Last One Standing Read online

  He took a step towards me and I just had time to tense my stomach muscles before he ploughed that fist into my belly.

  It was like being hit by a lump hammer. The air exploded from my lungs and it felt as if my internal organs had been torn apart. I couldn’t breathe. My vision wavered. Pain burst outwards from the centre of my stomach, wave after wave of it. The agony doubled me up, forcing me loose from Morgan Taylor’s grip. I was retching and choking, struggling for air, gritting my teeth against the pain. I opened my mouth wide trying to find some oxygen. Then Taylor was gripping me again, straightening me up. It felt like I was being torn in two. I could feel his grip hardening and then my vision cleared and I could see Nash grinning, spittle and blood on his lips. His huge fist forming once more.

  But suddenly Taylor’s lock on me was gone. His grip just vanished. I vaguely heard a surprised grunt and a hiss of pain, but by then Nash’s fist was coming towards me, this time aimed at my face.

  I was still in too much pain to react quickly, but I did sway backwards and twist slightly and Nash’s punch whistled by my face. He was then off balance because all of that power in his swing hadn’t connected with anything.

  It was but a split second of opportunity, and I seized it. I punched him on the ear as hard as I could. It may have been imagination but I thought I heard something crack.

  The punch hurt my hand. It hurt my belly. But it hurt Nash more. He stumbled in the same direction as the momentum of his punch had pulled him. He tried to catch his balance, but he went down.

  I was as mad and as angry as he was now. Morgan Taylor shouldn’t have grabbed me like that. I took a step towards Nash intending to kick him, no longer worried about playing fair. He started to rise, made it to all fours, but collapsed again. His hands were splayed out on the dirt and I was on the verge of stamping on one of them, but I saw he was opening and closing his mouth, trying to breathe. There was more blood between his lips. His eyes, when he looked at me, were full of both confusion and pain.

  I stepped away from Nash, trying to catch my own breath. I looked around, thinking Morgan Taylor might be coming for me, and could scarcely comprehend what I saw.

  Lin Wu Jia was holding Taylor’s hand. Actually, it was his fingers. She was holding them in such a way that his hand looked bent backwards, and his arm looked twisted too. It must have been terribly painful for Taylor because whatever Lin Wu Jia was doing – with seemingly no effort – had driven him to his knees. As I watched, she forced him lower and lower and he ended up with his face pressed right into the dirt, pain and curses escaping from his mouth.

  I heard gasps of surprise and shock and even nervous laughter from the crowd who had come out of the King’s Head. Across the street a couple of people were pointing. Suddenly no one was walking on. They were all stopping and watching.

  ‘Lin Wu . . .,’ I said, shaking my head, just about managing to breathe, just about able to cope with the pain still coming from my stomach. I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Two on one didn’t seem fair,’ she said, and smiled. Then she tweaked his fingers again and Morgan Taylor actually screamed.

  ‘We should go,’ I said. Nash was still on all fours, shaking his head, dribbling blood.

  Lin Wu Jia smiled, made Taylor scream again, then she let go of his fingers and he curled up in a ball; him and Nash Lane both down there in the dirt.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Nash Lane?’ my mother said. There was something in the way she spoke his name, something in her eyes, which made me want to know more. Especially when she added, ‘Yes, I don’t think he likes any of us.’

  Then she looked across at Lin Wu Jia and said, ‘You are very beautiful.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Lin Wu Jia said. ‘You are beautiful.’

  ‘What did Callum say your name was?’

  ‘Lin Wu Jia,’ I said.

  ‘But please call me Jia,’ Lin Wu Jia said. ‘It’s easier.’

  We were in our kitchen, sitting at the table. I’d explained to my ma what had happened, how my clothes had got so torn, and had introduced Jia. I hadn’t yet told Ma that it was Jia’s mother who Sam Johnson had been working for when he had been killed. That said, my ma was no fool, and I think she had guessed there was a connection.

  ‘Well, Jia,’ my mother said. ‘Are you hungry? You must have ridden all morning to have got here from anywhere.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Jia said. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

  ‘I’ll be making something anyway.’

  Jia smiled. ‘I might be a little hungry.’

  ‘Then I will make us dinner, and you can tell us all about it.’

  ‘All about what?’ I asked, thinking my ma knew something I didn’t.

  ‘Whatever it is that brings Jia here,’ my mother said.

  Jia told us a story.

  It had happened just shy of ten years ago at a place called Cape Horn, not far from Sacramento. The Central Pacific Railroad Company was building their end of the line that now stretched across our nation. The Company was literally inching along, sometimes not even making that much progress in a day. They needed to build trestles to span great ravines, blast and drill and chisel out tunnels through rock as hard as iron, and at Cape Horn they had to carve out a ledge on the side of a Sierra Nevada mountain on which the railroad tracks could then be laid.

  The Chinese man was known as Yellow Jack, a friendly and jovial man, whose only vice was a little gambling in the end-of-line camp each evening. For this stretch of the construction project, Jack’s job was to be lowered down from the clifftop in a wicker basket to bore and fill blast holes in the rock face with a hand-drill.

  That September morning there was a sharp chill in the air that cut through Jack’s cotton shirt and jacket, but he knew that within a few minutes of starting work he would be sweating, and that he would keep sweating until they hauled him up to the cliff top for dinner.

  The drill was heavy, and despite the fact the bit was sharpened every night, it only took a few minutes usage and the edge was gone. Trying to make a hole in the rock felt impossible. He used his chest to press the drill into the rock with as much force as he could, whilst still being able to turn the ratchet. This pressure pushed the basket away from the rock face and meant it was difficult to apply much force anyway. The steel would grind against the rock and within seconds the aged stone would turn white as the bit stripped away the outer surface, but then progress became more difficult, and once there was an indentation about the size of a fingernail it seemed to be a totally futile exercise. Yellow Jack swapped hands often, despite being right-handed. The sweat rolled down his face, back and his flanks. He was hungry, and although he had a water skin with him in the basket it had to last all morning – unless he managed to drill deep enough for a blast before then – so he was careful not to drink too much too soon. He looked at the view often, especially at those moments when he took a rest. The cliff-face stretched back to the west, and all the way along, until the curve of the mountain took them out of sight, he could see fellow countrymen hanging in their own baskets, slowly – so slowly – drilling the rock face. The low morning sun, golden and now warm, cast long horizontal shadows from each hanging man. There were small bushes and plants growing out of the cliff, and way down below, there was a carpet of green – trees that looked soft and inviting from this height. Higher up, snow-covered mountains stretched away in all directions. It was indeed a rare and beautiful sight. The Company paid him, too. He reminded himself of this fact whenever the pain in his hands and in his chest became too much. It was better than trying to make a living back home – especially with the Taiping army on the rampage. So he pressed against the rock and he forced the drill to grind around and around, gaining tiny fractions of an inch every few minutes.

  At lunchtime, his nephew, Liu, and another man, Chen, hauled Yellow Jack up to the top. Liu and Chen ran six ropes. The ropes were a hundred yards apart and Liu and Chen’s job was to lower the men, pull them up at
lunchtime or whenever they were ready to initiate a blast, then lower them back down as required. Liu always kept some rice and fish cooking, and every few minutes he would run between each rope to make sure the men doing the drilling were OK. Chen, who was older than Liu, sat in the sun and waited for Liu to call him whenever he needed some assistance.

  The eight men – the six drillers, Liu and Chen – gathered around Liu’s cooking pot and helped themselves to food. There was a bottle of wine and the men poured a little into tin cups. They lay down and closed their eyes. There was a cold wind up there on the top and it dried the sweat from the men’s clothes and from their skin. Yellow Jack fooled absent-mindedly with two ivory dice that he always carried with him. But it only felt like a couple of minutes before the Company man was yelling at them from a hundred yards away that it was time to get back to it. The men groaned – especially Liu who was only small, and now had the job to lower each man in turn. He, Chen and the driller who had been first up, wandered back along the cliff-top to the man’s basket. Liu asked him, as he would each man in turn, how soon he’d need lifting up out of the way of a blast. Within thirty minutes all six men were back down at the cliff-face, hanging in their baskets, drilling the rock.

  Each basket rope was attached to a tree way behind them on the cliff-top. It was also wrapped around several deep iron spikes that had been driven into the ground with lump-hammers. At the cliff edge was an iron frame holding a wheel. The rope ran around the grooved wheel. Like the iron spikes, the edge-frame had been driven into the ground. Sometimes these frames popped loose, but so long as the spikes and the rope around the tree held – which they did most of the time – then the suspended baskets were reasonably safe.

  About two o’clock in the afternoon, one of the men some four hundred yards back from Yellow Jack called up to Liu that he was ready to blast. Liu waited until the man gave him the nod that he’d lit the long fuse and then Liu and Chen hauled the man up, hand over hand, heaving the basket and its occupant to safety.

  Along the cliff-face the men still hanging paused from their drilling, held their breath, and looked back towards where the blast was expected. Usually a puff of smoke was the first thing they saw, then came a rumbling sound and sometimes – depending on the density of the rock – the loud crack of the explosion. After that the shattered rock burst outwards, a big cloud of dust and shale and stone that filled the air and seemed to float for a whole minute or more. Once, a bird flying by had been hit – and most probably killed – by a stone no bigger than a bullet and the men had cheered as if someone had pulled off a miracle gunshot.

  Then it was back to work until the next blast.

  Yellow Jack was ready to blast around four o’clock that afternoon. His shadow was now on the opposite side of the cliff-face to where it had been in the morning. His chest and shoulders ached. His hands and arms felt as heavy as lead. The hole he’d bored went deep in the rock and he laid his drill down on the woven floor of the basket, and pulled out several black powder cartridge rolls from a small leather bag. He pushed the cartridges deep into the hole, slowly ramming them in with a flat-ended iron rod. Into the last cartridge he inserted a long fuse. He pushed this into the cliff-face too, and then he sealed the hole with rock-paste – a concoction made up of stone dust, sand and cement powder, that he poured a little of his water into. It dried quickly and he pressed it into the hole, then added more.

  He looked up, following the line of his rope to the top of the cliff where white clouds were starting to fill the cold blue sky.

  ‘Liu! Liu!’

  He called a few times before his nephew appeared at the top. There was no hurry. The longer the plug had to dry the better the blast.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Is Chen there with you?’

  ‘Yes. We’re ready too.’

  ‘I’m OK to light the fuse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yellow Jack took a box of Lucifers from his pocket, scratched one into life, and held it against the end of the fuse, which spluttered, sizzled, and sparked like a string of rabbit fat dripping into a fire.

  He looked up at the cliff-top, but Liu was gone. He’d be standing a few yards back, his leather gloves on, him and Chen getting ready to heave that basket up.

  ‘Pull!’ Yellow Jack shouted. ‘It’s lit! Pull!’

  Liu wasn’t sure if he had seen the man around before. The man might have gambled with them once or twice in the evenings, but Liu wasn’t sure of that either. White men tended to look alike to him, and anyway the Americans didn’t mix with the Chinese. When the man came closer Liu felt a rising sense of unease. He wasn’t sure why. The man had been hanging around for a while over by the trees. He seemed to be checking knots. For a crazy moment Liu had wondered if the man was loosening rather than checking the ropes.

  When Jack had shouted up that he was ready for a blast Liu had been standing a few baskets along. It was too late in the afternoon to run, so he walked slowly back along the cliff-top, slipping his gloves on as he came, and by the time he got to Jack’s rope the man was there, too.

  ‘All OK, sir?’ he said to the man. Chen was there, as well, putting on his gloves.

  The man smiled. He had bright blue eyes. ‘Carry on.’

  Liu looked over the edge of the cliff and Jack was down there, looking up.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Jack said.

  Liu said, ‘We’re ready, too.’

  Jack asked if it was OK to light the fuse and Liu said yes, still looking over the edge. He saw Jack flick a match into life, and then Liu turned to go and grab the rope. He vaguely heard Jack say, ‘It’s lit! Pull me up!’

  Sometimes something is so out of place, so out of the ordinary, that it takes a moment to comprehend it.

  Chen was lying on the ground, his eyes wide open in fear – or maybe surprise – and his throat was gaping wide open like another mouth. Blood was pouring all down his shirt and there was a wheezing sound coming from his sliced windpipe.

  There was a revolver in the man’s hand pointing at Liu.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the man said.

  Liu half-raised his hands. He looked around. The cliff-top was deserted. The set of ropes he was in charge of stretched for almost half a mile.

  ‘I have to pull him up,’ Liu said. ‘He’s lit the fuse.’

  He tore his eyes from the man and looked at Chen. Chen was now lying still. The blood was no longer pulsing from the wound as if it was being pumped from somewhere, but it was still running over the jagged edges of the flesh and soaking his shirt, his jacket, the grass where he lay.

  Liu looked back at the man.

  ‘I have to pull him up!’

  As if on cue Jack’s voice rose from below. ‘Pull me up, Liu! The fuse is lit.’

  Liu lowered his hands and went to grab the rope.

  ‘Don’t move!’

  The man thrust the revolver forward. Liu was close enough that he could see the dark silver bullets in the cylinder.

  ‘Liu!’ Jack called. There was panic in his voice.

  The man shook his head.

  Yellow Jack snatched at the burning fuse, trying to smother it with his hands. He had gloves in the basket but there wasn’t time to put them on. The fuse burned the palms of his hands. He cried out in pain and yanked his scorched hands away. The fuse kept on sizzling. He yelled out to Liu again. If his nephew was playing a joke then it wasn’t funny. Jack would kick him all around the camp later. But no, Liu would never make a joke this way. Jack tried again to grab the fuse and yank it out of the hole, out of the cemented plug he had so carefully and solidly wedged into the rock. But his burned hands were too tender to get a good grip and they slipped on the fuse. When he tried reaching out to the rock face with one hand for leverage the movement pushed the basket away from the cliff.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Daway Ma in the next basket, a hundred yards away, pointing at him, waving furiously.

  Again he grabbed the fuse, pulling it as hard as the pain would
allow, and now he felt it move slightly. But it was impossible to hold onto the fire and he couldn’t help but let go. The fuse lay hanging against the cliff face, still smouldering, the sparks right up to the cement plug now.

  ‘Liu!’ he called.

  But it was too late. Even if his nephew started pulling him up now he’d get caught in the blast.

  Jack gritted his teeth. He thought back to the days as a young man when the monks trained him in fighting and in overcoming pain. He reached out and grabbed the fuse and this time he held it as tight as he could, ignoring the agony searing outwards from his burnt hands, and he pulled with all his might.

  The cement plug came loose and the fuse broke free from the black powder cartridge inside the hole.

  He fell back into the basket, not caring about the way the sudden movement made the basket swing precariously. He closed his eyes. He breathed a long sigh of relief. Tears came.

  The man said, ‘Wait.’

  Liu’s breath came in short gasps, first through his mouth, then his nose. His hands were shaking and his shoulders and neck were tense, readying themselves for an explosion.

  Chen’s dead eyes were looking right at him. It was strange how you could know that a man was dead by just looking at his eyes, even if they appeared no different to how they had been when he was living.

  ‘Please . . .’ Liu said.

  ‘Wait.’

  Now they heard Jack shouting up again. ‘Pull me up, Liu. What’s going on?’

  Liu looked at the man. The urgency had gone out of Jack’s voice and the man had noticed it.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the man said.

  He circled around Liu, keeping the revolver aimed at the young rope man. When he got close to the edge of the cliff the man peered over.

  Liu heard Jack saying, ‘Liu . . . Who are you?’ Liu tensed himself, ready to spring at the man, maybe knock him over the cliff. But the man turned.