Laura sat down, heavily. Hotchkiss made a grab at her, thought better of it, and began backing up. Suddenly they broke and ran for the back of the godown.
Then it was maelstrom all around her. Men ran after the retreating SWAT team, shouting. Others dashed up the stairs, where Hotchkiss's stunned and blinded victims were moan- ing, cursing, crying out. Laura drew up her legs, clenched the hands cinched behind her back, tried to make herself small.
Her mind raced wildly. She should go back to the roof, rejoin her people. No---better to help the injured. No-try to escape, to find the police, get arrested. No, she should-
A mustached Malay teenager with a swollen, battered cheek menaced her with a drawn sword. He gestured her up, prodding her with his foot.
"My hands," Laura said.
The boy's eyes widened. He stepped behind her and sawed through the tough plastic strap of her cuffs. Her arms came free with a sudden grating rush of pleasure-pain in her shoulders.
He spat angry Malay at her. She stood up. Suddenly she was a head taller than he was. He backed off a step, hesi- tated, turned to someone else-
A wind and a sibilant hissing filled the godown. A chopper had dropped to street level-it was looking in on them through the hole in the godown's front wall. Expressionless helmets behind the cockpit glass. An explosive huff as a gun-metal canister jumped loose. It hit the godown floor,, rolling, careening, gushing mist
Oh fuck. Tear gas. A sudden parching, virulent wave of it struck and she could feel the acid grip of it on her eyeballs. Panic hit her then. She scrambled on her hands and knees. Tearblur, savage pain of it in her throat. No air. She bounced off people, blinded and pushing wildly, and suddenly she was running.
Running free ...
Tears, in poisoned torrents, drenched her face. Where they touched her lips she felt a stinging tingle and a taste like kerosene. She kept running, shying away from the gray blur of looming buildings on the side of the street. Her throat and lungs felt full of fish hooks.
She reached the end of her adrenaline. She was too shocked to feel her own fatigue, but her knees began to buckle on their own. She headed for a doorway and collapsed into its recess.
Just then the sky opened up, and it began to rain. Another vertical, bursting monsoon. Wave after wave of it pounded the empty street. Laura crouched miserably in the doorway, catch- ing rain in her cupped hands, bathing her face and the exposed skin of her arms. At first the water seemed to make it worse a vicious stinging, as if she'd been breathing Tabasco sauce.
She had two plastic bangles now, over the chafed raw skin of her wrists. Her feet were soaked in their cheap, clammy sandals-not from rain, but from the water-cannon puddles in the street outside the godown.
She had run right through the street battle, blind. No one had even touched her. Except-there was a long strip of tangle-tape on her shin, still wriggling feebly, like the shed tail of a lizard. She picked it off her jeans.
She could recognize the area now-she'd run all the way to the Victoria and Albert Docks, just west of East Lagoon. To the north she saw the high-rise of the Tanjong Pagar public- housing complex-bland, dun-colored government bricks.
She sat, breathing shallowly, coughing, spitting every once in a while. She wished she were back with her people in the godown. But there was no way she could reach them again-it was not a sane option.
She'd meet them in jail anyway. Get the hell out of this battle zone and somehow manage to get arrested. Nice quiet jail. Yeah. Sounded good.
She stood up, wiping her mouth. Three cycle-rickshaws raced past her toward East Lagoon, each one crowded with a clinging mass of drenched, staring rebels. They ignored her,
She made a break for it.
There were two wet, unstable street barricades between her and Tanjong Pagar. She climbed over them in pounding rain.
No one showed to stop her.
The glass doors of the Tanjong housing complex had been smashed out of their aluminum frames. Laura ducked into the place, over crunchy heaps of pebbly safety glass. Air condi- tioning bit into her wet clothes.
She was in a shabby but neat entrance hall. Her foam sandals squelched messily on the scuffed linoleum. The place was deserted, its inhabitants, presumably, respecting the gov- ernment's curfew and keeping to their rooms upstairs. It was all mom-and-pop shops down here, little bicycle repair places, a fish market, a quack fractionation parlor. Cheerfully lit with fluorescents, ready for business, but all deserted.
She heard the distant murmur of voices. Calm, authorita- tive tones. She headed for them.
The sounds came from a glass-fronted television store.
Cheap low-res sets from Brazil and Maphilindonesia, color gone garish. They'd been turned on all over the store, a few showing the Government channel, others flickering over and over with a convulsive, maladjusted look.
Laura eased through the doorway. A string of brass bells jumped and rang-. Inside it reeked of jasmine incense. The shop's walls were papered with smiling, wholesome Singapore pop stars: cool guys in glitter tuxedos and cute babes in straw sun hats and peplums. Laura stepped carefully over a toppled, broken gum machine.
A little old Tamil lady had invaded the place. A wizened granny, white-haired and four feet tall, with a dowager's hump and wrists thin as bird bone. She sat in a canvas director's chair, staring at the empty screens and munching on a mouthful of gum.
"Hello?" Laura said. No response. The old woman looked deaf as a post-senile, even. Laura crept nearer, her shoes squelching moistly. The old woman gave her a sudden star- tled glance and adjusted her sari, draping the shoulder flap modestly over her head.
Laura combed at her hair with her fingers, feeling rainwa- ter trickle down her neck. "Ma'am, do you speak English?"
The old woman smiled shyly. She pointed at a stack of the canvas chairs, folded against the wall.
Laura fetched one. It had an inscription across the back in wacky-looking Tamil script-something witty and amusing, probably. Laura opened it and sat beside the old woman.
"Um, can you hear me at all, or, uh... "
The Tamil granny stared straight ahead.
Laura sighed, hard. It felt good -to be sitting down.
This poor dazed old woman-ninety if she was a day-had apparently come wandering downstairs, for canary food or something, too deaf or past-it to know about the curfew. To find-Jesus-an empty world.
With a sudden, surreptitious movement the old gal popped a little colored pebble into her mouth. Grape bubble gum. She munched triumphantly.
Laura examined the televisions. The old woman had set them for every possible channel.
Suddenly, on Channel Three, the flickering stabilized.
With the speed of, a gunfighter the old woman pulled a remote. The Government spokesman winked out. Channel
Three rose to a static-filled roar.
The image was scratchy home video. Laura saw the image bumping as the narrator aimed the camera at his own face. He was a Chinese Singaporean. He looked about twenty-five, chipmunk-cheeked, with thick glasses and a shirt crowded with pens.
Not a bad-looking guy, really, but definitely not TV mate- rial. Normal-looking. You wouldn't look twice at him in any street in Singapore.
The guy sat back on his dumpy, overstuffed couch. There was a tacky painting of a seascape behind his head. He sipped from a coffee cup and fiddled with a microphone paper- clipped to his collar. She could hear him swallowing, loudly.
"I think I'm on the air now," he announced.
Laura traded glances with the little old woman. The old gal looked disappointed. Didn't speak English.
"This is my home VCR, la," said Normal Guy. "It al- ways say: `do not hook to home antenna, can cause broadcast pollution.' Stray signal, you see? So, I did it. I'm broadcast- ing! I think so, anyway."