+++

‘Does this receipt say I ordered the Corleone burger? Does it? Do I look like I want that shit? Or does it say fish burger? Don’t look at your boss, look at me. Does it say fish burger?’

The customer screaming at Trig in the middle of Zinc Burger wasn’t the biggest or most intimidating guy ever [he was wearing a Kumamon t-shirt] but he was definitely one of the most volatile.

And all because of a mixed-up order.

‘Clearly you can’t fucking read, cos it does say fish burger, yet for some reason I had to wait ten minutes for this shit.’ He held up the Corleone burger, his hand claw-like in its grip. ‘And now I have to wait another ten fucking minutes for the thing I actually wanted in the first place.’

Trig looked at his boss, who was squinting at the buttons on the order screen, pretending there was a gremlin on it.

‘Fucking vegetable cunts. Shuffling round back there with your brains off.’ The customer tossed the Corleone burger back onto the counter. ‘Which one of you cabbages is getting my burger?’

‘Sorry, we’re correcting the order now, Sir.’

‘Still? Fucking kai geh. You said it was in the bag already. I asked you, is this the fish burger and you said yeah, fish burger. I look in the bag and it’s your fucking Godfather rip-off. Now you’re standing here doing nothing, telling me you’re correcting it.’

Trig looked again at his manager, but she was now busy pretending to tick something on her clipboard. The box for abandoning your subordinate to a psycho customer? Probably.

‘Wah, why do you keep looking at her? This is your mistake, you get the burger. Or one of your little trolls. Fuck. One of you better be fucking getting it.’

‘It’s getting-…we’re getting it now, Sir.’

‘About fucking time.’

‘Sorry, Sir.’

‘Stop calling me Sir, you don’t even like me.’

‘Understood.”

‘If this place weren’t open plan, you’d be pissing in my drink, little cunt.’

‘Here comes your burger now.’

‘It better be.’

One of the other staff dumped a burger on the counter, glanced at the volcanic customer with casual disdain and slurred ‘fish.’

The man unwrapped the burger and checked between the buns.

‘Fish burger,’ repeated Trig, hoping that’s what it really was.

‘Yeah. We’ll see.’

‘Thank you, have a good night.’

‘Useless twat…’

The man glared at Trig, glared at the staff in the background, glared at the straws, glared at the customer standing behind him then swaggered out of the restaurant like a white rapper.

Trig slouched, breathing out the last ten minutes in relief. The manager came over and whispered in his ear, ‘lower the volume next time, Eisenstein.’

‘I tried.’

‘Try harder.’

‘He was angry straight away. What was I supposed to do?’

‘Learn from Malcolm X. If someone’s screaming at you, you’ve already lost.’

‘Ma gum what?’

‘American. Good at winning arguments. Shot by CIA.’

Trig forced out a soft, ‘okay,’ and turned to serve the next customer. It was a large man in an XXL adidas t-shirt, loose but not loose enough to stop his nipples poking out.

‘I saw what happened, bro.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re too passive. He said that shit to me I would’ve shoved that fish burger up his ass.’

‘Okay, Sir.’

‘Gotta stand up for yourself.’

Trig opened his mouth instinctively to yell, ‘I’m at work, Ma gum X,’ but saw his manager looking at him so stopped himself.

‘This mine?’ the customer asked.

Trig looked inside the bag, looked at the ticket and nodded. The moon-sized man took the bag and did the same, muttering ‘shit’ when he saw what was inside.

‘It’s not correct?’ asked Trig, his voice breaking slightly in frustration.

The man shook his head, smiled. ‘Just messing with you, bro.’

‘It is correct?’

‘Yeah, it’s fine.’

Trig took a moment to compose himself, regulate his breaths then switched back to robot mode. ‘Thank you, sir, have a good night.’

+++

Two hours later, Trig peeled off his uniform, said goodnight to the few staff he actually liked, nodded at the rest then walked out into the night. Or as close as you could get to night in Hong Kong.

According to measurements taken by the S.M.D.S [Stars My Destination Society] four years earlier, the level of light pollution in the city was so severe that the Sun could go supernova and only a few people in Tai O would notice. Everyone else would simply freeze to death assuming it was a chilly wind.

Given the day he’d just had, freezing to death wouldn’t have been so bad.

Not that it was much different from any other day.

Everyone knew that waiters and taxi drivers in Hong Kong could be incredibly blunt, so no one cared when customers were blunt back. It was normal for people to rant and pick fights when their order didn’t turn up correct…well, not that normal, but it would happen at least twice a day, especially in fast food places.

And even more especially in Zinc Burger.

The problem: due to the Japanese pretensions of the chain restaurant management, the staff at Zinc Burger were trained to be extra polite, which meant they had a professional obligation to stand there and take it.

Of course, there were guidelines that taught them how to deal with this kind of situation. Trig had tried reading them once on break, while scrolling through lost civilisation vids:

Step one, smile a lot and hope the customer gets bored.

Step two, absorb the customer’s rage with vague service rhetoric.

Step three, look the customer in the eye.

Step four, make assurances and hope they are met.

The list went on, all options as useless as the one before it.

Salvo always told him to quit, find a different job, and before he could agree or disagree, she’d change her own mind and say, actually, there’s no point, all employers are evil here, might as well stay where you are.

Evil may have been a strong word, but it wasn’t far off.

Trig ambled out of the complex area, past the office workers heading back to the residential blocks surrounding it – Dai Yat Sing, the 50 block city within a city within a city – and stopped at the zebra crossing where only one out of every fifteen cars bothered to brake.

On the wall nearby was a poster for the shithole he’d just walked out of, the same promotion they’d been using for the last seven years.

Zinc Burger…food parlour of the Gods!

Ha, that was a laugh.

Even his manager was treated like a rubbish bag.

The day she’d got promoted, management took her to one side and asked if she wanted an end of year bonus or a pay rise. When she said pay rise and bonus, they cut her hours. When she said sorry, I meant pay rise, they said sure, we’ll add it to your end of year bonus. When she got her end of year bonus, it was the same as every other year. When she asked what had happened to the pay rise, she got told she was lucky to have been promoted.

And that was just the attitude toward the managers. The multitude of ways they had to avoid fairly paying workers like Trig were even worse, even more convoluted.

Fucking leeches.

Trig made his way round the edge of the giant residential monoliths and onto the main road leading up to Dai Lo San Tunnel. Or the main road leading up to the highway that went to the tunnel. Hong Kong was a small place, but not that small. Paticularly when you counted out how many people lived there. Seven million? Eight? Probably six or five after all the emigrations, the so-called middle class brain drain. Or gazebo democrats as Cav called them.

He crossed the road, noticing the sign to the tunnel, wondering how long it would take to walk up there. Not that he ever would. Shek Mun to City One and back across the river again to Shek Mun. That was the sum total of his journeys.

Home to work and home again…with the occasional detour to Cav’s place or a local bar. Salvo’s place too, if she ever let them go there. Which she never had. Closest they’d ever come was the little kiddie playground on her estate.

My family is too annoying, you’ll feel depressed.

Okay, Salvo. Family reasons. Cos everyone else’s is completely normal.

A group of uncles were standing by the bridge up ahead, drinking, so Trig turned left and headed down the slope towards the river. It wouldn’t take much to go around them, walk over the bridge on the other side, but his legs didn’t seem to want to do that.

Truth was, he didn’t want to go home yet. His sister would be there and he couldn’t be bothered listening to her go on about darts again. A year ago it was Japanese, now, for some reason, it was darts. Six more months of practice and I’ll be ready to enter tournaments, Trig.

Yeah, six more months of wasting half her salary in the darts bar, trying to get to pro level even though she was nowhere near fat enough to do that. Some of them are quite slim, she always said, waving googled pics of professional darts players in his face.

And when she wasn’t doing that, she was telling him off for having a shit job and not doing anything substantial with his life.

Nah, he wasn’t in the mood to hear that, not after the trash he’d just put up with. The river was way more relaxing. And it didn’t scold you for smoking either.

He lit up, and looked at his phone.

‘Fuck…’ he muttered, clocking the first headline that popped up.

The police were gaslighting again. ‘All cases of journalists being assaulted are over two years old and demonstrably false. We have witnesses reporting that they, these so-called journalists, waited for our officers to use pepper spray and then ran into the spray zone. Same for the tear gas. They were targeting our units on purpose. Anyone who claims otherwise is remembering incorrectly.’

Trig muttered ‘trash’ and walked farther down path.

It was weird, the lights from the Shek Mun housing estate across the river – his housing estate – looked quite beautiful reflected on the surface of the water, like an alternate, mystical Hong Kong.

Maybe there were people down there looking back up at his Hong Kong and thinking the same thing. Maybe aliens had a base on Pluto and were watching them all. Maybe this whole thing was a deity’s snow globe.

A jogger ran past, breathing like an asthmatic, saying ‘no’ to himself over and over.

Maybe we’re all dead already.

Trig followed the jogger through the first underpass then stopped near the riverside wall, watching the poor guy basically crawl up the steps to the main road.

The second underpass was another twenty or so metres down the same path, but there was nothing particularly tempting that way so he stayed parked where he was.

River watching.

Correction: dirty stream watching.

It wasn’t the worst sight in the world, but it wasn’t exactly the Lighthouse of Alexandria either.

He took another drag and tried thinking a bit more, but it was tough, all dystopian mud and laser fights, so he pulled out his phone instead.

One message, from Salvo.

‘Just finished Sankara book. Feel angry.’

Sankara? The guitar guy? Trig didn’t know how to reply so he went back to the news, even though he knew it would probably make him depressed.

The police were being quoted again.

‘Various cleaning products were found at the location, which can be used to make explosive devices, as well as material expressing support for Mongolian independence. It is well-known that this is code for something else and has been rendered illegal under the National Security Law. As for the so-called video of “assault” by our officers at the scene, this is clearly a case of digital manipulation and not suitable for comment. Of course, in the interest of transparency, we showed the video to the officers involved and they came to the same conclusion.’

Trig swiped the news away and switched to the ‘Colonising Space’ channel on YouTube.

Humans really were trash, he thought. Most of them. The ones in power. And the only way out of this is…what? Moon states in the Kuiper Belt?

Maybe aliens should come here and exterminate us. We probably deserve it. Some of us. Actually, they probably had advanced technology, they could use it to single out the worst humans and-…

There was a noise from farther down the path, making him cough on the smoke he’d just sucked in.

He looked over, squinting a bit as the lamp near the second underpass seemed to be broken.

There was something there…a figure…but it was too dark to make out. He moved forward a few steps and then a few more until he could make out limbs and a head.

It was a man…dressed in some kind of plastic jacket…and he was standing there, at the fringe of the second underpass, staring straight back at Trig.

Out of instinct, Trig looked left at the river then, out of stubborn pride, looked right back at the man again.

Hang on.

That wasn’t a jacket…

He focused harder, giving his eyes more time to adapt to the dark.

And the more he focused, the more it resembled a bin bag, draped over the man’s shoulders like a makeshift poncho.

And the weirdo was still staring.

Like a mesmerist.

Definitely not shy then, Trig thought, turning back and checking for other people walking down the better-lit section of the path. Despite being almost one in the morning, there were several people about fifty metres back, some in a group with bored-looking dogs around them and one guy on his own, who was coming Trig’s way.

Comfort of strangers…the one bright spot of this shitty district.

There was a whistling noise, very faint, from the darkness of the second underpass. Trig turned again, trying to make it as casual as possible, and saw the bin bag man with his arm outstretched, holding something.

As before, it was hard to see clearly, but it looked a little like…an over-sized protractor.

The whistling noise came again…from the man?

Yes, it had to be, there was no one else there. Unless there was another man behind him producing it surreptitiously, or a personal wind that orbited his body and-

Wait a sec.

Was he-

Shit.

The man was pointing at Trig, gesturing with the outstretched protractor for him to…come over? That’s what it looked like. Fuck.

Don’t, Trig cautioned himself.

Do, said a ten times more nihilistic voice behind it.

Graagrsgdjhh, slurred his Id.

Vetoing all three, he took a drag of his cigarette.

The bin bag man walked backwards, deeper into the underpass shadows, still gesturing with his protractor as he disappeared round the corner. Trig stressed ‘don’t’ internally a few more times, then sped through off-the-cuff tangents to try and summarise what he was seeing.

The guy’s wearing a bin bag. Weirdo. Serial Killer. Wizard. There’s a reason no one goes that far down the path. It leads nowhere. The guy is nuts. He is not a wizard. This is not the beginning of a super-cosmic adventure. He’ll stab you and dump your corpse in the river. There’s no water in that part. It’s dirty. Kids will find your body. You won’t need to work tomorrow. No more Corleone burgers. Stabbing isn’t that bad. Could be an initiation test. Maybe he is a wizard. Get stabbed, don’t die, well done, now I’ll tell you the truth about the universe. Or the solar system at least. He’s wearing a bin bag. Serial killing wizard. Weirdo.

Trig stubbed out his cigarette and looked back again. As he did, the man who’d been coming that way a minute earlier passed by, his eyes fixed on his phone. The rest of his appearance – light sports jacket, shorts, earphones – suggested he’d just finished running and was warming down.

I could follow him, Trig thought. But he’ll probably go up the steps to the main road, not farther down the path.

Use him as cover?

If anything does happen to me in the shadows, he’ll be able to see it.

Assuming he’s not lost in his phone.

And he’s a runner, so he’s fit enough to intervene physically.

If things went that way…

Trig waited a few more seconds, decided he was right then started walking.

Contrary to all logic and reason and the concept of not wanting to walk into a poorly-lit area and get stabbed violently, the runner with the phone ignored the steps leading up to the main road and continued on towards the second underpass.

Trig walked behind, keeping a distance of around fifteen metres.

It was weird, this guy didn’t even look back to check if anyone was behind him. Was that Hong Kong complacency? Trig hadn’t been anywhere else except Taiwan and Japan, but he couldn’t imagine people in other places being so apathetic about walking down a dark, deserted path at one in the morning.

It was probably the phone, distracting him.

The news about the police calling everything fake and misleading.

Or a menu of local prostitutes.

Trig lit another cigarette as the man ahead turned the corner at the end of the path and disappeared from sight. To follow or not to follow? If he did, and the man turned around, it would be awkward, but if he didn’t, he’d go back home regretful. If he was too cowardly, too passive to act in even a tiny, mysterious situation like this then…what was the point?

He stopped, counted out another twenty seconds then resumed walking.

The corner wasn’t far, and there weren’t many noises, and when he looked back he saw the group of people with dogs had stopped where he’d just been standing, so if he did go round this corner and get in trouble, at least he could scream and guarantee some kind of response.

He stopped at the edge of the second underpass, glimpsing a bit farther round the corner of the path.

There was some broken glass on the ground, possibly from the lamp above. That would explain why it wasn’t lit.

He stepped around the debris and…

A noise.

Like the sound of water in old Nintendo games. A digital whoosh.

Definitely not the sound of stabbing.

Trig took a breath, making sure it wasn’t loud enough to create its own distinct noise, then tucked the non-smoking hand in his jacket pocket and walked as casually as he could around the corner.

The underpass ran on for a few more metres then ended.

After that, more path, more darkness.

No path lamps at all.

Trig couldn’t see anyone, the phone guy or the bin bag nut, so he stopped walking and moved over to the railings. Putting hands on the top bar, he peered over the side. The river had dried to a trickle, and a rental bike was in the middle of the concrete riverbed, waiting for someone ambitious to climb down and unlock it. No sign of any dead bodies.

He turned back to the path and jogged forward. By his estimation, the phone guy would still be visible as the path ran on for about two hundred metres before leading out onto a smaller road.

Unless he’d gone into the trees to take a piss? But even then, the gap between the trees was big and there weren’t many leaves, so he’d still be clear enough to make out.

Trig reached the end of the path.

As expected, there was a street light on the road ahead, making it easy to see everything. He did a full scan. No one up on the road, no one in the trees.

Huh? Then where did the runner go?

Trig turned sharply, both his cigarette and left fist up and ready to strike.

No one behind him.

Did he jog off somewhere?

But…even running…he wouldn’t have made it to the end of the path. Would he? And what about the bin bag guy?

Trig walked back quickly the way he’d come, reaching the shadows of the underpass and looking left.

To the side of the path was a little clearing that made up the bulk of the underpass. There were a few boxes stacked up against the concrete wall, which seemed to be the main foundation block holding up the road above. The underpass area itself was small, not enough space to hide in, but there was a door built into the wall, possibly for maintenance workers, and leading up to that door was a long, narrow stain, its surface glistening sporadically in the slither of residual moon light somehow making it through to this place.

He walked forward, eyes half focused on the ground, half on the door.

His head was saying blood, his heart was saying alcohol, and his Id was saying kill everything, murder, sex tapes, purple rain, rarggggghhhh…

But it couldn’t be blood, that was stupid. Impossible. Not even a-

He reached the tip of the stain, moving his shoe as he realised it was still active.

What was this stuff? Water?

He took out his phone and turned on the flashlight. Not the strongest glow, but suitable for him to begin his amateur forensics.

Bending down, he studied the concrete.

The stain was wet and dark and…

He put his knees on the ground, getting close enough to make out a colour.

What the-