Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Then she started throwing. It was fun at first, yes, but really her part was pretty monotonous – pick up the sticks, form them into a bundle, close her eyes and drop them. It wasn’t like cards with pictures – all you saw was a stupid pile of sticks. Big deal. And Lin was turning into a real bitch.

  “Just keep throwing.”

  And she did – until her arm felt like it was coming off. This was ridiculous – didn’t she have enough? But something was happening to Lin, she was changing before her eyes, looming over her. Her breasts, tight and small like fruit, seemed to flatten until they looked like little more tattoos stenciled onto skin gone dark. She acted more like a stranger than a lover and seemed hardly to know her. Xiao continued throwing the sticks, too frightened to stop. Over and over.

  And Lin counted them, frowned, glowered. She wrote on her pad, looked in books – actual paper books, no less – then waited for the next throw. It went on, interminably. Xiao had no idea what time it was and began to worry about Qiang; there were limits after all and she knew she’d kind of been stretching things a bit lately. What could she do? Then she had a wonderful idea; the labia had done their work with Lin – she could use them now on Qiang. A good fuck and he would be manageable as a kitten for a fortnight. He’d…

  Her planning for domestic harmony was interrupted by the sight and sound of Lin suddenly sobbing before her, shoulders heaving. It was so unexpected, so astonishing that she sat there for some time, frozen in place, staring with mouth agape. What the fuck?

  She reached out a hand, hesitant, and touched Lin’s shoulder, who reacted by doing something even more astonishing; she pulled away from Xiao as if her fingers had burned her, leapt to her feet and backed away from the table, face so twisted it was as if Xiao looked at a human caricature.

  “Lin!” she cried.

  In answer, Lin ran from the room, returning in a moment having covered herself with a robe. She had Xiao’s dress and tossed it to her.

  “Please get dressed,” she said flatly.

  This was unbelievable; Lin wanted her to put her clothes on? Didn’t want to be touched? Her mind swam in circles like water going down a drain. It was impossible to put a coherent thought in her head.

  “For god’s sake,” she screamed, “what’s wrong?”

  Lin stopped, stared at her and seemed to gather herself, taking several deep breaths. She wrapped her arms around herself, squeezed, closed her eyes. She sat down abruptly, weakly raised a hand and made some sort of motion toward Xiao. They looked at each other for a moment; Xiao with wild eyes, fearful, bewildered; Lin completely inscrutable – though there was something there, some air about her that Xiao couldn’t put a name to. This was all just horribly wrong.

  Lin spoke first, her voice seeming to come from far away.

  “I’m sorry, darling.”

  Xiao felt a wave of relief – that’s much better. But to frighten her like this; if Lin thought she was sorry now, just wait.

  “I think you should be,” she retorted angrily. “You scared the shit out of me!” She glared at her, putting on her ‘now you’ve done it’ face. “And if you…”

  She broke off, stunned all over again, as Lin’s face collapsed into a fresh wave of weeping. She waited, not moving, until again Lin wrapped her arms around herself, finally managing to achieve some level of control.

  A fear came over Xiao suddenly; had any of this to do with the reading?

  “Lin,” she said nervously. “Are you…is this about me?”

  For an answer, a brief nod, and with it a small, vital fear came like ice in her belly, growing, freezing her insides, climbing up her spine until it reached her head and made her brain buzz. Lin was saying something; she needed to focus.

  “…Yarrow sticks make I Ching hexagrams, right?”

  Yes, yes, whatever. She nodded; just get on with it.

  “Then, you look up the hexagrams in the I Ching and they form a message, a future. They tell the future of the person throwing the sticks.”

  “OK, yes. But…”

  “Well, your message…your message was different; it was a link.”

  What the fuck, she wondered, did that mean. But the fear faded a bit – a link; that didn’t sound so bad. A link.

  “A link to what?” she asked.

  “To an ancient prophet. A student of the I Ching who lived almost two centuries ago, a man named Li Chunfeng.”

  She was becoming more and more confused. Lin saw the look on her face.

  “I know, but listen - this Li, he was a very special person. He was a genius of the I Ching - a true seer; he saw the future.” She paused, contemplating Xiao. “He told of the future in sixty poems, very specific poems, all of which forecast future events – like the quatrains that Nostradamus wrote. Do you remember?”

  She nodded impatiently. Nostradamus, sure, it sounded familiar, more or less.

  “These poems, over the centuries – fifty-nine of them have come true. Really, truly true – not just, oh sure, we can interpret this one to be World War II – that sort of crap. It’s been way more precise than that, more specific. Incredible, really.” She paused, seemed to be considering her words. “Only the last one was left unfulfilled, and no one thought it would ever come true, because…” Lin’s voice trailed off.

  “Because…” prompted Xiao. Please, she thought.

  “Because,” said Lin in a very strained voice, “the last poem spoke of the end.”

  “The end of what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Lin, you’re completely freaking me out. Just tell me what the poem says!”

  Lin reached for her tablet, played her fingers over it for a few moments and silently handed it to Xiao, who grabbed it from her and saw, in English, these words:

  Good and Evil, the Circle of Life;

  In the Year of the Snake, it is broken.

  The messenger comes

  and the human race is revoked.

  What few may survive

  the hand of she who carries death?

  She looked up incredulous, literally speechless. Lin, completely misinterpreting her bewilderment, spoke absently.

  “It sounds better in Hanzi, but I know you don’t read Chinese.”

  Xiao’s bewilderment was rapidly changing into an apoplectic rage. She really must’ve fucked Lin’s brains out because she’d obviously lost her mind. She tossed the tablet contemptuously onto the couch.

  “Are you insane? What does this super stupid poem have to do with me? I’ve been throwing those fucking sticks all afternoon and you give me some really bad poem? That’s my reading?

  Lin smiled – quite darkly it seemed to Xiao, and suddenly recalling some of what she’d seen Lin do in the old days, felt the first fingers of caution tickling her brain. And then Lin stood up, her eyes flashing, imperiousness washing over her.

  “Those fucking sticks,” she said slowly, “made a really special set of numbers, love, and the numbers made a really special set of hexagrams, and the hexagrams, well what they said was this: That sweet little thing you just fucked – the one with the new plump job on her cunt? Well, she’s the ‘she’ of Li’s last poem.”

  Xiao was captured by those black eyes, quite unable to move or speak, and heard the next words as if from a very great distance.

  “It’s you, Xiao, that brings the end of the world.”

  Xiao began to laugh; she laughed until she felt tears on her face and then she wasn’t entirely sure whether she was laughing or crying. Without another word to Lin, she got up and walked into the bedroom and gathered up her underclothes, stuffing them into her bag. She glanced around at the rumpled bed, turned her mind away from the images that rose to her.

  She walked slowly back into the living room, head held proudly, and went to the door, thinking of a final parting shot. Hand on the portal switch, she hesitated dramatically, turned and looked Lin directly in the eyes.

  “You’ll never see me again,” she said. “Not ever.”

/>   Lin smiled, something so dark in her eyes that Xiao felt her composure eroding away as dust before a gathering storm.

  “I know,” Lin said. “Believe me, I know.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  XIAO DID NOT get back to the farm until nearly six in the evening. Leaving Lin’s apartment, she was so shaken and uncertain that she’d been unable to summon UberCar, unable to stand the thought of going home. She was not only empty-handed, she now had this insanity that Lin had dumped on her to worry about. Not that she was worried about it - it was crazy of course - but you didn’t hear stuff like that every day; there was effort involved in shedding it. No, the real problem was that she still had all the issues she’d had this morning; Lin had solved nothing for her – just made things worse.

  For two hours she had walked around Jiujiang. Though she didn’t know the city very well, she’d come upon the Yangtze and had strolled absently along its walkways, gazing across the broad steel-colored flow of the river without a cogent thought in her head. Though language seemed to be evading her brain, images weren’t; she saw Lin, she saw Yarrow sticks in a heap, she saw Qiang with his boots covered in chicken shit. She saw the face of little Jiao, with its funny little single tooth. And as she walked, she felt like weeping.

  She couldn’t seem to find anything solid within herself, a foundation from which to restore vitality. She felt empty of volition; her movements either random or perhaps willed by some unknown force outside her. Only as hunger begin to gnaw at her belly was she able to rouse herself from her languor and find some small measure of energy to begin the journey home.

  She finally reached the farm as dusk fell, finding Qiang and grandmother and Jiao at the table, already eating. All turned at the sound of her steps, staring at her as if she were from Mars.

  Qiang stabbed his chopsticks into the rice.

  “Where in hell have you been?”

  She shook her head wearily.

  “Not now, I am tired and hungry.” Her voice was without heat. Grandmother reached for a bowl, filled it, and set in on the table for her.

  “Eat then, child,” she said. “Set down your things and rest.”

  Xiao nodded, absently dumped her bag on the floor, and sank into her chair and took up the bowl and a fork, and began to eat, feeling all eyes on her as she shoveled the food into her mouth. It revived her a bit, though she found it oddly tasteless, and she paused and looked over at Qiang.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. No harm in getting a start on patching things up.

  “I thought you were only going for a facial,” he said accusingly. “You’ve been gone for more than seven hours.”

  Was that all it had been? It felt like an entire week.

  “Yes, well I decided to go shopping in Jiujiang.”

  He stared at her. “You went to Jiujiang?”

  Was he deaf? She nodded and returned to the tasteless rice, realized dimly he was still blathering on.

  “…blocked me again, and I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

  “What for?” Not that she cared.

  He paused so long, she was forced to look at him, fork halfway to her mouth. Apparently, that’s exactly what he was waiting for.

  “To tell you the results,” he said. “From the lab.”

  She put the fork down, struggling to think. Results? Lab?

  Qiang peered at her, eyebrows drawn together into a solid brushy line.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “You seem out of it.”

  She shrugged. “Lots of walking.”

  “It’s not good,” he said, and paused dramatically. “Avian flu for sure.”

  Of course. The chickens. Dead chickens. She stared at him. There seemed to her to be nothing to say.

  “Did you hear me?”

  She nodded. “What now?” she asked.

  “Now?” he repeated.

  “Yes, what happens now?”

  “Nothing now,” he said, suddenly angry. “Already. While you were on your little shopping trip, the Committee sent people here and they’ve killed all the chickens. All of them. And the ducks.”

  She roused herself. “They killed the chickens? Already?”

  “Yes. Already.”

  “How did the Committee find out?”

  “How do you think? The University gets a positive, we’re the second ones to hear. Guess who’s the first?” He stared at her, almost in triumph it seemed to her.

  “There’s more.”

  She shook her head, trying to clear it. “What?”

  “Killing the chickens isn’t all of it. Didn’t you see the signs outside?”

  She tried to remember the UberCar coming up the drive. She shook her head.

  “We’re quarantined,” he said. He seemed almost proud.

  “Quarantined?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. Right here - on the farm, not to leave until we’re told.”

  “But…”

  “It’s not just any old avian flu,” he said, his voice low. “It’s a new strain, something they’ve never seen before. They’re afraid it could jump to humans.”

  “Jump?” she repeated dully.

  “Xiao, for the love of god, what’s wrong with you? Yes, jump. We could get sick from this.”

  “But we’re not sick,” she said. “I mean, if…”

  “Right,” he interrupted. “But they said it’s weird, a weird incubation period or something. Like, it can maybe make you sick a long time before you know. They think the chickens have had it for weeks, but just started dying in the last few days.”

  She was starting to get tired of all this. “How would they know? How would they know the chickens have had this thing for weeks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And,” she went on, building up a little steam, “how do they plan on keeping us in here?” She scowled. “Put up guards?”

  To her consternation, he was nodding. “For now, we’re just bound by convention to obey the signs. If the testing comes back showing possible human transmission, then the guards show up.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other in silence. The chickens are gone, she thought dully. And they owed for them. And the grain they’d purchased to feed them. And the mortgage, of course. All to come out of the money when they went to market. Now there’d be no market and no money.

  She looked up at him. “Qiang,” she asked helplessly. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” he replied grimly.

  And wait they did. For the next three days they stayed at the farm, going no further than the front porch. Qiang, with nothing to do for the first time in three years, was completely lost, restless and irritable.

  To help keep the peace, and honestly just to kill some time, Xiao turned him loose sexually, allowing him – for the first time in their marriage – access to her body almost on demand. As her labia gradually returned to normal, pummeled into submission she supposed, he seemed almost in a trance; it was obvious that the chickens, the farm and their future took a distant second place to good old fucking, because he was far more interested in thinking up new things to try in bed than solutions for the dire straits they were now in financially. When, in a moment of desperation, she wondered aloud how they’d survive, he’d only said, “Ah, hell, we’ll think of something.” He looked at her slyly. “Say, what do you think about trying anal?”

  Fine, she thought tiredly, fuck every hole you can, buster.

  On the evening of the third day, as they sat at the dinner table, a knock came at the front door, and with a cautioning glance toward Xiao, Qiang rose and answered it. When she heard the sounds of several voices speaking Mandarin and not English, she rose and went to him.

  Three men in Committee uniforms stood on the small porch, each of them wearing not just the old stand-by surgical masks, but the whole-head ventilator units that were rapidly becoming de rigueur among health agencies across China. She caught only snatches
of the conversation, but the gist of it apparently was that the testing of viruses taken from their birds had demonstrated an unprecedented level of inter-species contagion. That was the word they used; unprecedented. They were to consider themselves in formal quarantine and a guard would be left at the house twenty-four seven – no one in, no one out. Period. They’d be in quarantine until such time that the Committee was satisfied that they hadn’t

  caught anything. The men that had handled the birds were in the same boat, so don’t feel bad, it was nothing personal. If they needed food or medicine, the Committee would see to it – with the cost to be subtracted from the insurance remittance for the birds. That’ll handle about one dinner, she thought bitterly.

  When the men left, they returned to the table and she tried to finish eating, but the tastelessness of food had continued since the night she’d returned from Lin, and now she could no longer force it into her mouth. The misfortune that had come to them seemed so enormous that she couldn’t seem to wrap her head around it. Not only had they lost all their chickens and doubtlessly their farm, but now it seemed their very health was at risk. All of them, even little Jiao, who surely didn’t deserve this. But did Qiang or grandmother? Did she? Did anyone deserve this sort of misfortune? Who was keeping track and doling out punishment? God? That’s a laugh. What then? Karma – some sort of mindless weighing of good and bad? Who then was to say what constituted the good or the bad? When you killed someone for fucking with you, that was bad, but if you killed someone in war, that was good? And if you killed someone accidently, like in a car crash, that was only a little bad? It was all nonsense – all of it. But what did that leave then? Pure randomness? That was crazy too – was the red eye random? Was the end of the farm random? If they got sick from the fucking chickens, was that random? No, she thought, something had to be behind it all - she just couldn’t figure out what.

  And a week passed, and then two, and slowly she and Qiang went out of their minds. One afternoon they’d lolled listlessly around the kitchen while grandmother and Jiao napped, and she was so bored and desperate she slipped her hand down Qiang’s waistband, grabbing his dick.