimate Nails.

He didn’t linger to see whether the globe shattered or was merely chipped, or simply thudded to the floor unbroken. Even if the ghost at its core were not released, he knew the reaction of workers and patrons alike would still be one of great aversion. He faced forward again, satisfied, and had just squeezed the throttle when a little girl maybe two years old skipped from the curb into the swarming street ahead of her older brother, before he could take her hand.

Frang twisted his handlebars abruptly to the left. He veered around the child and just avoided striking her, but in so doing bumped hard against a young woman riding her own motorbike alongside him. She went right down, and snapping his head around Frang saw a bicycle that an elderly monk had been vigorously pedaling close behind the woman ram into her downed machine. The flimsy bicycle came up short, throwing off the blue-robed monk, who came to land directly in the path of a truck bearing a load of melons. Frang jerked his head forward again, but heard some terrible sounds behind him.

Frang was fighting with his own wobbling bike, almost kept it upright, but ultimately overbalanced and he too went down…skidding along the street with the vehicle atop his left leg.

Frang heard people crying out all around him, including the woman whom he had knocked down…and including himself, as the momentum of his bike dragged him across the pavement like a potato across a grater.

 

***

 

The red glass orb did break—on the floor right beside the front counter, behind which stood Juyen. At that moment a regular customer named Whi, the owner of a jewelry store who always tipped generously, was coming toward the counter to pay. The globe shattered directly in front of Whi, and she jumped back with a yelp as small chunks like a scattered handful of rubies clattered all around her and ticked against her shins. Half of the sphere remained intact and rocking, like the bloody top of an exploded skull.

Juyen and Whi looked down at this wobbling bowl, and both instantly recognized it for what it was. Whi reeled away from the counter and fled for the street, screaming shrilly, payment for her ten glossy nails forgotten. Juyen cried out, as well. She was torn between her fear of touching the thing, and her impulse to snatch up the bowl before any more of her customers, or her workers, saw it. Only a second or two of hesitation, and at last she convinced herself that at this point the orb itself was harmless, a vessel emptied of its poison, but already it was too late. More exclamations of horror shot up all throughout the salon, as workers lifted their heads to see what the commotion was, and customers stood up craning their necks, even those soaking their feet in the spa chairs.

In synchronization, workers and customers alike went from gazing aghast at the rocking bowl, to whipping their heads this way and that as if following the darting of an invisible fly. In terror, they were all looking for a ghost.

And then, still in synchronization, workers and customers alike burst up to scramble madly for the street. In the screaming stampede, tables were overturned…nail polish spilled in thick pools like congealing blood…bare feet slapped wetly out of whirlpool basins. These barefoot customers shrieked even more sharply as they trod on glass shrapnel, but that didn’t stop them from fleeing Ultimate Nails.

Juyen dropped to her knees to sweep all the fragments toward her. She seized the bowl, unmindful of its jagged rim, and thrust it behind the counter. Looking up at her crew as they abandoned ship, she shouted, “Stop it! I’ll fire all of you! You’re panicking my customers, you stupid bitches!”

Ghoo’s older sister Jha raced past, and Juyen made a grab for her leg but only managed to furrow the girl’s skin with her claws.

Juyen looked up as a final figure stood over her. Her husband Zam, the last person remaining in the salon besides herself. In his fist he held a nickel-plated snub-nosed revolver, which he had fetched from a locked drawer in their rear office. His strong jaw was thrust forward with rumbling fury. “Did you see who threw it?” he asked.

“Someone on a bike, I think,” Juyen said. “Go! Go kill them!” Then, like a shattered thing herself, she broke down into sobs of hopeless rage. “We’re haunted now! Word will spread throughout Haikan! We’re ruined!”

“Fuck my mother,” Zam hissed, and he charged out onto the sidewalk where all the workers and their customers had already dispersed to every direction like startled pigeons. He kept his gun close to his leg, to minimize the chance of it being seen, but he squeezed its ivory grip as if to crush it.

Alone in Ultimate Nails, Juyen sprang to her feet when she heard something rattle to the floor behind her. She scanned the back of the room, and saw a small glass bottle of nail polish rotating on the floor. Perhaps it had been upset in the crazed dash of women, and had finally dropped off a table edge, but Juyen knew better. Especially when the bottle wouldn’t stop spinning slowly around and around and around.

“Forgive me, spirit,” she whispered to her empty salon, pressing her hands together in front of her bowed forehead. She squeezed her eyes shut to unsee the spinning nail polish bottle, but this didn’t stop the flow of her tears. Tears of dread. Tears of defeat. “Forgive me.”

 

***

 

Fai had been so busy with familiar routines in her salon—tending the front counter, overseeing her workers, chitchatting with several of her customers, buying fruit for her girls from a bicycle vendor selling door-to-door, and purchasing lottery tickets for herself from a child hawker who wandered in from the sidewalk—that it wasn’t until she decided she needed to catch up on some work in her office that she remembered the new girl Ghoo was still in there, resting. With a start, Fai checked her wristwatch. Ghoo had gone upstairs to lie down on the cot in her office before they’d even opened for the day’s business…almost three hours ago, now.

“Oh!” Fai said, upset at herself for being so distracted and forgetting her newest employee entirely. She hurried to the staircase at the back of the room, determined to send the poor delicate child home to rest properly until she was strong enough to return to work.

Fai reached the closed door of her office, cheap aluminum with a frosted plastic panel in lieu of a window, and when she pushed it open it was as though she had set off a booby-trap—a blast of stench striking her in the face like a solid concussive wave. She gagged, and quickly covered her lower face with one hand. Had the sick girl vomited? Or shat herself in her clothes? Or both?

Fai’s office was so small that it only took two steps inside to stand over the cot that was pushed against one wall. The cot upon which Ghoo lay. But…could that disjointed shape be Ghoo? The room had no window, and the overhead fluorescents were off, the only light entering through the doorway. Fai had just started leaning forward to shake Ghoo’s shoulder with her free hand, when she made a strangled sound of horror behind her hand and backed up two steps into the threshold again. Her eyes adjusting to the murk, Fai better made out the thing on her cot. That is to say, her eyes made out what her mind could not.

For a heartbeat or two Fai thought someone had piled bleached white branches on top of Ghoo’s sleeping body. Or…deer antlers perhaps? But then Fai came to the realization that these white, coral-like forms had grown out of Ghoo’s body. Grown from her bare arms and legs, pushing past her clothing to thrust out from her collar and from under the hem of her shirt. Grown from her neck, from her scalp, from her jaw. At the same time, these sprouting appendages had left Ghoo’s own flesh withered, caved in on itself, as if all the muscle beneath and all the fluid in her young body had been leeched away. Even her pigment seemed leeched away, leaving her flesh as bloodlessly white as the branch-like growths themselves. This new, fast-growing matter was replacing Ghoo’s own. Life for life.

“Oh no…oh no,” Fai chanted in horror behind her hand. “No, no, no…”

Hearing Fai’s voice, Ghoo turned her head on her pillow. Even in the dimness of the room, Fai saw that one of Ghoo’s eyes was gone, leaving a socket scoured to the bare bone. On that same side, her lips were missing, bare teeth jagging up her cheek.

Ghoo croaked, “Zam?” It was the last word she said. On her dying exhalation, a puff of white spores rose up to float in the air before Fai.

Fai had no idea what she was witnessing, but some intuition told her that those hovering motes could be harmful if she ingested them. Fai did not know, as Ghoo had not known, that the daughter of a blind apothecary owner had carelessly rearranged the order of his wares beneath his work counter. Just as the blind man himself had not known, when handing over the two substances to his customer Zam, that the vial of white powder he had held in his left hand had been the pathogen, not the antifungal agent. And the vial of brown powder in his right hand the antifungal agent, not the pathogen.

Fai went shrieking down the stairs, panic having taken hold, and in her hurry one of her plastic sandals slipped loose and threw off her step. She pitched forward as if diving into a pool, and as if to further this image, thrusting out her hands to break her fall. Her stiffened arms could not withstand the weight of her plunging body, however, and both wrists snapped. She rolled onto her back, wailing like a madwoman, holding out her shattered arms.

Her girls ran to her from all around the room. Crouching beside her, one of the concerned nails artists asked, “What happened, Fai?”

Even as she asked, several other of the young women started upstairs to see for themselves. On their heels, a few curious customers followed…despite Fai’s hysterical protests.

Immediately, from upstairs came more screams. Screams upon screams.

 

***

 

When Zam lunged out onto the sidewalk he was dazzled by the sun, and by the chaos that confronted him. Traffic still churned thickly around the whirlpool of the roundabout, but in front of the salon stood a cluster of bikes as if they had washed to shore, bearing those who had witnessed the triple accident or had stopped to avoid crashing, themselves. Zam strode toward the nearest two of the three fallen victims. One, a young woman, was jabbering and sobbing wildly, pointing her arm accusingly in the direction of the third victim. She wailed more loudly when two passersby lifted her by the arms to lead her toward the sidewalk. She hopped on one foot. Some of those who had stopped to watch held out their cell phones to make videos of her.

The truck had come to a halt abruptly, so that some of its load of melons had cascaded down its sides, lying smashed in the street like organic spirit globes. The old monk lay smashed in the street, himself, torn into two halves with his blood and guts smeared in a long swath by the truck’s wheels. For a moment Zam was transfixed by this image, but people quickly crowded around the monk, blocking him from view, and Zam turned his attention to the third victim, who had fallen and been dragged further along the street. The hopping woman was still pointing toward him.

This man was gathering himself to his feet painfully, at the same time taking his bike by the handlebars to pull it out of the street, even as riders nonchalantly glided around him. The man wore a helmet with an uncommon full-face shield, tinted almost black. As Zam stared at him, the dusty and frayed rider glanced up and froze, as if he had picked out Zam in particular from the crowd. This wary reaction told Zam all he needed to know; that this was the man who had ruined his wife’s, and thus his own, livelihood. He broke into a run, still squeezing the ivory grip of his revolver. With Zam’s arms pumping, the flashing nickel-plated gun was more openly visible to anyone who might look toward him. It was visible to the man in the identity-concealing helmet.

 

***

 

Frang had his bike upright again and on the sidewalk, out of the current of traffic, and was about to sling one leg over the saddle when he saw Zam in the distance, staring directly at him. He doubted Zam recognized him as his brother, but he had little doubt Zam realized this was the person who had lobbed a supernatural weapon into Ultimate Nails—especially when he saw Zam start sprinting in his direction.

Frang jumped onto his seat, wincing at the pain so thoroughly dispersed throughout his banged and scraped body that it seemed to have no particular source. He prayed his bike hadn’t been too damaged to function properly, but before he could even start it he heard a loud report from further down the street, like a firecracker going off at a street festival. He looked up again and saw that Zam had stopped running to assume a firing stance like an action hero from some Western movie, holding his gun in both hands to take aim. At this distance, with a snub-nosed revolver Zam would be lucky to hit the side of a building if that were his target…but maybe luck was with him right now, because this second bullet clanged against the bike’s body near Frang’s right leg.

With a yelp, Frang tried to start his bike. It didn’t turn over.

Zam was charging forward again, to close more of the distance between them. People who had seen him fire the first two shots had leapt aside, out of his path.

Frang was surprised that his brother had given himself over to his anger so completely. He had always been the more cautious of the two of them, the one more concerned about trouble with the law. Frang supposed Zam felt that now with Juyen’s salon essentially destroyed, he had nothing left to lose. But Frang still had a lot to lose, including his life, and he wasn’t willing to sacrifice that even for a brother. When he tried starting his bike once again, and was again unsuccessful, he swung himself off it, let it drop to its side, and darted straight out into the swirling traffic of the roundabout. Bikes swerved sharply around him, their riders cursing him. One woman had to stop outright to avoid striking him, and the person behind her slammed against her rear wheel, jarring her.

Any citizen of the hectic city of Haikan knew that the best way to cross a street was to simply walk forward into the midst of traffic and let it work itself around you, rather than trying to pick and dodge one’s way through the streaming bikes and other vehicles. Frang had decided to gamble on trusting these riders to avoid him as he cut across the rotary, hoping that in the dense mix his body would present a more elusive target, and trusting that Zam would be afraid to fire a third time lest he hit some innocent bystander.

He was wrong to trust the traffic…and as wrong to trust his brother as his brother had been to trust him.

 

***

 

When he saw his enemy recklessly plunge right into traffic, Zam skidded to a stop and assumed a firing stance again, keeping a bead on his enemy as best he could. Still bracing his pistol in both hands, he fired a third time, aware that this left the five-shot revolver only two more cartridges in its cylinder.

The bullet didn’t get anywhere near Frang this time, instead plowing between the ribs of a young girl who was riding on the back of her boyfriend’s bike. Zam snarled an oath when he saw her slump backwards limply and fall away, to be bounced over by the bike that had been riding behind them—in his current state of mind, more furious that he’d missed his opponent than that he had hit an innocent.

The helmeted man had almost reached the traffic island that formed the nucleus of the rotary, when one of the countless motorbikes looping around it collided with his hip. The man went down, rolled back immediately to his feet, but now as he continued toward the traffic island Zam could see he was loping along as if injured and, hopefully, in agony. The man fell to hands and knees as he reached the island, scrambled up onto it on all fours like a desperate animal. Zam leveled his gun at the man’s back again.

With the revolver’s two-inch barrel too short to give the projectile the spin it needed to fly straight, this fourth bullet again went wide, and struck one of the twin red glass orbs held in the palms of the bronze statue of the Ruby Empress, representing her gifts of sight to Cholukan. The glass ball shattered, its chunks raining down at the statue’s base, and now Zam was horrified where he hadn’t been horrified by accidentally shooting that girl. It was as if he could feel the statue’s metal eyes shift in their sockets to blaze at him spitefully. Finally, the red haze of blind hate lifted and he realized what he was doing. He realized how many people were watching him from the sidewalk, from windows and tiers of balconies, even videoing his actions with their cell phones. The police would surely be on the way…and surely now, on top of everything else he had lost, his very soul was damned.

And then a bullet smashed into his upper left chest, just below his collarbone.

Zam staggered backwards a few steps but managed to stay on his feet, momentarily too shocked and stunned to feel pain, or to understand just what had happened to him. But when he heard a second shot fired at him from the rotary, and felt something whiz past his left ear as it bored through the air, his eyes latched onto the figure standing atop the base of the Ruby Empress’s statue, leaning back against her body for support, so as to give himself a clear line of sight above the heads of all the bike riders. Zam saw that his helmeted foe had a handgun of his own, and also held it outstretched in both hands, but his gun had a longer barrel and was more accurate.

Zam felt blood flowing down his chest and knew at last he’d been hit, but he thrust his pistol forward again in just his right fist this time—barely even aiming—and fired his fifth and last shot. His bellow of frustration and self-pity almost drowned out the gun blast itself.

Two more bullets were fired back at him in rapid succession. One passed harmlessly above his left shoulder. Though in fact his opponent had been aiming toward Zam’s chest, the broadest target from a distance, the other slug passed straight through the front of his throat and crashed into one of his cervical vertebrae.

Zam was dead before he fell onto his back.

 

***

 

“Forgive me, goddess,” Frang muttered, looking straight up at the Ruby Empress’s face from below. He almost hoped that with the helmet’s dark visor covering his face, she wouldn’t be able to recognize him to slate his soul for later damnation. “It was my brother who defiled you,” he added, glancing toward her outstretched left hand, which now only held the jagged bottom hemisphere of a red glass sphere.

He had seen his brother drop to the sidewalk. He had felt a mix of satisfaction and regret, and relief that Zam had probably not guessed his identity even up to the end.

Succumbing to the pain from his smashed pelvis and his scoured flesh, he slid down the front of the Ruby Empress’s legs to sit between her feet on her pedestal. His right arm dropped heavily to his side, the pistol still gripped in his fist. He heard police sirens approaching. How could he flee from them now, in this condition? They would put him in jail. Ultimately they would back him up against a wall for execution by firing squad.

His head sagged, and his despairing eyes finally noticed where his brother’s final bullet had ended up.

In the yellowed grass at the foot of the statue’s platform, some bereaved family member had placed a red glass spirit globe like the one he had thrown into Ultimate Nails only a matter of minutes earlier. Zam’s wild, stray shot had exploded the spirit globe into shards.

In his mind’s eye, then, Frang saw a ghost loom up right in front of him, its face only inches from his own: the angry face of a very young child, its eyes as enraged as those of a demon, its mouth stretched impossibly wide in a wail he couldn’t hear but which rattled the cells of his brain. The sirens of police vehicles, though, as they pulled up at the edge of the traffic island, substituted for the ghost’s unheard cry very nicely.

Frang lifted his revolver again, slipped its barrel past the lower edge of his helmet, pressed its muzzle to the underside of his jaw, and fired a bullet up into his jangling, beleaguered brain.

 

***

 

Not even a month after the nail salons Superior Nails and Ultimate Nails had folded, a brand new nail salon named Heavenly Nails opened for business at the roundabout.