Row upon row of young female workers sat in blue smocks assembling some kind of small product, each adding their part in turn as whatever it was made its way down the line. Two older, matronly woman wearing green smocks strode up and down the line keeping tabs on the workers. If this was a Chinese factory, it certainly wasn’t the hell hole Michael had been led to believe they were. It looked more like a sewing circle than anything; a large group of women, working on what appeared to be a plastic toy as it was passed down the table. The whole process couldn’t have been less high tech, or strangely, Michael thought, watching the completed widgets get thrown into a bin at the end of the line, more efficient.
Large grime streaked windows let the sunlight in, a dented freight elevator parked on the far wall of the open space. Glancing at his GPS, it was obvious to Michael that the coordinates were near the end of the assembly line. Michael could tell his presence didn’t go unnoticed; there were furtive looks in his direction, but he wasn’t actively acknowledged, not even by the supervisors in green smocks. The lack of attention suited his purposes just fine. He didn’t hesitate. He simply walked right in. The first few steps were fine. No one paid him much heed. Unfortunately, when he was about halfway down the assembly line a loud buzzing alarm sounded. Michael braced himself. But instead of security taking him down, the young female workers rose in perfect order, a few giggling at him as they filed out the door, leaving the factory floor. Glancing at the clock on the wall, Michael realized that he had just witnessed a shift change. They had literally left him alone in the room without a word. Before he could fully consider why his presence had generated so little interest, his GPS beeped plaintively. Aware that the unit was accurate to at best seven feet, Michael glanced around to find what he might be looking for. Eight feet away, he saw it.
Walking the final few steps to the end of the line, Michael reached into a large open cardboard box and withdrew one of the hundreds of identical objects the morning shift had produced. The object was a Lucite sphere, perhaps four and a half inches in diameter. It sat on a black plastic base and if Michael’s initial perception was correct, it was a snow globe. A snow globe which in turn contained a globe of the earth suspended in whatever solution they put in these things. The interesting thing was that when Michael picked it up, green LEDs began to light up all over the tiny enclosed globe—like phosphorescence in a frothing sea. As far as Michael could tell the LEDs glowed on every continent but Antarctica. It looked like a lot of work had gone into the object’s creation. What it didn’t look like was anything worth losing a father over.
The globe was unpackaged, but the next table over was stacked with elaborate boxing material that Michael briefly imagined ending up in a landfill. The globe gave Michael pause as he considered what it was his father was trying to say to him. Sending him a set of coordinates made sense. But coordinates to what? A toxic child’s toy? Michael tucked the globe into his pocket before casting his glance around the factory floor to ensure he wasn’t missing anything. He tried to find some kind of message or sign, something that would hint that he had found what he was looking for. Instead, he felt the kiss of cold steel to his throat.
Chapter 8
The second thing Michael’s father taught him about was fear. Michael was six years old. There was a gully behind their house. The gully was deep and rocky and a kid had been mauled there by a mountain lion not a year before. It was a scary place. That was why the neighborhood kids dared each other to go down there. Everyday after school the bigger kids would dare the smaller ones to climb down the rock gully, close their eyes, and count to twenty. Everybody did it. Then it was Michael’s turn. His mom had told him not to go down there. His dad had told him not to go down there. But the kids wanted him to go. So he climbed down the rocky trail.
Michael closed his eyes and started to count. And he felt the fear. Because he heard something in the undergrowth. Something scary. And it was getting closer. Michael couldn’t take it anymore. He opened his eyes and he started to run. But whatever it was kept right at him, charging through the undergrowth. Michael ran as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The thing caught his leg, bringing him down. Michael screamed, and when he looked back at what had captured him, he saw his father. His father didn’t look mad. But he looked worried. He asked Michael if he was afraid. Michael said yes. And his father said that was a good thing. It wasn’t a good thing that he had come down into the gully alone, but it was good to be afraid. Because we all got afraid, the difference was what we did with it. Some people ignored fear and those people were foolish. Because you had to respect fear. Fear gave you an edge. Fear could keep you alive.
***
The men wore no shoes. That explained why Michael hadn’t heard them coming, but not where they had come from. It also didn’t excuse the fact that despite his intentions to the contrary, he had been careless. Careless and stupid. He had become so absorbed in the snow globe that he forgot to keep one eye out for trouble. There were three of them. Short sturdy Chinese men in blue jumpsuits, but Michael really couldn’t determine much more than that because they held him from behind. He did note that they seemed to have little interest in harming him. At least not immediately. They seemed more interested in transport. Knife still at his throat, they hauled him to the freight elevator on the far factory wall. After a dozen grinding seconds the elevator descended several floors down to what Michael guessed was the ground level.
The elevator doors opened and Michael immediately noted that it was much noisier in here than he had expected. For whatever reason, the equipment must have been idle when he had come in. A series of machines were at work injecting plastic into hot molds that resembled industrial strength waffle irons. Two male workers stood over each machine, one monitoring the flow of the plastic pellets that were poured inside while another trimmed the excess plastic as the product was stamped out. His captors brought him to a standstill in front of one of the machines and Michael recognized the plastic pieces being created as the two halves of the model Earth which sat inside the snow globe he held in his pocket. Whatever they were making here, they certainly weren’t trying to hide it from him. Not yet anyway.
“Good afternoon,” a heavily inflected voice said from behind him. “My name is Mr. Chen.”
Michael had to admit that things were looking up. Not only were they talking to him, but the blade of the knife had left his throat. At this rate they’d be sipping monkey tea and chewing chicken feet in no time.
The man who identified himself as Chen stepped into view. Chen, who looked to be about forty, wore a well-pressed suit, his carefully coiffed jet black hair glistening under the overhanging bulbs. Michael sensed nothing malevolent or otherwise frightening about the man. And the bonus was he spoke English. Michael had been caught in enough places he wasn’t supposed to be to know that talking would be the best way out of the situation. It always was. But then, Chen smiled, revealing a row of crooked teeth, black with decay, and for no rational reason, a little bit of the hope Michael had felt just a moment earlier began to drain out of him.