“Of course,” he replied quickly and looked down on the ladder.
Then he crouched, tightly clenched both sides of the ladder and lifted it up like it was the weight of a feather. “I’ll keep it in place. Just climb down slowly.”
And after I threw Jack a jubilantly wondering look, “After you,” Jack said.
So I scaled down the rickety-rackety ladder energetically to the lavishly adorned foyer, where all the gold used in decoration was able to stand through the test of real blaze of fire and shined even brighter like a reincarnated phoenix out of its flaxen ashes, and was impressed by the view I was regarding at; make no mistake about this, it’s still incomparable to where I am now.
And when I made it down there and placed my foot on the solid ground, the ranting raving maniacs rallied right outside of an automatic steel gate that acted as the last barrier between us and them at the main entrance started striking, bashing and smashing the gate with whatever they had in possession and resumed roaring in a way that it resembled an ancient and primitive war cry uttered by a clan of vicious intruders from across the sea.
“Can someone please explain to me what is going on?” I said, as immense confusion flooded me.
I was eager to know what was going on. And I looked around aimlessly for my answer and happened to discover there were approximately eleven scared people, excluding me and Jack, scattered in this place, most of them had put on their masks, and multiple corpses strewn across this giant foyer. Also the surroundings were chaotic; the chandelier, which was supposed to be hanging in midair, was brought down and was viciously dismantled, only the wire linking the ceiling was intact, and the piece of fine gold was missing, the debris of the protective plastic box showered around.
“I’ve warned you about this. And obviously, you—” the driver, looking over his shoulder, said while holding the ladder for Jack.
Slightly enraged, “You told me the government would close the border in two days, but you never told me anything about this bad, and your appearance got me into a real trouble. A police officer knocked on my door this morning and asked me some questions about you,” I said, blaming him for what I’d been through because I deceived myself into believing he was the one who got me into this even I had no doubt it wasn’t his responsibility. Blaming others for what I thought I didn’t deserve just made me feel better. “Anyway, why do they hate us so much that it seems they want to barge in and slaughter us like we are the evil-doers instead?” Abruptly changing the subject after wrongly accusing someone was my usual tactic to avoid stirring up any further possible conflict.
“The appeal of extreme patriotism to uncultivated people with a fragile heart is irresistibly tempting when the government or, to be more accurate, the dominant party of the government is advocating it, maliciously hoodwinking people into thinking that the dominant party is equivalent to the concept of country itself and disseminating fabricated information to distort the truth. What you are witnessing here is beyond doubt one of the most convincing evidence of the existence of pure evilness,” Jack quipped when he got down from the ladder, his mature voice capturing everyone’s attention, though to me, what he said sounded far-fetched, and I had, for a moment, considered him as the conspiracy theorist, who was responsible for fabricating the entire closing-the-border thing.
“Jack!?” the driver bellowed surprisingly.
“You know him?” I asked.
He didn’t seem to be concerned with what I said.
“Long time no see, Kaylen,” Jack replied, wiping the dark black residue of smoke that covered his countenance fumigated on his face away with both hands, his action stimulated me to imagine how I looked like at that moment.
After running all my fingers around my face a few times, I stretched out my palms, which were as black as coal, and rubbed my hands against my trousers.
“Why don’t you call me? I would have picked you up at the airport myself only if I knew you’re coming back for us,” Kaylen said.
“I wasn’t—” Jack said, yet interrupted by a purring sound of a starting engine of a chainsaw.
“I don’t think now is the best time to catch up with an old friend,” I said, as I finished rubbing. “Is there a way out of this place? Like a rear door?”
Cast me a short glance before averting it back to Jack again, “Yes, there is a way out of here, a rear door exactly,” Kaylen answered firmly when the sound of revving engine became more and more terrifying.
But I instantly felt like I was stepping into another trap when he answered so promptly. What were they doing here if they had already found a way out of here? Why didn’t they make their escape? It was weird, but, on second thought, nothing about this place made sense at all. It wasn’t weird.
“We should go now,” I said.
Before he could respond, sparks flying hither and thither around one particular spot on the rigid gate suddenly illuminated the foyer, and the whirring cutting sound that occurred along with the sparks suggested the beginning of their first attempt to cut through the gate.
“Please, just lead the way. I don’t want to die here. You have a plan to get us all out of the country, don’t you?” I continued.
Nodded, “Of course. No problem. Everyone follow me,” Kaylen yelled and walked off.
As the rotating front tip of the guide bar of the chainsaw completely penetrated through a rift it cut open, all of us began scurrying behind him in the opposite direction of the rift to a rear door, which had an indistinguishable emergency exit signboard above it, set at the end of the foyer. I expected the escape to be a lot more laborious than simply walking out an emergency exit that I thought was awkward due to it’s ridiculously small size. I had to walk like a crab in order to fit through it, but that was it. We simply walked out of the hotel leisurely like ambling into our own apartment with a universal key ready in Kaylen’s hand.
Behind the door was a grim, filthy narrow rear alley, where bright sunlight couldn’t reach, winding back, carpeted with randomly discarded garbage between buildings. The stench arising from the squashy carpet was comparable to the acrid smoke inside the hotel, or even worse as it smelt like rotting dead rats. Despite the fact I hadn’t caught a glimpse of a rat, I wouldn’t be surprised if dozens of them suddenly came out of nowhere judging by the poor condition of that place. And we could only move along in single file because everyone wanted to minimize the risk of inadvertently touching the gray side walls, which looked extremely unhygienic with million-century-old stains on it.
Straggling right behind Kaylen, who was leading the way, “Did you come back for me?” I asked on a whim.
“What makes you think I would rush into a burning hotel for a man I hardly know?”
“Instinct.”
“Where are you from, my friend?”
“Port Aroma.”
“So what are you, a citizen of the Shangri-La, doing in this crazy country? You should’ve never come,” he said, voice trembling like he was restraining himself from weeping.
I could hear a little bit of jealousy in his trembling, so I bet he was upset because he wished to be born in a different time and place – he flat out denied this and claimed he was just feeling sad when I asked him about it upon arrival at the pond and he then rushed out of the car like a rabbit bouncing and leapt into the golden shining pond to prove that he’s being honest with me despite the fact that I had no idea how the pond-prove-you-honest thing worked at that time.
“I thought I would love this place,” I continued, closed my eyes, letting fragments of memories I had built up in this journey to flow through my mind like rotating a kaleidoscope, and paused, realizing how absurd my thought of coming back here had been.