EVERYWHERE SHEPHERD LOOKED, reds and yellows were flailing at each other with crude weapons. And, as more and more people joined in, the carnage grew.
Along the roadside, vendors carts had been pushed onto their sides and shoved together into makeshift barricades. What a few moments before had been merchandise for tourists—T-shirts, copy watches, pirated CDs, and fake Louie Vuitton bags—was now just debris under the feet of the battlers.
Shepherd knew he and the two women had to get out of the way, but he couldn’t see exactly how they were going to do that. They had no chance to get back onto the sidewalk or into the buildings that lined Silom since some of the demonstrators were already slugging it out behind them. The pickup trucks leading both marches had stopped nose-to-nose right in front of them and the only safety seemed to lie in moving further into the street, toward the trucks. Shepherd put his hands on the two women’s backs and herded them forward.
At that moment, the main mass of the red shirts gave a terrifying roar, broke ranks, and swarmed toward the yellows. Both groups had now armed themselves. Metal bars, paving stones, wooden planks, and homemade clubs were everywhere. One man even swung a golf club overhead. Shepherd thought it was a four iron.
At the front of the attacking reds was a man hefting a wide, flat board a little longer than a baseball bat. The yellow-shirted woman closest to him carried a Thai flag on a long staff. Neither the man nor the woman was young and they were ordinary enough looking people. Later, what Shepherd remembered most about both of them was the rage that contorted their faces as they charged toward each other.
The woman attempted to bring the flag down and use its staff as a lance to spear the onrushing man, but she was too slow. The man caught the flagpole on his upper arm and swatted it aside. Then he lifted the board above his shoulders and swung from the hips, putting all of his weight behind it.
The flat of the board smashed into the side of the woman’s head and Shepherd saw her skull buckle. Her face bulged on one side like a rubber ball pounded by a mallet. It contorted into something that looked more like a Halloween mask than a human head and a spray of blood burst in the air like red fireworks. The woman dropped to the pavement; then the two mobs surged together and she disappeared under a hundred pairs of feet.
That was when the screams started in earnest. The two girls were beginning to panic so Shepherd kept them moving. He slipped his arms around them and hauled them toward the green pickup truck that had stopped directly in front of them. By the time they got to it, they were directly in the eye of a full-scale battle.
“Crawl under!” he shouted at the women.
They stood there motionless, too frightened to move.
“Get under the goddamned truck!” he shouted again and shoved them both toward it.
The taller girl suddenly snapped to her senses. She dropped her pack, went down on her belly, and tugged the other girl after her. Both of them squirmed underneath the pickup.
Shepherd crouched down and pressed his back to the truck. He watched the battle as it swirled around him.
A yellow-shirted man to his left was scything a golf club back and forth, whipping it through the air like he was clearing brush with a machete. A red-shirted man ducked under the golf club and drove his shoulder into the yellow shirt’s stomach. Yellow shirt lost his balance and went down, then red shirt jerked the golf club away and kicked him in the head.
Shepherd still wasn’t particularly worried. This was a Thai fight and foreigners had nothing to do with it. Still, Thais didn’t really like foreigners all that much and he knew that having a free shot at one who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time might be appealing to some of them. Just to be on the safe side, he stayed low and tried not to look too white.
For a while, that worked fine and the combatants ignored Shepherd. Then one didn’t.
Out of the corner of his eye Shepherd caught a glimpse of an iron bar coming straight at his head. He ducked and the bar whistled by just above him. It came so close he felt the breeze from its passage riffle his hair. When the bar crunched into the truck cab with a sickening thud, he thought about what it would have done to his skull if it had connected.
But Shepherd only thought about it for an instant. Then he jumped to his feet and grabbed the bar with both hands. He jerked it down and to the side and tried to twist it away. When his head came up, Shepherd looked directly into the eyes of his assailant.
He was just a boy, one no more than fourteen years old Shepherd judged. But the boy was strong and seemed desperate to do Shepherd serious bodily harm. He couldn’t imagine why, but there didn’t seem to be any point in asking right then.
Because of the boy’s strength, Shepherd gave up trying to twist the bar away from him and instead gave it a sudden jerk directly toward his midsection. The boy stumbled forward, momentarily off balance, and Shepherd swung his right foot upward like a field goal kicker going for a sixty-yarder. When his toe connected with the boy’s crotch, he felt a soft, squishing sensation and the boy lifted completely off the ground. Screaming in agony, he lurched away. Then he fell to his knees and started to vomit.
Shepherd scooped up the iron bar and pushed his back against the truck again. He had just kicked a teenage kid in the balls as hard as he could and the truth was that he damn well hoped he had hurt him. The little shit was trying to take his head off with that iron bar. Shepherd wasn’t a bit sorry for what he had done. Not really.
But he was thinking about it anyway. And that was why he didn’t see the woman coming.
She was small and middle-aged and didn’t look very strong. She held a folding chair by its legs, one she had probably liberated from a trashed street vendor’s stand. Still, she was young enough and strong enough to swing it, and that was exactly what she did.
Because of her height she had to swing the chair in an upward trajectory to get a shot at Shepherd’s head and that took most of the momentum out of her swing. Even then, the blow glanced off his ear and rocked him to his knees. He went down, breaking his fall with his hands. He had the presence of mind to pull up his knees and twist his body to ward off what he assumed would be another blow, but when he looked up from where he lay on the pavement, the woman was gone.
The green pickup was right next to him and he tried desperately to pull himself underneath it. He clawed at the roadway with his hands like a swimmer doing the breaststroke. His palms scraped over the concrete and they hurt like hell, but he kept stroking. Shepherd’s head throbbed and nausea hit him in waves. Bright lights began to spin behind his eyes. He closed them, which really didn’t help much, and kept swimming.
He was starting to black out, he knew. That didn’t seem all that bad really, since at least then the pain would stop, but he had to get underneath the truck before it happened or he would be trampled. His right hand came down on something soft and a dozen unpleasant possibilities as to what it might be passed through his mind all at once. Then he opened his eyes and saw his hand had only landed on a woman’s shoe. He kept going.
Somehow Shepherd made it to the truck and pulled himself underneath. The two hippie chicks were gone and he wondered briefly what had happened to them.
Then all at once the pain stopped, and he was gone, too.